The Island of the Day Before (18 page)

The Spanish vanguards had behaved well, but now the main body of the army was entering the city, and the Casalesi had to deal with bullies who requisitioned everything, raped the women, clubbed the men, and treated themselves to the pleasures of city life after months in the woods and fields. Equally distributed among conquerors, conquered, and those shut up in the citadel: the plague.

On September 25th there was a rumor that Spinola had died. Rejoicing in the citadel and bewilderment among the conquerors, orphaned, too, like Roberto. These were days more colorless than those on the
Daphne,
until October 22nd when the relief army was announced, already at Asti. The Spanish started arming the castle, and lining up cannons on the banks of the Po, not respecting (while Toiras cursed) the agreement that at the army's arrival they were to abandon Casale. The Spanish, through the words of Senor de Salazar, recalled that the agreement set the 15th of October as the final date; if anything it was the French who should have relinquished the citadel a week since.

On October 24th, from the ramparts of the citadel great movements of enemy forces were observed; Toiras prepared to support the arriving French with his cannons. In the next few days the Spanish began to load their baggage onto river barges to ship it to Alessandria, and to those in the citadel this seemed a good sign. Then the enemies on the river began also constructing boat bridges to prepare for the retreat. To Toiras this looked so inelegant that he began firing his cannons on them. Out of pique, the Spanish arrested all the French still to be found in the city, and why there were any left, I confess I have no idea, but this is what Roberto reports, and at this point, where that siege is concerned, I am ready to believe anything.

The French were near, and it was known that Mazzarini, acting on the Pope's orders, was doing everything possible to prevent the clash. The captain moved from one army to the other, he returned to confer in Padre Emanuele's convent, rode off again to carry counterproposals to this side and that. Roberto saw him only and always from a distance, covered with dust, doffing his hat abundantly to all. Both sides meanwhile were blocked, because the first to move would be checkmated. Roberto even wondered if by chance the relief army was not an invention of young Mazzarini, who was making besieged and besiegers dream the same dream.

In fact since June a meeting of the imperial electors had been in session at Ratisbon, and France had sent her ambassadors there, including Père Joseph. And, as they shared out cities and regions, an agreement on Casale was reached as early as October 13th. Mazzarini learned of it quite quickly, as Padre Emanuele said to Roberto, and it was only a matter of convincing both those who were arriving and those who were waiting for them. The Spanish had received abundant news, but each despatch contradicted the others; the French knew something, too, but they feared Richelieu was not in agreement—and, for that matter, he was not, but from those days on, the future cardinal Mazarin studied how to make things go his way and behind the back of the man who would later become his patron.

This is how things stood when on October 26th the two armies found themselves face-to-face. To the east, along the hills towards Frassineto, the French army was deployed; opposite, with the river to the left, in the plain between the walls and the hills, was the Spanish army, which Toiras was cannonading from behind.

A line of enemy wagons was coming from the city; Toiras assembled what little cavalry he had left and sent it outside the walls to stop them. Roberto had begged to take part in this action, but permission was not granted. Now he felt as if on the bridge of a ship from which he could not go ashore, watching a vast stretch of sea and the mountains of an Island denied him.

Firing was suddenly heard, perhaps the two vanguards were coming to grips: Toiras had decided on a sortie to engage the men of His Catholic Majesty on two fronts. The troops were about to emerge from the walls, when Roberto, from the bastions, saw a black rider, heedless of the first bullets, galloping between the two armies just along the line of fire, waving a paper and shouting, as those present later recalled, "Peace! Peace!"

It was Captain Mazzarini. In the course of his last pilgrimages between one shore and the other, he had convinced the Spanish to accept the agreements of Ratisbon. The war was over. Casale remained with Nevers, the French and Spanish pledged to leave it. While the ranks were breaking up, Roberto leaped onto the trusty Pagnufli and sped to the scene of the failed conflict. He saw gentlemen in gilded armor exchanging elaborate salutes, formalities, and dance-steps as some little makeshift tables were being set up for the signing of the treaties.

The next day departures began, first the Spanish and then the French, but with confusion, casual encounters, exchanges of gifts, offers of friendship, while in the city corpses of the plague victims rotted in the sun, widows sobbed, some burghers found themselves enriched with both ready money and the French disease, having lain with no women save their wives.

Roberto tried to find his peasants again. But of La Griva's army there was no word. Some must have died of the plague, others were simply missing. Roberto thought they had gone home, and from them his mother had probably learned of her husband's death. He asked himself if he should not be close to her at this moment, but he no longer understood where his duty lay.

It is hard to say if his faith had been shaken most by the infinitely small and infinitely big worlds, in a void without God and without rule, that Saint-Savin had made him glimpse, or by the lessons of prudence from Saletta and Salazar, or by the art of Heroic Devices that Padre Emanuele bequeathed him as the sole science.

From the way he recalls it on the
Daphne
I tend to believe that at Casale, while he lost both his father and himself in a war of too many meanings and of no meaning at all, Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond which there was no longer an Author; or if there was, He seemed lost in the remaking of Himself from too many perspectives.

If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of perimeters, here he felt himself truly in the most extreme and most lost of peripheries; because, if there was a center, it lay before him, and he was its immobile satellite.

W
HY, THE READER
may ask, have I been speaking, for a hundred pages at least, of so many events that preceded Roberto's being wrecked on the
Daphne,
while on the
Daphne
itself I have made nothing happen. But if the days on board a deserted ship are empty, I cannot be held responsible, for it is not yet certain this story is worth transcribing, nor can Roberto be blamed. At most we can reproach him for having spent a day (what with one thing and another, it is barely thirty hours since he discovered the theft of his eggs) suppressing the thought of the one possibility that might have given his sojourn more flavor. As would soon be clear to him, it was a mistake to consider the
Daphne
too innocent. On that vessel there was someone or something, roaming or lurking in ambush, and not Roberto alone. Not even on that ship could a siege be conceived in its pure state. The enemy was inside the gates.

Roberto should have suspected it the very night of his cartographical embrace. Coming to, he felt thirsty, the pitcher was empty, so he went off to seek a keg of water. Those he had set out to collect rain were heavy, but there were smaller ones, in the larder. He went there, seized the closest to hand —on later reflection, he conceded that it was too close to hand—and, once in his cabin, he set it on the table, putting his mouth to the bung.

It was not water and, coughing, he realized that the keg contained aqua vitae. He did not know what kind, but good country boy that he was, he could tell it was not made from wine or juniper. He did not find the beverage unpleasant, and with sudden merriment he indulged to excess. It did not occur to him that if the kegs in the larder were all like this one, he should be worrying about his supply of drinking water. Nor did he ask himself why on the second evening he had drawn from the first keg of his store and found it filled with fresh water. Only later was he convinced that Someone had placed, afterwards, that insidious gift where he would grab it at once. Someone who wanted him in a state of intoxication, to have him in his power. But if this was the plan, Roberto followed it with excessive enthusiasm. I do not believe he drank much, but for a catechumen of his kind, a few glasses were already too many.

From the tale that follows we deduce that Roberto experienced the successive events in an unnatural state, and he would be in that state also during the days to come.

As is normal with the intoxicated, he fell asleep, but was tortured by an even greater thirst. In this thick sleep a last image of Casale returned to his mind. Before leaving, he had gone to say good-bye to Padre Emanuele and had found him in the process of dismantling and crating his poetic telescope, to return to Turin. But, having left Padre Emanuele, he encountered the wagons on which the Spanish and the imperials were piling the pieces of their obsidional machines.

It was those cogged wheels that peopled his dream: he heard a creaking of rusty locks, a scraping of hinges, and they were sounds that this time could not have been produced by a wind, since the sea was smooth as oil. Irritated, like those who, waking, dream they are dreaming, he forced himself to open his eyes and heard again that sound, which came from the lower deck or from the hold.

Rising, he felt a terrible headache. To treat it he could think of nothing better than to avail himself again of the keg, and when he left it, he was worse off than before. He armed himself, failing several times before he succeeded in thrusting his knife into its sheath, made numerous signs of the Cross, and staggered below.

Beneath him, as he already knew, was the tiller. He went farther down, to the end of the steps: if he turned towards the prow, he would enter the garden. Astern there was a closed door that he had never breached. From that place now came, very loud, a ticking, multiple and unsynchronized, like a superimposition of many rhythms, among which he could distinguish a tick-tick and a tock-tock and a tack-tack, but the general impression was of a tickety-tock-tackety-tick. It was as if beyond that door there was a legion of wasps and hornets, and all were flying furiously along different trajectories, slamming against the walls and ricocheting one into another. So he was afraid to open the door, fearing he might be struck by the crazed atoms of that hive.

After much hesitation, he made up his mind. He used the butt of his musket, broke the lock, and entered.

The storeroom received light from another gun-port, and it contained clocks.

Clocks. Water clocks, sand clocks, solar clocks propped against the walls, but especially mechanical clocks arrayed on various shelves and chests, clocks moved by the slow descent of weights and counterweights, by wheels that bit into other wheels, as those bit into still others, until the last wheel nipped the two unequal blades of a vertical staff, causing it to make two half-revolutions in opposing directions, its indecent wiggle moving, as balance, a horizontal bar fixed at its upper extremity. Spring clocks, too, where a fluted conoid played out a chain drawn by the circular movement of a little barrel that devoured it link by link.

Some of the clocks concealed their works behind rusted ornament and corroded chasing, displaying only the slow movement of their hands; but the majority exhibited their gnashing hardware, and recalled those dances of Death where the only living things are grinning skeletons that shake the scythe of Time.

All these machines were active, the largest hourglasses still gulping sand, the smaller now almost filled in their lower part, and for the rest a grinding of teeth, an asthmatic chewing.

To anyone entering for the first time, this place must have seemed to go on to infinity: the far wall of the little room was covered by a canvas that depicted a suite of rooms inhabited only by other clocks. But even after overcoming that spell, and considering only the clocks present, so to speak, in flesh and blood, there was enough to stun.

It may seem incredible—to you who read this with detachment—but imagine a castaway, amid the fumes of aqua vitae, on an uninhabited vessel, finding a hundred clocks almost all in unison telling the tale of his interminable time; he must think of the tale before thinking of its author. And this is what Roberto did as he examined those toys one by one, those playthings for the senile adolescence of a man sentenced to a very long death.

The thunder of Heaven came afterwards, as Roberto writes, when emerging from that nightmare he bowed to the necessity of discovering a cause for it: the clocks were functioning, thus someone must have set them in motion, even if their winding had been designed to last a long time. And if they had been wound before his arrival, he would have heard them already, passing by that door.

If it had been a single mechanism, he could have thought that it had been somehow set and needed only a starting tap; this tap could have been provided by a movement of the ship, or else by a sea bird entering through the gun-port and lighting on a lever, on a crank, initiating a sequence of mechanical actions. And does not a strong wind sometimes stir church bells, and has it not happened that bolts have snapped backwards when not pushed forward to their full length?

But a bird cannot in one blow wind dozens of clocks. No. Ferrante may or may not have once existed, but on the ship an Intruder did exist.

He had entered this room and had wound the mechanisms. Why he had done so was the first but less urgent question. The second was where had he then taken refuge.

So it was necessary to descend into the hold. Roberto told himself he now could no longer postpone it, though in reasserting his firm proposal, he further delayed its execution. He realized he was not entirely himself; he climbed up on deck to bathe his head in rainwater, and with a clearer mind set to pondering the identity of the Intruder.