Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  “My father . . . is unfortunate?”

  “Ah, you . . . you’re more fortunate . . . than him . . .” she reaffirmed, shaking her head slowly. Automatically, as if without realizing it, she had moved close to Carmine again, and, surely to distract him from our blasphemous words, she let him play with a ribbon that she took out of her hair. “You are more fortunate than he is,” she repeated. “Ah, you, who knows how many beautiful women you’ll have, in your life . . .”

  As she made this prediction, her chin trembled slightly, like a real girl’s. And the almost insipid, slightly sour innate innocence of her voice gained (from hidden tears) a resonance, like the imperfect music of certain humble childish instruments. She continued, her head still swaying:

  “And he, on the other hand, women don’t much want him. He . . . he’s too natural . . . he’s not tactful . . . with women he doesn’t have the imagination to show them off. Well, because many women don’t like a man who stays just that bit of time . . . and then forgets them . . . And no little kindness . . . a nice compliment . . . nothing, as if he were dealing with some low woman . . . That fact, a lot of women think it makes them look bad . . .”

  These phrases, necessary to demonstrate her conclusion, she drew from her breast with obvious difficulty (between blushes of awkwardness and innocence, and maybe even echoes—barely perceptible in her breath—of involuntary secret sighs . . .), but yet with the gravity of profound experience! And it was with a sense almost of amusement that I recognized, there, in her present demonstration, certain notorious speeches of her mother, Violante.

  “So that’s why,” she concluded, “I say of him, that he’s more unfortunate: because with women he can’t have much luck!”

  “But,” I objected, “he’s a very handsome man!”

  “Yes, very handsome . . . I don’t want to say he’s ugly, no! So—so . . . then he’s old.”

  “Old!”

  “What, isn’t he old? You know how old he is?” She counted on her fingers. “Thirty-five, he’s in his thirty-sixth year. He already has wrinkles, white hair . . .”

  That I had also noticed; but still I hadn’t yet thought that my father had now, in effect, reached old age!

  “So for that reason,” she resumed, “I begged you to remember . . . respect for your father. Because, besides being his son, you, with your fate, compared to his fate, you’re like a great lord of wealth! Because in your life who knows how many beautiful girls you’ll meet, and brilliant young women, and foreigners who . . . who . . . will love . . . you . . . And who knows what a beautiful bride you’ll have . . .”

  She swallowed once, twice. Her voice again cracked. But she quickly concluded, lowering her forehead with a meek, gentle, and persuasive seriousness:

  “As for him, if he didn’t take me, where—now that he really is old—where would he find the affection of another soul? Yes, if there wasn’t me, maybe no other woman would get involved with him . . . And since he was born without a family, poor man, he’d be alone and a gypsy for his whole life, like a soldier in the foreign legion . . . Now, in his life, there’s only me to take care of him . . .”

  She uttered those last sentences not with humility but in fact with the satisfaction of a matronly superiority, in which was mixed an air of somewhat childlike valor. And in that comic mixture, her unattainable beauty appeared to me magnificent, worthy of a true king! I looked at her for a moment; then I burst out:

  “You’re wrong if you think I’m going to have a wife!”

  “Artú! . . . Why . . .”

  “You’re wrong. There’s one woman alone, who could be my wife! I know who it is! And I don’t want another! I won’t ever marry anyone!”

  She stared at me with fear in her face, as if I had shouted a curse at her. But without wanting to, her gaze spoke a winged, smiling gratitude, even in the disbelief that shadowed it: as if she would not be unhappy, in essence, if I remained celibate in honor of that woman.

  Then all my love for her seized me again, in a great fire of regrets, demands, and revolt! Like a mad Catherine wheel, all the wonderful compliments I would give her if I were her husband were ignited in me; and the kisses, the caresses I would shower on her; and how every night I would sleep next to her naked body, to feel her bosom near me even in sleep. And of the beautiful clothes I would buy her, I would want her in a silk petticoat, and a shirt of embroidered silk, so I could see them on her when I undressed her. And I would take her to visit her mother, Violante, dressed in furs, with a feathered hat, like one of the finest ladies of Naples! And the journeys I would make would be uniquely in order to send her letters every day, written as beautifully as the poems of a genius. And I would go to America, to farthest Asia, to bring her back jewels such as no other woman had. Not for her to put away somewhere: but to cover her neck, and her ears, and her little hands, as if they were all kisses. So that her friends and acquaintances, seeing her pass by so rich in gold and true precious gems, would have to say: “Lucky her, she has such a grand husband!”

  These thoughts (which I’d had more than once, and repressed with difficulty, during the preceding months, since that famous day when I had discovered I loved her) swirled in my mind, I repeat, like a festival of fire. The impossibility, which transformed those joyous thoughts into sorrow, was an unnatural injustice, tormenting me. But as N. stood there before me, breathing and physical, suddenly every impossibility became absurd. In an arrogance of happiness, I ran toward her, on the other side of the big bed, and said:

  “I love you!”

  It was the first time in my life that I said that word: and it seemed to me that, in hearing me say it, she would have to feel the same emotion as me saying it. Instead, the usual fantastic negation (which at that moment seemed to me more odious than any vile superstition) twisted her face. She cried:

  “No! Artú! You mustn’t do evil!”

  And then, with the rage of one who wants what is his right, I embraced her, holding her tight, and tried to kiss her on the mouth.

  But she was ready to avoid my kiss, twisting her head back feverishly, and repeating: “No! No!” in a sort of wild invocation of help: as if there were someone in the room, besides the scared, defenseless Carminiello, who could help her. So she began to defend herself from me, struggling with knees, elbows, fists, even with her nails and teeth. A beast of the wilderness intending to kill me could not have developed such ferocity as she used to deny me a kiss! Then my love turned into hatred; and before I left, without having kissed her, with furious hands I blindly hit her cheeks, her neck, her hair. Until, with wonder and amazement (composed of a strange innocence, rather than remorse), I saw in the mass of her curls a small pink ear stained with drops of blood.

  In my reckless rage, I had given a violent tug to her earring, so that the clasp came unhooked and had slightly torn the lobe. And, letting her go, I found in my fingers the poor prey of that small circle of gold. As in a dream I heard the crying of my stepbrother, who surely was convinced that I wanted to murder his mother! And saw her, who, now pale, leaning against the child, held him by his garment so that he wouldn’t fall on the floor. It seemed to me that she wasn’t even complaining, she was so stunned; and she stared at me with wide eyes that were weak and suffering, as if she expected from me some new horror. I threw the earring at her feet. “You vile murderer!” I shouted at her. “Don’t be afraid, I’ll never kiss you again.” And running out of the room I added: “Goodbye. Forever. It’s all over.”

  In the Cave

  She had remained still, leaning on the bed, without a word; but when I was on the stair landing I heard her calling from the doorway, fearfully: “Artú! Artú! Where are you going?” Then I heard, from inside the room, Carmine’s crying grow sharper; and she hurried back to try to calm him. Again, as I crossed the hall, I heard her voice, which from the top of the stairs had resumed calling breathlessly, “Where are you going? Artú!” mingled with the clatter of her clogs as they descended the first steps and the ba
bbling of Carmine in her arms. But a moment later I was in the street; and the voices of the house vanished behind me, with distance, like sounds of another world.

  I didn’t know precisely where I would flee. I had no friend on the island, and besides, in my fury, I had neglected to take any money, abandoning my entire capital in my room. Aside from that bread and chocolate and fruit of the evening before, I hadn’t eaten for a day and a half: and, surely, the bizarre sense of unreality that transported me and lightened my anguish a little was due partly to that. With unalterable determination, I knew that soon the island would belong to the past. There were no more steamers leaving for the mainland that day; but I didn’t care about knowing exactly how and when I would leave. What I asked for the moment was only to retreat for a while to some deserted corner of the island where I could hide my lacerating solitude. “And so,” I said to myself bitterly, “ends the day of my birthday!”

  I crossed the square with the monument of Christ the Fisherman, then the main harbor, leaving the wharf behind; and, although I had no definite goal, seeking only uninhabited and solitary places, I set off to the left, toward the last gray bit of coast that, against a background of earth-covered rocks, formed the edge of the island on that side. On the level space before the Lingua del Faro, cluttered, like a shipyard, with boats in dry dock and under repair, some village girls were playing hopscotch on squares drawn on the ground with chalk. In my brutal course, I almost hit a jumper, but, paying no attention to her protests or those of her companions, I kept going toward the shore.

  Several natural caves were dug into the rocks there. Two or three of these—with an entrance no wider than the measure of a door, but spacious and comfortable enough inside—had been appropriated as storehouses for equipment, oars, and so on, by boat owners. They paid rent to the town, and had provided the entrances with strong plank doors, usually tightly locked. But going along the shore I saw that one of those doors was open. Maybe the renter of the cave had left the island, or that space was unused. Inside, in fact, there was nothing but a pile of old rotting ropes and some cans of glue covered with mold.

  I had happened onto that shore, one could say, by chance, and chance helped me! The small abandoned room was exactly what I needed. I entered, and pulled the door closed; swelled by bad weather, it fit perfectly into its opening, so that from the outside it appeared unquestionably locked, like the others. To better secure it from the wind, I barricaded it with that pile of ropes, on which I flopped down and stretched out. And there, on that bed, ignored by everyone, I felt free and alone, like a miserable vagabond.

  Lack of food, followed by that long run, began to make itself felt, with a light buzzing in my ears and a confused weariness. I gave no thought to my destiny, not even that of the next hours, as if it belonged not to me but to someone else whom I still didn’t know, and whom it didn’t much matter to me to know. And I no longer hated my father, I no longer loved N. In place of the dramatic sufferings that until a little before had agitated me, I felt an amorphous sadness, with no more feelings for anyone.

  The Goddess

  The wind had turned to scirocco and made the weather warm, stormy, and dark. The gaps in the plank door let a glimmer of murky light into the cave, mixed with the heavy salt scent of the air. The small stretch of coast, in that season, was deserted like the farthest reaches of the world; and for some minutes no other sound reached me but the noise of the sea stirred by the African wind. But soon afterward amid that din I heard coming closer through the wind the same voice that at the moment of my flight had pursued me to the door and, hoarse and breathless from the run, continued to cry, “Ar-tuuuro! Ar-tuuú!”

  My stepmother had evidently delayed just long enough to put Carmine down safely somewhere, and had immediately run out to look for me. From someone who had seen me go by and, finally, from the girls who were playing hopscotch, she must have found out the direction I had taken. But no one had seen me enter the cave; and, confident of my hiding place, I raised myself from my pile of ropes and, squatting behind the door, peeked out through the gaps between the boards.

  An instant later, I saw my stepmother emerge, breathing hard, at the end of the beach; and, from her habits, I seemed to guess with certainty, and not much difficulty, her thought. Hearing in the room my supreme farewell, “Goodbye forever,” she must have gotten the suspicion that I wanted to pass the notorious Pillars of Hercules again, this time with no return. (Besides, I confess, perhaps I had even, in a way, intended her to understand something of the sort.) And now, before that desolate empty shore, her suspicion was magnified.

  She passed the storehouse caves without stopping, since, clearly, those being private spaces, and properly closed, she didn’t consider that I could be there . . . She ran along the beach to the last barrier of rocks, then she turned back, more frantic, and then she retraced the same stretch. And suddenly she began to pound on the doors of the caves with her fists! But surely it was only her violence that found an outlet against that wood, without any real hope: in the mad disorder of her blows, one perceived the certainty that she was pounding in vain. I also seemed to hear her trying, with her little hands, to force the door of the cave next to mine. But she immediately abandoned that undertaking, which must have seemed to her absurd and futile.

  And she returned to the shore, back and forth, like a desperate murderer. Maybe, at this moment, she already saw me hurled down into the whirlpools and swept away to an unknown distance. She ran, shouting “Artú!” in all directions, in a new, strange, carnal voice of lacerating sharpness; and letting the wind drag her dress, with no shame. Her black shawl had fallen off her head, uncovering the curls, all disheveled and torn after the struggle she’d had with me; and when she ran into the wind her hair covered her face, went into her mouth, muffling her cries. Every so often her knees buckled and she slowed her pace; and her lips, which had become livid and almost swollen from so much shouting, relaxed in a brutal, inanimate bitterness. In the few minutes since we had left the house, she seemed to have grown into a woman of thirty; and to have exchanged her honest soul for the soul of a sinner. From her present devastated and earthly, old-woman’s ugliness emanated a sweet, barbaric splendor. As if her soul, speaking, implored: “Ah, Arturo, don’t be dead, have pity on a poor lover. Reappear to me alive, and I, in this very place, down on these rocks, will give you not only kisses but everything you want. I will go to hell for you, my holy love, I will be proud of it!”

  But, with a cruel and melancholy hardness, I thought, seeing her: “Go away. It’s over now. I have no more love for you or hatred for others. I have no feelings for anyone. Go home, go, I don’t even like you.”

  And I lay down again, with my arms under my head, hoping that she would go away and leave me alone.

  I heard her wandering on the beach a little longer, continuing to repeat “Artú,” but softly now, in a kind of inconsolable babble. Finally that pathetic voice went away along the road home, toward the town, and the beach was empty again.

  Then I really did have the feeling of being without life, down at the bottom of the sea, as she so feared. As soon as she left, the whistle of the three o’clock steamer reached me, through the wind, as it entered the harbor. But that no longer meant anything, I no longer expected anyone. The certainty that my father would not return for my birthday, besides, no longer caused me any sorrow. Worse, I was sure that by now his arrival wouldn’t cheer me.

  “In an hour or so it will be evening,” I thought with satisfaction, “and no one will pass by on this forgotten beach, no one will come to bother me anymore.” A night without duration or awareness was, perhaps, the only tolerable conclusion of this day.

  As the minutes passed, I felt my muscles grow stiff with lack of movement, and my thoughts became dazed, as if I were being transformed into a gigantic sea turtle, inside its armor of black stone. The second signal of the steamer, which after its brief stop was leaving the harbor, reached me as from centuries of distance, like some inc
redible news, which I no longer wanted to hear. Near me, at the door of my usurped room, the sounds of the wind and the waves mingled, and that natural chorus, without any human voice, certainly was discussing my destiny, in a language as incomprehensible as death.

  And it was at that point (the signal of the boat’s departure had faded into the distance) that I heard again, advancing from the end of the beach, a voice—not of a woman, manly this time; and not agitated, but, rather, confident and almost gay—that called the name of Arturo. It was not the timbre of my father’s voice; and the rapid, heavy-booted footsteps—which, approaching, echoed on the stones of the beach—were certainly not his.

  I got up, as before, to look out between the planks. And there outside, a few meters away, I saw a soldier passing.

  He had brown curly hair, was shorter than average, with a round face, a black mustache, and animated dark eyes that were exploring the surroundings.

  At the moment, it didn’t seem to me that I knew him; still, in his figure I noticed immediately something oddly familiar, which gave me a tremor of surprise and mystery.

  From behind my door I shouted: “Hey! What Arturo are you looking for?”

  He answered: “Eh, Arturo Gerace!”

  So I opened the door. “Arturo Gerace,” I said, “is me!” At which he exclaimed, “Arturo!” hurrying toward me with evident pleasure. And without any fuss he kissed me on both cheeks.

  “You don’t recognize me, I see,” he added. And, with an allusive and mysterious smile, he showed me, on the ring finger of his right hand, a silver ring, which had set into it a cameo depicting the head of the goddess Minerva.

  The Enchanted Pin

  Perhaps our nature leads us to consider the games of the unexpected more futile and arbitrary than they are—too much so. Thus, for example, when in a story or a poem the unexpected event seems to accord with some secret intention of fate, we willingly charge the writer with novelistic vice. And in life certain unexpected events, in themselves natural and simple, appear to us, because of our mood of the moment, extraordinary or even supernatural.