by D. W. Buffa
“The two men, sent by the city’s elders, treated me with every courtesy. They led me back across the river which we then followed on the other side for about half a mile, until we came to a waterfall. To my astonishment, they headed right toward it. But then, as we got closer, I saw that there was a rocky ledge just behind it. I thought it was a bridge back to the other side, a path that would take us around the mountain that towered high above us, but it was not that at all. A dozen steps across the ledge and we were inside a narrow, crooked cave, a labyrinth so dark I could not see. My two guides knew every turn by heart, and with each of them holding onto one of my arms, I stumbled through the pitch-black darkness until, after more than an hour, we came out the other side and into the most magnificent sight I had ever seen: great rolling valleys, lush with every kind of healthy vegetation, enormous cultivated fields, vast well-tended orchards, and, high above it, a distant plateau with a city shining like a chimera, all gold and silver, a mirrored reflection of the vanished Atlantis I had imagined for so many years.
“I was greeted not as a stranger, but as a long-lost friend, almost as a conqueror come back from a distant war. Children threw flowers at my feet, women looked at me with modest eyes; everyone of every age applauded my arrival. I was taken immediately to a stately apartment where my ever need was met. That first evening I sat guest of honor in the largest of the city’s dining halls.”
Holderlin rubbed his chin, his face a study in nostalgia so pleasant he had to shake himself to get back to what he knew he had to explain. He bent forward, but only at the waist; his head, his shoulders, did not move.
“That was the beginning of my education, that dining hall, the fact that they all ate together, took all their meals in common. I say that was the beginning of my education, but of course I did not understand immediately what it meant. I was too intrigued, too full of exuberance for what I was seeing, Atlantis come to life – I was certain now that I had discovered it – to think about the implications, to think about anything except the moment. I was struck most of all by the absence of curiosity. No one was pulling at my clothes, or pinching my skin; they did not look at me as if I were some alien being. It was almost as if they had been expecting me,” said Holderlin with a significant glance. “And perhaps they had. At least that’s what I thought at the time, that the news of my arrival had been brought to them the day of my rescue and that they had had time to think about the kind of reception they wanted to give me. Later, I realized that was not true, that it went deeper than that, that it was a part of their history – their story, the one that every child grows up with, the one that the men they call poets, the rhapsodes who recite from memory the saga of their adventures in the same way Homer told his story to the Greeks – that there were on rare but regularly repeated occasions, once every century or so, visitors, someone who happened by chance to come along. I was not the first, as I no doubt would not be the last, to discover them. It was part of the story, part of the adventure, how they treated each of them. Some of course they had to kill.”
“Had to kill?” asked Darnell. “That must have given you a moment’s pause.”
“There was no occasion. I only learned this later, and by that time I had every reason to think I would be safe. Also, every reason to think I would never leave, that I’d spend my life in a kind of exile of my own, a permanent visitor to a city no one knew existed. At first of course I was too excited to think about such things. I was particularly excited when I discovered that no matter how much I wanted to learn about them, they wanted to learn even more from me. They wanted to know everything, not just about where I came from and how I got there, but all about my education, starting when I was a child. Every day, for months, I sat with the city’s elders, answering, or trying to answer, questions about the art, the sciences, the industries, the peaceful pursuits, the wars, of what we in our ignorance call the civilized world.
“I was of course more than willing to tell them everything I knew. I tried not to disappoint them, they seemed so eager to hear all that was happening, all that had taken place, in that other world of which they had no part. I was so concerned with making certain that everything I said was accurate, and not my own suppositions, that I only gradually began to realize that nearly everything I told them seemed to do nothing more than to confirm what they had expected, their own conjectures about what would likely happen from what they knew of what had gone before. There were frequent comments, made with growing confidence, that the continued democratization of the world, the emergence of mass politics, was inevitable after the French Revolution; that the invention of the steam engine meant that industrialization, aided and abetted by modern science, would threaten the world with extinction. They were very certain of everything, and none of it, I’m afraid, very good with respect to what we might expect in the future.
“None of that seemed to bother them, however. They wanted their own way of life and to be left alone. I was there for a full year, and every time I noticed something I thought could be improved by the use of modern technique they expressed an interest, marveled at the simple ingenuity of it, and then, after telling me they would certainly consider it, promptly forgot everything I had said. As I became more comfortable, and more certain that there was very little chance I would ever leave, I began to ask what I thought were some penetrating questions of my own, questions about their arts and sciences, what they taught to each succeeding generation. What I discovered astonished me. They had mastered all the sciences, and rejected most of them as too devoted to what one of the elders called the arts of preservation – of extending life – and not enough to what makes a life worth living; too much to the trouble of existence and not enough to what, taking a page from the Greek, I might call the ‘grandeur of nobility.’ They are not a people of the modern world. The one science they treasure, the one they study all the time, is mathematics, which includes for them geometry.”
“Yes, Adam told me. He said he had some trouble with the theory of irrational numbers, though I think he was just being modest.”
Holderlin seemed surprised. “He told you that? He must trust you quite a lot to tell you anything about what happens there. They’re taught from the cradle, so to speak, to view one another as all members of the same family and everyone else a potential threat to their existence. But he told you that? What else did he tell you?” asked Holderlin with great interest.
“Nothing, which is one of the problems I’m having. He won’t explain anything; nothing about why he was being punished, why he was made an exile; nothing about whether there might be some explanation of his actions that would make what he did something other than incest and murder. If you hadn’t come to see me, I never would have known that in this city you’re describing the practice of infanticide is apparently not only permitted but, in the instances you mentioned, required.”
For some reason, Holderlin seemed to approve of Adam’s continued refusal to help Darnell with his defense.
“I wouldn’t have expected anything less. If he had been taken prisoner in a war – and those ancient histories are full of such examples – he would have been thought a coward if he told anything to his captors, whatever the consequences might be. The city is what matters, more than any of the citizens. That is the reason for the dining hall, for the fact that they all eat meals in common and never, any of them, in private. That is the reason they do not allow marriage.”
“Don’t allow…? What are you saying?” asked Darnell.
“That nothing there is private, that everything belongs to the city. Whether it started on Atlantis, or only some time later, I can’t really say; but at some point they came to believe that their survival depended on the complete dedication of everyone to the common good and that the best, and perhaps the only, way to achieve this was to make it impossible for anyone to withhold anything of his own from the city. That meant an absolute communism, not just of property, but of women. Everything belonged to everyone; nothing belonged to anyon
e. The family did not exist, because if it did there would be a conflict of loyalties, a tendency to favor your own over what belonged to someone else. Parents could not know their children; children could not know their parents. Children were all raised together, brothers and sisters, whoever their biological parents might actually have been. And then, when they reached the age when they could have children of their own, they were allowed to co-mingle, but never to make the choice themselves about whom to have intercourse with, and never to have the same partner twice.”
“What you’re describing sounds like indiscriminate promiscuity, random sexuality, no different than the copulation of beasts in the field,” said Darnell, furrowing his brow in disapproval.
“I can assure you that it is anything but that. These things take place only at set times and places, once a month during the full moon; and far from a random choice, the pairings are determined by a mathematical formula that is said to reflect the ordered movement of the heavens. One of the elders in charge of procreation, tried to explain it to me, but it was far beyond my capacity to understand. There is a whole ceremony, a set of rituals that take place, burnt offerings asking that each of these one-time unions be blessed with a healthy child. They have one god whose face is the sun, a god that presides over a world that has always been and will always be. There is no belief in an act of creation. Their religion is completely different than the revealed religions of the last few thousand years.”
Darnell had barely heard. He was thinking about what Holden had said just moments earlier.
“If no one knows his parents, if all the children are raised together, if they all consider one another brothers and sisters – then incest, as we know it, is impossible!”
“To the contrary, Mr. Darnell, it would seem to be inevitable.”
“Yes, but in the end it comes down to the same thing. No one can really know whether someone he calls sister had the same mother or father; he can’t know – Adam can’t have known – whether the girl he sleeps with is really his sister or not. But if they weren’t in trouble because they had relations with each other, why were they sent into exile, why were they being punished?”
“This isn’t easy to understand without first understanding how ingenious the lawgiver must have been, the one who established the arrangements of pure communism under which these people live. He knew it was the only way to prevent the divisions, the partial interests, that destroy a city from within; but he also seems to have known that it wouldn’t work, that the communism of women, or for that matter – because it was just the other side of the same coin – the communism of men, presupposed a kind of equality that could not exist. Women, whatever their other merits, are not all equal as the object of men’s desire, for the simple reason that some women are more beautiful than others. That was the crime of Alethia, and Adam’s crime as well: they were drawn to each other in a way that made them not want to be with anyone else. They were obsessed with this need they had to be together, separate and apart. They had to be driven out, sent into exile, so their example, their flaunting of the law, could not harm others.
“That was the provision that had been made by which to deal with the exceptional ones, the ones like Adam with the most erotic natures; the ones who, because of their remarkable intelligence, would never be content with living life in the average, a part of the herd; the ones who would always question the way things were and, by that questioning, come to understand the reason, the necessity, for the very rules they had once broken. Adam was sent into exile precisely because he had the kind of nature needed to become one of the island’s leaders. Exile is a testing ground to see whether he will become the greatest friend of the city or its enemy, a man who will learn to subjugate his own desires for the common good of all, willing to sacrifice everything for the city, or someone the slave of his own emotions who could never be trusted with power. That is what he’s doing here, though he doesn’t know it – being tested, to find out what he’s made of; that, and to see how much he can learn.”
It seemed to Darnell a peculiarly curious thing to say.
“Being tested? You make it sound like it was all deliberate, that it was their decision – these elders you speak of – to have Adam taken away, brought here, to America, to stand trial for what, as it turns out, weren’t crimes there at all.”
“Not the particular specifics of what happened – how could they have known anything about that? – But the general situation, the possibility that someone would come, and that something would have to be done about it. We’re always being tested, Mr. Darnell; it’s only chance that decides the occasion.”
Darnell had a great many questions still to ask, questions about the island and the rigid customs that contradicted every western notion of the rights of individuals. They talked, the two of them, late into the night, and though they once or twice suggested they might stop for dinner, the conversation always proved the greater need.
“How did you finally get off the island, how did you finally leave?” asked Darnell a few minutes after midnight when they had nearly finished. “You said at one point that you thought you would probably be there the rest of your life.”
“After they introduced me into the mysteries, the secret of their worship; after I came to understand their teaching that the world was not created, neither by God nor any process like evolution, but that – as your Aristotle thought he proved – the world is eternal; after I understood that the world is intelligence, the source from which even a god who created things would have to draw the image of what he wanted to do. When I understood all this, they told me I could go. They knew they could trust me to keep secret all that they had taught me.”
“Yes, but how did you get back? There was no one to take you, was there?”
“They took me, two of those men, two just like the ones who had brought me from the village. After twelve thousand years, they know something about sailing vast distances on the sea. They brought me to within a hundred yards of the shore, the same place from which I had first started out, a little more than a year earlier. I stayed at the same dilapidated inn I had stayed before, and the very next day went to same dusty tavern and found Antonio Lopez Rodriguez bragging about another doubtful adventure of his. I bought him a drink, thanked him for doing more for me than he would ever know, and then, as he stared at me with speechless eyes, I walked out of the bar, left South America and in forty years never went back.”
Holderlin was on his feet, mumbling an apology for taking up so much of the lawyer’s time.
“But I thought there were things you might want to know. I hope this proves useful, what I’ve told you, and that it will help you do something for the young man you call Adam.”
He paused. It was obvious that there was something he wanted to ask. Darnell, standing right in front of him, urged him not to hesitate.
“I wonder if it might be possible to have a few words with him. It might do him good to speak to someone in his own language. I still remember enough of it, I think, to carry on a conversation. And it would of course do me good as well, to learn just a little of what might have happened to some of the people there I came to know.”
Darnell said he would arrange it the very next day, here in his office, immediately after the end of that day’s proceedings.
“I’ll want to talk to you again, in any event – to go over the testimony you’re going to give.”
Holderlin seemed almost panic-stricken as he recoiled from the possibility of any public statement.
“There’s nothing I can testify to! It’s been more than forty years! And who would believe it, a story about Atlantis and a lost tribe of survivors? If I told a jury what I’ve told you, they’d laugh me out of court and start proceedings to have me committed to an asylum somewhere. And even if there was a chance someone might believe me, I gave my word, forty years ago, when I was initiated into their mysteries, that I would take their secrets to the grave.”
“But you’ve told me, M
r. Holderlin; so why not tell it in a court of law, under oath, to help the young man whose life you came here to help me save?”
“I told you, Mr. Darnell, because you are old enough and, as it seems to me, wise enough, to understand the harm that would come if this were ever to get out. What chance do you think they would have, these last descendants of a vanished civilization, one that, if you consider carefully what they have done, is so much better than most of what now exists? How long do you think it would be before every half-wit explorer, every would-be adventurer, descended upon the island with their video equipment and their camera crews, and destroyed for the sake of a moment’s celebrity, the oldest thing we have? And if the price of preservation is the life of one of its citizens, isn’t that a choice that properly belongs to them? Isn’t that what it means for Adam to be tested? No, Mr. Darnell, I am not going to testify; I’m never going to say a word after tonight. I know you know I’m right. Tomorrow, when I talk to Adam - ask him what he would like me to do: Use my testimony to help him save his life or say nothing and keep the city’s secret safe?”
Chapter Fourteen
