The Stone Raft (Harvest Book) (17 page)

They found a place, sat down, and ordered, Joaquim Sassa was starving, he fell on the bread, the butter, the olives, the wine, with a smile that begged for indulgence, This is the last meal of a man condemned to die, and some minutes passed before he asked, And the lady with the wand, where is she at this moment, She's staying at the Hotel Borges, the one on the Chiado, Oh, I thought she lived in Lisbon, No, she doesn't live in Lisbon, that much she did confide, without saying where she comes from, nor did I ask her, probably because I thought we would be taking her there, To do what, To examine the line on the ground, So you also have your doubts, I don't think I'm in any doubt, but I want to see the line with my own eyes, to touch it with my own hands, You're like the man with Platero the donkey, between the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Aracena, If she's telling the truth, we'll see more than Roque Lozano, who will find nothing but water when he reaches his destination, How do you know he was called Roque Lozano, I don't remember our asking him his name, the name of his donkey, yes, but not his. I must have dreamed it, And what about Pedro, will he want to come with us, A man who can feel the ground trembling beneath his feet needs company, Like the man who felt the wooden floor swaying, Peace, Poor Deux Chevaux is going to be too small to carry so many people, four passengers with luggage, even if it's only knapsacks, and the car is old, poor thing, No one can hope to live beyond his last day, You're a prophet, About time you realized it, It looked as if our travels were over, that each of
us would go home, back to our normal existence, Let's turn our back on all this and see what happens. So long as the peninsula doesn't collide with the Azores, If that's the end that awaits us, our life is guaranteed until it happens.

They finished their dinner, resumed their journey without haste, at the slow pace of Deux Chevaux, there was little traffic on the road, probably because of the scarcity of gasoline, they were fortunate in having a car that got such good mileage, But we would still run the risk of grinding to a halt somewhere or other, then our journey would really be over, Joaquim Sassa remarked, then suddenly remembering, he asked, Why did you say the starlings must have gone away, Anyone can tell the difference between farewell and so long, what I saw was definitely farewell, I can't explain it, but there is a coincidence, the starlings went away the moment Joana appeared, Joana, That's her name, You could have said the lady, the woman, the girl, that's how male diffidence refers to the opposite sex, when to use their names might seem much too familiar, Compared to your wisdom, mine is rudimentary, but, as you've just seen, I spoke her name quite naturally, proof that my inner self has nothing to do with this matter, Unless, at heart, you're much more Machiavellian than you appear, trying to prove the opposite of what you really think or feel so that I will think that what you think or feel is precisely what you only appear to be trying to prove, I don't know if I've made myself clear, You haven't, but never mind, clarity and obscurity cast the same shadow and light, obscurity is clear, clarity is obscure, and as for someone being able to say factually and precisely what he feels and thinks, don't you believe it, not because he doesn't want to, but because he cannot, Then why do people talk so much, Because that's all we can do, talk, perhaps not even talk, it's all a question of trial and error, The starlings went away, Joana arrived, one form of companionship went, another took its place, you should consider yourself fortunate, That remains to be seen.

At the hotel there was a message for Joaquim Sassa from Pedro Orce, his companion in torment, Don't disturb me, and another from Joana Carda, this time by telephone, for José Anaiço, So it's all true,
he hadn't dreamed it. Over José Anaiço's shoulder, the voice of Joaquim Sassa seemed to be mocking him, Lady Strange Eyes assures you she's real, therefore don't waste your time dreaming about her tonight. They went upstairs to their rooms, José Anaiço said, Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I'll call her to say we'll go with her, if that's all right, Fine, and don't pay too much attention to what I said, as you've probably guessed, I'm jealous. To be jealous of what only appears to exist is a waste of effort, My wisdom secretly tells me that everything only appears to exist, nothing actually exists, we must be satisfied with that, Good night, prophet, Pleasant dreams, comrade.

People neither knew nor suspected what was going on, such was the secrecy with which governments and scientific institutions set about investigating the subtle movement that was carrying the peninsula out to sea with enigmatic persistence and constancy. To discover how and why the Pyrenees had cracked was no longer a matter for discussion, any hope of redressing the situation was abandoned within days. Despite the vast amount of accumulated information, the computers coldly demanded fresh data or gave preposterous results, as in the case of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose programmers blushed with embarrassment upon receiving on their terminals the peremptory diagnosis, Overexposure to the sun, would you believe. In Portugal, perhaps because of the difficulty, even today, of ridding everyday speech of certain archaisms, the nearest conclusion we could reach was, The pitcher goes so often to the well that the handle finally stays there, a metaphor that only served to confuse people, since it wasn't a question of handles or wells or pitchers, but it is not difficult to perceive in it a reference to the effects of repetition, whose very nature, making allowances for frequency, is such that one never knows where it might end. Everything depends on the duration of the phenomenon, on the accumulated effect of these actions, something along the lines of A steady fall of water wears away the hardest stone, a formula that curiously has never been output by a computer, although it might well be, for between the one and the other there are similarities of all kinds, in the first instance there is
the heavy weight of the water in the pitcher, in the second instance there is water once more but this time drop by drop, dripping freely, and there is time, that other common ingredient.

These are popular philosophies that we could go on discussing forever, but they are of no great interest to men of science, to geologists or oceanologists. For the sake of simple souls, the matter could even be put in the form of an elementary question, one that in its ingenuousness brings to mind that of the Galician confronted by the River Irati, sinking into the earth, Where does this water go, he wanted to know, as you may recall, now we shall phrase it differently, What is happening beneath this water. Out here, where we stand with our feet firmly on the ground, looking at the horizon, or from the air where observation continues indefatigably, the peninsula is a mass of earth that seems, note the verb, seems to float on the waters. But obviously it cannot float. In order to do so it would need to have detached itself from the bottom, which means it would inevitably end up at that same bottom, this time reduced to rubble, for even supposing that under the circumstances a sufficient force could be applied without producing any greater deviation or damage, the disintegrating effect of the water and the maritime currents would progressively reduce the thickness of the navigating platform until the entire layer was dissolved. Therefore, by a process of elimination, we must conclude that the peninsula is sliding over itself at an unknown depth, divided now along a horizontal fault into two slabs, the lower one still part of the earth's crust, the upper one, as already explained, gliding slowly through the darkness of the waters, amid clouds of mud and startled fish, this is how the Flying Dutchman, of unhappy memory, must be navigating through the depths, somewhere in the ocean. The notion is intriguing and mysterious, with a little more imagination it could provide the most fascinating chapter of all for
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
We live in another age, however, science is much more exacting, and since it has not proved possible to discover what is causing the peninsula to displace itself above the seabed, someone should go down there to witness the phenomenon with his own eyes, to film the dragging of this great mass of stone, to record, perhaps,
the whale's cry, that squeaking, that interminable laceration. For this is the moment for the deep-sea divers.

As everybody knows, divers holding their breath cannot go down very deep or for very long. Fishers of pearls, sponges, or coral can dive to fifty feet, the best of them perhaps even to seventy, and they can stay under for three or four minutes, it's all a question of training and motivation. Here the depths are greater and the waters much colder, even when the body is protected by one of those rubber wet suits that transform anyone, man or woman, into a black Triton, with yellow stripes and dots. So one must have recourse to diving gear, to cylinders of compressed air, and with these more recent techniques and apparatus, taking a thousand and one precautions, one can reach depths on the order of two or three hundred meters. Better not tempt Providence by attempting to go any farther down, but send down unmanned machines instead, equipped with film and television cameras, sensors, tactile and ultrasonic probes, all the appropriate instruments for the job at hand.

At a given hour, to enable subsequent comparison of results, simultaneous operations began on the coasts to the north, south, and west, discreetly passed off as naval maneuvers within the scope of North Atlantic Treaty Organization training programes, lest the announcement of these investigations provoke fresh outbursts of panic, for, inexplicably, it had not occurred to anyone so far that the peninsula might be sliding over what for millions of years had been its plinth. The moment has come to reveal that the experts intend to keep quiet about another nagging anxiety stemming, almost inevitably, from this same hypothesis of a deep horizontal cut, it can be summed up in this other question of terrifying simplicity, What will happen if an abyss lies in the path of the peninsula, an end to that continuous surface over which it is sliding. Judging from experience, which is always desirable for a better understanding of the facts, in this case our experience as swimmers, we will understand perfectly what this must mean if we recall the novice swimmer's panic and distress when he unexpectedly loses his footing. Should the peninsula lose its footing or its balance, it will inevitably sink, go to the bottom,
suffocate, drown, who would have thought that after so many centuries of miserable existence we would be doomed to the fate of Atlantis.

Let us spare ourselves the details, these will one day be divulged for the enlightenment of all those interested in submarine life, for the time being shrouded in the utmost secrecy they are to be found in ships' logs, confidential reports, and various records, some in code. All we shall say is that detailed examination of the continental platform yielded no results, no new crack was found, no abnormal friction was picked up by the microphones. This initial hypothesis having failed, examination of the depths was the next step, and the cranes lowered instruments built to withstand high pressures, to scan and search the depths of the silent waters, but these found nothing. The research submarine
Archimedes,
a jewel of technology French-manned and French-owned, descended to the maximum peripheral depths, from the euphatic to the pelagic zone, and from there to the bathypelagic zone, deployed lamps, pincers, bathometers, sounding lines of various kinds, scanned the subaquatic horizon with its panoramic sonar, to no avail. The vast versants, the steep escarpments, the vertical precipices were exposed in their somber majesty, in their unspoilt beauty, the instruments registered continuously, with much clicking and switching on and off of lights, the ascending and descending currents, they photographed the fish, the shoals of sardines, the colonies of hake, the brigades of tuna and bonito, the flotillas of mackerel, the armadas of swordfish, and if the
Archimedes
had been carrying in its belly a laboratory equipped with the necessary reagents, solvents, and other chemical paraphernalia, it would have been able to identify the elements dissolved in the waters of the ocean, namely, in diminishing order in terms of quantity, and for the cultural benefit of the masses who have not the faintest idea how much exists in the sea where they swim, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium, bromine, carbon, strontium, boron, silicon, fluorine, argon, nitrogen, phosphorus, iodine, barium, iron, zinc, aluminum, lead, tin, arsenic, copper, uranium, nickel, manganese, titanium, silver, tungsten, gold, such riches, dear God, and with all the things we lack on terra firma, the only thing we cannot trace is the crack that would explain the
phenomenon, which does exist, after all, and is plain for all to see. In desperation, a North American expert, and one of the most distinguished, went so far as to proclaim before the winds and the horizon, standing on the deck of the hydrographic ship, I hereby declare that the peninsula cannot possibly be moving, whereupon an Italian expert, much less knowledgeable but armed with a historic and scientific precedent, muttered, but not so quietly that he could not be heard by that providential Being who hears all things, Eppur
si muove.
Their researchers empty-handed and chapped by all that salt, humiliated and frustrated, the governments simply announced that under the auspices of the United Nations they had carried out an investigation of possible changes in the habitat of the ichthyic species brought about by the peninsula's dislocation. It was not the mountain that had conceived a mouse, but rather the ocean that had given birth to a tiny sardine.