The Island of the Day Before (14 page)

He was still there when, having seen history now as a place rich in whims and incomprehensible plots for Reasons of State, he learned from Saint-Savin how treacherous was the great machine of the world, plagued by the iniquities of Chance. In a few days his adolescent dream of heroic feats was ended, and from Padre Emanuele he had learned that one should be excited by Heroic Enterprises—and that a life can be well spent not in fighting a giant but in giving too many names to a dwarf.

Leaving the convent, he accompanied Signor della Saletta, who in turn was accompanying Señor de Salazar beyond the walls. And to reach what Salazar called Puerta de Estopa, they walked along the ramparts for a while.

The two gentlemen were praising Padre Emanuele's machine, and Roberto ingenuously asked how all that knowledge could affect the destiny of a siege.

Señor de Salazar laughed. "My young friend," he said, "we are all here, serving different monarchs, in order to resolve this war as justice and honor dictate. But the days are long gone when the sword could alter the course of the stars. The time is past when gentlemen created kings; now it is kings who create gentlemen. Now all the gentlemen you can see down there," and he pointed to the Spanish tents, "and down here," and he indicated the French camps, "are engaged in this war in order to return to their natural setting, which is the court, and at court, my friend, no one competes any longer to equal the king in merit, but only to gain his favor. Today in Madrid you see gentlemen who have never drawn their sword, and they never leave the city: for to cover themselves with dust on the field of glory they would have to abandon the city to the hands of moneyed burghers and a noblesse de robe that nowadays even a monarch holds in great esteem. The warrior may abandon valor only to follow prudence."

"Prudence?" Roberto asked.

Salazar suggested he look over the plain. The two sides were engaged in listless skirmishes, and clouds of dust could be seen rising from the mouths of the tunnels where the cannonballs fell. To the northwest the imperials were pushing a mantelet: a sturdy cart, its sides armed with scythes, while the front was an oak wall reinforced with studded bars of iron. In that wall there were slits from which mortars extended, and colubrines, and arquebuses, and from the side you could see the Landsknechts barricaded inside. Bristling with muzzles in front and with blades on the flanks, chains creaking, the machine emitted occasional puffs of smoke from one of its mouths. The enemy clearly did not intend to employ it immediately, for it was a device to be brought beneath the walls when the mines had done their work; but it was equally clear that it was being displayed now to terrify the besieged.

"You see," Salazar said, "the war will be decided by machines, whether armored wagons or mine-tunnels, as may be. Some of our fine companions, on both sides, who have bared their breast to the enemy, unless they died by mistake, acted as they did not to conquer but to win a reputation to be exploited on their return to court. The most valiant among them were wise enough to choose enterprises that attracted attention, but only after they had calculated the balance between what they risked and what they stood to gain...."

"My father—" said Roberto, orphan of a hero who had calculated nothing. Salazar interrupted him. "Your father was, in fact, a man in the old style. Believe me, I mourn him; but can it still be worthwhile to perform a brave deed when people will talk more of a fine retreat than of a bold attack? Have you not observed, just now, a war machine ready to resolve the fate of a siege more swiftly than swords did in their day? And have not swords, these many years, yielded to arquebuses? We still wear a cuirass, but a pikeman could learn in a day how to pierce the cuirass of the great Bayard."

"Then what does a gentleman have left?"

"Wisdom, Signor della Griva. Success no longer has the color of the sun, but grows in the light of the moon, and no one has ever said that this second luminary was displeasing to the creator of all things. Jesus himself meditated, in the garden of Olivet, at night."

"But then he came to a decision inspired by the most heroic of virtues, and without prudence...."

"But we are not the firstborn Son of the Eternal One, we are the children of our century. When this siege ends, if a machine has not taken your life, what will you do, Signor della Griva? Will you perhaps return to your lands, where no one will give you an opportunity to prove yourself worthy of your father? After a few days of association with Parisian gentlemen, you already seem won over by their ways. You will want to try your fortune in the great city, and you well know that it is there that you must make use of that halo of bravery that your long inaction among these walls will have gained you. You too will seek your fortune, and you must be keen in obtaining it. If here you have learned to dodge a musket ball, there you must learn to elude envy, jealousy, greed, using those same weapons to combat your adversaries, namely, everyone. Hear me out. For half an hour you have been interrupting me to say what you think and, under the guise of questioning me, you would show me I am mistaken. Never do this again, especially with the powerful. Occasions will arise when confidence in your own perspicacity and the impulse to tell the truth will enable you to give sound advice to someone of higher station. Never do it. Every victory produces hatred in the vanquished, and if the victory is over one's own master, then it is foolish or harmful. Princes wish to be assisted, not outstripped. But you must be prudent also with your equals. Do not humiliate them by your merits. Never speak of yourself: either you will praise yourself, which is vanity, or you will denigrate yourself, which is stupidity. Rather, let others discover in you some venial sin, which envy can gnaw on without doing you too much harm. Be much but seem little. The ostrich never aspires to fly, and thus risk an exemplary fall: he allows the beauty of his feathers to be revealed gradually. And above all, if you have passions, never display them, however noble they may appear. Not everyone must be granted access to your heart. A prudent, cautious silence is the cabinet of wisdom."

"Sir, you are telling me that a gentleman's first duty is to learn simulation!"

Signor della Saletta intervened with a smile. "Come, my dear Roberto, Senor de Salazar is not saying the wise man must simulate. He is suggesting, if I have understood rightly, that the wise man must learn to dissimulate. It is a virtue above virtue to dissimulate virtue. Senor de Salazar is teaching you a prudent way of being virtuous, or how to be virtuous prudently. When the first man opened his eyes and discovered he was naked, he tried to conceal himself even from the sight of his Maker: so diligence in hiding was born almost when the world was born. Dissimulating means drawing a veil composed of honest shadows, which does not constitute falsehood but allows truth some respite. The rose seems beautiful because at first sight it dissimulates, pretending to be so fleeting, and although it is frequently said of mortal beauty that it seems not of this earth, it is simply a corpse dissimulated by the favor of youth. In this life it is not always best to be open-hearted, and the truths that mean most to us must always be uttered by halves. Dissimulation is not fraud. It is an effort not to show things as they are. And it is a difficult effort: when we excel, others must not recognize our excellence. If someone were to become famous for his ability to disguise himself, as actors do, all would know that he is not what he pretends to be. But concerning the true, excellent dissimulators, who have existed and exist still, we have no information."

"And note further," added Senor de Salazar, "that while you are being invited to dissimulate, you are not invited to remain dumb as a fool. On the contrary. You will learn to do with a clever word what you cannot do with open speech: to move in a world that favors appearance, and with all the rapidity of eloquence to be the weaver of words of silk. If arrows can pierce the body, words can pierce the soul. Make natural in yourself what in Padre Emanuele's machine is mechanical art."

"But, sir," Roberto said, "Padre Emanuele's machine seems to me an image of Genius, which does not aim at striking or seducing but at discovering and revealing connections between things, and therefore becoming a new instrument of truth."

"This is for philosophers. But for fools use Genius to awe, and you will earn acceptance. Men love to be awed. If your fate and your fortune are decided not on the field but in the halls of the court, a good point scored in conversation will be more fruitful than a victorious attack in battle. The prudent man with an elegant phrase extricates himself from any complication, and can use his tongue with the lightness of a feather. Most things can be paid for with words."

"You are expected at the gate, Salazar," said Saletta. And so ended for Roberto that unexpected lesson in life and wisdom. He was not edified by it, but he was grateful to his two teachers. They had explained to him many of the era's mysteries, never mentioned at La Griva.

A
S ALL HIS
illusions collapsed, Roberto fell prey to an amorous obsession.

It was now the end of June, and it was quite hot; for about ten days the first rumors had been spreading about a case of plague in the Spanish camp. Munitions were growing scarce in the city; the soldiers were being issued only fourteen ounces of black bread daily, and for a pint of wine from the Casalesi you had to pay three florins, that is to say twelve reales. Salazar from the camp and Saletta from the city had alternated visits to arrange the ransoming of officers captured by both sides in the course of combat, and the ransomed had to swear an oath not to take up arms again. There was more talk of that captain rising in the diplomatic world, Mazzarini, to whom the pope had entrusted negotiations.

Some hopes, some sorties, and the game of the reciprocal destruction of tunnels: thus the indolent siege progressed.

While waiting for the negotiations or for the relief army, the bellicose spirits grew calmer. Some Casalesi decided to go outside of the walls to harvest those fields of wheat spared by horses and wagons, heedless of the weary musket fire from the distant Spaniards. But not all were unarmed: Roberto saw a young peasant woman, tall and tawny, who at intervals interrupted her work with the sickle, crouched among the rows of grain, and raised a culiver, holding it like a veteran soldier, pressing the butt against her red cheek, to fire at the troublemakers. The Spaniards, irked by the shots of that warrior Ceres, returned fire, and a ball grazed the girl's wrist. Bleeding now, she fell back, but did not cease firing or shouting at the enemy. When she was finally almost below the walls, some Spaniards apostrophized her: "Puta de los franceses!" To which she replied, "Yes, I'm the Frenchmen's whore, but I'm not yours!"

That virginal figure, that quintessence of ripe beauty and martial fury, joined to the hint of shamelessness with which the insult had crowned her, kindled the boy's senses.

That day he combed the streets of Casale, eager to renew the vision: he questioned the peasants, learned that the girl's name according to some was Anna Maria Novarese, according to others Francesca, and in one tavern they told him she was twenty, she came from the country, and was carrying on with a French soldier. "She's a good girl, that Francesca, a very good girl," they said with a knowing leer, and to Roberto his beloved seemed all the more desirable as she was again praised in licentious tones.

A few evenings later, passing a house, he glimpsed her in a dark room on the ground floor. To enjoy the faint breeze that barely mitigated the Monferrino sultriness, she was seated at the window, in the light of an unseen lamp placed near the sill. At first he failed to recognize her because her lovely hair was wound around her head; just two locks escaped, falling over her ears. Only her face could be seen: bent slightly, a single, pure oval beaded with a few drops of sweat, it seemed the real lamp in that penumbra.

At a little low table she was occupied with some sewing, on which her intent gaze rested, so she did not notice the youth, who stepped back to peer at her from a corner, crouching against the wall. His heart pounding in his breast, Roberto noticed that her lip was shaded by blond down. Suddenly she raised a hand even more luminous than her face, to hold a length of dark thread to her mouth: placing it between her red lips, she bared her white teeth, severing it with one bite, the act of a gentle animal happily smiling in her domestic cruelty.

Roberto could have remained there all night; he barely breathed, in his fear of being discovered and in the ardor that froze him. But after a while the girl blew out the lamp, and the vision was dissolved.

He passed along that street in the days that followed, not seeing her again, save once, and even then he was not sure, because she, if it was she, sat with her head bowed, her nape bare and rosy, a cascade of hair covering her face. An older woman stood behind her, navigating through those leonine waves with a shepherdess's comb, which she sometimes laid aside to seize with her fingers a little fleeing creature, which her nails snapped with a sharp click.

Roberto, no novice to the rites of delousing, discovered however its beauty for the first time, and he imagined being able to plunge his hands into those silken waves, to kiss those furrows, being himself the destroyer of those bands of infesting myrmidons.

He had to move away from the enchantment because of the arrival of some noisy rabble in that street, and this was the last time that window offered him an amorous tableau.

On other afternoons and other evenings he saw the older woman there, and another girl, but not his. He concluded this was not her house, but the woman's, a relative, to whom she went occasionally to perform some chore. Where she was for days, he no longer knew.

An amorous yearning is a liquor that becomes stronger when decanted into a friend's ear. While he fruitlessly scoured Casale and became thin in his search, Roberto was unable to hide his condition from Saint-Savin. He revealed it out of vanity, for every lover bedecks himself with the beauty of his beloved—and of this beauty Roberto was certain.