The Island of the Day Before (8 page)

Nor did subsequent events allow Roberto to untangle the motives behind this story. Betrayed by Charles Emmanuel, Gonzalo de Cordoba realized that he had lost the campaign, recognized the Susa agreement, and led his eight thousand men back into Milanese territory. A French garrison was installed at Casale, another at Susa, the rest of Louis's army crossed the Alps again to wipe out the last Huguenots in Languedoc and the valley of the Rhone.

But none of those gentlemen had any intention of honoring pacts, and the officers seated around the table told the whole story as if it was all entirely natural, indeed some agreed and remarked, "La Raison d'Estat, ah, la Raison d'Estat." For reasons of state Olivares—Roberto gathered that he was some sort of Spanish Richelieu, but less blessed with luck—realized he had cut a sorry figure, unceremoniously dismissed Gonzalo, and put Ambrogio Spinola in his place, repeating that the insult offered to Spain was detrimental to the Church. "Rubbish," the abbé interjected. "Urban VIII favored the succession of Nevers." And Roberto wondered what the Pope had to do with matters not involving questions of faith.

Meanwhile the emperor—and there was no telling the thousand different ways Olivares put pressure on him—remembered that Mantua was in the hands of a commissioner, and Nevers could neither pay nor not pay for something that was still not his due; the emperor lost patience and sent twenty thousand men to besiege the city. The pope, seeing Protestant mercenaries running about Italy, immediately imagined another sack of Rome and sent troops to the Mantuan border. Spinola, more ambitious and determined than Gonzalo, decided to besiege Casale again, but seriously this time. In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.

In December of '29 the French again crossed the Alps. According to their pacts, Charles Emmanuel should have let them pass, but—evidence of his reliability—he reiterated his claims to the Monferrato and demanded six thousand French soldiers to besiege Genoa, which was really an obsession of his. Richelieu, who considered him a snake, said neither yes nor no. A captain, who dressed at Casale as if he were at court, described one day of the past February: "A marvelous feast, my friends! The musicians of the royal palace were missing, but the fanfares were there! His Majesty, followed by the army, rode before all Turin in a black suit worked in gold, a plume in his hat, and his cuirass gleaming!"

Roberto was expecting an account of a great attack, but no, this occasion was merely another parade. The King did not attack; he made a surprise diversion to Pinerolo and appropriated it, or reappropriated it, since a few hundred years earlier it had been a French city. Roberto had a vague idea of where Pinerolo was, and he could not understand how taking it would relieve Casale. Are we also under siege at Pinerolo perhaps, he wondered.

The Pope, worried by the turn things were taking, sent his representative to Richelieu, urging him to return the city to the Savoys. At table then they gossiped abundantly about that envoy, one Giulio Mazzarini, a Sicilian, a Roman plebeian—no, no, the abbé insisted, the natural son of an obscure officer from the mountains south of Rome. Somehow this Mazzarini had become a captain in the service of the pope; but he was doing everything he could to win the confidence of Richelieu, whose great favorite he now was. And he was someone to keep an eye on; for at that moment he was at Ratisbon, or on his way there, which is at the end of the earth, but it was in Ratisbon that the fate of Casale would be decided, not in some mine or countermine.

Meanwhile, as Charles Emmanuel was trying to cut lines of communication with the French troops, Richelieu also took Annecy and Chambéry, and Savoyards and French were fighting at Avigliana. In this slow game, the imperials were entering Lorraine to threaten France. Wallenstein was moving to help the Savoys, and in July a handful of imperials, transported on barges, took by surprise a lock at Mantua, the whole army had overrun the city, sacked it for seventy hours, emptying the ducal palace from top to bottom and, to reassure the pope, the Lutherans of the imperial army had despoiled every church in the city. Yes, those same Landsknechts that Roberto had seen arriving to lend Spinola a helping hand.

The French army was still engaged in the north, and no one could say if it would arrive in time, before Casale fell. They could only hope in God, the abbé said. "Gentlemen, it is political wisdom to realize that human means must always be sought, as if divine means did not exist; and divine means sought, as if human means did not exist."

"So let us hope in divine means," one gentleman exclaimed, but with an expression anything but devout, waving his cup until he had spilled some wine on the abbé's cassock. "Sir, you have stained me with wine," the abbé cried, blanching, which was the form indignation took in those days. "Pretend," the other replied, "that the mishap occurred during the Consecration. Wine is wine."

"Monsieur de Saint-Savin," the abbé cried, rising and putting his hand to his sword, "this is not the first time you have dishonored your own name by taking Our Lord's in vain! You would have done better, God forgive me, to stay in Paris dishonoring the ladies, as is the custom with you Pyrrhonians!"

"Come, come," Saint-Savin replied, obviously drunk, "we Pyrrhonians went about at night to provide music for the ladies, and the men of courage who wanted to enjoy some fine jest would join us. But when the lady failed to come to her window, we knew she preferred to remain in the bed the family confessor was warming for her."

The other officers had risen and were restraining the abbé, who tried to draw his sword. Monsieur de Saint-Savin is in his cups, they said to him, allowances had to be made for a man who had fought well those recent days, out of respect for the comrades who had just died.

"So be it," the abbé concluded, leaving the hall. "Monsieur de Saint-Savin, I invite you to end the night reciting a De Profundis for our fallen friends, and I will then consider myself satisfied."

The abbé went out, and Saint-Savin, who was sitting next to Roberto, leaned on his shoulder and commented: "Dogs and river birds make less noise than we do shouting a De Profundis. Why all the bell-ringing and all the Masses to resuscitate the dead?" He abruptly drained his cup, admonished Roberto with a raised finger, as if to direct him to a proper life and to the supreme mysteries of our holy religion. "Sir, be proud: today you came close to a happy death; and behave in future with the same nonchalance, knowing that the soul dies with the body. Go then to death after having savored life. We are animals among animals, all children of matter, save that we are the more disarmed. But since, unlike animals, we know we must die, let us prepare for that moment by enjoying the life that has been given us by chance and for chance. Let wisdom teach us to employ our days in drinking and amiable conversation, as is proper to gentlemen scorning base spirits. Comrades, life is in our debt! We are rotting at Casale, and we were born too late to enjoy the times of the good King Henry, when at the Louvre you encountered bastards, monkeys, madmen and court buffoons, dwarfs and legless beggars, castrati and poets, and the king was amused by them. Now Jesuits lascivious as rams fulminate against the readers of Rabelais and the Latin poets, and would have us all be virtuous and kill the Huguenots. Lord God, war is a beautiful thing, but I want to fight for my own pleasure and not because my adversary eats meat on Friday. The pagans were wiser than we. They had their three gods, but at least their mother Cybele did not claim to give birth and yet remain a virgin."

"Sir!" Roberto protested, as the others laughed.

"Sir," Saint-Savin replied, "the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void. Be strong like the sages of ancient Greece and look at death with steady eye and no fear. Jesus sweated too much, awaiting it. Why should he have been afraid, for that matter, since he was going to rise again?"

"That will do, Monsieur de Saint-Savin," an officer virtually ordered him, taking him by the arm. "Do not scandalize this young friend of ours, as yet unaware that in Paris nowadays blasphemy is the most exquisite form of
bon ton;
he might take you too seriously. And you, Monsieur de la Grive, go to bed, too. Remember that the Good Lord, in His mercy, will forgive even Monsieur de Saint-Savin. As that theologian said, strong is a king who destroys all, stronger still is a woman who obtains all, but strongest is wine, which drowns reason."

"You quote by halves, sir," Saint-Savin mumbled as two of his comrades were dragging him out almost bodily. "That phrase is attributed to the Tongue, which added: Stronger still, however, is Truth and I who speak it. And my tongue, even if it now moves with difficulty, will not be silent. The wise man must attack falsehood not only with his sword but also with his tongue. My friends, how can you call merciful a divinity that desires our eternal unhappiness only to appease his rage of an instant? We must forgive our neighbor, and he need not? And we should love such a cruel being? The abbé calls me Pyrrhonian, but we Pyrrhonians, if he must so call us, are concerned with consoling the victims of imposture. Once three companions and I distributed rosaries with obscene medals among some ladies. If you only knew how devout they became immediately thereafter!"

He went out, accompanied by the laughter of the whole company, and the officer remarked, "If God will not pardon his tongue, at least we will, for he has such a beautiful sword." Then he said to Roberto, "Keep him as your friend, and don't vex him any more than necessary. He has felled more Frenchmen in Paris over a point of theology than my whole company has run through Spaniards here. I would not want him next to me at Mass, but I would consider myself fortunate to have him beside me on the field."

Thus introduced to his first doubts, Roberto was to acquire more the following day. Returning to collect his pack in that wing of the castle where he had slept the first nights with his Monferrini, he had trouble orienting himself among the corridors and courtyards. He was going along a passage when he realized he had taken a wrong turn, and at the end of the hall he saw a mirror dulled with dirt, in which he spied himself. But as he approached, he realized that this self had, certainly, his face, but wore gaudy Spanish-style clothing, and his hair was gathered in a little net. Further, this self, at a certain point, no longer faced him, but withdrew to one side.

It was not a mirror. It was in fact a window with dusty panes overlooking an external rampart from which a stairway descended towards the courtyard. So he had seen not himself but someone very like him, whose trail he had now lost. Naturally he thought at once of Ferrante. Ferrante had followed him to Casale, or had preceded him, and perhaps belonged to another company of the same regiment, or to one of the French regiments, and while Roberto was risking his life at the outwork, the other was reaping God knows what advantages from the war.

At that age Roberto tended to smile at his boyhood imaginings of Ferrante, and reflecting on his vision, he quickly convinced himself that he had seen only someone who vaguely resembled him. He chose to forget the incident. For years he had brooded over an invisible brother, and that evening he thought he had seen him, but (he told himself, trying with his reason to contradict his heart) if he had seen someone, it was not a figment, and since Ferrante was a figment, the man seen could not have been Ferrante.

A master of logic would have refuted that paralogism, but for the present it satisfied Roberto.

A
FTER DEVOTING HIS
letter to the first memories of the siege, Roberto found some bottles of Spanish wine in the captain's quarters. We can hardly reproach him if, having lit the fire and cooked himself a pan of eggs with bits of smoked fish, he opened a bottle and permitted himself a regal supper on a table laid almost to perfection. If he was destined to remain a castaway for a long time, he had to maintain good manners and not become bestialized. He remembered how at Casale, when wounds and sickness were causing even the officers to behave like castaways, Monsieur de Toiras requested that, at table at least, each should bear in mind what he had learned in Paris: "To appear in clean clothes, not to drink after each mouthful, but first to wipe moustache and beard, not to lick one's fingers or spit in the plate, not to blow one's nose into one's napkin. We are not imperials, gentlemen!"

He woke the next morning at cockcrow, but he dawdled at length. When in the gallery he again opened the window a crack, he realized he had risen later than the day before, and dawn was already becoming sunrise: behind the hills now the pink of the sky was more intense, as the clouds drifted away.

Since the first rays would soon strike the beach, making it intolerable to his sight, Roberto thought of looking to where the sun was not yet predominant, and he moved along the gallery to the other side of the
Daphne,
towards the western land. It immediately appeared to him as a jagged turquoise outline, which in a few minutes' time was divided into two horizontal strips: a brush of greenery and pale palm trees already blazing below the dark area of the mountains, over which the clouds of night obstinately continued to reign. But slowly these clouds, still coal-black in the center, were shredding at the edges in a medley of white and pink.

It was as if the sun, rather than confront them, was ingeniously trying to emerge from inside them, though the light unraveled at their borders as they grew dense with fog, rebelling against their liquefaction in the sky in order that it become the faithful mirror of the sea, now wondrously wan, dazzled by sparkling patches, as if shoals of fish passed, each fitted with an inner lamp. Soon, however, the clouds succumbed to the lure of the light, and yielded, abandoning themselves above the peaks, while on one side they adhered to the slopes, condensing and settling like cream, soft where it trickled down, more compact at the summit, forming a glacier, and on the other side making snow at the top, a single lava of ice exploding in the air in the shape of a mushroom, an exquisite eruption in a land of Cockaigne.