The Island of the Day Before

  "And God—?" Ferrante asked. "Does God laugh?"

  "No, alas," the excoriated man replied, "because even humiliation would exalt us. How beautiful it would be if we could see at least a laughing God come to taunt us! What distraction, the spectacle of the Lord who from His throne, among His saints, makes sport of us. We would have the sight of another's joy, as cheering as the sight of another's frown. No, here no one is outraged, no one laughs, no one shows himself. God is not here. Here there is only hope without goal."

  "My God, a curse on all saints," Ferrante wanted to shout, in his villainy. "If I am damned, I must have the right to enact the spectacle of my fury." But his body was spent, and the voice that came from his bosom faint. He could not even curse.

  "You see," the skinned man said to him, his mouth unable to smile, "your punishment has already begun. Not even hatred is permitted anymore. This island is the one place in the Universe where pain is not allowed, where a listless hope cannot be distinguished from a bottomless boredom."

  Roberto went on constructing Ferrante's end as he lay on the deck naked, for he had stripped himself for his imitation of a stone; and in the meanwhile the sun burned his face, chest, and legs, restoring to him the feverish warmth that had only recently left him. Now prepared to confuse not only his fiction with reality but also the heat of his spirit with that of his body, he felt once more ablaze with love. And Lilia? What had happened to Lilia while Ferrante's cadaver sought out the isle of the dead?

  With a device not uncommon among Poets when they are incapable of restraining their impatience and no longer observe the unities of time and place, Roberto leaped over some events to find Lilia again some days later, clinging to that plank as it drifted over a now-calm sea glittering in the sun—and she approached (and this, Dear Reader, you never would have dared predict) the eastern shore of the Island of Solomon, that is to say, the side opposite the one off which the Daphne rode at anchor.

  There, as Roberto had learned from Father Caspar, the beaches were less friendly than those to the west. The plank, by now too fragile to withstand an impact, shattered against a rock. Lilia woke and clung to that rock as the fragments of her raft were lost among the currents.

  Now she was there, on a rock that could barely house her, as a stretch of water—but for her it was an ocean—separated her from the shore. Shaken by the typhoon, wasted by hunger, tormented even more by thirst, she could not drag herself from the rock to the sand, beyond which, her vision blurred, she discerned the colors of vegetable forms.

  But the rock was searing beneath her tender thigh and, hardly breathing, instead of cooling her inner blaze, she drew the burning air into herself.

  She hoped that not far away darting little streams would spring from shady cliffs, yet these dreams did not appease but, rather, exacerbated her thirst. She wanted to ask help of Heaven, but as her dry tongue cleaved to her palate, her voice could utter only abbreviated sighs.

  As time passed, the scourge of the wind scratched her with a raptor's claws, and she feared not so much dying as living until the work of the elements had disfigured her, making her an object of revulsion, no longer one of love.

  If she could have reached a brook, a trickle of living water, and put her lips to it, she would have seen her eyes, once two bright stars that promised life, now two frightful eclipses, and that countenance, where jesting cupids once made their home, now the horrid dwelling-place of abhorrence. If she could have actually reached a pond, her eyes would have poured out, in pity for her own state, more drops than her lips would have taken from it.

  This at least is what Roberto made Lilia think. But it irritated him. He was irritated that, close to death, she should be in anguish over her own beauty, as Romances often would have it, but his irritation was more with himself, who could not look squarely, without mental hyperboles, at the face of his dying love.

  How would Lilia be, really, in that extremity? How would she appear if stripped of that dress of death woven from words?

  After the sufferings of her long voyage and the wreck, her hair would be straw streaked with white; her bosom would surely have lost its lilies, her face would be furrowed by time. Wrinkled, now, her throat and breast.

  No, to celebrate her fading was another way of entrusting himself to the poetic machine of Padre Emanuele.... Roberto wanted to see Lilia as she truly was. Her head thrown back, her eyes staring and, narrowed by suffering, appearing to be too distant from the bridge of her nose, now sharpened; and those same eyes were weighed down with bags, the corners marked by a fan of little wrinkles, prints left by a sparrow on the sand. Nostrils slightly dilated, one more fleshy than the other. The mouth chapped, of amethyst color, two arcs at the sides, and the upper lip, a bit protruding, raised to display two little teeth no longer of ivory. The skin of the face gently sagging, two limp folds under the chin, detracting from the line of the neck...

  And yet this withered fruit was a prize he would not have bartered for all the angels of Heaven. He loved her also like this, nor could he know if she had been different when he first loved her, wanting her as she was then, behind the curtain of her black veil, that distant evening.

  He had allowed himself to be misled during his time as a castaway, wanting her to be harmonious, like the system of the spheres; but now they had also told him (and he had not dared confess this, too, to Father Caspar) that perhaps the planets did not pursue their journey along the perfect line of a circle but instead in a strabismic turn around the sun.

  If beauty is clear, love is mysterious: he discovered that he loved not only the spring but all the seasons of his beloved; she was even more desirable in her autumnal decline. He had always loved her for what she was and could have been, and only in this sense is love a giving of the self, without anticipation of return.

  He had allowed himself to be dazed by his wave-pounding exile, seeking always another self—dreadful in Ferrante, excellent in Lilia, through whose glory he had wanted to make himself glorious. But, to love Lilia meant to want her as he himself was, both of them sentenced to the travail of time. Until now he had used her beauty to foster the soiling of his mind. He had made her speak, putting into her mouth the words he wanted, words with which he was nevertheless discontent. Now he wanted her near, to love her suffering beauty, her wan voluptuousness, her bruised grace, her thin nakedness, to caress all eagerly, listening to her words, her own, not the ones he had lent her.

  He had to have her, dispossessing himself of himself.

  But it was too late to pay proper homage to his sick idol.

  On the other side of the Island, in Lilia's veins, liquefied, flowed Death.

  CHAPTER 39

  Itinerarium Extaticum Coeleste

  WAS THIS ANY way to end a romance? Not only do romances arouse hatred so that we may finally relish the defeat of those we hate, but also they invite compassion in order to lead us then to discover, when the danger is over, those we love. Roberto had never read a Romance that ended so badly.

  Unless this romance was not yet finished, and there was a secret Hero in store, capable of a feat conceivable only in the Land of Romances.

  Out of love, Roberto decided to perform that feat, entering the story himself.

  If I had arrived at the Island by now, he said to himself, I could save her. It is only my indolence that has kept me here. Now we are both anchored in the sea, desiring the opposite shores of a single body of land.

  And yet not all is lost. I see her dying at this moment, but if at this same moment I were to reach the Island, I would be there a day before she arrives, waiting for her, ready to rescue her.

  It is of little matter that I draw her from the sea when she is on the point of breathing her last. It is a known fact that when the body reaches that stage, a strong emotion can restore it to new vigor, and there have been cases of the dying who, on learning that the cause of their misfortune has been removed, suddenly reanimate.

  And what greater emotion, for that dying woman, than
to rediscover, alive, the beloved person? In fact, I would not even have to reveal to her that I am different from the one she loved, because it was to me and not to him that she gave herself; I would simply be taking the place that has been my due from the beginning. And what is more, Lilia, without realizing it, would sense a different love in my gaze, free of all lust, trembling with devotion.

  Is it possible—as anyone would ask himself—that Roberto had not reflected on the fact that this rescue would be granted him only if he were to reach the Island within that day, or at most by the early hours of the following morning: an exploit that his most recent experiments hardly made probable? Is it possible he did not realize that he was planning to land in reality on the Island to rescue a woman who was arriving there only through his narrative?

  But Roberto, as we have seen, having begun with the idea that the Land of Romances was completely separate from his own world, had finally come to make the two universes flow effortlessly one into the other, and he had mingled their laws. He thought that he could arrive at the Island because he was imagining his arrival, and that he could imagine hers at the moment when he was already there, because this was what he wished. On the other hand, he was transferring to his own world that freedom to will events and to see them achieved which makes Romances unpredictable. Finally, he would reach the Island for the simple reason that if he did not reach it, he would no longer know what story to tell.

  Around this idea, which anyone who has not followed us thus far would judge mad or madness, as you also may, he now reflected in a mathematical fashion, not hiding from himself any of the eventualities that intelligence and prudence suggested.

  As a general defines, the night before the battle, the movements his troops will execute on the coming day, and not only pictures the difficulties that could arise and the accidents that could disturb his plan, but also plumbs the mind of the opposing general, to foresee his actions and counteractions, and to arrange his future by acting in consequence of what the other might arrange in consequence of those consequences, so Roberto weighed means and ends, causes and effects, pros and cons.

  He had to abandon the idea of swimming to the reef and passing it. He could no longer see the submerged passages, and he could not reach the part that emerged except by facing invisible traps, surely mortal. And finally, even assuming he could reach it—whether underwater or on the surface—there was no certainty he could walk on it with his makeshift boots, or that it did not conceal pits into which he would fall, never to reappear.

  He could therefore reach the Island only by repeating the course of the boat, that is, by swimming southwards, following the shore at a distance, more or less at the Daphne's distance, then turning east once he had rounded the southern promontory, until he gained the inlet of which Father Caspar had spoken.

  This plan was not reasonable, and for two reasons. First, until now he had barely managed to swim as far as the reef, and at that point his strength was already exhausted; so it was not sensible to think he could cover a distance at least four or five times that—and without rope, not so much because he did not have a rope that long but because this time, if he went, it was to go, for if he did not arrive, it would make no sense to turn back. The second reason was that swimming southwards meant moving against the current; and knowing by now that his strength sufficed to fight it for only a few strokes, he would be inexorably pulled to the north, beyond the other cape, farther and farther from the Island.

  After sternly calculating these possibilities (admitting that life was short, art long, opportunity instantaneous and experiment uncertain), he told himself that it was unworthy of a gentleman to be daunted by such petty calculations, like a bourgeois computing the odds he had in staking at dice his greedily hoarded wealth.

  To be sure, he then said, a calculation must be made, but it must be sublime, if the stakes are sublime. What was he gambling in this wager? His life. But his life, if he never succeeded in leaving the ship, was worth little, especially now, if his solitude was accompanied by the knowledge that he had lost Her forever. What would he win if he came through the test? Everything, the joy of seeing her again and saving her, or at worst, of dying on her dead body, covering it with a shroud of kisses.

  True, the wager was not fair. There were more possibilities of perishing in the attempt than of reaching land. But even so the alea was advantageous: as if they had told him he had a thousand chances of losing a pitiful sum against one single chance of winning an immense treasure. Who would not accept?

  Finally he was seized by another idea, which immeasurably reduced for him the risk of this bet, indeed, saw him victor in either eventuality. Assume, then, that the current did carry him in the wrong direction. Well, but once he passed the other promontory (he knew this because of his experiment with the plank), the current would bear him along the meridian....

  If he were to let himself float, his eyes staring at the sky, he would never again see the sun move: he would drift along that border that separates today from the day before, outside time, in an eternal noon. Stopping time for himself, he would arrest it also on the Island, infinitely delay her death, because by now everything that happened to Lilia depended on his narrative decision. If he was suspended, the story of the Island would be suspended.

  A highly acute chiasmus, above all. She would find herself in the same position he had occupied now for an incalculable time, a few yards from the Island, and his losing himself in the ocean would make her a gift of what had been his hope, would keep her suspended on the edge of an interminable desire—both of them without a future and hence without a future death.

  Then he lingered to picture what his journey would be, and because of the conflation of universes which by now he had sanctioned, he felt as if this was the voyage of Lilia. It was the extraordinary vicissitude of Roberto that would guarantee also for her an immortality that the warp of longitudes would not otherwise have granted her.

  He would move northwards at a gentle and uniform speed: on his right and on his left the days and nights would follow one another, the seasons, eclipses, tides; brand-new stars would cross the heavens bearing pestilences and upheavals of empires, monarchs and pontiffs would grow old and vanish in puffs of dust, all the vortices of the Universe would perform their windy revolutions, more stars would be formed from the holocaust of older ones.... Around him the sea would be unleashed and then subdued, the Trades would perform their girandoles, and he in his calm furrow would not change at all.

  Would he stop one day? From what he remembered of the maps, no other land save the Island of Solomon lay on that longitude, at least not until that meridian connected with all the others at the Pole. But if a ship, with a following wind and a forest of sails, took months and months to travel a course like the one he was undertaking, how long would he last? Perhaps years before arriving at the place where he no longer knew what would become of day and night, or of the passing of centuries.

  But in the meantime he would repose in a love so much refined that it would be careless of losing eyes, lips, and hands. The body would be drained of all lymph, blood, bile, and phlegm, water would enter every pore; penetrating the ears, it would varnish his brain with salt, would replace the vitreous humor of his eyes, would invade his nostrils, dissolving every trace of the terrestrial element. At the same time the sun's rays would nourish him with igneous particles, and this would dilute the liquid in a single dew of air and fire that by sympathetic force would be recalled upwards. And he, by now light and volatile, would rise and be united first with the spirits of the air, then with those of the sun.

  And the same would happen to her, in the steady light of that rock. She would expand like gold to airy thinness beat.

  Thus in the course of days they would be united in that understanding, instant after instant they would be to each other like the stiff twin compasses, each moving with the motion of its companion, one leaning when the other goes farther, to follow or to return together to the center.
br />   Then both would continue their journey in the present, straight towards the star awaiting them, their dust of atoms among the other corpuscles of the Cosmos, a vortex among vortices, now eternal as the world because embroidered with Void. Reconciled to their fate, because the motion of the earth carries evils and fears, but the trepidation of the spheres is innocent.

  So in either case the wager will bring him a victory. He should not hesitate. Neither should he prepare for that triumphal sacrifice without observing the correct rites. Roberto entrusts to his papers the last actions he intends to make, and for the rest he leaves us to guess deeds, times, cadences.

  As a first liberating lavacrum, he spent almost an hour removing a part of the grating that separated the upper deck from the lower. Then he went below and set about opening every cage. As he gradually pulled away the withes, he was struck by a general flapping of wings, and he had to defend himself, raising his arms before his face, but at the same time crying "Shoo shoo!" He had to push some clucking hens unable to find an egress on their own.

  When he climbed back up on deck, he saw the populous flight rise through the rigging, and it seemed to him that for a few seconds the sun was covered by all the colors of the rainbow, striped across their breadth by marine birds who had hastened, curious, to join in this festival.

  The birds freed, he flung into the sea all the clocks, not thinking for a moment that he was wasting valuable time: he was erasing time to favor a journey against time.