Thinking of the Lady and of her distance, which the day before he had compared to the insuperable distance to the land westward, he looked once more at the Island, of which the spyglass revealed to him only wan and circumscribed hints, yet like those images seen in convex mirrors, which, reflecting a single side of a small room, suggest a spherical cosmos, infinite and stupefying.
How would the Island seem to him if he were to reach it one day? To judge by the landscape he saw from his vantage-point, and by the specimens which he had found on the ship, was it perhaps the Eden where milk and honey flow in streams, amid abundant trophies of fruit and flocks of meek animals? What more, in those islands of the opposing south, were the brave men seeking as they navigated there, defying the tempests of an illusory pacific ocean? Was this not what the Cardinal had wanted, in despatching him on a mission to discover the secret of the Amaryllis: the possibility of taking the lilies of France to a Terra Incognita that would finally renew the offerings of a vale untainted by the sin of Babel or by the Flood or by Adam’s Fall?
The human beings there must be loyal, dark of skin but pure of heart, caring nothing for the mountains of gold and the balms of which they were the heedless custodians.
But if this was so, would he not be repeating the error of the first sinner if he chose to violate the virginity of the Island? Perhaps Providence had rightly wanted him to be a chaste witness to a beauty that he should never disturb. Was this not the manifestation of the most perfect love, such as he professed to his Lady, loving from afar, renouncing the pride of dominion? Is aspiration to conquest love? If the Island were to be one with the object of his love, he owed the same nicety to it that he had shown to her.
The same frenzied jealousy he had felt every time he feared another’s eye threatened that sanctuary of reluctance was not to be interpreted as a claim to any right of his own, no, it was a denial of rights to anyone, a duty his love imposed on him, the guardian of that Graal. And to that same chastity he must feel bound with regard to the Island: the more he wished it to be rich in promises, the less he should want to touch it. Far from the Lady, far from the Island, he should only speak of them, wanting them immaculate as long as they could keep themselves immaculate, touched only by the caress of the elements. If there was beauty somewhere, its purpose was to remain purposeless.
Was the Island he saw really like that? Who was encouraging him to decipher the hieroglyph in this way? It was known that from the time of the first voyages to these islands, situated vaguely on the maps, mutineers were abandoned there, and the islands became prisons with bars of air, in which the condemned were their own jailers, punishing one another reciprocally. Not to arrive there, not to discover the secret, was, more than a duty, a right, a reprieve from endless horrors.
Or perhaps not. The only reality of the Island was that in its center stood, tempting in delicate hues, the Tree of Oblivion, whose fruit, if Roberto ate it, could give him peace.
To disremember. So he spent the day, apparently slothful but highly energetic in his effort to become tabula rasa. And, as happens to those who set themselves to forgetting, the more effort he made, the more his memory was fired.
He tried to put into practice all the suggestions he had formerly heard. He imagined himself in a room crammed with objects that reminded him of something: his Lady’s veil, the pages where he had made her image present through his laments on her absence, the contents of the palace where he met her; and he pictured himself throwing all those things out of the window, until the room (and, with it, his mind) became bare and empty. He made immense efforts, dragging to the windowsill crockery, tapestries, cupboards, chairs, and panoplies, but—contrary to what he had been told—as he gradually wore himself out in this labor, the figure of the Lady was multiplied, and from different corners she followed him in his spasms with a sly smile.
Thus, passing the day in dragging furniture, he forgot nothing. Quite the opposite. These were days when he thought of his own past, his eyes staring at the one scene he had before him, that of the Daphne, and the Daphne was transformed into a Theater of Memory, as such theaters were conceived in his day, where every feature recalled to him an episode, remote or recent, in his story: the bowsprit, his arrival after the wreck, when he realized he would never see his beloved again; the furled sails, his long hours of staring at them and dreaming of her lost, lost; the gallery, from which he explored the distant Island, and Her distance…. But he had dedicated to her so many meditations that, as long as he remained there, every corner of that seagoing house would remind him, moment by moment, of everything he wanted to forget.
He realized this truth as he came out on deck to seek distraction in the wind. This was his forest, where he went as unhappy lovers go into forests; here was his invented nature, plants planed by the shipwrights of Antwerp, rivers of rough canvas in the wind, tarred caverns, astrolabe-stars. And as a lover, revisiting a place, recognizes the beloved in every flower, in every rustling of leaves, every path, here, now, he could die of love, caressing the mouth of a cannon….
Did poets not celebrate their lady, praising her lips of ruby, her eyes of coal, her breasts of marble, her heart of diamond? Then he, too—locked in that mine of now-fossil firs—would have only mineral passions, hawsers beringed with knots would seem to him her locks, shining bosses her forgotten eyes, the sequence of eaves her teeth dripping scented saliva, a creaking capstan her neck adorned with necklaces of hemp, and he would find peace in the illusion that he had loved the work of a master of automata.
Then he regretted his hardness in imagining her hardness; he told himself that in petrifying her features he was petrifying his desire—which, on the contrary, he wanted living and unsatisfied—and, as evening fell, he turned his eyes to the broad conch of the sky dotted with undecipherable constellations. Only in contemplating celestial bodies could he think the celestial thoughts proper to one who, by celestial decree, was sentenced to love the most celestial of human creatures.
The queen of the forest, who in snowy dress whitens the woods and silvers the countryside, had not yet appeared above the peak of the Island, covered in mourning. The rest of the sky was ablaze and visible, and, at its southwestern extremity, almost level with the sea beyond the greater land, he discerned a clot of stars that Dr. Byrd had taught him to recognize: it was the Southern Cross. And, in the words of a forgotten poet, some of whose verses his Carmelite tutor had made him memorize, Roberto recalled a vision that had fascinated his childhood, that of a pilgrim in the realms of the Beyond who, emerging into that same Terra Incognita, saw those four stars, never glimpsed before unless by the first (and last) inhabitants of the Earthly Paradise.
CHAPTER 11, The Art of Prudence
WAS HE SEEING them because he had truly been shipwrecked at the edge of the Garden of Eden, or was it because he had emerged from the belly of the ship as from a hellish funnel? Both perhaps. That shipwreck, restoring him to the spectacle of another nature, had rescued him from the Hell of the World which he had entered, losing the illusions of boyhood, in the Casale days.
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
