They must be made to understand that with Savoy or with the Spanish they would lose their freedom and Casale would no longer be a capital but simply another ordinary fortress, like Susa, which Savoy is ready to sell for a handful of gold pieces. In any case we will improvise: after all, this is an Italian comedy. Yesterday I went out with four hundred men towards Frassineto, where the imperials are concentrating, and they retreated. But while I was engaged down there, some Neapolitans encamped on that hill, in precisely the opposite direction. I had them battered by the artillery for a few hours and I believe there was a fine slaughter, but they haven’t cleared out. So who won the day? I swear by our Lord I don’t know, and neither does Spinola. But I know what we’ll do tomorrow. You see those hovels in the plain? If they were ours, we would have many enemy positions within range.
A spy tells me they are empty, and this report gives me good reason to fear that men are hiding there—my dear young Lord Roberto, don’t look so outraged. Learn this prime rule: a good commander wins a battle by using informers well, and this second rule: an informer, since he is a traitor, is prompt to betray those who pay him to betray. In any case, tomorrow our infantry will go and occupy those houses. Rather than keep the troops inside the walls to rot, better to expose them to fire, which is good training.
Don’t be impatient, Lord Roberto, it is not yet your turn; but the day after tomorrow, Bassiani’s regiment must cross the Po. You see those walls over there? They are part of a little outwork the local men began before the enemy arrived. My officers don’t agree, but I believe it is best to occupy it before the imperials do. We must keep them within range on the plain, in order to harass them and impede the construction of the tunnels. In short, there will be glory for all. Now let us go to supper. The siege has only begun and provisions are still plentiful. It will be a while before we start eating the rats.”
CHAPTER 3, The Serraglio of Wonders
TO SURVIVE THE siege of Casale, where, as it turned out, he had not been reduced to eating rats, only to arrive on the Daphne, where perhaps the rats would eat him…. Timorously meditating on this nice contrast, Roberto was finally prepared to explore those places from which, the evening before, he had heard vague noises.
He decided to descend from the quarterdeck and, if all proved to be as it had been on the Amaryllis, he knew he would find a dozen cannons on the two sides, and the pallets or hammocks of the crew. From the helmsman’s room he reached the space below, divided by the tiller, which shifted with a slow creaking, and he should have been able to leave immediately by the door that opened into the lower deck. But, as if to gain familiarity with those deeper areas before facing his unknown enemy, he lowered himself further, through a trapdoor, into a space where on another ship there would have been more stores.
Instead he found a room organized with great economy, paillasses for a dozen men. So the larger part of the crew slept down here, as if the rest of the space had been reserved for other functions. The pallets were all in perfeet order. If there had been an epidemic, when the first men died, the survivors would surely have tidied up systematically. But, come to think of it, who could say whether all the sailors had died, or even any of them? And once again that thought failed to reassure him: a plague killing an entire crew is a natural event, sometimes providential, according to certain theologians; but an event that causes the crew to flee, leaving the ship in this state of unnatural order, might be far more worrisome.
Perhaps the explanation was to be found on the lower deck; he had to muster his courage. Roberto climbed back up and opened the door leading to the feared place.
He learned now the purpose of those vast gratings that perforated the main deck. Thanks to them, this lower deck had been transformed into a kind of nave, illuminated through the hatches by the full daylight that fell obliquely, intersecting the light that came from the gun-ports, colored by the reflection, now ambered, of the cannons.
At first Roberto perceived only shafts of sunlight, in which infinite corpuscles could be observed swirling, and as he saw them, he could not help but recall (and how he indulges himself with this play of learned memories, to dazzle his Lady, rather than confine himself to bald narration) the words with which the Canon of Digne invited him to observe the cascades of light that spread through the darkness of a cathedral, stirring within themselves a multitude of monads, seeds, indissoluble natures, drops of incense that exploded spontaneously, primordial atoms engaged in combat, battles, skirmishes by squadrons, amid numberless conjunctions and separations—obvious proof of the composition of this universe of ours, made of nothing but prime bodies teeming in the void.
Immediately thereafter, as if to confirm the fact that all creation is the work only of that dance of atoms, he had the impression of being in a garden, and he realized that from the moment he entered this place, he had been assailed by a host of odors, far stronger than those that had come to him earlier, from the shore.
A garden, an indoor orchard, is what the men from the Daphne had created in this space, to carry home flowers and plants from the islands they were exploring. The gratings allowed the sun, the winds, and the rains to keep the vegetation alive. Whether the vessel would have been able to preserve its sylvan booty through months of voyaging, or whether the first storm would have poisoned all with salt, Roberto could not say, but surely the mere fact that these plants were still alive indicated that the store, like the food, had been only recently collected.
Flowers, shrubs, saplings had been brought here with their roots and earth, and set in baskets and makeshift cases. But many of the containers had rotted; the earth had spilled out to create, from one container to the next, a layer of damp humus, where the shoots of some plants were already taking root. It was like being in an Eden sprouting from the very planks of the Daphne.
The light was not so strong as to trouble Roberto’s eyes, but strong enough to heighten the colors of the foliage and make the first flowers open. Roberto’s gaze rested on two leaves that had at first seemed like the tail of a crayfish, from which white jujubes blossomed, then on another pale-green leaf where a sort of half-flower was emerging from a clump of ivory lilies.
A disgusting stench drew him to a yellow ear into which a little corncob seemed to have been thrust, while near it hung festoons of porcelain shells, snowy, pink-tipped, and from another bunch hung some trumpets or upturned bells with a faint odor of borage. He saw a lemoncolored flower which, as the days passed, would reveal to him its mutability, for it would turn apricot in the afternoon and a deep red at sunset, as others, saffron in the center, faded then to lilial white.
He discovered some rough fruits that he would not have dared touch, if one of them, falling to the ground and splitting open in its ripeness, had not revealed a garnet interior. He ventured to taste others, and judged them more with the tongue that speaks than with the tongue that tastes, since he defines one as a bag of honey, manna congealed in the fertility of its stem, an emerald jewel brimming with tiny rubies. Now, reading between the lines, I would venture to suggest he had discovered something very like a fig.
None of those flowers or those fruits was known to him; each seemed generated by the fancy of a painter who had wanted to violate the laws of nature and invent convincing absurdities, riven delights and sapid falsehoods: such as that corolla covered with a whitish fuzz that blossomed into a tuft of violet feathers, but no, it was a faded primrose that extruded an obscene appendage, or a mask that covered a hoary visage with goat’s beards. Who could have conceived this bush, its leaves dark green on one side, with wild red-yellow decorations, and the other side flaming, surrounded by other leaves of the most tender pea-green, of meaty consistency, conch-shaped to hold the water of the latest rain?
Overwhelmed by the spell of the place, Roberto did not reflect on the residue of rain that the leaves were holding, though it surely had not rained for at least three days. The perfumes that stunned him led him to consider any enchantment natural.
It seemed to him natural that a flaccid, drooping fruit should smell like a fermented cheese, and that a sort of purplish pomegranate with a hole at the bottom, when shaken, should give off a faint rattle as a seed danced about inside it, as if this were not a flower at all but a child’s toy; nor was he amazed by a cusp-shaped blossom, hard and round at the base. Roberto had never seen a weeping palm, like a willow,
