The Island of the Day Before (50 page)

Beggars! Here was the idea for rescuing Ferrante! The Beggars, who, as the story goes, are governed by their own king and by a code of iron laws; the Beggars, a society of grim rabble living off thievery and misery, assassinations and extravagances, filth, villainy, and treachery, while they pretend to subsist on Christian charity!

An idea that only a woman in love could conceive, Roberto told himself. For her confidences Lilia did not approach courtiers or gentlemen of the robe, but, rather, the least of her maidservants, a woman engaged in unscrupulous traffickings with a waggoner who knew all the taverns around Notre-Dame, where at sundown the Beggars congregated after spending their day whining in doorways.... This was the path to take.

Now her guide conducts her, in the heart of the night, to the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, lifts a stone of the floor in the choir, and leads her down into the catacombs of Paris, advancing by torchlight in search of the King of the Beggars.

And this is when Lilia, disguised as a gentleman, a supple androgyne who passes through tunnels, down steps, and along low passages, where in the darkness she can discern here and there, huddled amid rags and tatters, legless bodies and faces marked with warts, pimples, erysipelas, scabs, impetigoes, boils, and cankers, all gaggling, with hand extended whether to ask for alms or to mime an invitation—with a chamberlain's mien—"Proceed, forward, our master is expecting you."

And there the master was, in the center of a hall a thousand leagues under the surface of the city, seated on a cask, surrounded by cutpurses, barrators, counterfeiters, and saltimbanques, a scum laureate in every abuse and corruption.

What could the King of the Beggars be like? Wrapped in a tattered cloak, his brow covered with tubercules, his nose gnawed by a tabes, his eyes of marble, one green and one black, a weasel's gaze, brows sloping downwards, a harelip revealing wolfs teeth sharp and protruding, kinky hair, sandy skin, hands with stubby fingers and curving nails....

Having heard out the Lady, he replied that he had at his service an army compared to which the army of the French King was a provincial garrison. And far less costly: if these people were recompensed in an acceptable manner, say, twice the amount they could collect begging in the same period of time, they would have themselves killed for so generous an employer.

Lilia slipped a ruby ring from her finger (as is usual in such situations), asking with regal manner, "Is this enough?"

"Enough," the King of the Beggars said, fondling the jewel with his vulpine gaze. "Tell us where." And having learned where, he added: "My people do not use horses or carriages, but that place can be reached on barges, following the Seine."

Roberto imagined Ferrante at sunset on the tower of the little fort conversing with Captain Biscarat, who suddenly saw them coming. They appeared first on the dunes, then spread out over the open field.

"Pilgrims for Santiago," Biscarat remarked with contempt, "and of the worst sort, or the most unhappy. They go seeking health when they have one foot in the grave."

In fact, the pilgrims, in a very long file, were advancing closer and closer to the shore, and Ferrante and Biscarat could discern a mass of blind men with extended hands, the maimed on their crutches, lepers bleared, abscessed, and scrofulous, a jumble of cripples mutilated, clad in rags.

"I would not want them to come too close, or to ask for shelter for the night," Biscarat said. "They would bring only filth inside the walls." And he ordered a few musket shots fired in the air, to make it clear that this little castle was not a place of hospitality.

But those shots seemed to act like a summons. As more rabble appeared in the distance, the leaders came nearer and nearer to the fortress, and already their animal mumbling could be heard.

"Keep them off, by God!" Biscarat shouted, and he had some bread thrown down at the foot of the wall, as if to say to them that such was the charity of the place's master and they could expect nothing more. But the foul band, its ranks swelling visibly, drove its vanguard to the very walls, trampling that gift underfoot and staring upwards, as if seeking something better.

Now they could be seen one by one, and they bore no resemblance to pilgrims, or to unhappy wretches asking relief for their ailments. Beyond doubt—Biscarat said, worried—they were ragtag adventurers. Or so it seemed at least for a while, as it was now dusk, and the field and the dunes had become only a gray teeming of giant rats.

"To arms, to arms!" Biscarat cried, finally realizing that this was no pilgrimage, no alms-begging, but an assault. And he ordered shots fired at those who had already reached the wall. But, as if it was indeed a pack of rodents, more came, shoving the first, the fallen were trampled and used as a step for others pressing from behind, and now the first could be seen clinging with their nails to the clefts of that ancient fabric, digging their fingers into the cracks, setting their feet in the gaps, clutching the bars of the lowest windows, thrusting their sciatical limbs into the slits. Meanwhile another part of that crowd was swaying on the ground, heaving their shoulders against the portal.

Biscarat ordered it barricaded on the inside, but the sturdiest planks of those doors were beginning to creak under the pressure of that bastard force.

The guards continued firing, but the few attackers who fell were immediately trodden on by others of the horde; now only a seething mass was visible, from which eels of rope rose, flung into the air, and it was clear that they were iron grapples, and already some of them were hooked to the battlements. And no sooner did a guard lean out a bit to unfasten those hooked irons than the first attackers, who had hoisted themselves up, struck him with spikes and clubs, or caught him in nooses and pulled him below, where he vanished into the press of those diabolical fiends, his death-rattle drowned in their roar.

In no time, anyone following events from the dunes would have been unable to see the fort, only a teeming of flies over a corpse, a swarm of bees on a stalk, a confraternity of hornets.

Meanwhile, from below, the crash of the great door was heard as it gave way, then a tumult in the yard. Biscarat and his men rushed to the other end of the platform—no longer concerned with Ferrante, who flattened in the arch of the door that gave onto the stairs, not very frightened, for he had a presentiment that these attackers were somehow friends.

Which friends, at this point, had reached and passed the battlements. Prodigal with their lives, falling at the last rounds of musket fire, heedless of their exposed breasts, they passed the barrier of drawn swords and horrified the guards with their villainous eyes, their frenzied faces. Thus the Cardinal's guards, otherwise men of iron, dropped their weapons, imploring mercy from Heaven against what they now believed a band from Hell, and the hellions first felled them with blows of their clubs, then flung themselves on the survivors, laying about, slapping, cuffing, smiting, thwacking, and they tore open throats with their bare teeth, quartered with their claws, they overwhelmed by spitting bile, they committed atrocities on the dead, and Ferrante saw one cut open a man's chest, grab the heart, and devour it amid shrill cries.

The last survivor was Biscarat, who had fought like a lion. Seeing himself finally defeated, he stood with his back to a parapet, drew a line on the ground with his bloody sword, and cried: "Icy mourra Biscarat, seul de ceux qui sont avec luy!"

But at that instant a one-eyed man with a peg leg, brandishing an axe, emerged from the stairs, gave a signal, and put an end to the butchery, ordering Biscarat to be tied up. Then he saw Ferrante, recognized him by the very mask that was to have made him unrecognizable, greeted him with a broad gesture of his armed hand, as if to sweep the ground with the plume of a hat, and said, "Sir, you are free."

He drew a message from his jerkin, with a seal Ferrante knew at once, and handed it to him.

It was she who advised him to make free use of that army, horrid but trustworthy, and to await her there, as she would arrive at dawn.

To begin with, Ferrante, once freed from his mask, released the pirates and signed a pact with them. They would regain the ship and sail under his orders, asking no questions. Their recompense: a share of a treasure as vast as a dozen Eldorados. True to his character, Ferrante had no thought of keeping his word. Once he found Roberto again, it would be enough to denounce his own crew at the first port of call, and he would have them all hanged, remaining master of the vessel.

He no longer needed the beggars, and their leader, an honorable man, told him they had received payment for this undertaking. He wished to leave the area as soon as possible. They scattered inland and returned to Paris, begging from village to village.

It was easy to board a shallop kept in the basin of the fort, reach the ship, and fling into the sea the two men who guarded it. Biscarat was chained in the hold, since he was a hostage who could be bartered advantageously. Ferrante granted himself a brief rest, returned ashore before dawn, in time to welcome a carriage from which Lilia stepped, more beautiful than ever in her male garb.

Roberto felt that he would suffer greater torment at the thought of the two greeting each other with reserve, not giving themselves away before the pirates, who believed their passenger to be a young gentleman.

They boarded ship. Ferrante made sure everything was ready to sail and, as the anchor was weighed, he went down to the chamber he had ordered to be made ready for his guest.

Here she awaited him with eyes that asked for nothing save to be loved; in the fluent exultation of her hair, now released over her shoulders, she was ready for the most joyous of sacrifices. O errant locks, locks gilded and beloved, locks unlocked that fly and play and, in playing, err—Roberto rhapsodized on Ferrante's behalf.

Their faces were close, to reap a harvest of kisses from a past sown with sighs, and at that moment Roberto drank, in thought, at that lip of fleshy pink. Ferrante kissed Lilia, and Roberto imagined himself in that act and in the thrill of biting that true coral. But then he felt she was eluding him like a gust of wind, he lost the warmth he thought he had felt for an instant, and he saw her, icy, in a mirror, in other arms, on a distant bridal bed on another ship.

To protect the lovers he lowered a curtain of jealous transparence, for those bodies, now bared, were books of solar necromancy, whose holy accents were revealed only to the two elect, who uttered them in turn from mouth to mouth.

The ship sailed away swiftly, Ferrante its master. In him she loved Roberto, into whose heart these images fell like sparks on a bundle of dry twigs.

W
E WILL REMEMBER
, I hope—for Roberto has borrowed from the novelists of his century the habit of narrating so many stories at once that at a certain point it becomes difficult to pick up the thread—that from his first visit to the world of coral our hero brought back the stone double, which seemed to him a skull, perhaps Father Caspar's.

Now, to forget the loves of Lilia and Ferrante, he was seated on deck at sunset, contemplating that object, examining its form.

It did not seem a skull. It was, rather, a mineral hive composed of irregular polygons, but the polygon was not the elementary unit of that object: each polygon revealed in its center a spoked symmetry of very fine threads, among which appeared—if you sharpened your eyes—cavities that perhaps formed other polygons and, if the eye could penetrate still further, it would perhaps see that the faces of those tiny polygons were made of other, still tinier, polygons, until—dividing the parts into parts of parts—the point came when they would end, having arrived at those parts not further divisible, which are the atoms. But since Roberto did not know to what degree matter could be divided, it was not clear to him how far his eyes—alas, not lynx-like, since he did not possess that lens through which Caspar had been able to identify even the animalcules of the plague—could descend into the abyss, finding new forms within the forms he perceived.

Even the head of the abbé, as Saint-Savin had shouted that night during the duel, could be a whole world for his lice—and, ah! Roberto, hearing the words again, thought of the world inhabited by those happiest of insects, the lice of Anna Maria (or Francesca) Novarese! But since lice are not atoms either but vast universes for the atoms that compose them, perhaps inside the body of the louse there are other animals still tinier who live there as in a spacious world. And perhaps my very flesh—Roberto thought—and my blood are no more than wefts of minuscule animals, that, in moving, lend me movement, allowing themselves to be conducted by my will, which serves them as coachman. And my animals are surely wondering where I am taking them now, subjecting them to an alternation of marine coolness and solar ardor, and, confounded by this turmoil of unstable climes, they are as uncertain of their destiny as I am of mine.

And what if even more minuscule animals found themselves in an equally unlimited space?

What stops me from thinking this? Only the fact that I have never learned anything about it? As my friends in Paris used to say to me, someone on the tower of Notre-Dame, looking down from that height at the Faubourg Saint-Denis, could never think that ill-defined spot was inhabited by beings similar to us. We see the planet Jove, which is very big, but from Jove they do not see us, and they cannot even conceive of our existence. And even yesterday, would I have suspected that beneath the sea—not on a remote planet or in a drop of water, but in a part of our own world—Another World existed?

And for that matter, until a few months ago, what did I know of the Austral Land? I would have said it was the fancy of heretic geographers; and perhaps—who knows?—in these islands, in times past, they burned some of their own philosophers for asserting in guttural grunts the existence of Monferrato and of France. And yet now I am here, and I must perforce believe that the Antipodes exist—and that, contrary to the opinion once held by very wise men, I am not walking with my feet up and my head down. Simply, the inhabitants of this world occupy the stern of the vessel, and we occupy the prow, and, each knowing nothing of the other, we are both sailing.