Here he is at evening, meditating on this new contradiction. Before, when he could not even hope to reach it, the Island seemed always within reach. Now, as he was learning the art that would take him there, the Island was receding.
Indeed, as he sees it distant not only in space but also (backwards) in time, from this moment on, whenever he mentions that distance, Roberto seems to confuse space and time, and he writes, “The bay, alas, is too yesterday,” and, “How hard it is to arrive over there which is so early,” or else, “How much sea separates me from the day barely ended,” and even, “Threatening rainclouds are coming from the Island, whereas today it is already clear….”
But if the Island moves ever farther away, is it still worth the effort to learn to reach it? Over the next few days Roberto abandons all attempts at swimming, while he renews his search with the spyglass for the Orange Dove.
He sees parrots among the leaves, he distinguishes fruits, from dawn to sunset he follows the quickening and the extinction of different colors in the foliage, but he does not see the Dove. Once more he is tempted to think that Father Caspar lied to him, or that he was a victim of a Jesuitical joke. At times he is convinced that even Father Caspar never existed—since he finds no trace of his presence on the ship. He no longer believes in the Dove, but neither does he believe now that on the Island there is the Specula. He finds this a source of consolation, because, he tells himself, it would have been irreverent to corrupt the purity of that place with a machine. And he thinks once more of an Island made to his measure, or, rather, to the measure of his dreams.
If the island rose in the past, it was the place he had to reach at all costs.
In that unhinged time he was not to find but to invent the condition of the First Man. Not the site of a fountain of eternal youth but itself a fountain, the Island could be the place where every human creature, forgetting his own melancholy learning, would find, like a child abandoned in a forest, that a new language could be born from a new contact with creation. And with it would rise a new and the only genuine science, from the direct experience of Nature, with no adulteration by philosophy (as if the Island were not father transmitting to son the words of the Law, but, rather, mother teaching him to stammer his first names).
Only thus could a reborn castaway discover the rules that govern the course of celestial bodies and the meaning of the acrostics they trace in the sky: not flailing among Almagests and Quadripartites but directly reading the approach of eclipses, the passage of the argyrocomate meteors, and the phases of the stars. Only a nose bleeding because struck by a falling fruit would really allow him to understand, at one blow, both the laws that draw the grave to gravity and de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. Only after observing the surface of a pond and poking it with a twig, reed, or one of those long and rigid metallic leaves, would the new Narcissus—without any dioptric or sciatherical computing—grasp the alternating skirmish of light and shadow. And perhaps he would be able to understand why the earth is an opaque mirror that swabs with ink what it reflects, and water a wall that makes diaphanous the shadows imprinted on it, whereas images in the air never find a surface from which to rebound, and so penetrate it, fleeing to the farthest limits of the aether, only to return sometimes in the form of mirages and other ostents.
But was possession of the Island not possession of Lilia? And then what? Roberto’s logic was not that of those recreant, caitiff philosophers, intruders into the atrium of the lyceum, who affirm always that a thing, if it is seen in one form, cannot also be of the opposite form. By an error of the errant imagination characteristic of lovers, Roberto already knew that the possession of Lilia would be, at once, the source of every revelation. To discover the laws of the universe through a spyglass seemed to him only the longest way to arrive at a truth that would be revealed to him in the deafening light of pleasure, if it were granted him to lay his head on the lap of his beloved, in a Garden in which every shrub was the Tree of Good.
But since—as even we should know—to desire something that is distant summons the spirit of someone who will steal it from us, Roberto had to fear that into the delights of that Eden a serpent had also crept. He was then gripped by the idea that on the Island the quicker one, the usurper, Ferrante, was awaiting him.
CHAPTER 28, Of the Origin of Novels
LOVERS LOVE THEIR misfortunes more than their blessings. Roberto could think of himself only as separated forever from the one he loved, but the more he felt separated from her, the more he was obsessed by the thought that some other man might not be.
We have seen how, accused by Mazarin of having been somewhere he was not, Roberto got it into his head that Ferrante was present in Paris and had on some occasions taken his place. If this was true, then while Roberto was arrested by the Cardinal and conducted on board the Amaryllis, Ferrante remained in Paris, and for everyone (including Her!) he was Roberto. Now Roberto had only to think of Her at the side of Ferrante, and lo, his marine Purgatory was transformed into a Hell.
He knew that jealousy is generated outside of any reference to what is, is not, or perhaps will never be; that it is a transport that from an imagined sickness derives real pain; that the jealous man is like a hypochondriac who sickens for fear of being sick. Beware, then, of allowing yourself to be caught by this tormenting gossip that obliges you to picture Her with a Him, and remember: Nothing more than solitude encourages suspicion, nothing more than daydreaming transforms suspicion into certainty. However, he added, as I am unable to avoid loving, I cannot avoid jealousy, and unable to avoid jealousy, I cannot avoid daydreaming.
In fact jealousy, among all fears, is the least generous: if you fear death, you can take comfort in the thought that you may nevertheless enjoy a long life or that in the course of a voyage you may find the fountain of eternal youth; or if you are penniless, you may take comfort in the thought of discovering a treasure. For every feared thing there is an opposing hope that encourages us. Not so when you love in the absence of the beloved. Absence is to love as wind to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
If jealousy is born from intense love, he who does not feel jealousy of the beloved is not a lover, or he loves lightheartedly, for we know of lovers who, fearing their love will fade, nourish it by finding reasons for jealousy at all costs.
The jealous man (who still wants his beloved to be chaste and faithful) can only think of her as worthy of jealousy, and therefore capable of betrayal, and thus he rekindles in present suffering the pleasure of absent love. Also because your imagining yourself in possession of the distant beloved—well aware it is not true—cannot render the thought of her, her warmth, her blushes, her scent, as vivid as the thought of those same gifts being enjoyed by an Other. Of your absence you are sure, but of the presence of the enemy you are if not sure then at least unsure. The amorous contact imagined by the jealous man is the only way he can picture with verisimilitude the beloved’s connubiality, which, if doubtful, is at least possible, whereas his own is impossible.
Hence the jealous man is not able, nor does he have the will, to imagine the opposite of what he fears, indeed he cannot feel joy except in the magnification of his own sorrow, and by suffering through the magnified enjoyment from which he knows he is banned. The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell—in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
Thus Roberto, suffering but remembering that infinity of worlds which he had discussed in previous days, had an idea or, rather, an Idea, a great and anamorphic stroke of genius.
He thought, namely, that he might construct a story, of which he was surely not the protagonist, inasmuch as it would not take place in this world but in a Land of Romances, and this story’s events would unfold parallel to those of the world in which he was, the two sets of adventures never meeting and overlapping.
What would Roberto gain by this? Much. By inventing the story of another world, which existed only in his mind, he would become that world’s master, able to ensure that the things that happened there would not exceed his capacity of endurance. On the other hand, as reader of the story whose author he was, he could share in the
