Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  Edward was fascinated by the discoveries of Newton, Leibniz, and Laplace, and especially admired the latter’s observations on celestial mechanisms, the inclines and eccentricities of orbits as well as the elegant solutions to problems through recourse to the harmonies of spheres. He immediately wanted to explore the multiple facets of the world in the same way, with the help of mathematics, which seemed to him the very instrument that had forged the universe. Like Laplace who, when Napoleon noted that nowhere in his system was there a reference to the Creator of the world, had replied simply: “I had no need of that hypothesis,” Edward found it unnecessary to have a supreme architect to explain the universe; architecture was all he needed.

  If two centuries earlier a good dose of genius had served to deduce from the fall of an apple the law of gravity and, even more, to evoke the forces that govern the entire solar system, most of the observations made by his contemporaries seemed to Edward unimaginatively descriptive and devoid of any originality. Strolling through the countryside around Bath, notebook in hand, he wondered how to express and thus elucidate the entity that was a tree, or the thorny problem represented by the corolla of a rose. There, it seemed to him, lay the true, the only issue: to invent formulas that could describe in one way or another what it was to be alive on this planet.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER THEY WERE BACK IN London, Edward obtained a modest scholarship to cover their moving expenses and the rent for a room in a most attractive house. That accomplished, they set out for Italy, for the caldaria, tepidaria, and frigidaria of Bath had given him an urge to know those of Pompeii, which now could be seen. It struck him that because of their proximity to the famous volcano and because they dated from a period so remote that it was nearly lost in the mists of time, they must conceal a mystery. Perhaps they would help him elucidate some of the hunches that still came to him with searing intensity, but then vanished before he’d even had time to grab a pencil and note them. What he had always appreciated about mathematics was the limpidity, clarity, and absolute precision conferred by its abstract and theoretical character, freed from reality and its contingencies. Now he was finding everywhere in the physical world applications for the formulas and equations with which he had covered reams of paper during his childhood, which now seemed equivalent to the scales and arpeggios a musician must master before tackling a symphony. Back to his first loves, whose memory had been wakened in him by Garance and her harmony of the spheres, Edward discovered he was fascinated by earth and the invisible forces at play beneath its surface.

  Having arrived mid-morning in Naples under a blazing sun, they reached their townhouse where they were expected, and stayed inside until late afternoon, when they walked for a while on the deserted beach. Edward, though he had lived his whole life on an island, felt as if he were regarding the sea for the first time, for the cold, grey expanse surrounding England had very little in common with the green mass, silver-fringed and nearly alive, that stretched out before them. On one side, the shore of the Bay of Naples was plunged in the gold of late afternoon; on the other, the Mediterranean unfurled its long rollers. The air smelled of iodine and ripe fruit. They strode the warm shingle for a long time, then Garance made her way towards the open sea along a nearly invisible spit of land, as if she were walking on the water. Edward followed some distance behind. Both stopped to gaze at the still horizon while the sea before them rose and fell as if following the breath of a gigantic creature.

  Turning around after a moment, Edward discovered that the road they had taken was about to be engulfed by the water that covered it, then briefly withdrew before making it disappear once again.

  “Time to go back,” he said. “The tide’s coming in.”

  But Garance stood there unmoving before the waves that now seemed to surround her on all sides. Holding her shoes, lifting her long cream-coloured skirt, its hem soaked, she remarked seriously:

  “Are we sure that the water is rising? Or is the whole earth climbing up to get closer to the sky?”

  Amused, Edward wanted to explain terrestrial tides, the combined influences of the Moon and Sun, the force of gravity; but all at once it seemed to him, an islander who’d never actually seen the sea, that neither had he really seen the sky. He took out his notebook and quickly sketched a planet straining vainly towards a star in the middle of a blank page, while Garance let go of her skirt which wrapped around her legs like a ribbon of seaweed, and splashed her way back to him.

  After a first dreamless night, they went onto their balcony, which looked out on one slope of Vesuvius. Bread was placed on the table with eggs, their yolks nearly red, strong tea, and a basket of local oranges and grapefruit, called here “fruits of paradise.”

  Garance sighed deeply with satisfaction as she observed the view of the countryside and the massive outline of the mountain on the horizon. Then, catching sight of a little cloud drifting so close to the summit it could have been a curl of smoke, she inquired:

  “Edward, Vesuvius has hardly changed since the eruption at Pompeii if I’m not mistaken?”

  “No, my dear, you’re not mistaken. Obviously it’s hard to judge but documents of the time suggest that it’s identical to what it was like two thousand years ago. These oranges are delicious.”

  “Then what’s to stop it from erupting again, Edward, and covering the area with lava and ashes a second time?”

  He sipped some tea.

  “Well … to tell the truth … nothing. There’ve already been around twenty eruptions since the one that buried Pompeii, and even though the last one was nearly twenty-five years ago, as far as we know the volcano is still active.”

  She mused on that as she grabbed a grapefruit and started to slice it.

  “If it can put your mind at rest,” Edward went on, “there are usually warning signs before an eruption: seismic tremors, clouds of gas, less significant lava flows and so on, which give the population plenty of time to take shelter …”

  “I wasn’t worried,” she replied, then she let out a cry, dropped her knife, jumped to her feet and ran inside, gulping. Edward, bending over automatically to pick up the utensil, spied on his wife’s plate, in the pink flesh of the fruit, a mass of blackened pulp with a worm wriggling inside it.

  That same morning they headed for Vesuvius, taking the funicular along with two scientists (one, an ophthalmologist by trade and vulcanologist by inclination, bore the curious name Tempest Anderson) and a dozen other tourists, among them two imperturbable Germans and a young French girl who turned green the moment the cabin began to move. Garance did all she could to calm the woman whose husband, himself hardly less anxious, chose to squeeze his eyes shut and take refuge in prayer, his disjointed Hail Marys punctuating their ascent. The contraption, clanking on its cables and iron rails, finally got to the top without mishap. They found there a man with ebony skin who was pacing, alone, the cracked circumference of the crater, eyes down as if he were looking for something in the grey and black earth. His footsteps drew behind him a complicated labyrinth one might have thought he was trying to get out of. Edward greeted him politely but the stranger seemed not to see him.

  The travellers spent hours gazing at what was beneath the surface of the soil, looking up now and then to discover, surprised, the city of Naples, spread out at their feet like a tiny construction set, unfolding all the way to the sea. Observing the hard, black, fissured soil, Edward thought for a moment that he could see a crack opening in the deepest part of the crater, revealing a thick magma, orange and seething, which reminded him strangely – was it the persistent smell of sulphur floating above this landscape of fire? – of the turbid water drawn in the Pump Room in Bath.

  Edward trudged through the heavy, lead-coloured dust, trying to imagine the depths from where lava had gushed two thousand years earlier. Although they had annihilated the Roman city, the flames had nonetheless carried in their destruction a form of eternal life, because they had been blazing, unchanged, from the dawn of time, like the fire that
burned in the Sun and the stars that gazed at them from high in the sky.

  After some rather long formalities, the repeated presentation of their passports, the production of letters of reference hand-written by outstanding professors from the universities of London and Oxford, the signing of countless documents written only in Italian but which clearly stated that they undertook not to disturb anything and not try to take home any statues or mosaics or even pebbles, they were finally able to set out to discover Pompeii, buried and now half-emerged from the earth, escorted by a guide only too happy to stretch out in the relative coolness of the shade of a low wall and let them stroll quietly. Thus they were able to spend several days, from morning till evening, surveying the streets of the ghost town in perfect solitude the dig having been interrupted a few days earlier and due to resume at an indeterminate date.

  The recently unearthed thermal baths, which resembled those in Bath, though thousands of kilometres and two oceans separated them, brought nothing new to Edward’s understanding – unless it was confirmation of Rome’s genius, capable of exporting art and technology to the most out-of-the-way corners of the Empire. Nevertheless, here, in the shadow of the volcano, he felt he was getting close, almost touching the revelation that kept getting away from him and of which he knew that it had to do with the secrets of earth and fire.

  Incredulous, they peered at the façade of an ancient bakery where they could read, in clear characters, the list of breads available from the house; they marvelled at graffiti a mischievous hand could have drawn the day before, then quickened their pace, blushing in spite of themselves at the menus adorned by mosaics illustrating the various choices offered by the ladies of the night who shared a house in which each had her own room. Their footsteps rang out in unison along the bumpy cobblestones just as had, two millennia earlier, the heels of men and women of whom nothing now remained but those inscriptions in the stone. As they strolled through this phantom city, both felt as though a certain dread was silenced, leaving room for a kind of serenity. Reliving their visit in memory years afterwards, Edward would see in those walks the happiest hours of his married life.

  Garance however had for some ten days been experiencing bouts of weakness that forced her to sit down to catch her breath or sometimes even lie down for a few minutes, the pink in her cheeks turning crimson at the slightest effort, and since the incident with the grapefruit she had complained of losing her appetite. She would retch as she pushed away meats roasted or cooked in sauce, and would eat only foods that were white: white bread, stiffly beaten egg whites, goat cheese, peeled apples, sweetened creamy rice.

  Late one afternoon when the sun was casting long, narrow shadows on the ground after beating down all day, she came to a halt, faltering, at a street corner in the deserted city, outside a sand-coloured house. Edward rushed to catch her, but she stepped over a chain loosely hooked onto two wooden posts and entered a square villa whose walls were adorned with portraits of young women carrying baskets overflowing with fruit. Then, without hesitating, walking as confidently as if she were in her own home, she crossed the first rooms, then reached a small bare chamber in the back, with one window that let in the last rays of the sun, bathing everything in a rosy light. There was a low stone berth where she lay down, then folded her hands over her chest. Edward joined her, shivering when the back of his neck touched the cold stone. They lay there for a moment without talking while the sun disappeared slowly into the darkness.

  “Listen. Did you hear it?” asked Garance softly.

  It was a game they played. Amid the crowd milling at a busy intersection in the heart of London; in the library reading room; on the pond where they sometimes went boating, she forced him to stop and prick up his ear. The first times, taken aback, he could only answer her question in all honesty: “Hundreds of wheels on the paving stones and a neighing horse,” or “A number of birds.” Garance had patiently peeled away, one by one, the strata of sound covering the unique and nearly imperceptible one (a merchant offering her flowers amid the din of cars and horses, buzzing bees imprisoned behind a display window, an unlucky angler cursing between his teeth, and even – or so she swore – the quiet laugh of the fish that got away) which she wanted to give him as if she had just made it appear, like a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat.

  There were few sounds in Pompeii. A lone nightingale produced a few trills, then was quiet, as if confused by its own lyrical flights; a lizard ran to take refuge under a stone; cicadas filled the air with their metallic chirring that blended into the background; a breath of wind passed over the city, light as the inhalation of a sleeping child. Lying on the bed of stone, Edward heard none of them, however; the sounds had disappeared as soon as they entered the square house. He closed his eyes, listened as best he could. He could distinguish nothing now but the subdued throbbing of his blood against his eardrums.

  “What do you hear?” asked Garance.

  “Nothing,” he admitted.

  She smiled.

  “Exactly.”

  She fell asleep almost at once and he watched over her until the close of day.

  When they got up again, the city had come to life. At the eastern end, where the streets that came out of the earth suddenly stopped, continuing only under layers of rock, gypsies had set up camp and their music rose in the night. Clapping their hands, men and women sitting around a big crackling fire intoned chants that Edward and Garance could understand only partially, where the subject was sun and exile. Among the gypsies, Edward noticed the mysterious man with ebony skin. He wasn’t singing. In the middle of the group, eyes half-closed, he was smiling gently as he watched the dancing flames. Over sleeping Pompeii fine white ashes fell.

  The next day, when they were at their breakfast table looking out on the now-familiar silhouette of Vesuvius, for the first time seeing its slopes covered with snow, Edward touched on their departure. He had thought that Garance might want to extend their stay but she gave him her agreement almost absentmindedly.

  He was pouring tea, reflecting out loud that he would go down to the port after breakfast to see if there might be a ship bound for Marseille over the next few days, when Garance abruptly pushed back her chair and dashed to the bedroom, one hand over her mouth. Worried, Edward followed and saw her rush into the lavatory. He heard sounds of water. Back on the balcony, he examined the table. Perhaps Garance could no longer tolerate the mere sight of coloured food?

  When she reappeared, dabbing at her eyes, he helped her sit down and offered her a cup of cold milk. Droplets of sweat stood out on her forehead and her hands trembled very slightly when she brought the white liquid to her lips.

  “Garance, are you unwell?” he asked anxiously. “Is something wrong?” Then, suddenly alarmed at the thought she could be suffering from some serious illness she’d hidden from him, he pleaded: “You must tell me, I beg you …”

  Her sky-blue eyes looked deeply into his, then she announced in a voice that was also trembling a little:

  “I’m not sick, Edward, I’m pregnant.”

  He stopped breathing for a moment that seemed to him to last a century, in the course of which he saw the horizon start dancing until it was nearly diagonal, then lie down again after performing several leaps. Then he stood up, knocking over the jar of jam, which left a red stain on the white tablecloth, and took Garance in his arms. She was crying, but it was with happiness.

  Over the next few days, on banknotes and in the margins of books on which he could never concentrate, on bills, tickets, the slightest scrap of paper that turned up and, if none appeared, with his fingertip in the dust covering a piece of furniture or the condensation on a window pane, he wrote the same impossible and miraculous equation:

  1 + 1 = 3.

  They went back to London without delay. Edward wouldn’t allow Garance to tire herself by carrying anything, even her parasol, which he held over her curly head the way slaves in the past would fan their queen with big palm fronds. Back on Alderney Stree
t, she resumed her music but now whenever he went into the drawing room, Edward could hear her softly explaining its subtleties to an invisible presence.

  Meanwhile, he ordered from the Sorbonne dusty tomes by abbé Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare who, along with his research into the electricity of plants, meteors, and the human body, had worked out an unusual theory about the forces that sustain earth’s core, going so far as to suggest that if one planted metal rods at a certain depth, they would work like lightning rods and prevent the earthquakes that disturb the subterranean world from spreading by forcing them to concentrate on one precise point. But the abbé was on the wrong track, Edward was sure of it.

  He plunged back into the quarrel that two centuries earlier had pitted the Saturnists against the Plutonists, the first reckoning that volcanic eruptions were due to the explosion of coal buried in the earth, which caught fire when pyrite came in contact with water, while the second were of the opinion that at the centre of the planet was a mass of matter in fusion which shot up sporadically through crater chimneys, some massive, some insignificant. But in these models, Edward saw mainly the gaps it was up to him to fill in.

  Questions occurred to him all at once, ones he would never have imagined springing from mathematics, as they were absolutely foreign to geometry and even to arithmetic. They dealt with the shape and weight of continents; the movement and action of the tides; the properties of matter when subjected to those forces, the most important being no doubt elasticity. This he set out to study methodically, as he always did, by reviewing the work of his forerunners, only to arrive at a distressing conclusion. The totality of the thinking on the problems of elasticity up to the end of the year 1820 could be summed up as follows: an inadequate theory of inflexion, an erroneous theory of torsion, an unproven theory about the vibration of plates.