There was no immediate counterattack, and Toiras made the mistake of considering that an error of the enemy, whereas it was calculated. Believing that the imperials were bent on sending more troops to contain that assault, Toiras goaded them with more cannonades, but the men merely fired into the city, and one ball damaged the church of Sant’Antonio, quite near staff headquarters.
Toiras was content, and ordered another group to move out from the San Giorgio bastion. Only a few companies, but they were commanded by Monsieur de la Grange, lively as a stripling despite his fifty-five years. Sword extended before him, La Grange ordered a charge against a little abandoned church, alongside which the construction of a tunnel was already far advanced; but suddenly, from behind a gulley, the main body of the enemy army appeared, having waited hours for this rendezvous.
“Betrayal!” Toiras shouted, rushing down to the gate, where he ordered La Grange to fall back.
A little later, an ensign of the Pompadour regiment brought before Toiras a boy of Casale, his wrists bound by a cord. He had been caught in a little tower near the castle, signaling with a white cloth to the besiegers. Toiras had him laid on the ground; he stuck the thumb of the boy’s right hand into the raised cock of his pistol, pointing the barrel towards the boy’s left hand. After putting his own finger on the trigger, Toiras asked, “Et alors?”
The boy quickly realized the bad turn things were taking, and began to talk: the previous evening, towards midnight, outside the church of San Domenico, a certain Captain Gambero had promised him six pistoles, three in advance, if he would do what he then had done, at the moment when the French troops moved from the San Giorgio bastion. Indeed, not having grasped the military art, the boy seemed to demand the outstanding three pistoles, as if Toiras should be pleased with his service. At a certain point he saw Roberto and started shouting that this was the notorious Gambero.
Roberto was stunned, the older Pozzo fell on the slanderous wretch and would have strangled him if some gentlemen of the staff had not restrained him. Toiras immediately pointed out that Roberto had been all night at his side and that, though he was surely a fine-looking youth, nobody could mistake him for a captain. In the meantime others had ascertained that a Captain Gambero really did exist, in the Bassiani regiment, and they haled him, kicking and shoving, into Toiras’s presence. Gambero protested his innocence, and in fact the boy prisoner did not recognize him, but Toiras prudently had the officer locked up anyway.
Capping the disorder, someone came to report that as La Grange’s troops were retreating, a man had fled from the San Giorgio bastion, reaching the Spanish lines, to be greeted with manifestations of joy. Not much could be said about him except that he was young, dressed in the Spanish style with a net over his hair. Roberto thought at once of Ferrante. But what made the deepest impression on him was the suspicion with which the French commanders looked at the Italians in Toiras’s train.
“Can one little rascal stop a whole army?” he heard his father ask, nodding towards the retiring French. “Forgive me, dear friend,” Pozzo said, addressing Toiras, “but here the idea is growing that, in our parts, we are all a bit like that rogue Gambero, or am I mistaken?” And when Toiras protested esteem and friendship, but in an absent tone, Pozzo went on: “Let it go. It seems to me everyone’s shitting his pants, and this business is more than I can take. I’ve had a bellyful of those lousy Spaniards, and if you don’t mind, I’ll knock off two or three just to show we can dance the galliard when we have to. And if we feel like it, we don’t bow down before anybody, mordioux!”
He then rode outside the gate and galloped like a fury, his sword raised, against the enemy host. He obviously didn’t mean to put them to flight, but it seemed proper to him to act on his own, just to show the others.
As proof of his courage, it was good; as a military action, very bad. A ball struck his forehead and he slumped onto the withers of his Pagnufli. A second volley rose against the rampart, and Roberto felt a violent blow to the temple, like a stone; he staggered. He had been grazed, but he freed himself from the arms of the man supporting him. Shouting his father’s name, he stood erect and glimpsed Pagnufli, bewildered, galloping with his master’s lifeless body across the empty field.
Once again Roberto thrust his fingers into his mouth and emitted his whistle; Pagnufli heard and came back towards the walls, but slowly, at a solemn little trot, so as not to unsaddle his rider, no longer imperiously pressing his flanks. The horse came in again, neighing his pavane for his dead master, returning the body to Roberto, who closed those still-wide eyes and wiped clean that face spattered with blood now clotted, while his own blood, alive, striped his cheek.
That shot may have touched a nerve. The next day, as soon as he came out of the cathedral of Sant’Evasio, where Toiras had decreed the solemn obsequies of the lord Pozzo di San Patrizio della Griva, Roberto could hardly tolerate the light of day. Perhaps his eyes were red from tears, but the fact remains that from then on, they continued to ache. Today students of the psyche would say that because his father had entered the shadows, Roberto also wanted to enter the shadows. He knew little of the psyche, but this figure of speech might have appealed to him, in the light—or in the shadows—of what happened later.
I consider that Pozzo died of punctilio, which seems superb to me, but Roberto was unable to appreciate it. All praised his father’s heroism to him; he should have borne his bereavement with pride, and here he was sobbing. Recalling how his father had told him that a gentleman must learn to bear, dry-eyed, the blows of adverse fortune, he apologized for his weakness to his parent, who could no longer call him to account, and repeated to himself that this was the first time he had been orphaned. He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.
But to give some sense to what had happened, he could not help falling back, once again, on Ferrante. Ferrante, following him closely, had sold to the enemy the secrets he knew and then shamelessly had joined the adversary’s ranks to enjoy the well-earned reward. His father, who had realized this, wanted thus to cleanse the stained escutcheon of the family, and to bathe Roberto in the glow of his own courage, to purify him of that aura of suspicion just cast on him, who was blameless. To make sure his father’s death was not in vain, Roberto owed to him the conduct that all at Casale expected of the hero’s son.
He could not do otherwise: he found himself now the legitimate lord of La Griva, heir to the family name and possessions, and Toiras no longer dared employ him for little tasks—nor could he call on him for big ones. And so, left alone to sustain his new role of illustrious orphan, Roberto found himself still more alone, lacking even the comfort of action: at the heart of a siege, released from all duties, he asked himself how he should spend his days as a besieged soldier.
CHAPTER 8, The Curious Learning of the Wits of the Day
ARRESTING FOR A moment the wave of memories, Roberto realized he had evoked his father’s death not with the pious intention of keeping open that Philoctetes’ wound, but by mere accident, as he was summoning up the specter of Ferrante, elicited by the specter of the Intruder of the Daphne. The two now appeared to him as such obvious twins that he decided to eliminate the weaker in order to overpower the stronger.
In the final analysis, he said to himself, during those days of siege did I ever have any other hint of Ferrante? No. What happened then? I was convinced of his nonexistence by Saint-Savin.
Roberto had in fact made friends with Monsieur de Saint-Savin. He had seen him again at the funeral, and had received a demonstration of affection from him. When not prey to wine, Saint-Savin was an accomplished gentleman. Small of stature, nervous, brisk, and though his face was perhaps marked by the Parisian dissipation of which he spoke, he could not have been thirty.
He apologized for his excesses at that supper: not for what he had said, but for his
