When Roberto finally removed Father Caspar from the oil, the Jesuit, who looked like a piglet ready for the oven, simply said with heroic stubbornness that not all was lost. There was another telescope, equally powerful, mounted on the Specula Melitensis. They had only to go and fetch it from the Island.
“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.”
CHAPTER 24, Dialogues of the Maximum Systems
WHAT 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 fourfifths of an hour, and the man who does not know this, seeing that at suchand-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
