Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  The Prison Fortress

  The only inhabitants of the island who did not seem to arouse my father’s contempt and antipathy were the invisible, unnamed inmates of the prison. In fact, certain of his romantic and terrible habits might let me suppose that a kind of brotherhood, or code of silence, bound him not only to them but to all the life convicts and imprisoned of the earth. And I, too, of course, was on their side, not only in imitation of my father but from a natural inclination, which made prison seem an unjust, absurd monstrosity, like death.

  The prison fortress was a kind of grim and sacred domain, and thus forbidden; and I don’t remember that, during all my childhood and adolescence, I ever entered alone. Sometimes, as if enthralled, I started up the ascent that led to it, and then, as soon as I saw those gates, I fled.

  I recall that, during walks with my father in those days, I had perhaps once or twice passed through the gates of the fortress and traversed its solitary spaces. And in my childhood memory those rare excursions were like journeys through a region far from my island. Following my father, I looked furtively from the deserted roadway toward those barred slits of windows like air vents, or glimpsed, behind an infirmary grille, the mournful white color of a prisoner’s uniform . . . and immediately turned away my gaze. Curiosity, or even mere interest, on the part of free and happy people seemed to me insulting to the prisoners. The sun, on those streets, was an insult, and up there the roosters crowing on the balconies of the cottages, the doves cooing along the cornices irritated me, with their tactless insolence. Only my father’s freedom did not seem offensive, but, on the contrary, comforting, like an assurance of happiness, the only one on that sad height. With his rapid, graceful gait, slightly swaying like a sailor’s, and his blue shirt swelling in the wind, he seemed to me the messenger of a victorious adventure, of an enchanting power. In the depths of my feelings, I was almost convinced that only a mysterious contempt, or carelessness, kept him from exercising his heroic will, beating down the gates of the prison and freeing the prisoners. Truly, I could imagine no limits to his dominion. If I had believed in miracles, I would surely have considered him capable of performing them. But, as I’ve already revealed, I didn’t believe in miracles or in occult powers, to which some people entrust their fate, the way shepherd girls entrust it to the witches or the fairies!

  Pointless Acts of Bravado

  The books I liked most, needless to say, were those which celebrated, with real or imagined examples, my ideal of human greatness, whose living incarnation I recognized in my father.

  If I had been a painter, and had had to illustrate epic poems, history books, and so on, I think that in the vestments of their leading heroes I would always have painted a portrait of my father, again and again. And to begin the work I would have had to dissolve a quantity of gold dust on my palette, so as to color the locks of those protagonists in a worthy fashion.

  As girls imagine fair-haired fairies, fair-haired saints, and fair-haired queens, I imagined great captains and warriors all as fair, and resembling my father like brothers. If a hero I liked in a book turned out to be, from the descriptions, dark and of medium height, I preferred to believe it was the historian’s mistake. But if the description was documented, and unquestionable, I liked that hero less, and he could no longer be my ideal champion.

  When Wilhelm Gerace set out again on his travels, I was convinced that he was leaving to carry out adventurous and heroic deeds: I would certainly have believed him if he had told me that he was going to conquer the Poles, or Persia, like Alexander the Great; that he had waiting for him, beyond the sea, companies of gallant men under his command; that he was a scourge of pirates or bandits, or, on the contrary, that he himself was a great pirate, or a bandit. He never said a word about his life outside the island; and my imagination pined for that mysterious, fascinating existence, in which, naturally, he considered me unworthy to participate. My respect for his will was such that I didn’t allow myself, even in thought, the intention to secretly spy on him, or follow him; and I didn’t dare even to question him. I wanted to win his respect, and maybe his admiration, hoping that one day, finally, he would choose me as a companion on his journeys.

  Meanwhile, when we were together, I was always looking for occasions to appear bold and fearless in his eyes. Barefoot, almost flying on my toes, I crossed cliffs that were burning hot from the sun; I dove into the sea from the highest rocks; I performed extraordinary aquatic acrobatics, wild, flashy exercises, and demonstrated my expertise in every kind of swimming, like a champion. I swam underwater until I lost my breath, and resurfacing brought back underwater prey: sea urchins, starfish, shells. But, peering at him from afar, I sought admiration in his gaze, or at least attention, in vain. He sat on the shore taking no notice of me; and when, pretending that I was indifferent to my feats, I casually ran to join him, and collapsed on the sand next to him, he rose capriciously, negligently, eyes distracted and brow wrinkled, as if a mysterious invitation had been murmured in his ear. He raised his arms lazily; he slipped sideways into the sea. And he went off, swimming very slowly, as if embraced by the sea, by the sea as if by a bride.

  The Story of Algerian Dagger

  Finally one day I believed that the occasion I had always been waiting for to prove myself had arrived! We were swimming together, and, as we swam, he inexplicably lost in the sea the famous amphibious watch he was so proud of and wore in the water. We were both saddened by the loss; he looked at the sea with an expression of rage, then looked again at his bare wrist; and he answered me with a shrug when I offered to go and look for the watch in the underwater depths. Yet he gave me his scuba mask, and I left, trembling with ambition and honor. He stayed on the shore, waiting for me.

  I explored the whole seafloor, in the area that we had passed through earlier on our swim: the water there was not very deep, and was broken by shoals and reefs. My search continued, the high cliffs hid me from his view; and resurfacing every so often to get my breath I heard his whistles calling me back. At first I didn’t answer, because I was ashamed of not being able to announce a victory; but finally, to reassure him that I hadn’t disappeared into the sea like the watch, I answered him, from the top of a cliff, with a long whistle. He looked at me in silence, without any gesture; and I, looking at his body, gilded by summer, and marked at the wrist by a whiter circle, decided: “Either return to him with the watch or die!”

  I put on the mask again, and resumed my exploration. By now, finding the watch did not mean only the recovery of a treasure: it was no longer only a question of honor. The search had assumed a strange sense of fatality, the time already passed seemed immeasurable, and its end was like a milestone of my fate! I wandered through those varied and fantastic depths, outside of human realms, burning, minute by minute, with that unparalleled hope: of shining, like a prodigy, in the eyes of Him! It was this, the grandiose stake that was in play! And no one to help me, neither angels nor saints to pray to. The sea is an indifferent splendor, like Him.

  My search remained futile; exhausted, I took off the mask and, with my hands, gripped a rock sticking out of the water to rest. The rock hid from me the view of the shore, and hid from my father the scene of my defeat. I was alone on a field without directions, worse than a maze.

  Then, at a movement I made as I gripped the rock, dejectedly keeping myself afloat, I spied a metallic glint in the sun! Planting my hands, I jumped up and discovered the lost watch, sparkling in a dry hollow in the rock. It was unharmed, and bringing it to my ear I heard it ticking.

  I held it in my fist and, with the mask hanging around my neck, in a few seconds reached the beach. My father’s eyes lighted up at seeing me arrive victorious. “You found it!” he exclaimed, almost incredulous. And in the act of possession, and affirmation of a right, he tore the watch from my hands, as if it were some booty that I could compete for. He brought it to his ear, and looked at it with satisfaction.

  “It was there, on that rock there!” I cried, still p
anting. I was beside myself, I would have liked to skip and dance, but I proudly restrained myself, so as not to show how much importance I gave my undertaking. My father looked at the rock frowning, lost in thought:

  “Ah,” he said after a moment, “now I remember. I took it off while we were searching for shellfish, to get some limpets that were wedged in at the tip of the rock. Then you called to show me a sea urchin you’d found, and made me forget. If you hadn’t been so bullying, you with your sea urchin, I wouldn’t have forgotten it!

  “Lost!” he added then, shrugging his shoulders, in a sarcastic tone. “I knew it, I knew it couldn’t be lost. It has a very secure clasp, guaranteed.” And, with satisfaction, he carefully fastened the watch around his wrist.

  So fate had played a trick, my action lost almost any splendor. The disappointment, mounting like a fever, made the muscles of my face tremble and burned my eyes. I thought, “If I cry, I’m dishonored,” and to protect myself, with violence, from my weakness, I angrily took the useless mask off my neck, and angrily gave it to my father.

  My father, taking it back, gave me an arrogant glance as if to say, “Hey, kid!” and I, unable to look at him after I’d been so disrespectful, wanted to flee. But quickly, with a playful expression, he placed his bare foot firmly on my bare foot, to hold me in check; and I saw his face bending over me, smiling, with a marvelous look that, for an instant, made him resemble a goat. He put his wrist with the watch under my eyes and said harshly:

  “You know the maker of this watch? Read it, it’s printed on the face.”

  On the face, in almost imperceptible letters, was printed the word “Amicus.”

  “It’s a Latin word,” my father explained. “You know what it means?”

  “Friend!” I answered, pleased with my quickness.

  “Friend!” he repeated. “And this watch, with this name, has a meaning of great importance. An importance of life and death. Guess.”

  I smiled, imagining for a moment that my father, with that symbol of the watch, wanted to proclaim our friendship: in life and in death.

  “You can’t guess!” he exclaimed, with a slight grimace of contempt. “You want to know? This watch is a present that a friend of mine gave me, maybe the dearest friend I have: you know the phrase ‘two bodies and one soul’? For example, one New Year’s Eve long ago, I was in a town where I didn’t know anyone. I was alone, I had used up all my money, and I had to spend the night under a bridge in the cold. That night, my friend was in a different city, and hadn’t heard from me for a long time, so he couldn’t know where or in what condition I was. In fact, since it was New Year’s, he had wondered all evening: ‘I wonder where he is? I wonder who he’s celebrating with tonight?’ And he went to bed early, but around midnight he began shivering, with a chill that he couldn’t explain. He didn’t have a fever, he was in a heated room, in bed, with warm covers, and all night he continued to shiver, unable to get warm, as if he had gone to bed on the icy earth, with no shelter.

  “Another time, joking with him, I unluckily fell, injuring my knee on a piece of glass. And he, by himself, with an Algerian dagger I’d given him, made a wound in his knee, in the same place.

  “When he gave me the watch he said: ‘Here, I’ve locked up my heart in this watch. Take it, I give you my heart. Wherever you are, near or far from me, the day this watch stops ticking, my heart, too, will have stopped beating!’ ”

  It was unusual for my father to make me a speech so long and intimate. But he didn’t tell me the name of his great friend, and immediately a name flashed in my mind: Romeo! Romeo-Boötes, in fact, was the only friend of my father I’d heard about; but he was dead, and so it was another my father was speaking of today. This other, who in my mind had the name Algerian Dagger, lived in the glorious Orients that my father always returned to: foremost among the satellites who, in those fugitive southern zones, followed the light of Wilhelm Gerace. The favorite! For a moment I glimpsed him: abandoned, in who knows what magnificent, tragic rooms, perhaps in the Great Urals, alone, waiting for my father; his face rapt, Semitic-looking, his knee bleeding, and a void in place of his heart.

  Departures

  That day, my father left. As usual, Immacolatella and I watched him as he randomly put back in his suitcase the shirts without buttons, the sweater, the heavy jacket, and so on. Every time he left, he put his entire wardrobe in the suitcase, since he could never predict how long he would be away: he might return in two or three days, or he might be absent for months, until winter and beyond.

  He always made his preparations for departure at the last minute, with a mechanical haste in his gestures, while his face was distracted, as if in his mind he had already left the island. Suddenly, when I saw him close the suitcase, I felt my heart whirl with an unexpected resolve and I said to him:

  “Couldn’t I go with you?”

  I hadn’t planned to ask the question that day, and it was immediately clear that he didn’t even consider it. His gaze darkened slightly, and his lips made an almost imperceptible frown, as if he were thinking of something else.

  “With me!” he replied then, studying me. “To do what? You’re a little kid. Wait till you grow up, to go with me.”

  He rapidly tied a rope around his suitcase (which was an ordinary one, and beat-up) and secured it with a strong, skillful sailor’s knot. Then, with Immacolatella and me on his heels, he hurried downstairs. Thus he left the Casa dei Guaglioni at a swift pace, holding the suitcase by one end of the rope, his cheeks alight, his eyes clouded by impatience. Now already he was mythical, unreachable, like a gaucho crossing the Argentine pampas with a lassoed bull; or a captain of the Greek armies flying in a chariot over the plain of Troy, with the corpse of the conquered Trojan dragging behind; or a horse tamer on the steppes, running beside his horse, ready to jump onto its back. And to think that he had still on his skin the salt of the Procidan sea, where he had been swimming with me that morning!

  Down in the street the carriage that would take him to the port was waiting, and I sat beside him on the red damask seat while, as usual, Immacolatella followed us happily on foot, to race against the horse. From the start of the route, she easily outpaced us by a good distance, and came back from the end of the street with her ears in the wind, barking as if to greet us and provoke the horse. But he proceeded at his usual old trot, and didn’t take the trouble to compete, surely considering her a fanatic.

  My father was silent and kept looking at his watch: then he looked at the driver’s back, and the horse, with a stubborn impatience, as if to incite the driver to crack the whip harder, and the horse to run. And meanwhile my imagination rose, like a flame, toward another departure, which today had been promised. Then, I would sit in the carriage beside my father; but not to accompany him to the port and say goodbye from the pier while he departs on the steamer, no! to board the ship with him and depart with him! Maybe for Venice, or Palermo, maybe as far as Scotland, or the mouth of the Nile, or Colorado! To find again Algerian Dagger and our other followers, who will be waiting for us there.

  Wait till you grow up, to go with me. I had a thought of rebellion against the absoluteness of life, which condemned me to pass an endless Siberia of days and nights before taking me away from this bitter situation: of being a boy. Out of impatience, at that moment, I would even have subjected myself to a very long lethargy, which would let me get through my lesser ages without being aware of it, to find myself suddenly a man, equal to my father. Equal to my father! “Unfortunately,” I thought, looking at him, “even when I’m a man I can never be his equal. I’ll never have blond hair, or violet-blue eyes, nor will I ever be so handsome!”

  The steamer that came from Ischia and was to carry my father to Naples had not yet entered the harbor. There were still a few minutes to wait. My father and I sat nearby on the suitcase, and Immacolatella, tired out from her races, lay at our feet. She seemed convinced that that sojourn on the pier meant the end of the journey for our family. And that, havin
g now reached our destination and settled down, we could all three rest as long as we liked, without ever having to be separated.

  But when the gangplank had been lowered, and my father and I got up, she, too, quickly rose, wagging her tail, without showing any surprise. When my father was separated from the two of us, on the ship that was moving away from the pier, she barked loudly, with an accusing expression; but she didn’t make a fuss. She wasn’t too sad that my father had left. For her I was the master. If I had left, she certainly would have jumped into the sea and tried to swim to the ship; then, returning to land, desperate, she would have remained on the pier weeping and calling me, until death.

  Immacolatella

  From the moment my father left Procida, he again became a legend for me! The interval we had spent together—almost still present, almost still my domain, all alight—hovered before me, to fascinate me bitterly with its spectral grace; then, like the Flying Dutchman, it vanished, spinning with dizzying speed. A kind of sparkling mist and some echoes of fractured voices, full of manly arrogance and mockery, were all that remained to me. It already seemed an event outside of time, and outside of the history of Procida: perhaps not lost but nonexistent! Every sign of my father’s sojourn in our house—the hollow left by his head on the pillow, a toothless comb, an empty packet of cigarettes—seemed to me miraculous. Like the Prince on finding Cinderella’s glass slipper, I repeated to myself: “So he exists!”