The Island of the Day Before (24 page)

Mazarin stood, to indicate to his guest that their conversation had ended, and to stand over him for a moment before he also rose. "You will follow Colbert. He will give you instructions and entrust you to the persons who will accompany you to Amsterdam for your embarkation. Go now and good fortune attend you."

They were about to leave the room when the Cardinal called them back: "Ah, I had almost forgotten, San Patrizio. You must have realized that from now until you sail you will be followed at every step, but you may ask yourself why we do not fear that later, at the first port of call, you will be tempted to escape and hide. We do not fear this because it would not be in your best interest. You could not return here, where you would remain an outlaw, or go into exile in some land down there, with the constant menace of being found by our agents. We do not for a moment entertain the suspicion that a man of your qualities would sell himself to the English. What would you sell, after all? Your being a spy is a secret that, in order to sell, you would first have to reveal, and once revealed, it would be of no further worth, unless it was worth a stab in the back. Whereas, returning, with even modest information, you will have earned our gratitude. We would be wrong to dismiss a man who has proved capable of carrying out such a difficult mission well. The rest, then, depends on you. The favor of the great, once won, must be jealously guarded if it is not to be lost, and nourished with services if it is to be perpetuated. You will decide at that point if your loyalty to France is such as to counsel you to devote your future to her king. It is said that other men, born elsewhere, have succeeded in making their fortune in Paris."

The Cardinal was proposing himself as a model of loyalty rewarded. But for Roberto surely at that point it was not a question of rewards. The Cardinal had given him a glimpse of adventure, new horizons, and had infused him with a wisdom of living he had not known before, an ignorance that may have lowered him in the esteem of others. Perhaps it was best to accept the invitation of destiny, which would carry him away from his sufferings. As for the other invitation, that of three evenings before, everything had become clear as the Cardinal was beginning his discourse. If an Other had taken part in a conspiracy, and all believed it was he, then an Other had surely conspired to inspire in Her the words that had tormented him with joy and enamored him of jealousy. Too many Others between him and reality. And so, all the better to be isolated on the seas, where he could possess his Beloved in the only way permitted him. After all, the perfection of love is not being loved, but being Lover.

He bent one knee, and said: "Eminence, I am yours."

Or at least that is what I would have liked to happen, for it does not seem to me civil to give him a safe-conduct that says, "C'est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l'état que le porteur du présent a fait ce qu'il a fait."

I
F THE
DAPHNE,
like the
Amaryllis,
had been sent out to seek the
Punto Fijo,
then the Intruder was dangerous. By now Roberto knew of the relentless struggle among the nations of Europe to gain that secret. He had to prepare himself carefully and play his cards with skill. Obviously the Intruder had acted at night first, then had come out into the open during the day, when Roberto remained awake in his cabin. Should he now revise his plans, giving the impression of sleeping in the daytime and staying awake at night? Why? The other would simply alter his strategy. No, Roberto should instead be unpredictable, make the other unsure, pretend to be asleep when he was awake and awake while he was asleep....

He had to try to imagine what the other thought he thought, or what the other thought he thought the other thought he thought.... Thus far the Intruder had been his shadow; now Roberto would become the shadow of the Intruder, learn to follow the trail of the man walking behind his. But that reciprocal ambush could not continue to infinity, one man scrambling up a ladder while the other descended the opposite side, one in the hold while the other was active on deck, one rushing below while the other was perhaps climbing up the flank of the ship.

Any sensible person would have immediately decided to proceed in the exploration of the rest of the ship, but we must bear in mind that Roberto was not sensible. He had succumbed again to aqua vitae, and had convinced himself he was doing so to gain strength. For a man in whom love had always inspired delay, that nepenthe could not inspire decision. So he moved slowly, believing himself a thunderbolt. He thought he was making a leap, when he crawled. Especially since he still did not dare go out during the day, and he felt strong at night. But at night he drank, and dragged his feet. Which was what his enemy wanted, he told himself in the morning. And to muster courage, he clung to the keg.

In any case, towards the evening of the fifth day, he decided to venture into that part of the hold that he still had not visited, below the hatchway of the storeroom. He realized that on the
Daphne
all space had been exploited to the utmost, and between the second deck and the hold partitions and false bottoms had been installed, in order to create closets reached by rickety ladders. He first entered the hawser locker, stumbling over coils of ropes of every kind, soaked in salt water. Then he descended still farther and found himself in the secunda carina, among chests and cases of various description.

He found more food and more barrels of fresh water. He should have rejoiced, and he did, but only because he could now carry on his hunt forever, with the pleasure of delaying it. Which is the pleasure of fear.

Behind the kegs of water he found four others of aqua vitae. He climbed back to the larder and once more examined the kegs there. All contained water, a sign that the keg of aqua vitae he had found the day before had been carried up from below deliberately, to tempt him.

Rather than worry about ambush, he went back down into the hold, brought up another keg of liquor, and drank some.

Then he returned below, we can imagine in what condition; but he stopped, catching the rotten smell of bilge. He could go no lower.

So he went aft, towards the poop, but his lamp was failing and he stumbled on something, realized he was moving through the ballast, at the very point where on the
Amaryllis
Dr. Byrd had devised the cabin for the dog. But here in the hold, among puddles of water and scraps of stored food, he discovered the print of a foot.

He was now so sure an Intruder was on board that his first thought was this: Finally he had proof he was not drunk. Which is, after all, the proof drunks constantly seek. In any case, the evidence was incontrovertible, clear as day, if that is the appropriate phrase to describe his progress between the darkness and the glimmer of his lantern. Convinced now that the Intruder existed, Roberto did not think that in all this coming and going he could have left the print himself. He climbed up again, determined to fight.

It was sunset. It was the first sunset he had seen, after five days of nights, twilights, and dawns. A few black clouds, almost parallel, flanked the more distant island, condensing along the peak, from whence they diminished into arrows aimed southwards. The shore stood dark against the sea now the color of pale ink, while the rest of the sky was a wan and weary camomile, as if the sun were not behind the scene, celebrating his sacrifice, but, rather, dozing off slowly while asking sky and sea to accompany his repose with a murmur.

Roberto, on the contrary, experienced a return of the fighting spirit. He decided to confound the enemy. He went to the clock room and carried as many clocks as he could up on deck, arranging them like the pins in a game of billiards, one by the mainmast, three on the quarterdeck, one against the capstan, still others around the foremast, and one at each hatch and port, so that anyone trying to pass in the dark would trip.

Then he wound the mechanical ones (not considering that in so doing he made them audible to the enemy he wished to surprise) and turned over the hourglasses. He gazed at the deck covered with machines of Time, proud of their noise, sure that it would overwhelm the Other and retard his progress.

Having set out those innocuous snares, he was their first victim. As night fell over a calm sea, he went from one to another of those metal mosquitoes, to listen to their buzz of lifeless essence, to watch those drops of eternity suffer one by one, and fear those terminal termites toothless but gluttonous (these are the very words he wrote), those cogged wheels that shredded the day into bits of instants and consumed life in a music of death.

He remembered some words of Padre Emanuele: "What a jocund Spectacle it would be if through a Crystal at the Breast the motions of the Heart could be seen like the movement of a Clock!" He followed by starlight the slow rosary of those grains of sand muttered by a glass, and he philosophized on those little bundles of moments, those successive anatomies of time, those fissures through which the hours trickled in a fine line.

The cadence of passing time carried a presage of his own demise, which was nearing, one movement after another. He looked close with his myopic eye to decipher that puzzle of fugues, with trepid trope he transformed a water machine into a fluid coffin, and in the end he inveighed against those charlatan astrologers capable of heralding to him only the hours that had passed.

And who knows what else he would have written if he had not felt the need to abandon his poetic mirabilia, as before he had abandoned his chronometric mirabilia—and not of his own volition but because, having in his veins more liquor than ichor, he had allowed that tick-tock gradually to become a toxical lullaby.

On the morning of the sixth day, wakened by the last machines still gasping, he saw among the clocks, all of them shifted, two little cranes scratching (were they cranes?). Pecking nervously, the birds upset and shattered one of the most beautiful of the hourglasses.

The Intruder, not in the least frightened (and why should he be, knowing perfectly well who was on board?), playing absurd trick for absurd trick, had freed the two animals from below. To create havoc on
my
ship—Roberto was in tears—to show he is more powerful than I....

But why those cranes, he wondered, accustomed to seeing every event as a sign and every sign as a Device. What did he intend them to mean? Roberto tried to recall the symbolic meaning of cranes, what he remembered from Picinelli or Valeriano, but he could find no answer. Now we know very well that there was neither a purpose nor a concept in that Serraglio of Stupefactions: the Intruder was now losing his mind as Roberto had. But Roberto could not know this, and he tried to read sense into something that was no more than a petulant scrawl.

I will catch you! I will catch you, damn you! he cried. And, still sleepy, he seized his sword and flung himself once more towards the hold, falling down the ladders and ending in a still unexplored area, among piles of fagots and newly hewn logs. But, falling, he struck the logs and, rolling with them, found himself with his face on a grating, again breathing the foul stink of the bilge. And at eye-level he saw scorpions crawling.

It was likely that, along with the wood, some insects also had been stored in the hold, and I am not sure they were actually scorpions, but that is how Roberto saw them—introduced by the Intruder, naturally, so that they would poison him. To escape this danger, Roberto began to scramble up the ladder; but, running on those moving logs, he remained where he was, or, rather, he lost his balance and had to cling to the rungs. Finally he climbed up and discovered a cut on his arm.

No doubt he had wounded himself with his own sword. Instead of thinking of the wound, he went back to the woodpile and searched breathlessly among the logs for his weapon, which was stained with blood. He carried it to the aftercastle and poured aqua vitae on the blade. But finding no improvement, he abjured all the principles of his science and poured the liquor directly on his arm. He invoked some saints with excessive familiarity, ran outside where a great downpour was beginning, at which the cranes flew off and vanished. The downpour brought him to; he became worried about his clocks, ran here and there to carry them to shelter. He caught his foot in a hatchway, sprained it, hopped back inside on one leg, crane-like, undressed and—his response to all these meaningless events—set to writing while the rain first grew heavier, then abated. Some hours of sunshine returned, and finally night fell.

And it is good for us that he did write, for we are thus able to learn what happened to him on the
Amaryllis
and what he discovered in the course of that voyage.

T
HE
AMARYLLIS
SAILED
from Holland and called briefly at London. There, one night, it furtively took something on board, while the sailors formed a cordon between the deck and the hold, so Roberto was unable to see what the new cargo was. Then the ship sailed due southwest.

With amusement Roberto describes the company he found on board. It seemed the captain had taken the greatest care to choose wool-gatherers and eccentrics for his passengers, to serve as a pretext at departure, with no concern if he then lost them along the way. They fell into three categories: those who thought the ship would sail westwards, like the Galician couple who wanted to join a son in Brazil, or the old Jew who had made a vow to go to Jerusalem in pilgrimage by the longest route; those who as yet had no clear idea as to the extension of the globe, like some scapegrace youths determined to make their fortunes in the Moluccas, which they could have reached more comfortably by way of the Levant; and finally those who had been blatantly deceived, like the group of heretics from the Piedmont valleys who meant to join the English Puritans on the northern coast of the New World and did not know that, in fact, the ship would head straight south, making its next call at Recife. Before the heretics became aware of the fraud, they arrived at that colony—then in Dutch hands—and agreed to be put ashore, in any case, at this Protestant port, fearing even worse trouble later among the Catholic Portuguese. At Recife the ship took on a Knight of Malta with the face of a freebooter, whose aim was to find an island some Venetian had told him of: it had been christened Escondida, he did not know its position, and no one else on the
Amaryllis
had ever heard the name. The captain apparently knew how to pick his passengers.