The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco Read Free Book Online Page B

bowels of the earth, Roberto roamed in that Eden that provoked odorous deliriums.
    Later, when he tells all this to the Lady, he speaks of rustic frenzies, gardens of caprice, Protean bowers, cedars (cedars?) mad with lovely fury.... Or else he re-experiences it as a floating cavern rich in deceitful automata where, girded with horribly twisted cables, fanatic nasturtiums billow, wicked stolons of barbarous forest.... He will write of the opium of the senses, a whirl of putrid elements that, precipitating into impure extracts, led him to the antipodes of reason.
    At first he attributed to the song reaching him from the Island the impression of feathered voices audible among the flowers and plants: but suddenly his flesh crawled at the passage of a bat that grazed his face, and immediately afterwards he had to duck to avoid a falcon that flung itself on its prey, felling it with a blow of its beak.
    Moving farther into the lower deck, still hearing the distant birds of the Island, and convinced he was hearing them through the openings of the hull, Roberto now realized those sounds were much closer. They could not come from shore: so other birds, and not far away, were singing, beyond the plants, towards the prow, in the direction of that storeroom from which he had heard noises the night before.
    It seemed to him, as he proceeded, that the garden ended at the foot of a tall trunk that went through the upper deck, then he realized that he had arrived more or less at the center of the ship, where the mainmast rose from the very bottom of the keel. But by now artifice and nature were so confused that we can justify also our hero's confusion. For, at that very point, his nostrils began to perceive a mixture of aromas, earthy molds, and animal stench, as if he were moving slowly from a flower garden to a sheepfold.
    He was passing the trunk of the mainmast, heading for the prow, when he saw the aviary.
    He could think of no other definition for that collection of wicker cages with solid boughs run through them to serve as perch, inhabited by flying creatures striving to discern that dawn of which they had only a beggared light, and to reply with distorted voices to the call of their similars singing in freedom on the Island. Set on the ground or hanging from the hatch of the deck above, the cages were arranged along this other nave like stalagmites and stalactites, creating another grotto of wonders, where the fluttering animals made their dwellings rock beneath the sun's rays, in a glitter of hues, a flurry of rainbows.
    If until that day he had never heard birds really sing, neither could Roberto say he had ever seen birds, at least not in such guises, so many that he asked himself if they were in their natural state or if an artist's hand had painted them and decorated them for some pantomime, or to feign an army on parade, each foot-soldier and horseman cloaked in his own standard.
    An embarrassed Adam, he could give no names to these creatures, except the names of birds of his own hemisphere: That one is a heron, he said to himself, that a crane, a quail.... But it was like calling a goose a swan.
    Here prelates with broad cardinal's trains and beaks shaped like alembics spread grass-colored wings, swelling a rosy throat and revealing an azure breast, chanting in almost human sound; there multiple squads performed in great tourney, venturing assaults on the depressed domes that circumscribed their arena, among dove-gray flashes and red and yellow thrusts, like oriflammes that a squire threw and caught. Grouchy light cavalry, with long nervous legs in a cramped space, neighed indignantly
cra-cra-cra,
at times hesitating on one foot and peering around suspiciously, shaking the tufts on their elongated heads ... Only in one cage, built to his measure, a great captain in a bluish cloak, his jerkin as vermilion as his eye and a cornflower plume on his helmet, emitted a dove's lament. In a small coop nearby, three foot-soldiers