The Island of the Day Before

by Umberto Eco

  The Island of the Day Before

  Umberto Eco

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  ...

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  Colophon

  Translator's Postscript

  Footnotes

  Translated from the Italian

  by William Weaver

  A HARVEST BOOK

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  Copyright © 1994 R.C.S. Libri & Grandi Opere SpA-Milano

  English translation copyright © 1995 by Harcourt, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed

  to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  This is a translation of L'Isola del Giorno Prima.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Eco, Umberto.

  [Isola del giorno prima. English]

  The island of the day before/by Umberto Eco;

  translated from the Italian by William Weaver.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Weaver, William, 1923– . II. Title.

  PQ4865.C6I8413 1995

  853'.914—dc20 95-7594

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-100151-4 ISBN-10: 0-15-100151-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603037-3 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603037-3 (pbk.)

  Designed by Lori J. McThomas

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2006

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  Is the Pacifique Sea my home?

  —JOHN DONNE,

  "Hymne to God my God"

  Stolto! a cui parlo? Misero! Che tento?

  Racconto il dolor mio

  a l'insensata riva

  a la mutola selce, al sordo vento...

  Ahi, ch'altro non risponde

  che il mormorar del'onde!

  —GIOVAN BATTISTA MARINO,

  "Eco," La Lira, xix

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  Daphne

  [>]

  CHAPTER 2

  An Account of Events in the Monferrato

  [>]

  CHAPTER 3

  The Serraglio of Wonders

  [>]

  CHAPTER 4

  Fortification Display'd

  [>]

  CHAPTER 5

  The Labyrinth of the World

  [>]

  CHAPTER 6

  The Great Art of Light and Shadow

  [>]

  CHAPTER 7

  Pavane Lachryme

  [>]

  CHAPTER 8

  The Curious Learning of the Wits of the Day

  [>]

  CHAPTER 9

  The Aristotelian Telescope

  [>]

  CHAPTER 10

  Geography and Hydrography Reformed

  [>]

  CHAPTER 11

  The Art of Prudence

  [>]

  CHAPTER 12

  The Passions of the Soul

  [>]

  CHAPTER 13

  The Map of Tenderness

  [>]

  CHAPTER 14

  A Treatise on the Science of Arms

  [>]

  CHAPTER 15

  Horologium Oscillatorium

  [>]

  CHAPTER 16

  Discourse on the Powder of Sympathy

  [>]

  CHAPTER 17

  Longitudinum Optata Scientia

  [>]

  CHAPTER 18

  Unheard-of Curiosities

  [>]

  CHAPTER 19

  A New Voyage Round the World

  [>]

  CHAPTER 20

  Wit and the Art of Ingenuity

  [>]

  CHAPTER 21

  Telluris Theoria Sacra

  [>]

  CHAPTER 22

  The Orange Dove

  [>]

  CHAPTER 23

  Divers and Artificious Machines

  [>]

  CHAPTER 24

  Dialogues of the Maximum Systems

  [>]

  CHAPTER 25

  Technica Curiosa

  [>]

  CHAPTER 26

  Delights for the Ingenious: A Collection of Emblems

  [>]

  CHAPTER 27

  The Secrets of the Flux and Reflux of the Sea

  [>]

  CHAPTER 28

  Of the Origin of Novels

  [>]

  CHAPTER 29

  The Soul of Ferrante

  [>]

  CHAPTER 30

  Anatomy of Erotic Melancholy

  [>]

  CHAPTER 31

  A Breviary for Politicals

  [>]

  CHAPTER 32

  A Garden of Delights

  [>]

  CHAPTER 33

  Mundus Subterraneus

  [>]

  CHAPTER 34

  Monologue on the Plurality of Worlds

  [>]

  CHAPTER 35

  Joyfull Newes out of the Newfound Worlde

  [>]

  CHAPTER 36

  The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying

  [>]

  CHAPTER 37

  Paradoxical Exercises Regarding the

  Thinking of Stones

  [>]

  CHAPTER 38

  An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell

  [>]

  CHAPTER 39

  Itinerarium Extaticum Coeleste

  [>]

  Colophon

  [>]

  CHAPTER 1

  Daphne

  I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, almost I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast up upon a deserted ship.

  THUS, WITH UNABASHED conceits, wrote Roberto della Griva presumably in July or August of 1643.

  How many days had he been tossed by the waves, feverish surely, bound to a plank, prone during the hours of light
to avoid the blinding sun, his neck stiff, strained unnaturally so as not to imbibe the water, his lips burnt by the brine? His letters offer no answer to this question: though they suggest an eternity, the time cannot have been more than two days, for otherwise he would never have survived the lash of Phoebus (of which he so poetically complains), he, a sickly youth, as he describes himself, a creature condemned by a natural defect to live only at night.

  He was unable to keep track of time, but I believe the sea grew calm immediately after the tempest swept him from the deck of the Amaryllis, on that makeshift raft a sailor had me fashioned for him. Driven by the Trades over a serene sea, in a season when, south of the Equator, a temperate winter reigns, he was carried for not many miles, until the currents at last brought him into the bay.

  It was night, he had dozed off, unaware that he was approaching a ship until, with a jolt, his plank struck against the prow of the Daphne.

  And when—in the glow of the full moon—he realized he was floating beneath a bowsprit with a rope-ladder hanging from it not far from the anchor chain (a Jacob's ladder, Father Caspar would have called it), in an instant all his spirit returned. His desperation must have inspired him: he tried to reckon whether he had enough breath to cry out (but his throat was all an arid fire) or enough strength to free himself from the bonds that had cut livid furrows into his skin, and then to essay the climb. I believe that at such moments a dying man can become a very Hercules, and strangle serpents in his cradle. In recording the event, Roberto seems confused, but we must accept the idea that if, finally, he reached the forecastle, he must somehow have grasped that ladder. Perhaps he climbed up a bit at a time, exhausted at every gain, until he flung himself over the bulwarks, crawled along the cordage, found the forecastle door open ... And instinct no doubt led him, in the darkness, to touch that barrel, pull himself up its side, until he found a cup attached to a little chain. And he drank as much as he could, then collapsed, sated, perhaps in the fullest meaning of the word, for that water probably contained enough drowned insects to supply him with food as well as drink.

  He must have slept twenty-four hours. This is only an approximate calculation: it was night when he woke, but he was as if reborn. So it was night again, not night still.

  He thought it was night still; for if not, a whole day had to have passed, and someone should have found him by now. The moonlight, coming from the deck, illuminated that place, apparently a kind of cook-room, where a pot was hanging above the fireplace.

  The room had two doors, one towards the bowsprit, the other opening onto the deck. And he looked out at the latter, seeing, as if by daylight, the rigging in good order, the capstan, the masts with the sails furled, a few cannon at the gun-ports, and the outline of the quarterdeck. He made some sounds, but not a living soul replied. He gazed over the bulwarks, and to his right he could discern, about a mile away, the form of the Island, the palm trees along its shore stirred by a breeze.

  The land made a kind of bend, edged with sand that gleamed white in the pale darkness; but, like any shipwrecked man, Roberto could not tell if it was an island or a continent.

  He staggered to the other side of the ship and glimpsed—but distant this time, almost on the line of the horizon—the peaks of another mass, defined also by two promontories. Everything else was sea, giving the impression that the ship was berthed in an anchorage it had entered through a channel separating the two stretches of land. Roberto decided that if these were not two islands, one was surely an island facing a vaster body of land. I do not believe he entertained other hypotheses, since he had never known bays so broad that a person in their midst could feel he was confronting twin lands. Thus, in his ignorance of boundless continents, Roberto had chanced upon the correct answer.

  A nice situation for a castaway: his feet solidly planted and dry land within reach. But Roberto was unable to swim. Soon he would discover there was no longboat on board, and the current meanwhile had carried away the plank on which he had arrived. Hence his relief at having escaped death was now accompanied by dismay at this treble solitude: of the sea, the neighboring Island, and the ship. Ahoy! he must have tried to shout on the ship, in every language he knew, discovering how weak he truly was. Silence. As if on board everyone was dead. And never had he—so generous with similes—expressed himself more literally. Or almost—and this is what I would fain tell you about, if only I knew where to begin.

  For that matter, I have already begun. A man drifts, exhausted, over the ocean, and the complaisant waters bring him to a ship, apparently deserted. Deserted as if the crew has just abandoned it, for Roberto struggles back to the cook-room and finds a lamp there and a flint and steel, as if the cook set them in their place before going to bed. But the two berths beside the furnace, one above the other, are both empty. Roberto lights the lamp, looks around, and finds a great quantity of food: dried fish, hardtack, with only a few patches of mold easily scraped away with a knife. The fish is very salty, but there is water in abundance.

  He must have regained his strength quickly, or else he was strong when he was writing this, for he goes into—highly literary—detail about his banquet, never did Olympus see such a feast as his, Jove's nectar, to me sweet ambrosia from farthest Pontus. But these are the things Roberto writes to the Lady of his heart:

  Sun of my shadows, light of my darkness.

  Why did Heaven not unmake me in that tempest it had so savagely provoked.? Why save from the all-devouring sea this body of mine, only to wreck my soul so horribly in such mean and even more ill-starred solitude?

  Perhaps, if merciful Heaven does not send me succor, you will never read this letter I now indite, and, consumed like a torch by the light of these seas, I will become dark to your eyes, as to some Selene, who, rejoicing too much in the light of her Sun, gradually consumes her journey beyond the far curve of our planet, bereft of the beneficent rays of her sovereign star, first growing thin to recall the sickle that severs the thread of life, then ever-paler, she is completely dissolved in that vast cerulean shield where ingenious nature forms heroic heraldry, mysterious emblems of her secrets. Bereft of your gaze, I am blind for you see me not, dumb for you address me not, oblivious for you forget me.

  And, alone, I live, bunting dullness and tenebrous flame, vague specter that in this adverse conflict of opposites my mind imagines ever the same, and so would convey to yours. Saving my life in this wood fortress, in this rocking bastion that defends me, prisoner of the sea, from the sea, punished by the clemency of Heaven, hidden in this deep sarcophagus open to every sun, in this airy dungeon, in this impregnable prison that offers me everywhere escape, I despair of seeing you more.

  My Lady, I write you as if to offer, unworthy tribute, the withered rose of my disheartenment. And yet I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, almost I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast upon a deserted ship.

  But is this really possible? To judge by the date of his first letter, Roberto begins writing immediately after his arrival, as soon as he finds pen and paper in the captain's quarters, before exploring the rest of the ship. And yet he must have required some time to recover his strength, reduced as he was to the condition of a wounded animal. Or perhaps, with a little amorous ruse, after first trying to ascertain his whereabouts, he then writes, pretending to write her before giving any thought to other things. But why, inasmuch as he knows, assumes, fears that these letters will never arrive and that he is writing them only for his own torment (tormenting solace, he would say, but we must not fall into his literary habits)? It is difficult to reconstruct the actions and feelings of a character surely afire with true love, for you never know whether he is expressing what he feels or what the rules of amorous discourse prescribe in his case—but then, for that matter, what do we know of the difference between passion felt and passion expressed, and who can say which has precedence? So Robe
rto was writing for himself: this was not literature, he was there truly, writing like an adolescent pursuing an impossible mirage, streaking the page with his tears, not because of the absence of the lady, pure image even when she was present, but out of fondness of himself, enamored of love....

  The situation is the stuff of a novel, but, once more, where to begin?

  I say he wrote this first missive later, and before writing it, he had a look around; and in subsequent letters he will relate what he saw. But those, too, raise the question of how to treat the diary of a man with poor vision, who roams during the night, relying on his weak eyes.

  Roberto will tell us that his eyes had been affected since the days of the siege of Casale, when that bullet grazed his temple. And this may be true, but elsewhere he hints that the weakness was caused by the plague. Roberto was certainly frail, and I infer he was also a hypochondriac—though in moderation: half of his photophobia must have been due to black bile, and half to some form of irritation, perhaps exacerbated by Monsieur d'Igby's salves.

  It seems certain that during the voyage of the Amaryllis he remained below deck, since the role of photophobe—if it was not his true nature—was the part he had to play to keep an eye on what happened in the hold. Several months in total darkness or in dim lamplight—and then the time on the plank, dazzled by the equatorial or tropical sun, whichever it was. When he lands then on the Daphne, sick or not, he hates the sun, spends the first night in the cook-room, recovers his strength and attempts a first inspection the night following, and then things proceed virtually of themselves. Day frightens him; not only will his eyes not tolerate it, but neither will the burns he must surely have on his back. So he goes to ground. The beautiful moon he describes on those nights reassures him, during the day the sky is the same as everywhere else, at night he discovers new constellations (heroic heraldry and mysterious emblems, in fact); it is like being in a theater. He is convinced that this will be his life for a long time, perhaps until his death; he refashions his Lady on paper so as not to lose her, and he knows he has not lost much more than the little he had before.

  At this point he takes refuge in his nightly vigils as in a maternal womb, and becomes thus more determined to elude the sun. Perhaps he has read of those Resurgents of Hungary, of Livonia or Walachia, who wander restless between sunset and dawn, hiding then in their graves at cock-crow: the role could lure him....