Costanza’s Suicide Voyage

Costanza’s Suicide Voyage turns an attempt to reach death into an involuntary passage to safety. After hearing that Martuccio Gomito and all aboard his bark have drowned, Costanza sets out alone in a small boat and relinquishes control of it, expecting the sea to kill her. The wind carries her instead to a beach near Susa, where Carapresa finds her and offers food, shelter, and counsel. The episode’s decisive reversal is not a chosen recovery but survival imposed by circumstance, followed by Costanza’s first uncertain return to hope.

The Report and the Decision

The voyage follows news brought to Lipari by many different people: Martuccio Gomito and everyone aboard the bark were said to have drowned. Costanza, already deeply distressed by her lover’s departure, takes the report as confirmation of his death. Her grief becomes a resolve not to go on living. Yet her heart will not allow her to kill herself by direct violence, so she seeks another means of making death unavoidable.

One night she secretly leaves her father’s house and goes to the harbor. There she finds a fishing smack lying a little apart from the other ships. Its owners have only just come ashore, and the boat is equipped with mast, sail, and oars. Costanza boards in haste and rows out to sea. The secrecy of her departure and the borrowed boat make the act both deliberate and precarious: she has chosen the setting for her death, but not a controlled way to bring it about.

Costanza knows something of seamanship, as women on the island commonly do. Once at sea, she sets the sail, then casts away the oars and rudder. By discarding the means of steering, she removes her own ability to direct the boat or return to land. She expects that an empty vessel without a steersman must be overturned by the wind or driven against a rock and broken apart. She wraps her head in a mantle, lies down in the bottom of the boat, and weeps, surrendering herself to the outcome she has arranged.

A Crossing Against Her Intention

The weather defeats Costanza’s expectation of destruction. The wind is northerly and very light, and the sea is nearly calm. Instead of overturning or wrecking the boat, the conditions carry it safely through the night. By the following day, about vespers, it reaches a beach near Susa, roughly a hundred miles beyond Tunis.

Costanza has remained so absorbed in despair that she has not lifted her head and does not register whether the boat is at sea or ashore. A poor woman on the beach, occupied with taking her masters’ fishermen’s nets out of the sun, sees the vessel striking land under full sail. Wondering why the fishermen aboard seem to be asleep, she approaches and finds no one but Costanza, who is sleeping deeply. She calls repeatedly before waking her.

The woman recognizes Costanza’s clothing as Christian and asks in Latin how she came to be alone in the boat. Hearing Latin, Costanza briefly suspects that a change of wind has carried her back to Lipari. She springs up and looks around, only to find an unfamiliar country. When she asks where she is, the woman tells her that she is near Susa in Barbary. The landing does not immediately relieve her: Costanza is distressed that God has not granted the death she sought, and she fears the shame or harm that might await her in a place where she knows no one.

Carapresa and the First Return of Hope

Seeing Costanza weep at the foot of the boat, the woman takes pity on her. By urging her, she brings Costanza into a little hut. There, her kindness makes it possible for Costanza to explain how she came to be on the shore. The woman also notices that Costanza has been fasting. She offers her own dry bread, some fish, and water, and persists until Costanza eats a little. These modest provisions answer immediate physical need while marking the first interruption in Costanza’s isolation.

Only after this does Costanza ask who her rescuer is and how she knows Latin. The woman says she is from Trapani, is called Carapresa, and serves Christian fishermen there. Costanza is still deeply miserable and cannot explain why Carapresa’s name affects her, but she takes it as a favorable omen. The name, associated in the episode’s note with a dear or precious prize, gives her a reason to hope without yet telling her what she may hope for. Her wish to die begins to lessen.

Costanza does not yet disclose who she is or where she comes from. Instead, she earnestly asks Carapresa, for the love of God, to have pity on her youth and advise her how to avoid being affronted. The request leaves the episode at a threshold: Costanza has survived the voyage, accepted food, and allowed a sliver of hope to enter, but she remains frightened and dependent on a stranger’s protection.

Reversal and Narrative Function

The boat’s journey is governed by the gap between intention and result. Costanza makes a deliberate sequence of choices—leaving home secretly, taking a ready boat, sailing out, and casting away the means of navigation—but she cannot command what follows. The very lightness of the wind and calm of the sea that preserve the boat overturn her plan. Her movement away from Lipari becomes not the death she intended but an arrival in Barbary, where an encounter she did not seek makes survival possible.

The episode also changes the form of Costanza’s predicament without resolving it. She begins with grief for a lover believed drowned and an intention to end her own life; she reaches land alive, but in an unfamiliar place and afraid of what may happen to her. Carapresa’s shelter and food do not erase that fear, yet they create the conditions for Costanza to speak, eat, and ask for help. The voyage thus closes not with certainty or safety secured, but with a small, concrete reversal: the woman who had surrendered herself to the waves is once again asking another person how she might live through what comes next.