by Elsa Morante
Meanwhile, the sailors pulled up the gangplank, the steamer departed for Ischia: this time, too, the fair-haired man I was waiting for hadn’t arrived.
But, some time or other, he did arrive. Maybe precisely on a day that, for some reason, I hadn’t been on the pier when the steamer docked. And then, coming home, I actually found what I always pictured as a chimera: him, sitting on the bed in his room, smoking a cigarette, the suitcase at his feet, still closed.
Seeing me, he’d say:
“Hello. You’re here?”
But at that instant Immacolatella, who had lingered on the street, would enter the room like the wind: and my father began his usual struggle with the dog, who was always exaggerated in her greetings. I would intervene, yelling at her: “Pup. Enough!” That besotted behavior seemed to me a sign of poor judgment on her part. How could she presume? Who could say how many better dogs my father might have met, in all that time! Besides, in my view that wild greeting for my father was only a pretext for making noise. It didn’t really matter much to her that my father had returned: for her, I was the master.
Finally, she’d calm down. And my father, smoking his cigarette, would say to me:
“What news?”
But he didn’t pay much attention to the news I recounted. Maybe he’d interrupt irrelevantly to ask: “Is the boat in order?” Or begin listening to the time tolled by the bell and, comparing it to his watch, protest: “What does it say, quarter to six? But no, it’s almost six! That clock over there is always going crazy.” Then, followed by the two of us, silent, aggressive, he’d pace up and down throughout the Casa dei Guaglioni, opening doors and windows, retaking possession. And already the Casa dei Guaglioni seemed like a great ship filled with ocean wind, embarked on stupendous journeys.
Finally, my captain would return to his room and collapse on the bed, faceup, with an unhappy and distracted expression: maybe he was already thinking of leaving again? He’d look at the sky outside the window and observe, “New moon,” but with an air of saying: “Always the same moon. The usual moon of Procida!”
More about the Amalfitano
Meanwhile, observing him, I noticed some wrinkles under his eyes, between his eyebrows, near his lips. I thought, with envy: “They’re signs of age. When I have wrinkles, too, it will be a sign that I’m grown up, and then he and I can be together always.”
As I waited for that mythological epoch, I cherished another hope for the present, which I never dared confess to my father, because it seemed to me too ambitious. Finally one night I made up my mind and asked him boldly: “Couldn’t you, some time or other, bring one of your friends with you here to Procida?” I said one of your friends, but I was thinking of one in particular (A.D.).
At first my father gave me no answer except a glance so forbidding that I felt a chill in my heart; and I also felt humiliated, so much that I had the impulse to go to my room, to console myself with the friendship of Immacolatella. But, meanwhile, I saw my father’s eyes grow lustrous and animated, as if, looking at me, he had changed his mind. He smiled, and I recognized the fabulous goat-like smile that another time had been the first signal of confidences.
I, too, smiled, although I was still rather vexed. And he, frowning, came out with this extraordinary declaration:
“What friends? Know that here on Procida I have one friend alone and there must be only him. I want no other. And that ban is eternal!”
At that speech, I felt almost transfigured. Who was his only friend, here on Procida? Was it possible that my father really meant to speak of me?
Staring at me severely, he resumed:
“Look there! You know who that is in the photograph?”
And he pointed to the photograph of the Amalfitano that was always in his room.
So I murmured, “Romeo,” and he exclaimed, in a tone of cutting superiority:
“Very good, kid.”
“When I came here to Procida for the first time,” he began, scowling at the memory, “I immediately realized (and, besides, I knew it even before getting off the boat) that this, for me, was a desert island! I agreed to call myself Gerace, because one name is the same as another. There’s even a poem that says so, the type that girls write in autograph albums:
What does the name matter? Call the rose
by any other name: will it smell less sweet?
“For me Gerace meant: future owner of farms and income. And so I bore that Procidan surname. But in this deserted crater, I had only one friend: him! And if Procida became my country, it wasn’t because of the Geraces but because of him!
“I recall that when I disembarked here (when everyone looked at me suspiciously, as if at an exotic beast), the only ones who honored me as I deserved were his dogs. There were eight, all mean, and usually they attacked anyone who approached. Instead, when I climbed up here to get a closer look at them (I had had a glimpse from down below, and they interested me, because they were of diverse and handsome breeds), all eight came around to greet me, as if they recognized me and I were already master of the house. That was also when I made his acquaintance; and from then on, you could say, not a day passed that I wasn’t here. To tell the truth, I kept coming back more to play with the dogs than for him, since although he made an effort to be brilliant, it wasn’t much fun to sit listening to the chat of an old man, who on top of that was blind. But even if I valued the dogs’ company more than his, he was content: provided I didn’t fail!
“Every so often he said to me: ‘I was always fortunate and now, before I die, I’ve had the greatest good fortune. The only reason I regretted not having married was this: not to have a son of my own, to love as much as myself. And now I’ve found him, my angel, my son: it’s you!’
“He also declared that, the night before he met me, he had gone from one dream to another, and all these dreams were prophetic. He had dreamed, for example, of returning to the time when he was a shipping agent, and of receiving, anonymously, a fragrant wooden chest that contained magnificent colored stones and Oriental spices that gave off a perfume like a garden. Then he had dreamed that, still healthy and spry, he had gone hunting on the island of Vivara; and that his dogs flushed out a family of hares (but without wounding them), among them a young hare as handsome as an angel, which had a ray of gold in its black fur. Then he had dreamed that an enchanted bitter-orange tree was growing in his room, all silvered by the moon . . . and other visions of this type.
“I sneered, skeptical, hearing him tell these stories, because I knew very well that they were all nonsense. He expected me to believe that, ever since he’d been blind, he’d had fantastic dreams, much more colorful than reality, and that even going to sleep had become a gala party, an adventure from a novel, in other words—a second life. But I knew a thing or two, on his account, and right away I recognized the trademark of all those boasts. I understood perfectly well that they were his inventions that he wanted me to believe, to show off, not to make a poor impression with his miserable old age. But the truth was that for him it was too late even for the consolation of dreams. Like most old people diminished at the end, he suffered from insomnia, and was also ill with stupid manias, frenzies, obsessions, which disturbed him day and night. These things were known about him, here on Procida. But he didn’t want to confess them to me: first of all, out of vanity; and then because he guessed that if he got in the habit of crying about his troubles, I would soon leave him. I’m made like that, I don’t have the vocation of a sister of charity. My mother, too, scolded me all the time: You’re one of those of whom the Gospel says: if a friend asks them for bread, they give him a stone.
“Well, in the midst of all his boasts, the reality was that for him the only wonderful dream was my company—it didn’t take much to grasp that. And as for me, even though I would have liked some variation, I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter of pastimes, here on Procida. I had no other friend, no place to go, and, besides, I never had a cent in my pocket. In fact your grandfather, b
efore letting me inherit, didn’t fork out any money, nor did I ask for any. Rather, I preferred to ask the Amalfitano, but he gave it to me reluctantly, and only a little, for cigarettes; because he was afraid that if I had money available I could run away from the island.
“So, one way or another, I ended up here every day.
“Sometimes he’d say to me: ‘Think, in the past I saw so many landscapes, so many people: I could populate a nation with the people I’ve seen. And the dearest friend of my entire existence, which is you, I only met now that I’m blind. To say that I knew all the beauty of life, I’d have to see one person alone: you. And yet it is precisely you I haven’t been able to see. Now, at the thought of dying, of leaving this life and this beautiful island of Procida, where I’ve known all happiness and freedom from care, I console myself with one hope: Some believe that the dead are spirits and see everything. Who can say that it’s not true? And if it’s true I’ll be able to see you after I die. That consoles me for death. What do you think?’ I answered him: ‘Hope, hope, Amalfi’—that’s what I usually called him—‘if the dead really can see, you can be content to die. To see me it’s worth the trouble. Too bad the facts are different: do you want to know what difference there is between a blind man, like you, and a dead man?’ ‘What difference? Tell me.’ ‘A blind man like you still has eyes, but no longer has sight; and a dead man doesn’t have sight and doesn’t have eyes, either. You can be sure, Amalfi, you, you’ve never seen me in person and you never will, forever and ever.’
“He was constantly asking me to describe what I looked like: my features, and the colors of my face and my eyes, and if I had streaks in my irises, a halo around the pupils, and so on. And, in order not to satisfy his curiosity too completely, I answered sometimes one way, sometimes another, capriciously. Once I told him that I had bloodshot eyes, like a tiger; and once that I had one blue eye and one black. Or I said that I had a scar on my cheek and immediately contracted the muscles of my face so that when, to make sure, he touched my cheek, he found there a deep hollow, and was almost in doubt.
“Then he said to me: ‘But on the other hand it’s better for me not to see you when I’m dead. What could I expect from it, except a bitter sorrow, since I’d see that you had made other friends, and were together with them, as before you were with me? I’d see you in the company of other friends, maybe on this very island where our friendship is written even in the rocks, even in the air!’ ‘Ah, of that,’ I answered, ‘you can be sure. The company of the dead is fine for the beyond, but I am ALIVE, and I will find my companions among the living. Of course I’ll have better things to do, during my days, than cultivate chrysanthemums on a dead man’s grave!’ He didn’t want to let me see the suffering that answer caused him; but he turned pale, and his features, in a moment, appeared worn out. Suffering was worse for him than for others: because, until those last years of his existence, he had never known it. His life, before, had been all fun and games. He had never known that one can suffer on account of another person. Well, just like that, I taught him!
“What tortured him most was the fear that, one day or other, out of impatience, I would quit Procida. If I was a little later than usual, he immediately suspected that I had gone without telling him and was perhaps already far from the coast. But I never left the island during those two years that he was still alive: until one night, while I was sleeping, as usual, down at your grandfather’s house, he died unexpectedly, here, alone, unable even to say goodbye to me. It was strange for me, the next day.
“At the moment I wanted to convince myself, by force, that he had only fainted; and I even began to rail at the doctor, yelling that he was a worthless provincial doctor, an idiot, and that was why he was saying there was nothing to be done! His duty was to find a cure right away! A medicine, an injection! It was his duty! I ordered him! I insisted, in other words, that the doctor revive him without delay: I was beside myself. And then when the doctor left and I found myself alone with that dead man, it was a terrible shock to my nerves (I was still a boy), and I began to sob. Crying made me furious, and I insulted the dead man, calling him coward, clown, stinker, because he had died without even saying goodbye to me. That seemed the worst thing, the most unacceptable: I don’t know what unique, fatal importance I gave that goodbye. And I was angry, thinking again of all the times that—because of some impatience in my character, or just to be arrogant, even though I had nothing else in particular to do—I had deliberately left the Amalfitano here alone, waiting in vain for my visit, for entire days! In fact, I had done well: It’s better not to spoil your neighbor too much, to tell him to go to hell every so often, otherwise it would be the end! Our life would go forward heavily, like a boat loaded with ballast, and would carry us to the bottom to suffocate . . . But at that moment my nerves wouldn’t listen to reason: and all the hours and days that I had spent roaming far from the Amalfitano’s house, to make him sigh and fret, seemed to me absolute treasures, squandered without any satisfaction to me!”
(At this point in his recollection, my father looked up at the photograph of the Amalfitano, with an expression of tender friendship; but right afterward he broke out into an irreverent, histrionic laugh, as if to mock the dead man.)
“Now it seemed to me that nothing, no person, was worth the trouble of spending one’s time with, compared with Romeo the Amalfitano; and I felt convinced and sure that I would never meet a being so fascinating, so marvelous: a being so handsome! Yes, it seemed to me undeniable, irrefutable, that he alone possessed every advantage of true beauty! If at that moment the Queen of Sheba, or the god Mars in person, or the goddess Venus had been introduced to me, I would have considered them vulgar types, café or postcard beauties compared with him! Who else possessed that slightly feverish, sly, delicate smile and, so tall, such small hands, gesticulating at every word, especially when he was talking nonsense? And those eyes which conferred his most terrible charm—because they were hurt, and their expression seemed lost, lifeless, without judgment, different from a human gaze?
“And those ways he had! Helpless, insecure, and ashamed (because he was bitterly ashamed of his blindness), but also grand, incurably grand! The grace of the most beautiful dancers, of the angels, was insignificant, inferior, compared with his!
“Even his gray curls, which fell behind his ears like a mane, and his provincial style of dress, with those rather ridiculous tight pants, now seemed to me the height of refinement! And his grace, his elegance, increased my despair! Damned, idiot blind man! If, by chance, Hell truly existed, I hoped he had arrived!
“To think that his company, which until yesterday had been assured, faithful, and at my disposal, had now become impossible! That desperate thought made me so furious that I threw myself on the floor, weeping and biting the iron frame of his bed. I called, Amalfi! Amalfi! and I remembered the injuries I had done him in life. I regretted them, but at the same time I almost felt like laughing, at the memory, for instance, of times when he was talking and telling me his dreams with grand gestures, and I would suddenly move away without a sound and hide in a corner, pretending to disappear like the fog. After a bit, he would notice my absence and, disconcerted, start calling me, and looking for me through the rooms, groping, pointing his stick at the walls. And the dogs, provoked by my nods, instead of helping him made an ineffectual noise, as if they, too, along with me, enjoyed agitating him. They, too, must have felt some remorse later, which may explain their suicide, if it’s true, as it seems, that they had that tragic end.
“And now it was he who let me call without answering. If he had awakened, just for an hour, he would have heard from me marvelous things, all truths without the shadow of a lie, and he would have had reason to be proud! He would neither hear nor see anyone anymore, until the end of eternity, and I knew it; but still, at all costs I must give him a proof, a pledge, that would save our friendship from death.
“So, placing my palm on his stiff hand, full of rings, like a sultan’s, I swore
to him that, however many friends I had in the future, I would always ban them from Procida! On this island, which had been inhabited for me only by our friendship, his memory would forever be my only friend. That I swore to him. And so here to Procida, where the joined names of Wilhelm and Romeo are written even in the stones, even in the air, I will never bring other friends. If I did, I would stain myself with betrayal and perjury and would condemn our friendship to death!”
The Amalfitano’s Dream
After that solemn statement, my father eyed the portrait of the Amalfitano maliciously, as if to say: “Are you content, dead man, with this homage to your capricious folly?”
And then he sighed.
And so on the island my father had always had Romeo beside him, a faithful companion, in the same way that, away from the island, he always had Algerian Dagger beside him! They shared his love, and his secrets; and both, for me, remained unknown and unattainable. Childhood, I thought, sighing, was always the cause of my bitter destiny. The death of Romeo, the adulthood of Algerian Dagger, left it behind, excluded from my father’s enchanted realms.
I was silent for a while; then I observed:
“For two years, you never left Procida! Not even once!” (I was thinking: “Happy time! Ah, because I wasn’t yet born?”)
“Never!” my father confirmed. “What do you think? It was a unique case! Well, it wasn’t only the situation, truly, it was also Amalfi. He was a wizard, and knew how to keep me on Procida. And, on the other hand, I thought, ‘He’s old, soon he’ll be out of the way, I can grant him some of my time.’ Especially since it was useful to me! If nothing else, it served me to inherit this beautiful house!” And my father laughed brutally in the face of the Amalfitano, as if intending to provoke him. But then, perhaps repentant, he looked at him with a disarming, boyish smile and, letting himself be drawn in again by memory, resumed speaking:
