The Island of the Day Before (29 page)

He rushed out on deck and fired a bullet at random, splintering a mast, then he shot again, until he realized that he was killing no one. Considering the time it took in those days to reload a musket, the enemy could take a stroll between shots, having a good laugh at that rumpus—which had impressed only the animals, clucking below.

The Intruder was laughing, then. But where was he laughing? Roberto went back to his drawing and told himself that he truly knew nothing about ship-building. The drawing showed only top, bottom, and length, not breadth. Seen in its length (we would now say, in cross-section), the ship revealed no other possible hiding-places, but seen in its breadth, other places could be lurking among those already discovered.

Roberto, pondering, realized only now that on this ship too many things were still missing. For example, he had found no other weapons. Very well: assume that the sailors had taken them away—if they had abandoned the ship of their own volition. But on the
Amaryllis
the hold had been crammed also with considerable lumber, for repairing masts, the helm, the sides, in the event of damage by the elements, whereas here he had found only enough firewood, recently dried, to supply the cook-stove, but nothing of oak or larch or seasoned fir. Also wanting, along with carpenter's wood, were carpenter's tools: saws, axes of various sizes, hammers, nails....

Were there other storerooms? He drew the design over again, and tried to portray the ship not seen from a side but as if observed from the crow's nest. And he decided that in this beehive he was drawing there could still be inserted a nook beneath the organ, from which it was possible to descend farther, without a ladder, into the blind passage. Not big enough to contain everything that was missing, but an extra hole, in any case. If in the low ceiling of the blind passage there existed a trap through which to hoist oneself into that same newly conceived space, from there anyone could climb up to the clocks and then have the run of the entire vessel.

Now Roberto was sure that the Enemy could be only there. He hurried below, slipped into the passage, this time throwing light on its ceiling. And there was a trapdoor. He resisted the initial impulse to open it. If the Intruder was up there, he would wait for Roberto to stick his head through the opening, then overpower him. The Intruder had to be taken by surprise from the direction where he was not expecting an attack, as they had done at Casale.

If there was a chamber above, it was adjacent to that of the telescope, and Roberto could enter there.

He went up, passing through the soda, stepping over the instruments, to find himself at a wall that—only now did he realize it—was not of the same hard wood as the hull.

This wall was fairly thin. As before, on entering the place from which the music came, he gave a sturdy kick, and the wood splintered.

He was in the dim light of a rat's nest, with a little porthole in the rounded far wall. And there on a pallet, his knees almost against his chin, his outstretched arm clutching a big pistol, was the Other.

He was an old man, his pupils dilated, his desiccated face framed by a pepper-and-salt beard, his sparse white hair standing up on his head, his mouth almost toothless, the gums the color of blueberries. He was engulfed in some cloth that once might have been black but now was greasy, with pale stains.

Pointing the pistol, which he gripped in both hands as his arms trembled, he shouted in a weak voice. The first sentence was in German or Dutch, and the second, and surely he was repeating his message, was in halting Italian—a sign that he had deduced his interlocutor's nationality by looking at his papers.

"If you move, I kill you!"

Roberto was so surprised by the apparition that his reaction was slow. And just as well, for he had time to realize that the pistol was not cocked, and the Enemy therefore was not much versed in the military arts.

So he went over amiably, grasped the pistol by the barrel, and tried to slip it from those hands clenched around the butt, while the creature emitted wrathful Germanic cries.

With some effort Roberto finally managed to wrest the weapon from him. The man sank down, and Roberto knelt beside him, supporting the old man's head.

"Sir," he said, "I mean you no harm. I am a friend. You understand? Amicus!"

The man opened and closed his mouth, but could not speak; only the white of his eyes could be seen, or, rather, the red, and Roberto feared he was on the point of death. He took the man in his arms, frail as he was, and carried him to his room. He offered him water, made him sip some aqua vitae, and the man said, "Gratias ago, domine," raised his hand as if to bless Roberto, who at that point, taking a closer look at the man's dress, realized he was a cleric.

W
E WILL NOT
reconstruct the dialogue that followed over the next two days. For that matter, Roberto's papers become more laconic from now on. His confidences to the lady having perhaps fallen under alien eyes (he never had the courage to seek confirmation from his new companion), he stops writing altogether for many days, then records in a far more curt style what he learns and what happens.

So Roberto found himself facing Father Caspar Wanderdrossel,
e Societate Iesu, olim in Herbipolitano Franconiae Gymnasio, postea in Collegio Romano Matheseos Professor,
and, further, astronomer, and student of many other disciplines, at the General Curia of the Order. The
Daphne,
under a Dutch captain who had already ventured along those routes for the Vereenigde OostIndische Compagnie, had left the Mediterranean shores many months earlier, circumnavigating Africa with the aim of arriving at the Islands of Solomon. Precisely as Dr. Byrd had proposed to do on the
Amaryllis,
except that the
Amaryllis
sought the Islands by sailing west to reach the east, whereas the
Daphne
had done the opposite; but it matters little, the Antipodes can be reached from either direction. On the Island (and Father eoria Oacra Caspar motioned beyond the beach, beyond the trees), the Specula Melitensis was to be mounted. The nature of this Maltese Mirror was not clear, and Father Caspar, mentioning it, lowered his voice as if referring to a secret so famous that it was on the lips of the entire world.

To arrive here, the
Daphne
had taken its own good time. Everyone knows what it meant to navigate those seas in that period. After leaving the Moluccas, bound southeast for Porto Sancti Thomae in New Guinea, as it was necessary to call at the places where the Society of Jesus had its missions, the ship, driven by a storm, became lost in waters never before seen, arriving at an island inhabited by rats as big as boys, with very long tails and bags over their abdomen. Roberto had encountered a stuffed exemplar (indeed, Father Caspar reproached him for throwing away "a Wunder worth all Peru").

They were, Father Caspar told him, friendly animals, who surrounded the seamen, holding out their little hands to beg for food, or actually tugging at the men's clothes, but in the end they proved to be expert thieves and even stole hardtack from one sailor's pocket.

If I may be allowed to interject, to support Father Caspar's credibility, let me confirm that such an island exists, and cannot be mistaken for any other. Those pseudo-kangaroos are called Quokkas, and they live only there, on Rottenest Island, which the Dutch had then only recently discovered, calling it in fact the Island of Rats' Nests. But as the island is off Perth, the
Daphne
must have reached the western coast of Australia. If we consider that she was therefore on the thirtieth parallel south, and west of the Moluccas, whereas she was supposed to have gone east, just a bit below the Equator, we would be obliged to say that the
Daphne
was off course.

But that was the least of it. The men of the
Daphne
must have seen a coast not far from that island, and they probably thought it was some other little island with some other rodent on it. They were in search of something quite different, and who knows what Father Caspar's instruments were saying on board. Surely, the seamen were only a few oar strokes from that Terra Incognita et Australis that mankind had been dreaming of for centuries. What is hard to conceive—since the
Daphne
would finally reach (as we shall see) a latitude of seventeen degrees south—is how they managed to circumnavigate at least half of Australia without ever seeing it: either they sailed north and then passed between Australia and New Guinea, risking at every mile running aground on either one shore or the other; or else they sailed south, passing between Australia and New Zealand, seeing always open sea.

You would think I was narrating a romance, if Abel Tasman, setting out from Batavia more or less during the months of our story, had not also arrived at a land that he called Van Diemen, which today we know as Tasmania; but since he, too, was seeking the Solomon Islands, he kept the southern shore of that land on his left, never imagining that beyond it lay a continent a hundred times greater, and he ended up southeast of New Zealand, flanked it to the northeast and, abandoning it, reached the Tongas. Thus he arrived by and large where the
Daphne
was, I believe, but there, too, he passed between the coral reefs and headed for New Guinea. Which meant caroming like a billiard ball, but it seems that for many years afterwards navigators were fated to arrive within a hair's breadth of Australia and not see it.

So we can accept Father Caspar's story as authentic. Often following the whims of the Trades, the
Daphne
ended up in storm after storm and would be badly mauled, so they would have to stop at some God-forsaken island without trees, just sand forming a ring around a little central lake. There they would patch up the ship, and this explained why there was no longer a supply of carpenter's wood on board. Then they resumed navigating, and finally came to cast anchor in this bay. The captain sent a boat ashore with an advance guard, decided there were no inhabitants, but, just in case, he loaded and aimed his few cannon, then three operations—all fundamental—were set in motion.

First, the collection of water and provisions, which were by then almost exhausted; second, the capture of animals and uprooting of plants to take home to delight the naturalists of the Society; third, the felling of trees to provide a new supply of logs and planks, material against future misfortunes. The final operation was the installation, on a height of the Island, of the Specula Melitensis, and this proved the most laborious undertaking. From the hold they had to collect all the carpenter's tools and the various pieces of the Specula, then carry them ashore. All this consumed much time, particularly because they could not unload directly in the bay: between the ship and the shore, almost at the surface of the water and with only a few, too-narrow gaps, there extended a barbican, a curtain wall, a terreplein, an Erdwall made entirely of coral—in short, what today would be called a coral reef. After many unfruitful attempts they discovered that they would have to round the cape to the south of the bay each time; beyond it there was an inlet that allowed them to land. "And that is why that boat abandoned by the sailors we cannot see nunc, although it is still behind there, heu me miserum!" As can be deduced from Roberto's transcription, this Teuton had lived in Rome, speaking Latin with his brothers from a hundred countries, but he had had little practice in Italian.

When the Specula had been set up, Father Caspar began making his observations, which proceeded successfully for almost two months. What was the crew doing meanwhile? They were idling, and discipline on board was breaking down. The captain had taken on many kegs of aqua vitae, which were supposed to be used only as a restorative during storms, and then with great parsimony, or else to serve for barter with the natives; but instead, flouting all orders, the crew started bringing the kegs up on deck, and everyone drank to excess, including the captain. Father Caspar was working, the others were living like brutes, and from the Specula he could hear their lewd singing.

One day Father Caspar was working alone at the Specula. It was very hot, so he removed his cassock (thus, the good Jesuit said with shame, sinning against modesty, which God could now forgive since He had punished him promptly!), and an insect stung him on the chest. At first he felt only a little jab, but when he was ferried back on board that evening, he was attacked by a high fever. He told no one of what had happened to him, then in the night his ears rang and his head was heavy, so the captain unbuttoned the cassock, and what did he see? A pustule, such as wasps can cause, or even mosquitoes of great dimensions. But immediately that swelling became in the officer's eyes a carbunculus, an anthrax, a nigricant pimple—in short, a bubo, a most evident symptom of the
pestis, quae dicitur bubonica,
as was immediately noted in the log-

Panic spread through the ship. It was futile for Father Caspar to tell about the insect: plague victims always lied so as not to be segregated; this was well known. Futile for him to assure them that he knew the plague well, and this was not plague for many reasons. The crew was almost ready to cast him overboard, to avert contagion.

Father Caspar tried to explain that during the great pestilence that struck Milan and Northern Italy a dozen years before, he had been sent, with some of his brothers, to lend a hand in the lazarettoes, and to study the phenomenon closely. And therefore he knew a great deal about that contagious lues. There are diseases that affect only individuals and in different places and times, like the Sudor Anglicus, others peculiar to a sole region, like the Dysenteria Melitensis or the Elephantiasis Aegyptia, and still others that, like the plague, strike over a long period all the inhabitants of many regions. Now, the plague is announced by sun spots, eclipses, comets, the appearance of subterranean animals emerging from their lairs, plants that wither because of mephitis: and none of these signs had appeared on board or on land, or in the sky or on the sea.