Seven-Tenths (37 page)

The second diver soon surfaces and his basket is emptied. ‘Not far from the Madonna,’ he says as he disappears again. The ‘Madonna’, we all know, is the name someone on a previous trip has given to a curious coral formation, a slender pillar some 15 feet tall which in outline, seen from one aspect, resembles a statue even to the extent of having a texture like the petrified folds of a robe. On her seaward side, the reef falls away into a series of steep gullies, in the first of which our divers are working, and she forms a useful marker.

When each man has filled two baskets, the divers come in and are spelled by a second pair. Our captain is strict about this. Each pair dives for roughly forty minutes, rests for the same, then goes down for a final forty minutes. Whatever theory he is working on, it bears little relation to the rigid decompression rates on which an alien
medical science insists. Transient headaches are a matter of course, yet nobody in his crews ever gets the bends, though there are crippled young men further up the coast. It is mysterious.

The engine chugs on, the compressor’s worn cylinder clatters, the valve on the tank bleeds with a chattering hiss. The boys go on packing the scrabbling lobsters in ice. A loud sizzle is heard aft. In the galley (a sheet of tin on which stands a cement cooking stove large enough for a single pot) someone has tossed the first pieces of chopped octopus into a work of hot oil. The domestic smell of frying drifts across the boat and over the sea. Faces are dimly illumined by the red glow of the stove’s mouth, across which a hand with a palm-leaf fan flaps rhythmically. The captain and others go on scanning the darkness for the first signs of a coastguard cutter. Yet the deployed divers and the cookery would make a quick getaway impossible, and, after the initial tension, a calm insouciance overtakes us until we almost forget the dead man over the horizon.

When he quoted the Jesuit, Alzina, Justus Forfex was beginning his short study of sea burial. As he was to relate in his autobiography
Viaticum
(‘Life has written me, not I my life’), he was shipwrecked eight times in his wanderings between 1842 and 1867. One way and another, he was able to observe burial customs from Subang Gulf through New Castile to what he whimsically dubbed ‘Cholynesia, or the Bile Islands’. He also had the opportunity, over long months’ tattered living off crabs and coconut juice on deserted atolls, to reflect on how the significance of water pervades both soul and body.

Years later, as Giusto Forbici, he passed his scholarly retirement in a gaunt, book-lined palace in Arezzo. When asked why he had chosen that particular city (he was born on the Italian coast, down south in Salerno), he replied that there was no part of Arezzo from which one could possibly see the sea. In his most notorious essay, ‘De atramento et oceanis morteque’, he writes of the relation between ink, oceans and death. For those with a little Latin, his title makes the connections less apparently strained since the word for ink,
atramentum
, would call to mind the adjective
atratus
, meaning ‘darkened’ or ‘wearing mourning’. This essay had its roots in the circumstances of Forbici’s last and most desperate shipwreck, when he was the sole survivor washed up on a coral strand in the heart of ‘Cholynesia’. Washed up with him was more than his fair share of irony: nine immense straw-covered glass carboys which he remembered having glimpsed in the ship’s hold. These, he knew, contained fresh water. His elation at this reprieve was short-lived. They turned out to be full of ink, part of a consignment destined for Dutch bureaucrats in Batavia. The ink was made of dried sepia extracted from thousands of cuttlefish, purified, mixed with lamp-black and
thinned with spirits and water. It smelt of bad fish. Forbici thus found himself alone on an islet with many gallons of a substance scarcely more drinkable than the ocean surrounding him.

With immense effort he trundled the great flasks up above the high tide mark and buried them. He hoped to prevent the direct heat of the sun from evaporating the alcohol through the cork bungs and thereby stop the liquid’s fishy component from putrefying still further. For nearly three months he eked out survival by drinking small tots of rotten ink. They made him retch as well as leaving a slight hangover. He produced occasional sooty turds full of free carbon, until towards the end as he grew weak and feverish he was seized with stomach cramps accompanied by a stygian leakage. Not only was he drinking ink but seemed to be excreting it as well.

How formative is illness for the imagination! Entering what should have been his final delirium (he later wrote), he saw himself as quite conventionally encompassed on all sides by death. Yet suddenly he perceived it was a distillate of that very death – as produced by octopuses and cuttlefish – that was keeping him alive by a kind of homoeopathy. Was this proof of the eccentric Dr Hahnemann’s ‘Law of Similia’? How did these cephalopods extract their black essence from clear seawater? Since it was impossible to make an element such as carbon, did this not imply that the world’s oceans already consisted of highly dilute ink which the creatures then concentrated? Two-thirds of the planet was a fatal inkwell.

These thoughts seemed to him very clear and satisfactory as he sat under a sparse canopy of thorny macrophyllum whose mildly hallucinogenic leaves he now and then chewed. Much later, after being rescued and having recovered his wits, he remembered Varelius’s little monograph on the presence of gold in the sea. Forbici then made the leap which was to give his own essay its fame. He reasoned that if the sea acted as a body of solvent, leaching out of rocks their auriferous veins, then its clear depths must contain all the essence of land (
il nocciolo della terra
), down to its last molecular constituent. If the human body itself was composed only and wholly of chemicals and minerals that occurred in the Earth’s crust, then it followed that the sea must also contain all the component
parts of a person. In theory, therefore, a wizard, alchemist or divine agent would be able to assemble a human being from a quantity of seawater. Nothing would be lacking but the soul; and who knew but that also might be found lurking in the invisible interstices of water?

This lively fancy was not at all understood in Arezzo and went down positively badly in Pisa, Siena and Florence. It was scarcely ten years since Darwin had published his own genealogy of the human race, and that had been impious enough in its proposal of a scurrilous ancestry that vastly pre-dated the book of Genesis. Now here came this vagabond – an Italian no less – who was just as godless but even bleaker, to suggest that the frame made in God’s image was composed of nothing but chemicals after all, regardless of its lineage. The Bishop of Lucca referred in a sermon to ‘a fashionable, Satanic materialism that … reduces the sacrament of motherhood to the level of a factory or a workshop assembling puppets’, a remark which some believe gave Carlo Collodi the germ of his fable ‘Pinocchio’, which was published a decade later in 1883.

Forbici, leathery and reclusive in his Aretine library, gave not a fig for the Bishop of Lucca. ‘I look in the mirror and see – nothing,’ he wrote exuberantly. ‘I look through the casement at the people who, from the sound of their voices, I judge are in the courtyard below but who seem today not as visible as they should be. Our bodies – what are they? Diffuse clouds of whirling atoms held together by some clotting or electric propensity. Why should this appear so miraculous? How can we ever embrace? It is our brilliant
fluidity
that provokes me to love whatever our poor shadows extend. We pontificate and preen, we survive childbirth and shipwreck with all the corporeality [
fisicità
] of a cloud. The sky-cities we saw above Pacific horizons have long since returned to the ocean, and so shall we. What is it about this process that makes one confident and affectionate? Cradles full of clouds. Coffins full of clouds. Shaving-mirrors full of clouds. Books full of clouds.’ This retired traveller then went on to meditate – at too great a length, maybe – on water. He returned to the relationship between dilution and concentration. Was it possible for
un nocciolo
to be dilute and still remain an essence? Can a concentration be said to exist even when dispersed
among extraneous things? It is hard for today’s readers to address such questions with Forbici’s tirelessness. His staunchest admirers are obliged to admit that in his later, landlocked years, the great Justus Forfex became obsessive about water, bodies, the oceans, ink and so forth, returning to them in essay after essay. He never did manage to pull them (or himself) together into a single philosophical proposition. Instead, they flow in and out of his thoughts and writings like busy animalcula crossing a microscope slide. Cholynesia had taken its toll.

His earlier monograph on sea burial, though, showed him at his best. It is a lively volume full of arcana and jolting details, still widely consulted by anthropologists, scholars and ghouls. It lists with great attention to detail the classical or ancient practices as well as those he had personally witnessed in the southern archipelagos. And yet even this essay lacks a central thought as to what it might mean to be returned to water, as opposed to the magic benefits accruing to survivors for burying a body in the sea. ‘Returned to water’ is the significant phrase, one which might not have occurred to him then because this little book antedated his final and most traumatic shipwreck. He had not yet formulated his thesis that all bodies are by nature oceanic and that earth-burial, urn burial, cremation, etc., are merely forms of postponement. (Even fire is water.) And, of course, he was unable to end his monograph with the highly pertinent story of how he had finally been rescued from his atoll with its dwindling ink supply.

Forbici dealt with all this in his so-called ‘Parergo’, a ‘by-work’ or corollary to the rest of his writings. When Marcello Vanni came to produce the collected edition in 1907, he judiciously printed the ‘Parergo’ twice, inserting it as an appendix to
Viaticum
(where it forms a neat climax to his author’s adventures) and again as an addendum to the monograph on sea burial,
Talassotafia
. In this position it augments the list with one last strange example, while the autobiographical element gives it an immediacy which is irresistible.

Over the long weeks of isolation on the atoll he had undoubtedly entered an extreme world. There were times when all his shipwrecks and misfortunes collapsed together and he knew he had been living
on the islet for centuries, slowly wading its leeward shallows in a constant quest for food. He had reached the stage where the finding of a single overlooked sea urchin became the high point of the day. Using probes of antler coral he would prise open the friable shell, trembling, so as to leave the inside undamaged. Then, having reluctantly discarded the animal’s rudimentary digestive tract (which only made him vomit ink), he greedily ran his thumbnail around the shell’s interior, scraping up a tiny mound of gonads which tasted to him like the rarest caviar. The ghost crabs which lived in burrows in the coral sand and danced in and out of the rippling wavelets at dusk were still plentiful but difficult to catch. When by guile (blocking up its bolt-holes) he did succeed in catching one, he triumphantly ate it whole, crunching up claws and carapace even as the translucent running legs scrabbled at his lower lip.

He had tried and failed to catch fish, even the tiniest fry that hung like flakes of brilliant metal about the coral outcrops. No net, no line, no hook. The scholar was reduced to dropping boulders into the shallows where the fish flickered in the hopes of stunning one. The turbulence subsided, the water cleared; nothing had changed except the new naked rock lying there with the braver fish already nosing around it. Forbici did find one place on the atoll that looked promising, a pool among the rocks on the windward side. Roughly circular and about 4 yards across, its ragged sides fell vertically for several fathoms, forming a kind of porous shaft. Over many centuries, some freak of the current must have scoured it out of the dead coral formations of which the islet was built. By lying at its lip and putting his face close to the water’s surface, he could see, beyond his own ragged castaway’s visage, a dark bottom strewn with broken coral: white chunks and lengths among which bulky parrot-fish moved lazily.

For long hours he pondered a way of trapping these succulent creatures. With some damage to his hands he managed to break off several wands of the tough little bush which had become his shelter. These he tried to weave into a trap of sorts; but no sooner had he dipped this crude, lopsided construction into the water than it began to unravel. Besides, as he realised too late in an outburst of
rage, he had no cord with which to lower it, and nothing tempting with which to bait it. He gave up and went back to eating titbits of weed and mollusc he found beneath the rocks in the lagoon.

Otherwise the days passed unrecordably, and the listless view from beneath the macrophyllum repeated itself at the mesmeric pace of evolution itself. It is not difficult, even well over a century later, to be confident of what Forbici saw. On the atoll’s windward side the craggy foreground hides the water’s edge. Impelled by the long Pacific swell, occasional tufts of sea leap up among the coral rocks into the dazzled air. A marine heartbeat thuds underfoot and trapped air sighs gustily in vents and fissures. The water in the pool rises and then sinks. This is land no solider than a petrified sponge, with the sea passing continuously through its roots. Small crustacea move on the lunar surface; the isopod
Ligea
scurries everywhere into cracks like a littoral woodlouse. It is a fossil scene.

At night, according to Forbici, a cool breeze sprang out of nowhere. In an act of self-burial which might bring him a little warmth he would heap up the detritus of a billion dead creatures over his legs, for he was sick and shivery. He had nothing to do but lie on his back and stare at the universe. Forbici’s cosmos was entirely classical: Greek and Roman and Arab. Apart from his training as a scholar, years of voyaging had left him with a good knowledge of the heavens. The pictures he saw were familiar: an archer, a herdsman, Hercules, a plough and a lyre and Berenice’s Hair. To stop himself falling forever upwards into the radiant silverpoint overhead (for the tropical night sky sucks the soul away from its human moorings and dissolves it in oceans of eternity) he would retell himself the stories he could remember. He believed it was Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer and Kepler’s teacher, who had introduced Coma Berenices (which in fact was only faintly visible from Cholynesia’s latitudes). Instead of choosing a story from Scandinavian mythology, or else making some contemporary allusion, Brahe had instinctively gone back to the classics. The devoted Queen Berenice vowed that if her husband Ptolemy returned safely from war with Assyria she would cut off all her hair and present it to Venus. When Ptolemy duly returned in triumph, she remained true to her promise. Jupiter, awed
by this sign of human devotion, retrieved the pledge from the temple and hung her shining tresses in tribute among the spring stars. By such means, Forbici did his best to cling to his culture, his identity, his memories. But that had been in the earlier part of his marooning.

Nights on the atoll were severing one by one the threads which still attached him to a previous life somewhere beyond the flickering horizon. To rest one ear on his gravel pillow was to hear the ocean on all sides of the atoll, rinsing and clucking and mewing. But it was also to hear it thrumming below in deep gasps like those of a labouring beast as it turns and turns a creaking water mill. These sounds filled Forbici with terror. Trapped between the starry ocean overhead and that which surrounded and undermined him, he knew himself about to be engulfed. He awoke from hectic dreams of typhoons, of tsunami-like waves big enough to sweep the atoll bare or else tear it loose like a twirling stone raft. The whole weight of the universe pressed down on him until he felt himself trodden beneath the waves, buried by immensity, sinking through ever-blackening layers, a miserable fragment of mind lost among the ocean’s roots. In still other dreams he found himself trudging across waterless orange deserts, maybe on Mars or in some Arabian wilderness, in driven search for the oasis where all yearnings would be quenched. Mirages floated up in the trembling air and flowed together until they formed a rim of palms that encircled his whole horizon. It no longer mattered in which direction he urged his stumbling feet: there was nothing but the mockery of endless recession. Here he would awake in black tears. Lying exhausted, beached on dawn’s calm and lapped by undrinkable ocean, he forced his parched mouth to repeat the tales he knew, declensions of Greek verbs, multiplication tables, the names of relatives.