by Umberto Eco
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.
CHAPTER 27
The Secrets of the Flux and Reflux of the Sea
THE 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).
Only thus could a reborn castaway discover the rules that govern the course of celestial bodies and the meaning of the acrostics they trace in the sky: not flailing among Almagests and Quadripartites but directly reading the approach of eclipses, the passage of the argyrocomate meteors, and the phases of the stars. Only a nose bleeding because struck by a falling fruit would really allow him to understand, at one blow, both the laws that draw the grave to gravity and de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. Only after observing the surface of a pond and poking it with a twig, reed, or one of those long and rigid metallic leaves, would the new Narcissus—without any dioptric or sciatherical computing—grasp the alternating skirmish of light and shadow. And perhaps he would be able to understand why the earth is an opaque mirror that swabs with ink what it reflects, and water a wall that makes diaphanous the shadows imprinted on it, whereas images in the air never find a surface from which to rebound, and so penetrate it, fleeing to the farthest limits of the aether, only to return sometimes in the form of mirages and other ostents.
But was possession of the Island not possession of Lilia? And then what? Roberto's logic was not that of those recreant, caitiff philosophers, intruders into the atrium of the lyceum, who affirm always that a thing, if it is seen in one form, cannot also be of the opposite form. By an error of the errant imagination characteristic of lovers, Roberto already knew that the possession of Lilia would be, at once, the source of every revelation. To discover the laws of the universe through a spyglass seemed to him only the longest way to arrive at a truth that would be revealed to him in the deafening light of pleasure, if it were granted him to lay his head on the lap of his beloved, in a Garden in which every shrub was the Tree of Good.
But since—as even we should know—to desire something that is distant summons the spirit of someone who will steal it from us, Roberto had to fear that into the delights of that Eden a serpent had also crept. He was then gripped by the idea that on the Island the quicker one, the usurper, Ferrante, was awaiting him.
CHAPTER 28
Of the Origin of Novels
LOVERS LOVE THEIR misfortunes more than their blessings. Roberto could think of himself only as separated forever from the one he loved, but the more he felt separated from her, the more he was obsessed by the thought that some other man might not be.
We have seen how, accused by Mazarin of having been somewhere he was not, Roberto got it into his head that Ferrante was present in Paris and had on some occasions taken his place. If this was true, then while Roberto was arrested by the Cardinal and conducted on board the Amaryllis, Ferrante remained in Paris, and for everyone (including Her!) he was Roberto. Now Roberto had only to think of Her at the side of Ferrante, and lo, his marine Purgatory was transformed into a Hell.
He knew that jealousy is generated outside of any reference to what is, is not, or perhaps will never be; that it is a transport that from an imagined sickness derives real pain; that the jealous man is like a hypochondriac who sickens for fear of being sick. Beware, then, of allowing yourself to be caught by this tormenting gossip that obliges you to picture Her with a Him, and remember: Nothing more than solitude encourages suspicion, nothing more than daydreaming transforms suspicion into certainty. However, he added, as I am unable to avoid loving, I cannot avoid jealousy, and unable to avoid jealousy, I cannot avoid daydreaming.
In fact jealousy, among all fears, is the least generous: if you fear death, you can take comfort in the thought that you may nevertheless enjoy a long life or that in the course of a voyage you may find the fountain of eternal youth; or if you are penniless, you may take comfort in the thought of discovering a treasure. For every feared thing there is an opposing hope that encourages us. Not so when you love in the absence of the beloved. Absence is to love as wind to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
If jealousy is born from intense love, he who does not feel jealousy of the beloved is not a lover, or he loves lightheartedly, for we know of lovers who, fearing their love will fade, nourish it by finding reasons for jealousy at all costs.
The jealous man (who still wants his beloved to be chaste and faithful) can only think of her as worthy of jealousy, and therefore capable of betrayal, and thus he rekindles in present suffering the pleasure of absent love. Also because your imagining yourself in possession of the distant beloved—well aware it is not true—cannot render the thought of her, her warmth, her blushes, her scent, as vivid as the thought of those same gifts being enjoyed by an Other. Of your absence you are sure, but of the presence of the enemy you are if not sure then at least unsure. The amorous contact imagined by the jealous man is the only way he can picture with verisimilitude the beloved's connubiality, which, if doubtful, is at least possible, whereas his own is impossible.
Hence the jealous man is not able, nor does he have the will, to imagine the opposite of what he fears, indeed he cannot feel joy except in the magnification of his own sorrow, and by suffering through the magnified enjoyment from which he knows he is banned. The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell—in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
Thus Roberto, suffering but remembering that infinity of worlds which he had discussed in previous days, had an idea or, rather, an Idea, a great and anamorphic stroke of genius.
He thought, namely, that he might construct a story, of which he was surely not the protagonist, inasmuch as it would not
take place in this world but in a Land of Romances, and this story's events would unfold parallel to those of the world in which he was, the two sets of adventures never meeting and overlapping.
What would Roberto gain by this? Much. By inventing the story of another world, which existed only in his mind, he would become that world's master, able to ensure that the things that happened there would not exceed his capacity of endurance. On the other hand, as reader of the story whose author he was, he could share in the heartbreak of its characters: for does it not happen that readers of romances may without jealousy love Thisbe, using Pyramus as their vicar, and suffer for Astrée through Celadon?
To love in the Land of Romances does not mean experiencing any jealousy at all: there, that which is not ours is still somehow ours, and that which in this world was ours and was stolen from us, there does not exist—even if what does exist there resembles what in existence we lost or did not lose.
So, then, Roberto would write (or conceive) the story of Ferrante and of his loves with Lilia, and only by constructing that fictional world would Roberto forget the gnawing of his jealousy in the real world.
Further, he reasoned, to understand what happened to me and how I fell into the trap set by Mazarin, I must reconstruct the History of those events, finding the causes, the secret motives. But is there anything more uncertain than the Histories we read, wherein if two authors tell of the same battle, such are the incongruities revealed that we are inclined to think they write of two different conflicts? On the other hand, is there anything more certain than a work of fiction, where at the end every Enigma finds its explanation according to the laws of the Realistic? The Romance perhaps tells of things that did not really happen, but they could very well have happened. To explain my misadventures in the form of a Novel means assuring myself that in all the muddle there exists at least one way of untangling the knot, and therefore I am not the victim of a nightmare. An Idea insidiously antithetical to the first, for in this way the invented story will be superimposed on the true story.