The Island of the Day Before (5 page)

Roberto began to see war as a splendid experience; from wayfarers he heard edifying tales, like the one about the French knight wounded and captured at San Giorgio, who complained that he had been robbed by a soldier of a portrait that was very dear to him; and the duke of Lerma, on hearing this, had the portrait returned to him, treated his wounds, then gave him a horse and sent him back to Casale. Yet, despite spiraling deviations that made them lose all sense of direction, old Pozzo had seen to it that his band did no real fighting.

Thus it was with great relief, but also with the impatience of those who want to participate in a long-awaited festivity, that one fine day, from the top of a hill, they saw the city below their feet and before their eyes, guarded to the north at their left by the broad stripe of the Po, which just in front of the fortress was divided by two great islands in the midst of the river, which curved sharply towards the south at the great star-shaped bulk of the citadel. Merry with towers and campaniles inside, Casale seemed impregnable on the outside, all bristling as it was with saw-toothed bastions, which made it resemble one of those dragons you see in storybooks.

It was a grand sight. All around the city, soldiers in varicolored garb dragged obsidional machines among groups of tents bedecked with banners and among knights wearing many-plumed hats. Now and then you could see, against the green of the woods or the yellow of the fields, a sudden flash that wounded the eye, and it was a gentleman's silver cuirass joking with the sun, nor could you guess in which direction he was going, perhaps he was cantering along just for show.

Beautiful for everyone else, the spectacle seemed less happy to Pozzo, who said: "Men, this time we're truly buggered." And to Roberto, who asked why, he added with a slap on the nape: "Don't play stupid, those are imperials; you surely don't believe there are that many Casalesi or that any of them would come outside their walls for the fun of it. The Casalesi and the French are inside, piling up bales of straw, and fouling their pants because there aren't even two thousand of them, whereas those men down there must number at least a hundred thousand. Look over at those hills opposite us, too." He was exaggerating: Spinola's army counted only eighteen thousand foot and six thousand cavalry, but that was enough, more than enough.

"What will we do, Father?" Roberto asked.

"What we'll do," his father replied, "is be careful to see where the Lutherans are, and bear in mind there's no getting past them:
in primis,
we can't understand one thing they say;
in secundis,
they kill you first and ask who you are afterwards. Look sharp and discover where the Spaniards are. As I've told you, they're people you can reason with. Make sure they're Spaniards of good family. What counts in these matters is breeding."

They picked their way along an encampment identified by banners of their most Catholic majesties, where more cuirasses glittered than elsewhere, and they moved downhill, commending their souls to God. In the confusion they were able to proceed a long way into the enemy's midst, for in those days only select corps, like the musketeers, had uniforms, and with the rest you could never tell who was on your side. But at a certain point, and just when they had only to cross a stretch of no-man's-land, they encountered an outpost and were stopped by an officer, who urbanely asked who they were and where they were going, while behind him, a squad of soldiers stood, alert.

"Sir," Pozzo said, "be so kind as to make way for us, for we must go and take up our proper position in order to fire on you."

The officer doffed his hat, bowed with a salute that would have swept dust two meters before him, and said: "Señor, no es menor gloria veneer al enemigo con la cortesía en la paz que con las armas en la guerra." Then, in good Italian, he added: "Proceed, sir. If a fourth of our men prove to have one half of your courage, we will win. May Heaven grant me the pleasure of meeting you on the field of battle, and the honor of killing you."

"Fisti orb d'an fisti secc," muttered Pozzo, using an expression in the language of his lands that is even today an optative, wishing, more or less, that the interlocutor be first blinded and immediately afterwards seized with fatal choking. But aloud, calling on all his linguistic resources and his knowledge of rhetoric, he said: "Yo también!" He also doffed his hat, spurred his mount gently, not as much as the theatricality of the moment demanded, for he had to allow his men time to follow him on foot as he rode on towards the walls.

"Say what you like, they're polite people," Pozzo said to his son, and it was well that he turned his head, for thus he avoided the shot of an arquebus from the bastions. "Ne tirez pas, conichons! On est des amis. Nevers! Nevers!" he cried, raising his hands; then he addressed Roberto again: "You see what ungrateful people these are. Better the Spaniards, if you ask me."

They entered the city. Someone must have promptly reported their arrival to the commander of the garrison, Monsieur de Toiras, one-time comrade in arms of old Pozzo. Hearty embraces preceded a first stroll along the ramparts.

"My dear friend," Toiras was saying, "according to the rolls in Paris I am commanding five regiments of infantry of ten companies each, a total of ten thousand foot-soldiers. But Monsieur de La Grange has only five hundred men, Monchat has two hundred fifty, and in all I can count on one thousand seven hundred men on foot. Then I have six companies of light cavalry, a total of only four hundred men, however well-equipped they may be. The Cardinal knows I have fewer men than I should, but he insists I have three thousand eight hundred. I write him, sending proof to the contrary, and His Eminence pretends not to understand. I have had to recruit a regiment of Italians as best I could, Corsicans and Monferrini, but—forgive me for saying so—they are poor soldiers. Imagine! I had to order the officers to assign their valets to a separate company. Your men will join the Italian regiment, under Captain Bassiani, a good man. We'll send young La Grive there too, so when he comes under fire he will understand the orders. As for you, dear friend, you will join a group of excellent gentlemen who have come to us of their own free will, as you have, and are in my suite. You know the country and can give me good advice."

Jean de Saint-Bonnet, lord of Toiras, was tall, dark, with blue eyes, in the full maturity of his forty-five years, choleric but generous and naturally conciliatory, brusque in manner but generally affable, also with his soldiers. He had distinguished himself as defender of the lie de Ré in the war against the English, but apparently he was not liked by Richelieu and the court. His friends repeated in whispers a dialogue between him and the Chancelier de Marillac, who had contemptuously said that in France two thousand gentlemen could have been found equally capable of handling the lie de Ré matter as well as Toiras, and Toiras had replied that four thousand could be found capable of keeping the seals better than Marillac. His officers attributed a second bon mot to him (though others gave the credit for it to a Scottish captain): in a war council at La Rochelle, the future gray eminence Père Joseph, who prided himself on a knowledge of strategy, had put his finger on a map, saying, "We will cross here," and Toiras had rebutted coldly, "Unfortunately, Reverend Father, your finger is not a bridge."

"This is the situation, cher ami," Toiras was saying, pointing to the landscape as they walked along the bastion. "The theater is splendid, and the actors are the best of two empires and many seigneuries; among our adversaries we have even a Florentine regiment, commanded by a Medici. We count on Casale as a city: the castle, from which we control the side towards the river, is a fine fort, defended by a good moat, and at the walls we have made a fine gun platform that will allow the defenders to work well. The citadel has sixty cannon and solidly built bastions. There are some weak points, but I have reinforced them with demilunes and batteries. All this is excellent for withstanding a frontal assault, but Spinola is no novice: look at those men at work down there, they are preparing tunnels for mines, and when they arrive here below, at the wall, it will be as if we had opened the gates to them. To stop their work we would have to confront them in the open field, but there we are weaker. And as soon as the enemy has brought those cannons closer, he will start bombarding the city, and here the mood of the Casale civilians becomes important, and I don't trust them very far. For that matter I can understand them: the safety of their city means more to them than does M. de Nevers, and they are not yet convinced that dying for the lilies of France is a good thing. They must be made to understand that with Savoy or with the Spanish they would lose their freedom and Casale would no longer be a capital but simply another ordinary fortress, like Susa, which Savoy is ready to sell for a handful of gold pieces. In any case we will improvise: after all, this is an Italian comedy. Yesterday I went out with four hundred men towards Frassineto, where the imperials are concentrating, and they retreated. But while I was engaged down there, some Neapolitans encamped on that hill, in precisely the opposite direction. I had them battered by the artillery for a few hours and I believe there was a fine slaughter, but they haven't cleared out. So who won the day? I swear by our Lord I don't know, and neither does Spinola. But I know what we'll do tomorrow. You see those hovels in the plain? If they were ours, we would have many enemy positions within range. A spy tells me they are empty, and this report gives me good reason to fear that men are hiding there—my dear young Lord Roberto, don't look so outraged. Learn this prime rule: a good commander wins a battle by using informers well, and this second rule: an informer, since he is a traitor, is prompt to betray those who pay him to betray. In any case, tomorrow our infantry will go and occupy those houses. Rather than keep the troops inside the walls to rot, better to expose them to fire, which is good training. Don't be impatient, Lord Roberto, it is not yet your turn; but the day after tomorrow, Bassiani's regiment must cross the Po. You see those walls over there? They are part of a little outwork the local men began before the enemy arrived. My officers don't agree, but I believe it is best to occupy it before the imperials do. We must keep them within range on the plain, in order to harass them and impede the construction of the tunnels. In short, there will be glory for all. Now let us go to supper. The siege has only begun and provisions are still plentiful. It will be a while before we start eating the rats."

T
O SURVIVE THE
siege of Casale, where, as it turned out, he had not been reduced to eating rats, only to arrive on the
Daphne,
where perhaps the rats would eat him.... Timorously meditating on this nice contrast, Roberto was finally prepared to explore those places from which, the evening before, he had heard vague noises.

He decided to descend from the quarterdeck and, if all proved to be as it had been on the
Amaryllis,
he knew he would find a dozen cannons on the two sides, and the pallets or hammocks of the crew. From the helmsman's room he reached the space below, divided by the tiller, which shifted with a slow creaking, and he should have been able to leave immediately by the door that opened into the lower deck. But, as if to gain familiarity with those deeper areas before facing his unknown enemy, he lowered himself further, through a trapdoor, into a space where on another ship there would have been more stores. Instead he found a room organized with great economy, paillasses for a dozen men. So the larger part of the crew slept down here, as if the rest of the space had been reserved for other functions. The pallets were all in perfeet order. If there had been an epidemic, when the first men died, the survivors would surely have tidied up systematically. But, come to think of it, who could say whether all the sailors had died, or even any of them? And once again that thought failed to reassure him: a plague killing an entire crew is a natural event, sometimes providential, according to certain theologians; but an event that causes the crew to flee, leaving the ship in this state of unnatural order, might be far more worrisome.

Perhaps the explanation was to be found on the lower deck; he had to muster his courage. Roberto climbed back up and opened the door leading to the feared place.

He learned now the purpose of those vast gratings that perforated the main deck. Thanks to them, this lower deck had been transformed into a kind of nave, illuminated through the hatches by the full daylight that fell obliquely, intersecting the light that came from the gun-ports, colored by the reflection, now ambered, of the cannons.

At first Roberto perceived only shafts of sunlight, in which infinite corpuscles could be observed swirling, and as he saw them, he could not help but recall (and how he indulges himself with this play of learned memories, to dazzle his Lady, rather than confine himself to bald narration) the words with which the Canon of Digne invited him to observe the cascades of light that spread through the darkness of a cathedral, stirring within themselves a multitude of monads, seeds, indissoluble natures, drops of incense that exploded spontaneously, primordial atoms engaged in combat, battles, skirmishes by squadrons, amid numberless conjunctions and separations—obvious proof of the composition of this universe of ours, made of nothing but prime bodies teeming in the void.

Immediately thereafter, as if to confirm the fact that all creation is the work only of that dance of atoms, he had the impression of being in a garden, and he realized that from the moment he entered this place, he had been assailed by a host of odors, far stronger than those that had come to him earlier, from the shore.

A garden, an indoor orchard, is what the men from the
Daphne
had created in this space, to carry home flowers and plants from the islands they were exploring. The gratings allowed the sun, the winds, and the rains to keep the vegetation alive. Whether the vessel would have been able to preserve its sylvan booty through months of voyaging, or whether the first storm would have poisoned all with salt, Roberto could not say, but surely the mere fact that these plants were still alive indicated that the store, like the food, had been only recently collected.