The Island of the Day Before (31 page)

But if Father Caspar had decided to ignore the decree of Louis XIII and had established his first meridian, say, at Bologna, then the
Daphne
would have been anchored more or less between Samoa and Tahiti. The natives there, however, do not have dark skin like those he says he saw.

For what reason should the tradition of the Isla de Hierro be accepted? We must start with the assumption that Father Caspar speaks of the Prime Meridian as of a fixed line established by divine decree from the days of the Creation. Where would God have considered it natural to have the line run? Through that place of uncertain location, surely Oriental, that was the Garden of Eden? Through ultima Thule? Jerusalem? No one so far had dared make a theological decision, and rightly: God does not reason as men do. Adam, for example, appeared on the earth after the sun was already there, and the moon, day and night, and hence the meridians.

The solution therefore had to be found not in terms of History but, rather, of Sacred Astronomy. It was necessary to make the dictates of the Bible coincide with what knowledge we had of the celestial laws. Now, according to Genesis, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. But these waters could not be those we know, which God separates only on the second day, dividing the waters that are above the firmament (from which we still receive rain) from those below, namely rivers and seas.

Which means that the first result of Creation was First Matter, without form or dimensions, qualities, properties, tendencies, lacking movement and repose, raw primordial chaos,
hyle,
which was yet neither light nor darkness. It was an undigested mass where the four elements were still mingled, as well as cold and hot, dry and wet, churning magma that exploded in glowing drops like a pot of beans, like a diarrhoeic belly, a clogged pipe, a stagnant pond where circles of water appear and disappear through the emersion and immersion of blind larvae. It was such that the heretics deduced that this matter, so resistant to every creative impulse, was at least as eternal as God.

But even so, a divine fiat was necessary if from it and in it and on it the alternating process of light and darkness was to be imposed, day and night. This light (and that day) which is mentioned in the second stage of Creation was not yet the light we know, that of the stars and of the two great luminaries, which were not created until the fourth day. This was creative light, divine energy in the pure state, like the ignition of a keg of powder, which at first is black granules compressed into an opaque mass, and then all of a sudden it is an expansion of flames, a concentrate of lightning that spreads to its own extreme confine, beyond which, in contraposition, darkness is created (even if the explosion occurs at day). It is as if from a held breath, from a coal reddening through an inner respiration, from that göldene Quelle des Universums was born a scale of luminous excellences gradually descending towards the most irreparable of imperfections; as if the creative afflatus came from the infinite and concentrated luminous power of the Divinity, so searing that it seems to us dark night, down through the relative perfection of the Cherubim and the Seraphim, through the Thrones and the Dominions, to the lowest waste where the worm crawls and the insensible stone survives at the very border of the Void. "And this was the Offenbarung gottlicher Mayestat!"

And if, on the third day, grasses and trees and meadows are already born, it is because the Bible does not yet speak of the landscape that cheers our sight, but of a dark vegetative power, the couplings of seed, the stir of suffering and twisted roots that seek the sun, which, however, on the third day has not yet appeared.

Life arrives on the fourth day, when the moon and sun and stars are created to give light to the earth and to separate day from night, as we understand them when we calculate the course of time. It is on this day that the circle of the heavens is arranged, from the Primum Mobile and the fixed stars to the moon, with the earth in the center, a hard gem barely lighted by the rays of the luminaries, and around it a garland of precious stones.

The sun and the moon, establishing our day and our night, were the first and unsurpassed model of all future clocks, which, monkeys of the firmament, mark human time on the Zodiac's face, a time that has nothing to do with cosmic time: it has a direction, an anxious respiration composed of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and not the calm breathing of Eternity.

We will stop then at this fourth day, Father Caspar said. God creates the sun, and when the sun is created—and not before, naturally—it begins to move. Well, at the moment when the sun begins its course never to stop again, in that Blitz, in that flash before it takes its first step, it is directly above a precise line that vertically divides the earth in two.

"And the Prime Meridian is that on which it is suddenly noon," Roberto commented, believing he had understood everything.

"Nein!" his teacher reproached him. "You think God is dumb like you? How can He make the first day of Creation at noon begin? Do you perhaps begin, in beginning des Heyls, the Creation with an aborted day, a Leibesfrucht, a foetus of a day with only twelve hours?"

No, certainly not. On the Prime Meridian the course of the sun would have to begin by the light of the stars, when it was midnight plus a scrap, and before that there was Non-Time. On that meridian began, at night, the first day of Creation.

Roberto objected that if on
that
meridian it was night, an aborted day would have to begin somewhere else, where the sun appeared suddenly, without it or anything else having been before, only dark chaos, without time. Father Caspar said that the Holy Book does not tell us the sun appeared suddenly as if by magic, and that he was not displeased to think (as all logic, natural and divine, demanded) that God had created the sun, causing it to proceed in the sky, through the first hours, like an unignited star, that would bit by bit come alight like green wood touched by the first spark from a flint. The wood at first barely smolders and then, as the puffing encourages it, it begins to crackle and finally agrees to a lively, blazing fire. Was it not beautiful to imagine the Father of the Universe blowing on that still-green ball, urging it to celebrate its victory twelve hours after the birth of Time, right here on the Antipodal Meridian where they stood at this moment?

They still had to define what the Prime Meridian was. And Father Caspar admitted that the Isla de Hierro was still the best candidate, as—Roberto had already learned this from Dr. Byrd—there the compass-needle makes no deviation, and the meridian line passes through the point very close to the Pole where the iron mountains are at their highest. Surely a sign of stability.

So then, to sum up, if we agree that Father Caspar had set out from that meridian and moreover found the correct longitude, we still have to admit that while carefully tracing the course as navigator, he had failed as a geographer: the
Daphne
was not at our Solomon Islands but somewhere west of the New Hebrides, and that was that. However, I must reluctantly tell a story that, as we shall see, has to take place on the one-hundred-eightieth meridian, otherwise it loses all its flavor, while I accept that on the contrary it actually takes place God only knows how many degrees away, in one direction or the other.

I will venture, then, a hypothesis that I defy any reader to challenge. Father Caspar had erred to such an extent that he found himself, unwittingly, on
our
hundred-and-eightieth meridian, I mean the one we calculate from Greenwich, the last place on earth he would have thought of, because it lay in the country of schismatic antipapists.

In which case the
Daphne
would be at the Fiji Islands (where the natives are, in fact, very dark-skinned), at the very spot where today our one-hundred-eightieth meridian passes, namely, at the island of Taveuni.

It works, more or less. The outline of Taveuni shows a volcanic chain like the large island Roberto saw to his west. Except that Father Caspar had told Roberto that the fatal meridian passed just in front of the bay of his Island. Now, if we find ourselves with the meridian to the east, we see Taveuni to the east, not to the west; and if to the west we see an island apparently corresponding to Roberto's description, then we surely have to the east some smaller island (my choice would be Qamea), but then the meridian would pass behind anyone looking at the Island of our story.

The truth is that with the data Roberto gives us, it is not possible to determine where the
Daphne
fetched up. Furthermore all those little islands are like the Japanese for the Europeans, and vice versa: they all look the same. But still I wanted to make a try. One day I would like to retrace Roberto's voyage, searching for signs of him. But my geography is one thing, and his history is another.

Our sole consolation is that all these quibbles are absolutely insignificant from the point of view of our tentative romance. What Father Wanderdrossel says to Roberto is that they are on the one-hundred-eightieth meridian, which is the antipode of the Antipodes, and there on the one-hundred-eightieth meridian we find not our Solomon Islands but his Island of Solomon. What does it matter, finally, whether it is there or not? If nothing more, this will be the story of two men who believe they are there, not of two who are there; and if you would listen to stories—this is dogma among the more liberal—you must suspend disbelief.

So: the
Daphne
was facing the one-hundred-eightieth meridian, just at the Solomon Islands, and our Island was—among the Islands of Solomon—the most Solomonic, as my verdict is Solomonic, cutting through the problem once and for all.

"So?" Roberto asked at the end of the explanation. "Do you truly believe you will find on that Island all the riches of which Mendaña spoke?"

"Those are Lügen der spanischen Monarchy! We are facing the greatest prodigium of all human and sacred history, which you still can nicht understand! In Paris you looked at the ladies and followed the ratio studiorum of the Epicureans instead of reflecting on the great miracles of this our Universum, may the Sanctissimum Nomen of our Creator fiat semper praised!"

As it happened, the reasons Father Caspar had set sail bore no resemblance to the larcenous designs of the various navigators of other countries. Everything stemmed from the monumental work that he was writing, a treatise destined to remain more perennial than bronze, on the Great Flood.

A true man of the Church, he intended to prove that the Bible had not lied; but, also a man of science, he wanted to make the Sacred Text agree with the results of the research of his own time. And to this end he had collected fossils, explored the lands of the Orient to discover something on the peak of Mount Ararat, and made very careful calculations of the putative dimensions of the Ark, such as to allow it to contain so many animals (and, mind you, seven pairs of the clean ones), and at the same time to have the correct proportion between the exposed part and the submerged part so the ship would not sink under all that weight or be swamped by waves, which during the Flood cannot have been negligible ripples.

He made a sketch to show Roberto the cross-section of the Ark, like an enormous square building of six storeys, the birds at the top, to receive the sun's light, the mammals in pens that could house not only kittens but also elephants, and the reptiles in a kind of bilge, where the amphibians could also find living space in the water. No room for the Giants, and so that species became extinct. Finally, Noah did not have the problem of fish, the only creatures that had nothing to fear from the Flood.

Still, studying the Flood, Father Caspar had come up against a physicus-hydrodynamicus problem, apparently insoluble. God, the Bible tells us, causes rain to fall on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and the waters rise above the land until they cover even the highest mountains, and indeed they are arrested at fifteen cubits above the highest of the mountains, and the waters cover the earth thus for one hundred and fifty days. All well and good.

"But have you tried ever the rain to collect? It rains all one day, and you cover the little bottom of a barrel. And if it rains one whole week, you scarcely fill the barrel! So imagine then an ungeheuere Regen, so hard you cannot stay from the house in it, and all that rain pours on your poor head, a rain worse than the hurricane of your shipwreck.... In forty days ist das unmöglich, not possible, to fill all the earth above the highest mountains!"

"You mean to say the Bible lied?"

"Nein! Certainly not! But I must demonstrate where God all that water found, for it is not possible He made it fall from the sky! That is not enough!"

"So?"

"So, dumm bin ich nicht, not stupid! Vater Caspar has thought what no other human being before now had thought ever. In primis, he read well the Bible, which says, ja, that God opened all the cataracts of Heaven, but also had erupt all the Quellen, the Fontes Abyssy Magnae, all the fountains of the gross abyss. Genesis sieben elf. After the Flood ended was, He has the fountains of the deep closed. Genesis acht zwei! What are these fountains of the deep?"

"What are they?"

"They are the waters that in the deepest depths of the sea are found! God took not only the rain but also the waters of the deepest oceans and poured them on the earth! And He took them here because, if the highest mountains of the earth are around the first meridian, between Jerusalem and Isla de Hierro, certainly the marine abysses the most deep must be here, on the antimeridian, for reasons of symmetry."

"Yes, but the waters of all the seas of the globe are not enough to cover the mountains, otherwise they would always be covered. And if God emptied the waters of the sea onto the earth, He would cover the earth but He would drain the sea, and the sea would become a great empty hole, and Noah fall into it with all of his Ark."