Arturo's Island Read online

  “Not anymore, but as a girl my mother had hair like mine. My sister, on the other hand, doesn’t have a lot of hair.”

  Then, having finished combing her hair, she exclaimed:

  “Madonna! How red the sky is tonight!”

  And she added, sighing, in a grave and enchanted tone, but not bitter, as if, obedient, she recognized the laws of marriage in her own destiny:

  “Think! This is the first time I’ve been away from home!”

  My father returned from the yard; and before it got dark we carried upstairs the suitcases, which we had left in the front hall. As we had at the pier, my father carried his and I the bride’s. She followed behind us, carrying, bundled up in the shawl, the combs, the shoes, and the purse with the jewelry.

  Upstairs

  The bride’s suitcase was fairly light, but, although it couldn’t contain much, it made me curious. This was the first time I had lived in the same house with a woman and witnessed her life from up close; and I had no idea about the habits of women, about the clothing of those bundled creatures, and if, even shut up within the walls, even when they sleep, they always appear so shapeless and mysterious. The bride still hadn’t taken off her coat from the journey, a faded ill-fitting garment, which was too short for her, so that the wide skirt of her dress, of a shiny but very worn velvet, hung down from it quite a bit. Undoubtedly, in appearance this woman was a common beggar; but after the surprise of the jewels I might expect her to be hiding in the suitcase perhaps the costumes of an Oriental sultan.

  For now, she took out of it only a pair of shabby old shoes, without heels, and adapted to use as slippers; and she began wearing them immediately, with satisfaction, although they were too large for her. She had to shuffle when she walked, and every so often they came off her feet.

  My father, putting down his own suitcase, had told me to put the bride’s in another room, opposite his, where there was a wardrobe and an iron bedstead; and he himself, soon afterward, carried in a mattress and blankets. But the bride, who at first seemed very pleased to have a room just for her things, became frightened when she realized that that room was intended for her to sleep in as well; and, in spite of her awe of my father, she began to repeat obstinately that it was impossible, that she was afraid of spending the night in a room by herself, that she wanted to sleep with everyone else. My father listened to her in annoyance, because he was not accustomed to sharing his room with anyone; but, seeing that she really had gone pale with fear, he turned to me, without even deigning to answer her, and said impatiently: “All right! I’ll keep her in my room with me. Come on, moro, help me lift this bed.” And he and I together carried the bride’s bed into his room.

  She followed us happily. The new bed wouldn’t fit next to my father’s big bed, which occupied almost the whole back wall; and we put it crosswise, with the head against the longest wall, so that it was almost at the foot of my father’s bed. As soon as she saw things arranged in that way, the bride, who wanted to make a show of helping us, began to beat and turn the dusty mattresses and pillows energetically, starting with the big bed. And amid those exertions, she asked my father, in all naturalness:

  “So now from tonight I’ll sleep in the big bed with you, instead of Arturo? And he’ll sleep here in the little bed?” Her conviction was, evidently, that I didn’t have my own room to sleep in at night, but was accustomed to sleeping with my father, in his bed!

  At that new sign of her ignorance, I confined myself to laughing; but my father, who was already annoyed by carrying the bed, scornfully shrugged one shoulder and said to her, curling his lips in an expression of mockery and mimicking her:

  “No, signora. When I want to sleep, you will sleep in the small bed. I will sleep in my big bed, where I’ve always slept. And Arturo will sleep in his bed, in his room, where he has always slept!”

  Then, feigning anger, he shouted at her:

  “Remember, girl, that here you are not among the riffraff or in some tribe, here you are in the CASTLE OF THE GERACES! And if you utter another disgraceful word, I’ll send you up there to sleep, in that other castle, with the guards and the prisoners!”

  It was clear that she didn’t understand why she deserved such a rebuke; but still she blushed with the shame of having uttered something disgraceful. And she looked at me, questioningly, as if asking what harm there would be in a bride sleeping in the same room as me, a boy.

  Finally, she made me angry; and I said to her, in a tone of lively contempt:

  “I sleep alone, in my room! I don’t need other people near me. If you think they’re all afraid like you, you’re wrong. I would sleep alone even in the Rocky Mountains or the steppes of Central Asia!”

  At those words, the bride looked at me with sincere admiration, but, eyes wide, she gazed all around the room, as if the idea of sleeping alone with my father frightened her. Yet between those two fears, sleeping utterly alone in a room and sleeping alone with my father, she chose the second rather than the first.

  Maybe to comfort herself, she resumed beating the big mattress even more vigorously, so that the dust reached my father, who had flopped lazily onto the small bed. He jumped up and spit in one direction; then, this time with real anger, grabbed her hands in the air and, his face darkening, exclaimed:

  “Hey! Will you stop it with these mattresses? What’s got into you? When did you ever get such a frenzy for cleaning that you’ll ruin the mattresses?”

  She murmured in bewilderment: “At my house . . . we do . . .”

  “Oh, yes! at your house! When in the world! At your house! They beat the mattresses!”

  “Always, every year, for Holy Easter . . . and sometimes more often . . . more often during the year . . .”

  He lowered the bride’s wrists suddenly, letting go of them with such brutality that it was as if he wanted to sever them; and his angry voice was tinged with scorn:

  “Well,” he said, “you’re not at your house anymore now, here we are in the Castle of Procida, this is my marriage bed, and no one ordered you to do Easter cleaning today.”

  And, having said that, he spit again, and went to pick up his suitcase from a corner; he carried it to the middle of the room and began to undo the rope tied around it. I had never before seen him attack someone with such intensity and rancor: the times he had had some reason to reprimand me, he scolded me brusquely, scowling and almost distracted, with a few trifling words. This scene with the bride showed me a new form of his moods, as mysterious to me as his mysterious and unquestionable justice; and in witnessing it I felt my nerves contract, as if this time I, too, shared the bride’s fear. At the end, when he had let go of her wrists and moved away from her, I had the feeling of an obscure liberation.

  Having opened the suitcase, he half knelt on the floor and began to empty it in a disorderly fashion, as he always did. The bride meanwhile remained unmoving near the bed, looking around the room. We were all three silent for a while; then she broke the silence, asking, curious, why the room had so many doors in a row.

  My father, having no wish to get into a lot of lengthy explanations, immediately gave this answer, without even raising his head from the suitcase:

  “Because in this house, as in all castles, every room is guarded at night by armed sentinels, each one standing watch in front of a door. To prove that they never sleep, every hour, all night long, they play a fanfare on the trumpet together.”

  She didn’t dare to contradict my father, but, uncertain whether to really believe him or not, at that fantastic explanation she looked at me, as if to read a confirmation in my face. I couldn’t contain my laughter, and so she, too, her face coloring slightly, laughed full-throatedly. By then my father had finished unpacking, and he quickly got up off the floor. Paying no more attention to us, he placed the pile of stuff on the chest of drawers, and kicked the suitcase into the corner; then, listening intently to the sound of the bell, which could be heard ringing in the distance, he compared the time on his watch Amicus. Th
e story of the doors and the sentinels, which the bride and I were still laughing about, had already vanished from his mind.

  He returned to the small bed, where he’d been lying a few minutes earlier, and sat across it, on the edge of the pillow, leaning his back against the bars. Distracted, a little sleepy, his hair falling over his eyes, he stretched out one foot, wiping his spit off the floor with the sole of his shoe. At that moment the bride observed the portrait of the Amalfitano, and asked: “Who is it?” Yawning, he answered:

  “It’s a holy image, which protects the castle.” And he added slyly, lying on the bed:

  “As in all castles, here, too, there’s a dead ancestor who still wanders around. That’s his portrait. Be careful that that dead man doesn’t come and stab you in the heart while you’re sleeping.”

  At that answer, she looked at my face, as before, but this time she read there neither a confirmation nor a denial. She shrugged one shoulder, smiling, and whispered:

  “If one has a good conscience, why should one fear punishment?”

  “Because,” my father said to her, “he hated all women.”

  “What! He hated all women!”

  “Yes. And if he had been lord of the universe he would have murdered them all.”

  “But if there are no more women, this world will end.”

  My father rested his head on his folded arm and, laughing, glanced furtively at the bride with a hostile and crafty expression.

  “What did he care,” he said, “about the continuation of the world? Since he’s dead. What satisfaction does the continuation of the world offer him?”

  “He was a Christian, and had those thoughts!” she said, crossing her hands over her chest, as if to arm herself, in the contest between her own timidity and proper feelings. Her face trembled in such a way that, looking at it, I imagined her heart beating like a bird just stolen from its nest, trapped in a fist. She leaned her head slightly toward her shoulder, swaying from one foot to the other; and finally she asked submissively:

  “Why did he hate them?”

  “Because,” my father answered, lowering his head down on the pillow, “he said that women are all ugly.”

  “All ugly!” she repeated. “What! All of them ugly! Then . . . how . . . all of them! Then even women in the movies are ugly?”

  “What do you know about movies?” said my father, stretching, in a lazy, drawling voice. “You’ve only been once, when I took you, and the film was about Indians!”

  At those words I thought, with some dismay, that on this point I was behind her, since there was no movie theater on Procida, and I had never seen a film in my whole life.

  The bride answered, insecure:

  “My sister has been . . . a relative of ours took her, who’s in Nola . . . a good Christian! She saw that other film . . . I don’t remember the name, but the ones who were in that one didn’t have red skin. And then you can also see the actors painted on the posters . . . you can see them all over Naples . . .”

  “Go on, yes, go on discussing those prostitutes!” my father exclaimed mockingly. “That way we’ll soon enjoy seeing your tongue fall off! Don’t you know, the Devil cuts out the tongue of people who talk about filth and prostitutes? Your mother didn’t tell you?”

  The bride turned red. My father yawned.

  “So, be quiet, what do you know?” he continued. “Stop it, girl. I don’t want to talk about beauty with you.”

  Mortified, she tried, anyway, to offer a more worthy example, which would redeem her from the unsuitable one she had used before.

  “And the Queen,” she said, “then even the Queen is ugly?”

  My father laughed, crushing his mouth against the pillow, with such gusto that it seemed he would bite it; and I, too, laughed. She looked at us in bewilderment, at both of us, perhaps seeking, in her submissive mind, a last line of defense. Finally, her eyes, as they looked at us, turned cloudy, and in a fervent, trembling voice she offered the supreme argument:

  “And the Madonna,” she said, “even she is ugly? The Mother of God!”

  My father closed his eyes:

  “That’s enough,” he said. “I’m sleepy. I want to rest for an hour or two. Go away and leave me alone. I’ll see you later.”

  We silently left his room and closed the door. In the hall, the bride, in a low voice so as not to disturb my father, asked me to keep her company while she took her things out of the suitcase; because she wasn’t yet used to the house and was afraid to be alone in a room, now that it was almost dark.

  The Suitcase

  We returned to the other room, where the bed had been. In place of the bed a cleaner rectangle of the brick floor was visible; and there I sat down. The room had several lamps; but the only one with a bulb that wasn’t burned out was a kind of metal lantern sticking out from the wall, high up. That bulb was so dusty that it shed scarcely any light; and so she climbed up onto the chest of drawers on her knees and unscrewed it. Then, to clean it, she spit on it several times, wiping it with her slip.

  The opening of the suitcase was disappointing. There were only some shapeless rags, a pair of ordinary clogs, and a light flowered dress, already shabby, and discolored by sweat. There was a big kerchief, but not so pretty as the ones painted with roses that my father was in the habit of wearing as scarves; and nothing else. The suitcase was already almost empty. All that remained, on the bottom, was a layer of newspaper pages and wastepaper that you could see right away was being used to protect some framed pictures. They were all images of the Madonna, and she took them out with the utmost respect, and, first kissing them, one by one, she placed them on the chest of drawers.

  She believed not just in a single Madonna but in many: the Madonna di Pompei, the Virgin of the Rosary, the Madonna del Carmine, and I don’t know what others, and she recognized them by their dress, by their crown, and by their pose, as if they were so many different queens. One, I remember, was wrapped in stiff bands of gold, like the sacred mummies of Egypt, and, like her child, also swaddled in gold, bore on her head an enormous, many-pointed crown. Another, all jeweled, was black, like an African idol, and held up a son who looked like an ebony doll, and he, too, was covered with dazzling gems. Another, instead, had no crown: she was ringed only by a delicate halo, and, if one excluded this unique sign of who she was, she resembled a pretty, buxom shepherdess. With her naked baby, she was playing with a lamb, and from beneath the simple dress a plump white foot stuck out.

  Another was sitting, in the pose of a lady, on a beautiful inlaid chair; and she was rocking a cradle so sumptuous that not even in the house of a duke could one see its equal! Yet another, similar to a warrior, wore a kind of armor of precious metals, and brandished a sword . . .

  (From what I could deduce, I understand that these Virgins had diverse characters. One was rather inhuman, impassive as the goddesses of the ancient East: to honor her was necessary, but it was better not to ask her for favors. Another was a wizard, and knew how to perform every miracle. Still another, Our Lady of Sorrows, was the holy and tragic guardian to whom passions and sufferings are confided. All of them liked celebrations, ceremonies, genuflexions, and kisses; they all loved, too, to receive gifts; and they all had great power; but, it seems, the most extraordinary, most miraculous, and most gracious was the Madonna di Piedigrotta.

  (Then, besides all these Virgins and their children, and all the saints, male and female, and Jesus Himself, there was God. From the tone in which my stepmother named him, it was clear that God, for her, wasn’t a king, or even the head of the entire Holy Army, or even the lord of Paradise. He was much more: he was a name, unique, solitary, inaccessible; favors are not asked of him, nor is he worshipped. And, in essence, the duty of the whole immense crowd of Virgins and Saints who welcome prayers, vows, and kisses is this: to safeguard the inaccessible solitude of a name. This name is the only singularity that is opposed to the multiplicity of earth and Heaven. He doesn’t care about celebrations or miracles or desires or s
ufferings or even death: he cares only about good and evil.

  (This was the religion of my stepmother, or at least that’s how I thought I could reconstruct it, from her behavior and her talk, that day and later, throughout our life in common. Of necessity, it’s an imperfect reconstruction, partly because my stepmother was always restrained by a kind of modesty when she talked about holy things. And although on some great occasions she was eloquently effusive on the subjects of her faith, she always left certain points in silence and mystery. Thus, for example, it’s hard for me to say even now what particular idea she had of the Devil, or if she believed in his existence.)

  A number (at least three or four) of the Virgins brought from Naples were propped in a row against the dresser mirror; but there were as many others in the suitcase that the mirror had no room for. They were placed, each with a kiss, on the night table and on the windowsill.

  After the jewels, these pictures of the Virgin Mary were without question the bride’s most magnificent possessions. Printed in color, in gold and silver, framed and under glass, they were also embellished with various ornaments. The picture of the Madonna di Piedigrotta was ringed with large shells, strips of silk, rooster feathers, and colored glass, which made it look like an emblem of barbarian triumph.

  In essence, I thought, that suitcase had been surprising enough after all. But, although dazzled, I made no comments of any kind.

  Eternal Life

  Having arranged her Virgins, the bride looked at them again, all around the room, and then asked if I thought my father would let her keep one in the bedroom, at the head of the little bed in which she was to sleep. Shrugging my shoulders somewhat skeptically, I answered: “I don’t think so.” Then I said severely: