The Glass Ocean(25)
• • •
The cousin has more, family stories, the Dell’oro ancestor who carved jewels engraved with enigmatic runes and symbols, the remains of ancient languages only the jeweler understood, which were believed to foretell the fortune of the wearer; another who made a woman entirely of gold, so lifelike that she was believed to speak, saying Help me—in a voice peculiarly low, throaty, more like the painful gyration of an unoiled hinge on a rusty gate; another who created automata, beasts of the field, so realistic they could not be told from the real thing, until the slaughterer’s knife revealed what was inside, the perfect coiled springs, the gears, the ingenious, jeweled mechanism; this was not life but something else, as Giorgio might have put it, a very particular kind of life.
There was obsession in it. A tendency to obsession. La tendenza. These things are rumors. Distortions. Monstrosities. It is these that my father thinks about there in his berth, down in the sloshing belly. And of course: of Clotilde at the taffrail. Clotilde at the spinet. Clotilde bending over to button her boot. But I’m not like them. Amended. Him. I’m not like him. I hate him—and I’ll never go back—
And then they pass, manwomanboyandspinet, into the heat of the subtropics. It is as if my father’s anger at his father, once allowed expression, has dispersed, forming now a climate through which they will all be obliged to sail.
Now begins their true journey, to which all else has been the prelude.
Many things, previously hidden, will now be revealed: my mother’s heat-bared shoulder; the wan, unshaven cheek and wild, staring eye of mal de mer–tormented Linus Starling, as he emerges from below deck for the first time in weeks, pale as a moth, as a mushroom, as the belly of a toad. Then, too, there is the monocle of John McIntyre, glinting ferociously in the light of that unrelenting sun, shooting sparks, divots of light.
• • •
For there are no ambiguities in the tropics. The sun shines mercilessly upon all; reveals all, mercilessly. It is a time of sharp contrasts, and sharp conflicts: of air and cloud and water against hull and sail, each battling the other, begrudging any progress; of pale skins turned painfully red, then gratefully brown; of stark, relentless blues and dense, dark, weighted shadows—for the shadows here, at the latitude 25 degrees north, possess the solidity, the authority, of objects. In a strange equatorial inversion, the occupants of the Narcissus find themselves rendered blind by an opulence of light, they fracture their vision on shadows each day as they pass from the burning brightness of outdoors into the ship’s unbearable, stifling, stinking darkness. Imagine them (as do I), traveling, dazzled and blinking, from shipside to workroom, workroom to shipside, laden with buckets full of that imperturbably smiling ocean, brimming with all she has yielded and will not miss, firm in pursuit of their science yet made fools of by sun and shade, stumbling against each other blindly, spilling water, tripping over coils of rope, staggering among the piglets that run wild upon the deck with the cook in hot pursuit, his cleaver’s flash as brilliant and as merciless as the sun.
Merciless. Yes, that is the word. It is all brightly, gaily, grandly merciless.
And my mother: the brightest, gayest, most merciless of all.
• • •
It’s her turn now.
• • •
Now, during the hot, brilliant days and warm, languid nights, my mother begins the series of concerts in her stateroom. Like a little snail I shrink/Into my painted shell, that is what she sings, beneath a midnight sky alight with stars, the entire Milky Way, or so it seems, whirling away above them into a space infinite, black, and dizzying, while the Narcissus plows its own Milky Way, equally luminous, in the dark, fetid ocean, a galaxy of living creatures that twirl and spark for an instant, then spiral away again into depthless obscurity.
What a liar she is, my mother.