The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
Replacing air with water, organ pipes emitted not sounds but liquefied breaths, and others were like candelabra, water enacting fire, where flames burning in the center of the column cast lights on the foam rising on all sides.
Another seemed a peacock, crested, with a broad tail opened, for which the sky supplied the colors. Not to mention fountains that looked like stands to support a wig and were adorned with flowing locks. In one, a sunflower opened in a single dew. Another had the face of the sun itself, finely sculpted, with a series of nozzles around its circumference, so that the celestial body emitted not rays but coolness.
On one a cylinder rotated, ejaculating water from a series of spiral furrows. There were fountains with the mouths of lions or tigers, with gryphon's maw and serpent's tongue, and one was a female weeping from her eyes and her teats. And for the rest it was all a vomiting of fauns, a purling of winged creatures, a whispering of swans, a showering from Nile elephants' trunks, a spilling of alabaster vessels, an emptying of cornucopias.
Visions that for Roberto—on closer study—were a fall from the frying-pan into the fire.
Meanwhile in the vale the now-sated lovers had only to reach out and accept from a leafy vine the gift of its treasures, and a fig, as if wishing to weep tenderly over the spied-on union, distilled tears of honey, while on an almond tree bejewelled with blossoms lamented the Orange Dove....
Then Roberto woke, soaked with sweat.
"What?" he said to himself reproachfully. "I succumbed to the temptation to live through Ferrante, and now I realize that it is Ferrante who has lived through me, that as I was moping, he was truly experiencing what I permitted him to experience!"
To cool his anger, and to have visions that—these, at least—were denied Ferrante, he again set out early in the morning, rope around his loins and Persona Vitrea on his face, towards his world of coral.
CHAPTER 36
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying
REACHING THE EDGE of the reef, Roberto swam with his face submerged among those endless loggias, but he was unable to admire the animated rocks serenely because a Medusa had transformed him into inanimate stone. In his dream he had seen the looks Lilia bestowed on the usurper; and if in the dream those looks had enflamed him, now in waking memory they froze him.
Roberto wanted to regain possession of his Lilia; he swam, thrusting his face down as far as possible, as if that embrace with the sea could award him the prize that in his dream he had awarded Ferrante. It did not require a great effort, on the part of his spirit trained to form concepts, to imagine Lilia in every undulant cadence of that submerged park, to see her lips in every flower, where he would lose himself like a greedy bee. In transparent greenery he found again the veil that had covered her face on the first nights, and he stretched out his hand to raise that screen.
In this intoxication of his reason, he regretted that his eyes could not rove as freely as his heart wished, and among the corals he sought his beloved's bracelet, her snood, the bangle that beguiled the lobe of her ear, the sumptuous necklaces that adorned her swan-like neck.
Lost in his search, he allowed himself at one point to be attracted by a jewel that appeared to him in a crevass; he removed his mask, arched his back, raised his legs vigorously, and forced himself towards the sea bed. The thrust was excessive, he tried to grasp the edge of a shelf; just before closing his fingers around a crusted rock, he seemed to see a fat and sleepy eye open. At that same instant he remembered Dr. Byrd had spoken to him of a Stone Fish that lurks among the coral caverns to surprise any living creature with the venom of its scales.
Too late. His hand had rested on the Thing and an intense pain shot through his arm to his shoulder. With a twist of his trunk he managed miraculously not to end up with his face and chest on top of the Monster, but to arrest his momentum he had to strike it with the mask. In the impact the mask shattered, but he had to let go of it anyway. Pressing his feet against the rock below, he pushed himself up to the surface while in the space of a few seconds he saw the Persona Vitrea sink out of sight.
His right hand and his entire forearm were swollen, his shoulder numb; he was afraid he might faint; he found the rope and with great effort gradually succeeded in pulling it, a little at a time, with one hand. He climbed the ladder, much as he had on the night of his arrival, not knowing how, and, as on that night, he slumped to the deck.
But now the sun was already high. His teeth chattering, Roberto recalled Dr. Byrd telling him that after an encounter with the Stone Fish most humans were doomed; a few did survive, but no one knew an antidote against that suffering. Though his eyes were clouded, he tried to examine the wound—it was no more than a scratch, but it must have been enough to allow the mortal substance to penetrate his veins. He lost consciousness.
When he woke, his fever was raging and he felt an intense thirst. He realized that on this edge of the ship, exposed to the elements, far from food and drink, he would not last long. He crawled below and reached the partition between the stores and the chicken pen. He drank greedily from a keg of water, but he felt his stomach contract. He fainted again, his face in his own vomit.
During a night racked by fierce dreams, he attributed his sufferings to Ferrante, whom he now confused with the Stone Fish. Why did Ferrante want to block his way to the Island and to the Dove? Was this why he had set out in pursuit of Roberto?
He could see himself lying there and looking at another self seated opposite him, beside a stove, dressed in a house robe, trying to decide if the hands he touched and the body he felt were his. He, who saw the other, felt his clothes on fire. Then, while the other was clothed, he was naked—but he no longer knew which of the two was awake and which asleep, and he thought that both were surely figures produced by his mind. No, not he, because he thought, and therefore he was.
The other (but which?) at a certain point stood up, but he had to be the Evil Genius who was transforming Roberto's world into dream, for already he was no longer himself but Father Caspar. "You've come back!" Roberto murmured, holding out his arms. But the priest did not answer or move. He looked at him. It was surely Father Caspar, but as if the sea—giving him up—had cleansed and rejuvenated him. His beard was trimmed, his face plump and roseate like Padre Emanuele's, his habit unwrinkled and neat. Then, still motionless, like an actor declaiming, and in impeccable language, a skilled orator, he said with a grim smile: "It is useless for you to defend yourself. Now the whole world has a single destination, and it is Hell."
He went on in a loud voice, as if speaking from the pulpit of a church: "Yes, Hell, of which you know little, you and all those who along with you are proceeding with light foot and mad spirit! Did you believe that in Hell you would find swords, daggers, wheels, razors, streams of sulphur, potions of molten lead, frozen waters, cauldrons and grates, saws and clubs, awls to gouge out eyes, pincers to pull teeth, combs to rip open flanks, chains to pound the bones, animals that gnaw, hooks that pull, thongs that choke, racks, crosses, goads, and axes? No! Those are merciless torments, true, but such as the human mind can still conceive, as we have also conceived bronze bulls, seats of iron, and sharpened reeds to push under fingernails.... You hoped Hell was a reef made up of Stone Fish. No, the torments of Hell are something different, because they are born not from our finite mind but from the infinite mind of a wrathful and vindictive God, forced to display His fury and show that as His mercy was great in absolution, no less great is His justice in punishment! They must be such torments that in them we can see the gulf between our impotence and His omnipotence!"
"In this world," that messenger of penance continued, "you are used to seeing that for every ill a remedy is found, that there is no wound without its balm, no venom without its theriac. But you must not think it is the same in Hell. Burns there, it is true, are highly troublesome, but there is no liniment that soothes them; thirst sears, but there is no water to slake it; hunger is rabid, but no food allays it; unendurable is the shame, but no cover can co
The old man paused, extended his arms, his hands turned towards Heaven, as he muttered in a whisper, as if to confide a tremendous secret that should never go beyond that nave. "Suffering that never ends? Does that mean we shall suffer until a little goldfinch, drinking one drop every year, succeeds in draining all the world's seas? No, longer. In saecula. Shall we suffer until a plant louse, taking one bite every year, has devoured every forest? No, longer. In saecula. Will we suffer, then, until an ant, taking one step every year, has circled the entire earth? No, longer. In saecula. And if all this Universe were desert and once every century a single grain were taken from it, would we perhaps end our suffering when the Universe was empty? Not even then. In saecula. Assume that a damned soul, after millions of centuries, can shed only two tears, will we then continue suffering until his weeping has sufficed to form a flood greater than that which in ancient times destroyed the human race? Come now, enough of this, we are not children! If you want me to say it, then: In saecula, in saecula must the damned suffer, in saecula, which means centuries without number, without end, without measure."
Now Father Caspar's face seemed that of the Carmelite at La Griva. He raised his eyes as if to find in Heaven a sole hope of mercy. "But what of God," he said with the voice of a penitent worthy of compassion, "yes, what of God? Does He not suffer at the sight of our sufferings? Will He not feel a pang of concern, in the end will He not reveal Himself, so we can be consoled at least by His weeping? Alas, ye innocent! God, unfortunately, will show Himself, but you still cannot imagine how! When we raise our eyes, we will see that He (must I say it?)...we will see that He, having become for us a Nero, not in injustice but in severity, will not console us or succor us or sympathize with us, but, rather, He will laugh with inconceivable delight! Imagine what ravings must then seize us! We burn—we will say—and God laughs? We burn, and God laughs? Oh, most cruel God! Why do You not torture us with Your thunderbolts, rather than insult us with Your laughter? Redouble, merciless One, our flames, but do not rejoice in them! Ah, Your laughter for us is more bitter than our tears! Ah, Your joy to us is more grievous than our woes! Why does our Hell not have chasms where we can flee the countenance of a God that laughs? Too long have we been deceived by those who told us that our punishment would be the sight of the face of a scornful God. A laughing God, we should have been told, a laughing God.... Rather than see and hear that laughter we would have the mountains collapse on our heads, or the earth disappear beneath our feet; but no, in our misfortune we shall see what pains us, and be blind and deaf to everything except to what we wish to be blind and deaf!"
Roberto smelled the sour odor of the chicken feed in the gaps of the planks, and from outside came the mewing of the sea birds, which he had mistaken for the laughter of God.
"But why Hell for me?" he asked. "And why for all? Was it not to keep it only for a few that Christ redeemed us?"
Father Caspar laughed like the God of the damned. "Why, when did He redeem you? On what planet, in what universe do you think you are living now?"
He took Roberto's hand, raising him violently from where he lay, and dragged him through the maze of the Daphne as the sick man felt a gnawing at his intestine, and it was as if his head housed only foliot clocks. Clocks, he thought: time, death....
Caspar dragged him into a room he had never discovered, its walls white; there Roberto saw a closed catafalque with a circular eye on one side. Before the eye, on a grooved runner, was inserted a little wooden strip fitted with several eyes, all the same size, framing pieces of opaque glass. As the strip was moved along the groove, the eyes could be aligned serially with the eye of the box. Roberto recalled having once seen in Provence a smaller version of this machine that, it was said, could bring light to life thanks to shadows.
Father Caspar opened the side of the box, allowing a glimpse of a great lamp on a tripod; on the side opposite the spout the lamp had, not a handle, but a round, specially curved mirror. When the lamp's wick was lit, the mirror projected the luminous rays into a pipe, a short spyglass whose terminal lens was that external eye. From here (as soon as Caspar had closed the box again) the rays passed through the glass of the strip, broadening in a cone and casting on the wall some colored images, which to Roberto seemed truly alive, so vivid and precise were they.
The first figure represented a man with a demon's face chained to a rock in the midst of the sea, lashed by the waves. Roberto could not tear his eyes from that apparition, he blended it with those that followed (as Father Caspar caused them to appear, sliding the strip of wood) and composed them all—dream within dream—without distinguishing what was being said to him from what he was seeing.
A ship was approaching the rock, and he recognized it as the Tweede Daphne; from it Ferrante descended, now freeing the chained man. All was clear. In the course of his voyaging, Ferrante had found Judas—as the legend assures us he was to be found—imprisoned upon the open sea, to expiate his betrayal.
"Thank you," Judas said to Ferrante—but to Roberto the voice surely came from the lips of Caspar. "From the time I was bound here until the ninth hour today I have hoped to be able yet to atone for my sin....I thank you, brother...."
"You have been here only a day, or even less?" Ferrante said. "But your sin was committed in the thirty-third year after the birth of Our Lord, and therefore one thousand six hundred and ten years ago...."
"Ah, simple mind," Judas replied, "it is surely one thousand six hundred and ten of your years since I was set on this rock, but it is not yet and never will be one day for me. You do not know that, entering the sea that surrounds this island of mine, you penetrated another world that flows alongside and within yours, and here the sun moves around the earth like a tortoise whose every step is slower than the one before. So in this my world, at the beginning my day lasted two of yours, and then three, and so on, more and more, until now, after one thousand six hundred and ten of your years, I am still and always at the ninth hour. And soon time will be even slower, and then slower still, and I will live always at the ninth hour of the year thirty-three after that night in Bethlehem...."
"But why?" Ferrante asked.
"Why, because God has willed that my punishment consist in living always on Good Friday, to celebrate always and every day the Passion of the man I betrayed. The first day of my suffering, when for other human beings sunset approached, and then night, and then the dawn of Saturday, for me only an atom of an atom of a minute of the ninth hour of that Friday had gone by. As the course of my sun began to move even more slowly, for the rest of you Christ was rising from the dead, but I was still barely a step from that hour. And now, when centuries and centuries have passed for you, I am still only a crumb of time from that instant...."
"But still this sun of yours moves, and the day will come, even if after ten thousand years and more, when you will enter your Saturday."
"Yes, and then it will be worse. I will have left my Purgatory to enter my Hell. My grief at the death I caused will not cease, but I will have lost the possibility, which still remains to me, of making what happened not happen."
"But how?"
"You do not know that not far from here runs the antipodal meridian. Beyond that line, both in your world and in mine, lies the day before. If I, now freed, could cross that line, I would be in my Holy Thursday, for this scapular that you see on my back is the bond that requires my sun to accompany me like my shadow, and guarantee that wherever I go, all time has the duration of mine. I could then reach Jerusalem, traveling through a very long Thursday, and I could arrive there
"But," Ferrante objected, "if you prevent the Passion, then there will never be the Redemption, and the world will still be stained by original sin."
"Aii!" Judas shouted, crying. "I was thinking only of myself! But what must I do then? If I continue to let myself act as I acted, I remain damned. If I amend my error, I confound the plan of God and will be punished by damnation. Was it then written from the beginning that I was damned to be damned?"
The procession of images went dark at the weeping of Judas, as the oil of the lamp was consumed. Father Caspar was speaking again, in a voice Roberto no longer recognized as his. The scant light now came from a fissure in the wall and illuminated only half of the priest's face, distorting the line of his nose and making the color of his beard uncertain, very white on one side and very dark on the other. The eyes were both hollows, because the one exposed to the light seemed also in shadow. Roberto realized only then that it was covered by a black patch.
"And it is at that point," he said now, this man who was surely the Abbé de Morfi, "it is at that moment that your brother conceives the masterstroke of his Genius. If he makes the journey Judas has suggested, he can prevent the Passion from taking place, and thus prevent Redemption from being granted us. No Redemption, all men victims of the same original sin, all doomed to Hell, your brother a sinner—but a sinner like all humankind, and therefore justified."
"But how could he, how can he, how did he?" Roberto asked.
"Oh"—the abbé smiled with horrid glee—"it required very little. It sufficed only to deceive the Almighty as well, who is incapable of conceiving every travesty of the truth. It sufficed to kill Judas, as I promptly did on that rock, put on his scapular, send my ship ahead to the opposite shore of the Island, arrive here in disguise to prevent your learning the correct rules of swimming so you could never precede me over there, then force you to construct with me the aquatic bell to enable me to reach the Island." And as he spoke, he slowly removed his habit, appearing in pirate garb, then equally slowly he removed the beard, rid himself of the wig, and Roberto thought he was seeing himself in a mirror.