Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

Their love of liberty was another thing which aroused Freya's enthusiasm. If they should have to endure more than a year of enclosure in the Aquarium, they would become sick with sadness and would gnaw their claws until they killed themselves.

"Ah, the charming and vigorous bandits!" she continued in hysterical enthusiasm. "I adore them. I should like to have them in my home, as they have gold-fishes in a globe, to feed them every hour, to see how they would devour…."

Ferragut felt a recurrence of the same uneasiness that he had experienced one morning in the temple of Virgil.

"She's crazy!" he said to himself.

But in spite of her craziness, he greatly enjoyed the faint perfume that exhaled through the opening at her throat.

He no longer saw the silent world that, sparkling with color, was swimming or paddling behind the crystal. She was now the only creature who existed for him. And he listened to her voice as though it were distant music as it continued explaining briefly all the particulars about those stones that were really animals, about those globes that, on distending themselves, showed their organs and again hid themselves under a gelatinous succession of waves.

They were a sac, a pocket, an elastic mask, in whose interior existed only water or air. Between their armpits was their mouth, armed with long jaw bones, like a parrot's beak. When breathing, a crack of their skin would open and close alternately. From one of their sides came forth a tube in the form of a tunnel that swallowed equally the respirable water and drew it through both entrances into its branching cavity. Their multiple arms, fitted out with cupping glasses, functioned like high-pressure apparatus for grasping and holding prey, for paddling and for running.

The glassy eye of one of the monsters appearing and disappearing among its soft folds, stirred Freya's memories. She began speaking in a low tone as if to herself, without paying any attention to Ferragut who was perplexed at the incoherence of her words. The appearance of this octopus brought to her mind "the eye of the morning."

The sailor asked: "What is the 'eye of the morning'?"… And he again told himself that Freya was crazy when he learned that this was the name of a tame serpent, a reptile of checkered sides that she wore as necklace or bracelet over there in her home in the island of Java,—an island where groves exhaled an irresistible perfume, covered in the sunlight with trembling and monstrous flowers like animals, peopled at night with phosphorescent stars that leaped from tree to tree.

"I used to dance naked, with a transparent veil tied around my hips and another floating from my head … I would dance for hours and hours, just like a Brahman priestess before the image of the terrible Siva, and the 'eye of the morning' would follow my dances with elegant undulations … I believe in the divine Siva. Don't you know who Siva is?…"

Ferragut uttered an impatient aside to the gloomy god. What he wanted to know was the reason that had taken her to Java, the paradisiacal and mysterious island.

"My husband was a Dutch commandant," she said. "We were married in Amsterdam and I followed him to Asia."

Ulysses protested at this piece of news. Had not her husband been a great student?… Had he not taken her to the Andes in search of prehistoric beasts?…

Freya hesitated a moment in order to be sure, but her doubts were short.

"So he was," she said as a matter of course. "That professor was my second husband. I have been married twice."

The captain had not time to express his surprise. Over the top of the tank, on the crystalline surface silvered by the sun, passed a human shadow. It was the silhouette of the keeper. Down below, the three shapeless bags began to move. Freya was trembling with emotion like an enthusiastic and impatient spectator.

Something fell into the water, descending little by little, a bit of dead sardine that was scattering filaments of meat and yellow scales. An odd community interest appeared to exist among these monsters: only the one nearest the prey bestirred himself to eat. Perhaps they voluntarily took turns; perhaps their glance only reached a little beyond their tentacles.

The one nearest to the glass suddenly unfolded itself with the violence of a spring escaping from an explosive projectile. He gave a bound, remaining fastened to the ground by one of his radiants, and raised the others like a bundle of reptiles. Suddenly he converted himself into a monstrous star, filling almost the entire glassy tank, swollen with rage, and coloring his outer covering with green, blue, and red.

His tentacles clutched the miserable prey, doubling it inward in order to bear it to his mouth. The beast then contracted, and flattened himself out so as to rest on the ground. His armed feet disappeared and there only remained visible a trembling bag through which was passing like a succession of waves, from one extreme to the other, the digestive swollen mass which became a bubbling, mucous pulpiness in a dye-pot that colored and discolored itself with contortions of assimilative fury; from time to time the agglomeration showed its stupid and ferocious eyes.

New victims continued falling down through the waters and other monsters leaped in their turn, spreading out their stars, then shrinking together in order to grind their prey in their entrails with the assimilation of a tiger.

Freya gazed upon this horrifying digestive process with thrills of rapture. Ulysses felt her resting instinctively upon him with a contact growing more intimate every moment. From shoulder to ankle the captain could see the sweet reliefs of her soft flesh whose warmth made itself perceptible through her clothing and filled him with nervous tremors.

Frequently she turned her eyes away from the cruel spectacle, glancing at him quickly with an odd expression. Her pupils appeared enlarged, and the whites of her eyes had a wateriness of morbid reflection. Ferragut felt that thus the insane must look in their great crises.

She was speaking between her teeth, with emotional pauses, admiring the ferocity of the cuttlefish, grieving that she did not possess their vigor and their cruelty.

"If I could only be like them!… To be able to go through the streets … through the world, stretching out my talons!… To devour!… to devour! They would struggle uselessly to free themselves from the winding of my tentacles…. To absorb them!… To eat them!… To cause them to disappear!…"

Ulysses beheld her as on that first day near the temple of the poet, possessed with a fierce wrath against men, longing extravagantly for their extermination.

Their digestion finished, the polypi had begun to swim around, and were now horizontal skeins, fluting the tank with elegance. They appeared like torpedo boats with a conical prow, dragging along the heavy, thick and long hair of their tentacles. Their excited appetite made them glide through the water in all directions, seeking new victims.

Freya protested. The guard had only brought them dead bodies. What she wanted was the struggle, the sacrifice, the death. The bits of sardine were a meal without substance for these bandits that had zest only for food seasoned with assassination.

As though the pulps had understood her complaints, they had fallen on the sandy bottom, flaccid, inert, breathing through their funnels.

A little crab began to descend at the end of a thread desperately moving its claws.

Freya pressed still closer to Ulysses, excited at the thought of the approaching spectacle. One of the bags, transformed into a star, suddenly leaped forward. Its arms writhed like serpents seeking the recent arrival. In vain the guard pulled the thread up, wishing to prolong the chase. The tentacles clamped their irresistible openings upon the body of the victim, pulling upon the line with such force that it broke, the octopus falling on the bottom with his prey.

Freya clapped her hands in applause.

"Bravo!…" She was exceedingly pale, though a feverish heat was coursing through her body.

She leaned toward the crystal in order to see better the devouring activity of that pyramidal stomach which had on its sharp point a diminutive parrot head with two ferocious eyes and around its base the twisted skeins of its arms full of projecting disks. With these it pressed the crab against its mouth, injecting under its shell the venomous output of its salivary glands, paralyzing thus every movement of existence. Then it swallowed its prey slowly with the deglutition of a boa constrictor.

"How beautiful it is!" she said.

The other beasts also seized their live victims, paralyzed and devoured them, moving their flabby bodies in order to permit the passage of their swelling nutritive waves and clouds of various colors.

Then the guard tossed in a crab, but one without any string whatever.

Freya screamed with enthusiasm.

This was the kind of hunt that takes place in the ferocious mystery of the sea, a race with death, a destruction preceded with emotional agony and hazards. The poor crustacean, divining its danger, was swimming towards the rocks hoping to take refuge in the nearest crevice. A polypus came up behind it, whilst the others continued their digestion.

"It's escaping!… It's escaping!" cried Freya, palpitating with interest.

The crab scrambled through the stones, sheltering itself in their windings. The polypus was no longer swimming; it was running like a terrestrial animal, climbing over the rocks by its armed extremities, which were now serving as apparatus of locomotion. It was the struggle of a tiger with a mouse. When the crab had half of its body already hidden within the green lichens of a hole, one of the heavy serpents fell upon its back clutching it with the irresistible suction of his air-holes, and causing it to disappear within his skein of tentacles.

"Ah!" sighed Freya, throwing herself back as though she were going to faint on Ulysses' breast.

He shuddered, feeling that a serpentine band of tremulous pressure had encircled his body. The acts of that unbalanced creature were fraying his nerves.

He felt as though a monster of the same class as those in the tank but much larger—a gigantic octopus from the oceanic depths—must have slipped treacherously behind him and was clutching him in one of its tentacles. He could feel the pressure of its feelers around his waist, growing closer and more ferocious.

Freya was holding him captive with one of her arms. She had wound herself tightly around him and was clasping his waist with all her force, as though trying to break his vigorous body in two.

Then he saw the head of this woman approaching him with an aggressive swiftness as if she were going to bite him…. Her enlarged eyes, tearful and misty, appeared to be far off, very far off. Perhaps she was not even looking at him…. Her trembling mouth, bluish with emotion, a round and protruding mouth like an absorbing duct, was seeking the sailor's mouth, taking possession of it and devouring it with her lips.

It was the kiss of a cupping-glass, long, dominating, painful. Ulysses realized that he had never before been kissed in this way. The water from that mouth surging across her row of teeth, discharged itself in his like swift poison. A shudder unfamiliar until then ran the entire length of his back, making him close his eyes.

He felt as if all his interior had turned to liquid. He had a presentiment that his life was going to date from this kiss, that with it was going to begin a new existence, that he never would be able to free himself from these deadly and caressing lips with their faint savor of cinnamon, of incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and intrigue.

And he let himself be dragged down by the caress of this wild beast, with thought lost and body inert and resigned, like a castaway who descends and descends the infinite strata of the abyss without ever reaching bottom.

CHAPTER VI

THE WILES OF CIRCE

After that kiss, the lover believed that all his desires were about to be immediately realized. The most difficult part of the road was already passed. But with Freya one always had to expect something absurd and inconceivable.

The midday gun aroused them from a rapture that had lasted but a few seconds as long as years. The steps of the guard, growing nearer all the time, finally separated the two and unlocked their arms.

Freya was the first to calm herself. Only a slight haze flitted across her pupils now, like the vapor from a recently extinguished fire.

"Good-by…. They are waiting for me."

And she went out from the Aquarium followed by Ferragut, still stammering and tremulous. The questions and petitions with which he pursued her while crossing the promenade were of no avail.

"So far and no further," she said at one of the cross streets of Chiaja. "We shall see one another…. I formally promise you that….

Now leave me."

And she disappeared with the firm step of a handsome huntress, as serene of countenance as though not recalling the slightest recollection of her primitive, passional paroxysm.

This time she fulfilled her promise. Ferragut saw her every day.

They met in the mornings near the hotel, and sometimes she came down into the dining-room, exchanging smiles and glances with the sailor, who fortunately was sitting at a distant table. Then they took strolls and chatted together, Freya laughing good-naturedly at the amorous vows of the captain…. And that was all.

With a woman's skillfulness in sounding a man's depth and penetrating into his secrets,—keeping fast-locked and unapproachable her own,—she gradually informed herself of the incidents and adventures in the life of Ulysses. Vainly he spoke, in a natural reciprocity, of the island of Java, of the mysterious dances before Siva, of the journeys through the lakes of the Andes. Freya had to make an effort to recall them. "Ah!… Yes!" And after giving this distracted exclamation for every answer, she would continue the process of delving eagerly into the former life of her lover. Ulysses sometimes began to wonder if that embrace in the Aquarium could have occurred in his dreams.

One morning the captain managed to bring about the realization of one of his ambitions. He was jealous of the unknown friends that were lunching with Freya. In vain she affirmed that the doctor was the only companion of the hours that she passed outside of the hotel. In order to tranquillize himself, the sailor insisted that the widow should accept his invitations. They ought to extend their strolls; they ought to visit the beautiful outskirts of Naples, lunching in their gay little trattorias or eating-houses.

They ascended together the funicular road of Monte Vomero to the heights crowned by the castle of S. Elmo and the monastery of S. Martino. After admiring in the museum of the abbey the artistic souvenirs of the Bourbon domination and that of Murat, they entered into a nearby trattoria with tables placed on an esplanade from whose balconies they could take in the unforgetable spectacle of the gulf, seeing Vesuvius in the distance and the chain of mountains smoking on the horizon like an immovable succession of dark rose-colored waves.

Naples was extended in horseshoe form on the bow-shaped border of the sea tossing up from its enormous white mass, as though they were bits of foam, the clusters of houses in the suburbs.

A swarthy oysterman, slender, with eyes like live coals, and enormous mustaches, had his stand at the door of the restaurant, offering cockles and shell fish of strong odor that had been half a week perhaps in ascending from the city to the heights of Vomero. Freya jested about the oysterman's typical good looks and the languishing glances that he was forever casting toward all the ladies that entered the establishment … a prime discovery for a tourist anxious for adventures in local color.

In the background a small orchestra was accompanying a tenor voice or was playing alone, enlarging upon the melodies and amplifying the measures with Neapolitan exaggeration.

Freya felt a childish hilarity upon seating herself at the table, seeing over the cloth the luminous summit. Bisected in the foreground by a crystal vase full of flowers, the distant panorama of the city, the gulf, and its capes spread itself before her eager eyes. The air on this peak enchanted her after two weeks passed without stirring outside of Naples. The harps and violins gave the situation a pathetic thrill and served as a background for conversation, just as the vague murmurs of a hidden orchestra give the effect in the theater of psalmody or of melancholy verses moving the listener to tears.

They ate with the nervousness which joy supplies. At some tables further on a young man and woman were forgetting the courses in order to clasp hands underneath the cloth and place knee against knee with frenzied pressure. The two were smiling, looking at the landscape and then at each other. Perhaps they were foreigners recently married, perhaps fugitive lovers, realizing in this picturesque spot the billing and cooing so many times anticipated in their distant courtship.

Two English doctors from a hospital ship, white haired and uniformed, were disregarding their repast in order to paint directly in their albums, with a childish painstaking crudeness, the same panorama that was portrayed on the postal cards offered for sale at the door of the restaurant.

A fat-bellied bottle with a petticoat of straw and a long neck attracted Freya's hands to the table. She ridiculed the sobriety of Ferragut, who was diluting with water the reddish blackness of the Italian wine.

"Thus your ancestors, the Argonauts, must have drunk," she said gayly.

"Thus your grandfather, Ulysses, undoubtedly drank."

And herself filling the captain's glass with an exaggeratedly careful division of the parts of water and wine, she added gayly:

"We are going to make a libation to the gods."

These libations were very frequent. Freya's peals of laughter made the Englishmen, interrupted in their conscientious work, turn their glances toward her. The sailor felt himself overcome by a warm feeling of well-being, by a sensation of repose and confidence, as though this woman were unquestionably his already.

Seeing that the two lovers, terminating their luncheon hastily, were arising with blushing precipitation as though overpowered by some sudden desire, his glance became tender and fraternal…. Adieu, adieu, companions!

The voice of the widow recalled him to reality.

"Ulysses, make love to me…. You haven't yet told me this whole day long that you love me."

In spite of the smiling and mocking tone of this order, he obeyed her, repeating once more his promises and his desires. Wine was giving to his words a thrill of emotion; the musical moaning of the orchestra was exciting his sensibilities and he was so touched with his own eloquence that his eyes slightly filled with tears.

The high voice of the tenor, as though it were an echo of Ferragut's thought, was singing a romance of the fiesta of Piedigrotta, a lamentation of melancholy love, a canticle of death, the final mother of hopeless lovers.

"All a lie!" said Freya, laughing. "These Mediterraneans…. What comedians they are for love!…"

Ulysses was uncertain as to whether she was referring to him or to the singer. She continued talking, placid and disdainful at the same time, because of their surroundings.

"Love,… love! In these countries they can't talk of anything else. It is almost an industry, somewhat scrupulously prepared for the credulous and simple people from the North. They all harp on love: this howling singer, you … even the oysterman…."

Then she added maliciously:

"I ought to warn you that you have a rival. Be very careful, Ferragut!"

She turned her head in order to look at the oysterman. He was occupied in the contemplation of a fat lady with grisled hair and abundant jewels, a lady escorted by her husband, who was looking with astonishment at the vendor's killing glances without being able to understand them.

The lady-killer was stroking his mustache affectedly, looking from time to time at his cloth suit in order to smooth out the wrinkles and brush off the specks of dust. He was a handsome pirate disguised as a gentleman. Upon noticing Freya's interest, he changed the course of his glances, poised his fine figure and replied to her questioning eyes with the smile of a bad angel, making her understand his discretion and skillfulness in ingratiating himself behind husbands and escorts.

"There he is!" cried Freya with peals of laughter. "I already have a new admirer!…"

The swarthy charmer was restrained by the scandalous publicity with which this lady was receiving his mysterious insinuations. Ferragut spoke of knocking the scamp down on his oyster shells with a good pair of blows.

"Now don't be ridiculous," she protested. "Poor man! Perhaps he has a wife and many children…. He is the father of a family and wants to take money home."

There was a long silence between the two. Ulysses appeared offended by the lightness and cruelty of his companion.

"Now don't you be cross," she said. "See here, my shark! Smile a bit. Show me your teeth…. The libations to the gods are to blame. Are you offended because I wished to compare you with that clown?… What if you are the only man that I appreciate at all!… Ulysses, I am speaking to you seriously,—with all the frankness that wine gives. I ought not to tell you so, but I admit it…. If I should ever love a man, that man would be you."

Ferragut instantly forgot all his irritation in order to listen to her and envelop her in the adoring light of his eyes. Freya averted her glance while speaking, not wishing to meet his eye, as though she were weighing what she was saying while her glance wandered over the widespread landscape.

Ulysses' origin was what interested her most. She who had traveled over almost the entire world, had trodden the soil of Spain only a few hours, when disembarking in Barcelona from the transatlantic liner which he had commanded. The Spaniards inspired her both with fear and attraction. A noble gravity reposed in the depths of their ardent hyperbole.

"You are an exaggerated being, a meridional who enlarges everything and lies about everything, believing all his own lies. But I am sure that if you should ever be really in love with me, without fine phrases or passionate fictions, your affection would be more sane and deep than that of other men…. My friend, the doctor, says that you are a crude people and that you have only simulated the nervousness, unbalanced behavior, and intrigues that accompany love in other civilized countries even to refinement."

Freya looked at the sailor, making a long pause.

"Therefore you strike," she continued, "therefore you kill when you feel love and jealousy. You are brutes but not mediocre. You do not abandon a woman intentionally; you do not exploit her…. You are a new species of man for me, who has known so many. If I were able to believe in love, I would have you at my side all my life…. All my life long!"

A light, gentle music, like the vibration of fragile and delicate crystal, spread itself over the terrace. Freya followed its rhythm with a light motion of the head. She was accustomed to this cloying music, this Serenata of Toselli,—a passionate lament that always touches the soul of the tourist in the halls of the grand hotels. She, who at other times had ridiculed this artificial and refined little music, now felt tears welling up in her eyes.

"Not to be able to love anybody!" she murmured. "To wander alone through the world!… And love is such a beautiful thing!"

She guessed what Ferragut was going to say,—his protest of eternal passion, his offer to unite his life to hers forever, and she cut his words short with an energetic gesture.

"No, Ulysses, you do not know me; you do not know who I am…. Go far from me. Some days ago it was a matter of indifference to me. I hate men and do not mind injuring them, but now you inspire me with a certain interest because I believe you are good and frank in spite of your haughty exterior…. Go! Do not seek me. This is the best proof of affection that I can give you."

She said this vehemently, as if she saw Ferragut running toward danger and was crying out in order to ward him from it.