The Island of the Day Before (36 page)

"How?" Roberto asked.

"By natation."

"But you told me you cannot swim, nor should you, at your age...."

"I, no. You, yes."

"But I do not know how to swim either!"

"Learn."

W
HAT FOLLOWS IS
of uncertain nature:
I
am not sure if it is a chronicle of dialogues that occurred between Roberto and Father Caspar, or if it is a series of notes that the former took at night to rebut the latter the following day. In any case, it is obvious that for all the time he remained on board with the old man, Roberto wrote no letters to the Lady. And similarly, from his nocturnal existence he was moving, little by little, to a diurnal one.

For example, until now he had looked at the Island early in the morning, and then for only very brief periods, or else at evening, when the outlines and distances lost definition. But now at last he saw that the flux and reflux, the play of the tides, which for a part of the day brought the waters to lap the strip of sand that separated them from the forest and for the rest of the day made them withdraw, revealed a rocky expanse that, as Father Caspar explained, was the last outcrop of the coral reef.

Between the flux, or the afflux, and the reflux, his companion explained, about six hours go by, for such is the rhythm of the sea's respiration under the influence of the moon. Not as some had believed in ancient times, attributing this movement of the waters to the breathing of a monster of the deep, to say nothing of that French gentleman who declared that even if the earth does not move from west to east, it still pitches, so to speak, from north to south and vice versa, and in this periodic pitching it is natural that the sea should rise and fall, as when one shrugs and his cassock moves up and down his neck.

Mysterious, this problem of the tides, because they vary according to the lands and the seas, and the position of the shores varies with respect to the meridians. As a general rule during the new moon, the high water comes at midday and midnight, but then the phenomenon is later each day by four-fifths of an hour, and the man who does not know this, seeing that at such-and-such an hour of such-and-such a day a certain channel is navigable, ventures into it at the same hour the next day and runs aground. Not to mention the currents that the tides provoke, and some of them are such that at the moment of reflux a ship cannot make it to shore.

And further, the old man said, for whatever place you may be in, a different calculation is necessary, and Astronomical Tables are required. He tried, indeed, to explain to Roberto those calculations—that is, how you must observe the delay of the moon, multiplying the days of the moon by four and then dividing by five, or else the reverse. The fact is that Roberto understood none of it, and we shall see later how this slackness of his led to serious trouble. He confined himself merely to being amazed each time the meridian line, which should have run from one end of the Island to the other, sometimes passed through the sea, sometimes through the rocks, and he never knew which was the right moment. Also because, flux or reflux as the case might be, the great mystery of the tides mattered far less to him than the great mystery of that line, beyond which Time went backwards.

We have said that he had no particular inclination not to believe what the Jesuit was telling him. But often he enjoyed provoking him to make him say more, and then Roberto would resort to the whole repertory of argumentation he had picked up in the gatherings of those fine gentlemen that the Jesuits considered if not emissaries of Satan, at least topers and debauchees who had made the tavern their lyceum. Finally, though, it became hard for Roberto to reject the physics of a master who, adhering to the principles of that same physics, was teaching him how to swim.

His first reaction, with his shipwreck still impressed on his mind, was to declare that nothing on earth could induce him to resume contact with the water. Father Caspar pointed out that during that same wreck, it was the water that had supported him—a sign therefore that it was an affectionate and not a hostile element. Roberto replied that the water had supported not him but the plank to which he had been bound, and it was then easy for Father Caspar to point out to him that if the water had borne a piece of wood, an entity without a soul, tending to the Abyss as anyone knows who has thrown a stick from a height, all the more was water suited, then, to bear a living being disposed to enhance the natural tendency of liquids. Roberto should know, if he had ever flung a dog into the water, that the animal, moving its paws, not only remained afloat but quickly returned to shore. And, Caspar added, perhaps Roberto did not know that if infants barely a few months old were put into water, they were able to swim, for nature has made us swimmers like every animal. Unfortunately, of all animals, we are the most inclined to prejudice and error, and therefore, as we grow up, we acquire false notions as to the virtues of liquids, and thus fear and mistrust cause us to lose our inherent gift.

Roberto then asked if he, the reverend father, had learned to swim, and the reverend father replied that he did not claim to be better than many others who had shunned good things. He had been born in a town very distant from the sea, and he had set foot on a ship only at an advanced age, when—he said—his body was nothing but a withering of the
cutis
, a dimming of the sight, a besnotting of the nose, a whispering of the ears, a yellowing of the teeth, a stiffening of the spine, a wattling of the throat, a gouting of the heels, a spotting of the complection, a whitening of the locks, a creaking of the tibias, a trembling of the fingers, a stumbling of the feet, and his breast was all one purging of catarrhs amid the coughing of phlegm and the spitting of sputum.

But, as he quickly clarified, his mind being keener than his carcass, he knew what the sages of Greece had long since discovered, namely, that if you immerge a body in a liquid, this body receives support and impulse upwards, through all the water it displaces, as water seeks to reoccupy the space from which it has been exiled. And it is not true that this body floats or does not according to its form, and the ancients were mistaken in saying that a flat thing stays up and a pointed thing sinks; if Roberto were to try to thrust something by force into water, say, a bottle (which is not flat), he would perceive the same resistance as if he had tried to thrust a tray.

It was a question therefore of acquiring familiarity with the element, whereupon everything would take its course. And he proposed that Roberto lower himself along the rope ladder hanging from the prow, known also as Jacob's ladder, but for his own serenity he should remain tied to a rope, or hawser, or cord as might be, long and sturdy, bound fast to the bulwarks. Then if he became afraid of drowning, he had only to pull the rope.

It is hardly necessary to say that this master of an art he had never practiced had not taken into consideration an infinity of concomitant accidents, ignored also by the wise men of ancient Greece. For example, to allow Roberto freedom of movement, Caspar supplied him with a rope of notable length, and at the first trial, like every aspirant swimmer, Roberto ended up below the surface of the water, then had difficulty pulling, and before the halyard drew him out, he had already swallowed enough salt water to make him want to renounce, on that first day, any further attempt.

But this was, all the same, an encouraging start. Having descended the ladder and barely touched the water, Roberto realized that the liquid was pleasant. Of the wreck he had a chill and violent memory, and the discovery of a tepid sea invited him to proceed further with the immersion until, never letting go of the ladder, he allowed the water to reach his chin. In the belief that this was swimming, he then wallowed there, abandoning himself to memories of Parisian luxury.

Since his landing on the ship he had performed, as we have seen, some ablutions, like a kitten licking its fur, but dealing only with face and pudenda. For the rest—and as he grew increasingly obsessed with his hunt for the Intruder—his feet became smeared with the dregs of the hold, and sweat glued his clothes to his body. Upon contact with this tepor that washed his body together with his clothing, Roberto remembered the time he discovered, in the Palais Rambouillet, two separate tubs for the use of the marquise, whose concern for the care of her body provided a subject of conversation in a society where washing was not frequent. Indeed, the most refined of her guests believed that cleanliness consisted not in the use of water but in the freshness of one's linen, which it was a sign of elegance to change often. And the many scented essences with which the marquise stunned them were not a luxury but, rather—for her—a necessity, a defense erected between her sensitive nostrils and their greasy odors.

Feeling himself more a gentleman than he had been in Paris, Roberto, clinging to the ladder with one hand, with the other rubbed shirt and trousers against his dirty body, while scratching the heel of one foot with the toes of the other.

Father Caspar observed him with curiosity but remained silent, wanting Roberto to make friends with the sea. Still, fearing that Roberto's mind might stray in this excessive concern for his body, the Jesuit tried to distract him. He talked to him of the tides and the attractive powers of the moon.

He tried to make Roberto appreciate a proposition that had something incredible about it: if the tides respond to the summons of the moon, they should be present when the moon is present, and absent when the moon is on the other side of our planet. But, quite to the contrary, flux and reflux continue on both parts of the globe, as if pursuing each other every six hours. Roberto lent an ear to this talk, but he was thinking more about the moon—as he had done all those past nights—than about the tides.

He asked how it is that we see always only one face of the moon, and Father Caspar explained that it turns like a ball held on a string by an athlete who makes it revolve, but who can see nothing but the side towards himself.

"But," Roberto rebutted, "this face is seen both by the Indians and the Spaniards; whereas on the moon the same thing is not true with respect to their moon, which some call Volva and which is our earth. The Cisvolvians, who live on the face turned towards us, see the earth always, whereas the Transvolvians, who live in the other hemisphere, are unaware of it. Imagine if they were to move to this side! Think of their shock on seeing at night a shining circle fifteen times bigger than our moon! They would expect it to fall down on them at any moment, as the ancient Gauls always feared the sky would fall on their head! To say nothing of those who live right on the border between the two hemispheres, seeing Volva always on the point of rising at the horizon!"

The Jesuit made some ironic and arrogant remarks about the supposed inhabitants of the moon—an old wives' tale—because all celestial bodies do not share the nature of our earth and are therefore not suited to supporting a living population, so it is best to leave those places to the angelic hosts, who can move spiritually in the crystal of the heavens.

"But how could the heavens be of crystal? If that were so, the comets passing through would shatter them."

"But who ever told you the comets pass in the ethereal regions? The comets pass in the sublunary region, and here we have air, as you can see for yourself."

"Nothing moves that is not body. The heavens move. Hence they are body."

"In order to talk nonsensical, you even become Aristotelian. But I know why you say this. You want air to be also in the heavens, then there is no more differentia between above and below, all turns, and the earth moves its derrière like a strumpet."

"But we see every night the stars in a different position...."

"Richtig. De facto they move."

"Wait. I have not finished. You would have the sun and all the stars, which are enormous bodies, make a revolution around the earth every twenty-four hours, and the fixed stars, or, rather, the great ring in which they are set, should travel more than twenty-seven thousand times two hundred million leagues? For this is what would have to happen if the earth did not make a complete revolution in twenty-four hours. How can the fixed stars move so fast? Their inhabitants would be dizzy!"

"If they have any inhabitants. But this is petitio principii."

And he pointed out that it was easy to invent an argument in favor of the movement of the sun, whereas there were far more arguments against the movement of the earth.

"I know well," Roberto replied, "that Ecclesiastes says 'terra autem in aeternum stat, sol oritur,' and that Joshua stopped the sun and not the earth. But you yourself have taught me that if we take the Bible literally, there would have been light before the creation of the sun. So the Holy Book must be read with a grain of salt, and even Saint Augustine knew that it often speaks more allegorico...."

Father Caspar smiled and reminded him that the Jesuits had long ago given up defeating their adversaries with Scriptural cavils; now they used incontrovertible arguments based on astronomy, on sense, on mathematical and physical reasons.

"What reasons, ad exemplum?" Roberto asked, scraping away a bit of grease from his belly.

"Ad exemplum," Father Caspar replied, irked, with the powerful Argument of the Wheel: "Now you listen me. Think a wheel, all right?"

"I am thinking a wheel."

"Bravo, so you can also think, instead of being Barbary ape and repeating what you heard in Paris. Now think that this wheel is stuck on a pivot, like it is a potter's wheel, and you want to turn this wheel. What do you do?"

"I put my hands on it, perhaps just one finger on the rim of the wheel, I move my finger, and the wheel turns."

"You do not think you had done better to take the pivot, in the center of the wheel, and try to make it turn?"

"No, it would be impossible...."

"So! And your Galileans or Copernicans want to have the sun in the center of the universe fixed and making move all the great circle of the planets around, instead of thinking the movement from the great circle of the heavens comes, while the earth remains still in the center. How could Dominus Deus put the sun in the lowest place and the earth, corruptible and dark, among the luminous and aeternal stars? Understand your error?"