“Ferrante!” he cried.
“In person, my dear brother. I, who—as you were struggling like a dog or a frog—found my ship again on the far side of the Island, and sailed through my long Thursday towards Jerusalem, found the other Judas on the verge of betraying, hanged him from a fig tree, preventing him from handing over the Son of Man to the Sons of Darkness, entered the Garden of Olives with my men and abducted Our Lord, stealing Him from Calvary! And now you, I, all of us are living in a world that has never been redeemed!”
“But Christ? Where is Christ now?”
“Do you then not know that the ancient texts already said there are doves the color of flame because the Lord, before being crucified, wore a scarlet tunic? Have you not yet understood? For one thousand six hundred and ten years Christ has been prisoner on the Island, whence He tries to escape in the form of an Orange Dove, but is unable to abandon that place, where next to the Specula Melitensis I have left Judas’s scapular, and where it is therefore forever the same day. Now all I have to do is kill you, and live free in a world where remorse is banned, Hell is certain for all, and where one day I shall be crowned the new Lucifer!” And he drew a dirk, took a step towards Roberto to commit his final crime.
“No!” Roberto shouted. “I will not allow it! I will kill you and free Christ. I can still wield my sword, and it was to me, not to you, that my father taught his secrets!”
“I have had only one father, one mother: your festered mind,” Ferrante said with a sad smile. “You taught me only to hate. Do you think you have given me a great gift, giving me life so that in your Land of Romances I could embody Suspicion? As long as you are alive, thinking for me what I must think, I will never cease to despise myself. So whether you kill me or I kill you, the end is the same. En garde!”
“Forgive me, my brother,” Roberto cried. “Yes, let us fight. It is fitting that one of us die.”
What did Roberto want? To die, to set Ferrante free by making him die? Prevent Ferrante from preventing the Redemption? We will never know, for he did not know the answer himself. But this is the way of dreams.
They climbed up on deck. Roberto hunted for his weapon and found it reduced (as we will recall) to a stump; but he shouted that God would give him strength, and a good swordsman can fight even with a broken blade.
The two brothers confronted each other for the first time, to begin their last conflict.
The heavens were ready to abet the fratricide. A reddish cloud suddenly cast between ship and sky a bloody shadow as if, up above, they had slaughtered the Horses of the Sun. A great concert of thunder and lightning erupted, followed by a downpour, and sky and sea deafened the duellers, dazzling their vision, striking their hands with icy water.
But the two darted here and there among the thunderbolts that rained around them, attacking each other with blows and side cuts, suddenly falling back, clutching a hawser, almost flying to avoid a thrust, hurling abuse, cadencing every attack with a cry, among the equal cries of the wind howling around them.
On that slippery deck Roberto was fighting so that Christ could be nailed to the Cross, and he invoked divine aid; Ferrante, to prevent Christ’s suffering, invoked the names of all the devils.
Called to assist him was Astaroth, as the Intruder (now intruding also into the plans of Providence) offered himself involuntarily to the coup de la mouette. Or perhaps this is what he wished, to conclude that dream that had neither beginning nor end.
Roberto pretended to fall, the other rushed to finish him off; Roberto, leaning on his right hand, thrust the broken sword at his opponent’s chest. He did not spring up with the agility of Saint-Savin, but Ferrante at this point had accumulated too much impetus and could not avoid being stuck, or, rather, impaling himself at his sternum on the stump of the blade. Roberto choked on the blood that poured from the mouth of his enemy, in death.
He tasted blood in his mouth, and probably in his delirium he had bitten his tongue. Now he was swimming in that blood, which spread from the ship to the Island; he did not want to advance for fear of the Stone Fish, but he had completed only the first part of his mission, Christ was waiting on the Island to shed His blood, and Roberto was now His sole Messiah.
What was he doing now in his dream? With Ferrante’s dirk he had begun tearing a sail into long strips, which he then knotted together with the help of ropes. On the lower deck he had captured, using thongs, the hardiest of the cranes or storks or whatever they might be, and he was now binding them by their legs, as coursers, to that flying carpet of his.
With his aerial ship he rose in flight towards the now attainable land. Under the Specula Melitensis he found the scapular and destroyed it. Having restored space to time, he saw descending upon him the Dove, which finally, ecstatic, he saw in all its glory. But it was natural—or, rather, supernatural—that the bird now should appear to him not orange but white. Yet it could not be a dove, for the dove is not suited to represent the Second Person of the Trinity; it was perhaps a Pious Pelican, as the Son must be. Roberto could not clearly see what bird was offered him as sweet topsail for that winged vessel.
He only knew that he was flying upwards, and images followed one another as the mad phantoms would have it. They were now navigating in the direction of all the innumerable and infinite worlds, to every planet, to every star, so that on each, as if in a single moment, the Redemption would be achieved.
The first planet they reached was the pure moon, on a night illuminated by the earth’s midday. And the earth hung on the line of the horizon, an enormous looming boundless polenta of cornmeal still cooking in the sky and almost falling upon him, gurgling with fevered and feverish fevery ferocity in boiling boils on the boil, plop ploppity plop. The fact is that when you have the fever, you become polenta, and the lights you see all come from the boiling of your head.
And there on the moon, with the Dove…
We will not have looked for coherence and verisimilitude, I trust, in all I have narrated thus far, because we have been describing the nightmare of a man poisoned by a Stone Fish. But what I am preparing to narrate surpasses all our expectations. The mind or the heart of Roberto, or in any case his vis imaginativa, was ordering a sacrilegious metamorphosis: on the moon he now saw himself not with the Lord but with the Lady, Lilia finally recovered from Ferrante. Roberto, by the lakes of Selene, was receiving what his brother had stolen from him among the ponds of the island of fountains. He kissed her face with his eyes, contemplated her with his mouth, sucked, bit again and again, and the enamoured tongues jested, jousting.
Only then did Roberto, whose fever was perhaps abating, come to, but remaining fond of what he had experienced, as happens after a dream departs, leaving not only the spirit affected but also the body.
He did not know whether to weep with happiness at his regained love, or to weep with remorse for having turned—thanks to the fever, which ignores the Laws of Genre—his Sacred Epic into a Libertine Comedy.
That moment, he told himself, will truly gain me Hell, for I am surely no better than Judas or Ferrante—indeed, I am only Ferrante and till now I have simply exploited his wickedness in order to dream of doing what my cowardice has always kept me from doing.
Perhaps I shall not be called to answer for my sin, because it is not I who sinned, but the Stone Fish that made me dream in its own way. However, if I have arrived at such mindlessness, it must be a sign that I am truly about to die. I had to wait for the Stone Fish to make me think of death, whereas this thought should be the first duty of every good Christian.
Why have I never thought of death, and of the wrath of a laughing God? Because I was following the teachings of my philosophers, for whom death is a natural necessity and God is He who into the disorder of atoms introduced the Law that composes them in the harmony of the Cosmos. Could such a God, master of geometry, produce the disorder of Hell, even if out of justice, and could He laugh at the subverting of every subversion?
No, God does not laugh, Roberto said to himself. He bows to the Law that He Himself willed, the Law that wills the body to decay, as mine is surely decaying in this decadence. And Roberto saw the worms near his mouth, but they were not an effect of his delirium; amid the filth of the hens, they had formed through spontaneous generation, descendants of that excrement.
He
