The Island of the Day Before (39 page)

Father Caspar replied that to make a machine sing it was necessary to shape wood or metal and arrange holes, or attach strings and scrape them with bows, or even—as he had done on the
Daphne
—invent a water device; but if we opened the throat of a nightingale, we saw no machine of this sort there, a sign that God followed paths different from ours.

Then he asked if, as Roberto looked with such favor on infinite solar systems revolving in the sky, he could not admit that each of these systems might be part of a larger system that revolved in its turn within a system still larger, and so on—for, proceeding from such premisses, you became like the virgin prey of a seducer: she grants him first a small concession but soon will have to grant him more, and then more, and once embarked on that road, she might arrive at any terrible extremity.

Of course, Roberto said, one can conceive anything. Vortices without planets, vortices that bump into one another, vortices that are not round but hexagonal, so that each face or side fits into another vortex, all of them together forming a kind of hive with its cells, or else they are polygons that, pressed one against the other, create voids that Nature fills with other, lesser vortices, all cogged among themselves like the works of a clock—their entirety moving in the universal sky like a great wheel that turns and propels inside itself other wheels that turn, each with smaller wheels turning within, and all that great circle making in the sky an immense revolution that lasts millennia, perhaps around another vortex or vortices of vortices....At which point Roberto risked drowning, because of the great vertigo that overwhelmed him.

And it was at this moment that Father Caspar had his triumph. Then, he explained, if the earth revolves around the sun, but the sun revolves around something else (and omitting the question of whether this something else revolves around a something else of yet another something else), we have the problem of the
roulette
—of which Roberto must have heard talk in Paris, since from Paris it went into Italy among the Galileans, who would think up anything provided they could disturb the world.

"What is the roulette?" Roberto asked.

"You can call it also trochoid or cycloid, but it is much the same. Imagine a wheel."

"Like before?"

"No. Now imagine you the wheel of a wagon. And imagine on the rim of the wheel a nail. Now imagine the wheel not moving, and the nail just above ground. Now you think that the wagon moves and the wheel turns. What to the nail happens?"

"Well, if the wheel turns, at a certain point the nail will be on top, but when the wheel has made its complete revolution, the nail is again close to the ground."

"So you think this wheel has like a circle moved?"

"Why, yes. Certainly not like a square."

"Now you listen, booby. You say the nail finds itself on the ground where it before was?"

"Wait a moment.... No, if the wagon went forward, the nail would be on the same ground, but much farther ahead."

"Therefore it has not made circular movement."

"No, by all the saints in Paradise!"

"You must not say Byallsaintsofparadise."

"Forgive me. But what movement has it made?"

"It has made a trochoid, and for you to understand I say it is like the movement of a ball you throw before you, then it touches ground, then makes another arc of circle, then again—but, while the ball makes smaller and smaller arcs, the nail makes always regular arcs, if the wheel always at the same speed goes."

"And what does this mean?" Roberto asked, anticipating his defeat.

"This means you would have so many vortices and infinite worlds, and that the earth turns, and here your earth turns no more, but goes through the infinite sky like a ball, tumpf tumpf tumpf.... Ach! what a fine movement for this most noble planet! And if your vortex theory gut ist, all heavenly bodies would go tumpf tumpf tumpf.... Now let me laugh, for this is finally the most gross amusement of mein Leben!"

It was difficult to reply to an argument so subtle and geometrically perfect—and what is more, in perfect bad faith, because Father Caspar should have known that something similar would have happened also if the planets revolved as Tycho posited. Roberto went off to sleep, damp and downcast as a dog. In the night he reflected, wondering if it was not best for him now to abandon all his heretical ideas on the movement of the earth. Let me see, he said to himself, if Father Caspar is right and the earth does not move (otherwise it would move more than it should and be impossible to stop again), does this endanger his discovery of the antipodal meridian, and his theory of the Flood, and also the fact that the Island is there a day before the day it is here? Not at all.

So, he said to himself, perhaps it is best for me not to debate the astronomical opinions of my new teacher, and instead devote myself to swimming, to achieve what really interests me, which is not to prove that Copernicus and Galilei were right, or that other old bloat Tycho of Uraniborg—but to see the Orange Dove, and set foot in the day before—something that not Galilei, not Copernicus, not Tycho, nor any of my masters and teachers in Paris ever dreamed of.

So, then, the next day he presented himself again to Father Caspar as an obedient pupil in matters both natatory and astronomical.

But Father Caspar, with the excuse of a rough sea and some further calculations that he had to make, postponed that day's lesson. Towards evening he explained that to learn natation, as he said, requires concentration and silence, and you cannot have your head among the clouds. Seeing that Roberto tended to do just that, it was the Jesuit's conclusion that the young man had no aptitude for swimming.

Roberto asked himself why his master, so proud of his mastery, had renounced his plan so abruptly. And I believe the conclusion he came to was the correct one. Father Caspar had got it into his head that lying or even moving in the water, under the sun, had produced in Roberto an effervescence of the cerebrum, which led him to dangerous thoughts. Finding himself in intimacy with his own body, and immersing himself in the liquid, which was also matter, had somehow bestialized him and led him to those thoughts that are peculiar to insane and animal natures.

So Father Wanderdrossel had to find some different means that would allow them to reach the Island but would not endanger the health of Roberto's soul.

W
HEN FATHER CASPAR
said it was again Sunday, Roberto realized that more than a week had gone by since their first meeting. The Jesuit celebrated Mass, then addressed him with an air of decision. "I cannot wait until you have learned to swim," he said.

Roberto replied that it was not his fault. Father Caspar conceded that it might not be his fault, but meanwhile the weather and the wild animals were ruining the Specula, which required daily care. Hence,
ultima ratio,
only one solution remained: he would go to the Island himself. When asked how he would do this, Caspar said he would try his fortune with the Aquatic Bell.

He explained that for a long time he had been pondering how to travel underwater. He had even thought of constructing a boat made of wood reinforced with iron, double-hulled like a box with a lid. The vessel would be seventy-two feet long, thirty-two feet high, eight feet wide, and heavy enough to descend below the surface. It would be operated by a propeller turned by two men inside, the way donkeys turn a mill-wheel. And to see where it was going, a tubospicillum would protrude, an eyeglass that through a play of interior mirrors would allow them to observe from within what was happening above, in the open air.

Why had he not built it? Because such is Nature—he said—for the humiliation of our inadequacy: there are ideas that on paper seem perfect, but then, put to the test of experience, they prove imperfect, and no one knows the reason.

Father Caspar had, however, built the Aquatic Bell: "And the plebs ignorans, if one had said them a man can go to the bottom of Rhein and his clothing remain dry, and even swearing and holding his hand in a fire, they would have said it was a madness. But the proof of the experimentum has been made, and almost a century ago in the oppidum of Toleto in Hispania. So I go to the Island now with my Aquatic Bell, walking, as you see me now walk."

He headed for the soda, which was an apparently inexhaustible store: besides the astronomical apparatus there was yet more to be found. Roberto was obliged to carry up on deck other bars and semicircles of metal and a voluminous package wrapped in a skin, which still smelled of its original, horned owner. In vain did he point out that if this was Sunday, the Lord's Day, they should not be working. Father Caspar answered that this was not work, still less was it servile labor, but, rather, the exercise of an art, the noblest of all arts, and their efforts would be crowned by an increase in knowledge of the great Book of Nature. And therefore it was the same as meditating on the Sacred Scriptures, with which the Book of Nature is closely associated.

So Roberto set to work, spurred by Father Caspar, who intervened at the most delicate moments, when the metallic components had to be mounted through previously prepared grooves. Working for the whole morning, they thus assembled a cage shaped like the trunk of a cone, slightly taller than a man, in which three circles, the highest being of the smallest diameter, the central and the lowest ones progressively broader, all three of them held parallel by four inclined bars.

To the middle circle was attached a canvas harness into which a man could fit. A number of straps fastened around the shoulders and the chest held his groin steady, to prevent his sliding down. The same straps secured his shoulder blades and neck, to prevent his head from striking the upper circle.

While Roberto wondered what the use could be of this contraption, Father Caspar unwrapped the folded skin, which was revealed as the perfect case, or glove, or thimble of that metallic apparatus, over which it easily fit, fixed by some hooks on the inside so that once assembled, the apparatus could not be unsheathed. And the finished object was, in effect, a cone without a tip, open at the top and at the base—or, if you like, indeed, a kind of bell. On it, between the top and the middle circles, there was a little glass window. To the roof of the apparatus a sturdy ring had been attached.

At this point the bell was shifted towards the windlass and hooked to an arm that through a clever system of pulleys allowed it to be raised, lowered, lifted over the rail, hoisted aboard, or unloaded like any bale or case or package of cargo.

The windlass was a bit rusty after many days of disuse, but finally Roberto managed to operate it and raise the bell to half its height, so that its interior could be observed.

This bell now awaited only a passenger, who would step inside, fasten the straps, then dangle in the air like a clapper.

A man of any stature could enter it: he had only to adjust the harness, loosening or tightening buckles and knots. Now, once he was well fastened, the inhabitant of the bell could walk, carrying his little cockpit with him, and the straps kept the head at the level of the window, while the lower edge came more or less to his calf.

Now Roberto had only to imagine, the triumphant Father Caspar explained, what would happen when the windlass lowered the bell into the sea.

"What happens is that the passenger drowns," Roberto concluded, as anyone would have. And Father Caspar accused him of knowing very little about the "equilibrium of liquors."

"You may possibly think that the Void exists somewhere, as those ornaments of the Synagogue of Satan may have told you when you in Paris spent all your time with them. But you will perhaps admit that in the bell there is not the Void but air. And when you have a bell full of air lowered into the water, the water does not enter. Either it, or air."

That was true, Roberto admitted. And no matter how deep the sea was, a man could walk without any water entering, at least until the passenger, with his breathing, had not consumed all the air, transformed it into vapor (as you see when you breathe on a mirror) which, being less dense than water, would yield space to it—definitive proof, Father Caspar commented, exultant, that Nature has a horror of the Void. But with a bell of that size, the passenger could count on at least thirty minutes' respiration, he calculated. The shore seemed very far away, if it were to be reached by swimming, but, walking, it would be a stroll, because almost at the halfway point between ship and shore lay the coral barrier—where the boat had not been able to follow a direct course but instead made a wider curve beyond the promontory. And in certain stretches the coral was at the water's surface. If the expedition were begun in a period of reflux, the walking to be done underwater would be further reduced. It would suffice to reach that emergent land, and as soon as the occupant climbed up, even moving only one foot, the bell would again fill with fresh air.

But how could anyone walk on the sea bed, which must bristle with dangers, and how could he climb up on the barrier, which was composed of sharp stones and corals still sharper? And, further, how would the bell descend without capsizing in the water, or without being thrust up, for the same reasons that a diver returns to the surface?

With a shrewd smile Father Caspar said that Roberto had forgotten the most important objection: that the air-filled bell, pushed into the sea, would displace an amount of water equal to its mass, and this water would weigh far more than the body trying to penetrate it, to which therefore much opposing resistance would be offered. But in the bell there would also be many pounds of man, and, further, there were the metal buskins. And, with the look of someone who has thought of everything, he went and fetched from the inexhaustible soda a pair of boots with iron soles about five fingers thick, fastening at the knee. The iron would serve as ballast, and would also protect the feet of the explorer. They would slow his progress but spare him those concerns for the rough terrain that as a rule enforce a cautious tread.