Aboard the Amaryllis, where he never went out on deck during the day, Roberto had heard the passengers tell of fiery dawns as if the sun were impatient to shoot its arrows at the world, whereas now, with no tears, he saw pastel hues: a sky foaming with dark clouds faintly edged in pearl, while a tinge, a memory, of pink was rising behind the Island, which seemed colored turquoise on rough paper.
But that almost nordic palette was enough for him to understand that the outline, which at night had seemed homogeneous, was created by the lines of a wooded hill that ended in a steep slope over a stretch covered with tall trees, down to the palms that lined the white beach.
Slowly the sand grew more luminous, and along the edges, at the sides, he could discern what seemed gigantic embalmed spiders as they were moving their skeletal limbs into the water. Roberto, from the distance, conceived of them as "ambulant vegetables," but at that moment the glare of the sand, now too bright, made him withdraw.
He discovered that where his eyes might fail, his hearing would not betray him, and he entrusted himself to that sense, closing the window almost completely and lending an ear to the noises from land.
He was accustomed to the dawns of his native hill, but he realized that for the first time in his life he was hearing birds really sing, and he had never heard so many, so various.
By the thousands they hailed the sunrise; it seemed to him that he could recognize, among the parrots' cries, the nightingale, the blackbird, the calander, an infinite number of swallows, and even the shrill sound of the cicada and the cricket, and he wondered if the animals he heard were actually of those species and not some antipodal cousin of theirs.... The Island was distant, and yet he had the impression that those sounds carried a scent of orange blossoms and basil, as if the air of all the bay were steeped in perfume—and for that matter M. d'Igby had told him how, in the course of one of his voyages, he had recognized the nearness of land by a waft of odorous atoms borne by the winds....
He sniffed and listened to that invisible throng, as if looking from the battlements of a castle or the slit-windows of a fort at an army vociferously fanning out along the slope of the hill and the plain below, and along the river that protected the walls. He had the impression of having already experienced what he was imagining; and in the face of the immensity that besieged him, he felt besieged, and he almost aimed his musket. He was at Casale again, and before him was spread out the Spanish army, with the noise of its wagons, the clash of arms, the tenor voices of the Castilians, the shouting of the Neapolitans, the harsh grunts of the Landsknechts, and in the background some trumpet blasts that, however, reached him muted, above the muffled sounds of an occasional arquebus, klok, paff, taa-boom, like the fireworks on the feast day of the local saint.
As if his life had been spent between two sieges, one the image of the other—with the sole difference that now, at the conclusion of this circle of two full lustra, this river was too broad and also encircling, so any sortie was impossible—Roberto lived again the days of Casale.
CHAPTER 2
An Account of Events in the Monferrato
ROBERTO TELLS US very little about the sixteen years of his life preceding that summer of 1630. He refers to episodes of the past only when they seem to have some connection with his present on the Daphne, and the chronicler of his turbulent annals must read between the lines of the story. To judge by his quirks, he is the sort of author who, to postpone the unmasking of the murderer, gives the reader only the scantiest of clues. And so I must wrest hints from him, as if from a delator.
The Pozzo di San Patrizio family belonged to the minor nobility, lords of the vast estate of La Griva along the border of the province of Alessandria (in those days a part of the duchy of Milan, and hence Spanish territory); but whether for geographical reasons or because of temperament, they considered themselves vassals of the marquis of Monferrato. Roberto's father spoke French with his wife, the local dialect with his peasants, and Italian with foreigners; to his son he expressed himself in various ways, depending on whether he was teaching the boy a secret of swordsmanship or taking him on a ride through the fields, cursing the birds that were ruining the crops. For the rest, the young Roberto spent his time without friends, daydreaming of distant lands as he wandered, bored, through the vineyards, or of falconry if he was hunting swallows, or combating dragons as he played with his dogs, or hidden treasure as he explored the rooms of their little castle or fort, as it could also be called. His mind was inspired to wander thus by the dusty volumes of romances and chivalric poems he found in the south tower.
So he was not uneducated, and he even had a tutor, if only seasonally: a Carmelite who had supposedly traveled in the Orient, where, it was murmured—the boy's mother would repeat, blessing herself—he had become a Mussulman. Once a year he would arrive at the castle with a manservant and four little mules laden with books and other scribblings, and he would be housed there for three months. What he taught his pupil I cannot say, but when Roberto turned up in Paris, he made a favorable impression; in any case he was quick to learn whatever he was told.
Of this Carmelite only one thing is known, and it is no accident that Roberto mentions it. One day old Pozzo cut himself while polishing a sword, and whether because the weapon was rusty, or because he had injured a sensitive part of his hand or fingers, the wound provoked severe pain. Then the Carmelite took the blade and sprinkled on it some powder that he kept in a little box; immediately old Pozzo swore he felt relief. In fact, the next day the wound was already healing.
The Carmelite enjoyed the general amazement, and he told father and son how the secret of this substance had been revealed to him by an Arab; it was a medicine far more powerful than the one Christian spagyrists called unguentum armarium. When they asked him why the powder was put not on the wound but, rather, on the blade that had produced it, he answered that such is the working of nature, among whose strongest forces is a universal sympathy, which governs actions at a distance. And he added that if this seemed hard to believe, they had only to think of the magnet, which is a stone that draws metal filings to itself, or of the great iron mountains, which cover the northern part of our planet and attract the needle of the compass. And so the unguent, adhering firmly to the sword, drew out those virtues of iron that the sword had left in the wound, impeding its healing.
Any man who in youth witnesses something of this sort cannot but remain marked by it for the rest of his life, and we shall soon see how Roberto's destiny was sealed by his attraction towards the attractive power of powders and unguents.
This, however, is not the episode that left the greatest mark on Roberto's boyhood. There is another, though properly speaking it is not an episode; it is more like a refrain, of which the boy preserved a suspect memory. It seems that his father, who was surely fond of his son even if he treated him with the taciturn roughness characteristic of the men of those lands, sometimes—and precisely in the first five years of Roberto's life—would lift him from the ground and shout proudly: "You are my firstborn!" Nothing strange, to be sure, beyond the venial sin of redundance, since Roberto was an only child. But, as he grew up, Roberto began to remember (or convinced himself that he remembered) how, at these outbursts of paternal joy, his mother's face would assume an expression of pleasure mingled with uneasiness, as if the father did well to say those words, though their repetition stirred in her an anxiety never completely eased. Roberto's imagination had long leaped and danced around the tone of that exclamation, concluding that his father did not utter it as if it were an assertion of the obvious but, rather, as an odd investiture, underlining the you, as if to say, "You, and not another, are my firstborn son."
Not another, or not that other? In Roberto's letters there appears always some reference to an Other, who haunts him; and the idea seems to have been born in him during those very years, when he became convinced (and what else could a little boy brood over, isolated as he was among bat-infested turrets, vineyards, lizards and horses, awkw
ard in dealing with the big peasant boys his age, his unequal peers, a boy who when he was not listening to the fairy tales of his grandmother listened to those of the Carmelite?), convinced that somewhere an unrecognized brother was at large, who must have been of an evil nature, as their father had repudiated him. Roberto was at first too little and then too modest to wonder if this brother was his on his father's side or on his mother's (in either case one of his parents would have been living under the cloud of an ancient, unpardonable sin): a brother in some way (perhaps supernaturally) guilty of the rejection he had suffered, and because of it he surely hated him, Roberto, the favorite.
The shadow of this enemy brother (whom he would have liked to know, all the same, in order to love him and be loved) had troubled his nights as a boy; later, in adolescence, he leafed through old volumes in the library, hoping to find hidden there—what?—a portrait, a certificate from the curate, a revelatory confession. He wandered through the garrets, opening old chests full of great-grandparents' clothes, rusted medals, a Moorish dagger; and he lingered to question, with puzzled fingers, embroidered dresses that had certainly clad an infant, but whether that was years or centuries ago, there was no knowing.
Gradually he had also come to give this lost brother a name, Ferrante, and had begun attributing to him the little crimes of which he himself was wrongfully accused, like the theft of a cake or the improper liberation of a dog from his chain. Ferrante, privileged by his banishment, acted behind Roberto's back, and Roberto in turn hid behind Ferrante. Indeed, little by little the habit of blaming the nonexistent brother for what he, Roberto, could not have done, became transformed into the habit of inculpating him with what Roberto had done, and of which he repented.
It was not that Roberto told others a lie: rather, with a lump in his throat, silently assuming the punishment for his own misdeeds, he managed to convince himself of his innocence and to feel the victim of an injustice.
Once, for example, to try out a new axe that the smith had just delivered to him, also partly out of spite for some abuse or other that he felt he had endured, Roberto chopped down a little fruit tree that his father had only recently planted with great hopes for future seasons. When Roberto realized the gravity of his foolishness, he imagined atrocious consequences: being sold to the Turks, at the very least, so they could set him rowing for life in their galleys. He was preparing to attempt flight, ready to end his life as an outlaw in the hills. Seeking a justification, he quickly persuaded himself that the person who had cut down the tree was Ferrante.
But, discovering the crime, his father assembled all the boys of the estate and said that, to avert his indiscriminate wrath, the guilty party would be wise to confess. Roberto felt mercifully generous: if he blamed Ferrante, the poor boy would suffer another repudiation; and after all the unhappy child misbehaved as if to confirm his orphaned abandonment, offended as he was by the sight of his parents smothering another in caresses.... Roberto took a step forward and, trembling with fear and pride, declared that he wanted no one else to be blamed in his stead. This statement, though it was not a confession, was taken for one. Twisting his moustache and looking at the boy's mother, the father said, harshly clearing his throat several times, that to be sure the crime was very serious, and punishment was inevitable, but he could not help but appreciate that the young "master of La Griva" had honored the family tradition and this was how a gentleman should always act, even if he was only eight years old. Then he announced that Roberto would not be allowed to participate in the mid-August visit to his cousins at San Salvatore, which was a grievous punishment (at San Salvatore there was Quirino, a vintner who could hoist Roberto to the top of a dizzyingly tall fig tree), but less grievous, certainly, than the galleys of the Sultan.
To us the story seems simple: the father, proud to have an offspring who does not lie, looks at the mother with ill-concealed contentment and administers a mild punishment to save face. But Roberto then embroidered this event at length, arriving at the conclusion that his father and mother had no doubt guessed the culprit was Ferrante, had appreciated the fraternal heroism of their preferred son, and had felt relieved not to have to bare the family secret.
Perhaps it is I who am embroidering, from meager clues, but the presence of the absent brother will have its importance in our story. We will find traces of this puerile game in the behavior of the adult Roberto—or at least of Roberto at the moment we find him on the Daphne, in a plight that, to tell the truth, would have ensnared anyone.
But I digress; we have still to establish how Roberto arrived at the siege of Casale. And here we must give fantasy free rein and imagine how it might have happened.
It took time for news to reach La Griva, but for at least two years they had known that the succession to the dukedom of Mantua was causing the Monferrato region much trouble, and a bit of a siege had already taken place. To be brief (and this is a story that others have already told, though in a fashion even more fragmentary than mine): in December of 1627 the duke Vincenzo II of Mantua is dying, and around the deathbed of the old rake who has been unable to produce sons there is a ballet of four claimants, with their agents and their protectors. The victor is the marquis of Saint-Charmont, who manages to convince Vincenzo that the inheritance should go to a cousin in the French line, Charles de Gonzaga, duke of Nevers. Old Vincenzo, between one dying gasp and the next, forces or allows Nevers to marry in great haste his niece Maria Gonzaga, then he dies, leaving his new nephew the dukedom.
Now Nevers was French, and the duchy he was inheriting comprised also the march of Monferrato with Casale, its capital, the most important fortress in Northern Italy. Situated as it was, between Spanish Milan and the lands of the Savoys, Monferrato controlled the upper course of the Po, the passes between the Alps and the south, the road from Milan to Genoa, and it acted as a cushion between France and Spain; for neither of the two powers could trust that other cushion-state, the duchy of Savoy, where Charles Emmanuel I was playing a game that it would have been kind to call duplicitous. If Monferrato went to Nevers, practically speaking it would go to Richelieu; so Spain obviously preferred someone else inherit, say, the duke of Guastalla, ignoring the fact that the duke of Savoy also had some claim to the succession. But since a will existed, and it designated Nevers, the other pretenders could only hope that the germanic Holy Roman Emperor, whose feudatory the duke of Mantua formally was, would refuse to ratify the succession.
But the Spanish were impatient and, while all were waiting for the Emperor to come to a decision, Casale had already been besieged once by Gonzalo de Córdoba and now, for the second time, an imposing army of Spaniards and imperials commanded by Spinola was surrounding it. The French garrison was preparing to resist, expecting a French army to come to its aid, but that army was still engaged in the north, and only God knew if it would arrive at Casale in time.
This was more or less the situation when old Pozzo, in mid-April, assembled before the castle the younger men of his household and the most keen of his peasants, and distributed the arms in his possession; then he called Roberto and to all made this speech, which he must have spent the whole night rehearsing: "Now listen to me, the lot of you. This land of ours, La Griva, has always paid tribute to the lord of Monferrato, who for quite a while has also been, practically speaking, the duke of Mantua. Now the duke is this Nevers, and if anybody comes and tells me that Nevers is not a Mantuan or a Monferrino, I'll kick his backside, because you're nothing but a bunch of ignoramuses, incapable of understanding these things, so best you keep your mouths shut and leave everything to your master, who at least knows what honor is. For most of you, I know, honor is not worth spitting on, but let me tell you something: if the imperials enter Casale—they are not men with scruples—your vineyards will go to hell and as for your women, better not think about it. So we are off to defend Casale. I am not forcing anybody. If there is some lazy, lily-livered lout who does not agree with me, he should speak up right now, and I will have him hanged fr
om that oak." None of those present could yet have seen the etchings of Callot with clumps of people like these hanging from other oaks, but there must have been something in the air: they all raised their weapons, muskets or pikes or simple poles with a sickle tied to the top, and they yelled, "Viva Casale, down with the imperials." In one voice.
"My son," Pozzo said to Roberto as they were riding over the hills, their little army following them on foot, "that Nevers isn't worth one of my balls, and old Vincenzo, when he passed on the dukedom, not only had a limp prick but a limp brain as well. But he gave it to Nevers and not to that blockhead Guastalla, and the Pozzos have been vassals of the legitimate lords of Monferrato since the beginning of time. So we're going to Casale and, if we have to, we'll get ourselves killed because, God damn it, you can't stick with somebody when things go well and then drop him when he's up to his neck in the muck. But if we manage not to get ourselves killed, all the better. So keep your eyes open."
The journey of those volunteers, from the border of the Alessandria country to Casale, was surely one of the longest in recorded history. Old Pozzo's reasoning was in itself exemplary: "I know Spaniards," he said, "they're people who like to take their time. They'll head for Casale by way of the plains to the south, where wagons and cannons and various contraptions can pass more easily. So if we turn west, just before Mirabello, and follow the road through the hills, we'll take a day or two longer, but we'll get there without running into trouble, and we'll still be ahead of the Spaniards."
Unfortunately, Spinola had more tortuous ideas about the preparation of a siege and, when he was to the southeast of Casale, he began by ordering the occupation of Valenza and Occimiano; several weeks previously he had sent the duke of Lerma, Ottavio Sforza, and the count of Gemburg to the west of the city, with about seven thousand foot-soldiers, to try to take immediately the castles of Rosignano, Pontestura, and San Giorgio, thinking to block any possible support that might come from the French army, as, scissor-like, from the north, crossing the Po and heading south, the governor of Alessandria, Don Geronimo Augustin, was advancing with another five thousand men. And all were deployed along the path that Pozzo believed to be felicitously deserted. Nor, when our gentleman learned as much from some peasant, could he change his route, for to the east, by now, there were more imperials than to the west.