The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco Page A

sun like the glass of a mirror. I would like to tell the stories of their kings, their wars, and their revolutions, or of the unhappiness of lovers up there, who in the course of their nights sigh as they look down at our Earth. I would like to tell about war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries, or the bones with the marrow. All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.' Then I realize that an equally beautiful story can be told, inventing an original duel, for example, a man fighting and convincing his adversary to deny God, then running him through so that he dies damned. Stop, Monsieur de la Grive, draw your sword once again, like that, parry, there! You set your heels along the same line: a mistake, for you jeopardize the steadiness of your legs. The head must not be held erect, because the space between the shoulder and the neck exposes an excessive surface to the blows of the adversary...."
    "But I protect my head with the sword in my extended hand."
    "Wrong, in that position you are weaker. Besides, I opened with the German stance, and you placed yourself in the Italian position. Bad idea. When a ready position has to be countered, you should imitate it as closely as possible. But you have told me nothing of yourself, of your experiences before you turned up in this valley of dust."
    More than anyone, an adult able to dazzle with perverse paradoxes can fascinate a youth, who immediately wants to emulate him. Roberto opened his heart to Saint-Savin, and to make himself interesting—since the first sixteen years of his life offered scant material—he recounted his obsession with his unknown brother.
    "You have read too many romances," Saint-Savin said to him, "and you try to live one. But the purpose of a story is to teach and please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."
    "And what might I be taught by what you consider the romance of Ferrante?"
    "A romance," Saint-Savin explained to him, "must always have at its base a misconception—of a person, action, place, time, circumstance—and from that fundamental misconception episodic misconceptions must arise, developments, digressions, and finally unexpected and pleasant recognitions. By misconception I mean things like a living person's reported death, or one person's being killed in place of another, or a misconception of quantity, as when a woman believes her lover dead and marries another, or of quality, when it is the judgement of the senses that errs, when someone who appears dead is then buried, while actually he is under the influence of a sleeping potion; or else a misconception of relation, as when one man is wrongly believed the murderer of another; or of instrument, as when one man pretends to stab another using a weapon whose tip, while seeming to wound, does not pierce the throat but retracts into the sleeve, pressing a sponge soaked in blood.... Not to mention forged letters, assumed voices, messages not delivered in time or delivered to the wrong place or into the wrong hands. And of these stratagems the most celebrated, but too common, is that involving the mistaking of one person for another, the mistake being explained by the Double ... The Double is a reflection that the character pulls behind himself or that precedes him in every situation. A fine machination, whereby the reader identifies with the main character, sharing his fear of an Enemy Brother. But you see how man is also machine, and it suffices to turn one wheel on the surface and other wheels then turn inside: the brother and the enmity are merely the reflection of the fear that each man has of himself, of the recesses of his own soul, where