The Island of the Day Before (32 page)

"You say correct. And more: if God take all the water of Terra Incognita and poured that on Terra Cognita, without this water in this hemisphere the earth all change its Zentrum Cravitatis and overturn everything, and perhaps leap into the sky like a ball which you give a kick to it."

"So?"

"So then you try to think what you do if you are God."

Roberto was caught up in the game. "If I am God," he said, forgetting to use the subjunctive mood as the God of the Italians commands, "I create new water."

"You yes, but God no. God can ex nihilo water create, but where to put it
after
the Flood?"

"Then God, from the beginning of time, had put aside a great reserve supply of water beneath the deep, hidden in the center of the earth, and He brought it out on that occasion, just for forty days, as if it were spouting from the volcanoes. Surely this is what the Bible means when we read that He opened the fountains of the deep."

"You think? But from volcanoes comes fire. All the zentrum of the earth, the heart of Mundus Subterraneus, is a gross mass of fire! If in the zentrum is fire, there water cannot also be! If water would be there, volcanoes would be fountains," he concluded.

Roberto refused to give up. "Then, if I am God, I take the water from another world, since worlds are infinite, and I pour it on the earth."

"You have in Paris heard those atheists who of infinite worlds talk. But God has only one world made, and that is enough for His glory. No, think better, if you do not infinite worlds have, and you have not time to make them specially for the Flood and then throw them into the Void again, what do you do?"

"I honestly do not know."

"Because you have mens parva."

"I may, indeed."

"Yes, very parva. Now you think. If God could the water take that was yesterday on all the earth and pour it today, and tomorrow take all that was yesterday and it is already the double, and pour it day after tomorrow, and so on ad infinitum, perhaps comes the day when He all this sphere of ours can fill, to cover all the mountains, nicht?"

"I am poor at sums, but I would say, at a certain point, yes."

"Ja! In forty days he fills the earth with forty times the water found in the seas, and if you make forty times the depth of the seas, you surely cover the mountains: the deep is as much or far more deep than the mountains high are."

"But where did God find yesterday's water, when yesterday was already past?"

"Why, here! Now listen. Think you are on the Prime Meridian. Can you imagine that?"

"Yes, I can."

"Now think that here it is noon, and let us say noon on Holy Thursday. What time is it in Jerusalem?"

"After all that I have learned about the course of the sun and about the meridians, I would say that in Jerusalem the sun would already have passed the meridian some time ago, so it would be late afternoon. I understand where you are leading me. Very well: at the Prime Meridian it is noon, on the one-hundred-eightieth meridian it is midnight, for the sun passed already twelve hours before."

"Gut. Then here is midnight, thus end of Holy Thursday. What happens here immediately after?"

"The first hour of Good Friday begins."

"And not on the Prime Meridian?"

"No, over there it will still be the afternoon of that Thursday."

"Wunderbar. Therefore here it is already Friday and there it is still Thursday, no? But when there it has Friday become, here is already Saturday and the Lord is resurrect here when there still dead, nichtwahr?"

"Yes, all right, but I don't understand—"

"Now you will understand. Where here is midnight and one minute, a minuscule part of one minute, you say that here is already Friday?"

"Yes, of course."

"But think if at the same moment you would not be here on the ship but on that island you see, east of the line of the meridian. Perhaps you say there it already Friday is?"

"No, it is still Thursday. It is midnight less one minute, less one second, but Thursday."

"Gut! At the same moment here is Friday and there, Thursday!"

"Certainly, and—" A thought suddenly arrested Roberto. "And that's not all! You make me realize that if at that same instant I were on the line of the meridian, it would be midnight on the dot, but if I looked to the west, I would see the midnight of Friday and if I looked to the east, I would see the midnight of Thursday. Holy God!"

"You do not say God, bitte."

"Forgive me, Father, but this is something miraculous."

"Und so in the face of a miracle you do not the name of God in vain take! Say Holywood, if you like. But the great miracle is that there is no miracle! All was foreseen
ab initio.
If the sun to circle the earth takes twenty-four hours, to west of the one-hundred-eightieth meridian begins a new day, and east we have still the day before. Midnight of Friday here on the ship is midnight of Thursday on the island. You know what to the sailors of Magellan happened when they finished their voyage around the world, as Peter Martyr tells? They came back and thought it was a day earlier and instead it was a day later, and they believed God had punished them by taking from them a day, because they had not every Friday holy fasting observed. On the contrary, it was very natural: they had traveled from east to west. If from America towards Asia you sail, you lose one day; if in the opposite direction you sail, you gain a day: this is why the
Daphne
followed the route of Asia, and your stupid ship the way of America. You are now a day younger than me. Is that not to laugh?"

"But I would be a day younger only if I went to the Island," Roberto said.

"This was my little jocus. But to me is no matter if you are younger or older. To me matters that at this point of the earth there is a line that on this side is the day after and on that side the day before. And not only at midnight but also at seven, at ten, every hour! God then took from this abysso the water of yesterday (that you see there) and emptied it on the world of today, and the next day the same, and so on! Sine miraculo, naturaliter! God had arranged Nature like to a great Horologium! It is as if a Horologium does not show the twelve hours, but the twenty-four. In this Horologium moves the hand or arrow towards the twenty-four, and to the right of the twenty-four it was yesterday, and to the left, today."

"But how could the earth of yesterday remain steady in the sky, if there was no more water in this hemisphere? Did it not lose its Centrum Gravitatis?"

"You think with the humana conceptione of time. For us homines exists yesterday no more, and tomorrow not yet. Tempus Dei, quod dicitur Aevum, is very different."

Roberto reasoned that if God removed the water of yesterday and placed it in today, the earth of yesterday might undergo a succussation thanks to that damned center of gravity, but to human beings this should not matter: in their yesterday the succussation had not taken place; it had happened instead in a yesterday of God, who clearly knew how to handle different times and different stories, as a Narrator who writes several novels, all with the same characters, but making different things befall them from story to story. As if there had been a Chanson de Roland in which Roland died under a pine, and another in which he became king of France at the death of Charles, using Ganelon's hide as a carpet. A thought which, as we shall see, was to accompany Roberto for a long while, convincing him not only that the worlds can be infinite in space but also parallel in time. But he did not want to speak of this with Father Caspar, who already considered profoundly heretical the idea of many worlds, and there was no telling what the good Jesuit would have said of this idea of Roberto's. He therefore confined himself to asking what God did to shift all that water from yesterday to today.

"The eruptione of underwater volcanoes, natürlich! You conceive? They blow hot winds, and what happens when a pan of milk is heated? The milk swells, rises, overflows the pan, spreads over the stove! But at that time it was not milk sed boiling aqua! Gross catastrophe!"

"And how did God take all that water away after the forty days?"

"If it did not rain anymore, there was sun et nunc aqua evaporated little by little. The Bible says one hundred fifty days it took. If you wash and dry your shirt in one day, you can dry the earth in one hundred fifty. And besides, much water into enormous subterranean lakes flowed, which now lie zwischen the surface and the zentral fire."

"You have almost convinced me," Roberto said, who cared less about how that water had been moved than about the fact of being so close to yesterday. "But by arriving here what have you demonstrated that you could not have demonstrated before through the light of reason?"

"I leave the light of reason to the old theologia. Today scientia wants proof through experientia. And the experientia is that I am here. Then before I arrived here I took many soundings, and I know how deep the sea down here is."

Father Caspar abandoned his geo-astronomical explanation and launched into the description of the Flood. He spoke now his erudite Latin, gesticulating as if to evoke the various phenomena, celestial and infernal, as he paced the deck. While he strode, the sky above the bay was clouding over, announcing a storm of the sort that arrives, all of a sudden, only in the sea of the Tropics. Now, all the fountains of the deep and the cataracts of the sky having opened, what horrendum et formidandum spectaculum was offered to Noah and his family!

People took refuge first on the roofs, but their houses were swept away by the currents that arrived from the Antipodes with the force of the divine wind which had raised and driven them. Men and women climbed into the trees, but these were uprooted like weeds; they could see still the crowns of the most ancient oaks, and they clung to them, but the winds shook them with such rage that none could maintain their grip. Now in the waters that covered valleys and mountains swollen corpses could be seen floating, on which the remaining birds tried to perch, terrified, as if on some ghastly nest, but soon they lost even this last refuge, and they also succumbed, exhausted, to the tempest, their wings limp. "Oh horrenda justitiae divinae spectacula," Father Caspar exulted, and this was nothing—he guaranteed—compared to what it will be given us to see on the day when Christ returns to judge the quick and the dead.

And to the great din of nature responded the animals of the Ark, the howls of the wind were echoed by the wolves, to the roar of thunder the lion made counterpoint, at the shudder of lightning bolts the elephants trumpeted, the dogs barked on hearing the voice of their dying kin, the sheep wept at the crying of the children, the crows cawed at the cawing of the rain on the roof of the Ark, the cows lowed at the lowing of the waves, and all the creatures of earth and air with their calamitous whimpering or mewing took part in the mourning of the planet.

But it was on that occasion, Father Caspar assured Roberto, that Noah and his family rediscovered the language Adam had spoken in Eden, which his sons had forgotten after the Fall, and which the descendants of Noah would almost all lose on the day of the great confusion of Babel, except the heirs of Gomer, who carried it into the forests of the north, where the German people faithfully preserved it. Only the German language—the obsessed Father Caspar now shouted in his native tongue—"redet mit der Zunge, donnert mit dem Himmel, blitzet mit den schnellen Wolken," or, as he inventively continued, mixing the harsh sounds of different idioms, only German speaks the tongue of Nature, "blitzes with the Clouds, brumms with the Stag, gruntzes with the Schweine, zlides with the Eel, miaus with the Katz, schnatters with the Gandern, quackers with the Dux, klukken with the hen, clappers with the Schwan, kraka with the Ravfen, schwirrs with the Hirundin!" And in the end he was hoarse from his babelizing, and Roberto was convinced that the true language of Adam, rediscovered with the Flood, flourished only in the lands of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Dripping sweat, the priest concluded his evocation. The sky, as if frightened by the consequences of every flood, had held back its storm, like a sneeze that seems almost ready to explode but then is restrained with a grunt.

I
N THE DAYS
that followed it became clear that the Specula Melitensis could not be reached, because Father Wanderdrossel, like Roberto, was unable to swim. The longboat was still over there in the inlet, but it was as if it did not exist.

Now that he had a strong young man at his disposal, Father Caspar could have constructed a raft and made a big oar but, as he had explained, all the tools and materials were on the Island. Without an axe they could not chop down the masts or the yards, without hammers they could not unhinge the doors and nail them together.

But Father Caspar did not seem excessively troubled by his long isolation; indeed, he rejoiced, as he could once again enjoy the use of his cabin, the deck, and some instruments of study and observation.

Roberto still did not understand what Father Caspar Wanderdrossel was. A sage? That, certainly, or at least a scholar, a man curious about both natural and divine science. An eccentric? To be sure. At one moment he let fall that this ship had been fitted out not at the expense of the Society but with his private funds, or, rather, the money of his brother, a rich merchant as mad as he was; on another occasion he confided, complaining, that some of his fellow Jesuits had "stolen many fecondissime ideas" after pretending to reject them as mere scribbling. Which suggested that back in Rome those reverend fathers had not grieved at the departure of this sophistic character. Considering that he was sailing at his own expense and there was a good chance he might be lost along those perilous routes, they may have encouraged him in order to be rid of him.

The company Roberto had kept in Provence and in Paris had been such as to make him skeptical of the assertions of physics and natural philosophy that he heard the old man now make. But as we have seen, Roberto absorbed knowledge to which he was exposed as if he were a sponge, and was not distressed at believing in contradictory truths. Perhaps it was not that he lacked a taste for system; his was a choice.