Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  Uncertain, I looked up at my interlocutor, as if to question whether he was speaking seriously. It wasn’t the first time such an unexpected judgment on my father had struck my ears. I recalled that in the past I had heard another person assert something not very different. And that fact now seemed to me something bewitched (an arcane, intricate allusion to my nature and my destiny): that two witnesses, unknown to each other, and opposite, and distant, should be in agreement in an opinion that I, instead (maybe only I, in the entire world?), still persisted in treating as heresy.

  “You,” I cried, “don’t understand anything about my father!”

  “Oh, maybe you understand better . . .”

  “You can’t even dream the journeys my father’s made!” I cried. “His whole life has been to travel through the farthest foreign lands! Always! His whole life!”

  Regarding me with a slight, ironic, but rather sincere surprise, Stella arched his eyebrows in his usual way, so that on his forehead many transverse wrinkles formed.

  “Oh, seriously!” he observed. “It’s a new idea to me . . . And, as far as we know, what would be the main journeys he’s made? All right: Germany-Italy forty years ago: that’s known. And then . . . ? Well, of course, the trip around Vesuvius: that’s a season ticket for him . . .”

  “I feel sorry for you!” I declared, blazing with scorn.

  “Oh, you feel sorry for me . . . Really! . . . But, getting back to the point, satisfy my curiosity on something else, if it’s not too much trouble . . . Why would he devote himself, all his life, to these great cruises? For a touristic purpose? Missionary? . . . Or why?”

  I felt my nerves jump, and my blood throb, such was the spirit of revolt and bitter certainty that inflamed me: “Why!” I repeated. “For what purpose! Well! For his freedom! For true knowledge. That’s the purpose. To learn about the entire world, and the nations, with no borders—”

  Stella turned to laugh on his own account. “That’s enough, now,” he interrupted me, raising one palm with an air of being sated, as if he’d had too much. “I led you on . . . Now I have the proof that what he said really is true: that you’re crazy about him.”

  “Who said it?”

  “Him. He said: I have two sons, one a little blond and one dark: no one will ever be capable of making better-looking sons than mine. And the dark one, ever since he was born, has been crazy about me.”

  “It’s not true that he said it!”

  “Yes. It’s true that he said it. And it’s true that you’re crazy about him.”

  “It’s not true!”

  “It’s not true that you’re crazy about him?”

  “No.”

  “Then if it’s not true, how do you explain the fairy tales you’re telling me about him? To listen to you, he’s a kind of long-distance oceanic flyer . . . of . . .”

  He rose solemnly to his feet. “. . . A kind of . . . true Citizen of Space!” he continued, in a tone of fierce mockery. “. . . While in fact he’s the sheltered type who’s never been weaned from his mother’s breast, and never will be! And as for journeys, ever since he got himself out of his barbarian lands and found a cradle in this fine volcano, it would be something, as far as I know, if he got as far as Benevento, or Rome-Viterbo!”

  Here, for the first time in speaking of my father, Stella had a curious, almost irrepressible laugh, a friendly and ill-concealed indulgence. “Maybe,” he resumed, “he’s afraid that this sacred treasure island will fall into the sea if he loses sight of it. As soon as he goes three or four stations too far, he starts to get homesick, like an orphan. And, remembering it, he makes a face . . . He’s even jealous of it, like it was a woman! So he’s called Procida, as a nickname . . .”

  This last bit of information (whether truth or lies) I didn’t too much mind hearing. And I waited, almost thirsty, for Stella to continue. But he suddenly abandoned the subject. And, sitting down again on the couch, in a kind of brutal and thuggish gaiety, he shook his head, so fiercely that his hair, which he had smoothed and carefully brilliantined, got all mussed. Over his features passed a coarse expression of youthful grace, in which I don’t know what reflections, amusements, abandonments, rowdiness, intrigues clashed with the arrogance. It was clear that his mind had suddenly been drawn away to follow a thought from which I, there present, was excluded; but it wasn’t clear if this thought attracted or bewildered him. As when you watch a cat chasing a feather, you can’t tell if its mood is play or tragedy.

  With a bored, impulsive expression he got up and stretched his arms; then he sat down again. But suddenly he came out with a strangely serious, almost dramatic laugh. And he exclaimed:

  “Your father is a PARODY!”

  This was fatal: sinister, uncontrollable anger overwhelmed me. Clenching my fists, I advanced toward Stella with these words:

  “Now I’ll spit in your face.”

  Then a hard, strangely oblique shadow fell over Stella’s face. In turn, he moved toward me. And he said, accentuating each syllable:

  “Whose face will you spit in?”

  The Final Scene

  Beside myself with rage, I was about to charge at him; but at that very moment a hurried, familiar step sounded in the hall; and my father, arriving in the doorway behind me, grabbed me by the arm.

  He had just caught Stella’s last words and, like an echo, repeated: “Whose face will you spit in?” He gave me a penetrating look, tinged with threat and apprehension, and turned very pale. That tortured pallor disarmed me. Still, it was with abrupt violence that I struggled out of his grip, refusing to give him any explanation. Then I moved sullenly away from Stella, who, in turn, abandoning the fight, had sat down again on the couch, in an indifferent and mocking position. And I paused at the corner of the hearth, a few steps from them.

  He had brought from upstairs, in a pile in his arms, sheets, blankets, a pillow. “Like a servant,” I thought. At the same time, I noted, with bitter surprise, that he had put on new clothes, which I had never seen before today: striped velvet pants, and a gray knit jacket, and at his neck a blue silk kerchief. He had shaved with care, and even combed his hair, smoothing it back. So clean, elegant, he appeared to me as handsome as a great prince in a novel; yet, as I gazed at him, enchanted, I surprised myself by seeking in him, absurdly, desperately, that comic or grotesque aspect that deserved from Stella the epithet “parody.”

  I longed to recognize in him something truly ridiculous; but, unfortunately, I saw only grace. His weary thinness, which stood out particularly in that luxurious outfit, made him seem weaker and younger: and Stella’s boyish health was offensive, like insolence or vulgarity, next to him.

  He again turned his gaze, shadowed by alarm, from Stella to me. But he asked no other questions. Then, immediately and deliberately retreating from our mysterious fight, as if it had been nothing, he approached the couch and, dropping the sheets and blankets beside Stella, announced to him, with open animation:

  “So it’s all done. I’ve even packed the suitcase!” Then, to me, in a different voice, tuned to authoritarian pride:

  “By the way, Arturo. I looked for you to tell you, but you weren’t in your room. I’m leaving tomorrow morning, with the first boat.”

  Tomorrow morning! Until that last word, I had refused to understand the imminence of that reality, which swept away tomorrow, and all the other days of my future, in a storm of devastation. I stared at my father with lost eyes, after which he informed me, frowning:

  “It’s as well to say goodbye now, because tomorrow morning I won’t have time . . .” My voice broke out, suffocated by revolt:

  “You’re leaving . . . with him!”

  “That doesn’t concern you,” my father answered.

  “You can’t do it! No! You can’t do it!”

  My father gave me a sidelong glance, looming over me in angry splendor:

  “I,” he answered, “leave with whomever I like. With the kind forbearance de Usted.”

  I felt that he w
as now displaying his worst arrogance against me partly to shine in Stella’s eyes: partly, maybe, to revenge himself on me, with his authority, for the low servitude in which Stella kept him! Stella himself seemed to understand this thing: and looked at him furtively, ironic, with no appreciation. But he was so fierce, with his dramatic fire, that he didn’t notice that irony.

  “So, Arturo, we’re agreed?” he ended, turning halfway toward me, in a curt, conclusive tone, which was meant to be an invitation to take my leave. I was about to answer: “Of course! Goodbye!” and turn my back on him. But an instinct, prouder than any will (similar to what is called for preservation), shouted in my ears like a thunderclap that, afterward, between him and me it would be over, and that there, just outside the room, a night without end awaited me. I took a step and (just grazing Stella with a look of disdain, as if his presence were something to be ignored) stood in front of him:

  “I’m sixteen!” I exclaimed. “You promised that when I became a man you would travel with me. And now that time has come. I’m old enough, I’m a man!”

  “Oh. I’m glad about it,” said my father. Then, moving to the end of the hearth and leaning against it, one hand in his pocket, he invited me in a tone of forced calm:

  “Come here, Arturo, here in front of me, please.” Of course, he was afraid that I would again insult Stella. Contemptuous, I obeyed. And then, staring at me, he said:

  “Shall we part politely, Arturo?”

  I scowled, without answering. “Well, in that case,” he continued, mastering with difficulty his stormy impatience, “please put off the subject to another occasion, and go upstairs, if you don’t mind. We’re agreed, about the promise you mention: of course, every promise is sacred, between gentlemen . . . But this doesn’t seem the best time to discuss it: midnight, when I’m about to leave . . . We’ll talk about it more calmly when I return.”

  I gave a laugh of desperate cynicism. He darkened.

  “So, meanwhile,” he added, in a grim, altered voice, “you’ll have time to grow up a little, I hope. For example, you might learn not to act like such a boor as tonight: since you’re just proving that even if you’re old enough you’re a boy, or, rather, a child . . . Good night!”

  I felt myself turn fiery red, then pale as the dead. “Yes,” I answered, “I’m going. But your promises—you can keep them, I don’t want them . . .”

  In confusion I noticed that my voice was starting to shout. It had now become a true male voice, no longer toneless as it had been some months earlier; and hearing it I again had the peculiar sensation that a stranger, a barbarian, was speaking through my mouth. I wasn’t thinking about what I said; and I no longer saw anything outside the person of W.G., who looked at me with a kind of curiosity in his cloudy blue eyes. My pupils, avid with bitterness, went to his left wrist, stripped of the watch:

  “You have no loyalty,” I continued to shout, “to promises or to vows! You even betrayed friendship! I know you now! You’re a traitor!”

  I seemed to be utterly lost in a real storm, with no support beneath my feet but a horrible rolling motion. I saw W.G. slowly separate from the side of the hearth and come toward me at a slightly weary but deliberate pace; and I expected that he wanted to beat me. It would have been the first time in our lives that he’d beaten me; and even in that instant I had time to think that I certainly wouldn’t react. He was my father, and fathers have the right to beat their sons. Although I was now grown, it was still he who had produced me.

  But it can’t really be said that he beat me. He was satisfied with seizing my arms, near the shoulder joint, and saying, “Hey! Moro!” Then he released me with a violent shake, his expression threatening, but at the same time he gave a laugh almost of amusement. And he added: “Oh, so now you know me, eh! You said!

  “Well, and if you know me from now on,” he resumed, taking two or three steps in front of me, “I have known you for quite some time, my little dark-haired boy!”

  “No, you don’t know me at all,” I murmured. “No one knows me, not me!”

  “Oh, really, my great unknown! But I know you very well, I know you like the back of my hand. And in fact now, here, before witnesses, I intend to tell you what you are!”

  “Then say it. Who cares!”

  He stopped, a step away from me, in a cruel and pitiless position. And at that moment his face began to display: magnificence, and celebration, and complicity, and supreme judgments, and duplicity, and futility, and slaughter! In other words, all those already known expressions he assumed when you couldn’t understand if he was preparing (perhaps) some august and lethal punishment or, rather (perhaps), was plotting a diabolical trick.

  “All right,” he said, “I therefore here attest, and all the world must know, that you, Arturo, are JEALOUS! Or, more precisely, we’ll say that Your Lordship merits the title of Universally Jealous. You in fact, oh great Hidalgo, oh Don Juan, oh king of hearts, suddenly fall in love with everybody. And you go around shooting Your arrows at everyone like the Love child of Venus, and if you don’t hit us then you get jealous . . . According to Your claim, the whole world should be the lover of Arturo Gerace. But then, for Your part, Your Lordship doesn’t love anyone, given that you are willful and vain and egotistical and sly, taken uniquely by your own beauties. And now go to sleep. Out!”

  “I’m going, yes . . .” I said in a low voice. Then in a louder, darker, more desperate voice I repeated: “Yes, I’m going! And I want to forget you! Forever! Listen! This is my last word!”

  “Very good,” he said, “we’re in agreement. It’s the last word.”

  Impetuously I turned toward the doorway; but in that movement I happened to glance at Stella, half lying on the big sofa against the wall. The whole time, without putting in a word, he had witnessed our quarrel in comfort, as if he were at the theater; and during my father’s last speech he had let some low laughs be heard. I caught him, in fact, with his mouth still in an attitude of laughter; and that, at that moment, made me lose the last glimmer of reason. I turned back a step and, beside myself, without even knowing what I was doing, grabbed at random a piece of silverware from the table and hurled it at him.

  My father remained motionless for several seconds, contained by anger and by astonishment, while Stella, skillfully avoiding the throw, put the article down calmly (I don’t think it was a knife, rather a fork, but I couldn’t say precisely) on a chair nearby.

  Meanwhile, I had stopped halfway between the hearth and the door, and waited, determined. I couldn’t, in fact, after such a challenge, leave without something else, at risk of letting them assume, maybe, that I was running away in fear of Stella. But he, without even getting up from the sofa, smiled at me very seriously, and said in a conciliatory tone:

  “Well, why are you mad at me now? I’m sorry, but I wasn’t laughing at you.”

  Then, turning to my father, with an expression of gracious and superior patience:

  “From the first moment,” he said, “immediately, as soon as he set foot in this room, he’s been trying in every way possible to quarrel with me.”

  “Get out of here! Go, and don’t come back! Do you understand?” my father repeated, now trembling with a true, terrible anger.

  Then my hardened gaze ran around the room, which seemed to rotate in my view like a revolving scene on the point of disappearing forever; and abruptly I left. When I got to my room I didn’t even bother to turn on the light. I threw myself on the bed, with my face against the pillow, and remained for several minutes like that, waiting for an apocalypse, or an earthquake, or some cosmic devastation, that would resolve that hateful night. On the one hand, I would have wanted morning never to arrive; on the other, I counted out with fear the interminable hours of the night, certain that I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  The Letter

  My intention was to stay awake all night; but at the same time I would have liked to fall into an extreme lethargy, which lasted days, months, and maybe centuries, as in a fairy
tale. My eyelids burned, but I wasn’t sleepy. After a while, I turned on the light and wrote a letter for my father.

  I no longer remember, naturally, the exact text of that letter; but I remember very clearly the concept. It said, briefly, more or less this:

  Dear Pa, my last word, which I now write to you, is this: that you were wrong tonight if you thought I still wanted to travel with you, as I did when I was young. At that time, maybe it was true that I wanted to, but now that desire is gone. And you are wrong if you think I’m envious of your friends. Maybe it was true that, as a boy, I envied them, but now I’ve learned that they’re monstrous criminals and disgusting creeps. And I hope that some time or other, in the city where you’re with them, one of them will kill you. Because I hate you. And I would prefer to have been born without a father. And without a mother and without anyone. Farewell. Arturo.

  I don’t know how long I stayed awake, ears straining, to hear if my father went back to his room, because, as soon as I heard his steps, I intended to go out into the hall and deliver my letter, without saying a word. But no step or sound interrupted the silence of the night outside my half-closed door. Still, I could have carried the letter to his room and left it for him, in plain sight, on the suitcase; and I thought of doing that. But the idea of going outside there, into the hall and the big deserted room, disturbed me. It seemed to me that those walls, those familiar objects, tonight had been marked and made ominous by the insults I had received. And that to confront alone their mute presences—that, too—would be a new insult.