by Elsa Morante
The truth is that in a vague way I had always, in those months, assumed that the end of the present summer would be the end of my time on Procida. But then, thinking summer, I saw, in my mind, an indefinite season, with no limits, equal to an entire existence! I deluded myself in the confused faith that, just as this summer would ripen the grapes, the olives, and the other fruits of the gardens, it would, in some way, also ripen the bitterness of my fate, and my sufferings would come to a great consoling resolution. To arrive at the end with those sufferings still bitter: that was the omen I couldn’t believe in, and nevertheless saw in the light, and in the delicate breaths of air, like an equivocal and icy farewell. Question without answer is what, translated into words, that farewell meant: and nothing and no one said to me another word; not even the eyes of N., which were so beautiful and maternal, and for me made of stone.
Carried along by my distracted mind, I found myself on the steep ascent of the Due Mori, which ends in Piazzetta del Monumento. The square, bordered on the west, in view of the beach, by a simple balustrade, shone at that hour with a calm and brilliant light, between the pink-orange color of its walls and the golden reflection of the water. I’ve spoken several times of this beautiful square, but maybe I haven’t yet said that four streets led out of it. One was the slope of the Due Mori. Another was the one that we had traveled so many times in the carriage, descending toward the area of the harbor, and which then continued on the opposite side of the square, changing its name, into my famous street amid the gardens. The last, on the western side, was the widest and was well paved, and wound upward, like a meandering lookout, toward the height of the fortress. The same balustrade continued from the square along the street’s external side, thus leaving it open, at that hour, like the square, to the full sun, which lighted it with a marvelous pink-orange.
The Terra Murata
That was the only road on the island that led to the gate of the Terra Murata, the walled land (as people call the neighborhood of the prison, in memory of the ancient fortifications). It was along here that the truck carrying the new prisoners up from the port passed. I don’t know how long it had been since I’d taken that road, which for me was as if eliminated from the island.
But that day I chose it instinctively, without much hesitation or surprise: noticing only a rapid beating of my heart, as if, in breaking my ban, I were performing a daring and solemn act. The long strip of the road was deserted as far as the last visible turn; and I had a sense of repose going up through that magical calm, whose terrible melancholy seemed to offer me a refuge. The island, whose dolphin shape extended below amid the play of foam, with the smoke from the houses and the din of voices, appeared very distant, and no longer enchanting to me, who sought harsher enchantments! I advanced into an area outside of time, where the end of summer brought neither hope nor farewells. Up in the tragic structures of the Terra Murata, a single hopeless, late season endured forever in its proud devastation, divided from the world of mothers.
Toward the top of the ascent, on the left, opposite the balustrade, were the first buildings of the prison, with the homes of the employees, the offices, and the infirmaries. At the end the ascent broadened into a terrace, which offered on two sides a view of the sea, open to infinity, fresh and blue. Here rose the gigantic entrance of the Terra Murata, with its high stone vault and the sentry towers for the guards dug into the pilasters. An armed guard always walked in front of one of the sentry boxes, but he didn’t prohibit free passersby from entering, because, beyond the entrance, beyond the city of the prisons, there existed a populous village, with old churches and convents.
When I reached the terrace, I saw my father, a few meters away; he was half sitting on the balustrade, with his back turned to the view, in a kind of dreamy apathy, letting the western breeze ruffle his hair. Seeing him, I stopped, startled; but he didn’t notice me. Against the luminosity of the setting sun, his face, angular because it was so thin, seemed the face of an adolescent, shadowed by the neglected beard that was like a golden down. A moment later, he moved, in his faded blue shirt, unbuttoned over his white chest and here and there flapping in the breeze, and made his way in through the arch of the entrance. Then, I, too, going at a slow pace to keep my distance from him, set off in the same direction. Now it seemed to me that I had already known I had come here to spy on him. And I felt that perhaps since the beginning of the summer I had been preparing myself to follow, sometime or other, the tracks of his mystery.
The Hunt
From the vaulted passage of the entrance, a gloomy corridor whose plaster was frescoed, from top to bottom, with dusty black crosses, one came out onto the central square of the Terra Murata, which was so immense it seemed like a city square but was always strangely deserted. On the left of this square, at the end of a steep paved dip, a gate barred access to a vast, bare yellow courtyard, surrounded by enormous rectangular buildings. HOUSE OF PUNISHMENT was written over the gate, around a brightly colored relief of Santa Maria della Pietà.
That was the entrance to the penitentiary. From that point, past some low buildings protected by walls, the hill of the prison rose behind the central square, up to the ancient castle that could be seen, on the right, towering above the small village built at its foot. For a second, my heart stopped, as I expected to see my father go confidently down along the slope and immediately disappear, as if by a miracle, from my gaze, behind that forbidden gate. But instead he went to the right; and skirting the square he headed toward the higher area of the Terra, where, on the terraces of the ancient fortress, in a labyrinth of intersections, ascents, and descents, the dwellings of the village had been piling up for centuries.
Unlike the central square, now three-quarters in shadow, that area was still struck by the sun, whose light tinged with red the narrow windows, amid ancient overlapping arches, the uneven roofs, and the loggias flowering with peppers and geraniums. Walking crookedly, as if he were drunk, my father entered those noisy alleys in the sunset. On his feet he wore low sandals with wooden soles that are common on our beaches in summer, and these, echoing on the cobblestones, guided me behind him in the tangle of streets. My steps, instead, because of my rope-soled shoes, were silent; but although I was following him at a short distance, I was no longer afraid that he would discover me. I felt protected by a kind of cynicism and fatality, as if I had swallowed the ring that makes one invisible, and he were an elf, a will-o’-the-wisp substance, and all means of communication between us were cut off. I imagined that the inhabitants scattered about the alleys, or looking out of the loggias, or sitting on the outside staircases, who called and talked to one another, couldn’t see us go by.
My mind had become inert; but a dull, almost desolate certainty told me that Wilhelm Gerace was now walking defenseless before me, like an unconscious guide; and that, inevitably, soon, I didn’t know how, I would be led into the theater of his mysteries.
I didn’t even feel curiosity; rather, a sense of forgetfulness or stillness, such as one has in a dream. At most five or six minutes had passed, and it seemed hours since I had come through the entrance of the Terra Murata.
The goal of W.G. now, in this area, could be only one: the old castle. It was there, evidently, that the prisoner had been assigned his dwelling. He must be in one of those small cells, with the tiny windows like air vents, which faced the sea without seeing it, and toward which travelers on the steamers, looking out curiously from the railings, on the journey to or from Procida, directed their pitying attention. But although that could be my father’s only goal, he continued for a while to wander in a disorderly fashion here and there through alleys and side streets, around the single street (called Via del Borgo) that led to the entrances to the castle. I wondered if in fact he might have been drinking. That senseless back-and-forth made one think of nocturnal butterflies madly fluttering around a lamp. Finally he made up his mind and, as I expected, took Via del Borgo. And there, suddenly, I lost track of him.
Via del Bo
rgo was a kind of tunnel excavated into the rocky ground below the inhabited area, with no other pavement than a thick layer of dust. For its entire length (perhaps three hundred meters), between the archway of the entrance and that of the exit toward the castle, the only light it received was from an opening cut out halfway along, which was as wide as a small door, and led to the space above. For long intervals, therefore, this street (which the inhabitants commonly called the Canalone) stagnated in an eternal darkness; only occasionally, on the sides, a faint light glimmered from some small cavelike entrances at ground level, from which narrow stairways led into the cottages above.
As I entered Via del Borgo, the blue stain of my father’s shirt, which preceded me by a few meters, was swallowed up by the shadows. At first I was able to distinguish ahead of me the sound of his wooden clogs, which, although muffled on the dusty ground, echoed faintly under the vault; then nothing. From the town above, voices of girls could be heard calling their brothers in from the street, for the day was ending; and here and there, in the small dark entrances, a boy could be seen playing on the ground near the stairway, among dogs, hens, and sometimes the beating wings of a pigeon. Now my eyes had grown used to that dim light; but, walking faster, I sharpened my gaze in vain, trying to see my prey. I ran along the rest of Via del Borgo, and in a moment was at the exit, in the vast grassy courtyard at the end of which, through a massive doorway dug into a kind of rampart, one approached the dungeons of the nearby castle. But of my father no trace. On that arid field, in front of the barred doorway, there was only the soldier on guard, weapon over his shoulder, who barely glanced at me, more sleepy than suspicious. Apart from him there was no sign of a human presence. I stood there bewildered for a while; and finally, with a shrug, returned, lazily, along Via del Borgo.
It seemed to me pointless to retrace the shadowy Canalone from end to end; and I left it halfway along, emerging through the cut-out opening. It occurred to me that my father, too, might have come out here; and in that way his disappearance could be explained, without too many fantastic tricks. It might be. But, even if that was the exact route, who could say, at that hour, where he might be? And besides, finally, what did W.G. matter to me? What did it matter to discover his secrets? Suddenly, more than the hope, it was the desire to find him that had left me. Climbing up toward the heights of the fortress, I ran into a group of boys who were coming down carrying a kite, and I was tempted to ask if they had seen a tall man dressed in blue; but I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. And I kept going only out of inertia, without a precise plan.
The Palace
From the cut-out wall of the Canalone, one ascended piles of rock and rubble to an abandoned terrain called the Guarracino, which ran behind the village, along the far edge of the Terra Murata above the highest cliffs on the island. The Guarracino was blocked, at the end, by the immense structure of the old castle; and the last stretch was made up of a mountain of derelict houses (I think from the time of the Turkish pirates), roofless and largely buried under mounds of earth. That mountain of ruins was separated from the castle, erected almost on the edge of the rocks opposite, by a natural, impassable gully, its bottom littered with garbage and stones; and on the right, amid steep thickets of thorns and weeds, it sloped down toward the sea.
Below was the island’s North Point, which I had avoided during the past season, like a specter, whenever I had to cross that area of the sea in my boat. Now you could hear the sea, which, sucked into fissures in the cliff, crashed repeatedly with a faint roar; no other sound could be heard. The Guarracino was completely deserted; and climbing up that mangy ravaged mountain I was filled with a desolate sadness.
The voices of the village, not far away, reaching me muffled and softened in the calm air, seemed voices of a childish race, different from mine: and, hearing them, I had the feeling that a grim wandering knight might have as, toward evening, he goes alone through woods and valleys, listening to the dialogues of the birds gathering in the trees to sleep all together. I regretted the days when at this hour I was lounging around the port, sated by having made love with Assuntina all afternoon, and already half asleep; and I felt some remorse toward the Indian slave, who today had waited for me in vain. “At this precise moment,” I thought, “she is busy preparing dinner down in her cottage for her relatives returning from the fields. And my stepmother, in the Casa dei Guaglioni, is beside the basket, trying to sing Carmine to sleep. But Carmine isn’t sleepy, and wants to keep playing . . .” All were occupied with simple, natural things. I alone was following terrible and extraordinary mysteries, which might not even exist, and which, besides, I no longer wished to know.
Among the ruins of those buried cottages, the remains of taller structures still rose here and there—some pieces of wall, two or three meters high, with crumbled squares in place of the old windows. Unexpectedly, at the foot of one of those walls, I noticed my father’s wooden sandals.
I backed up and hid quickly behind the wall: suddenly, after having sought W.G. so intensely, I was afraid of seeing him, even without being seen by him. And I stayed there, suspended, my heart in tumult, without venturing out of my hiding place. Evidently he had taken off his sandals to walk more quickly, barefoot, on that rough terrain: and he couldn’t be far, since between the rocky abyss and the sea every path was cut off. But even if I held my breath, I couldn’t hear, in the passing of the seconds, any sign of a living presence.
On that side of the mountain, the structure of the castle had neither windows nor doors: nothing but gigantic blank walls, reinforced by columns, buttresses, and blind arches, so that it resembled almost a mass of natural rock, rather than some human place. On one wing alone, jutting out in a semicircle that extended sheer over the sea, a few small vent-like windows could be seen from here, where I was; but through those windows no sound or movement could be perceived. As if the persons in somber white uniforms who lived in the palace were lying in lethargy, locked inside those walls.
Unless you had wings, it was impossible to reach the rooms of the palace from this part of the Terra Murata. And in the abandoned silence that persisted around me, every sort of marvelous vision regarding W.G. surfaced. Stairways, secret passages, fantastic deceptions, or maybe, even, death. I pictured him as, having taken off his wooden sandals, he rushed down the cliff and was smashed to pieces: and it seemed to me that nothing mattered anymore, even if he was dead. Whether he was dead or alive, near or far, had become indifferent to me. I desired suddenly to have already left the island, to be among foreign people, with no return; and I decided that in the future I would let all new acquaintances believe that I was a foundling, with no father or mother or relations. Abandoned in swaddling clothes on a step, and raised in an orphanage, or something like that.
I yawned, to insult the invisible shadow of W.G. But, weary, I stayed there, not knowing what I expected. The sun had almost completely disappeared on the sea. I’m not sure how many minutes had passed, when I heard him, not far away, singing.
The Wretched Voice and the Signals
His voice, which I recognized immediately, with a jolt, came from the lowest, hidden spurs of the mountain, so that it seemed to be rising from the bottom of the sea cliff. That illusion gave the scene the restless solemnity of dreams; but the strangest thing was this—that he was singing. I almost never heard him sing, and his voice, in fact, wasn’t beautiful (it was, one might say, the only ugly thing about him): it had an acid sound, almost female, unmelodious. But precisely because it lacked musicality and grace, that song of his, mysteriously, moved me still more. I think that not even the melody of an archangel could have been so moving.
He sang a verse from one of the most popular Neapolitan songs, which I’d known, more or less, since I learned to sing; and for me it had become common and banal from the many times I had heard it and repeated it on my own. The one that goes:
I can’t find a moment of peace
Night becomes day
I’m always here waiting
Hoping to talk to you!
But he sang with a bitterness of persuasion so raw and desperate that I listened as if I were learning a great new song, of tragic significance. Those four lines, and their melody, which he sang slowly, drawing it out, and shouting, seemed to be speaking of my own solitude: when I went wandering around, avoided by N., without friendships or happiness or repose. And of today, when I had ended up on this mountain of misery, in this reckless hiding place, in order to understand the ultimate sadness.
Unable to see the person of W.G. from where I was, I climbed up onto a ledge of the wall I was hiding behind. And from up there, spying through an old broken window, I immediately saw my singer. He was alone, half lying on a patch of weedy ground, at the end of the last terraces in the direction of the cliff; and from that narrow sloping flower bed he sang in the direction of the palace, like a wretched toad singing to the moon. His eyes were fixed precisely on one of those small windows that could be discerned even from the ground, set in the wing that extended in a semicircle between the depth of the mountain and the sea. It was an isolated window halfway up, and like its companions it gave no sign of life through the small space open above the vent: nothing but silence and darkness.
Yet it seemed that my father was waiting for some response to his song. Reaching the end of the verse, he remained for a while in an anxious silence, turning over painfully on the ground like a sick man in a hospital bed. Then he started from the beginning, in the same way as before. At that point, fearing that he might see me, I left my lookout and jumped down to the foot of the wall. From there, leaning out sideways slightly, I could, although without seeing him, keep watch on that impassive window of the palace. And in fact I didn’t take my eyes off it.