The invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares [9]
I know very little about motors, but even so I was not long in getting them started. Now when the rain water is all gone I can turn on the pump. It surprises me that the machines are
relatively uncomplicated and in good condition and, especially, that I knew what to do with them. But I was not completely successful and I have come to feel, more and more, that perhaps I may never be. For I have not yet been able to discover the purpose of the green motors, in the same room, or the reason for the mill wheel I saw in the lowlands at the southern tip of the island (it is connected to the basement by an iron pipeline, and if it were not so far from the coast I should imagine it had something to do with the tides,- could it possibly charge the storage batteries of the power plant?). My ineptitude makes me very frugal; I turn on the motors only when it is absolutely necessary to do so.
But once I had every light in the museum burning all night long. That was the second time I made discoveries in the basement.
I was ill. I hoped that I might find a medicine cabinet somewhere in the museum. There was nothing upstairs, so I went down to the basement and—that night I forgot my sickness, I forgot the horrible, nightmarish existence I was leading. I discovered a secret door, a stairway, a second basement. I entered a many-sided room, like those bomb shelters I have seen in movies. The walls were covered with strips of a material that resembled cork, and with slabs of marble, arranged symmetrically. I took a step: through stone arches I saw the same room duplicated eight times in eight directions as if it were reflected in mirrors. Then I heard the sound of many footsteps—they were all around me, upstairs, downstairs, all through the museum. I took another step: the sounds faded away, as if they had been muffled. (It reminded me of the way a snowstorm on the cold highlands of my Venezuela deadens all the noises within earshot.)
I went upstairs, back to the silence, the lonely sound of the sea, the quiet movement of the centipedes. I dreaded an invasion of ghosts or, less likely, an invasion of the police. I stood behind a curtain for hours, perhaps minutes, irked by the hiding place I had chosen (I could be seen from the outside; and if I wanted to escape from someone in the room I would have to open a window). Then, mustering my courage, I searched the house, but I was still uneasy, for there was no mistake about it: I had clearly heard myself surrounded by moving footsteps all through the building, at different levels.
Early the next morning I went down to the basement again. The same footsteps seemed to surround me again, some close, others farther away. But this time I understood them. Annoyed, I continued to explore the second basement, intermittently escorted by the diligent swarm of echoes, many dimensions of the same echo. There are nine identical rooms in the second basement, and five others in a lower basement. They appear to be bomb shelters. Who built this place in 1924 or thereabouts? And why did they abandon it? What sort of bombings were they afraid of? And why should men who could plan such a well-constructed building make a shelter like this, which tries one's mental equilibrium: when I sigh, for example, I can hear the echoes of a sigh, both near and faraway, for two or three minutes afterward. And when there are no echoes, the silence is as horrible as that heavy weight that keeps you from running away in dreams.
From my description the attentive reader can obtain a list of more or less startling objects, situations, facts; the most startling of all, of course, is the sudden arrival of the people who are up on the hill as I write. Are these people connected in some way with the ones who lived here in 1924? Did these visitors build the museum, the chapel, the swimming pool? I find it difficult to believe that one of them ever stopped listening