The Island of the Day Before (61 page)

He realized now that in a less specific, less obviously theatrical fashion, experienced through little surprises day after day, this sensation of Repose Denied was something he had known first in Provence, then in Paris, where everyone he encountered somehow destroyed a certitude of his, each proposing a different map of the world, but the various proposals never cohered into a finite design.

He heard of machines that could alter the order of natural phenomena, so what was heavy rose and what was light sank, so that fire would moisten and water burn, as if the very Creator of the Universe were capable of revising Himself and could finally compel plants and flowers to disobey the seasons, and the seasons to engage in a struggle with time.

If the Creator consented to change His mind, did an order that He had imposed on the Universe still exist? Perhaps He had imposed many, from the beginning; perhaps He was prepared to change them day by day; perhaps a secret order existed, presiding over the constant change of orders and perspectives, but we were destined never to discover it, to follow instead the shifting play of those appearances of order that were reordered at every new experience.

Then the story of Roberto della Griva would be merely the tale of an unhappy lover, condemned to live beneath an exaggerated sky, a man unable to reconcile himself to the idea that the earth wandered along an ellipse of which the sun was only one of the fires.

Which, as many will agree, is too little to make a story with a proper beginning and a proper end.

Finally, if from this story I wanted to produce a novel, I would demonstrate once again that it is impossible to write except by making a palimpsest of a rediscovered manuscript—without ever succeeding in eluding the Anxiety of Influence. Nor could I elude the childish curiosity of the reader, who would want to know if Roberto really wrote the pages on which I have dwelt far too long. In all honesty, I would have to reply that it is not impossible that someone else wrote them, someone who wanted only to pretend to tell the truth. And thus I would lose all the effect of the novel: where, yes, you pretend to tell true things, but you must not admit seriously that you are pretending.

I would not even know how to come up with a final event whereby these letters fell into the hands of him who presumably gave them to me, extracting them from a miscellany of other defaced and faded manuscripts.

"The author is unknown," I would, however, expect him to say. "The writing is graceful, but as you see, it is discolored, and the pages are covered with water-stains. As for the contents, from the little I have seen, they are mannered exercises. You know how they wrote in that century.... People with no soul."

M
ANY PEOPLE—THE
author, first of all—have been of inestimable help in the preparation of this English text. I would like in particular to thank Nicholas Adams of Vassar College and Silvio Bedini of the Smithsonian Institution. I am indebted to my colleagues at Bard College, Elizabeth Frank, Daniel Freedman, Frederick Hammond, William Mullen, and Hope Konechny; to Pietro Corsi of the
Nuova Rivista dei Libri,
Florence; Antonio Clericuzio of the Università di Cassino; Mara Miniati of the Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence; and Valentina Pisanty and Alasdair McEwan, Milan.

This translation is dedicated to the cherished memory of Francis Steegmuller.

W. W.

1. The reader can easily verify the truth of what I have written by consulting P. A. Leupe, "De handschriften der ontdekkingreis van A. J. Tasman en Franchoys Jacobsen Vissche 1642–5," in
Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidkunde.
N. R. 7, 1872,
[>]
. No objection can be made, surely, to the documents collected as
Generale Missiven
, including an extract from the "Daghregister van het Casteel Batavia" dated 10 June 1643, in which Tasman's return is reported. But my hypothesis is still plausible, for it would be easy to suppose that in order to maintain a secret like that of longitude, even a document of this sort would be manipulated. With communications that from Batavia had to reach Holland (and there is no telling when they arrived there) a gap of two months would pass unnoticed. Moreover, I am not at all sure Roberto arrived in the area in August and not earlier.

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2. Absolutely no log or documentation of this voyage exists. Why?

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