If it is a lover's error to write on the sands of the shore the beloved name, which is only to be washed away then by the waves, how prudent a lover Roberto felt himself, having entrusted his beloved's body to the arcs of grottoes and gulfs, her hair to the flow of the currents through mazy archipelagoes, the summer moisture of her face to the glint of the waters, the mystery of her eyes to the blue of a vast desert—and the map repeated many times the features of that beloved body, in various attitudes of bays and promontories. Desirous, he was wrecked with his mouth on the map, he sucked in that ocean of voluptuousness, tickled a cape, hesitated to penetrate a strait; his cheek pressed against the page, he breathed the breath of the winds, he would have liked to savor the pools and the springs, fling himself thirsting to drink the streams dry, become sun to kiss the banks, tide to caress the secret estuaries....
However, he was to enjoy not possession but, rather, privation. While, raving, he touched that vague prize of an erudite pen, Others perhaps, on the real Island—where it reclined in charming poses the map had not yet been able to capture—were biting into its fruits, bathing in its waters.... Others, stupefied and ferocious giants, extended at that moment a rough hand to its breast; misshapen Vulcans possessed that delicate Venus, grazed her mouths with the same ignorance of the fisherman of the Island Not Found who, beyond the last horizon of the Canaries, foolishly discards the rarest among pearls....
She in another's loving hands.... This thought was the supreme intoxication, in which Roberto writhed, howling his rapier impotence. And in this frenzy, as he groped on the table as if to seize at least the hem of a skirt, his gaze slipped away from the depiction of that softly waved pacific body to another map, where the unknown author had sought perhaps to portray the fiery conduits of the volcanoes of the western land: it was a portulan of our entire globe, all plumes of smoke at the summits of projections of the crust or inside a tangle of dried veins; and he felt suddenly the living image of that globe, he moaned, exuding lava from every pore, the lymph of his unsatisfied satisfaction erupting, as he lost also his senses—destroyed by arid hydropsy (so he writes)—over that longed-for austral flesh.
CHAPTER 14
A Treatise on the Science of Arms
AT CASALE, TOO, he dreamed of open spaces, and of the broad valley where he had seen La Novarese for the first time. But now that he was no longer ill, he concluded, more lucidly, that he would never find her again, either because he would soon be dead, or because she was dead already.
Actually, he was not dying; indeed he was gradually re-covering, but he did not realize this and mistook the languors of convalescence for the languishing of life. Saint-Savin came often to visit him, supplying him with a gazette of events if Padre Emanuele was present (the priest kept an eye on the visitor, as if he were about to steal Roberto's soul), but when the older man had to leave (for in the convent negotiations were intensifying), Saint-Savin philosophized on life and death.
"My friend, Spinola is dying. You are already invited to the great festivities we will hold for his decease."
"My friend, next week I shall also be dead...."
"That is not true. I would recognize the face of a dying man. But it would not be right for me to distract you from the thought of death. Indeed, take advantage of your sickness to perform that admirable exercise."
"Monsieur de Saint-Savin, you talk like an ecclesiastic."
"Not at all. I am not urging you to prepare for the next life, but to use well this, the only life that is given you, in order to face, when it does come, the only death you will ever experience. It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying, to succeed later in doing it properly just once."
Roberto wanted to get up, but Padre Emanuele forbade it, not believing that Roberto was yet ready to return to the confusion of the war. Roberto hinted that he was impatient to find a certain person again; Padre Emanuele considered it foolish that his body, so wasted, should allow itself to be further weakened by the thought of another body, and he tried to make the female species seem contemptible to him. "That most vain Womanly World," he said, "that certain modern female Atlases carry on their back, revolves around Dishonor and has the Signs of the Crab & Capricorn for its Tropics. The Mirror, which is its Primum Mobile, is never so murky as when it reflects the Stars of those lewd Eyes, transformed, through the exhalation of the Vapors of stultified Lovers, into Meteors heralding disaster for Honesty."
Roberto did not appreciate the astronomical allegory, nor did he recognize his beloved in the portrait of those society sorceresses. He remained in bed, though still exhaling the Vapors of his infatuation.
More news reached him meanwhile from Signor della Saletta. The Casalesi were wondering if they should not grant the French access to the citadel: they had realized by now that if the enemy was to be denied entry, citizenry and garrison had to join forces. But Signor della Saletta implied that now more than ever, while the city seemed on the point of falling, its inhabitants made only a show of collaborating, while in their hearts they laughed at the pact of alliance. "It is necessary," he said, "to be innocent as the dove with Monsieur de Toiras, but also sly as the serpent in the event that his king wishes them to sell Casale. We must fight in such a way that if Casale is saved, we can share in the merit; but without going too far, so that if it falls, the blame will be attributed entirely to the French." And he added, for Roberto's instruction: "The prudent man must never harness himself to a single wagon."
"But the French say that you are merchants: no one notices when you fight, and all see when you are selling at high prices!"
"To live much it is best to be worth little. The cracked pot is never entirely broken, and in the end its very endurance becomes wearing."
One morning, at the beginning of September, a liberating downpour struck Casale. The healthy and the convalescent all went outside to enjoy the rain, which would wash away every trace of contagion. But it was more a refreshment than a cure, and the disease continued to rage even after the storm. The only consoling news was the equally destructive job the plague was doing in the enemy camp.
Able now to stand on his feet, Roberto ventured out of the convent, and at a certain point, at the threshold of a house marked with a green cross designating it as a place of infection, he saw Anna Maria or Francesca Novarese. She was wan as a figure in the Dance of Death. Once snow and garnet, she was reduced to a sallow uniformity, though her haggard features had not lost their former charms. Roberto recalled the words of Saint-Savin: "Would you continue your genuflections after old age has turned that body into a phantom, able only to remind you of the imminence of death?"
The girl was weeping on the shoulder of a Capuchin, as if she had lost someone dear, perhaps her Frenchman. The Capuchin, his face grayer than his beard, was supporting her, one bony finger pointed at the sky, as if to say, "One day, up there..."
Love becomes a matter for the mind only when the body desires and that desire is suppressed. If the body is weak and unable to desire, the mental aspect vanishes. Roberto discovered he was so weak that he was incapable of loving. Exit Anna Maria (Francesca) Novarese.
He went back to the convent and to bed, determined to die really: he suffered too much at not suffering more. Padre Emanuele recommended he take fresh air. But the news arriving from outside did not encourage him to live. Now, besides the plague, there was famine, or, rather, something worse: a frenzied hunt for the food that the Casalesi were still hiding and did not want to give to their allies. Roberto said that if he could not die of the plague, he wanted to die of starvation.
Finally Padre Emanuele got the better of him and sent him out. Turning the corner, Roberto came upon a group of Spanish officers. He started to flee, but they saluted him ceremoniously. He realized that as various bastions had been breached, the enemy was now installed in various parts of the town, whence it could be said that it was not the country besieging Casale, but Casale that was besieging its own castle.
At the end o
f the street he encountered Saint-Savin. "My dear La Grive," he said, "you fell ill a Frenchman and you are healed a Spaniard. This part of the city is now in enemy hands."
"And we may pass?"
"Do you not know that a truce has been signed? And, in any case, the Spanish want the castle, not us. In the French sector wine is growing scarce, and the Casalesi bring it up from their cellars as if it were the Most Precious Blood. You will not be able to keep good Frenchmen from frequenting certain taverns in this quarter, where the tavern-keepers are now bringing in excellent wine from the country. And the Spaniards receive us like great gentlemen. Except that the proprieties must be respected: if you want to brawl, you must brawl in your own quarter and with compatriots, for in this area we must behave politely, as is correct between enemies. So I confess the Spanish quarter is less amusing than the French, for us at least. But do join us. This evening we want to serenade a lady who had concealed her charms from us until the other day, when I saw her look out of a window for an instant."
And so that evening Roberto found again five familiar faces from the court of Toiras. Even the abbé was of the company, and for the occasion had decked himself out in laces and furbelows, with a satin sash. "The Lord forgive us," he said with flaunted hypocrisy, "but the spirit must yet be appeased if we are still to perform our duty...."
The house was in a square in what was now the Spanish part of the city, but the Spanish at that hour must all have been in the pothouses. In the rectangle of sky outlined by the low roofs and the crowns of the trees flanking the square, the moon reigned serene, only slightly pocked, and was reflected in the water of a fountain murmuring in the center of that rapt quadrangle.
"O fairest Diana," Saint-Savin said, "how calm and peaceful must your cities and your villages be, that do not know war, for the Selenites live in their own natural felicity, ignorant of sin...."
"No blasphemy, Monsieur de Saint-Savin!" the abbé said. "For even if the moon were inhabited, as Monsieur de Moulinet has fancied in that recent romance of his, and as the Scriptures do not teach us, those inhabitants would be most unhappy, as they would not know the Incarnation."
"And it would have been most cruel of the Lord God to deprive them of that knowledge," Saint-Savin rebutted.
"Do not seek to penetrate divine mysteries. God had not vouchsafed the preaching of His Son even to the natives of the Americas, but in His goodness He now sends missionaries there, to carry the light to them."
"Then why does Monsieur the Pope not send missionaries also to the moon? Are the Selenites perhaps not children of God?"
"Do not talk foolishness!"
"I will ignore your having called me a fool, Monsieur l'Abbé, but you must know that beneath this foolishness lies a mystery, which certainly our Lord Pope does not wish to reveal. If the missionaries were to discover inhabitants on the moon, and saw them looking at other worlds within the range of their eyes but not of ours, they would see them wondering if on those other worlds there are not other creatures living, similar to us. And the Selenites would then ask themselves if the fixed stars also are not so many suns surrounded by their moons and by their other planets, and if the inhabitants of those planets also see other stars unknown to us, which would be that many more suns with as many planets, and so on and on, to infinity...."
"God has made us incapable of conceiving the infinite, so be content, human races, with the quia."
"The serenade, the serenade," the others were whispering. "That is the window." The window was bathed in a rosy light that came from the interior of an imagined chamber. But the two debaters were by now aroused.
"And further," Saint-Savin insisted, mocking, "if the world were finished and surrounded by the Void, God would also be finished: since His task, as you say, is to dwell in Heaven and on earth and in every place; He could not dwell where there is nothing. The Void is a non-place. Or else, to enlarge the world He would have to enlarge Himself, and be born for the first time where before He was not, and this would contradict His proclaimed eternity."
"Enough, sir! You are denying the eternity of the Eternal One, and this I cannot allow. The moment has come for me to kill you, so that your so-called wit can no longer weary us!" And he drew his sword.
"If that is your wish," Saint-Savin said, saluting and putting himself on guard. "But I will not kill you: I do not wish to subtract soldiers from my king. I will simply disfigure you, so that you will live wearing a mask, as the Italian comedians do, a fitting distinction for you. I will draw a scar from your eye to your lip, and I will give you this neat pig-castrator's cut, but only after having taught you, between a feint and a parry, a lesson in natural philosophy."
The abbé attacked, trying to strike home at once with great slashes, shouting at his opponent that he was a poisonous insect, a flea, a louse to be crushed mercilessly. Saint-Savin parried, then pressed him, driving him back against a tree, but philosophizing at every move.
"Aha! What wild slashes and thrusts, the vulgar chops of one blinded by rage! You lack any Idea of fencing. But you also lack charity, in your contempt for fleas and lice. You are too small an animal to be able to imagine the world as a big animal can, as the divine Plato displays it to us. Try to imagine the stars as worlds with other lesser animals, and remember that lesser animals in turn serve as worlds to still lesser breeds: then you will not find it contradictory to think that we—and also horses and elephants—are whole worlds for the fleas and the lice that inhabit us. They do not perceive us because of our bigness, as we do not perceive larger worlds because of our smallness. Perhaps there is now a population of lice that takes your body for a world, and when one of them has traveled there from forehead to nape, his fellows say of him that he has dared venture to the confines of the known earth. This little populace considers your hair the forests of their country, and when I have struck you, they will see your wounds as lakes and seas. When you use your comb, they believe this agitation is the flux and reflux of the ocean, and it is their misfortune to inhabit such a changeable world, because of your inclination to comb your hair constantly like a female, and now that I snip off that tassel, they will take your cry of anger for a hurricane. There!" And he snipped off an ornament, almost ripping the abbé's embroidered jacket.
The abbé foamed with rage. He had moved to the center of the square, looking behind him to make sure there was room for the movements he was now essaying, then retreating so that the fountain would protect his back.
Saint-Savin seemed to dance around him, without attacking. "Raise your head, Monsieur l'Abbé. Look at the moon, and reflect that if your God was able to make the soul immortal, He could easily have made the world infinite. But if the world is infinite, it will be so in time as well as in space, and therefore it will be eternal, and when there is an eternal world, which has no need of creation, then it will be unnecessary to conceive the idea of God. Oh, what a fine joke, Monsieur l'Abbé. If God is infinite, you cannot curtail His power: He could never ab opere cessare, and therefore the world will be infinite; but if the world is infinite, then there will no longer be God, just as there will soon be no more tassels on your jacket!" And suiting the deed to the word, he snipped off a few more appendages of which the abbé was so proud, then he shortened his guard, lifting the tip slightly; and as the abbé tried to close the distance, Saint-Savin sharply struck the flat of his opponent's blade. The abbé almost dropped his sword, clutching with his left hand his aching wrist.
He cried: "I must finally cut you open, you villain, you blasphemer! Holy womb! By all the damned saints of Paradise, by the blood of the Crucified!"
The lady's window was opened, someone looked out and shouted. By now all present had forgotten the purpose of their enterprise and were moving around the two duellers, who shouted as they skirted the fountain, while Saint-Savin confounded his enemy with a series of circular parries and feints on the tip of his weapon.
"Do not call on the mysteries of the Incarnation for help, Monsieur l'Abbé," he quipped
. "Your holy Roman church has taught you that this ball of mud of ours is the center of the Universe, which turns around it, acting as its minstrel and strumming the music of the spheres. Be careful, you are allowing yourself to be driven too close to the fountain, you are getting your hem wet, like an old man suffering from stones.... But what if, in the great Void, infinite worlds are moving, as a great philosopher said before your similars burned him in Rome, and very many of them are inhabited by creatures like us, and what if all had been created by your God, where does the Redemption then fit?"
"What will God do with you, sinner!" the abbé cried, parrying a cut with some effort.
"Was Christ perhaps made flesh only once? Was Original Sin committed only once, and on this globe? What injustice! Both for the other worlds, deprived of the Incarnation, and for us, because in that case the people of all the other worlds would be perfect, like our progenitors before the Fall, and they would enjoy a natural happiness without the weight of the Cross. Or else infinite Adams have infinitely committed the first error, tempted by infinite Eves with infinite apples, and Christ has been obliged to become incarnate, preach, and suffer Calvary infinite times, and perhaps He is still doing so, and if the worlds are infinite, His task will be infinite, too. Infinite His task, then infinite the forms of His suffering: if beyond the Galaxy there were a land where men have six arms, as in our own Terra Incognita, the Son of God would be nailed not to a cross but to a wooden construction shaped like a star—which seems to me worthy of an author of comedies."
"Enough! I will put an end to your comedy!" the abbé screamed, beside himself, and he flung himself at Saint-Savin, wielding his final blows.
Saint-Savin parried them effectively, then there was a static instant. While the abbé had his sword raised after a prime parry, Saint-Savin moved towards him as if to attack, and pretended to fall forward. The abbé stepped to one side, hoping to strike him as he fell. But Saint-Savin, who had not lost control of his legs, sprang up like lightning, supporting himself with his left hand on the ground as the right darted upwards: it was the coup de la mouette. The tip of the sword marked the abbé's face from the base of the nose to the upper lip, slicing off the left half of his moustache.