The invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares [41]
What was his purpose? To use this rendezvous with his friends to create a kind of private paradise? Or was there some other reason that I have not yet been able to fathom? And if so it very possibly may not interest me.
Now I believe I can identify the dead crew members of the ship that was sunk by the cruiser Namuia: Morel used his own death and the death of his friends to confirm the rumors about the disease on the island; Morel spread those rumors to protect his machinery, his immortality.
But all this, which I can now view rationally, means that Faustine is dead, that Faustine lives only in this image, for which I do not exist.
Then life is intolerable for me. How can I keep on living in the torment of seeming to be with Faustine when she is really so far away? Where can I find her? Away from this island Faustine is lost with the gestures and the dreams of an alien past.
On one of my first pages I said:
"I have the uncomfortable sensation that this paper is changing into a will. If I must resign myself to that, I shall try to make statements that can be verified so that no one, knowing that I was accused of duplicity, will doubt that I was condemned unjustly. I shall adopt the motto of Leonardo —Ostinato rigore—as my own,[8] and endeavor to live up to it."
Although I am doomed to misery, I shall not forget that motto.
I shall complete my diary by correcting mistakes and by explaining things I did not understand before. That will be my way of bridging the gap between the ideal of accuracy (which guided me from the start) and my original narration.
The tides: I read the little book by Belidor (Bernard Forest
de). It begins with a general description of the tides. I must confess that the tides on this island seem to follow the explanation given in the book, and not mine. Of course, I never studied tides (only in school, where no one studied), and I described them in the initial chapters of this diary, as they were just beginning to have some importance for me. When I lived on the hill they were no threat. Although I found them interesting, I did not have the time to observe them in detail (there were other dangers to claim my attention then).
According to Belidor, there are two spring tides each month, at the time of the full moon and the new moon, and two neap tides during the first and third quarters of the moon.
Sometimes a meteorological tide occurred a week after a spring tide (caused by strong winds and rainstorms): surely that was what made me think, mistakenly, that the tides of greater magnitude occur once a week.
Reason for the irregularity of the daily tides: According to Belidor, the tides rise fifty minutes later each day during the first quarter of the moon, and fifty minutes earlier during the last quarter. But that theory is not completely applicable here: I believe that the rising of the tides must vary from fifteen to twenty minutes each day. Of course, I have no measuring device at my disposal. Perhaps scientists will one day study these tides and make their findings available to the world; then I shall understand them better.
This month there were a number of higher tides; two of them were lunar, and the others, meteorological.
The appearances and disappearances: The machines project the images. The power from the tides causes the machines to operate.
After rather lengthy periods of low tides, there was a series of tides that came up to the mill in the lowlands. The machines began to run, and the eternal record started playing again where it had broken off.
If Morel's speech was on the last night of the week,
the first appearance must have occurred on the night of the third day.
Perhaps the absence of images during the long period before they first appeared was due to the change of the tides with the solar periods.
The two suns and the two moons: Since the week is repeated all through the year, some suns and moons do not coincide (and people complain of the cold when the weather on the island is warm, and swim in fetid