If he were to let himself float, his eyes staring at the sky, he would never again see the sun move: he would drift along that border that separates today from the day before, outside time, in an eternal noon. Stopping time for himself, he would arrest it also on the Island, infinitely delay her death, because by now everything that happened to Lilia depended on his narrative decision. If he was suspended, the story of the Island would be suspended.
A highly acute chiasmus, above all. She would find herself in the same position he had occupied now for an incalculable time, a few yards from the Island, and his losing himself in the ocean would make her a gift of what had been his hope, would keep her suspended on the edge of an interminable desire—both of them without a future and hence without a future death.
Then he lingered to picture what his journey would be, and because of the conflation of universes which by now he had sanctioned, he felt as if this was the voyage of Lilia. It was the extraordinary vicissitude of Roberto that would guarantee also for her an immortality that the warp of longitudes would not otherwise have granted her.
He would move northwards at a gentle and uniform speed: on his right and on his left the days and nights would follow one another, the seasons, eclipses, tides; brand-new stars would cross the heavens bearing pestilences and upheavals of empires, monarchs and pontiffs would grow old and vanish in puffs of dust, all the vortices of the Universe would perform their windy revolutions, more stars would be formed from the holocaust of older ones…. Around him the sea would be unleashed and then subdued, the Trades would perform their girandoles, and he in his calm furrow would not change at all.
Would he stop one day? From what he remembered of the maps, no other land save the Island of Solomon lay on that longitude, at least not until that meridian connected with all the others at the Pole. But if a ship, with a following wind and a forest of sails, took months and months to travel a course like the one he was undertaking, how long would he last? Perhaps years before arriving at the place where he no longer knew what would become of day and night, or of the passing of centuries.
But in the meantime he would repose in a love so much refined that it would be careless of losing eyes, lips, and hands. The body would be drained of all lymph, blood, bile, and phlegm, water would enter every pore; penetrating the ears, it would varnish his brain with salt, would replace the vitreous humor of his eyes, would invade his nostrils, dissolving every trace of the terrestrial element. At the same time the sun’s rays would nourish him with igneous particles, and this would dilute the liquid in a single dew of air and fire that by sympathetic force would be recalled upwards. And he, by now light and volatile, would rise and be united first with the spirits of the air, then with those of the sun.
And the same would happen to her, in the steady light of that rock. She would expand like gold to airy thinness beat.
Thus in the course of days they would be united in that understanding, instant after instant they would be to each other like the stiff twin compasses, each moving with the motion of its companion, one leaning when the other goes farther, to follow or to return together to the center.
Then both would continue their journey in the present, straight towards the star awaiting them, their dust of atoms among the other corpuscles of the Cosmos, a vortex among vortices, now eternal as the world because embroidered with Void. Reconciled to their fate, because the motion of the earth carries evils and fears, but the trepidation of the spheres is innocent.
So in either case the wager will bring him a victory. He should not hesitate. Neither should he prepare for that triumphal sacrifice without observing the correct rites. Roberto entrusts to his papers the last actions he intends to make, and for the rest he leaves us to guess deeds, times, cadences.
As a first liberating lavacrum, he spent almost an hour removing a part of the grating that separated the upper deck from the lower. Then he went below and set about opening every cage. As he gradually pulled away the withes, he was struck by a general flapping of wings, and he had to defend himself, raising his arms before his face, but at the same time crying “Shoo shoo!” He had to push some clucking hens unable to find an egress on their own.
When he climbed back up on deck, he saw the populous flight rise through the rigging, and it seemed to him that for a few seconds the sun was covered by all the colors of the rainbow, striped across their breadth by marine birds who had hastened, curious, to join in this festival.
The birds freed, he flung into the sea all the clocks, not thinking for a moment that he was wasting valuable time: he was erasing time to favor a journey against time.
Finally, to avert any cowardice in himself, he collected on deck, under the mainmast, logs, planks, empty casks, sprinkled them with the oil of all the lamps, and set fire to them.
A first flame blazed up, which immediately licked at the sails and the rigging. When he was certain the fire was being fed by its own strength, he prepared for his farewell.
He was still naked, as he had been since he began dying by turning himself to stone. Stripped even of the rope, which would no longer limit his voyage, he descended into the sea.
He planted his feet against the wood, thrusting himself forward to move away from the Daphne, and after following the side to the stern, he left it forever, towards one of the two happinesses that were surely awaiting him.
Before destiny, and the waters, decide for him, I hope that—pausing for breath every so often—he allows his eyes to move from the Daphne, as he bids it farewell, to the Island.
There, above the line traced by the treetops, his eyes now very sharp, he should see rising in flight—like an arrow eager to strike the sun—the Orange Dove.
Colophon
THERE, AND WHAT later happened to Roberto I do not know or think it will ever be known.
How to draw a novel from a story, so novelistic, when the end—or, for that matter, the true beginning—is missing?
Unless the story to be told is not that of Roberto but of his papers— though here, too, all must be based on conjecture.
If the papers (fragmentary, in any case, from which I have devised a story, or a series of intersecting or skewed stories) have come down to us, it is because the Daphne did not burn entirely. That much is obvious. Who knows, perhaps the fire barely singed the masts, then died out on that windless day. Or else—there is nothing to prevent us from believing this—a few hours later a torrential rain fell and extinguished the blaze….
How long was the Daphne there before someone found it and discovered Roberto’s writings? I can venture two hypotheses, both fruit of the imagination.
As I have already mentioned, a few months before these events, in February 1643 to be exact, Abel Tasman—having set out from Batavia in August of 1642, then after reaching Van Diemen’s Land, later to become Tasmania, seeing New Zealand only from a distance and heading for the Tongas (already reached in 1615 by Schouten and Le Maire and named the Coconut Islands and the Traitors Islands), then proceeding north— discovered a series of little sand-girt islands, recording them at 17.19 degrees latitude south and 201.35 degrees longitude. We will not go into the matter of longitude here, but those islands, which he named Prins Willelms Eijlanden, if my hypotheses are correct, should not have been far from the Island of our story.
Tasman ends his voyage, he says, in June, and hence before the Daphne could have arrived in those parts. But we cannot be sure that Tasman’s diaries are reliable (and, indeed, the original no longer exists).1
Let us try to imagine, then, that through one of those fortuitous detours in which his voyage is so rich, he returned to the area, say in September of that year, and discovered there the Daphne. No hope of repairing it, without sails and rigging as it was by then. He inspected it, to learn its origin, and came upon Roberto’s papers.
Though his knowledge of Italian was poor, he realized that the papers included some discussion of the problem of longitudes, so they had to be considered highly secret, to be delivered only to the Dutch East India Company. Therefore in his own diary he says nothing about the matter and perhaps falsifies the dates to eliminate traces of his adventure. Thus Roberto’s papers end up in some secret archive. Tasman made another voyage the next year, and God only knows where he went. 2
Let us imagine the Dutch geographers leafing through those papers. As we know, there was nothing of interest to be found in them, except perhaps Dr. Byrd’s canine method, which—I am willing to bet—several spies must have ferreted out already from various sources. There is mention of the Specula Melitensis, but we must remember that,
