Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  He wasn’t hostile to society; in fact, he had quite a splendid character, and often gave banquets, and even masked parties, and on such occasions he proved to be generous to the point of madness, so that he had become a legend on the island. However, no woman was admitted to his entertainments; and the girls of Procida, envious of their boyfriends and brothers who took part in those mysterious evenings, spitefully nicknamed the Amalfitano’s abode the Casa dei Guaglioni, or Boys’ House (guaglione, in Neapolitan dialect, means boy or youth).

  My grandfather Antonio, disembarking in his homeland after some decades of absence, did not think that destiny had reserved the Casa dei Guaglioni for his family. He scarcely recalled the Amalfitano, with whom he had never had a friendly relationship; and that old monastery-barracks among the thorns and prickly pears did not in the least resemble the dwelling he had dreamed of for himself during his exile. He bought a house in the country, with a farm, in the southern part of the island, and went to live there, alone with his tenant farmers, being a bachelor with no close relatives.

  Actually, there existed on the earth one close relative of Antonio Gerace, whom he had never seen. This was a son, born during his early life as an emigrant, from a relationship with a young German schoolteacher, whom he soon abandoned. For several years after the abandonment (the emigrant had moved to America following a short stint in Germany), the girl-mother had continued to write to him, begging him for material help, because she found herself without work, and seeking to move him with marvelous descriptions of the child. But the emigrant was himself so wretched at the time that he stopped answering the letters, until the young woman, discouraged, stopped writing. And when, returning to Procida aged and without heirs, Antonio tried to find her, he learned that she had died, leaving the child, now around sixteen, in Germany.

  Antonio Gerace then summoned that son to Procida, to finally give him his own name and his own inheritance. And so he who was to become my father disembarked on the island of Procida, dressed in rags like a gypsy (I learned later).

  He must have had a hard life. And his childish heart must have been nourished on rancor not only toward his unknown father but also toward all the other innocent Procidans. Maybe, too, by some act or behavior, they affronted his irascible pride from the start, and forever. Certainly, on the island, his indifferent and offensive manner made him universally hated. With his father, who tried to win his affection, the boy was aloof to the point of cruelty.

  The only person on the island he saw was the Amalfitano. It was some time since the latter had given entertainments or parties, and he lived isolated in his blindness, surly and proud, refusing to receive those who sought him out and pushing away with his stick those who approached him on the street. His tall, melancholy figure had become detested by everyone.

  His house opened again to only one person: the son of Antonio Gerace, who formed such a close friendship with him that he spent every day in his company, as if the Amalfitano, and not Antonio Gerace, were his real father. And the Amalfitano devoted to him an exclusive and tyrannical affection: it seemed that he couldn’t live a day without him. If the son was late in his daily visit, the Amalfitano went out to meet him, sitting at the end of the street to wait. And, unable to see if he was finally coming, in his blind man’s anxiety he would every so often call out his name, in a hoarse voice that seemed already to come from the grave. If passersby answered that Gerace’s son wasn’t there, he would throw some coins and banknotes on the ground, haphazardly and with contempt, so that, thus paid, they would go and summon him. And if they returned later to say that they hadn’t found him at home, he had them search the entire island, even unleashing his dogs in the hunt. In his life now there was nothing else: either being with his only friend or waiting for him. Two years later, when he died, he left him the house on Procida.

  Not long afterward, Antonio Gerace died: and the son, who some months earlier had married an orphan from Massa, moved to the Amalfitano’s house with his young, pregnant bride. He was then about nineteen, and the wife not yet eighteen. It was the first time, in almost three centuries since the palazzo was built, that a woman had lived within its walls.

  The farmers remained in my grandfather’s house and on his land, and are still tenants there today.

  The Boys’ House

  The premature death of my mother, at eighteen, giving birth to her first child, was certainly a confirmation, if not the origin, of a popular rumor according to which the deceased owner’s hatred meant that it was forever fatal for a woman to live in the Casa dei Guaglioni, the Boys’ House, or even simply to enter it.

  My father had barely a faint smile of scorn for that country tale, so that I, too, from the start learned to consider it with the proper contempt, as the superstitious nonsense it was. But it had acquired such authority on the island that no woman would ever agree to be our servant. During my childhood a boy from Naples worked for us; his name was Silvestro, and at the time he entered our house (shortly before my birth) he was fourteen or fifteen. He returned to Naples at the time of his military service, and was replaced by one of our tenant farmers, who came only a couple of hours a day, to do the cooking. No one gave any thought to the dirt and disorder of the rooms, which to us seemed natural, like the vegetation of the uncultivated garden within the walls of the house.

  It’s impossible to give an accurate picture of this garden (today the cemetery of my dog Immacolatella). Around the adult carob could be found, among other things, the rotting frames of old furniture covered with mosses, broken dishes, demijohns, oars, wheels, and so on. And amid the rocks and the debris grew plants with distended, thorny leaves, sometimes beautiful and mysterious, like exotic specimens. After the rains, hundreds of flowers of more noble stock bloomed, from seeds and bulbs planted there long ago. And in the summer drought everything blackened, as if burned.

  In spite of our affluence, we lived like savages. A couple of months after my birth, my father had departed from the island for an absence of almost half a year: leaving me in the arms of our first boy, who was very serious for his age and raised me on goat’s milk. It was the same boy who taught me to speak, to read and write; and then, reading the books I found in the house, I educated myself. My father never cared to make me go to school: I was always on vacation, and my days of wandering, especially during his long absences, ignored any rule or schedule. Only hunger and sleep signaled the time to return home.

  No one thought to give me money, and I didn’t ask for it; besides, I didn’t feel a need for it. I don’t remember ever possessing a cent, in all my infancy and childhood.

  The farm inherited from my grandfather Gerace provided the foods necessary for our cook: who didn’t depart too far from the primitive and the barbarian in the arts of the kitchen. His name was Costante; and he was as taciturn and rough as his predecessor, Silvestro (the one I could, in a certain sense, call my nurse), had been gentle.

  Winter evenings and rainy days I occupied with reading. After the sea and roaming around the island, I liked reading best. Usually I read in my room, lying on the bed, or on the sofa, with Immacolatella at my feet.

  Our rooms gave onto a narrow hall, along which, at one time, the brothers’ cells (perhaps twenty in all) had opened. The former owner had knocked down most of the walls between the cells in order to make the rooms more spacious; but (perhaps charmed by their decorations and carvings) had left some of the old doors intact. So, for example, my father’s room had three doors, all in a row along the hall, and five windows, similarly in a line. Between my room and my father’s, one cell had been preserved in its original dimensions, and there, during my childhood, the boy Silvestro slept. His sofa bed (or, to be clearer, a sort of cot) was still there, together with the empty chest for storing pasta where he put his clothes.

  As for my father and me, we didn’t put our clothes anywhere. Our rooms had dressers and wardrobes available, which, if you opened them, threatened to collapse, and emitted the odors of some extinct Bour
bon bourgeoisie. But these pieces of furniture were of no use to us, except, sometimes, for tossing no longer serviceable objects that cluttered the rooms—for example, old shoes, broken fishing rods, shirts reduced to rags, and so on. Or storing booty: fossil shells, from the time when the island was still a submarine volcano; cartridge cases; bottoms of bottles mottled by the sand; pieces of rusted engines. And subaqeous plants, and starfish, which later dried out or rotted in the musty drawers. Maybe that’s partly why I’ve never recognized the smell of our rooms anywhere else, in any human space or even in the dens of earthly animals; maybe, rather, I’ve found something similar in the bottom of a boat, or in a cave.

  Those enormous dressers and wardrobes, occupying a large part of the free wall space, barely left a place for the beds, which were the usual iron bedsteads, with decorations of mother-of-pearl or painted landscapes, such as are found in all the bedrooms of Procida and Naples. Our winter blankets, in which I slept wrapped up, as if in a sack, were full of moth holes; and the mattresses, which were never plumped or carded, were flattened with use, like sheets of dough.

  I recall that every so often, using a pillow or an old leather jacket that had belonged to Silvestro as a broom, my father, with my help, swept up from around his bed the old cigarette butts, which we piled in a corner of the room and later threw out the window. It was impossible to say in our house what material or color the floor was, because it was hidden under a layer of hardened dust. Similarly, the windowpanes were all blackened and opaque; suspended high up in the corners and between the window grilles the iridescence of spider webs was visible, shining in the light.

  I think that the spiders, the lizards, the birds, and in general all nonhuman beings must have considered our house an uninhabited tower from the time of Barbarossa, or even a rocky protrusion rising from the sea. Along the outside walls, lizards emerged from cracks and secret furrows as from the earth; countless swallows and wasps made nests there. Birds of foreign species, passing over the island on their migrations, stopped to rest on the windowsills. And even the seagulls came to dry their feathers on the roof after their dives, as if on the mast of a ship or the top of a cliff.

  At least one pair of owls lived in our house, although it was impossible for me to discover where; but it’s a fact that, as soon as evening descended, you could see them flying out of the walls, with their entire family. Other owls, of different species, came from far away to hunt in our land, as in a forest. One night, an immense owl, an eagle owl, came to rest on my window. From its size I thought for a moment that it was an eagle; but it had much paler feathers, and later I recognized it from its small upright ears.

  In some of the uninhabited rooms of the house, the windows, forgotten, stayed open in all seasons. And, entering those rooms unexpectedly, at an interval of months, you might encounter a bat, or hear the cries of mysterious broods hidden in a chest or among the rafters.

  Certain curious creatures turned up, species never seen on the island. One morning, I was sitting on the ground behind the house, pounding almonds with a stone, when I saw emerge, up from the rockslide, a small, very pretty animal, of a species between a cat and a squirrel. It had a large tail and a triangular snout with white whiskers, and it observed me attentively. I threw it a shelled almond, hoping to ingratiate myself. But my gesture frightened it, and it fled.

  Another time, at night, looking out over the edge of the slope, I saw a bright white quadruped, the size of a medium tuna, advancing up from the sea toward our house; it had curved horns, which looked like crescent moons. As soon as it became aware of me it turned back and disappeared amid the cliffs. I suspected that it was a dugong, a rare species of amphibious ruminant, which some say never existed, others that it is extinct. Many sailors, however, are sure they’ve often seen one of these dugongs, which lives in the neighborhood of the Grotta Azzurra of Capri. It lives in the sea like a fish, but is greedy for vegetables, and during the night comes out of the water to steal from the farms.

  As for visits from humans, Procidans or foreigners, the Casa dei Guaglioni had not received any for years.

  On the first floor was the brothers’ former refectory, transformed by the Amalfitano into a reception room. It was an enormous space, with a high ceiling, almost twice the height of the other rooms, and windows that were high off the ground and looked toward the sea. The walls, unlike those of the other rooms, were not covered with wallpaper but decorated all around by a fresco, which imitated a columned loggia, with vine shoots and bunches of grapes. Against the back wall there was a table more than six meters long, and scattered everywhere were broken-down sofas and chairs, seats of every style, and faded cushions. One corner was occupied by a large fireplace, which we never used. And from the ceiling hung an immense chandelier of colored glass, caked with dust: only a few blackened bulbs were left, so that it gave off the same light as a candle.

  It was here that in the days of the Amalfitano, amid music and singing, the groups of youths had their gatherings. The room still bore traces of their celebrations, and faintly recalled the great halls of villas occupied by the conquerors in war or, in some respects, the assembly halls in prisons—and in general all the places where youths and boys gather together without women. The worn, dirty fabrics covering the sofas showed cigarette burns. And on the walls, as well as on the tables, there were inscriptions and drawings: names, signatures, jokes, and expressions of melancholy or of love, and lines from songs. Then a pierced heart, a ship, the figure of a soccer player balancing the ball on his toes. And some humorous drawings: a skull smoking a pipe, a mermaid sheltering under an umbrella, and so on.

  Numerous other drawings and inscriptions had been scratched off, I don’t know by whom; the scars of the erasures remained visible on the plaster and on the wooden tables.

  In other rooms, too, similar traces of past guests could be found. For example, in a small unused room, you could still read on the wallpaper above an alabaster stoup (left from the time of the monastery) a faded ink signature surrounded by flourishes: “Taniello.” But, apart from these unknown signatures and worthless drawings, nothing else could be found, in the house, to bear witness to the time of parties and banquets. I learned that after the death of the shipping agent many Procidans who had taken part in those celebrations in their youth showed up at the Casa dei Guaglioni to demand objects and souvenirs. They claimed, vouching for one another, that the Amalfitano had promised them as gifts for the day of his death. So there was a kind of sack; and perhaps it was then that the costumes and masks were carried off, which are even now much talked about on the island; and the guitars, and mandolins, and glasses with toasts written in gold on the crystal. Maybe some of these spoils have been saved, in the cottages of peasants or fishermen. And the women of the family, now old, look with a sigh at such mementos, feeling again the jealousy they felt as girls of the mysterious revels from which they were excluded. They’re almost afraid to touch those dead objects, which might contain in themselves the hostile influence of the Casa dei Guaglioni!

  Another mystery was what became of the Amalfitano’s dogs. It’s known that he had several, and loved them; but at his death they disappeared from the house without a trace. Some assert that, after their master was carried to the cemetery, they grew sad, refusing food, and were all left to die. Others say that they began to roam the island like wild beasts, growling at anyone who approached, until they all became rabid, and the wardens captured them one by one, and killed them, throwing them off a cliff.

  Thus the things that had happened in the Casa dei Guaglioni before my birth came down to me indistinctly, like adventures from long-ago centuries. Even of my mother’s brief stay (aside from the photograph that Silvestro had saved for me) I could find no sign in the house. From Silvestro himself I learned that one day when I was around two months old, and my father had recently departed on his travels, some relatives from Massa arrived, apparently peasants, who carried off everything that had belonged to my mother, as if it were t
heir lawful inheritance: her trousseau, brought as a dowry, her clothes, and even her clogs and her mother-of-pearl rosary. They certainly took advantage of the fact that there was no adult in the house to resist: and Silvestro at a certain point was afraid that they wanted to carry me off, too. So, on some pretext, he hurried to his cell, where he had put me to sleep on the bed, and quickly hid me in the old pasta crate where he kept his clothes (and whose battered cover let in air). Next to me he put the bottle of goat’s milk, so that if I woke up I would be quiet and give no sign of my presence. But I didn’t wake up, staying silent during the entire visit of the relatives, who, besides, weren’t much concerned to have news of me. Only on the point of leaving with their bundle of things, one of them, more out of politeness than anything else, asked if I was growing well and where I was: and Silvestro answered that I had been put out to nurse. They were satisfied with that and, returning forever to Massa, were not heard from again.

  And so passed my solitary childhood, in the house denied to women.

  In my father’s room there is a large photograph of the Amalfitano. It portrays a slender old man, enveloped in a long jacket, with unfashionable pants that allow a glimpse of white stockings. His white hair falls behind his ears like a horse’s mane, and his high, smooth forehead, struck by the light, has an unnatural whiteness. His lifeless, open eyes have the clear, enraptured expression of certain animal eyes.

  The Amalfitano chose a calculated, bold pose for the photographer. He is taking a step, and hints at a gallant smile, as if in greeting. With his right hand, he raises an iron-tipped black stick, which he is in the act of twirling; and with the left he holds two large dogs on a leash. Under the portrait, in the shaky hand of a semiliterate blind old man, he has written a dedication to my father: