Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  TO WILHELM

  ROMEO

  This photograph of the Amalfitano reminded me of the figure of Boötes, Arturo’s constellation, as it was drawn on a big map of the northern hemisphere in an astronomy atlas that we had in the house.

  Beauty

  What I know about my father’s origins I learned when I was already grown. Since I was a boy, I’d occasionally heard the people of the island call him “bastard,” but that word sounded to me like a title of authority and mysterious prestige: such as “margrave,” or some similar title. For many years, no one ever told me anything about the past of my father and grandfather: the Procidans are not loquacious, and, at the same time, following my father’s example, I kept my distance from the island’s inhabitants, and had no friends among them. Costante, our cook, was a presence more animal than human. In the many years that he worked for us, I don’t remember ever exchanging with him two words of conversation; and, besides, I very rarely saw him. When his work in the kitchen was done, he returned to the farm; and I, coming home when I felt like it, found his simple dishes waiting for me, now cold, in the empty kitchen.

  Most of the time, my father lived far away. He would come to Procida for a few days, and then leave again, sometimes remaining absent for entire seasons. If at the end of the year you made a summary of his rare, brief sojourns on the island, you would find that, out of twelve months, he had been on Procida, with me, for perhaps two. Thus I spent almost all my days in absolute solitude; and this solitude, which began in early childhood (with the departure of my nurse Silvestro), seemed to me my natural condition. I considered my father’s every sojourn on the island an extraordinary favor on his part, a special concession that I was proud of.

  I believe I had barely learned to walk when he bought me a boat. And one day when I was about six, he brought me to the farm, where the farmer’s shepherd bitch was nursing her month-old puppies, so that I could choose one. I chose the one that seemed to me the most high-spirited, with the friendliest eyes. It turned out to be a female; and since she was white, like the moon, she was called Immacolatella.

  As for providing me with shoes, or clothes, my father seldom remembered. In the summer, I wore no other garment than a pair of trousers, in which I also dove into the water, letting the air dry them on me. Only occasionally did I add to the trousers a cotton shirt that was too short, and all torn and loose. Unlike me, my father possessed a pair of khaki bathing trunks; but, apart from that, he, too, in summer, wore nothing but some old faded trousers and a shirt that no longer had a single button, and fell open over his chest. Sometimes he knotted around his neck a flower-patterned kerchief, of the type that peasant women buy at the market for Sunday Mass. And that cotton rag, on him, seemed to me the mark of a leader, a wreath of flowers that declared the glorious conqueror!

  Neither he nor I owned a coat. In winter, I wore two sweaters, one over the other, and he a sweater underneath and, on top, a threadbare, shapeless checked wool jacket, with excessively padded shoulders that increased the authority of his height. The use of underwear was almost completely unknown to us.

  He had a wristwatch (with a steel case and a heavy steel-link wristband), which also marked the seconds and could even be worn in the water. He had a mask for looking underwater when you were swimming, a speargun, and naval binoculars with which you could distinguish the ships traveling on the high sea, along with the figures of sailors on the bridge.

  My childhood is like a happy land, and he is the absolute ruler! He was always passing through, always leaving; but in the brief intervals that he spent on Procida I followed him like a dog. We must have been a comical pair, for anyone who met us! He advancing with determination, like a sail in the wind, with his fair-haired foreigner’s head, his lips in a pout and his eyes hard, looking no one in the face. And I behind, turning proudly to right and left with my dark eyes, as if to say: “Procidans, my father is passing by!” My height, at that time, was not much beyond a meter, and my black hair, curly as a gypsy’s, had never known a barber. (When it got too long, I shortened it energetically with the scissors, in order not to be taken for a girl; only on rare occasions did I remember to comb it, and in the summer it was always encrusted with sea salt.)

  Our pair was almost always preceded by Immacolatella, who ran ahead, turned back, sniffed all the walls, stuck her muzzle in all the doors, greeted everyone. Her friendliness toward our fellow citizens often made me impatient, and with imperious whistles I recalled her to the rank of the Geraces. I thus had occasion to practice whistling. Since I’d lost my baby teeth, I’d become a master of the art. Putting index and middle fingers in my mouth, I could draw out martial sounds.

  I could also sing reasonably well; and from my nurse I had learned various songs. Sometimes, while I walked behind my father or was out in the boat with him, I sang over and over again “Women of Havana,” “Tabarin,” “The Mysterious Sierra,” or Neapolitan songs, for example the one that goes: Tu si’ ’a canaria! Tu si’ ll’amore! (You’re the canary! You’re love!), hoping that in his heart my father would admire my voice. He gave no sign even of hearing it. He was always silent, brusque, touchy, and reluctantly conceded me a glance or two. But it was already a great privilege for me that the only company tolerated by him on the island was mine.

  In the boat, he rowed, and I monitored the route, sitting in the stern or astride the prow. Sometimes, intoxicated by that divine happiness, I let go, and with enormous presumption began to give orders: Go, right oar! Go, with the left! Back-oar! But if he raised his eyes to look at me his silent splendor reminded me how small I was. And it seemed to me that I was a minnow in the presence of a great dolphin.

  The primary reason for his supremacy over all others lay in his difference, which was his greatest mystery. He was different from all the men of Procida, that is to say from all the people I knew in the world, and also (O bitterness) from me. Mainly he stood out from the islanders because of his height. (But that height revealed itself only in comparison, if you saw him near others. When he was alone, isolated, he seemed almost small, his proportions were so graceful.)

  Besides his height, his coloring distinguished him. His body in summer acquired a gentle brown radiance, drinking in the sun, it seemed, like an oil; but in winter he became as pale as a pearl. And I, who was dark in every season, saw in that something like the sign of a race not of the earth: as if he were the brother of the sun and the moon.

  His hair was soft and smooth, of an opaque blond, which in certain lights glinted with gem-like highlights; and on the nape, where it was shorter, almost shaved, it was truly gold. Finally, his eyes were a blue-violet that resembled the color of certain expanses of the sea darkened by clouds.

  That beautiful hair of his, always dusty and disheveled, fell in locks over his wrinkled brow, as if to hide his thoughts with their shadow. And his face, which preserved, through the years, the energetic forms of adolescence, had a closed and arrogant expression.

  Sometimes a flash of the jealous secrets that his thoughts seemed always intent on passed over his face: for example, a rapid, wild, and almost gratified smile; or a slightly devious and insulting grimace; or an unexpected ill humor, without apparent cause. For me, who could not attribute to him any human whim, his brooding was grand, like the darkening of the day, a sure sign of mysterious events, as important as universal history.

  His motives belonged to him alone. For his silences, his celebrations, his contempt, his sufferings I did not seek an explanation. They were, for me, like sacraments: great and grave, beyond any earthly measure and any frivolity.

  If, let’s say, he had shown up one day drunk, or delirious, I would surely have been unable to imagine, even with that, that he was subject to the common weaknesses of mortals! Like me, he never got sick, as far as I remember; however, if I had seen him sick, his illness would not have seemed to me one of the usual accidents of nature. It would have assumed, in my eyes, almost the sense of a ritual mystery, in which Wilhelm Gerace
was the hero, and the priests summoned to be present received the privilege of a consecration! And certainly I would not have doubted, I believe, that some upheaval of the cosmos, from the earthly lands to the stars, was bound to accompany that paternal mystery.

  There is, on the island, a stretch of level ground surrounded by tall rocks where there’s an echo. Sometimes, if we happened to go there, my father amused himself by shouting phrases in German. Although I didn’t know their meaning, I understood, from his arrogant expression, that they must be terrible, rash words: he flung them out in a tone of defiance and almost profanation, as if he were violating a law, or breaking a magic spell. When the echo came back to him, he laughed, and let out more brutal words. Out of respect for his authority, I didn’t dare to second him, and although I trembled with warlike anxiety, I listened to those enigmas in silence. It seemed to me that I was present not at the usual game of echoes, common among boys, but at an epic duel. We’re at Roncesvalles, and suddenly Orlando will erupt onto the plain with his horn. We’re at Thermopylae and behind the rocks the Persian knights are hiding, in their pointed caps.

  When, on our rounds through the countryside, we came to an upward slope, he would be seized by impatience and take off at a run, with the determination of a wonderful task, as if he were climbing the mast of a sailboat. And he didn’t care to know if I was behind him or not; but I followed at breakneck speed, with the disadvantage of my shorter legs, and joy kindled my blood. That was not one of the usual runs I did, countless times a day, competing with Immacolatella. It was a famous tournament. Up there a cheering finish line awaited us, and all thirty million gods!

  His vulnerabilities were as mysterious as his indifference. I remember that once, while we were swimming, he collided with a jellyfish. Everyone knows the result of such an accident: a brief, inconsequential reddening of the skin. He, too, surely knew that; but, seeing his chest marked by those bloody stripes, he was stricken by a horror that made him go pale to his lips. He fled immediately to the shore and threw himself faceup on the ground, arms spread, like one already overwhelmed by the nausea of the death agony! I sat beside him: I myself had more than once been the victim of sea urchins, jellyfish, and other marine creatures, giving no importance to their injuries. But that day, when he was the victim, a solemn sense of tragedy invaded me. A vast silence fell over the beach and the whole sea, and in it the cry of a passing seagull seemed to me a female lament, a Fury.

  The Absolute Certainties

  He scorned to win my heart. He left me in ignorance of German, his native tongue; with me, he always used Italian, but it was an Italian different from mine, which Silvestro had taught me. All the words he spoke seemed to be just invented, and still undomesticated; and even my Neapolitan words, which he often used, became, uttered by him, bolder and new, as in poems. That strange language gave him, for me, the charm of the Sibyls.

  How old was he? Around nineteen years older than me! His age seemed serious and respectable, like the holiness of the Prophets or of King Solomon. Every act of his, every speech, had a dramatic fatality for me. In fact, he was the image of certainty, and everything he said or did was the verdict of a universal law from which I deduced the first commandments of my life. Here was the greatest seduction of his company.

  By birth he was a Protestant; but he professed no faith, displaying a sullen indifference toward Eternity and its problems. I’ve been a Catholic, on the other hand, since I was a month old, on the initiative of my nurse Silvestro, who took care, at the time, to have me baptized in the parish church at the port.

  That was, I think, the first and last time I visited a church as a Christian subject. I liked at times to linger in a church, as in a beautiful aristocratic room, in a garden, on a ship. But I would have been ashamed to kneel, or perform other ceremonies, or pray, even only in thought: as if I could truly believe that that was the house of God, and that God is in communication with us, or even exists!

  My father had received some education, thanks to the teacher, his girl-mother; and he possessed (in large part inherited from her) some books, including some in Italian. To this small family library were added, in the Casa dei Guaglioni, numerous volumes left there by a young literature student who for many summers had been a guest of Romeo the Amalfitano. Not to mention various novels suitable for youthful taste, mysteries and adventure stories of differing provenance. And so I had available a respectable library, even if it was made up of battered old volumes.

  They were, for the most part, classics, or scholastic or educational texts: atlases and dictionaries, history books, narrative poems, novels, tragedies, and poetry collections, and translations of famous works. Apart from the texts incomprehensible to me (written in German or Latin or Greek), I read and studied all these books; and some, my favorites, I reread many times, so that even today I remember them almost by heart.

  Among the many teachings, then, that I got from my readings, I chose on my own the most fascinating, and those were the teachings that best corresponded to my natural feeling about life. With those and, in addition, the early certainties that the person of my father had already inspired in me, a kind of Code of Absolute Truth took shape in my consciousness, or imagination, whose most important laws could be listed like this:

  I. THE AUTHORITY OF THE FATHER IS SACRED!

  II. TRUE MANLY GREATNESS CONSISTS IN THE COURAGE TO ACT, IN DISDAIN FOR DANGER, AND IN VALOR DISPLAYED IN COMBAT.

  III. THE BASEST ACT IS BETRAYAL. THUS ONE WHO BETRAYS HIS OWN FATHER OR LEADER, OR A FRIEND, ETC., HAS REACHED THE LOWEST POINT OF DEPRAVITY!

  IV. NO LIVING CITIZEN ON THE ISLAND OF PROCIDA IS WORTHY OF WILHELM GERACE AND HIS SON ARTURO. FOR A GERACE TO BE FRIENDLY TOWARD A FELLOW CITIZEN WOULD BE TO DEBASE HIMSELF.

  V. NO AFFECTION IN LIFE EQUALS A MOTHER’S.

  VI. THE CLEAREST PROOFS AND ALL HUMAN EXPERIENCES DEMONSTRATE THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST.

  The Second Law

  These boyhood certainties of mine were for a long time not only what I honored and loved but the substance of the only possible reality for me! In those years, to live outside my great certainties would have appeared to me not only dishonorable but impossible.

  However, lacking a suitable interlocutor with whom to discuss them intimately, I had never said a word about them to anyone in the world. My Code had remained my jealous secret: and this, certainly, out of superiority and pride, was a good quality; but it was also a difficult quality. Another difficult quality of my Code was a reticence. None of my laws, I mean, named the thing I hated most: that is, death. That reticence was, on my part, a sign of elegance and of contempt for that hated thing, which could only insinuate itself into the words of my laws in a devious manner, like a pariah or a spy.

  In my natural happiness, I avoided all thoughts of death, as of an impossible figure with horrendous vices: hybrid, abstruse, full of evil and shame. But, at the same time, the more I hated death, the more fun I had and the more pleasure I got from attempting proofs of daring: in fact, I disliked any game that didn’t include the fascination of risk. And so I had grown up in that contradiction: loving valor, hating death. It may be, though, that it wasn’t a contradiction.

  All reality appeared to me clear and distinct: only the abstruse stain of death muddied it; and so my thoughts, as I said, retreated with horror at that point. On the other hand, with a similar horror I thought I recognized a perhaps fatal sign of my immaturity, like fear of the dark in ignorant girls (immaturity was my shame). And I waited, as for a sign of marvelous maturity, for that unique muddiness—death—to dissolve into the clarity of reality, like smoke into transparent air.

  Until that day, I could consider myself only, in essence, an inferior, a boy; and meanwhile, as if drawn in by the insidious pull of a mirage, I ran wild, a little hooligan (as my father said), in every kind of childish exploit . . . But such bold acts, naturally, could not suffice, in my judgment, to promote me to the envied rank (maturity) or free me from an inner and supreme doubt of m
yself.

  In fact, it was in essence always a matter of games; death, there, was still a stranger to me, almost an unreal fantasy. How would I behave at the true test, in war, for example, when I really saw that murky, monstrous stain advancing, growing larger, before me?

  Thus, a skeptic in my games of childish daring, from the start I always waited at the ultimate challenge, like a provocateur and rival of myself. Maybe, was it because I was only a vain kid and no more (as W.G. once accused me of being)? Maybe, was my precocious bitterness toward death, which shadowed me and tempted me to redemption, nothing but the anxiety to be pleasing to myself to the point of perdition—the same anxiety that destroyed Narcissus?

  Or maybe, instead, was it only a pretext? There is no answer. And, besides, it’s my business. In conclusion: in my Code, the Second Law (where the famous reticence huddled more naturally, as in its den) counted most of all for me.

  The Fourth Law

  The Fourth Law, suggested to me by my father’s attitude, was, perhaps along with my natural inclination, evidently the original cause of my Procidan solitude. I seem to see again my small figure of the time wandering around at the port, amid the traffic and the movement of people, with an expression of mistrustful and surly superiority, like a stranger who finds himself in the middle of a hostile population. The most demeaning feature I noted, in that population, was a permanent dependence on practical necessity; and that feature made the glorious and different species of my father stand out even more! There not only the poor but the rich as well seemed constantly preoccupied by their present interests or earnings: all of them, from the ragged kids who scuffled for a coin, or a crust of bread, or a colored pebble, to the owners of fishing boats, who discussed the price of fish as if that were the most important value of their existence. No one among them, evidently, was interested in books, or in great actions! Sometimes the schoolboys were lined up in an open space by the teacher for pre-military exercises. But the teacher was fat and sluggish, the boys displayed neither ability nor enthusiasm, and the whole spectacle, from the uniforms to the actions and the methods, appeared so unmartial, in my judgment, that I immediately looked away with a sense of pain. I would have blushed with shame if my father, turning up at that moment, had surprised me looking at certain scenes and certain characters!