The Island of the Day Before (43 page)

All that the Sacred Scriptures contain
prima facie
shines like silver, but its hidden meaning glows like gold. The inviolable chastity of the word of God, hidden from the eyes of the profane, is as if covered by a veil of modesty and remains in the shadow of mystery. It says that pearls must not be cast before swine. Having the eyes of a dove means not stopping at the literal meaning of words but knowing how to penetrate their mystical sense.

And yet this secret, like the dove, eludes us, and we never know where it is. The dove is there to signify that the world speaks in hieroglyphics, and there is a hieroglyph that itself signifies hieroglyphics. And a hieroglyph does not say and does not conceal; it simply shows.

And other Jews said that the dove is an oracle, and it is no accident that the Hebrew word
tore,
dove, recalls
Torah,
which is their Bible, sacred book, origin of all revelation.

The dove, as it flies in the sun, seems simply to sparkle like silver, but only one who has been able to wait at length to discover its hidden face will see its true gold or, rather, the color of a shining orange.

From the time of the venerable Isidore, Christians have recorded that the dove, reflecting in its flight the rays of the sun illuminating it, appears to us in different colors. It depends on the sun, and its Devices are
Dal Tuo Lume i Miei Fregi
(From Your Light Comes My Ornament) and
Per te m'adomo e splendo
(Through You I Am Adorned and Shine). Its neck is sheathed in the light of varied colors, and yet the dove remains always the same. And thus it is a warning not to trust appearances, but also to find the true appearance beneath the false ones.

How many colors has the dove? As an ancient bestiary says:

Uncor m'estuet que vos devis
des columps, qui sunt blans et bis:
li un ont color aierine,
et li autre l'ont stephanine;
li un sont neir, li autre rous,
li un vermel, l'autre cendrous,
et des columps i a plusors
qui ont trestotes les colors.

What, then, will an Orange Dove be?

To conclude, assuming that Roberto knew something about it, I find in the Talmud that the powerful chiefs of Edom, Israel's enemies, decreed that they would tear out the brain of any man wearing phylacteries. Now Elisha put them on and walked out in the street. A guardian of the law saw him and pursued him when he fled. When Elisha was overtaken, he took off the phylacteries and hid them in his hands. The enemy said to him: "What do you have in your hands?" And he replied: "The wings of a dove." The other man forced open his hands. And there were the wings of a dove.

I am not sure what this story means, but I find it very beautiful. And so must Roberto have found it.

Amabilis columba,
unde, unde odes volando?
Quid est rei, quod altum
coelum cito secando
tam copia benigna
spires liquentem odorem?
Tam copia benigna
unguenta grata stilles?

What I mean to say is this: the dove is an important sign, and we can understand why a man lost in the Antipodes might decide he had to train his eyes carefully to understand its meaning.

The Island beyond reach, Lilia lost, his every hope beaten, why should the invisible Orange Dove not be transformed into the golden medulla, the philosopher's stone, the end of ends, volatile like everything passionately wanted? To aspire to something you will never have: is this not the acme of the most generous of desires?

It seems so clear to me (
Luce lucidior
) that I have decided to proceed no further with my Explication of the Dove.

Now back to our story.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, at the first light of the sun, Roberto stripped completely. In the presence of Father Caspar, out of modesty, he had lowered himself clothed into the water, but he realized that clothing weighed him down and encumbered him. Now he was naked. He tied the rope around his waist, climbed down the Jacob's ladder, and he was again in the sea.

He remained afloat: that much he had already learned. He now had to learn how to move his arms and legs, as swimming dogs move their paws. He ventured a few strokes, continued for some minutes, and realized he had moved only a few ells away from the ladder. Moreover, he was tired.

He knew how to rest, so he turned supine for a while, letting the water and the sun caress him.

He felt his strength return. Clearly, he should move until he tired, then rest like a dead man for a few minutes, then resume. His progress would be slow, the time very long, but this was the proper way to do it.

After a few trials he came to a courageous decision. The ladder descended on the right-hand side of the bowsprit, towards the Island. Now he would try to reach the western side of the ship. He would rest there, and afterwards he would come back.

The passage below the bowsprit was not long, and the sight of the prow from the other side was a victory. He let himself float, face up, arms and legs wide; on this side, he felt, the waves cradled him more comfortably than on the other.

At a certain moment he felt a tug at his waist. The rope was stretched to its full extent. He returned to the canine position and took stock: the sea had carried him north, many ells beyond the tip of the bowsprit. In other words, a current flowing from south-west to north-west gained in force a little west of the
Daphne.
He had not noticed it when he made his immersions on the right, sheltered by the bulk of the fluyt, but moving to the left, he had been caught in the current, and it would have borne him away if the rope had not held him. He had thought he was lying motionless, but he had moved, like the earth in its vortex. Hence it had been fairly easy for him to round the prow: it was not that his skill had increased; rather, the sea had enhanced it.

Worried, he chose to try returning to the
Daphne
with his own strength, and paddling a little, dog-like, he moved a few inches closer, but realized that the moment he paused to catch his breath, the rope tautened again, a sign that he had been carried back.

He clung to the rope and pulled it towards himself, revolving in order to wind it around his waist, thus in a short time he was back at the ladder. Once on board, he decided that any attempt to reach the shore by swimming would be dangerous. He had to construct a raft. He looked at the supply of wood on board the
Daphne
and found he had no implement with which to shape even the smallest log, unless he spent years hacking at a mast with his knife.

But had he not reached the
Daphne
bound to a plank? So it was simply a matter of unhinging a door and using it as a raft, propelling it perhaps with his hands. For a hammer there was the hilt of his sword, and inserting the blade as a wedge, finally he managed to rip one of the wardroom doors from its hinges. At the end, the blade snapped. Small harm done; he no longer had to fight against human beings, only against the sea.

But if he lowered himself into the sea on the door, where would the current take him? He dragged the door towards the left side and managed to throw it into the sea.

At first the door floated slothfully, but in less than a minute it was far from the ship, heading to the left, more or less in the direction he himself had floated, then towards north-west.

Now it was proceeding as the
Daphne
would have, had its anchor been weighed. Roberto managed to follow it with his naked eye until it passed the cape, then he had to use his spyglass to see it still moving very fast beyond the promontory. The door sped, as if on the bosom of a broad river that had banks and shores in the midst of a sea that lay calmly on either side of it.

He reflected that if the one-hundred-eightieth meridian extended along an ideal line that linked the two promontories halfway down the bay, and if that stream's course changed immediately after the bay and flowed north, then beyond the promontory it followed precisely the antipodal meridian!

Had he been on that door, he would have navigated along the line separating today from yesterday—or from the yesterday of his tomorrow....

At the moment, however, his thoughts were elsewhere. Had he been on that door, he would have had no way to oppose the current except with the movement of his hands. It took a great effort just to guide his own body, so he could imagine how it would be on a door without prow, poop, or tiller.

On the night of his arrival the plank had brought him beneath the bowsprit thanks only to the effect of some wind or secondary current. To predict a new event of this kind he would have to study carefully the movements of the tides for weeks, perhaps months, flinging into the sea dozens and dozens of planks—and even then, who could say...

Impossible, at least with the knowledge he possessed, hydrostatic or hydrodynamic as might be. Better to continue placing his hopes in swimming. To reach shore from the center of a current is easier for a dog that kicks than for a dog in a basket.

So his apprenticeship had to continue. And it would not suffice for him to learn to swim between the
Daphne
and the shore. In the bay, too, at different times of the day, and according to the flux and reflux, minor currents were present: and therefore, at a moment when he was confidently proceeding to the east, a trick of the waters could drag him first to the west and then straight towards the northern point. So he would also have to train himself to swim against the current. With the help of the rope, he should be able to defy the water to the left of the hull as well.

In the days that followed, Roberto, staying on the side with the ladder, remembered how at La Griva he had seen not only dogs swim but also frogs. And since a human body in the water, with arms and legs outspread, recalls more the shape of a frog than that of a dog, he told himself that perhaps he should swim like a frog. He even assisted himself vocally, crying
croax, croax
as he flung out his arms and legs. He stopped croaking when those animal utterances had the effect of giving too much energy to his forward bound, causing him to open his mouth, with consequences that an experienced swimmer might have foreseen.

He transformed himself into an elderly, decorous frog, majestically silent. When he felt his shoulders tiring, through that constant outward movement of the hands, he returned to more
canino.
Once, looking at the white birds that followed his exercises, vociferating, sometimes diving only a few feet from him to snatch a fish (the coup de la mouette!), he tried also to swim as they flew, with a broad wing-like movement of his arms, but learned that it is harder to keep a mouth and nose closed than it is a beak, and he gave up the idea. At this point he no longer knew what animal he was, dog or frog; perhaps a hairy toad, an amphibious quadruped, a centaur of the seas, a male siren.

However, in all these various attempts, he noticed that he was moving, more or less. In fact, having begun his journey at the prow, he found himself beyond the halfway point of the side. But when he decided to reverse his direction and go back to the ladder, he realized that he had no more strength, and he had to allow the rope to tow him.

What he lacked was correct respiration. He could manage to go but not to come back....He had become a swimmer, but in the manner of that gentleman who made the entire pilgrimage from Rome to Jerusalem, half a mile each day, back and forth in his own garden. Roberto had never been an athlete, and the months on the
Amaryllis,
always indoors, then the strain of the wreck and the waiting aboard the
Daphne
(except for the few exercises imposed on him by Father Caspar) had enfeebled him.

Roberto shows no awareness of the fact that through swimming he would gain strength, and he seems instead to think he must strengthen himself in order to swim. Thus we see him swallow two, three, even four egg yolks at a time, or devour a whole chicken before attempting another dip. Luckily there was the rope. Once he was seized by such convulsions in the water that he could hardly climb back on deck.

Here he is at evening, meditating on this new contradiction. Before, when he could not even hope to reach it, the Island seemed always within reach. Now, as he was learning the art that would take him there, the Island was receding.

Indeed, as he sees it distant not only in space but also (backwards) in time, from this moment on, whenever he mentions that distance, Roberto seems to confuse space and time, and he writes, "The bay, alas, is too yesterday," and, "How hard it is to arrive over there which is so early," or else, "How much sea separates me from the day barely ended," and even, "Threatening rainclouds are coming from the Island, whereas today it is already clear...."

But if the Island moves ever farther away, is it still worth the effort to learn to reach it? Over the next few days Roberto abandons all attempts at swimming, while he renews his search with the spyglass for the Orange Dove.

He sees parrots among the leaves, he distinguishes fruits, from dawn to sunset he follows the quickening and the extinction of different colors in the foliage, but he does not see the Dove. Once more he is tempted to think that Father Caspar lied to him, or that he was a victim of a Jesuitical joke. At times he is convinced that even Father Caspar never existed—since he finds no trace of his presence on the ship. He no longer believes in the Dove, but neither does he believe now that on the Island there is the Specula. He finds this a source of consolation, because, he tells himself, it would have been irreverent to corrupt the purity of that place with a machine. And he thinks once more of an Island made to his measure, or, rather, to the measure of his dreams.

***

If the island rose in the past, it was the place he had to reach at all costs. In that unhinged time he was not to find but to invent the condition of the First Man. Not the site of a fountain of eternal youth but itself a fountain, the Island could be the place where every human creature, forgetting his own melancholy learning, would find, like a child abandoned in a forest, that a new language could be born from a new contact with creation. And with it would rise a new and the only genuine science, from the direct experience of Nature, with no adulteration by philosophy (as if the Island were not father transmitting to son the words of the Law, but, rather, mother teaching him to stammer his first names).