The Island of the Day Before

  "Ferrante!" he cried.

  "In person, my dear brother. I, who—as you were struggling like a dog or a frog—found my ship again on the far side of the Island, and sailed through my long Thursday towards Jerusalem, found the other Judas on the verge of betraying, hanged him from a fig tree, preventing him from handing over the Son of Man to the Sons of Darkness, entered the Garden of Olives with my men and abducted Our Lord, stealing Him from Calvary! And now you, I, all of us are living in a world that has never been redeemed!"

  "But Christ? Where is Christ now?"

  "Do you then not know that the ancient texts already said there are doves the color of flame because the Lord, before being crucified, wore a scarlet tunic? Have you not yet understood? For one thousand six hundred and ten years Christ has been prisoner on the Island, whence He tries to escape in the form of an Orange Dove, but is unable to abandon that place, where next to the Specula Melitensis I have left Judas's scapular, and where it is therefore forever the same day. Now all I have to do is kill you, and live free in a world where remorse is banned, Hell is certain for all, and where one day I shall be crowned the new Lucifer!" And he drew a dirk, took a step towards Roberto to commit his final crime.

  "No!" Roberto shouted. "I will not allow it! I will kill you and free Christ. I can still wield my sword, and it was to me, not to you, that my father taught his secrets!"

  "I have had only one father, one mother: your festered mind," Ferrante said with a sad smile. "You taught me only to hate. Do you think you have given me a great gift, giving me life so that in your Land of Romances I could embody Suspicion? As long as you are alive, thinking for me what I must think, I will never cease to despise myself. So whether you kill me or I kill you, the end is the same. En garde!"

  "Forgive me, my brother," Roberto cried. "Yes, let us fight. It is fitting that one of us die."

  What did Roberto want? To die, to set Ferrante free by making him die? Prevent Ferrante from preventing the Redemption? We will never know, for he did not know the answer himself. But this is the way of dreams.

  They climbed up on deck. Roberto hunted for his weapon and found it reduced (as we will recall) to a stump; but he shouted that God would give him strength, and a good swordsman can fight even with a broken blade.

  The two brothers confronted each other for the first time, to begin their last conflict.

  The heavens were ready to abet the fratricide. A reddish cloud suddenly cast between ship and sky a bloody shadow as if, up above, they had slaughtered the Horses of the Sun. A great concert of thunder and lightning erupted, followed by a downpour, and sky and sea deafened the duellers, dazzling their vision, striking their hands with icy water.

  But the two darted here and there among the thunderbolts that rained around them, attacking each other with blows and side cuts, suddenly falling back, clutching a hawser, almost flying to avoid a thrust, hurling abuse, cadencing every attack with a cry, among the equal cries of the wind howling around them.

  On that slippery deck Roberto was fighting so that Christ could be nailed to the Cross, and he invoked divine aid; Ferrante, to prevent Christ's suffering, invoked the names of all the devils.

  Called to assist him was Astaroth, as the Intruder (now intruding also into the plans of Providence) offered himself involuntarily to the coup de la mouette. Or perhaps this is what he wished, to conclude that dream that had neither beginning nor end.

  Roberto pretended to fall, the other rushed to finish him off; Roberto, leaning on his right hand, thrust the broken sword at his opponent's chest. He did not spring up with the agility of Saint-Savin, but Ferrante at this point had accumulated too much impetus and could not avoid being stuck, or, rather, impaling himself at his sternum on the stump of the blade. Roberto choked on the blood that poured from the mouth of his enemy, in death.

  He tasted blood in his mouth, and probably in his delirium he had bitten his tongue. Now he was swimming in that blood, which spread from the ship to the Island; he did not want to advance for fear of the Stone Fish, but he had completed only the first part of his mission, Christ was waiting on the Island to shed His blood, and Roberto was now His sole Messiah.

  What was he doing now in his dream? With Ferrante's dirk he had begun tearing a sail into long strips, which he then knotted together with the help of ropes. On the lower deck he had captured, using thongs, the hardiest of the cranes or storks or whatever they might be, and he was now binding them by their legs, as coursers, to that flying carpet of his.

  With his aerial ship he rose in flight towards the now attainable land. Under the Specula Melitensis he found the scapular and destroyed it. Having restored space to time, he saw descending upon him the Dove, which finally, ecstatic, he saw in all its glory. But it was natural—or, rather, supernatural—that the bird now should appear to him not orange but white. Yet it could not be a dove, for the dove is not suited to represent the Second Person of the Trinity; it was perhaps a Pious Pelican, as the Son must be. Roberto could not clearly see what bird was offered him as sweet topsail for that winged vessel.

  He only knew that he was flying upwards, and images followed one another as the mad phantoms would have it. They were now navigating in the direction of all the innumerable and infinite worlds, to every planet, to every star, so that on each, as if in a single moment, the Redemption would be achieved.

  The first planet they reached was the pure moon, on a night illuminated by the earth's midday. And the earth hung on the line of the horizon, an enormous looming boundless polenta of cornmeal still cooking in the sky and almost falling upon him, gurgling with fevered and feverish fevery ferocity in boiling boils on the boil, plop ploppity plop. The fact is that when you have the fever, you become polenta, and the lights you see all come from the boiling of your head.

  And there on the moon, with the Dove...

  We will not have looked for coherence and verisimilitude, I trust, in all I have narrated thus far, because we have been describing the nightmare of a man poisoned by a Stone Fish. But what I am preparing to narrate surpasses all our expectations. The mind or the heart of Roberto, or in any case his vis imaginativa, was ordering a sacrilegious metamorphosis: on the moon he now saw himself not with the Lord but with the Lady, Lilia finally recovered from Ferrante. Roberto, by the lakes of Selene, was receiving what his brother had stolen from him among the ponds of the island of fountains. He kissed her face with his eyes, contemplated her with his mouth, sucked, bit again and again, and the enamoured tongues jested, jousting.

  Only then did Roberto, whose fever was perhaps abating, come to, but remaining fond of what he had experienced, as happens after a dream departs, leaving not only the spirit affected but also the body.

  He did not know whether to weep with happiness at his regained love, or to weep with remorse for having turned—thanks to the fever, which ignores the Laws of Genre—his Sacred Epic into a Libertine Comedy.

  That moment, he told himself, will truly gain me Hell, for I am surely no better than Judas or Ferrante—indeed, I am only Ferrante and till now I have simply exploited his wickedness in order to dream of doing what my cowardice has always kept me from doing.

  Perhaps I shall not be called to answer for my sin, because it is not I who sinned, but the Stone Fish that made me dream in its own way. However, if I have arrived at such mindlessness, it must be a sign that I am truly about to die. I had to wait for the Stone Fish to make me think of death, whereas this thought should be the first duty of every good Christian.

  Why have I never thought of death, and of the wrath of a laughing God? Because I was following the teachings of my philosophers, for whom death is a natural necessity and God is He who into the disorder of atoms introduced the Law that composes them in the harmony of the Cosmos. Could such a God, master of geometry, produce the disorder of Hell, even if out of justice, and could He laugh at the subverting of every subversion?

  No, God does not laugh, Roberto said to himself. He bows to the Law that He Himself
willed, the Law that wills the body to decay, as mine is surely decaying in this decadence. And Roberto saw the worms near his mouth, but they were not an effect of his delirium; amid the filth of the hens, they had formed through spontaneous generation, descendants of that excrement.

  He then gave welcome to those heralds of decomposition, for he understood that this confounding of himself with viscid matter was to be experienced as the end of all suffering, in harmony with the will of Nature and of Heaven that administers it.

  I have only a little while to wait, he murmured, as in a prayer. In the space of not many days my body, now still well composed, will change color and become wan as a bean, then blacken from head to foot and be sheathed in a dark heat. Then tumefaction will begin, and on that bloat a fetid mold will generate. Nor will it be long before the belly begins exploding here and splitting there, releasing rottenness, and here a wormy half-eye will be seen swaying, there a shred of lip. In this mud then a quantity of little flies will be born and other tiny animals that cluster in my blood, and they will consume me bit by bit. One part of these creatures will rise from my bosom, another will drip like mucus from the nostrils; others, drawn by my putrescence, will enter and leave the mouth, and the most sated will gurgle in the throat.... And all this while the Daphne little by little becomes the realm of the birds, and germs arriving from the Island cause animalesque vegetables to grow here, whose roots, now digging into the bilge, will be nourished by my secretions. Finally, when my whole corporeal fabric has been reduced to pure skeleton, in the course of the months and the years—or perhaps the millennia—that armature will also slowly become a powder of atoms on which the living will walk, not understanding that the whole globe of the earth, its seas, its deserts, its forests, and its valleys, is nothing but a living cemetery.

  There is nothing more conducive to healing than an Exercise in Happy Death, the rehearsal of which reassures us. So the Carmelite had once said to him, and so it was, for now Roberto felt hunger and thirst. Weaker than when he dreamed of the fighting on the deck, but less so than when he lay by the hens, he found the strength to suck an egg. The liquid that trickled down his throat was good. And even better was the milk of a nut that he opened in the larder. After all that meditating over his dead body, now, to heal it, he incorporated into his body the healthy bodies to which Nature gives life every day.

  This is why, except for some admonitions from the Carmelite, at La Griva no one had taught him to think of death. During family conversation, almost always at dinner and at supper (after Roberto had returned from one of his explorations of the ancient house, and had perhaps lingered in a great shadowy room redolent of apples set on the floor to ripen), the talk was only of the goodness of the melons, the reaping of the wheat, and the expectations for the vintage.

  Roberto remembered how his mother taught him he could live happily and peacefully if he would employ to advantage all the good things that La Griva gave him: "And it would be well for you not to forget to provide yourself with salted meat of the ox, the sheep, or the ram, and of calf and pig, for they keep for some time and are of great use. Cut the pieces of meat not very big, put them in a pot with much salt over them, leave them for one week, then hang them from the beams in the kitchen so they can dry in the smoke, and do this in crisp, cold weather, with the westerly winds, after Martinmas, for the meat will then last as long as you wish. In September come the little birds, and lambs for the whole winter, not to mention the capons, the old hens, the ducks, and such like. Do not scorn even the ass if it breaks a leg, for they produce little round sausages that you afterwards score with a knife and set to fry, and they are a dish for a lord. And in Lent, let there always be mushrooms, soups, nuts, grapes, apples, and all God's bounty. And also for Lent turnips must be kept ready, and herbs that, floured and cooked in oil, are better than a lamprey; and you will make sweet Lenten dumplings, with a paste of oil, flour, rose-water, saffron, and sugar, with a drop of Malmsey, cut in rounds like old window panes, filled with grated bread, apples, cloves, and crushed walnuts, which, with a pinch of salt you will set in the oven and cook, and you will eat better than any prior. After Easter come the kids, asparagus, pigeons.... Later the ricotta arrives and the fresh cheese. But you must also know how to make use of peas and boiled beans floured and fried, which are excellent ornaments for the table.... This, my son, if you live as our elders lived, will be a life of bliss, far from all travail...."

  No, at La Griva there was no talk of death, judgement, Hell, or Paradise. Death, for Roberto, had appeared at Casale, and it had been in Provence and in Paris that he had been led to ponder it, amid virtuous discourse and carefree discourse.

  I shall surely die, he said to himself, if not now thanks to the Stone Fish, in any case later, since it is clear that from this ship I shall never wander, now that I have lost—with the Persona Vitrea—also the means of approaching the barrier safely. What illusion was I harboring? I would die, perhaps later, even if I had not arrived on this wreck. I entered life knowing that the Law requires us to leave it. As Saint-Savin said, we play our role, some long, some not so long, and then we leave the stage. I have seen others go before me, others will see me go, and they will give the same performance for their successors.

  For that matter, how long was the time when I did not exist, and for how long in the future will I not be? I occupy a very small space in the abyss of the years. This little interval does not succeed in distinguishing me from the nothingness into which I shall go. I came into the world only to swell the ranks. My part was so small that even if I had remained in the wings, everyone would still have declared the play perfect. It is like a storm at sea: some drown immediately, others are dashed against the rocks, still others are cast up on an abandoned ship, but not for long, not even they. Life goes out, on its own, like a candle that has consumed its substance. And we should be accustomed to it, because, like a candle, we have been shedding atoms since the moment we were lit.

  It is no great wisdom to know these things, Roberto told himself. We should know them from the moment we are born. But usually we reflect always and only on the death of others. Ah yes, we all have strength enough to bear others' ills. Then the moment comes when we think of death because the illness is our own, and we realize it is impossible to stare directly at the sun and at death. Unless we have had good teachers.

  I did. Someone said to me that truly few know death. As a rule it is tolerated through stupidity or habit, not through resolve. We die because we cannot do otherwise. Only the philosopher can think of death as a duty, to be performed willingly and without fear. As long as we are here, death is not here, and when death comes, we have gone. Why would I have spent so much time conversing about philosophy if now I were not capable of making my death the masterwork of my life?

  His strength was returning. He thanked his mother, whose memory had led him to abandon thoughts of the end. She could not do otherwise, she who had given him the beginning.

  He set to thinking about his birth, of which he knew far less than of his death. He told himself that thinking of origins is proper to the philosopher. It is easy for the philosopher to justify death: that we must plunge into obscurity is one of the clearest things in the world. What obsesses the philosopher is not the naturalness of the end, it is the mystery of the beginning. We can lack interest in the eternity that will follow us, but we cannot elude the anguished question of which eternity preceded us: the eternity of matter or the eternity of God?

  This was why he had been cast up on the Daphne, Roberto concluded. Because only in that restful hermitage would he have had the leisure to reflect on the one question that frees us from every apprehension about not being and consigns us to the wonder of being.

  CHAPTER 37

  Paradoxical Exercises Regarding the Thinking of Stones

  BUT HOW LONG had he been sick? Days? Weeks? Or had a storm in the meantime struck the ship? Or, even before encountering the Stone Fish, concentrated as he was on the sea and on his Roman
ce, had he not noticed what was happening around him? For how long had he so lost his sense of reality?

  The Daphne had become a different ship. The deck was dirty and the casks leaked, were coming apart; some sails had unfurled and were torn, hanging from the arms like masks, winking and grinning among their rents.

  The birds complained, and Roberto hurried to feed them. Some were dead. Luckily the plants, nourished by rain and air, had grown and some had forced their way into the cages, offering pasture to many; for others, the insects had multiplied. The surviving animals had even procreated, and the few dead had been replaced by many living.

  The Island remained unchanged; except that for Roberto, who had lost his mask, it had moved farther away, drawn by the currents. The reef, now that he knew it was defended by the Stone Fish, had become insuperable. Roberto could swim again, but only for the love of swimming, while keeping well away from the rocks.

  "Oh, human machinations, how chimerical you are," he murmured. "If man is nothing but a shadow, you are smoke. If nothing but a dream, you are phantoms. If nothing but a dot, you are zeroes."

  So many deeds, Roberto said to himself, only to learn that I am a zero. Indeed, more of a zero than I was at my arrival as derelict. The shipwreck shook me and led me to fight for life, but now I have nothing to fight for or to fight against. I am condemned to a long repose. I am here to contemplate not the Void of spaces, but my own: and from it only ennui will come, sadness, and despair.