The Island of the Day Before (46 page)

So in that world—and after ten or more years—he had found Roberto again! It is impossible to express the joyous rancor with which the deceiver rediscovered his hated brother. With a face that would have seemed transfigured and overwhelmed by malevolence had it not been hidden beneath his disguise, Ferrante told himself that at last he had the opportunity to annihilate Roberto, and to take possession of his name and his wealth.

First, he spied on him, for weeks and weeks in the course of those evenings, studying that face to catch in it the trace of every thought. Accustomed as he was to concealing, he was also very skilled at discovering. For that matter, love cannot be hidden: like any fire, it is revealed by smoke. Following Roberto's glances, Ferrante immediately understood that he loved the Lady. He then told himself that his first step would be to take from Roberto what he held most dear.

Ferrante noticed that Roberto, after attracting the attention of the Lady with his talk, lacked the courage to approach her. His brother's shyness served the spy's purposes: the Lady could easily interpret it as indifference, and to scorn affection is the most effective way to extinguish it. Roberto was clearing the path for Ferrante. Ferrante allowed the Lady to suffer in uncertain expectation, then—calculating the right moment—he set himself to flatter her.

But could Roberto allow Ferrante a love equal to his own? Certainly not. Ferrante considered woman the portrait of inconstancy, minister of fraud, fickle in speech, belated in action, and quick in caprice. Educated by would-be ascetics who never ceased reminding him that El hombre es el fuego, la mujer la estopa, viene el diablo y sopla, he was accustomed to considering every daughter of Eve an imperfect animal, an error of Nature, a torture for the eyes if ugly, a suffering of the heart if beautiful, tyrant of any who loved her, enemy of any who scorned her, disordered in her desires, implacable in her dislikes, capable of enchanting with the mouth and enchaining with the eyes.

But it was this very disdain that impelled him to entrap;
from his lips came words of adulation, but in his heart he was celebrating the degradation of his victim.

Ferrante was thus preparing to lay his hands on that body that Roberto had not dared graze with his thoughts. Was he, despiser of everything that for Roberto was object of devotion, ready—now—to steal Lilia and make her the insipid ingénue of his comedy? What torture. And what painful duty, to follow the insane logic of Romances, which imposes participation in the most odious affects, for you must conceive as the children of your own imagination the most odious of protagonists.

But there was nothing to be done. Ferrante would have Lilia—otherwise why create a fiction, if not to die of it?

What happened and how, Roberto could not picture (nor was he ever tempted to try). Perhaps Ferrante late one night stole into Lilia's chamber, clinging to some ivy (whose tenacious embrace is a nocturnal invitation to every loving heart) that climbed up to her window.

There is Lilia, showing signs of outraged virtue, to such a degree that anyone would be convinced of her indignation, anyone except a man like Ferrante, ready to believe the readiness of all human beings to betray. And here is Ferrante, sinking to his knees before her and speaking. What does he say? He says, in a false voice, everything that Roberto would not only have liked to say to her but has said, without her knowing that he said it.

How can the villain have managed—Roberto asked himself—to learn the tenor of the letters I sent her? And further, of the letters Saint-Savin dictated to me at Casale, which I later destroyed. And even the letters I am writing now, on this ship. And yet there is no doubt, Ferrante is declaiming in sincere tones sentences Roberto knew very well:

"My Lady, in the wondrous architecture of the Universe it has been written since the first day of Creation that I would encounter you and love you.... Forgive the raving of a desperate man, or, better, pay no heed to it; it was never said that sovereigns had to justify the death of their slaves.... Have you not made of my eyes two alembics, the better to distill my life and convert it into limpid water? I beseech you, do not turn your lovely head away: bereft of your gaze, I am blind, for you do not see me, deprived of your word, I am mute, for you do not speak to me, and I shall be without memory if you do not remember me.... Oh, let love at least make of me an insensible shard, a mandrake, a fountain of stone that weeps away every anguish!"

The Lady now surely trembled, in her eyes burned all the love she had formerly concealed, burned with the strength of a prisoner whose bars of Reserve someone has broken, offering the silken ladder of Opportunity. Ferrante had only to press on, and he did not confine himself to saying what Roberto had written; he knew other words that he now poured into the ears of the bewitched Lady, bewitching also Roberto, who could not recall having written them.

"O my pale sun, at your sweet pallor the vermilion dawn loses all its fire! O sweet eyes, of you I ask only to be ill. And in vain do I flee through fields or woods to forget you. No forest covers the earth, no tree rises in a forest, no bough grows on a tree, no frond sprouts from a bough, no flower laughs in the frond, no fruit is born from the flower, in which I do not see your smile...."

And, at her first blush: "Oh, Lilia, if you knew!...I have loved you without knowing your face or your name. I sought you, and I did not know where you were. But one day you appeared to me like an angel.... Oh, I know, you are wondering why this love of mine does not remain pure in silence, chaste in distance.... But I am dying, O my heart, now you see my soul is already escaping me, do not allow it to dissolve in the air, grant that it may dwell on your lips!"

Ferrante's accents were so sincere that Roberto himself now wanted her to fall into that sweet lime. Only thus could he have the certainty that she loved him, Roberto.

So Lilia bent to kiss him, then did not dare. Willing and unwilling, three times she held her lips to the desired breath, three times she drew back, then cried: "Oh yes, yes, if you do not ensnare me, I shall never be free, I will not be chaste if you do not violate me!"

And, taking his hand, and kissing it, she raised it to her bosom; then she drew him to her, tenderly stealing the breath from his lips. Ferrante leaned over that urn of happiness (to which Roberto had entrusted the ashes of his heart), and the two bodies melted into a single soul, the two souls into a single body. Roberto no longer knew who was in those arms, since she believed she was in his, and he, in yielding her mouth to Ferrante, tried to withdraw his own, so as not to concede that kiss to the Other.

Thus, while Ferrante kissed, and she kissed in return, the kiss now dissolved into nothing, and Roberto was left only with the knowledge of having been robbed of everything. But he could not avoid thinking of what he refused to imagine: for he knew that it is in the nature of love to exceed.

At that outraged excess, forgetting that she was giving to Ferrante, believing him Roberto, the proof that Roberto had so desired, he hated Lilia, and running about the ship, he howled: "Oh, wretch! I would offend all your sex if I called you woman! What you have done is more proper to a fury than to a female, and even the title of beast would be too great an honor for such an animal of Hell! You are worse than the asp that poisoned Cleopatra, worse than the horned viper whose deceits delight the birds then sacrificed to its hunger, worse than the amphisbaena that, on anyone it grasps, scatters such venom that in an instant he dies, worse than the dread leps that, armed with four venomous teeth, corrupts the flesh it bites, worse than the jacule that darts from trees and strangles its victim, worse than the colubra that vomits its poison into fountains, worse than the basilisk that kills with his gaze! Infernal termagant, who knows neither Heaven nor earth, neither sex nor faith, monster begot of a stone, an alp, an oak!"

Then he stopped, realized again that she had yielded to Ferrante believing him Roberto, and that therefore she was not to be damned but forgiven for that subterfuge. "Careful, my beloved, he presents himself to you with my face, knowing that you could love no one who was not I! What am I to do now, except hate myself to be able to hate him? Can I allow you to be betrayed, enjoying his embrace believing it mine? I have already accepted life in this prison to pass all my days and my nights devoted to the thought of you; can I now permit you to believe you are bewitching me while in fact succumbing to his spell? Oh, Love, Love, Love, have you not punished me enough already, is this not a death undying?"

F
OR TWO DAYS
Roberto again fled the light of day. In his sleep he saw only the dead. His mouth and gums were irritated. From his viscera the pain spread to his chest, then to his back, and he vomited acid substances, though he had taken no food. The black bile, gnawing and undermining his whole body, fermented and erupted in bubbles such as those water expels when subjected to intense heat.

He had surely fallen victim (and it is inconceivable that he realized this only then) to what is generally called Erotic Melancholy. Had he not been led to explain, that evening at Arthénice's, how the image of the beloved awakes love, insinuating itself as simulacrum through the meatus of the eyes, those doorkeepers and spies of the soul? But afterwards the amorous impression allows itself to glide slowly through the veins until it reaches the liver, stimulating concupiscence, which moves the whole body to sedition, leads straight to the conquest of the citadel of the heart, whence it attacks the more noble powers of the brain and enslaves them.

Which is to say that its victims virtually lose their reason, the senses stray, the intellect is beclouded, the imagination is depraved, and the poor lover grows thin, wan, his eyes become hollow, he sighs, and is steeped in jealousy.

How is it to be cured? Roberto thought he knew the remedy above all remedies, which, however, was denied him: to possess the beloved person. He did not know that this is not enough, for melancholics do not become such through love; rather, they fall in love to express their melancholy—preferring desolate places for spiritual converse with the absent beloved, thinking only of how to arrive in her presence; although, arriving there, they become all the more afflicted, and would like still to attain some other goal.

Roberto tried to recall what he had heard from men of science who had studied Erotic Melancholy. Apparently it was caused by idleness, by sleeping supine, and by an excessive retention of seed. For too many days he had lived in enforced idleness, but as far as retention of seed was concerned, he shunned any enquiry into its causes or any thought of remedy.

He had heard talk about hunting parties as a stimulus of oblivion, and decided he would intensify his natatory endeavors, and would not sleep on his back; but among the substances that excite the senses is salt, and in swimming one swallows a fair amount of salt.... Further, he remembered having heard that the Africans, exposed to the sun, were more addicted to vice than the Hyperboreans.

Was it perhaps food that had unleashed his saturnalian propensities? Doctors forbade game, goose liver, pistachios, truffles, and ginger, but they did not say which fish were not advisable. They warned against overly comfortable clothing, such as sable and velvet, and also against music, amber, nutmeg, and Cyprus Powder. But what could he know of the unknown power of the hundred perfumes released from the greenhouse below, or of those borne by the winds from the Island?

He could have warded off many of these unfortunate influences with camphor, borage, wood sorrel; with enemas, with a vomitory of salt of vitriol dissolved in broth, and finally with leeching of the median vein of the arm or that of the brow; and then by eating only chicory, endive, lettuce, and melons, grapes, cherries, plums, and pears and, above all, fresh mint.... But none of these were at hand on the
Daphne.

He resumed moving among the waves, trying not to swallow too much salt, and resting as seldom as possible.

Certainly he did not cease thinking about the story he had summoned up, but his irritation with Ferrante was now translated into fits of arrogance, and he measured himself against the sea as if, subjecting it to his will, he were making his enemy his subject.

After a few days, one afternoon he remarked for the first time the amber color of the hair on his chest and—as he notes with various rhetorical contortions—his groin. He realized that his whole body had become tanned, also strengthened, for on his arms he saw a rippling of muscles he had never noticed before. He considered himself a Hercules at this point, and he lost all sense of prudence. The next day he descended into the water without the rope.

He would abandon the ladder, moving along the hull to the right as far as the rudder, then he would round the stern, and swim back along the other side, passing beneath the bowsprit. And he put his arms and legs to work.

The sea was not calm, and wavelets flung him against the ship's side, forcing him to redouble his efforts, whether to stay close to the ship or to move away from it. He was breathing heavily, but he advanced without fear. Until he reached his halfway point, the stern.

He realized that he had expended all his strength. He was now too weak to swim the length of the ship, but he could not turn back either. He tried clinging to the rudder, which offered him only a dubious hold, covered as it was with mucilage, while it slowly creaked under the alternating slaps of the waves.

Above his head he could see the gallery, imagining beyond its windows the safe haven of his quarters. He told himself that if by misadventure the ladder at the prow had come loose, he might spend hours and hours before his death yearning for that deck he had so often wished to leave.

The sun was covered by a patch of clouds, and he was already growing numb. He stretched his head back, as if to sleep. After a moment he opened his eyes, turned, and realized that what he had feared was happening: the waves were pulling him away from the ship.