Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  Three or four times more his voice could be heard resuming its song from the bottom of the mountain, with a dark, childish stubbornness. He repeated, from the song I knew, always and only that single verse; and at every repeat his tone expressed a different sorrow: entreaty, command, or tragic, onerous infatuation. But the window remained blind and deaf: as if the prisoner who lived there had deserted his room, or were dead, or, at the least, sunk in a deep sleep.

  Finally, the futile song ceased; but soon afterward, in place of the song, I heard some brief rhythmic whistles rising from the hidden slope, in a new attempted call to the window. And at hearing them, I trembled, consumed by jealousy!

  I had immediately recognized, in the rhythm of those whistles, a secret language of signals, a kind of Morse code, that my father and I had invented together, in the happy times of my childhood. We used that alphabet of whistles to send messages at a distance, during our beach games in the summer; and even sometimes, by mutual consent, to make fun of certain types of Procidans present and unaware at the harbor or the café on the square.

  Now evidently my father must have taught the prisoner that mysterious alphabet, which I thought was the property of us two alone: Wilhelm Gerace and me!

  Those invented signals had been so familiar to me for years that, hearing them, I could immediately translate them into words, better than an old telegrapher. The jealous emotion that had surprised me made me miss, however, the first syllables of the message sent by my father. What I heard sounded like this:

  ... NEITHER VISITS NOR LETTERS NOTHING

  AT LEAST A WORD

  WHAT WOULD IT COST YOU?

  A new silent wait on the part of my father followed; but the window persisted in its tomblike indifference. My father repeated:

  AT LEAST A WORD

  And then, after another silence:

  WHAT WOULD IT COST YOU?

  Finally, through the small space at the top of the window, where the vent, unfolding like an accordion, left exposed the last section of bars, two hands could be seen, gripping the bars. Certainly my father, too, saw them immediately, and suddenly stood, so that I could see him, from the shoulders up, hurrying toward the edge of the cliff. There he stopped, almost under the palace, from which the void of the sea separated him by only three or four meters; and he remained mute in expectation, as if those pitiful clinging hands were two stars, which had appeared to announce to him his destiny.

  A little afterward, the hands left the bars; but the prisoner, certainly, was still standing behind the window, maybe he had climbed on his bunk to reach the vent; and from there he brought two fingers to his lips to send his responding signals louder! His whistles, in fact, were soon heard, very sharp and rhythmic, in a sequence of barbaric monotony. And instantly, with an incredible feeling of certainty, of adolescent pride and contempt, I recognized in them as in a known lashing voice the unique, extreme arrogance of the criminal of the dock!

  His message to my father, which I translated to myself immediately, consisted of the following three words:

  GET OUT, PARODY!

  Then nothing more. Except, maybe because of a simple auditory hallucination, I seemed to hear all around, from the nearest windows, a chorus of low laughter, like a dark, great mockery of my father. Then again there was a dead silence, which was interrupted soon afterward by the guards on their rounds, beating their clubs against the grates, to check the bars before evening. The sound was gradually approaching, from the invisible windows of the façade that faced the sea; and I saw my father, at that sound, leave where he was and prepare to go back up slowly. Then, in fear that he would catch me, I ran headlong down from the mountain, retracing the return route rapidly.

  All the way home, I was repeating to myself, in order not to forget it, the word parody, whose meaning I wasn’t entirely sure of. And when I got home I went to look it up in an old school dictionary, which had been in my room for years: maybe it belonged to my schoolteacher grandmother, or maybe to the student of Romeo the Amalfitano. At the word parody I read:

  IMITATION OF THE BEHAVIOR OF ANOTHER, IN WHICH WHAT IN OTHERS IS SERIOUS BECOMES RIDICULOUS, OR COMIC, OR GROTESQUE.

  Thus Wilhelm Gerace had played on me the ultimate trick. If with full awareness and intention he had examined the most malicious way of getting me back under his spell, he could not have invented a treacherous game equal to this, into which he had drawn me without knowing it. Now, that is, it had become clear to me that in his pilgrimages to the Terra Murata all that awaited him was a shameful solitude; that up there he was mortifed and rejected like the lowest servant. And at that discovery, I don’t know why, my affection for him, which I had believed suffocated and almost gone, was rekindled, more bitter, anguished, almost terrible!

  CHAPTER 8

  Farewell

  You won’t go anymore, amorous butterfly,

  Fluttering around inside night and day

  Disturbing the sleep of beauties . . .

  Among the soldiers, by Bacchus!

  —FIGARO, THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO

  Hated Shadow

  Two more months passed. It was near the end of November. At that time I learned that Assuntina was betraying me.

  It’s pointless to waste time telling how I found out: I have to hurry now to the end of this memoir. Enough to say that I was informed of it without possibility of doubt; and not with a single lover was she betraying me but with more than one; and even before me she had had these different lovers! The day I learned all that, I purposely passed by her house; and when, seeing that I didn’t stop, she ran after me, I turned and pushed her away with such precise insults and such violence that she retreated in fear. I passed by again later: there was no one in front of the cottage, the door was closed. With my penknife I carved into the door a picture of a sow—troia, a whore—with the caption: “Farewell forever.” After that, I wandered through the nearby countryside and got lost; finally I collapsed in a field and burst into sobs.

  I had never loved Assuntina, that was true; but recently I had even thought of marrying her, so great was my desire to have a woman who was attached to me and was mine. I had decided that, right after marriage, I would kiss her, the way I had once kissed N. and never her. And then—this was the main thing—we would have a child together. I liked immensely the idea of fathering a child, and I amused myself thinking what he would be like, and planned to take him with me on my future travels, like a true friend. Now that plan, too, evaporated, like so many others.

  At least if my mother had been alive, I could have told my sorrows to someone! For a moment, I had a vision of N., as she had been with me in other times; but immediately the image of now was superimposed on that: so angry that even her curls seemed to have become fierce. In truth, on that point what the vile Assuntina had said could be recognized as just: and that is that my stepmother, under the appearance of a lamb, hid the untamable toughness of a wild beast.

  Enough: now I really was alone. And what, then, attracted me still on that enchanted island? What kept me from abandoning it for eternity, as I had done with my revolting faithless lover?

  Answer: Wilhelm Gerace, who in other years had left again on his travels by this time of the autumn, this year still honored Procida with his presence.

  Often certain of our affections, which we suppose are magnificent, even superhuman, are, in reality, insipid; only an earthly, even atrocious bitterness can, like salt, awaken the mysterious taste of their profound mixture. For all my childhood and youth, I had thought I loved W.G.; but maybe I was deceived. Only now, perhaps, was I beginning to love him. Something surprising happened, which certainly in the past I would never have believed, if it had been predicted: I felt pity for W.G.

  I’d had a feeling of pity for others in my life. For example, I had felt it for strangers, unknown people, even, occasionally, some passerby. For Immacolatella. For N. Even for Assuntina. In other words, I already knew how incomparably terrible that feeling is. But the people I had felt i
t for had nevertheless been, even if dear to me, connected to me only by chance, by a choice; they hadn’t been relatives by birth. For the first time, now, I knew this inhuman violence: to feel pity for my own blood.

  In spite of the winter tedium that already prevailed on the island, W.G. had for some weeks appeared less gloomy and more sociable. Not, certainly, that he was cured of his fixed thought; rather, I would have said that that thought held him, more than ever, in its sovereign power. Only now, shaking him from his anguished half sleep, it appeared to draw him, day by day, toward a new and obscurely joyful impatience. Which made him move restlessly from one room to another, and along the streets of the town and the paths of the countryside as if pursued by a crowd of cruel presentiments and impossible wishes. Sometimes he broke into an exalted, innocent cheerfulness, childishly; but that cheerfulness seemed to tire him desperately; and then, in need of repose, he took refuge in a tremendous melancholy.

  I noticed that his pilgrimages to the Terra Murata became less frequent; but that was not enough to deceive me. I constantly recognized in his eyes, in his behavior, the hated shadow that occupied his mind. And so I always showed him a sullen, taciturn face. When, going into the town or for a walk in the country, he sought my company (this had been happening again, for some days), I followed him unwillingly. And if he spoke to me I answered in short sentences, rudely.

  Those last weeks, when I think back, seem truly to have “flown by,” the fastest of my life. And how long, instead, they must have seemed to him, who surely was counting the days! The dramatic, impatient joy of waiting surrounded him, in the air. And I felt that some new thing was about to happen; but I refused to share the joyful drama with him, and so I didn’t even try to explain to myself that wait, or maybe I was pretending to ignore it. Anyway, the explanation soon arrived.

  One Night

  One night in early December, I came home very late. Ever since N. had declared her irrevocable aversion, I’d been coming home late, in order not to be at the table with her. Before going to sleep, she always left my dinner warming near the coals; but, then, for some weeks, I had gotten into the habit of eating on my own in the town, at the Osteria del Gallo or the widow’s café. I was in fact very wealthy that autumn: my father showered me with money. There was no day, one could say, when he didn’t give me a bill of fifty or a hundred lire, and that morning he had given me the crazy sum of five hundred lire. I didn’t know what to do with so much wealth; and I left banknotes in the middle of books, amid the rags in the drawer. I always had at least seven or eight piled and creased in my pocket, and I gave grandiose tips, so that perhaps, to find another such case in their history, the Procidans had to go back to the Spanish seventeenth century.

  Usually I went to eat at the tavern around seven; but afterward I lingered in the town until ten or later; so that sometimes coming home I was hungry again, and willingly ate the meals that my stepmother left for me. With that intention, I returned home that evening and went to the kitchen. And here I had a surprise: the ashes were still warm but the two small earthenware pots where N. usually left me the dinner were uncovered and empty nearby. And on the table, unlike every other evening, the plates and silverware that N. set for me were not to be seen.

  It was the first time such a thing had happened; I took a piece of bread from the drawer and went out to eat it in the yard. But I felt that my hunger had passed, and I threw it away.

  It was a dim night, pierced by a damp, cold wind. I had barely taken a few steps when, behind me, a gust closed the shutters of the lighted French door, which I had left open. Without lamps or moon, the yard was so dark that one couldn’t see the edge: it didn’t seem inviting, and I soon decided to return to the house, which rose in the background quiet and sleeping. It was while I was approaching the house that I noticed, behind the large window of the big room, a pale reddish glow.

  Especially in winter, our family always left that cold enormous room closed and deserted. The first thing I thought of, even without believing it, was the spirits: the stories that had left me doubtful as a boy came to mind—about the ghost of the Amalfitano, about his youths . . . “Maybe,” I thought, “it was the spirits who ate my dinner . . .” And, reentering, skeptical and puzzled, I went immediately to the big room.

  I saw right away that the reddish glow I had noticed from outside came from the hearth. Someone, wishing to warm that cavernlike space that was the room, had lighted some pieces of wood in the old monks’ fireplace: and because it hadn’t been used for perhaps half a century, the room was nearly filled with smoke. At my entrance a solitary form moved on one of the broken couches near the hearth; and at first, in the dark, it seemed a dog. But it rose: it was a man, and, turning on the light switch, I recognized him immediately. Even if I hadn’t recognized his features and his outfit (the same Sunday outfit he had worn that day on the dock), the instant, bitter, and consuming hatred that I felt toward him would have been enough.

  In the Big Room

  The faint, dusty ceiling lamp barely illuminated that corner of the room. But even in the poor light, the hospitable, refined, exulting welcome that my father, inexpertly improvising, had prepared for him was immediately evident to my eyes, like a painting in sharp relief: a kind of innocent, disorderly celebration! On the table, which had been moved near the sofa, were the plates with the remains of my dinner, olives, pastries, dates, cigarettes, wine, also an empty bottle of spumante and one of liqueur. On the floor, dug out from somewhere or other in the house, a carpet; and on the couch a pillow and my father’s wool blanket . . . All that, to my eyes of a wounded savage, assumed the importance of a royal display!

  This time (unlike that day on the dock), his features immediately stood out with an extraordinary precision: more clearly than if they’d been illuminated by a floodlight. Right away, on first seeing him again, I realized how mistaken I’d been, on the dock, to judge him ugly. And the instant knowledge that he was handsome pierced me like a blade. Perhaps I wouldn’t have so detested his looks if he had been fair-haired; but he was dark, instead, as dark as and even darker than me; and that produced in my feelings, I don’t know why, the shock of an intolerable tragedy.

  In my memory my conversation with him remains wrapped in a smoky scene, set ablaze by my hatred. The shape of his body inspired hatred: it was tall, well developed, and the muscles, which didn’t seem to have suffered in prison, stood out in his movements. And his shoulders. And his strong neck, which proudly supported the head (molded with bold grace, with its prisoner’s pallor). And his beautiful dark hair, cut with care, boyishly, the hairline low on his forehead, as in a sculpture . . . There was not a feature, a gesture in him that could induce me to forgiveness.

  His eyes, in shadow in the hollow sockets, the eyebrows unkempt, had a scornful, arrogant, and sly manner of looking at his interlocutor not directly but sideways. His mouth was hard and graceful, and his lips didn’t part when he smiled but rose slightly on one side, in a sort of allusive brutality, as if a true, kind smile would deny his virility. And on his chin he had a hint of a dimple, which added further determination and daring to his expression.

  Betrayal

  “Where’s my father?” I said curtly, as soon as I was in the room. My turbulent, aggressive tone was meant to announce that he and I were already sworn enemies. He eyed me, without moving a step from the corner of the hearth.

  “And who is he, your father?” he said, with pretended ignorance, in response.

  “What! My father! The owner here! I’m Arturo Gerace!”

  “Oh! A pleasure . . .” he said with an air of false, lazy formality. “The owner went upstairs just now; but he’ll be down again before long.”

  “Then I’ll wait here,” I declared. And I settled myself on the threshold, standing, my back against the doorpost.

  “Please, sit down,” he said, with a half-indifferent expression, as if to say that for him my presence or an ant’s was the same. Then, stretching out again on the sofa, he added:
“By the way, would you turn out the light again? Your father advised me not to leave it on: there’s danger in being seen from outside . . .”

  I didn’t move; and he glanced at me. “Well, what are you waiting for? Turn it off,” he said. And at my deliberate disobedience he rose onto his elbow, while an expression of insolence and playful mystery flashed through his eyes.“It’s dangerous, I’m telling you,” he threatened vaguely, “the police . . .” Then, lowering his voice, with an inspired, sly emphasis, he uttered:

  “I AM A FUGITIVE!”

  I looked at him, without batting an eye. From his manner, from his accent, I had quickly scented deception; but it was also possible that his words were true—they certainly accorded in an ideal way with the image I had had of him from the first day . . . And that was the only explanation for the presence, tonight, in our house, of a life prisoner, as from the start I had supposed he was . . .

  For an instant, in spite of my hatred, I almost let myself be drawn in by that mirage of magnificent complicity that blazed before me, surprising, unexpected: hiding in our house a genuine fugitive—hunted by the police!—was an honor and at the same time a force against him: keeping him at our mercy . . . Yet in my doubt I left the light on: if only so that he wouldn’t presume that I seriously believed him. He looked at me:

  “What are you waiting for, turn it off!” he repeated again.

  I shrugged, with an expression almost of disgust. Then, almost in spite of himself, he let out from behind his arrogantly closed lips a short childish laugh. At the same time, assuming an attitude of sarcasm and superior pride, he arched his eyebrows, so as to wrinkle his forehead: