The Island of the Day Before (12 page)

Weary of political talk, Roberto went back to see Padre Emanuele a few days later, in the convent where he was staying. There, they directed Roberto not to a cell but an apartment reserved for the priest under the arches of a silent cloister. He found Padre Emanuele conversing with two gentlemen, one sumptuously dressed in purple with gold braid, a cloak with gilded trimming and lined with short fur, a doublet edged with a crocheted red stripe and a ribbon of little gems. Padre Emanuele introduced him as the ensign Don Gaspar de Salazar, but from his haughty tone and the style of his moustache and hair Roberto had already identified him as a gentleman from the enemy army. The other visitor was Signor della Saletta. For a moment Roberto suspected he had fallen into a den of spies, then he realized, as I realize on this occasion, that the etiquette of sieges allowed a representative of the besiegers access to the besieged city for meetings and negotiations, just as Signor della Saletta had free access to Spinola's camp.

Padre Emanuele said that he was just preparing to show the two guests his Aristotelian Machine, and he led all three into a room where the strangest imaginable piece of furniture was standing—nor am I sure I can reconstruct its form exactly from Roberto's description of it to his Lady, as it was surely something never seen before or since.

The base consisted of a great chest or case whose front held eighty-one drawers—nine horizontal rows by nine vertical, each row in both directions identified by a carved letter (BCDEFGHIK). On the top of the chest, to the left stood a lectern on which a great volume was placed, a manuscript with illuminated initials. To the right of the lectern were three concentric cylinders of decreasing length and increasing breadth (the shortest being the most capacious, designed to contain the two longer ones); a crank at one side could then, through inertia, make them turn, one inside the other, at different speeds according to their weight. Each cylinder had incised at its left margin the same nine letters that marked the drawers. One turn of the crank was enough to make the cylinders revolve independently of one another, and when they stopped, one could read triads of letters aligned at random, such as CBD, KFE, or BGH.

Padre Emanuele set about explaining the concept that governed his Machine.

"As the Philosopher has taught us, Genius is simply the ability to perceive objects under ten Categories, and these are Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Affection, Position, Time, Place & State. The substances are the very subject of all reasoning & their ingenious Correlatives must be predicated. What the Substances are is noted in this book under the letter A, nor would my whole life suffice to make a complete List of them. In any case I have already collected several Thousands, taking them from the books of Poets and of wise men, and from that wondrous Regestus that is the
Fabric of the World
of Francesco Alunno. Thus among the Substances we may place, under Supreme Being: Divine Persons, Ideas, Gods of Fable, greater, middle & lesser, Celestial Deities, and the Aerial, Marine, Terrestrial & Infernal, the deified Heroes, Angels, Demons, Sprites, the Heavens and the wandering Stars, celestial Signs and Constellations, the Zodiac, the Circles & Spheres, the Elements, Vapors, Exhalations, and then—making no attempt to mention everything—Subterranean Fires & Sparks, Meteors, Seas, Rivers, Springs & Lakes & Cliffs.... And so on and so on through the Artificial Substances, with the works of each Art, Books, Pens, Inks, Globes, Compasses, Squares, Palaces, Temples & Hovels, Shields, Swords, Drums, Paintings, Brushes, Statues, Axes & Saws, and finally the Metaphysical Substances such as Genus, Species, Properties & Accidentals & similar Notions."

He pointed now to the drawers in his construction, and opening them, he showed how each contained square sheets of very thick parchment, the kind used for binding books, aligned in alphabetical order: "I must tell you, each vertical row refers, from B to K, to one of the other nine Categories, and for each of them one of the nine drawers has gathered families of Members. Verbi gratia, for Quantity is recorded the family of the Quantity of Volume, whose Members comprise the Small, the Great, the Long or the Short; or the family of Numeral Quantity, whose members are Naught, One, Two &c., and Many or Few. Under Quality you will find the family of the qualities associated with seeing, such as Visible, Invisible, Beautiful, Deformed, Clear, Obscure; or with Smell, such as Aroma & Stink; or the Qualities of Affection, such as Happiness & Sadness; and so on for each category. And each sheet represents a Member. I then consider all the things affected by it. Is that clear?"

All nodded with awe, and the priest continued. "Now we will open at random the great Book of Substances, and we will pick any one at all.... Here: Dwarf. What could we say, before initiating any scholarly discussion, of the Dwarf?"

"Que es pequeño, little, petit," ventured don Gaspar de Salazar, "y que es feo, e infeliz, y ridículo..."

"True," Padre Emanuele granted, "but still I do not know what to choose, and if I were required to speak not of a Dwarf but rather, say, of Corals, could I be sure of finding equally salient features so promptly? And besides, Smallness has to do with Quantity, Ugliness with Quality, and where then should I begin? No, better to trust in Fortune, whose Ministers my Cylinders are. Now I make them move & I obtain, as random dictates, the triad BBB. B in the first Position is Quantity, B in the second Position bids me look along the line of Quantity, in the drawer of Volume, and there, at the very beginning of the B sequence, I find Small. And in this sheet devoted to Small I find that the Angel is small, as it stands on a pin, & so is the Pole small, the fixed point of the Sphere, & among elementary small things are the Spark, the Drop of water & the Scruple of Stone, & the Atom, of which, according to Democritus, all things are composed. In Human Things here is the Embryo, the Pupil, the Astragal; for Animals the Ant & the Flea, for Plants the Twig, the Mustard Seed & the Crumb; for the Mathematical sciences the Minimum Quod Sic, the Letter I, the book bound in 16°, or the Apothecary's Dram; for Architecture the Coffer or the Pivot; or for Fables the Psychapax general of Mice against the Frogs & the Myrmidons born of Ants.... But we must stop here, for I could already call our Dwarf a Coffer of Nature, Puppet of a Youth, Crumb of a Man. And pray note that if we try turning the Cylinders again and obtain instead—here we are—CBF, the letter C would refer me to Quality, the B would send me to look for my Members in the drawer of that which affects Sight, and then the letter F would have me encounter as Member the being Invisible. And among the Invisible Things I would find—ah, wondrous conjunction—the Atom & the Point, which would allow me now to define my Dwarf as Atom of Man or Point of Flesh."

Padre Emanuele turned his cylinders and searched through his drawers, fast as a conjuror, so the metaphors seemed to arise for him as if by enchantment, without anyone's noticing the mechanical gasping that produced them. But he was still not satisfied.

"Gentlemen," he continued, "the Ingenious Metaphor has to be far more complex! Every Thing that I have found so far must be analyzed in its turn from the aspect of the ten Categories, and as my Book explains, if we consider a Thing that depends on Quality, we should see if it is visible & and at what distance, what Deformity or Beauty it has & what Color; how much Sound, how much Odor, how much Taste; if it is sensible or tactile, if it is rarefied or dense, hot or cold, & of what Form, what Affection, Love, Art, Learning, Health, Infirmity, & if any Science of it exists. And I call these questions Particles. Now I know that our first essay has led us to deal with Quantity, which includes Smallness among its Members. Now I turn the cylinders again and I obtain the triad BKD. The letter B, we have already determined, must refer to Quantity; if I consult my book, it tells me that the first Particle apt to express a Small Thing is to establish With What it is Measured. If I consult the book to find to what Measure refers, it sends me back to the Quantity drawer, under the Family of Quantities in General. I go to the page for Measure & there choose the thing K, which is the Measure of the Geometric Finger. And here I would be able to compose a quite clever Definition, as, for example, that wanting to measure that Puppet of Youths, that Atom of Man, a Geometric Finger would be an Immeasurable Measure, which, uniting to Metaphor also Hyperbole, tells me much of the Misfortune & Ridiculousness of the Dwarf."

"What a marvel," Signor della Saletta said, "but, in the second triad obtained, you have not yet used the last letter, the D...."

"I expected no less of your perception, sir," Padre Emanuele said smugly, "but you have touched the Wonderful Point of my invention! This letter is left over (and I could discard it if it bored me, or if I considered I had already achieved my aim); it allows me to resume my search! This D allows me to begin again the cycle of the Particles, looking into the category of State (exempli gratia, what garb befits them, or if they can serve as emblem of something), & from there start over, as I did earlier with Quantity, turning the cylinders again, using the first two letters & retaining the third for yet another trial, and so on ad infinitum, for millions of Possible Conjugations, though some may seem more clever than others, and it will be my Wisdom that distinguishes those more apt to generate Amazement. But I would not lie to you, Gentlemen, I had not chosen Dwarf at random; only last night I applied myself with the greatest care to deriving the maximum possible advantage from this Substance."

He waved a page and began to read the series of definitions with which he was suffocating his poor dwarf, a little man shorter than his name: embryo, fragment of homunculus, such that the corpuscles that arrive with the light from the window seem much greater, a body that with millions of his similars could tell the hours through the neck of an hourglass, the complection in which the foot is close to the head, the carnal appendage that begins where it ends, the line that clots in a point, the tip of a needle, a subject to be spoken to with caution for fear that your breath would blow it away, a substance so small that it is not penetrable by color, a mustard spark, a bodikin that has nothing more or less than what it never had, matter without form, body without body, pure being of reason, invention of wit so minute that no blow could ever find it in order to wound it, able to escape through every fissure and feed for a year on a single barley seed, to be so epitomized that there is never any telling whether it is seated, prone, or erect, capable of drowning in a snail's shell, seed, granule, grape, dot of i, mathematical individual with arithmetical nothing....

And he would have continued, for he possessed the material, if those present had not stopped him with applause.

R
OBERTO UNDERSTOOD NOW
that Padre Emanuele behaved essentially as if he were a follower of Democritus or of Epicurus: he accumulated atoms of concepts and composed them in various guises to make many objects of them. And as the Canon sustained that a world made of atoms was not in conflict with the idea of a divinity who disposed them according to reason, so Padre Emanuele from that powder of concepts accepted only the truly acute compositions. Perhaps he would have done the same if he had taken up creating scenes for the theater: do not playwrights derive improbable and clever events from passages of probable but insipid things, so that they may be satisfied with unexpected hircocervi of action?

And if this was so, did it not perhaps happen that in the concurrence of circumstances creating both his shipwreck and the condition in which he found himself on the
Daphne
—the smallest detail being lifelike: the reek and creak of the hull, the smell of the plants, the cries of the birds—all collaborated in forming the impression of a presence that was nothing but the effect of a phantasmagory perceived only by the mind, like the laughter of the fields and the tears of dew? So the phantom of a hidden intruder was a composition of atoms of action, like that of the lost brother, both formed with fragments of his own countenance and of his desires or thoughts?

And as he began to hear against the panes a light rain cooling the noonday heat, he said to himself: It is only natural, I—and no other—am the one who has climbed aboard this ship as an intruder, I disturb this silence with my footsteps, and so it is that, as if afraid of having violated another's sanctum, I constructed another self who roams beneath the same decks. What evidence have I of his existence? A few drops of water on the leaves? But is it not possible that, as it is raining now, it rained last night, however briefly? The feed? But could not the birds, pecking at what was already there, have scattered it, making me think someone had thrown new grain? The absence of eggs? Why, only yesterday I saw a gyrfalcon devour a flying mouse! I am populating a hold I have not yet visited, and I am doing this perhaps for reassurance, as I am terrified at finding myself abandoned between sky and sea. Signor Roberto della Griva, he repeated to himself, you are alone and you may remain alone until the end of your days, and this end may also be near. The food on board is plentiful, but for a period of weeks, not months. Go therefore and set on the deck some vessel to collect all the rainwater you can, and learn to fish from the bulwarks, tolerating the sun. And one of these days you must find a way to reach the Island, and live there as its sole inhabitant. This is what you should be thinking about, not stories of Intruders and Ferrantes.

Braving the light, now filtered through clouds, he collected some empty barrels and arranged them on the bridge. In performing this task, he realized he was still very weak. He went below again, lavished the animals with food (perhaps so that no one else would be tempted to do it in his stead), and once again gave up the idea of descending still farther. He came back, spent a few hours lying down, while the rain showed no sign of letting up. There were gusts of wind, and for the first time he realized that he was in a floating house, which rocked like a cradle, as a slamming of doors enlivened the considerable bulk of that wooden womb.