The Island of the Day Before (10 page)

"Betrayal!" Toiras shouted, rushing down to the gate, where he ordered La Grange to fall back.

A little later, an ensign of the Pompadour regiment brought before Toiras a boy of Casale, his wrists bound by a cord. He had been caught in a little tower near the castle, signaling with a white cloth to the besiegers. Toiras had him laid on the ground; he stuck the thumb of the boy's right hand into the raised cock of his pistol, pointing the barrel towards the boy's left hand. After putting his own finger on the trigger, Toiras asked, "Et alors?"

The boy quickly realized the bad turn things were taking, and began to talk: the previous evening, towards midnight, outside the church of San Domenico, a certain Captain Gambero had promised him six pistoles, three in advance, if he would do what he then had done, at the moment when the French troops moved from the San Giorgio bastion. Indeed, not having grasped the military art, the boy seemed to demand the outstanding three pistoles, as if Toiras should be pleased with his service. At a certain point he saw Roberto and started shouting that this was the notorious Gambero.

Roberto was stunned, the older Pozzo fell on the slanderous wretch and would have strangled him if some gentlemen of the staff had not restrained him. Toiras immediately pointed out that Roberto had been all night at his side and that, though he was surely a fine-looking youth, nobody could mistake him for a captain. In the meantime others had ascertained that a Captain Gambero really did exist, in the Bassiani regiment, and they haled him, kicking and shoving, into Toiras's presence. Gambero protested his innocence, and in fact the boy prisoner did not recognize him, but Toiras prudently had the officer locked up anyway. Capping the disorder, someone came to report that as La Grange's troops were retreating, a man had fled from the San Giorgio bastion, reaching the Spanish lines, to be greeted with manifestations of joy. Not much could be said about him except that he was young, dressed in the Spanish style with a net over his hair. Roberto thought at once of Ferrante. But what made the deepest impression on him was the suspicion with which the French commanders looked at the Italians in Toiras's train.

"Can one little rascal stop a whole army?" he heard his father ask, nodding towards the retiring French. "Forgive me, dear friend," Pozzo said, addressing Toiras, "but here the idea is growing that, in our parts, we are all a bit like that rogue Gambero, or am I mistaken?" And when Toiras protested esteem and friendship, but in an absent tone, Pozzo went on: "Let it go. It seems to me everyone's shitting his pants, and this business is more than I can take. I've had a bellyful of those lousy Spaniards, and if you don't mind, I'll knock off two or three just to show we can dance the galliard when we have to. And if we feel like it, we don't bow down before anybody,
mordioux!
"

He then rode outside the gate and galloped like a fury, his sword raised, against the enemy host. He obviously didn't mean to put them to flight, but it seemed proper to him to act on his own, just to show the others.

As proof of his courage, it was good; as a military action, very bad. A ball struck his forehead and he slumped onto the withers of his Pagnufli. A second volley rose against the rampart, and Roberto felt a violent blow to the temple, like a stone; he staggered. He had been grazed, but he freed himself from the arms of the man supporting him. Shouting his father's name, he stood erect and glimpsed Pagnufli, bewildered, galloping with his master's lifeless body across the empty field.

Once again Roberto thrust his fingers into his mouth and emitted his whistle; Pagnufli heard and came back towards the walls, but slowly, at a solemn little trot, so as not to unsaddle his rider, no longer imperiously pressing his flanks. The horse came in again, neighing his pavane for his dead master, returning the body to Roberto, who closed those still-wide eyes and wiped clean that face spattered with blood now clotted, while his own blood, alive, striped his cheek.

That shot may have touched a nerve. The next day, as soon as he came out of the cathedral of Sant'Evasio, where Toiras had decreed the solemn obsequies of the lord Pozzo di San Patrizio della Griva, Roberto could hardly tolerate the light of day. Perhaps his eyes were red from tears, but the fact remains that from then on, they continued to ache. Today students of the psyche would say that because his father had entered the shadows, Roberto also wanted to enter the shadows. He knew little of the psyche, but this figure of speech might have appealed to him, in the light—or in the shadows—of what happened later.

I consider that Pozzo died of punctilio, which seems superb to me, but Roberto was unable to appreciate it. All praised his father's heroism to him; he should have borne his bereavement with pride, and here he was sobbing. Recalling how his father had told him that a gentleman must learn to bear, dry-eyed, the blows of adverse fortune, he apologized for his weakness to his parent, who could no longer call him to account, and repeated to himself that this was the first time he had been orphaned. He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.

But to give some sense to what had happened, he could not help falling back, once again, on Ferrante. Ferrante, following him closely, had sold to the enemy the secrets he knew and then shamelessly had joined the adversary's ranks to enjoy the well-earned reward. His father, who had realized this, wanted thus to cleanse the stained escutcheon of the family, and to bathe Roberto in the glow of his own courage, to purify him of that aura of suspicion just cast on him, who was blameless. To make sure his father's death was not in vain, Roberto owed to him the conduct that all at Casale expected of the hero's son.

He could not do otherwise: he found himself now the legitimate lord of La Griva, heir to the family name and possessions, and Toiras no longer dared employ him for little tasks—nor could he call on him for big ones. And so, left alone to sustain his new role of illustrious orphan, Roberto found himself still more alone, lacking even the comfort of action: at the heart of a siege, released from all duties, he asked himself how he should spend his days as a besieged soldier.

A
RRESTING FOR A
moment the wave of memories, Roberto realized he had evoked his father's death not with the pious intention of keeping open that Philoctetes' wound, but by mere accident, as he was summoning up the specter of Ferrante, elicited by the specter of the Intruder of the
Daphne.
The two now appeared to him as such obvious twins that he decided to eliminate the weaker in order to overpower the stronger.

In the final analysis, he said to himself, during those days of siege did I ever have any other hint of Ferrante? No. What happened then? I was convinced of his nonexistence by Saint-Savin.

Roberto had in fact made friends with Monsieur de Saint-Savin. He had seen him again at the funeral, and had received a demonstration of affection from him. When not prey to wine, Saint-Savin was an accomplished gentleman. Small of stature, nervous, brisk, and though his face was perhaps marked by the Parisian dissipation of which he spoke, he could not have been thirty.

He apologized for his excesses at that supper: not for what he had said, but for his uncivil way of saying it. He inquired about Monsieur Pozzo, and Roberto was grateful to him for at least feigning interest. Roberto told how his father had taught him what he knew of fencing; Saint-Savin asked various questions, waxed enthusiastic at the mention of a certain thrust, drew his sword right in the middle of a square and insisted that Roberto illustrate the action. Either Saint-Savin already knew it or he was very quick, because he parried it with dexterity, though admitting that it was an invention worthy of the haute école.

In gratitude he indicated only one stratagem of his own to Roberto. He put him on guard, they traded a few feints, he awaited the first attack, suddenly he seemed to slip to the ground, and when Roberto dropped his guard, speechless, Saint-Savin rose as if by miracle and snipped a button off his tunic—showing that he could have wounded him had he thrust harder.

"You like that, my friend?" he said, as Roberto saluted, conceding defeat. "It's the coup de la mouette, the seagull thrust, as it's called. If you go to sea one day, you will observe how those birds dive abruptly as if they were falling, but when they have barely grazed the water, they soar up again with their catch in their beaks. It is a move that requires long practice, and it is not infallible. In my experience, it failed once—for the braggart who invented it. And so he made me a gift both of his life and of his secret. I believe he was sorrier to part with the second than with the first."

They would have gone on at length if a little crowd of civilians had not collected. "Shall we stop?" Roberto said. "I would not want someone to say I have forgotten I am in mourning."

"You honor your father better now," Saint-Savin said, "by remembering his teachings, than you did before, listening to that execrable Latin in church."

"Monsieur de Saint-Savin," Roberto said to him, "are you not afraid of ending up at the stake?"

Saint-Savin frowned for a moment. "When I was more or less your age, I admired a man who had been an older brother to me. Like an ancient philosopher I called him Lucretius, for he, too, was a philosopher, and moreover a priest. He ended up at the stake in Toulouse, but first they tore out his tongue and strangled him. And so you see that if we philosophers are quick of tongue, it is not simply, as that gentleman said the other evening, to give ourselves
bon ton.
It is to put the tongue to good use before they rip it out. Or, rather, jesting aside, to dispel prejudice and to discover the natural cause of Creation."

"So you truly do not believe in God?"

"I find no reason to, in nature. Nor am I the only one. Strabo tells us that the Galicians had no notion of a higher being. When the missionaries wanted to talk of God with the natives of the West Indies, Acosta recounts (and he was also a Jesuit), they could use only the Spanish word
Dios.
You will not believe it, but no suitable term existed in the local language. If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention.... But do not look at me as if I lacked sound principles and were not a faithful servant of my king. A true philosopher never seeks to subvert the order of things. He accepts it. He asks only to be allowed to cultivate the thoughts that comfort a strong spirit. For the others, luckily there are both popes and bishops to restrain the crowd from revolt and crime. The order of the state demands a uniformity of conduct, religion is necessary for the people, and the wise man must sacrifice a part of his independence so that society will remain stable. As for me, I believe I am an upright man: I am loyal to my friends, I do not lie, except when I make a declaration of love, I love knowledge, and they say I write good verses. So the ladies consider me charming. I would like to write romances, which are so much in fashion, but though I think of many, I never sit down to write one...."

"What romances do you think of?"

"Sometimes I look at the Moon, and I imagine that those darker spots are caverns, cities, islands, and the places that shine are those where the sea catches the light of the sun like the glass of a mirror. I would like to tell the stories of their kings, their wars, and their revolutions, or of the unhappiness of lovers up there, who in the course of their nights sigh as they look down at our Earth. I would like to tell about war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries, or the bones with the marrow. All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.' Then I realize that an equally beautiful story can be told, inventing an original duel, for example, a man fighting and convincing his adversary to deny God, then running him through so that he dies damned. Stop, Monsieur de la Grive, draw your sword once again, like that, parry, there! You set your heels along the same line: a mistake, for you jeopardize the steadiness of your legs. The head must not be held erect, because the space between the shoulder and the neck exposes an excessive surface to the blows of the adversary...."

"But I protect my head with the sword in my extended hand."

"Wrong, in that position you are weaker. Besides, I opened with the German stance, and you placed yourself in the Italian position. Bad idea. When a ready position has to be countered, you should imitate it as closely as possible. But you have told me nothing of yourself, of your experiences before you turned up in this valley of dust."

More than anyone, an adult able to dazzle with perverse paradoxes can fascinate a youth, who immediately wants to emulate him. Roberto opened his heart to Saint-Savin, and to make himself interesting—since the first sixteen years of his life offered scant material—he recounted his obsession with his unknown brother.

"You have read too many romances," Saint-Savin said to him, "and you try to live one. But the purpose of a story is to teach and please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."

"And what might I be taught by what you consider the romance of Ferrante?"

"A romance," Saint-Savin explained to him, "must always have at its base a misconception—of a person, action, place, time, circumstance—and from that fundamental misconception episodic misconceptions must arise, developments, digressions, and finally unexpected and pleasant recognitions. By misconception I mean things like a living person's reported death, or one person's being killed in place of another, or a misconception of quantity, as when a woman believes her lover dead and marries another, or of quality, when it is the judgement of the senses that errs, when someone who appears dead is then buried, while actually he is under the influence of a sleeping potion; or else a misconception of relation, as when one man is wrongly believed the murderer of another; or of instrument, as when one man pretends to stab another using a weapon whose tip, while seeming to wound, does not pierce the throat but retracts into the sleeve, pressing a sponge soaked in blood.... Not to mention forged letters, assumed voices, messages not delivered in time or delivered to the wrong place or into the wrong hands. And of these stratagems the most celebrated, but too common, is that involving the mistaking of one person for another, the mistake being explained by the Double ... The Double is a reflection that the character pulls behind himself or that precedes him in every situation. A fine machination, whereby the reader identifies with the main character, sharing his fear of an Enemy Brother. But you see how man is also machine, and it suffices to turn one wheel on the surface and other wheels then turn inside: the brother and the enmity are merely the reflection of the fear that each man has of himself, of the recesses of his own soul, where unconfessed desires lurk, or, as they are saying in Paris, unconscious concepts. For it has been demonstrated that imperceptible thoughts exist, affecting the soul without the soul's being aware of them, clandestine thoughts whose existence is demonstrated by the fact that, however little each of us examines himself, he will not fail to remark that in his heart he bears love or hatred, joy or sorrow, while remaining unable to remember distinctly the thoughts that generated it."