The Seven Messengers

BY DINO BUZZATI

TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN BY REBECCA HEATH

Having departed to explore my father's kingdom, every day I am getting farther from the city, and the news that reaches me is getting rarer and rarer. I began the trip when I was just over thirty and more than eight years have passed, exactly eight years, six months and fifteen days of uninterrupted travel. I thought when I left that within a few weeks I would easily reach the boundary of the kingdom, but instead I have continued to find new people and countries and everywhere men who speak the same language as I, who say they are my subjects. I believe sometimes that my geographer's compass has gone crazy and that thinking I am always traveling south, we are perhaps going in circles without ever increasing the distance that separates us from the capital, which would explain why we have not reached the frontier yet. But more frequently I am tormented by the doubt that this border even exists, by the thought that the kingdom extends without any limit whatsoever, and that no matter how far I travel, I will never be able to reach the end. I started on my trip when I was little more than thirty, too late perhaps. Friends, even my family, scorned my project as a useless waste of the best years of my life. In reality, few of those loyal to me agreed to leave. Although carefree - a good deal more than now! - I worried how I was going to keep in touch with my loved ones during the trip and I chose from among my escorts, the seven best to act as messengers. I thought, in all innocence, that having seven of them might be too many. With the passage of time, however, I realized that seven was ridiculously too few: and this although none of them ever fell ill or encountered bandits or wore out their mounts. All seven have served me with a tenacity and a devotion that I will never be able to repay. In order to tell them apart easily I gave them names in alphabetical order: Alessandro, Bartolomeo, Caio, Domenico, Ettore, Federico, Gregorio. Unaccustomed to being so far from home, I sent the first one, Alesssandro, on the evening of the second day of the trip when we had already covered some eighty leagues. The evening after, to ensure the continuity of the communication, I sent the second, then the third, then the fourth, consecutively, until the eighth evening of the trip, when Gregorio left. The first one had not yet returned. He reached us on the tenth evening while we were setting up camp for the night in an uninhabited valley. I learned from Alessandro that his speed was less than what I had foreseen; I thought since he was alone and riding an excellent horse, that he could cover twice our distance in the same amount of time; instead, his speed was only one and a half times ours so that in one day, while we covered forty leagues, he could traverse sixty, but no more. So it was with the others. Bartolomeo, who left for the city on the third evening of the trip, reached us on the fifteenth; Caio, who left on the forth, returned on the twentieth. I soon realized that I had only to multiply the number of days traveled by five to know when the messenger would catch up with us. As we got farther from the capital, the messengers' route became increasingly longer. After fifty days of travel the interval between one arrival and another began to spread out noticeably; while before I saw one arrive in camp every five days, this interval became 25; in this way the voice of my city was 2

becoming increasingly feeble. Whole weeks went by without my receiving any news at all. When six months passed - we had already crossed the Fasani Mountains the interval between one arrival and another increased to a good four months. Thus I received news that was already out of date; the envelopes reached me wrinkled, sometimes water-stained from the nights the bearers spent out in the open. We kept going. In vain I tried to persuade myself that the clouds passing over me were like those of my youth, that the sky of the distant city was no different from the blue dome that towered above me, that the air was the same, that the murmur of the wind was the same, that the voices of the birds were the same. The clouds, the sky, the air, the wind, the birds, all seemed to me new and different and I felt like a stranger. Forward, forward! Vagabonds we met in the plains told me the border was close. I encouraged my men not to rest; I snuffed out the discouraging words that issued from their lips. Four years had already passed since my departure; what a long struggle. The capital, my home, my father - they had become strangely remote; I hardly believed in them any more. Some twenty months of silence and solitude passed between the arrivals of the messengers. They brought me strange letters yellowed by time and in these I found forgotten names, figures of speech that seemed unusual to me, feelings I was not able to understand. The next morning, after a single night of rest, while we getting ready to resume our travel, the messenger departed in the opposite direction, carrying to the city the letters that I had ready for a long time. But eight and a half years have gone by. This evening I was dining alone in my tent when Domenico arrived, still managing to smile despite being overcome by fatigue. I had not seen him for nearly seven years. For all this long time he had done nothing but ride, across prairies, woods and deserts, changing mounts who knows how many times, to bring me that package of letters that as yet I have had no desire to open. He has already gone to bed and will leave tomorrow at dawn. He will leave for the last time. In a notebook I have calculated that if all goes well, if I continue my road as I have done until now and he his, I will not see Domenico again for another 34 years. I will then be 72. I am starting to feel tired and it is likely that death will take me first. And so I will never see him again. In 34 years (before that, indeed much before) Domenico will unexpectedly catch sight of the fires of my campsite and will ask himself why, during his absence, I have made so little progress. Like last night, the good messenger will enter my tent with letters yellowed by the years, full of absurd news of a time already buried; but he will stop on the threshold, seeing me immobile, stretched out on my pallet, with two soldiers bearing torches at my side, dead. Nevertheless go, Domenico and do not tell me that I am cruel! Take my final greeting to the city where I was born. You are the last remaining link to the world that was also once mine. The most recent letters have told me that many things have changed, that my father is dead, that the crown has passed to my older brother, that they believe I am lost, that they have built tall stone palaces in the place where I once used to play under the oak trees. But it is still my old 3

country. You are the last link with them, Domenico. The fifth messenger, Ettore, who will reach me, God willing, in a year and eight months, will not be able to leave again because he would not have time to return. After you silence, oh Domenico, unless I find the longed-for frontier. But the further I go, the more I am convinced that the frontier does not exist. The frontier does not exist, I suspect, at least in the sense we usually mean. There are no walls of separation, nor dividing valleys, nor mountains that close off the passes. Probably I will cross the frontier without even realizing it and I will continue going forward, unaware. For this reason I intend that Ettore and the other messengers after him, when they have reached me again, will not start back to the capital but will go ahead, so that I can know in advance what awaits me. For some time in the evening I've been troubled by an unusual anxiety, not a regret for the joys left behind as in the early days of the trip, but impatience to learn about the uncharted lands toward which I am journeying. As I travel I note - and I have not confided this to anyone until now - I note that from day to day as I advance toward the improbable goal, in the sky there shines an unusual light, like one I have never seen before, even in my dreams, and how the plants, the hills the rivers that we cross, seem made of a substance which is different from ours and that the air brings omens I do not know how to interpret. A new hope will pull me farther forward tomorrow morning, toward those unexplored mountains that the shadows of night are hiding. Once more I will break camp while Domenico disappears over the horizon in the opposite direction, taking my useless message to the far-away city.