The Island of the Day Before (53 page)

After entering the Pacific Ocean, they arrived at an island where the lions were black and the hens clad in wool, where the trees flowered only at night, the fish had wings and the birds scales, stones floated and wood sank, butterflies shone in the dark, and water was intoxicating like wine.

On a second island they saw a palace built of rotting wood, painted with colors that offended the eye. They entered and found themselves in a hall lined with raven's feathers. In every wall there were niches where instead of stone busts they saw homunculi with emaciated faces, who by an accident of Nature had been born without legs.

On a filthy throne sat the King, who with a wave of his hand initiated a concert of hammers, drills that screeched against stone slabs, and knives that squeaked on porcelain plates. At the noise she men appeared, all skin and bones, abominable in their distorted gaze.

Opposite them appeared some women, the fattest imaginable: bowing to their companions, they began a dance that underlined their deformity and awkwardness. Then six brutes burst in, looking as if all had been born of one womb, their noses and mouths so big, and backs so gibbous, that they seemed not so much creatures as lies of Nature.

After the dance our travelers, having heard not one word uttered and assuming that on this island a language was spoken different from their own, tried asking questions with gestures, that universal language in which one can communicate also with Savages. But the man replied in a language that resembled, rather, the Lost Language of Birds, made of trills and whistles, and they understood it as if it were their native tongue. They learned that whereas in every other place beauty was prized, in this palace only the hideous was appreciated. And this was what they should expect if they continued their voyage to lands where what is normally above lies below.

Resuming the journey, they reached a third island, which seemed deserted, and Ferrante, alone with Lilia, ventured into the interior. As they advanced, they heard a voice that counseled them to flee: this was the Island of Invisible Men. At that very instant there were many natives around the couple, pointing at the two visitors who shamelessly exposed themselves to the gaze of others. For these people, in fact, being looked upon, one became the victim of another's gaze and lost his own nature, transformed into the opposite of himself.

On a fourth island they found a man with hollow eyes, a thin voice, his face all a single wrinkle, but with fresh colors. His beard and hair were like cotton wool, his body so palsied that when he turned, he had to make a complete revolution. He said he was three hundred and forty years old, and in that time he had renewed his youth three times, having drunk the water from the Fount of Youth, which rose in that very land, prolonging life but not beyond three hundred forty years—hence in a short while he would die. The old man warned the travelers not to seek the fountain: living there, becoming first the double then the triple of oneself was a source of great afflictions, and in the end one no longer knew who one was. And worse: living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss.

But the Antipodal World was beautiful in its variety, and, sailing another thousand miles, they reached a fifth island, which was only a pullulation of ponds. Each inhabitant spent his life on his knees at a pond, contemplating himself, believing that one who is not seen is as if nonexistent, and if they were to look away, ceasing to see themselves in the water, they would die.

They landed then at a sixth island, still farther to the west, where all the natives talked among themselves incessantly, one telling another what he would like the other to be and do, and vice versa. Those islanders, in fact, could live only if they were narrated; if a transgressor told unpleasant stories about others, forcing them to enact the events, the others would cease telling anything about him, and he would die.

But their concern was to invent for each individual a different story: if they all had the same story, they would not be able to tell one another apart, because each is what his experiences have created. That is why they had constructed a great wheel which they called Cynosura Lucensis. Erected in the village square, it was made up of six concentric circles that revolved separately. The first was divided into twenty-four slots or windows, the second into thirty-six, the third into forty-eight, the fifth into seventy-two, the sixth into eighty-four. In the various slots, according to a system that Lilia and Ferrante could not grasp in so short a time, were written actions (such as come, go, die), passions (such as hate, love, indifference), then manners (good or ill), sorrow or happiness, and places and times (at home or next month).

Spinning the wheels created stories like "He went yesterday to his home and met his enemy who was suffering, and helped him," or else "He saw an animal with seven heads and killed it." The inhabitants declared that with this machine they could write or think seven hundred twenty-two million different stories, and there were enough to give meaning to the lives of each of them for centuries to come. This pleased Roberto, because he would be able to build a wheel of this sort and go on thinking up stories even if he were to remain on the
Daphne
for ten thousand years.

Many and bizarre were the discoveries of lands that Roberto himself would have liked to discover. But at a certain point in his dreaming he wanted a less populous place for the two lovers, so that they could bask in their love.

Thus he had them arrive at a seventh and most lovely beach, enhanced by a little wood standing at the shore of the sea. They crossed it and found themselves in a royal garden where, along a shady allée among lawns decorated with beds of flowers, many fountains played.

But Roberto, as if the pair were seeking a more private refuge and he new sufferings, caused them to reach a flowering arch, beyond which they stepped into a little vale where reeds of some marshy cane rustled in a breeze that scattered in the air a mixture of perfumes. And from a little pool, down glistening steps, a line of water bubbled as pure as a string of pearls.

He wanted—and I feel his staging followed all the rules—the thick shade of an oak to encourage the lovers at their feast, and he further added gay plane trees, humble arbutus, prickly junipers, fragile tamarisks, and supple limes garlanding a lawn illuminated like an Oriental tapestry. With what would Nature, the painter of the world, have adorned it? Violets and narcissus.

He left the two to their abandon, while a limp poppy raised from heavy oblivion its drowsy head to drink in those dewy sighs. But then he preferred that, humiliated by such beauty, it flush with shame and self-contempt. As he, Roberto, did; and we can only say it served him right.

To avoid seeing further what he would so have liked himself to be seen doing, Roberto then rose with his morphetic omniscience to overlook the entire island, where now the fountains commented on the amorous miracle of which they wished to be patrons.

There were little columns, ampoules, phials from which a single jet spurted—or many, from many little spouts—and others had at their summit a kind of ark from whose windows a flow descended, forming as it fell a doubly weeping willow. One, a single cylindrical stem, generated at its head many smaller, similar cylinders facing in various directions, as if it were a casemate or fortress or ship of the line armed with cannon—an artillery of water.

Some were plumed, or maned, or bearded, in as many varieties as the stars of the Magi in Nativities, whose tails their jets imitated. On one stood the statue of a boy holding an umbrella in his left hand, its ribs ending in as many jets; while in his right the child held his tiny member and mingled in a stoup his urine with the waters coming from the dome above him.

In another, on a capital lay a tailed fish that seemed to have just swallowed Jonah, and it expelled water from its mouth as well as from two holes opening above its eyes. And astride it was a cupid armed with a trident. A fountain in the form of a flower supported, with its central jet, a ball; while another was a tree, whose many blooms, each one, made a sphere spin, and it seemed so many planets were moving one around the other in the globe of the water. There were fountains where the very petals of the flower were of water, pouring from a continuous slit bordering a wheel set on a column.

Replacing air with water, organ pipes emitted not sounds but liquefied breaths, and others were like candelabra, water enacting fire, where flames burning in the center of the column cast lights on the foam rising on all sides.

Another seemed a peacock, crested, with a broad tail opened, for which the sky supplied the colors. Not to mention fountains that looked like stands to support a wig and were adorned with flowing locks. In one, a sunflower opened in a single dew. Another had the face of the sun itself, finely sculpted, with a series of nozzles around its circumference, so that the celestial body emitted not rays but coolness.

On one a cylinder rotated, ejaculating water from a series of spiral furrows. There were fountains with the mouths of lions or tigers, with gryphon's maw and serpent's tongue, and one was a female weeping from her eyes and her teats. And for the rest it was all a vomiting of fauns, a purling of winged creatures, a whispering of swans, a showering from Nile elephants' trunks, a spilling of alabaster vessels, an emptying of cornucopias.

Visions that for Roberto—on closer study—were a fall from the frying-pan into the fire.

Meanwhile in the vale the now-sated lovers had only to reach out and accept from a leafy vine the gift of its treasures, and a fig, as if wishing to weep tenderly over the spied-on union, distilled tears of honey, while on an almond tree bejewelled with blossoms lamented the Orange Dove....

Then Roberto woke, soaked with sweat.

"What?" he said to himself reproachfully. "I succumbed to the temptation to live through Ferrante, and now I realize that it is Ferrante who has lived through me, that as I was moping, he was truly experiencing what I permitted him to experience!"

To cool his anger, and to have visions that—these, at least—were denied Ferrante, he again set out early in the morning, rope around his loins and Persona Vitrea on his face, towards his world of coral.

R
EACHING THE EDGE
of the reef, Roberto swam with his face submerged among those endless loggias, but he was unable to admire the animated rocks serenely because a Medusa had transformed him into inanimate stone. In his dream he had seen the looks Lilia bestowed on the usurper; and if in the dream those looks had enflamed him, now in waking memory they froze him.

Roberto wanted to regain possession of his Lilia; he swam, thrusting his face down as far as possible, as if that embrace with the sea could award him the prize that in his dream he had awarded Ferrante. It did not require a great effort, on the part of his spirit trained to form concepts, to imagine Lilia in every undulant cadence of that submerged park, to see her lips in every flower, where he would lose himself like a greedy bee. In transparent greenery he found again the veil that had covered her face on the first nights, and he stretched out his hand to raise that screen.

In this intoxication of his reason, he regretted that his eyes could not rove as freely as his heart wished, and among the corals he sought his beloved's bracelet, her snood, the bangle that beguiled the lobe of her ear, the sumptuous necklaces that adorned her swan-like neck.

Lost in his search, he allowed himself at one point to be attracted by a jewel that appeared to him in a crevass; he removed his mask, arched his back, raised his legs vigorously, and forced himself towards the sea bed. The thrust was excessive, he tried to grasp the edge of a shelf; just before closing his fingers around a crusted rock, he seemed to see a fat and sleepy eye open. At that same instant he remembered Dr. Byrd had spoken to him of a Stone Fish that lurks among the coral caverns to surprise any living creature with the venom of its scales.

Too late. His hand had rested on the Thing and an intense pain shot through his arm to his shoulder. With a twist of his trunk he managed miraculously not to end up with his face and chest on top of the Monster, but to arrest his momentum he had to strike it with the mask. In the impact the mask shattered, but he had to let go of it anyway. Pressing his feet against the rock below, he pushed himself up to the surface while in the space of a few seconds he saw the Persona Vitrea sink out of sight.

His right hand and his entire forearm were swollen, his shoulder numb; he was afraid he might faint; he found the rope and with great effort gradually succeeded in pulling it, a little at a time, with one hand. He climbed the ladder, much as he had on the night of his arrival, not knowing how, and, as on that night, he slumped to the deck.

But now the sun was already high. His teeth chattering, Roberto recalled Dr. Byrd telling him that after an encounter with the Stone Fish most humans were doomed; a few did survive, but no one knew an antidote against that suffering. Though his eyes were clouded, he tried to examine the wound—it was no more than a scratch, but it must have been enough to allow the mortal substance to penetrate his veins. He lost consciousness.

When he woke, his fever was raging and he felt an intense thirst. He realized that on this edge of the ship, exposed to the elements, far from food and drink, he would not last long. He crawled below and reached the partition between the stores and the chicken pen. He drank greedily from a keg of water, but he felt his stomach contract. He fainted again, his face in his own vomit.

During a night racked by fierce dreams, he attributed his sufferings to Ferrante, whom he now confused with the Stone Fish. Why did Ferrante want to block his way to the Island and to the Dove? Was this why he had set out in pursuit of Roberto?