(182) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where one sees, long before, that a gaze, without brow, without name, without master… wanders before daylight fashions it a face.
Absence, far away, leaning over the wake, sometimes conceals within the night two eyes that are about to appear.

Lucian’s Journal

Behind and ahead of me, though I no longer truly knew which was which, so cautiously did I still have to turn to keep from being carried away by my own rotation, the light remained like a beacon that made me turn my head more than it gave me any direction, and the immense liner, listing offshore, intermittently lit the rocks across which I was making my way, so that I no longer quite knew whether that brightness reached me from the place I had just left or whether, reflected by the foam and the water trapped in the hollows, it was now rising from the island itself; the portholes went dark one by one, not in any clear succession that would have allowed me to witness the disappearance of a world, but in patches, by decks, by areas that left isolated lights burning elsewhere, until the vessel resembled less a ship than some distant city whose districts were being swallowed one after another by the night.
As that light diminished, the nearby forms lost their brilliance while acquiring a presence I had not known in them before: dark blocks whose roughness I could feel beneath my bare feet, small pools filled with water in which the movement of the sea still persisted in minute oscillations, rocky outcrops against which the waves shattered with a force that had now become almost intimate to me, since it continued to circulate through my legs; and so I moved forward, arms spread wide, not like someone wishing to embrace a landscape whose access he had just conquered, but like a man who, having at last found ground again, still had to learn to believe in its stillness.
I was no longer looking for the drawings, and perhaps I had precisely to stop looking for them before one of them could appear, for my gaze passed without intention over a fissure, two slanting rocks, a small hollow where water held by the stone still trembled beneath the breath of the wind, then returned to that arrangement before I could say what had called it back; I took a few more steps, turned around, and this time a certainty formed within me without the aid of any reasoning—not yet the certainty that I had found a place I knew, but the stranger certainty that I had already seen this particular relation between the stones, this oblique fracture, this darker mass behind which the whiteness of a wave appeared and disappeared.
Only then did a sheet of paper return to me—or rather, it seemed to place itself between what I was looking at and my memory of it—with a few lines I would probably never before have been able to say mattered to me: a broken line, a shadow, that same little pool whose insignificance in the drawing had until then spared me the trouble of truly seeing it, and which now contained real water in which one of the ship’s last lights was still very faintly reflected.
I had wanted to see, and suddenly it seemed to me that this very desire contained the whole illusion with which I had set out, for I had imagined vision as the final confirmation of a distance: the drawings would be before me, the world as well, and I would pass from one to the other while remaining the one who compares, the one who establishes relations without himself having to be included in the relation; yet the stone had already cut open my palm, the sea still filled my mouth with salt, my knee hurt with every step, and this landscape I had come to examine had begun by stopping the ship, throwing me into the water, depriving me of every support, then returning me foot by foot to a land whose image I recognized only after my body had received its mark.
And so I could no longer know with the same assurance whether I had arrived before the drawings or whether, in a way I would never have accepted a few hours earlier without dismissing it as an excessive metaphor, I had entered into them—not because they had transformed themselves into a world or because the world had mysteriously obeyed their lines, but because the distance that had allowed me to treat them as objects placed before my intelligence had broken down; and what had seemed to me, in Félix’s letter, an almost improper intrusion upon the question of their author was beginning to shift as well, since I was no longer certain that the most urgent question was which hand had drawn these stones when these stones, this sea, this rolling motion still lodged in my legs were, in their own utterly intentionless way, altering the man who claimed to be looking at them.
I understood then, without yet being able to give that understanding a form stable enough to call it thought, that perhaps I had not made the journey in the way I had believed; that between Félix’s sentence, the movement by which I had embarked, Igniatius’s drawings, the sea that had displaced the ship and the Archipelago that had stopped it, there was no such clear succession of causes and consequences as would have allowed me to say: I decided, then I left, then I arrived. Something had passed from one to the other, a question becoming movement, a movement becoming passage, a passage becoming a fall, and that fall itself had brought me to this rock upon which I was now trying to remain standing, so that I no longer quite knew at what point in this long sentence I had begun to be its subject rather than one of its complements.
I took another step and my body leaned while the ground remained still, forcing me to open my arms as I had done on deck and then in the water, and I had the fleeting sensation that this dance had not ended with the shipwreck but had merely changed its ground, that I would now have to learn upon this stone what I had begun to learn among the waves: that a man does not necessarily cease to be carried away the moment he regains his footing, and that perhaps the balance upon which I had relied until then was not the absence of movement but that manner—grown so habitual that it had made itself forgotten—of responding to movements slight enough for me to believe myself motionless; and so I let that final oscillation pass through my legs and torso instead of correcting it at once, and as it slowly subsided within me, I looked again at the fissure, the two stones, the water held between them, without trying, for the first time since my departure, to decide whether what lay before my eyes confirmed or contradicted anything.
For the moment, it was enough simply to be there, still unable to know whether I had found the world of the drawings again or merely lost part of the world with which I had come looking for them, while far away the liner’s last lights faded upon a sea whose great movements continued, perfectly indifferent to my presence, to rise, cross one another, return towards the reefs and withdraw again into the open water, as though the journey to which I had believed I had given an origin in my own decision had, from the beginning, merely been taking place within currents infinitely older than myself.