And as he began to hear against the panes a light rain cooling the noonday heat, he said to himself: It is only natural, I—and no other—am the one who has climbed aboard this ship as an intruder, I disturb this silence with my footsteps, and so it is that, as if afraid of having violated another’s sanctum, I constructed another self who roams beneath the same decks. What evidence have I of his existence? A few drops of water on the leaves? But is it not possible that, as it is raining now, it rained last night, however briefly? The feed? But could not the birds, pecking at what was already there, have scattered it, making me think someone had thrown new grain? The absence of eggs? Why, only yesterday I saw a gyrfalcon devour a flying mouse!
I am populating a hold I have not yet visited, and I am doing this perhaps for reassurance, as I am terrified at finding myself abandoned between sky and sea. Signor Roberto della Griva, he repeated to himself, you are alone and you may remain alone until the end of your days, and this end may also be near. The food on board is plentiful, but for a period of weeks, not months. Go therefore and set on the deck some vessel to collect all the rainwater you can, and learn to fish from the bulwarks, tolerating the sun. And one of these days you must find a way to reach the Island, and live there as its sole inhabitant. This is what you should be thinking about, not stories of Intruders and Ferrantes.
Braving the light, now filtered through clouds, he collected some empty barrels and arranged them on the bridge. In performing this task, he realized he was still very weak. He went below again, lavished the animals with food (perhaps so that no one else would be tempted to do it in his stead), and once again gave up the idea of descending still farther. He came back, spent a few hours lying down, while the rain showed no sign of letting up. There were gusts of wind, and for the first time he realized that he was in a floating house, which rocked like a cradle, as a slamming of doors enlivened the considerable bulk of that wooden womb.
He savored this metaphor and wondered how Padre Emanuele would have read the ship as a source of Enigmatic Devices. Then he thought of the Island and defined it as unattainable proximity. This fine conceit showed him, for the second time that day, the dissimilar similitude between the Island and the Lady, and he stayed awake into the night to pen the pages I have drawn on for this chapter.
The Daphne pitched all night, but its motion, like the waves of the bay, grew calm at first dawn. Through the window Roberto saw the signs of a cold but clear morning. Remembering those Hyperboles of the Eyes recalled the day before, he reminded himself that he could observe the shore through the spyglass he had seen in the adjoining cabin; the lens itself and the narrow field would temper the sun’s glare.
He set the instrument on the frame of a window in the gallery and boldly gazed at the farthest confine of the bay. The Island seemed pale, its peak tufted with a patch of wool. As he had learned on the Amaryllis, ocean islands retain the humidity of the Trades and condense it in cloudy puffs, so that sailors often recognize the presence of land before they can see the shores, from the clumps of the airy element that it holds as if they were anchored there.
It had been Dr. Byrd who told him about the so-called Trade Winds, in French les alisées. Over those seas there are great winds that decree hurricanes and calms, but the Trades joke with them, capricious winds whose movement is depicted on maps in the form of a dance of curves and currents, raving carols and graceful deviations. They penetrate the course of the greater winds and disrupt them, cut across them, race with them. They are lizards that dart along unexpected paths, as if in the Sea of the Contrary only the rules of art count, not those of nature. They have the form of artful things, and resemble not the harmonious arrangements of Nature, such as snow or crystal, but, rather, those volutes that architects impose on domes, capitals, and columns.
That this was a sea of artifice Roberto had long suspected, and it explained why down here cosmographers had always imagined creatures contrary to nature, who walked with their feet in the air.
To be sure, the artists of the courts of Europe, who built grottoes encrusted with lapis lazuli, fountains operated by secret pumps, had not inspired nature in her invention of the lands of those seas; any more than it was the nature of the Unknown Pole that inspired those artists. The fact is, Roberto said to himself, both Art and Nature are fond of machination, and that is simply what the atoms themselves do when they aggregate in this way or in another. Is there any more artificed wonder than the tortoise, work of a goldsmith of thousands and thousands of years past, who fashioned this Achilles’ shield patiently nielloed, imprisoning a serpent with its feet?
At home, he continued his musing, everything that is vegetal life has the fragility of a leaf with its veins and of the flower that lasts the space of a morning; whereas here the vegetal is like leather, a thick and oily matter, a scaly sheath prepared to resist the rays of mad suns. Every leaf—in these lands where the wild inhabitants surely do not know the art of metals or of clays—could become instrument, blade, goblet, spatula, and the petals of the flowers are of lacquer. Everything vegetal here is strong, while everything animal is weak, to judge by the birds I have seen, spun from varicolored glass, while at home we have the strength of the horse, the stubborn sturdiness of the ox….
And what of fruits? At home the complexion of the apple, ruddy with health, denotes its friendly taste, whereas the livid mushroom betrays its hidden venom. Here, on the contrary, as I saw yesterday and during the voyage of the Amaryllis, there is the witty play of opposites: the mortuary white of one fruit guarantees vivid sweetness, whereas the more russet fruits may secrete lethal philters.
With the spyglass he studied the shore and glimpsed between land and sea some climbing roots that seemed to leap towards the open sky, and clumps of oblong fruits that revealed their treacly ripeness by appearing as unripe berries. And he recognized on some other palms coconuts yellow as summer melons, whereas he knew they would proclaim their maturity by turning the color of dead earth.
So to live in this terrestrial Beyond—he had to remember, if he was to come to terms with its nature—he should proceed in the direction opposite to his instinct, for instinct was probably a discovery of the first giants, who tried to adapt themselves to the nature of the other side of the globe. Believing the most natural nature was that to which they had become adapted, they thought nature naturally born to adapt herself to them. Hence they were sure the sun was small, as it seemed to them, whereas certain leaves of grass were immense, if they looked at them through eyes close to the ground.
To live in the Antipodes, then, means reconstructing instinct, knowing how to make a marvel nature and nature a marvel, to learn how unstable the world is, which in one half follows certain laws, and in the other half the opposite of those laws.
He heard again the birds waking, over there, and—unlike the first day— he realized how artful those songs sounded if compared to the chirping of his native land: whistles, gurgles, crackles, grumblings, duckings, whimperings, muffled musket shots, whole chromatic scales of pecking; and sometimes he heard something like a croaking of frogs squatting among the leaves of the trees, in Homeric parley.
The spyglass allowed him to see spindles, feathery bullets, black shudders or other shudders of indistinct hue, who flung themselves from a taller tree aiming at the ground with the insanity of an Icarus eager to hasten his own destruction. Suddenly it seemed to him even that one tree, perhaps a kumquat from China, shot one of its fruits into the air, a skein of bright crocus that quickly vanished from the round eye of the glass. He convinced himself it was the effect of a glint and gave it no further thought, or so at least he believed. We shall see later that when it came to unconscious concepts, Saint-Savin was right.
He thought those birds of unnatural nature were the emblem of the Parisian coteries he had left behind many months past. In this universe without humans, where, if not the only living creatures, certainly the only speaking creatures were the birds, he found himself as in that salon where, on first entering, he had caught only a vague chattering in an unknown language, whose scent he shyly perceived—though I would say he must have finally absorbed the sense of that scent, otherwise he would not have been able to reason about it as he now did. But, remembering
