The Island of the Day Before (48 page)

"Colbert, no one could be so mad as to take me for a fool. So our man is playing a game, convinced that he holds winning cards."

"In what sense?"

"For example, suppose he boarded that ship and immediately discovered what he was to have learned, so he no longer needed to stay there."

"But if he had wanted to betray us, he would have gone to the Spanish or to the Dutch. He would not have come here to challenge us. And to ask what of us, after all? Money? He knew quite well that if he acted loyally, he could have had even a place at court."

"Obviously he is convinced he has discovered a secret worth more than a place at court. Believe me, he knows men. We can only lead him on. I will see him this evening."

Mazarin received Ferrante while with his own hands he was putting the final touches to a table he had laid for his guests, a triumph of things that seemed to be other things. On the board, wicks glowed, protruding from goblets of ice, and bottles in which the wine was of unexpected colors stood among baskets of lettuces garlanded with artificial flowers and fruits artificially aromatic.

Mazarin, who believed that Roberto, that is to say Ferrante, was in possession of a secret from which he wanted to derive great profit, had determined to make a show of knowing everything (everything, in short, that he did not know) to induce the rogue to let some hint escape him.

On the other hand, Ferrante—when he found himself in the Cardinal's presence—had already guessed that Roberto was in possession of a secret from which great profit could be derived, and he had determined to make a show of knowing everything (everything, in short, that he did not know) to induce the Cardinal to let some hint escape him.

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to this puzzle. What a beautiful story, Roberto said to himself as he sought the thread of the skein that he had twisted.

"Signor di San Patrizio," Mazarin said as he moved a dish of live crayfish that seemed cooked closer to another dish of cooked crayfish that seemed alive, "a week ago we put you on board the
Amaryllis
in Amsterdam. You cannot have abandoned your mission: you were well aware you would pay for that with your life. Therefore you must have already discovered what you were sent to discover."

Ferrante, confronted with this dilemma, saw that it was not in his interest to confess having abandoned the mission. So there was only one course open to him. "If it please Your Eminence," he said, "in a sense I have learned what Your Eminence wanted me to learn," and he added to himself: "And meanwhile I have learned that the secret is on board a ship named the
Amaryllis,
and that it sailed from Amsterdam a week ago...."

"Come, sir, do not be modest. I know very well that you now know more than I was expecting. After your departure I received other information, for you surely do not imagine you are the only agent I have. Thus I know that what you have found is of great value, and I am not here to haggle. I cannot help wondering, however, why you chose to come back to me in such a tortuous way." And at the same time he indicated to the servants where they should set some meats in wooden forms shaped like fish, on which he had them pour not broth but julep.

Ferrante was more and more convinced that the secret was priceless, but he told himself it is easy to kill a bird in flight if it flies in a straight line, but not if it constantly changes direction. Therefore he took his time, sounding out the adversary: "Your Eminence knows the prize at stake required tortuous means."

"Ah, you rascal," Mazarin said to himself, "you are not sure what your discovery is worth and you are waiting for me to set the price. But you must be the one to speak first." To the center of the table he shifted some sorbets so confected that they seemed peaches still clinging to their bough, then he spoke: "I know what you have. You know that you can bring it only to me. Do you think it a good idea to pass white off as black and black as white?"

"Ah, you damned fox," Ferrante muttered under his breath, "you do not in the least know what I should know, and the trouble is that I do not know it either." Then he also spoke: "Your Eminence knows well that sometimes the truth can have the essence of bitterness."

"Knowledge never harms."

"But sometimes it hurts."

"Hurt me, then. I will not be more hurt than when I learned you had stained your honor with treason. I should have left you in the hands of the executioner."

Ferrante finally realized that in playing the part of Roberto, he risked ending on the gallows. Better to reveal himself for what he was, and risk at most a beating from a lackey.

"Your Eminence," he said, "I have made the mistake of not telling you the truth at once. Monsieur Colbert took me for Roberto de la Grive, and his error has perhaps also misled even a gaze as acute as that of Your Eminence. But I am not Roberto, I am only his natural brother, Ferrante. I presented myself to offer some information I thought would interest Your Eminence, since Your Eminence was the first to mention to the late and never to be forgotten Cardinal the plot of the English, as Your Eminence knows ... the Powder of Sympathy and the problem of longitude...:"

At these words Mazarin made a gesture of pique, almost knocking over a tureen of fake gold decorated with jewels exquisitely simulated in glass. He blamed a servant, then murmured to Colbert: "Put this man back where he was."

It is quite true that the gods blind those they wish to destroy. Ferrante thought to arouse interest by revealing that he knew the most private secrets of the late Cardinal, and exaggerating in his sycophantic pride, he tried to show himself better informed than his deceased master. But no one had yet told Mazarin (and it would have been difficult to prove it to him) that there had been commerce between Ferrante and Richelieu. Mazarin found himself facing someone, whether Roberto or another, who not only knew what he had said to Roberto but also what he had written to Richelieu. From whom had he learned this?

When Ferrante was led away, Colbert said, "Does Your Eminence believe what that man said? If he were a twin, all would be explained. Roberto would still be at sea, and—"

"No, if this man is Roberto's brother, the case is even more inexplicable. How has he come to know what was known first only to me, you, and our English informer, and then to Roberto de la Grive?"

"His brother must have told him."

"No, his brother learned everything from us only that evening, and afterwards he was never out of someone's sight, until the ship set sail. No, no, this man knows too many things he should not know."

"What shall we do with him?"

"Interesting question, Colbert. If he is Roberto, he knows what he has seen on that ship and he must speak. If he is not, we must absolutely discover where he obtained his information. In either case, excluding the very thought of haling him before a judge, where he would say too much and in the presence of too many people, we cannot simply make him disappear with a few inches of steel in his back: he still has much to tell us. If he is not Roberto but, as he says, Ferrand or Fernand..."

"Ferrante, I believe."

"No matter. If he is not Roberto, who is behind him? Not even the Bastille is a secure place. People are known to have sent messages from there and received them. We must wait till he speaks, and find the way to open his mouth, but in the meantime we should shut him up somewhere unknown to all, and make sure no one finds out who he is."

And it was at this point that Colbert had a darkly luminous idea.

A few days before, a French vessel had captured a pirate ship off the coast of Brittany. It was, by strange coincidence, a Dutch fluyt with the name, naturally unpronounceable, of
Tweede Daphne,
that is to say,
Daphne the Second,
a sign—Mazarin remarked—that somewhere there must be a
Daphne the First,
which showed how those Protestants lacked not only faith but also imagination. The crew was made up of people of every race. The only thing to do was hang them all, but it was worth investigating whether or not they were in the hire of England and from whom they had seized the ship, which might then be advantageously bartered with its legitimate owners.

So it was decided to moor the ship not far from the Seine estuary, in a little half-hidden bay that escaped the notice even of the pilgrims for Santiago who, coming from Flanders, passed a short distance away. On a tongue of land that enclosed the bay there was an old fortress which had once served as a prison but was now more or less abandoned. And there the pirates were cast into dungeons, guarded by only three men.

"Enough," Mazarin said. "Take ten of my guards, put them under the command of a good captain not without prudence...."

"Biscarat. He has always done things well, from the days when he duelled with the musketeers over the Cardinal's honor...."

"Perfect. Have the prisoner taken to the fort and put him in the guard room. Biscarat will eat his meals with the prisoner in that room and accompany him if he is taken out for air. A guard at the door of the room also, at night. Time in confinement weakens even the most stubborn spirit; our obstinate spy will have only Biscarat to speak to, and he may let some confidence slip. And, above all, no one must recognize him, either during the trip or at the fort...."

"If he goes out for air..."

"Come, Colbert ... where's your inventive spirit? Cover his face."

"Might I suggest ... an iron mask closed with a lock, the key thrown into the sea?"

"Come now, Colbert, are we in the Land of Romances? Last night we saw those Italian players wearing leather masks with long noses that alter their features yet leave the mouth free. Find one of those, put it on him in such a way that he cannot remove it, and give him a mirror in his cell, so he can die of shame day by day. He chose to mask himself as his brother, did he not? Then let him be masked as Polichinelle! And remember: from here to the fort, a closed carriage, stopping only at night and in open country, no showing himself at the post-stations. If anyone asks questions, a lady high degree is being escorted to the frontier, a conspirator against the Cardinal."

Ferrante, embarrassed by his burlesque disguise, now had been staring for days (through a grating that allowed scant light into his room) at a gray amphitheater surrounded by bleak dunes, with the
Tweede Daphne
riding at anchor in the bay.

He controlled himself when he was in Biscarat's presence, letting the captain believe sometimes he was Roberto, sometimes Ferrante, so that the reports sent to Mazarin were always puzzling. He managed to overhear, in passing, some conversation among the guards, and had learned that in the dungeons of the fort a band of pirates lay in chains.

Wanting to take revenge on Roberto for a wrong he had not inflicted, Ferrante racked his brain for a way to encourage a revolt, to free those rogues, seize the ship, and set out on Roberto's trail. He knew where to begin: in Amsterdam he would find spies who could tell him something of the destination of the
Amaryllis.
He would overtake it, would discover Roberto's secret, rid himself of that tedious double in the sea, and then he would be able to sell something to the Cardinal at a high price.

Or perhaps not. Once he discovered the secret, he might decide to sell it to others. But why sell it, indeed? For all he knew, Roberto's secret could involve the map of a treasure island, or else the secret of the Alumbrados and the Rosy-Cross, of which people had been talking for twenty years. He would exploit the revelation to his own advantage, would no longer have to spy for a master, would have spies in his own service. Wealth and power gained, not only would he possess the ancient name of his family, but the Lady would be his as well.

To be sure, Ferrante, steeped in rancor, was not capable of true love, but—Roberto told himself—there are people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard love talked about. Perhaps, in his cell, Ferrante finds a love story, reads it, and convinces himself he is in love as a way of feeling himself elsewhere.

Perhaps She, in the course of that first encounter, gave Ferrante her comb as a pledge of love. Now Ferrante is kissing it, and as he kisses it, he is wrecked, oblivious, in the gulf whose waves the ivory prow had fended.

Perhaps—who knows?—even such a scoundrel could succumb to the memory of that face.... Roberto now saw Ferrante seated in the darkness at the mirror that reflected only the candle set before it. Contemplating two little flames, one aping the other, the eye stares, the mind is infatuated, visions rise. Shifting his head slightly, Ferrante sees Lilia, her face of virgin wax, so bathed in light that it absorbs every other ray and causes her blond hair to flow like a dark mass wound in a spindle behind her back, her bosom just visible beneath a delicate dress, its neck cut low....

Then Ferrante (at last! Roberto exulted) sought to gain too much from the vanity of a dream, and set himself, insatiable, before the mirror, and saw behind the reflected candle only the disfiguring black snout.

An animal unable to bear the loss of an undeserved gift, he resumed touching her comb; but now, in the smoking of the candle-end, that object (which for Roberto would have been the most adorable of relics) seemed to Ferrante a toothy mouth ready to bite his dejection.

A
T THE IDEA
of Ferrante shut up on that island looking at a
Tweede Daphne
he would never reach, separated from the Lady, Roberto felt, and we must allow it, a reprehensible but comprehensible satisfaction, not unconnected with a certain satisfaction as narrator, since—with fine antimetabole—he had managed to seal up also his adversary in a siege spectacularly dissimilar to his own.

You from that island of yours, with your leather mask, will never reach the ship. I, on the contrary, from my ship, with my mask of glass, am now on the verge of reaching my Island. Thus he spoke (to him, to himself) as he prepared to attempt once more his journey by water.