It can be said of the Italian war what Percy Bysshe Shelley said of
the Medusa's head which he saw in Florence, and which he attributed to
Leonardo da Vinci: "Its beauty and its horror are divine."
This night of danger and death is one of the sweetest that ever spread
its blue veil over the face of the heavens. The sea darkens, and in
its innumerable pulsations the nocturnal phosphoresence is already
discernible. Here and there the rippled surface of the sea glitters
with an internal light as a quivering eyelid, disclosing mysterious
glances. The new moon is like a burning handful of sulphur. Ever and
anon the black cloud of smoke rising from the funnels hides it or
appears to drag it in its spirals like a moving flame.
Life is not an abstraction of aspects and events, but a sort of
diffused sensuousness, a knowledge offered to all the senses, a
substance good to touch, smell, taste, feel. In fact, I feel all the
things near to my senses, like the fisherman walking barefooted on
the beach covered with the incoming tide, and who now and then bends
to identify and pick up what moves under the soles of his feet. The
aspects of this maritime city are like my passions and like the
monuments of Nineveh and Knossus, places of my ardor and creations of
my fancy, real and unreal, products of my desire and products of time.
This city is one of those tumultuous harmonies whence often the most
beautiful elements of my art are born. Nothing escapes the eyes Nature
gave me, and everything is food for my soul. Such a craving for life is
not unlike the desire to die in order to achieve immortality.
In fact, to-night death is present like life, beautiful as life,
intoxicating, full of promises, transfiguring. I stand on my feet,
wearing shoes that can easily be unlaced, on the deck of a small
ironclad on which there is only space enough for the weapons and the
crew. Steam is up. The black smoke of the three funnels rises toward
the new moon, shining yellow in the cloud, burning like a handful of
sulphur. The sailors have already donned life-saving belts and inflated
the collars which must support the head in the agony of drowning. I
hear the voice of the second officer giving the order to place in the
only two boats the biscuits and the canned meat.
A young officer, muscular, but agile as a leopard, who has Boldness'
very eyes, and has to his credit already an admirable manoeuvre in
conducting the destroyer from the arsenal to the anchorage, pays
for the champagne. We drink a cup sitting around the table on which
the navigation chart is spread, while the commander of the flotilla
dictates, standing, to the typist the order of the nocturnal operation,
which is to be issued to the commanders of the other ships. A
suppressed joy shines in the eyes of all. The operation is fraught with
danger, is most difficult, and the cup we drink may be our last.
An ensign, who is little more than a boy, and a Sicilian, who resembles
an adolescent Arabian brought up in the court of Frederick of Serbia,
rubs in his hands a perfumed leaf, one of those leaves which are grown
in a terra cotta vase on the parapets of the windows looking into the
silent lanes of the city. The perfume is so strong that every one of us
smells it with quivering nostrils. That single leaf on that terrible
warship, where everything is iron and fire, that leaf of love, seems to
us infinitely precious, and reminds us of the gardens of Giudecca and
Fondamenta Nuove left behind.
The commander continues to dictate the order of the operation with
his soft Tuscan accent, with some same telling words that Ramondo
d'Amoretto Manelli used in the epistle he sent to Leonard Strozzi
when the Genoese were vanquished by the navy of the Venetians and
Florentines.