The Island of the Day Before (4 page)

Any man who in youth witnesses something of this sort cannot but remain marked by it for the rest of his life, and we shall soon see how Roberto's destiny was sealed by his attraction towards the attractive power of powders and unguents.

This, however, is not the episode that left the greatest mark on Roberto's boyhood. There is another, though properly speaking it is not an episode; it is more like a refrain, of which the boy preserved a suspect memory. It seems that his father, who was surely fond of his son even if he treated him with the taciturn roughness characteristic of the men of those lands, sometimes—and precisely in the first five years of Roberto's life—would lift him from the ground and shout proudly: "You are my firstborn!" Nothing strange, to be sure, beyond the venial sin of redundance, since Roberto was an only child. But, as he grew up, Roberto began to remember (or convinced himself that he remembered) how, at these outbursts of paternal joy, his mother's face would assume an expression of pleasure mingled with uneasiness, as if the father did well to say those words, though their repetition stirred in her an anxiety never completely eased. Roberto's imagination had long leaped and danced around the tone of that exclamation, concluding that his father did not utter it as if it were an assertion of the obvious but, rather, as an odd investiture, underlining the
you,
as if to say, "You, and not another, are my firstborn son."

Not another, or not
that
other? In Roberto's letters there appears always some reference to an Other, who haunts him; and the idea seems to have been born in him during those very years, when he became convinced (and what else could a little boy brood over, isolated as he was among bat-infested turrets, vineyards, lizards and horses, awkward in dealing with the big peasant boys his age, his unequal peers, a boy who when he was not listening to the fairy tales of his grandmother listened to those of the Carmelite?), convinced that somewhere an unrecognized brother was at large, who must have been of an evil nature, as their father had repudiated him. Roberto was at first too little and then too modest to wonder if this brother was his on his father's side or on his mother's (in either case one of his parents would have been living under the cloud of an ancient, unpardonable sin): a brother in some way (perhaps supernaturally) guilty of the rejection he had suffered, and because of it he surely hated him, Roberto, the favorite.

The shadow of this enemy brother (whom he would have liked to know, all the same, in order to love him and be loved) had troubled his nights as a boy; later, in adolescence, he leafed through old volumes in the library, hoping to find hidden there—what?—a portrait, a certificate from the curate, a revelatory confession. He wandered through the garrets, opening old chests full of great-grandparents' clothes, rusted medals, a Moorish dagger; and he lingered to question, with puzzled fingers, embroidered dresses that had certainly clad an infant, but whether that was years or centuries ago, there was no knowing.

Gradually he had also come to give this lost brother a name, Ferrante, and had begun attributing to him the little crimes of which he himself was wrongfully accused, like the theft of a cake or the improper liberation of a dog from his chain. Ferrante, privileged by his banishment, acted behind Roberto's back, and Roberto in turn hid behind Ferrante. Indeed, little by little the habit of blaming the nonexistent brother for what he, Roberto, could not have done, became transformed into the habit of inculpating him with what Roberto had done, and of which he repented.

It was not that Roberto told others a lie: rather, with a lump in his throat, silently assuming the punishment for his own misdeeds, he managed to convince himself of his innocence and to feel the victim of an injustice.

Once, for example, to try out a new axe that the smith had just delivered to him, also partly out of spite for some abuse or other that he felt he had endured, Roberto chopped down a little fruit tree that his father had only recently planted with great hopes for future seasons. When Roberto realized the gravity of his foolishness, he imagined atrocious consequences: being sold to the Turks, at the very least, so they could set him rowing for life in their galleys. He was preparing to attempt flight, ready to end his life as an outlaw in the hills. Seeking a justification, he quickly persuaded himself that the person who had cut down the tree was Ferrante.

But, discovering the crime, his father assembled all the boys of the estate and said that, to avert his indiscriminate wrath, the guilty party would be wise to confess. Roberto felt mercifully generous: if he blamed Ferrante, the poor boy would suffer another repudiation; and after all the unhappy child misbehaved as if to confirm his orphaned abandonment, offended as he was by the sight of his parents smothering another in caresses.... Roberto took a step forward and, trembling with fear and pride, declared that he wanted no one else to be blamed in his stead. This statement, though it was not a confession, was taken for one. Twisting his moustache and looking at the boy's mother, the father said, harshly clearing his throat several times, that to be sure the crime was very serious, and punishment was inevitable, but he could not help but appreciate that the young "master of La Griva" had honored the family tradition and this was how a gentleman should always act, even if he was only eight years old. Then he announced that Roberto would not be allowed to participate in the mid-August visit to his cousins at San Salvatore, which was a grievous punishment (at San Salvatore there was Quirino, a vintner who could hoist Roberto to the top of a dizzyingly tall fig tree), but less grievous, certainly, than the galleys of the Sultan.

To us the story seems simple: the father, proud to have an offspring who does not lie, looks at the mother with ill-concealed contentment and administers a mild punishment to save face. But Roberto then embroidered this event at length, arriving at the conclusion that his father and mother had no doubt guessed the culprit was Ferrante, had appreciated the fraternal heroism of their preferred son, and had felt relieved not to have to bare the family secret.

Perhaps it is I who am embroidering, from meager clues, but the presence of the absent brother will have its importance in our story. We will find traces of this puerile game in the behavior of the adult Roberto—or at least of Roberto at the moment we find him on the
Daphne,
in a plight that, to tell the truth, would have ensnared anyone.

But I digress; we have still to establish how Roberto arrived at the siege of Casale. And here we must give fantasy free rein and imagine how it might have happened.

It took time for news to reach La Griva, but for at least two years they had known that the succession to the dukedom of Mantua was causing the Monferrato region much trouble, and a bit of a siege had already taken place. To be brief (and this is a story that others have already told, though in a fashion even more fragmentary than mine): in December of 1627 the duke Vincenzo II of Mantua is dying, and around the deathbed of the old rake who has been unable to produce sons there is a ballet of four claimants, with their agents and their protectors. The victor is the marquis of Saint-Charmont, who manages to convince Vincenzo that the inheritance should go to a cousin in the French line, Charles de Gonzaga, duke of Nevers. Old Vincenzo, between one dying gasp and the next, forces or allows Nevers to marry in great haste his niece Maria Gonzaga, then he dies, leaving his new nephew the dukedom.

Now Nevers was French, and the duchy he was inheriting comprised also the march of Monferrato with Casale, its capital, the most important fortress in Northern Italy. Situated as it was, between Spanish Milan and the lands of the Savoys, Monferrato controlled the upper course of the Po, the passes between the Alps and the south, the road from Milan to Genoa, and it acted as a cushion between France and Spain; for neither of the two powers could trust that other cushion-state, the duchy of Savoy, where Charles Emmanuel I was playing a game that it would have been kind to call duplicitous. If Monferrato went to Nevers, practically speaking it would go to Richelieu; so Spain obviously preferred someone else inherit, say, the duke of Guastalla, ignoring the fact that the duke of Savoy also had some claim to the succession. But since a will existed, and it designated Nevers, the other pretenders could only hope that the germanic Holy Roman Emperor, whose feudatory the duke of Mantua formally was, would refuse to ratify the succession.

But the Spanish were impatient and, while all were waiting for the Emperor to come to a decision, Casale had already been besieged once by Gonzalo de Córdoba and now, for the second time, an imposing army of Spaniards and imperials commanded by Spinola was surrounding it. The French garrison was preparing to resist, expecting a French army to come to its aid, but that army was still engaged in the north, and only God knew if it would arrive at Casale in time.

This was more or less the situation when old Pozzo, in mid-April, assembled before the castle the younger men of his household and the most keen of his peasants, and distributed the arms in his possession; then he called Roberto and to all made this speech, which he must have spent the whole night rehearsing: "Now listen to me, the lot of you. This land of ours, La Griva, has always paid tribute to the lord of Monferrato, who for quite a while has also been, practically speaking, the duke of Mantua. Now the duke is this Nevers, and if anybody comes and tells me that Nevers is not a Mantuan or a Monferrino, I'll kick his backside, because you're nothing but a bunch of ignoramuses, incapable of understanding these things, so best you keep your mouths shut and leave everything to your master, who at least knows what honor is. For most of you, I know, honor is not worth spitting on, but let me tell you something: if the imperials enter Casale—they are not men with scruples—your vineyards will go to hell and as for your women, better not think about it. So we are off to defend Casale. I am not forcing anybody. If there is some lazy, lily-livered lout who does not agree with me, he should speak up right now, and I will have him hanged from that oak." None of those present could yet have seen the etchings of Callot with clumps of people like these hanging from other oaks, but there must have been something in the air: they all raised their weapons, muskets or pikes or simple poles with a sickle tied to the top, and they yelled, "Viva Casale, down with the imperials." In one voice.

"My son," Pozzo said to Roberto as they were riding over the hills, their little army following them on foot, "that Nevers isn't worth one of my balls, and old Vincenzo, when he passed on the dukedom, not only had a limp prick but a limp brain as well. But he gave it to Nevers and not to that blockhead Guastalla, and the Pozzos have been vassals of the legitimate lords of Monferrato since the beginning of time. So we're going to Casale and, if we have to, we'll get ourselves killed because, God damn it, you can't stick with somebody when things go well and then drop him when he's up to his neck in the muck. But if we manage not to get ourselves killed, all the better. So keep your eyes open."

The journey of those volunteers, from the border of the Alessandria country to Casale, was surely one of the longest in recorded history. Old Pozzo's reasoning was in itself exemplary: "I know Spaniards," he said, "they're people who like to take their time. They'll head for Casale by way of the plains to the south, where wagons and cannons and various contraptions can pass more easily. So if we turn west, just before Mirabello, and follow the road through the hills, we'll take a day or two longer, but we'll get there without running into trouble, and we'll still be ahead of the Spaniards."

Unfortunately, Spinola had more tortuous ideas about the preparation of a siege and, when he was to the southeast of Casale, he began by ordering the occupation of Valenza and Occimiano; several weeks previously he had sent the duke of Lerma, Ottavio Sforza, and the count of Gemburg to the west of the city, with about seven thousand foot-soldiers, to try to take immediately the castles of Rosignano, Pontestura, and San Giorgio, thinking to block any possible support that might come from the French army, as, scissor-like, from the north, crossing the Po and heading south, the governor of Alessandria, Don Geronimo Augustin, was advancing with another five thousand men. And all were deployed along the path that Pozzo believed to be felicitously deserted. Nor, when our gentleman learned as much from some peasant, could he change his route, for to the east, by now, there were more imperials than to the west.

Pozzo said simply: "We'll stick to our plan. I know these parts better than they do, and we'll slip past like weasels." Which meant altering the plan considerably. And they even encountered the French from Pontestura, who meanwhile had surrendered and, on condition that they did not return to Casale, had been allowed to proceed towards Finale, where they could set out for France by sea. The Griva men came upon them around Otteglia, and they were close to firing, each side believing that the other was an enemy; from their commander Pozzo learned that, among the terms of the surrender, it was established that the Pontestura wheat should be sold to the Spanish, who would send the money to the people of Casale.

"The Spaniards are gentlemen, my son," Pozzo said, "and it's a pleasure to fight against such people. Luckily we are no longer living back in the times when Charlemagne fought the Moors, who, when they were at war, it was all killing here, there, and yonder. These new wars are between Christians, thank God! Now that they have their hands full at Rosignano, we'll pass behind them, slip between Rosignano and Pontestura, and we'll be at Casale in three days."

Having spoken these words at the end of April, Pozzo with his men arrived in sight of Casale on the 24th of May. It was—at least in Roberto's recollection—a fine journey, as they always abandoned roads and trails to cut across the fields. Makes no difference, Pozzo said, in wartime everything goes to hell anyway, and if we don't ruin the crops, the others will. In their concern to survive they had a high old time in vineyards, orchards, and chicken-runs. Why not? Pozzo said, this was Monferrato land and it should nourish its defenders. When a Mombello peasant objected, Pozzo had the men give him thirty lashes, saying that if you don't maintain a bit of discipline, it's the other side that wins the war.