The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

The great calms of July had come. The sea extended before the view all white, milky, greenish here and there in the vicinity of the shore. A mist, slightly tinted with violet, paled the distant coasts: Cape Moro, the Nicchiola, Cape Ortona, the Vasto Point. The scarcely perceptible undulations of the smooth sea produced between the rocks a deep-toned harmony, measured by equal pauses. Holding himself at the extremity of one of the long, horizontal masts, the child acted as a lookout; with watchful eye he scrutinized beneath him the mirror of the wave, and, from time to time, to entice the frightened fish into entering the net, he threw a stone, the light splash of which increased the surrounding melancholy.

At times, the visitor dozed beneath the caress of the slow rhythms. These brief slumbers were the only compensation for his sleepless nights. And he had the habit of pretending this need of repose, so that Hippolyte might permit him to rest on the Trabocco as long as he pleased. George assured her that he could not sleep elsewhere than on those planks, amid the exhalations of the rocks, amid the music of the sea.

To this music he lent an ear more and more attentive and subtle. From now on he knew all its mysteries, understood all its significations. The feeble splash of the surf, like the lingual sound of a flock quenching its thirst; the great, sudden roar of a giant wave, which, arriving from the offing, meets and breaks the wave refracted from the shore; the most humble note, the most superb note, and the innumerable intermediate scales, and the diverse measures of the intervals, and the most simple chords, and the most complex chords, and all the powers of this profound marine orchestra in the sonorous gulf—he knew all, he understood all.

Mysterious, the twilight symphony developed and swelled, very slowly, very slowly, beneath a sky of chaste violets, and between the ethereal clusters of which shone the first timid glances of the constellations still covered by a veil. Here and there, errant breezes raised and pushed the billows, rare at first, then more frequent, then weaker; they raised and pushed the waves whose delicate crests blossomed, stole a glint from the twilight, foamed a moment, and fell back languidly. Now like the dull sound of cymbals, now like the sound of silver disks clashed against one another, such was the sound produced in the silence by those falling and expiring waves. New billows arose, engendered by a stronger gust, curved limpidly, bore in their curvature the grace of the closing day, broke with a sort of indolence, like restless white rose-trees shedding their eaves, and leaving durable foam, like petals, on the mirror that stretched out where they disappeared forever. Still others arose, increased in velocity and strength, approached the shore, reached it with a triumphant roar followed by a diffused murmur similar to the rustling of dry leaves. And, while this illusionary rustling of the unreal forest lasted, other waves, over there, over there, on the crescent of the gulf, unfurled at constantly diminishing distances, to be followed by the same murmur, so that the sonorous zone seemed to extend to the infinite by the perpetual vibrations of a myriad of dry leaves.

The water rushed on the unshakable rocks with the impetuous warmth of love or anger; it dashed over them roaring, washed over them foaming, invaded with its liquidity the most secret crevices. It seemed that an ultra-sovereign natural soul was filling with its frantic perturbation an instrument as vast and multiple as an organ, guilty of every discordance, touching all the notes of joy and pain.

The water laughed, moaned, prayed, sang, caressed, sobbed, threatened—by turns joyous, plaintive, humble, ironical, coaxing, dejected, cruel. It dashed to the summit of the highest rock, to fill the little cavity round as a votive cup; it crept into the oblique crevice where swarmed the mollusks; it sank into the soft carpets of coralline, tearing them and creeping as lightly as a serpent on a bed of moss. The regular dripping of the waters which ooze in the occult cave, the rhythmic overflow of the springs similar to the pulsation of a vast heart, the harsh splashing of the streams on the steep declivity, the dull rumbling of the torrent imprisoned between two walls of granite, the reiterated thunder of the river precipitated from the heights of the cataract—all these sounds produced by running waters on the inert stone and all the sports of their echoes, the sea imitated. The tender word that one murmurs apart in the shade, the sigh exhaled by a mortal anguish, the clamor of a multitude buried in the depths of a catacomb, the sob of a titanic bosom, arrogant and cruel derision—all these sounds produced by the human mouth when sad or gay, the sea imitated. The nocturnal choruses of the spirits with the aërial tongues, the whispering of the phantoms put to flight by the dawn, the suppressed grins of fluid and malevolent creatures in ambush on the threshold of their lairs, the calls of vocal flowers in sensual paradises, the magic dance in the moonlight—all these sounds that the ears of the poets listen to in secret, all the enchantments of the antique siren, the sea imitated. One and multiple, elusive and imperishable, it enclosed in itself all the languages of Life and Dreamland.

In the attentive mind of the auditor it seemed like the resurrection of a world. The grandeur of the marine symphony revived in him faith in the unlimited power of music. He was stupefied at having been able to deprive his soul so long of this daily nourishment, of having renounced the only means conceded to man to free himself from the deception of appearances and to discover in the inner universe of the soul the real essence of things. He was stupefied at having been able to neglect so long this religious cult, which, after Demetrius's example, he had practised with so much fervor since the first years of his infancy. For Demetrius and for himself, had not music been a religion? Had it not revealed to both the mystery of the supreme life? To both it had repeated, but with a different sense, the words of Christ: "My kingdom is not of this world."

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

Once more George felt himself penetrated by the supernatural fascination which that man, existing outside of life, exercised upon him from the bottom of the tomb. Distant things came back to his memory similar to indistinct waves of harmony; elements of thought received from that teacher seemed to take vague forms of rhythm; the ideal sceptre of the defunct appeared to be transfigured musically, to lose its visible outlines, to reënter into the profound unity of the being, into that being which the solitary musician, in the light of his inspiration, had discovered under the diversity of the Appearances.

"Without doubt," he thought, "it is music that initiated him into the mystery of Death, that showed him, beyond this life, a nocturnal empire of marvels. Harmony, an element superior to time and space, had given him, like a beatitude, a glimpse of the possibility of freeing himself from space and time, of detaching himself from the individual will that confined him in the prison of a personality enclosed in a restricted place, that kept him perpetually subject to the brutish matter of corporeal substance. How he had a thousand times felt in himself, in the moments of inspiration, the awakening of the universal will; what extraordinary joy he had tasted on recognizing the supreme unity that is at the bottom of things; he believed that death would be a means for prolonging his existence in the infinite, that he would become dissolved in the continuous harmony of the Great All and would participate in the endless voluptuousness of the Eternal. Why should I, too, not have the same initiator into the same mystery?"