The Island of the Day Before (52 page)

Shaking his head, the Canon took his leave. And so did the youth, who seemed quite troubled by this talk; head bowed, he excused himself and said he had to return to his house.

"Poor boy," the libertine then said, "he builds machines to count the finite, and we have terrified him with the eternal silence of too many infinities. Voila, the end of a fine vocation."

"He will not recover from the blow," another of the Pyrrhonians said. "He will try to make peace with the world, and he will end up among the Jesuits."

Roberto thought now of that dialogue. The Void and space were like time, or time was like the Void and space. Sidereal spaces exist where our earth appears like an ant, and so do spaces such as the world of corals, the ants of our Universe—and all these spaces are one inside the other.... Was it therefore unthinkable that there could be worlds subject to different times? Has it not been said that on Jove one day lasts a year? Therefore worlds must exist that live and die in the space of an instant, or survive beyond our ability to calculate both the Chinese dynasties and the date of the Flood. Worlds where all movements and the response to those movements do not occupy the time of hours and minutes but of millennia.

Did there not exist—and close at hand—a place where the time was yesterday?

Perhaps he had already entered one of those worlds where, once an atom of water had begun corroding the shell of a dead coral, now crumbled and scattered by the many years that had passed, as many as those from the birth of Adam to the Redemption. And was he not living his own love in this time, where Lilia, like the Orange Dove, had become something for whose conquest he now had at his disposal the tedium of centuries? Was he not preparing to live in an infinite future?

Towards many similar reflections a young gentleman who had only recently discovered those corals felt himself driven.... And there is no knowing where he would have arrived if he had had the spirit of a true philosopher. But Roberto was not a philosopher; instead he was an unhappy lover barely emerging from a venture, all things considered, not crowned with success: towards an Island that eluded him in the icy brumes of the day before.

He was, however, a lover who though educated in Paris had not forgotten his country life. Therefore he came to conclude that the time he was thinking about could be stretched in a thousand ways like dough made with egg yolks, as he had seen the women at La Griva knead it. I do not know why Roberto hit upon this simile—perhaps too much thinking had whetted his appetite, or perhaps, terrified by the eternal silence of all those infinities, he would have liked to be home again in the maternal kitchen. He soon went on to recall other rustic delicacies.

There were the pies stuffed with little birds, hares, and pheasants, as if to affirm that there can be many worlds, one next to the other or a world within a world. But his mother also made those cakes known as "German-style," with seven layers or stripes of fruit partitioned with butter, sugar, and cinnamon. And from that idea he went on to envision a salted cake, where amid various strata of pastry he put first one of ham, then one of sliced hard-boiled egg, then one of green vegetable. And this led Roberto to think that the Universe could be a pan in which different stories were cooking at the same time, each at its own rate but perhaps all with the same characters. And as the eggs that are below in a pie have no notion of what is happening, beyond their layer of pastry, to their fellow eggs or to the ham above them, so in one stratum of the Universe one Roberto could not know what the other was doing.

Granted, this is not a refined way of reasoning, and with the belly, moreover. But it is obvious he already had in mind the point at which he wanted to arrive: In a single moment many different Robertos could be doing different things, perhaps under different names.

Perhaps under the name of Ferrante? In that case, could the story he believed he was inventing about an enemy brother not be the obscure perception of a world where to him, Roberto, other vicissitudes were occurring, different from those he was experiencing in this world and at this time?

Come now, he said to himself, of course you would have liked to be the one experiencing what Ferrante experienced when the
Tweede Daphne
unfurled her sails to the wind. But this we know because, as Saint-Savin said, there exist thoughts we do not think about at all, though they make an impression on the heart without the heart (still less the mind) becoming aware; and it is inevitable that some of these thoughts—which at times are nothing but obscure desires, and not even all that obscure—should be introduced into the universe of the Romance that you think you are conceiving for the pleasure of portraying the thoughts of others.... But I am I, and Ferrante is Ferrante, and now I will prove it, having him experience adventures of which I could not be the protagonist—and which, if they take place in any universe, it is that of Imagination, parallel to none other.

And he took pleasure, all that night long, heedless of the corals, in conceiving an adventure that, however, would lead him once again to the most lacerated delight, the most exquisite suffering.

F
ERRANTE HAD TOLD
Lilia, now ready to believe any falsehoods that might come from those beloved lips, a story almost true, except that in it he played the part of Roberto, and Roberto that of Ferrante; and he convinced her to sacrifice all the jewels in the casket she had brought with her to find the usurper and tear from him a document of capital importance to the fate of the Nation, which the other had torn from him, and with which, returning it, he could obtain the Cardinal's pardon.

After fleeing the French shores, the
Tweede Daphne's
first port of call was Amsterdam. There Ferrante, double spy that he was, could find someone able to give him information of a ship named the
Amaryllis.
Whatever that information was, a few days later he was in London looking for someone else. And the man to whom he addressed himself could only have been a villain of his own stamp, ready to betray those for whom he was betraying others.

So Ferrante, having received from Lilia a diamond of great purity, was seen entering at night a pothouse where he was welcomed by a creature of dubious sex, perhaps a former eunuch of the Turks, with a glabrous face and a mouth so small you would have said he smiled only by moving his nose.

The room Ferrante stole into was frightful thanks to the smuts from a pile of bones burning in a smoldering fire. In one corner a naked corpse was hanging by its feet, secreting a nettle-colored liquid from its mouth into a copper basin.

The eunuch recognized Ferrante as a brother in crime. He heard the question, saw the diamond, and betrayed his masters. He led him into another room that looked like an apothecary's shop, filled with jars of clay, glass, tin, copper. All contained substances that served to alter the aspect of their users: crones who wanted to appear young and beautiful, miscreants who sought to disguise their features. There were rouges, emollients, asphodel roots, tarragon bark, and a substance made with stag marrow and water of honeysuckle that refined the skin. He had pastes to turn the hair blond, a mixture of green ilex, rye, white horehound, soda niter, alum, and yarrow; or to change the complexion there were compounds of stallion, bear, camel, snake, rabbit, whale, mare, bittern, doe, wildcat, and otter. Also an oil for the face made of styrax, lemon, pine-nut, elm, lupin, vetch, and chickpea, and a shelf of bladders with which strumpets could seem virgins. For those who would ensnare a lover he had viper tongues, quail heads, asses' brains, pilewort, badgers' paws, stones from eagles' nest, hearts shaped in tallow thick with broken needles, and other objects made of mud and lead most repugnant to the sight.

In the center of the room stood a table, and on it was a basin covered with a bloodied cloth, to which the eunuch pointed with a look of complicity. Ferrante did not understand, and his host assured him he had come to the right man. In fact, the eunuch was none other than he who had wounded Dr. Byrd's dog and who, every day at the agreed time, dipping into vitriol water the cloth steeped in the animal's blood, or holding the same cloth to the fire, had been transmitting to the
Amaryllis
the signals Byrd awaited.

The eunuch related everything about Byrd's voyage and about the ports where he would surely have called. Ferrante, who truly knew little or nothing of the matter of longitudes, could not imagine that Mazarin had sent Roberto on that ship only to learn something that to him now seemed obvious, so he concluded that what Roberto was really meant to reveal to the Cardinal was the location of the Islands of Solomon.

He believed the
Tweede Daphne
swifter than the
Amaryllis,
he trusted his luck, he thought he would easily overtake Byrd's ship, and, since it would have landed on the Islands, he could more easily surprise the crew ashore, exterminate them (Roberto included), and then dispose of that territory at his pleasure, as he would be its sole discoverer.

It was the eunuch who suggested to him the method of proceeding without mistaking his course: it would suffice to wound another dog, and every day act upon a sample of its blood, as the eunuch did for the
Amaryllis
dog, and Ferrante would receive the same daily messages that Byrd received.

"I will sail at once," Ferrante said, and when the other reminded him that first a dog would have to be found, "I have a far better dog on board," he exclaimed. He took the eunuch onto the ship, made sure that among the crew there was a barber expert in phlebotomy and other similar chores. "I, Captain," declared one who had eluded a hundred nooses and a thousand fetters, "when we ran the seas, I cut off more arms and legs of comrades than I wounded enemies!"

Descending into the hold, Ferrante chained Biscarat to two stakes crossed obliquely and, grasping a knife, deeply cut the captain's hip. As Biscarat moaned, the eunuch collected the dripping blood with a cloth he had put in a bucket. Then he explained to the barber how he should keep the wound open for all the duration of the voyage, not allowing the wounded man to die but also not allowing the wound to heal.

After this latest crime, Ferrante ordered the men to set sail for the Islands of Solomon.

Having written this chapter, Roberto felt disgust and weariness, himself crushed by the labor of so many evil deeds.

He no longer wanted to imagine the sequel, and instead he wrote an invocation to Nature, praying that—as a mother, wishing to make her baby sleep in his cradle, draws a cloth over it and covers him in his own little night—she draws deep night over the planet. He prayed that Night, stealing everything from his view, bid his eyes close; that, together with darkness, silence come; and that—as at the rise of the sun, lions, bears, and wolves (to whom, as to thieves and assassins, daylight is hateful) run to hide in caves where they find refuge and safety—as the sun withdrew beyond the west, all the din and the tumult of his thoughts retire. That, once the light was dead, the spirits that the light revived in him would be stunned, and mute repose would reign.

When he blew out the lamp, his hands were illuminated only by a lunar ray entering from outside. A fog rose from his stomach to his brain and, falling on his eyelids, closed them so that his spirit could no longer peer out and see any distracting object. And not only did his eyes and ears sleep, but also his hands and feet—everything save the heart, which never rests.

Does the soul also sleep during such repose? Alas, no. It remains wakeful, only it withdraws behind a curtain and becomes theater: then phantom zanies come on stage and perform a comedy, but such as a company of drunken or mad actors might play, so travestied seem the characters, so strange the dress and lewd the attitudes, so inappropriate the situations, so outrageous the speech.

As when you cut a centipede into several parts, and the separated sections run off blindly, because except for the first, which comprises the head, the others cannot see; and each, like a healthy roach, goes off on the five or six legs left him, carrying away that piece of soul that is his. Similarly, in dreams, from the stem of a flower you see a crane's neck sprout, ending in a baboon's head with four snail's horns that spit fire, or you see blossoming from an old man's chin a peacock's tail as beard; another man's arms look like twisted vines, and his eyes are lights glowing in a conch shell, and his nose is a reed-pipe.

Roberto, who was sleeping, thus dreamed Ferrante's voyage as it continued; only he was dreaming it as a dream.

A revelatory dream, I would say. It almost seems that Roberto, after his meditations on infinite worlds, no longer wanted to imagine a plot unfolding in the Land of Romances but, rather, a real story in a real land, a land he also inhabited, except that—as the Island lay in the simple past—his story could take place in a not distant future, which could satisfy his desire for a space less confined than that to which his shipwreck had sentenced him.

If he had begun the story by presenting a generic Ferrante, an Iago, his rancor conceived for an offense never suffered, a Ferrante who now, unable to bear the sight of the Other at Lilia's side, was taking his place, then—daring to recognize his darkest thoughts—Roberto would have admitted openly that Ferrante was himself.

Now Roberto was persuaded that the world could be experienced from infinite parallaxes; before, he had set himself up as an indiscreet eye to study Ferrante's actions in the Land of Romances, or in a past that had also been his own. (That past had barely touched him, touched him without his realizing it, as it was determining his present.) Roberto was now becoming the eye of Ferrante, for in the company of his adversary he wanted to enjoy the events that fate held in store.

So now the vessel proceeded across the liquid meadows, and the pirates were docile. Watching over the voyage of the two lovers, the buccaneers confined themselves to discovering marine monsters and, before arriving on the American shores, they sighted a Triton. As for the part visible out of the water, the creature had a human form, except that the arms were short in proportion to the body: the hands were big, the hair gray and thick, and it had a beard down to its stomach. Its eyes were large, its skin rough. As they approached it, it seemed submissive and moved towards the net. But as soon as it felt the men drawing it to the boat, and even before it could reveal itself below the navel, showing whether or not it had a fish's tail, it ripped the net with one blow and vanished. Later it was seen taking the sun on a rock, but still hiding the lower part of its body. Looking at the ship, it waved its arms as if applauding.