By |Calvino
According to Mr. George H. Darwin, once upon a time the moon used to be very close to the earth. It was the ocean tides that pushed it, little by little, into the distance: the tides caused by the moon on the earth caused the earth to gradually lose its own energy.
"I know," cried old QFWFQ. "None of you can remember it, but I remember it all clearly. The moon was above our heads then, and its size was immense: when we looked at the moon, it was as bright as day, it was a cream-colored light, and the huge moon seemed to overwhelm and crush us. When the moon was new, it rolled through the air, just like a black umbrella held by the wind. The tip of that moth-eyed moon hung so low that it seemed to pierce the reef for the moon to anchor and moor. Back then, nothing was the same as it is now: due to the different distance from the sun, the orbit and the angle of inclination were different from today. With the Earth and the Moon right next to each other, it's not hard to imagine how the two big guys couldn't find a way not to shadow each other, with the result that at any moment there would be a lunar eclipse."
Orbit, you ask? Oval, of course. One moment it's pressing down on our heads, then another moment it's spinning and flying away. And what about the tides, they rise when the moon is low, and no one can stop them. Some full-moon nights, the sky is low, the tide is high, and the moon is a fraction of a degree away from being soaked by the sea, just a few meters at most. Don't we ever think of going to the moon? We can't! All you have to do is row a boat under the moon and put up a wooden ladder to climb up to the moon.
The point where the moon is closest to the earth is Golden Reef Bay. We rowed a sampan, which is a small, round-bodied, flat-bottomed cork boat, to that sea. There were quite a lot of people on board, including me, Captain Vukhod and his wife, my cousin Deaf, and sometimes little Shien Shih, who was about twelve years old. On those nights the sea was exceedingly calm, and glittered like a pool of mercury. Little crabs, cuttlefish, transparent kelp, and small coral that could not withstand the gravitational pull of the moon, leaped out of the sea, and ascended into the air to fall on the moon, and hang on the surface of the moon that was smeared with mortar; and there were other little things suspended in mid-air as a swarm of luminous fluids, which we were continually driving away with a swoop of our plantain leaves.
Our work was carried out in this way: we had a wooden ladder with us in the boat, and one of us held the ladder while the other climbed it, and there was another who rowed the pulley and paddled the boat under the moon, so that the co-operation of several men was required (these were the principal characters). The man who climbs on top of the ladder screams in terror as the boat approaches the moon, "Stop it! Stop it quick! The moon is going to crash through my head!" It's hard to describe the feeling: the behemoth that is the moon, with its surface full of sharp protrusions and deep concave cracks, seems about to crush itself. Now surely it would be different, and then the moon, or rather the belly of the moon, the part nearest to the earth, almost touching at the edges, was covered with a layer of pointed scales. It looked a lot like the belly of a fish, even that flavor was similar. As I recall, if it didn't look like a fish, it was because fish are soft, and the moon was more like smoked salmon.
In fact, standing balanced upright on the highest rung of the crossbar at the top of the ladder, you can just reach the moon by extending your arm. Our original estimate was correct (at the time, we hadn't yet suspected that the moon would drift away from Earth). The only thing that needed attention was how to get up to the moon. I chose a solid piece of scale (all five or six of us in the group had to go up in turn), grasped it first with one hand and then with the other, and immediately felt that the ladder and the ship had fled under my feet and that the movement of the moon had enabled me to escape from the gravitational pull of the earth. Yes, the moon has a force that rips you apart, and you will feel that force as you transition from the earth to the moon. You have to quickly grab the scales and leap like a somersault and land on the moon with both feet. From Earth, you are hanging upside down, head first, but you yourself are standing normally as usual, the only peculiar thing is that you see before you a sea of water glittering, and your companions in the boat are upside down on their hands and feet, like bunches of grapes hanging upside down.
The one who excelled most in this jump to the moon was my deaf cousin. As soon as his rough hands touched the moon (he was always the first to climb the ladder), they immediately became very soft and exceptionally accurate. He always found the perfect spot to land on the moon at once, and even attached himself to the earth's satellite with a single press of his hands. At one point, I even felt that when he stretched out his hands, the moon looked like he was coming to meet it.
When he returned to Earth from the Moon, he was also very dexterous and agile, and for us it was a kind of high jump: stretching out his arms and jumping as high as he could (this is from the Moon, but if you look at it from the Earth, it looks more like diving, with his upper arms spread back, and a plunge), and in any case, it was exactly the same as jumping from the Earth, because there was nothing on the Moon to support a ladder. My cousin, on the other hand, didn't take a deep leap with his arms out in front of him, he tucked his head down like he was going to do a somersault and rose up in the air on the rebound of his hands on the surface of the moon. We watched him from the boat as he flipped and jumped in the air, as if he were trying to lift a giant ball of the moon with his hands. As he braced his hands hard against the surface of the moon, the whole moon shook until he landed above us and we were able to grab him by the ankles and pull him back into the boat.
Now, you will ask what exactly we were going to do on the moon, and I will explain it to you. We lost to fetch the milk, using a big spoon and a big wooden bucket. The moon milk is very thick, like a kind of curd. This moon milk is fermented between the scales of those things that are attracted to the moon and fly to it when it skims over the prairies, forests, and swamps of the earth, and its essential constituents are plant juices, tadpoles, asphalt, soldier beans, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon roe, mosses, pollen, gelatinous matter, small worms, resins, peppercorns, mineral salts, fuel, and so on. Just stick a spoon between the scales and you can extend a spoon full of this precious emulsion. Of course, it is not pure and contains quite a bit of sediment. Not everything dissolves during the fermentation process, and some things are still mixed straight up in the emulsion: nails, tacks, seahorses, hazelnuts, flower stalks, ceramic fragments, fishhooks, and occasionally combs. This milky pulp has to be skimmed off and passed through a straining spoon again after it is served. None of this is difficult; the hard part is getting it back to Earth. Here's how we do it: for each spoonful, we hold the handle in both hands and fling it down to earth with all our might, like a catapult. If the force of the throw is strong enough, the spoonful of milky slurry will be thrown to the surface of the sea. Once at the surface, it would float to the surface and it would be easy to fish it out to the boat. In this throwing sport, again, my deaf cousin came into his own. He had a very strong arm, and was so good at aiming that he could fling the milk-pulp at once into the wooden basin held by the men in the boat. I, on the other hand, failed repeatedly, often throwing spoonfuls of milky milk back onto my head because I couldn't overcome the moon's gravitational pull.
My deaf cousin's overachievement went far beyond that. For him, pulling out the moon's milk between the scales is a kind of game: he sometimes doesn't use a spoon at all, just a hand, or even a single fingertip, to reach into the cracks of the scales. He has no certain course of motion, but simply jumps from one point to another, as if he were trying to play a joke on the moon, to take it by surprise, or even to tickle it. Strange to say, wherever his hand went, milky pulp actually shot outward as if from the teats of a swollen ewe. We had to follow him with spoons to collect the milk he "developed". He traveled east and west, with no clear route, but at random. Some places he went just because he thought they smelled good, such as the soft folds exposed between some scales. Sometimes, Cousin didn't even use his fingers, but went stepping with his calculated and precise leaps, poking the moon's breasts with his big toes (he landed on the moon barefoot). Judging by the shrieks of delight he made and the flurry of jumps that followed, this seemed to be the height of his happy-go-lucky amusement.
The surface of the moon is not uniformly scaly; some areas are smooth, bare, monochromatic clay. To the deaf man, this soft open space gave him visions of somersaulting and soaring almost like a bird, and he wanted to dip his whole body into the moon's milky pulp. In this way he jumped about so much that at a certain point he could no longer be seen. The moon stretches over a vast expanse that we would never have any curiosity or any reason to explore, and there my cousin disappeared. I think that the games of somersaults and the like which he did under our very noses were merely a preparatory activity or an opening prologue, and that he must have gone off to some secret place to do some secret activity.
There was something special about those nights at Gold Reef Cove; rapturous, but with a kind of suspense, as if instead of a brain there were a fish inside the cerebrum, a fish attracted to the moon and floating up. We sang, we shouted, we juggled. The captain's wife played the harp; her arms were extremely long, glistening silver like eels in the evening light, and her armpits were a mysterious dark color like spiny sea urchins. Her harp sounded sweet, but her voice was shrill, to the point of being almost unbearable. I had to let out long cries, not so much to accompany her voice as to protect my auditory organs.
Transparent jellies floated to the surface of the water and shivered, and some left the surface and flew to the uneven moon. Little Sheeny took pleasure in catching the jellies flying through the air, but it wasn't easy. Once she stretched out her arms to try to catch a jellyfish, leaped upward, and floated up herself. Because she was skinny, she was still a few ounces short of overcoming the moon's gravity and being pulled back up again by the earth's gravity. So she flew with the jellies over the surface of the ocean. This really scared her, and she cried and laughed a little, and then simply started grabbing crustaceans and small fish in the air and putting them in her mouth and chewing them up. We were busy chasing after her: the moon began to move away along an oval orbit, trailing behind it a patch of sea creatures that drifted between the sea and the sky like a streaming nebula; there was a long, curved patch of kelp, and the little girl was suspended in the middle of those kelp. Little Sheenbreath had two pigtails, and these, too, fluttered and bucked up toward the moon; and she stomped and kicked, giving the air a certain force, as if to overcome the unseen currents. In her flight she lost her slippers and socks which also dragged from her feet and hung in the air by the gravitational force of the earth, and we stood on the ladder and endeavored to retrieve them.
Grabbing the airborne floating critters and eating them was indeed a good idea, and the more she ate the more weight she gained and the more she plummeted toward the earth, and because she was the largest and heaviest of those floating objects, the mollusks, kelp, and plankton concentrated as if she were, and soon cloaked her in a shell of silica, chitinous shells, tortoiseshells, and even seaweed. She gradually escaped the moon's gravitational pull amidst all this septuagenarian detritus until she dropped to the sea and soaked in the water.
We rowed to the rescue: her body was still quite magnetic, and it took us a great deal of effort to free her from all the detritus that clung to her. The soft coral was entangled in her hair, and with every stroke of the comb we gave her, little fishes and shrimps fell in droves; her eyes were gummed up with shells, and the suction cups of the cap shells sucked up the eyelids; the tentacles of the turtle were wrapped around her from her arms to the nape of her neck; and her dress was almost a fabric of kelp and sponge. We could only remove the largest foreign objects first, and the rest, such as those small shells and fins, were left to her to continue picking clean for the rest of the week. Her skin was covered in little diatoms, and they were never shed, and if you didn't look closely, she always looked like she had a thin layer of dust on her.
That's how the two forces between the Earth and the Moon fight each other, and I say there's even more: objects that fall from the Moon to the Earth retain the Moon's magnetism for a certain period of time, rejecting the attraction of our world. I'm big enough and heavy enough that every time I go up and back down to Earth there's a re-acclimatization process, and my companions have to grab me by both arms and yank hard, and they're on a bumpy boat while I continue to be head down and feet up for quite a while before I make it.
"You hold on, hold on to us hard!" They shouted at me. In the midst of all this grabbing and groping, I sometimes grabbed Mrs. Vugard's breasts. Round and firm breasts that felt good to touch and solid in my heart, her gravitational pull was equal to that of the moon, if not a little greater. In my head-first landing, I was able to wrap my other arm around her waist, making it easier to re-transition into the world and drop to the bottom of the ship in one fell swoop. Captain Vugard had to throw a bucket of water at me in order to wake me up.
And so it was that I began to fall in love with the Captain's wife, which was also something that caused me a great deal of pain. For I soon realized that Mrs. Captain's eyes were always fixed on one person: as soon as my cousin's hand touched the surface of the Earth's satellites with a steady hand, I could see in her gaze feedback on the emotion of mutual trust between the deaf man and the moon; when my cousin disappeared to go off on one of those mysterious lunar expeditions, I saw her jittery as a pin in her seat. For me, it was already all very clear: Mrs. Vouhod was being jealous of the moon, and I was being jealous of my cousin. Mrs. Vougaard had eyes like diamonds, with fire burning in her gaze, and she looked at the moon almost as if she were challenging it, as if she were saying, "You will not possess him!" And I felt completely excluded.
The person who understood the least about all this was the deaf man. When people helped him to land, and, as I have already explained, everyone pulled at his legs, Mrs. Vugard could not help herself at every turn, and the whole being threw herself into it with unstinting devotion of mind and body, stretching out her silver-white arms to meet him. An aching sadness struck me at this (I'd grabbed her when she landed, and her body was submissive, but didn't lunge with the same emotional devotion as it did for my cousin); and he was all over the place, still absorbed in his mesmerization of the moon.
I looked at the captain, and asked myself if he had noticed his wife's demeanor and performance; but nothing showed in his wrinkled, salt-stained, purple-red face. As the deaf man is always the last to leave the moon, his landing meant the sailing of the ship. At that moment, Woogaard made a very friendly gesture, picking up the harp that had been left in the bottom of the boat and handing it to his wife, and I sang along to the melancholy tune, "Every silvery fish swims on the surface of the water, and every blurred fish sinks at the bottom of the sea." Everyone sang in unison.
Every month, as soon as this satellite of the Earth got there, the deaf man went into his isolation, and only woke up when the moon approached. On that occasion, I purposely did not go to the moon landing and was able to stay on board next to the captain's wife. As soon as my cousin got up the ladder, Mrs. Vugard said, "I want to go up there today, too!"
The Captain's wife had never been to the moon before, but Vugard didn't object, and even pushed her up the ladder, shouting, "Go ahead!" So we all moved to help her: I supported her from behind, and I felt her above my arms, round and soft. To hold her up, my palms and face were pressed against her, until, as she rose to the moon, I felt an agony of loss of contact, so much so that, in order to be able to follow, I swooped down and said, "I'll go up a little more, so that I can hold her up a little!"
I was pulled back as if caught in a vice, "You stay here, there's something for you to do here!" Captain Vulgate, not raising his voice, ordered me.
Everyone's intentions had been clear then, and I hadn't understood them, and even now I didn't seem to have everything straightened out. The captain's wife may have been harboring a desire to go to the moon with my cousin*** (or at least to keep him from appearing alone on the moon), and her plan may well have had an even more ambitious goal, even one that was understood by the deaf man and*** plotted together: to hide above the moon together for a month. But perhaps my cousin, being profoundly deaf, did not understand everything she tried to explain, and was not even aware that he was the object of Madame's expectations. And the captain? He expected to get rid of his wife, and we saw that he changed his appearance as soon as she went over the moon, and then I understood why he did not try to keep her at all. However, could he have known from the beginning that the moon's orbit was changing?
None of us ever had a question about it. The deaf man, and perhaps the deaf man alone, knew something in his haze, and foresaw that he was going to bid farewell to the moon that night. For this reason, hid in his secret place and never showed himself again. The captain's wife, on the other hand, followed him all the time: we saw her many times crossing the open spaces between the scales, stopping suddenly and looking at those of us who had remained on board, as if to ask if we had seen the deaf man.
There was certainly something unusual about that night: the sea, instead of being so taut and almost arching toward the sky as it used to be when the moon was full, seemed relaxed and soft, as if the moon's magnetism was no longer in effect. Even the moonlight, unlike at other full moons, seemed to have become thicker in the blackness of the night. The companions above that moon should have realized what was happening as well, and cast alarmed glances at us. Both of us shouted out in unison, "The moon is moving away from the earth!"
Before the shouts had died down, the moon revealed my cousin, running, not looking alarmed or stunned: he held his hands on the moon's floor and flipped over on his heel as he always did, but this time he could only jump into the air and levitate, and like the last time the little Shion-breath paused for a moment between the moon and the earth, he turned his head and with all his strength waved his arms like he was overcoming the current when he was swimming in the direction we were heading at a Swimming with a slowness never seen before.
The other sailors on the moon hastened to imitate him, and no one thought of bringing back to the ship the moon's milk which he had gathered, nor did the captain reprimand either for it. As more time passed, the distance between the two planets was no longer easily traversed, and no matter how much they imitated their cousin or flew or swam, it was just a matter of hand-waving and gesticulating in mid-air. "Catch each other! Idiots! Hold on to each other, you guys!" The captain shouted. At his command, the sailors tried to grab each other, formed a ball, and together they headed for the Earth's gravitational zone: all of a sudden, with a thud, they fell into the sea.
The boat fought to salvage them. "Wait, it's not even close ma'am!" I called out. The captain's wife tried to jump over as well, but she only floated a few meters from the moon, paddling her silver-white arms gently. I climbed up the ladder and tried to reach my harp over for her to grab the opportunity. "You can't get there! You have to go and catch her to get there!" I swung the harp to leap, and the distance from my head to the moon was no longer as close as it had been earlier; the giant disk-like moon appeared smaller, and smaller and smaller, as if our eyes were staring it further and further away. The sky was like a bottomless abyss, with only the stars growing more and more numerous, and the night sky cascaded down an empty river above us, plunging me into a state of overwhelming panic and dizziness.
"I'm scared," I thought, "I'm too scared to jump! I'm a coward!" And at that point I actually jumped. I swam desperately through the air, reaching my harp toward her, and instead of meeting me, she spun herself around, toward my face one moment, my back the next.
"Let's pull together!" I shouted, having almost caught up with her. I grabbed her by the waist, my arms gripping her to the ground. "Let's fall together!" I concentrated so hard on getting closer to her, on experiencing the fullness of what it was like to straddle her, that it took me a little later to realize that while I was pulling her away from the moon, I was causing her to fall back down onto it again. Did I not realize it? Or did I have something in mind from the beginning? I couldn't make heads or tails of my thoughts, but out of my throat came, "I'll stay with you for a month! No, I'll stay by you for a month!" I cried, with an overwhelming impulse, "I'll stay on you for a month!" It was then that we landed on the moon, and I spread my arms, and we fell east and west on the cool scales.
I raised my eyes, thinking that just as I had done on previous moon landings, I would surely see the ocean above my head like a huge, infinite roof. This time, however, though I saw it, it was much higher, and there were coastlines, reefs, and promontories; and as for the boats, they were pitifully small; the faces of my companions could no longer be made out, and their cries were extremely faint. Only one voice came from close by, and that was that of Madame Vougaard. She had found the harp, and was caressing it, and playing like a sob a sad song.
The long month began, the moon slowly revolved around the earth, and on the planet that hung in the air we saw no longer familiar shores, but oceans and seas whose depths were unimaginable, deserts formed by blazing volcanic gravel, glacier-covered lands, forests with occasional flashes of reptiles, steep mountains cut by flying streams of water, towns in the swamps, great graveyards of tuff,... The empire of terra cotta mud ...... distance coats all together with the same hue: from the outside, every image appears strange. Both the swarms of elephants and the swarms of locusts appeared on the plains so equally spread out and so thickly clustered that it was impossible to distinguish between them.
As a rule I should have been very happy: at last, as I had wished, it was only I who was with her, enjoying the intimacy with Madame Vougaard alone, and the moon, which my cousin had envied, had become my exclusive domain; and for the days and nights of the month the moon was unceasingly revealed to us, and the milk of its surface nourished us with its sweet and sour taste. When we lifted up our eyes, the world that had nurtured us at last unfolded its variegated forms before our eyes, as no earthling could have seen them; and we gazed at the stars on the other side of the moon, large and small, like bright fruits ripe on branches bent by the firmament. Yet all was on the brighter side of hope, and for me it was an exile.
I am just missing the Earth, which makes each of us who we are and not someone else; and standing here, far from the Earth, I myself do not seem to be the same person, nor she the same person. I longed to return to the Earth and feared I would lose it. My dream of love was also complete when I soared and swam between the Earth and the Moon, and without the Earth's gravitational pull, my love affair could only be focused on my feelings of longing for all that was y missing, that place, its surroundings, its past and its future.
That's how I feel. What about her? As soon as I asked myself this, I worried and feared. For, if she only thought of the Earth, as I do, it would be a good sign, a sign that we had finally reached mutual understanding; but it could also be a sign that all was for naught, that the only thing on her mind was deafness. However, all was not true. She never lifted her eyes to that earth of ours, but only muttered endlessly, pale-faced, in the wilderness, fiddling with her harp, as if quite in tune with this temporary condition of the moon. Can this be a sign of my triumph over my adversary? No! I had lost, lost so hopelessly. For she understood that my cousin's love lay only in the moon, and all she wanted was to become the moon, to be part of the object he loved.
The moon completed its weekly rotation around the earth, and we were once again back over Golden Reef Bay. It was a horror when I recognized the familiar bay: even the most pessimistic of anticipations had not expected it to become so small as it did as the distance increased. My companions in that bay of water rowed over again, without a ladder, for it was in was of no use; but a piece of long spears protruded from several of the boats, each brandishing one, and each fitted with a toothed fork or a four-clawed hook at the top, perhaps to catch the fresh cheese of the moon for the last time, or to give a little help to us who were here. It soon became quite evident that the poles were not long enough to reach the moon; so they fell in droves, looking so short and dejected, and drifted over the sea; and a few of the boats lost their balance and capsized in the midst of all this confusion. Just then a boat began to stretch out a longer pole. To put it up required a very slow operation, for the bamboo poles were very thin, and the shaking of the operation would break them. This operation requires a lot of strength and skill to keep all the gravity perpendicular and keep the boat from tilting out of balance.
Look! The top of this bamboo pole is really touching the moon! We watched as it probed over, poked at the fish-scaled surface of the moon, and paused for a moment, as if to give the moon a little push that was big enough to move it even farther away from the earth, and then back to its original position, as if it had first completed a bouncy jump, and then rebounded farther away again. I recognized, no, both Mrs. Woogard and I recognized, it was my cousin, it could only be my cousin! It was he who was playing a game with the moon for the last time. He used this carving skill, it was the moon that was balancing on his bamboo pole as if it were leaning on him for support. We find out that he never had any other purpose for this talent, never intended to get any tangible result, or even to push the moon out of the way, so to speak, and send him on a farther orbit. That is, he would not accept the notion of going against the Moon's nature, its itinerary, and its will, and if the Moon was now going to go away from the Earth, it was he who was enjoying that going away as much as he had enjoyed its proximity in the first place.
How should Mrs. Vulgate react in the face of all this? Only this moment revealed that her love for the deaf man was never a capricious act of frivolity, but of righteousness. If her cousin loved the moon, she would rather stay here, above the moon. I am of this opinion because I saw her not take a step toward the bamboo pole, but only raise her harp toward the earth, and pluck the strings. I "saw" her only out of the corner of my eye, because as soon as the bamboo pole touched the moon, I jumped up and seized it, crawling on it like a snake, using the strength of my arms and legs, floating lightly in the thin air, and feeling the control of the forces of nature by a command to return to the earth, and forgetting all about the reason why I had landed on the moon, or perhaps about this motive. reason, and perhaps an unprecedented sobering realization of the unfortunate end of that motive. I climbed up the bamboo pole to a point where I no longer needed to use any energy and was drawn headlong downward by the earth, the pole was broken into a thousand pieces and I fell into the sea.
Returning to the Earth was sweet, returning to the motherland was blissful, but my heart was still pained by the loss of her, and my eyes kept staring at the Moon, looking at her that I could never catch up with. I searched with my eyes and found her. She was still in the same place where I had left her, on a beach above my head, not saying a word. She was a slice of the moon, harp in hand, strumming softly. I could still clearly make out her breasts, her arms, her waist, exactly matching the image I remembered. Now the moon became a flat, round, far-off silver disk, and whenever there was a moon in the sky, my eyes went to it. The bigger the moon became, the more I imagined seeing her, or something of her, in a different perspective. She was the one who made the moon what it was, and made the dogs bark all night long every full moon, and I was among them.