The Escape

A STORY BY ALBERTO MORAVIA

Translated by Angus Davidson

AS THEY came close to the island, the outboard engine began spluttering and then stopped; the husband rose to his feet to restart it. The wife looked at the confused mass of buildings piled up on top of the highest part of the island and finally asked, “What’s that castle?” The husband, busy with the engine, answered without looking up, “it’s not a castle, it’s a prison.” She noticed then that above the towering buttresses, a gray wall rose against the sky, with three rows of windows that appeared to be walled up.

“The windows are blocked up,” she said. “Why is that?”

“They’re bocca di lupo windows.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” replied her husband, with a touch of impatience, “that anyone inside the cells sees nothing but a little piece of sky, very high up.”

“And why?”

Her husband inserted the lanyard into the engine and gave a vigorous jerk, but the engine, after a few revolutions, stopped once more. “Why? To prevent the prisoners from making signals, I imagine.”

The woman asked again, “And who is there in the prison?”

To her husband this seemed a particularly irritating question, no doubt because of its quality of obviousness. He half straightened up, holding the lanyard, and said, “It’s full of nice, honest people on holiday — original sort of people who prefer prison to a good hotel.”

“Now you’re teasing me,” she said.

“But Laura, who would you expect to be there? Murderers, thieves, criminals of the worst kind.”

She turned away from the direction of the island, crouching on the seat with her arms encircling her legs, offended.

The memory of an encounter of the previous year had come back to her. She had gone to the island by steamer with her husband, and had seen, coming out of a cabin and going ashore with the other passengers, a young man between two guards, his wrists loaded with chains, with a handsome though arrogant face, very pale and with black curls encircling his forehead and temples. At the time she had not asked who the young man might be, although she had guessed; it had seemed to her that there was a tacit understanding between herself, her husband, and the other passengers to take no notice of him and even to pretend to be unaware of his presence. Yet he had remained in her memory, owing perhaps to the contrast between his good looks and the chains with which he was laden. Now, thinking back, she regretted that she had not asked for information — perhaps the young man had been condemned for life; but she was sure that it could not be for any of those hateful crimes that give rise to feelings of scorn; clearly he must have been sentenced for some crime of passion, ordained, as they say, by fate. Suddenly she said, “Whenever you’re behind an engine, whether it’s the engine of the car or the engine of this boat, you become unreasonable.” Her husband did not reply, but having again inserted the lanyard, he gave it an even more violent jerk. The engine started up, the boat purred away over the calm water, leaving behind a tenuous track that looked like a piece of white, evanescent lace upon the shot silk of the sea.

And now the boat, having passed beyond the rocky fortress, moved across in front of the island’s harbor. The sun had not yet come into view on this side, and the red, yellow, and white houses along the quayside were still plunged in the subdued half-light of early morning and looked uninhabited. The boat left the harbor behind and rounded a promontory. Neither the prison nor the harbor could now be seen, only a white, slanting shore crowned with frolicsome vines and rising higher and higher in the distance. They went on for some distance parallel with the shore; then the engine started spluttering again and stopped. The woman, annoyed, turned her back on her husband and looked toward the shore; and she took no notice of the stifled curse he uttered as he rose to his feet again to restart the engine. He made several attempts while she continued, obstinately, to turn her back upon him; finally, the boat started off in the direction of a little beach shut in between two high rocks, but when they arrived at a short distance from the shore, it stopped again. The woman heard her husband say, in a tone of irritation, “I don’t know what’s the matter . . . there must be something broken; what we need is a mechanic,” and without turning around, she answered, “Let’s go back to the harbor; you’ll find a mechanic there.”

“And what happens if we get stuck out at sea? No, I must get out here and go to the village.”

She said nothing; she was accustomed to leaving matters of this kind to her husband, and besides, it did not in fact matter to her that the engine refused to work. This indifference, which seemed to be proclaimed by her bent, bare back, exasperated her husband. “To you it doesn’t matter in the least, does it?” he said. “It’s I who will have to take that walk to the village.”

She shrugged her shoulders, very slightly, imagining that her husband would not notice. But her husband saw her and said with the utmost irritation, “And don’t just shrug your shoulders.”

“I didn’t shrug my shoulders.”

“Yes, you did. For some time now I haven’t liked the way you’ve been behaving.”

“Oh, leave me in peace, you idiot.” She realized that her eyes were full of tears, for some reason that she could not explain, and she twisted herself yet further toward the shore, as though she were trying to see something. And she did in fact see a man in blue trousers and a white shirt coming quickly down a path from the top of the slope toward the beach. It was, however, a very brief glimpse; once he had reached the beach, the man vanished, as if by enchantment. She wondered whether she ought to tell her husband of her strange vision, and then decided not to do so; but at the same time she realized that she had a guilty feeling — why, she did not know.

Her husband meanwhile had cast anchor, as she knew from the sound of the tackle and the plop in the water; then he said, “Well, shall we get out?” Mechanically she put her legs over the side of the boat and let herself slip into the water up to her knees, until she touched the sandy bottom with her feet. As she came out onto the black, damp shingle of the beach, she noticed in the wall of rock on her right a dark cave that appeared to be deep; and she was suddenly sure that the man of whom she had caught a glimpse on the path was inside it. But she said nothing and again felt a touch of remorse. Her husband had now caught up with her; he took her arm and murmured, “Forgive me.”

“Υor must forgive me,” she replied with a lively feeling of hypocrisy, turning and giving him a smacking kiss on the cheek. Meanwhile she was thinking “If only he would go away, if only he’d leave me alone.”

Her husband, his serenity quite recovered, said, “You don’t mind waiting for me? I’ll go straight there and back; it’ll take about an hour.”

“Why, of course not,” she answered, “and it’s so beautiful here.” Her husband went off, climbing the path up the slope. Then she sat down on the beach at some distance from the water, in such a position that she could watch the cave without attracting attention.

FOR some time she remained motionless, sitting on the shingle, looking at the sea; then, almost imperceptibly, she turned her head in the direction of the cave and was surprised that her husband had failed to notice it. As she had guessed, the man was there, sitting on the ground inside the cave, his blue-trousered legs bent, his hands clasped around his knees. The upper part of his body and his head were not visible, partly because of the deep shadow, partly because of a rock which jutted out across the opening. She looked at the hands intertwined over his knees, and all at once she was certain that he must be the young man whom she had seen in chains a year before; those were his hands, she recognized them, the hands which she had then seen loaded with chains. She wondered whether she should speak to him, and decided, with a certainty that surprised her, not to do so. Something, she reflected, had started between them from the moment she had seen him coming down the path and had not informed her husband, something that had happened in silence, that would continue in silence and would end in silence.

Meanwhile the minutes were passing, the man did not move, and the impenetrable shadow that enveloped his face seemed to her to be the actual shadow, the mysterious, almost sacred shadow of the misfortune which separated them and prevented them from communicating. She was aware, nevertheless, that the man’s immobility troubled her, as if there existed between them a kind of challenge and the question was which of them would be the first to move and betray his own feelings. Almost against her will she suddenly made a gesture which seemed to her to give a name to her troubled feeling; she knew that she had pretty ears, round and small, so she raised her hand and threw back her hair in such a way that the man could see one of them. But the man did not move; and she had a feeling of unreality, of irresponsibility, at the thought of having allowed herself to go so far as to flirt with a convict.

She started gazing at the sea again, profoundly troubled now, more by her own feelings than by the presence of the man. She was coldly determined to entice him out of the cave, at all costs, even if he came out in order to attack or kill her. She recalled that there were a few objects of value in her bag, and slowly she drew them out — a gold cigarette case with a ruby in the clasp, a lighter, also of gold, with which she lit a cigarette. Finally, as though she were impatient, she fumbled again, found her watch, and looked at the time. The watch, too, was of gold, and she put it down on the shingle beside the cigarette case and the lighter— a little heap of gold which she thought should be tempting to him. But she remembered having imagined that the man had been sentenced for a crime of passion, and she bit her lips; he would not allow himself to be enticed by gold; something else was needed.

Her heart was beating very fast, she gasped for breath, she felt a deep blush mounting in waves to her cheeks; she raised her hand to her shoulder, grasped the shoulder strap of her costume between two fingers, and pulled it slowly down over her arm until one breast was almost completely uncovered. Then she cast a wild glance in the direction of the cave: the man was still there, silent, motionless, his face invisible. She lowered her eyes to the useless little heap of gold on the shingle, and thence back again to the sea. Her gaze wandered at first to the horizon, then to the boat anchored in the dark, still water a short distance from the shore; and at last she understood what it was that the man was looking at, greedily, anxiously, from the deep shadow of the cave.

Slowly, lazily, she rose to her feet and gently stretched herself, clasping her two hands at the back of her neck and throwing back her head. Then she moved down toward the water, saying to herself, “Good-bye.” She did not go toward the boat, but walking on the sandy bottom, the water rising gradually over her body with an uncomfortable tickling sensation, she made her way toward the extreme end of the little bay, to the point where by rounding the rocky point it was possible to reach the adjoining bay. When the water came up to her throat, she threw herself forward and started swimming, drawing farther and farther away from the boat. She went around the rock, put down her feet on the bottom, and, finally, turned. It was no more than five minutes since she had looked back, but the man was already in the boat; bending down, with his back turned to her, he was busying himself with the engine. He was evidently an expert with outboard motors; almost at once the engine started up and the boat went off, describing a semicircle; but, by a chance which seemed to her disastrous, everything happened without her being able to see his face. She stayed where she was, the water up to her chin, speechless, feeling that this silence was the final act of complicity between them. And now a thought tormented her: “If the engine breaks down again, he’ll think I wanted to entice him into a trap.” At last she came slowly out of the sea and made her way to the point on the beach where she had left her bag.

The sun had come into view behind the cliff and shone brightly upon the damp shingle, upon the little heap of gold, which the man had not touched, and upon the blue expanse of the sea. She sat down beside her bag and with her eyes followed the outboard-motor boat, which appeared to be aiming straight toward the open sea. To the right of the beach, from beyond the promontory, there suddenly appeared a launch with three men on board. The motorboat went farther and farther into the distance, growing smaller as it went; nevertheless, she could clearly distinguish the man sitting in the stern, his hand on the tiller. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped, at the point where the smooth, almost transparent sea became ruffled and purplish blue. It had stopped, and the man had risen and was now bending again over the engine. Meanwhile the launch was making resolutely for the motorboat. The woman saw what was going to happen and watched resignedly. The man remained intent on the engine, while the distance between the launch and the motorboat lessened; then he appeared to give up, sat down in the stern, and remained motionless. The launch was now close to the motorboat, now touching it. The woman still watched: between the man and the three men in the launch, in the midst of the deserted sea glittering in the sunshine, a leisurelv, peaceful conversation seemed to be taking place, as though they were trippers who had met by chance and knew each other. Anyhow, she reflected, the sunshine, the distance, the immensity of the sea and sky made this meeting insignificant, incomprehensible, remote. Then the man stood up, and she saw him move from the motorboat to the launch. She looked at her watch: almost an hour had gone by, and soon her husband would be returning.