I raised my eyes as I did every time I touched the Moon’s crust, sure that I would see above me the native sea like an endless ceiling, and I saw it, yes, I saw it this time, too, but much higher, and much more narrow, bound by its borders of coasts and cliffs and promontories, and how small the boats seemed, and how unfamiliar my friends’ faces and how weak their cries! A sound reached me from nearby: Mrs Vhd Vhd had discovered her harp and was caressing it, sketching out a chord as sad as weeping.
A long month began. The Moon turned slowly around the Earth. On the suspended globe we no longer saw our familiar shore, but the passage of oceans as deep as abysses and deserts of glowing lapilli, and continents of ice, and forests writhing with reptiles, and the rocky walls of mountain chains gashed by swift rivers, and swampy cities, and stone graveyards, and empires of clay and mud. The distance spread a uniform colour over everything: the alien perspectives made every image alien; herds of elephants and swarms of locusts ran over the plains, so evenly vast and dense and thickly grown that there was no difference among them.
I should have been happy: as I had dreamed, I was alone with her, that intimacy with the Moon I had so often envied my cousin and with Mrs Vhd Vhd was now my exclusive prerogative, a month of days and lunar nights stretched uninterrupted before us, the crust of the satellite nourished us with its milk, whose tart flavour was familiar to us, we raised our eyes up, up to the world where we had been born, finally traversed in all its various expanse, explored landscapes no Earth-being had ever seen, or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.
I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that She, for me. I was eager to return to the Earth, and I trembled at the fear of having lost it. The fulfilment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and Moon; torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.
This is what I was feeling. But she? As I asked myself, I was torn by my fears. Because if she also thought only of the Earth, this could be a good sign, a sign that she had finally come to understand me, but it could also mean that everything had been useless, that her longings were directed still and only towards my deaf cousin. Instead, she felt nothing. She never raised her eyes to the old planet, she went off, pale, among those wastelands, mumbling dirges and stroking her harp, as if completely identified with her temporary (as I thought) lunar state. Did this mean I had won out over my rival? No; I had lost: a hopeless defeat. Because she had finally realized that my cousin loved only the Moon, and the only thing she wanted now was to become the Moon, to be assimilated into the object of that extrahuman love.
When the Moon had completed its circling of the planet, there we were again over the Zinc Cliffs. I recognized them with dismay: not even in my darkest previsions had I thought the distance would have made them so tiny. In that mud puddle of the sea, my friends had set forth again, without the now useless ladders; but from the boats rose a kind of forest of long poles; everybody was brandishing one, with a harpoon or a grappling hook at the end, perhaps in the hope of scraping off a last bit of Moon-milk or of lending some kind of help to us wretches up there. But it was soon clear that no pole was long enough to reach the Moon; and they dropped back, ridiculously short, humbled, floating on the sea; and in that confusion some of the boats were thrown off balance and overturned. But just then, from another vessel a longer pole, which till then they had dragged along on the water’s surface, began to rise: it must have been made of bamboo, of many, many bamboo poles stuck one into the other, and to raise it they had to go slowly because—thin as it was—if they let it sway too much it might break. Therefore, they had to use it with great strength and skill, so that the wholly vertical weight wouldn’t rock the boat.
Suddenly it was clear that the tip of that pole would touch the Moon, and we saw it graze, then press against the scaly terrain, rest there a moment, give a kind of little push, or rather a strong push that made it bounce off again, then come back and strike that same spot as if on the rebound, then move away once more. And I recognized, we both—the Captain’s wife and I—recognized my cousin: it couldn’t have been anyone else, he was playing his last game with the Moon, one of his tricks, with the Moon on the tip of his pole as if he were juggling with her. And we realized that his virtuosity had no purpose, aimed at no practical result, indeed you would have said he was driving the Moon away, that he was helping her departure, that he wanted to show her to her more distant orbit. And this, too, was just like him: he was unable to conceive desires that went against the Moon’s nature, the Moon’s course and destiny, and if the Moon now tended to go away from him, then he would take delight in this separation just as, till now, he had delighted in the Moon’s nearness.
What could Mrs Vhd Vhd do, in the face of this? It was only at this moment that she proved her passion for the deaf man hadn’t been a frivolous whim but an irrevocable vow. If what my cousin now loved was the distant Moon, then she too would remain distant, on the Moon. I sensed this, seeing that she didn’t take a step towards the bamboo pole, but simply turned her harp towards the Earth, high in the sky, and plucked the strings. I say I saw her, but to tell the truth I only caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, because the minute the pole had touched the lunar crust, I had sprung and grasped it, and now, fast as a snake, I was climbing up the bamboo knots, pushing myself along with jerks of my arms and knees, light in the rarefied space, driven by a natural power that ordered me to return to the Earth, oblivious of the motive that had brought me here, or perhaps more aware of it than ever and of its unfortunate outcome; and already my climb up the swaying pole had reached the point where I no longer had to make any effort but could just allow myself to slide, head first, attracted by the Earth, until in my haste the pole broke into a thousand pieces and I fell into the sea, among the boats.
My return was sweet, my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon, for ever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the colour of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.
At Daybreak
The planets of the solar system, G. P. Kuiper explains, began to solidify in the darkness, through the condensation of a fluid, shapeless nebula. All was cold and dark. Later the Sun began to become more concentrated until it was reduced almost to its present dimensions, and in this process the temperature rose and rose, to thousands of degrees, and the Sun started emitting radiations in space.
Pitch-dark it was—old Qfwfq confirmed—I was only a child, I can barely remember it. We were there, as usual, with Father and Mother, Granny Bb’b, some uncles and aunts who were visiting, Mr Hnw, the one who later became a horse, and us little ones. I think I’ve told you before the way we lived on the nebulae: it was like lying down, we were flat and very still, turning as they turned. Not that we were lying outside, you understand, on the nebula’s surface; no, it was too cold out there. We were underneath, as if we had been tucked in under a layer of fluid, grainy matter. There was no way of telling time; whenever we st
arted counting the nebula’s turns there were disagreements, because we didn’t have any reference points in the darkness, and we ended up arguing. So we preferred to let the centuries flow by as if they were minutes; there was nothing to do but wait, keep covered as best we could, doze, speak out now and then to make sure we were all still there; and, naturally, scratch ourselves; because—they can say what they like—all those particles spinning around had only one effect, a troublesome itching.
What we were waiting for, nobody could have said; to be sure, Granny Bb’b remembered back to the times when matter was uniformly scattered in space, and there was heat and light; even allowing for all the exaggerations there must have been in those old folks’ tales, those times had surely been better in some ways, or at least different; but as far as we were concerned, we just had to get through that enormous night.
My sister G’d(w)n fared the best, thanks to her introverted nature: she was a shy girl and she loved the dark. For herself, G’d(w)n always chose to stay in places that were a bit removed, at the edge of the nebula, and she would contemplate the blackness, and toy with the little grains of dust in tiny cascades, and talk to herself, with faint bursts of laughter that were like tiny cascades of dust, and—waking or sleeping—she abandoned herself to dreams. They weren’t dreams like ours (in the midst of the darkness, we dreamed of more darkness, because nothing else came into our minds); no, she dreamed—from what we could understand of her ravings—of a darkness a hundred times deeper and more various and velvety.
My father was the first to notice something was changing. I had dozed off, when his shout wakened me: ‘Watch out! We’re hitting something!’
Beneath us, the nebula’s matter, instead of fluid as it had always been, was beginning to condense.
To tell the truth, my mother had been tossing and turning for several hours, saying: ‘Uff, I just can’t seem to make myself comfortable here!’ In other words, according to her, she had become aware of a change in the place where she was lying: the dust wasn’t the same as it had been before, soft, elastic, uniform, so you could wallow in it as much as you liked without leaving any print; instead, a kind of rut or furrow was being formed, especially where she was accustomed to resting all her weight. And she thought she could feel underneath her something like granules or blobs or bumps; which perhaps, after all, were buried hundreds of miles further down and were pressing through all those layers of soft dust. Not that we generally paid much attention to these premonitions of my mother’s: poor thing, for a hypersensitive creature like herself, and already well along in years, our way of life then was hardly ideal for the nerves.
And then it was my brother Rwzfs, an infant at the time; at a certain point I felt him—who knows?—slamming or digging or writhing in some way, and I asked: ‘What are you doing?’ And he said: ‘I’m playing.’
‘Playing? With what?’
‘With a thing,’ he said.
You understand? It was the first time. There had never been things to play with before. And how could we have played? With that pap of gaseous matter? Some fun: that sort of stuff was all right perhaps for my sister G’d(w)n. If Rwzfs was playing, it meant he had found something new: in fact, afterwards, exaggerating as usual, they said he had found a pebble. It wasn’t a pebble, but it was surely a collection of more solid matter or—let’s say—something less gaseous. He was never very clear on this point; that is, he told stories, as they occurred to him, and when the period came when nickel was formed and nobody talked of anything but nickel, he said: ‘That’s it: it was nickel. I was playing with some nickel!’ So afterwards he was always called ‘Nickel Rwzfs’. (It wasn’t, as some say now, that he had turned into nickel, unable—retarded as he was—to go beyond the mineral phase; it was a different thing altogether, and I only mention this out of love for truth, not because he was my brother: he had always been a bit backward, true enough, but not of the metallic type, if anything a bit colloidal; in fact, when he was still very young, he married an alga, one of the first, and we never heard from him again.)
In short, it seemed everyone had felt something: except me. Maybe it’s because I’m absent-minded. I heard—I don’t know whether awake or asleep—our father’s cry: ‘We’re hitting something!’, a meaningless expression (since before then nothing had ever hit anything, you can be sure), but one that took on meaning at the very moment it was uttered, that is, it meant the sensation we were beginning to experience, slightly nauseating, like a slab of mud passing under us, something flat, on which we felt we were bouncing. And I said, in a reproachful tone: ‘Oh, Granny!’
Afterwards I often asked myself why my first reaction was to become angry with our grandmother. Granny Bb’b, who clung to her habits of the old days, often did embarrassing things: she continued to believe that matter was in uniform expansion and, for example, that it was enough to throw refuse anywhere and it would rarefy and disappear into the distance. The fact that the process of condensation had begun some while ago, that is, that dirt thickened on particles so we weren’t able to get rid of it—she couldn’t get this into her head. So in some obscure way I connected this new fact of ‘hitting’ with some mistake my grandmother might have made and I let out that cry.
Then Granny Bb’b answered: ‘What is it? Have you found my cushion?’
This cushion was a little ellipsoid of galactic matter Granny had found somewhere or other during the first cataclysms of the universe; and she always carried it around with her, to sit on. At a certain point, during the great night, it had been lost, and she accused me of having hidden it from her. Now, it was true I had always hated that cushion, it seemed so vulgar and out of place on our nebula, but the most Granny could blame me for was not having guarded it always as she had wanted me to.
Even my father, who was always very respectful towards her, couldn’t help remarking: ‘Oh, see here, Mamma, something is happening—we don’t know what—and you go on about that cushion!’
‘Ah, I told you I couldn’t get to sleep!’ my mother said: another remark hardly appropriate to the situation.
At that point we heard a great ‘Pwack! Wack! Sgrr!’ and we realized that something must have happened to Mr Hnw: he was hawking and spitting for all he was worth.
‘Mr Hnw! Mr Hnw! Get hold of yourself! Where’s he got to now?’ my father started saying, and in that darkness, still without a ray of light, we managed to grope until we found him and could hoist him on to the surface of the nebula, where he caught his breath again. We laid him out on that external layer which was then taking on a clotted, slippery consistency.
‘Wrrak! This stuff closes on you!’ Mr Hnw tried to say, though he didn’t have a great gift for self-expression. ‘You go down and down, and you swallow! Skrrrack!’ He spat.
There was another novelty: if you weren’t careful, you could now sink on the nebula. My mother, with a mother’s instinct, was the first to realize it. And she cried: ‘Children: are you all there? Where are you?’
The truth was that we were a bit confused, and whereas before, when everything had been lying regularly for centuries, we were always careful not to scatter, now we had forgotten all about it.
‘Keep calm. Nobody must stray,’ my father said.
‘G’d(w)n! Where are you? And the twins? Has anybody seen the twins? Speak up!’
Nobody answered. ‘Oh, my goodness, they’re lost!’ Mother shouted. My little brothers weren’t yet old enough to know how to transmit any message: so they got lost easily and had to be watched over constantly. ‘I’ll go and look for them!’ I said.
‘Good for you, Qfwfq, yes, go!’ Father and Mother said, then, immediately repentant: ‘But if you do go, you’ll be lost, too! No, stay here. Oh, all right, go, but let us know where you are: whistle!’
I began to walk in the darkness, in the marshy condensation of that nebula, emitting a constant whistle. I say ‘walk’; I mean a way of moving over the surface, inconceivable until a few minutes earlier, and it was already an achi
evement to attempt it now, because the matter offered such little resistance that, if you weren’t careful, instead of proceeding on the surface you sank sideways or even vertically and were buried. But in whatever direction I went and at whatever level, the chances of finding the twins remained the same: who could guess where the two of them had got to?
All of a sudden I sprawled; as if they had—we would say today—tripped me up. It was the first time I had fallen, I didn’t know what ‘to fall’ was, but we were still on the softness and I didn’t hurt myself. ‘Don’t trample here,’ a voice said, ‘I don’t want you to, Qfwfq.’ It was the voice of my sister G’d(w)n.
‘Why? What’s there?’
‘I made some things with things . . .’ she said. It took me a while to realize, groping, that my sister, messing about with that sort of mud, had built up a little hill, all full of pinnacles, spires and battlements.
‘What have you done there?’
G’d(w)n never gave you a straight answer. ‘An outside with an inside in it.’
I continued my walk, falling every now and then. I also stumbled over the inevitable Mr Hnw, who was stuck in the condensing matter again, head first. ‘Come, Mr Hnw. Mr Hnw! Can’t you possibly stay erect?’ and I had to help him pull himself out once more, this time pushing him from below, because I was also completely immersed.
Mr Hnw, coughing and puffing and sneezing (it had never been so icy cold before), popped up on the surface at the very spot where Granny Bb’b was sitting. Granny flew into the air, immediately overcome with emotion: ‘My grandchildren! My grandchildren are back!’