On 12 August (2026), there was a total solar eclipse passing through Spain, in fact, almost passing only through Spain (a bit in Iceland and are there people in this fringe of Greenland?):
I went to see it in Burgo de Osma, in the Provincia de Soria, as planned. The town itself was also worth a visit. I don't visit places much anymore, because the World out there is not for one person, I believe, it is for two people, and if not two people holding hands, at least two people drinking a coffee together after they've seen everything, when it only remains the other one to look at. What is for one person only is a book, introspection, despair and the toilets. Very few things. Everything else is to be bounced against someone. Everything of this list not alone is something else. Even despair together is something else entirely. It's Grantaire who stands up to face the line of those who are about to be executed to declare: «J'en suis!»
I went to Burgo with introspection, despair and a book. Why there and not in Soria itself, say, or my much beloved Lerma, where I have seen the Moon so many times, as if it is waiting for me there. I don't know, I was just commanded there. I didn't think it twice. It was the place. It came out of nowhere. It was the right place.
It was funny, for instance, that everybody was French there! I found that all the Spanish people were actually duly registered in some exposition, that had all of them pinned to the wall like butterflies by an entomologist, with an iconic spot of the city, and a declination of their identity. Each of them was not someone anymore, they were a museum artifact. The visitors there were also locals, commenting: "¡Aquí está el tío Raúl!" or "¿Esa no estaría la mujer del panadero?" I spent a bit of time listening to the comments that were being expanded on the "artwork," as you sometimes do in a museum when the guide of some other group explains something that interests you. But instead of historical anecdotes, gossips and recriminations were being offered by the curators.
And apart from those museum entries, essentially everybody else was French. In the streets, at the tables of the terraces, in the cathedral, everybody speaking French. The bartender was Spanish, of course. I had actually seen him in the exposition. But the rest of the population of this surreal city? French! Tourists, I thought, no big deal. But why only French tourists?
In the castle, where I had stopped at the top to look at how the valley carves a sea with mountain formations that look like rocky waves, someone asked me "Hola! Espagnol?" The greeting was Spanish with a strong French accent but the request was already sounding like Pagnol's childhood memory: «Est-ce Pagnol?» I replied «Français, Monsieur!» in a playful mix of confraternity and evidence that I was like the rest of us in this place, French. I could have told him: «J'en suis!»
He asked me if I was in town for the castle or for the eclipse. I thought of replying jokingly "quelle éclipse?" but I realized it would be rude. I also realized that any reply would look rude to such a stupid question, so instead of something like "tout de suite, pour le château; ce soir, pour l'éclipse", I just said coyly «Un peu des deux.» You bet I was not going to tell him I was there on a private pilgrimage to witness how an impossible meeting can happen in the sky, me who knows that they can't happen here on the ground floor.
It then came to which was the best observation spot and he explained he had visited already all the sites, and why none of them but the least obvious one, the cross («la croix»), was suitable. He then asked where I was planning to go myself—which was the cross—but I couldn't make it look like it was the obvious choice, so I said that he seemed to have made a compelling case for the cross. He sensed I was somewhat uneasy making this statement so he reassured me that the castle—where we were then—also looked very good and if I wanted to stay there, it was all right, just that this hill in front was a bit too close. I didn't know what to say so I looked at the hill as if I was pondering his advice.
Then he said that he had sighted vultures from the cross in the morning, and that if we'd be lucky to see vultures at the same time as the eclipse, it would just be "le top du top", which I again found a somewhat daft aspiration and couldn't bring myself to comment on this statement in any way whatsoever. As I was merely nodding and humming, he then shared his fear of a cloud and on this one I felt I could contribute at least a banality, and reassure him that such a blue, spotless sky would certainly not cause any troubles, but he started to worry me instead, saying that the day before, it was like this at this time of day, only to have a clouded sunset, and that he had spotted the same tiny little cloud formation again, in the distance, pointing with his arm stretched over the tower of Burgo, and which he said was growing fast. Although it was diametrically opposed and invisible if you wouldn't look for it, he had gotten so agitated that he was succeeding in dragging me in his own lubies. I had come all this way to find at the highest point of those lands a compatriot who also had made a long detour—visited all the places—to bump into me and share stories of anguish, frustrated quests and probable failures. Would I have to confess to him too? The World is for two, as I said, even when you decline every second person offered, while waiting for the one who will not be there.
But his wife called him by phone and he said he could see "them" by the poplars and was himself at the top of the castle, waving hello, but that he was coming down now. He told me «Alors à ce soir, peut-être!» and to celebrate our departure I finally conceded «Oui, avec les vautours!» and that was my big meeting for the day.
Before him I had passed someone sitting by the door of the tower, which was a dark spot, and when I asked him «¿Se puede entrar?», in Spanish, he clearly did not understand and was thus definitely French. After the vulture guy, I passed by two young people, shirtless, trying to climb the walls, giving each other advice how to do so, in French. Down on the road, by the benches, were French families with babies crying in French and grandparents complaining about the heat in French.
I stopped inside the church in front of the castle. A French group came in and out, almost in a flicker. I was then collapsed on a bench, looking at them walking up and down the nave in a file as they were looking for things to look at, all meticulously avoiding to notice me. I might have been a sight, though! I was half praying, half fighting obsessive visions that had gripped me out of nowhere, in this church, visions of encounters that other people might have in their own corner of the world, that were not about vultures and clouds growing on the horizon and optimization of observation decks, but of abandoning oneself to the forceful appeal of nature. I was having visions of a discussion in a bar of someone asking her, in Italian, "Mi dai il tuo numero?", and my character—looking just like she did in the bar where I once was not with her—went "Perché vuoi il numero quando puoi avere me?" The devil doesn't exist, eh? So where was this coming from? Maybe I'm the devil, but that exists all right. I was shaking of a silent rage, more silent than the church itself, and a cold despair, as thick and cold as the columns of the aisles, because the Italian creature who had already stood up with a “Daje, andiamo” would not have cared a bit if the reply would have been scorn or silence, he would have just moved along to the next flirt, knowing that it doesn't matter if it's one or the other. Limerence should be a punishment for everybody. I was angry at him because happens what happens, I cannot be angry at her. It's a small consolation to know that Tolstoy existed, when you know that such other things exist too.
This was my Gethsemane for the day, the supplice of the solitude, the torment of not knowing, not understanding, the affliction of abandonment. I had to drink the cup to the bitter end, to accept that your everything can be less than a cheeky Italian fling, one that you can't even know about, only imagine, not even imagine, suffer from the tortures of whatever devilish—literal or metaphorical—constructions instil in your brain such psychological distress, you have to accept that you're not even worth ten minutes around a coffee while others can be elevated to the most intimate, most sacred, most secret treasures without having to even be mindful about it. Oh I was nailed on my bench. I didn't need to go and climb the hill to find the cross, it had found me and it had nailed itself to me.
I looked around trying to find some distraction in this place which for sure had witnessed its lot of tragedies and pain and torture. It was the church by the cemetery, itself by the side of the Ucero. It seemed the place had run out of French people, and it was silent, dark and desolate. I was expecting it to rain inside. As my gaze wandered on the sanctuary, I noticed a "Subida" and "Bajada" signs behind the altar, inviting one to get closer. Crossing over what I feared might be forbidden territory for the profane, and then going up the stairs from the Subida side, I arrived at a relic: a beautiful face of a young woman in a clay or wax mask was topping a skeleton draped in precious embroidered clothes, her ulna and radius fully exposed, the humerus to which they were loosely attached a bit more concealed, and her skeleton hands clutching a flower. I found at the exit that this was Santa Cristina, the patroness of Burgo.
Still there at the top of the stairs, I was reflecting on my psychological trauma of a few minutes ago: this was not entirely different, the union of the divine and the putrid, the godly and the bestial, taking the form of Eros and Thanatos united in the same body: the holy head with the gory dead, the beautiful face peacefully resting on a revolting, dried out in the most nauseating brownish color pile of bones. I remembered how such relics supposedly have no trace of corruption, and I was wondering whether I was witnessing a miracle, or if it was just a sick, barbarous act of devotion that had gone too far. Isn't loving that much, loving too much? At which point do you venerate the ossuary as if it was the person? I went down by the Bajada side of this little procession. On my way out, I was almost relieved to meet another little group of French tourists, although they did not even walk down the nave, as one of them signalled to the others «Non c'est rien, c'est juste une église normale quoi». I thought of intervening, of telling them «Mais il y a la Sainte, enfermée dans la cage de ses os, dépouillée de sa tunique de peau!», paraphrasing Gheorghiu in his step de la vingt-cinquième heure à l'heure éternelle, where he explains how our skin is just our clothing. But it sounded incongruous, and what I really wanted to ask them is why they were French, what were they doing here, why everybody was French, but this question had obviously no sense. Nothing had sense. I left defeated, still shaking.
In the cathedral, in the morning, looking for the masterpiece of the area which is the sepulture of the founder of the city—San Pedro de Osma—I found out that even he was French. He was really Pierre de Bourges—he is Pierre d'Osma on the Wikipedia—a French cleric who ended up in Spain, became bishop of Osma, where he founded the cathedral (the Romanesque one that preceded the present building) and died in Palencia. When he died, another Frenchman, Raymond de Sauvetat, succeeded him. All this I learned from the audio guide... I was wondering if there was someone or something chasing me and that wanted me to keep driving and go back to France.
San Pedro's sepulchre is normally only opened to guided tours, but it was free of access on this occasion, and I could spend a lot of time there instead of reading Stendhal on the hill. It stands in a marvelous chapter house of great solemnity. It is a mid-13th century monumental grave covered with a continuous frieze of Gothic reliefs narrating the saint's life and miracles. Its polychromatic decoration is original, as the tomb was walled up behind an altarpiece and was forgotten there until it was rediscovered in 1879, almost as new. The depiction of the miracles and good deeds of San Pedro show that he was not your usual Saint, but one of great character, a trouble-maker not shying from a good fight, and destroying enemies with spiritual super powers as if in an action movie.
One can read delightful accounts in a translated version of La Vida y Milagros de San Pedro de Osma. There is one story of a Christian prisoner set free by a muslim woman, on the condition that he marries her. The parents of the woman disapproved, but San Pedro intervened personally and settled the matter—a real miracle—even offering the dowry himself. After he died, he opened his eyes to address the devil and warn him that he would get no business here, called for salt, water and an oracional, and asperged the room himself, still dead. My favourite story, however, which really betrays the Saint's character, is how he again personally set records straight by raising from the grave, went to find two other deceased bodies (you could read that as "buddies" with an accent) and together went to teach a lesson or two to some unworthy bishop-to-be (not even a bishop). This is best recounted by the translator of the Latin original:
(33) Además de los enumerados aconteció, igualmente, otro suceso que no debe ser pasado en silencio. Cierto personaje que recibía el nombre de Juan Téllez fue elegido como obispo de Osma de forma indebida, según aseguraban ciertas personas de su época. Éste, sufriendo una muerte prematura, falleció antes de ser ordenado obispo y fue enterrado junto al sepulcro del bienaventurado obispo. Y cuando yacía allí después de algún tiempo, una noche ocurrió que, cuando los sacristanes dormían y uno de ellos, que tenía por nombre Anaya, aún permanecía despierto, vio que alguien vestido con ropajes sagrados y llevando una mitra y un báculo salió del sepulcro del bienaventurado obispo Pedro y que, tras arrodillarse ante el altar de la bienaventurada Virgen y, según le pareció, rezar allí una oración, acudió ante el sepulcro del obispo don Beltrán y lo llamó. Tras salir éste, ambos continuaron hasta el sepulcro del obispo don Esteban. Una vez que también éste fue llamado y salió, los tres, revestidos con las ropas propias de un obispo, fueron en fila, con el bienaventurado Pedro en medio, hasta el altar de la bienaventurada Virgen. Y tras rezar también allí una oración y retirar del altar dos candelabros con cirios encendidos que aún hoy se conservan en la iglesia de Osma, acudieron hasta el sepulcro del antedicho obispo electo y, golpeando en el sepulcro con los báculos, gritaron: “¡Sal, sal!”. Y al gritar aquél desde dentro, como si chillase de dolor: “Enseguida salgo”, éstos lo urgían con mayor premura y lo instaban a salir. Y cuando, finalmente, salió con la apariencia de un espectro negrísimo y huyó hacia la puerta de la iglesia, saliendo aquéllos en su persecución, el obispo Esteban, anteriormente citado, arrojó tras él un candelabro que quedó clavado en la puerta y fue sacado de ella al día siguiente a la vista de muchos.
The story carries on, but I think that it sufficiently shows how, for some people, the «Rest in Peace» is a formality and that when something needs to be done, it is no better done than by yourself directly. With ceremonial and procedure, though. A beautiful story. The "real one" that led to a candlestick being stuck in a door during the night was probably interesting too.
Another piece which I found marvellous is a Mapa Mundi of the 11th century, with a Commentary on the Apocalypse, with details of the continents known at the time: the Reconquista had just recovered Soria. That's why Pedro de Osma was dispatched in the area in the first place, to bring back the catholic faith there, and we have seen that he was quite the Saint for the job. But it was still three hundred years before the full peninsula would be recovered, and the New World discovered. So there is only Europe, Asia and Africa. Japan is shown as the emblem of the unknown, remote territories, forbidden lands "because the sun is too hot" there. It's actually ill-placed because the map is rotated: north is on the left, which puts east at the top, which explains the position of the Sun. Europe is on the lower-left and Africa on the right (we can read Libia there). The red rectangle is PA-RA-DI-SUS. The faces relate to figures of the apocalypse, which was the map's main purpose. The character below the sun is a sciapod, a one-footed man who moves by hopping and, when tired, lays down and uses his single foot as a parasol. An eleventh-century mapmaker drew what is literally a self-eclipse of the Hinomaru—the Japanese sun—and filed this desperate gesture next to Paradise! You can imagine how much I was enjoying this...
The cathedral itself has two points of major interest: the giant staircase, and a statue of Christ, on whose head a rooster once stood, planting its claws as if another crown of thorns. This couldn't be, of course, so a sacristan took a stone and threw it at the bird to have it fly away, but instead, he hit Christ in the face, and the statue started to bleed. You can still see the mark of the stone on the temple. And a rooster has been added to the composition. It was not on the head but I still wanted to kick it with something anyway. Imagine the spiritual journey for the sacristan on this day, of devotion damaging what it adores. We're still speaking about it... The only missing element was San Pedro kicking open his grave to jump out of it excitedly, inquiring in a very upset but holy voice "what on Earth is going on again here?"
This was in the morning. I went to the castle from there, where I had this existential meeting, and from the castle to the Calvaries: the one with Santa Cristina, first—mine—and the one del Siglo—on the hill—then. It was not much time to wait because I was kept busy with the visits and hiking around, let alone this seance of torture in the church. On site of the Cruz del Siglo was the police and a group of Chineses, so I went till the end of the rock formation, to be alone. People gathered in moderate amount, but nobody came too close to me, except a couple who probably also wanted some privacy. I don't think I bothered them too much because I was looking in the other direction, but it seemed they were the focal point of all the attention of everybody else, in particular of some weird guy fixing the horizon as if he was fixing them for the entire duration of their own way to celebrate the eclipse.
I started reading Stendhal's famous essay, De l'Amour. The introduction first, where it was explained that the Essay followed a failed attempt by the Author to write a fictitious novel on his encounter with Métilde. This failed because that «idée de génie» (of making a fictitious account of a real-life encounter of which he had been forbidden to speak about) had eventually turned out empty for him. Even for Stendhal! Go figure... he had swapped the details; for instance, in the novel, he gave himself a Polish name, which in real life was the husband's. He found out, however, that he was trying to describe a flower with the vocabulary of a building. It didn't work.
So not being able to make it up, he wrote an Essay on love, instead, which became famous, especially for this concept of crystallization, which entered psychological jargon. I believe Dorothy Tennov integrates it in her theory of limerence. Crystallization is featured at the very beginning. It's this idea that you come to admire even the flaws of the person you love, even what is hateful, repelling... Ossuaries, deviance, giving yourself as if a number, everything. Any blemish, vice, infirmity becomes like a crystal that covers the original "object", like in this process where twigs get stonified in caves. Scars make you not ugly but unique. A beautiful idea. It certainly works for motherly love too. Wouldn't you like to love and be loved like that?
The introduction tells us about Métilde. She was 28 when Stendhal met her, ah! She was therefore, the introduction tells us, already an old woman, by the standard of the time. She was divorced from a 20-year older husband, oh! Like in the attempted novel of Stendhal, all the details are mixed up. With this old Polish husband, she had two children, one of which would become a famous astronomer, although you probably don't know him. When Stendhal met her, he got quickly obsessed. It's not clear why—maybe it'll be clarified as the book progresses—but what is clear is that she was emphatically not interested in him. She tolerated him at the beginning, but Stendhal quickly became overly performative and she disappeared. In a delicious anecdote, she had left to Volterra, a small Italian city, and Stendhal had followed her there anonymously, not wanting to impose himself. He used as a disguise a pair of green glasses! When he bumped into her in the street, the disguise was not enough. She got infuriated at the "audacity", the "indiscretion", and a lot of other reproaches that everybody would concede her. I know little else more at this stage. Only that she died young, 35, at which point Stendhal wrote in his own copy of the book, with the date of her passing: «Mort de l'Auteur!». You're not Stendhal for nothing!
I relate to him... I think I'll like the book. It's not his best writing but I understand what he wants to say. I understand all too much. The exaggeration, «Tout l'art d'aimer[...] se réduit à dire exactement ce que le degré d'ivresse du moment comporte, c'est-à-dire, en d'autres termes, à écouter son âme.» His style, which you could describe as «recargado y insoportable», as some people did—the introduction reproduces very severe feedback that he got at the time. His indiscretion... making a theory of love as a pretext to write each page of it really about this poor woman. For someone who didn't want a public exposition of herself, you can imagine how it went between them! I couldn't go very far because the moon had already started to eat the sun. It had pierced a little croissant in its flank.
So then I followed this improbable meeting—not that of Métilde and Stendhal, which had failed and was in the past, but that of the moon and the sun, which was mathematical and thus perfect and still in the future. Nonetheless, a miracle of sort: the invisible, the absent devouring the blindingly obvious, what is there all the time, always, and fails to be affected. Because look as you might, without the special glasses, there was no way to see that a total eclipse was underway. The sun is so powerful that it doesn't matter if you remove 95% of it, it's still as bright as to remain exactly the same. The eye is logarithmic and the brain is a square root, so neither would file a complaint on their own. Oh there were slow, subtle changes in the tonality of the colors: the sandy-stones were turning ochre, the greenish pale was turning violet, but it was all subtle... Checking with modern technology that something astronomical is indeed going on when everything seems normal, is a nice metaphor to entertain your thoughts about something that you don't see, but that is there nonetheless.
But then, then, in Burgo as in all the points of this band of Spain on this twelve of August, came the moment when their meeting, their passing by one another, their encounter—I'm speaking of the sun and the moon—produced what could literally be the most spectacular natural phenomenon I have seen in my life.
The totality.
How was it? Incredible. Beyond all expectations, and I had put a lot of them into it! Totality is totally different. Even a departure of less than one percent leaves you with a moot experience: you can see the sun almost entirely eaten with glasses, the atmosphere is strange... yes to all this... but that's just what it is: a natural phenomenon that you could sketch on a piece of paper. I had seen the 1999 solar eclipse from Chaméane, far from totality. I probably had forgotten most of it by the next day. I will never forget what I saw this time. Totality is an out-of-this-World experience! When they lock, when they align perfectly, when you can remove your glasses and see the corona, naked, alone, and the sun itself literally becomes a black hole, you're the recipient of a highly crafted offering! One too coincidental not to be a miracle. One too mathematical to be a revelation.
To call this metaphorical is to say too little. The moon that you don't see, but which you know is there, gradually emerges from the light to become darkness, to become the sun itself, to invert all that was before. The precision of their locking is fantastic. Like a minute clockwork matching two cosmic bodies to the millimetre. It looks like their movement, their merging, their embrace, their penetration is building with the steadiness of an equation, but when they lock, they stay still, time stops, the sky is gone, the world is over, they don't keep moving, they just found each other and in this moment, this precise moment, the universe is still.
The sky is dark, but the moon, the sun behind it, it is pitch black. Total obscurity. Not black like pixels on a screen. Vantablack. A literal, genuine black hole in the sun! The perfect blackbody. The absence. A hole cut in the sky. It is mesmerizing.
The sun that looked so small through the glasses—surprisingly tiny, I had imagined it much bigger since I am four—now that it was covered by the moon, it looked like it was occupying half of the sky, like those pictures people take from very far to magnify an object. And this stillness—with only the actual flames from the corona glittering on its rim—this silence, the suspension, I never felt in my body the laws of Kepler like that. You could literally feel the weight of the sun hanging in the empty space. It was about a year ago now that I experienced something similar, some suspension of sort, this feeling of finding my perception outside of myself, of touching planets in the two-dimensional sky as if they were marbles on a table, and feeling them wobble as if grapes in a jelly, and here it was the same, but much longer, not a fraction of a second, but minutes, an eternity. And this conviction, this knowledge, that there is something. An untold communication. Really, a message, a wink from creation, a clue from God: "I am there, you see? Why do you worry? It's coming. It will come. It's written." What will? I don't know, but it is... It is there, and it's coming. We were just shown that it exists, and that we should not despair.
It was not only me. A good friend who needs not be named—although this is so beautifully written that I don't think such a testimony could embarrass anybody, reader or writer—sent me uninvited this striking email shortly after. It is striking because this friend is extremely rational and positivist:
The eclipse is something mesmerising, unique, crazy. I expected a lot in terms of darkness and general feeling of not seeing the light of the sun and I was warned that the way I am I shouldn’t have much expectations… well it went well beyond that. I cried… really, I literally cried. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. In a moment the sun was perfectly aligned with the moon so that a gigantic flare of white was perfectly visible on the totally dark background. You feel so small, so human… I don’t know, it’s this feeling of something majestic, like two bodies of extraordinary dimensions being exactly there for an immense and magnificent spectacle.
Well even just remembering it is still moving me. I’m such a child.
I hope you did watch it. You should at least see one eclipse before dying.
I have a couple of other testimonies of similar enchantment but that also need not be reproduced because they are more to the point of "it was great" (which it was, so everything's been said). Some do not cover the totality, though, so they might also miss the point.
We have all seen hundreds of pictures, of course... pictures don't do justice, they don't reflect the experience, the real sensation of the sky around you, pierced through its heart. It's like reading Pascal's epiphany and thinking you've met God. It's like thinking that watching an adult movie could give you a sensation of what it is to make love.
Still, something remarkable in our quickly evolving world is also the profusion of widely shared testimonies and the craft and sophistication with which modern technology and people's skills have been able to push the art. This is a collection of a few creative and artistic renditions that are a tribute more to the artists than the phenomenon, but maybe this is always what art is ultimately about:
And this includes also various videos, some of them the fruit of much thinking, planning and superb delivery:
Beautiful, right? Majestic! Who could say the opposite. Everybody who has witnessed it could, however, confirm that, one way or another, they have experienced something considerably more than all that the above captures.
I will conclude with Stendhal, because while I just said that pictures don't make justice to what it was, great writers and great literature can make justice to what a great feeling is.
Part of my fulfilment on this day—besides meeting the saints, Cristina and Pedro—comes from that I had already read, from having been comforted enormously by the little I had acquainted myself with of Stendhal. How universal are the afflictions and how similar are the remedies to them. This is Stendhal going sileto:
Je veux imposer silence à mon cœur qui croit avoir beaucoup à dire.
I was also thrilled to read that the exegete writing the introduction—the great expert on Stendhal, Victor del Litto—comments that through this work, Stendhal resolved to the most beautiful, most powerful act of love:
Il lui donne la plus grande preuve d'amour qui existe: le renoncement.
It is beautiful. I can also relate to that. I remember in Cinema Paradiso of the story Alfredo tells Salvatore, of the impossible love between a soldier and the king's daughter, and how the woman is touched enough to set a condition: wait one hundred days and one hundred nights by my window. And then, if you do that, I'll be yours. This "I'll be yours" again, the same than in the Italian bar where the princess gives herself for nothing. And the soldier, sure enough, goes and wait, every single day. And the princess says nothing, ignores him, but she checks on him. And she probably regrets. She should have said nothing. Just disappears. It wouldn't have changed much the story, the waiting would have been the same. One hundred days, or twice that amount, which is how many days passed since January 28 and today, when I write this, it's the same, it doesn't matter, the waiting is infinite in its first hour already. She was, indeed, magnanimous. This was the «un mot d'amour» to the Quijote. This was a «quisiera tomar un café contigo». Because on the 99th day, or on the 199th today, the soldier stands up, and leaves. "Why does he leave?" asks Salvatore. And Alfredo gets genuinely angry and says «Ne m'demande pas ce que ça signifie, j'en sais rien!»
Such a beautiful story has many interpretations. A common one (which is that of Salvatore) is that the soldier would not have been able to suffer the heartbreak of the princess not honoring her plea, that she was testing him without really considering him. But this is not it. Another is defiance, revenge, bravado, the "I could do it and you don't deserve it" or "if you don't want me, I don't want you either." It is not it either.
What this is, is, of course, del Litto's greatest proof of love: «le renoncement.» This is the soldier telling her: "See? I loved you so much that I don't even "want" you. What I wanted is you to be loved to the magnitude of the love you can set ablaze. And by renouncing the hundredth night, I am now giving you this love: all of me. I am giving you my ninety-nine days and nights, that are behind us, and I am giving you the thousand days and nights that are in front of me—because after such an expense of love, there is no forgetting, there is no deflection, there is no replacement: it has crystallized—so I will keep loving you, but I will not be there asking you anything, I will not be there at all, because I am unworthy anyway, because you are a princess and I am a soldier, and loving you was never mine to do, but don't go and think that I gave up, that I don't care, that it was momentarily. This love that you didn't want is not one to take anyway, it's one that is. It is the knowledge, the proof that you can be loved that much. You, the princess, have this love. Even if it's invisible. Like the sun has the moon. It's not possible, yet it happens."