Gringo

XXXI

THE UNMOORED WORLD-MAP

SHE took the small blue and brown globe in her hands — with its islands, its continents leaping from the water like dolphins, and a few wisps of clouds, white like cream cones, for the gentle dolphins. The globe fit quite comfortably in the hollow of her lap.

— Note that there are many small globes like this one, she said to Rani, who was sticking out her tongue — perhaps because of the cones. But we'll try on this one: it's a very pretty globe. If it doesn't work, we'll go and look elsewhere.

Delicately, She took the Greenwich meridian between thumb and forefinger and pulled on it gently: clac! It snapped like a rubber band. All the clocks began to feel dizzy.

— You see — there are many of these. It's quite a tangle. Look how they've laced it all up...

She caught a few parallels of latitude and clac! — the Arctic Circle was blown away. The Bering Sea gave a shudder and the North Pole was no longer quite sure which way was north. Then with one sharp tug, She broke the equator.

— Phew! said Rani, feeling her stomach. It had been tight for a long time.

— You see, said Ma. Now their net is all full of holes.

Gringo was watching all of this with astonishment. Then a booming voice was heard:

— Hey, Marcel — the generator has broken down. It's a terrestrial breakdown.

— Damn! said Marcel.

— Damn! said Gringo.

Then he opened his eyes wide and witnessed the most astonishing spectacle ever given to men to see — as if, in truth, they had waited three billion years to witness it: the protozoa were wriggling in their hole. But it was the whole earth that was wriggling, suddenly seized by a strange sensation.

First, Gringo felt an odd ebullition in his body... countless microscopic currents of air were passing through the whole compact lattice of venules, dendrites, and nucleoli: it was airing out, lightening suddenly, de-coagulating; one had the sudden impression that an enormous, countless tangle was unravelling, cracking everywhere, releasing its minute threads, loosening its knots — and it poured in, from everywhere, a microscopic, countless tide rushing through the whole body like small channels of bubbles and light. One breathed, swelled; the whole body was dilating with a kind of porous joy, as if it had not breathed for millennia and millennia — as if it had never breathed before — and suddenly, oh! a frothy, light, luminous draught of ozone streaming everywhere, sparkling everywhere, spreading everywhere: the body began to flow out of its skin-bag like a multitude of small silver rivers going and going, touching everything, tasting everything, marveling and cascading through meadows of light. And then the eyes became very strange: they were untied too from their two black holes and they scattered, streamed in all directions, lit up in every corner, at the end of each small silver stream, through every pore — a myriad of lightning-eyes touching, sensing, seeing. As if to see were to drink, to flow with it, to beat and flutter in all the flutterings of the world; it was no longer "seeing," it was no longer "outside": it was inside everywhere, like innumerable small silver seagulls plunging into innumerable small pools and tasting all together the great white dazzling of the sea. An immense shattered gaze, simple, immediate, at the heart of everything. An unmoored body, coursed by salt and great wind. An endless, crystalline, almost musical breathing — like a swell mingled with seaweed and sea-spray losing itself in another swell that was lost on blue shores. It was the great breathing of the world, like a breath of joy through the seas and the hills, and in each small murmuring pool like a rustling of scattered stars.

Gringo was blinking as if about to fall overboard and plunge into the world-map for good — with the green dolphins and the whales. Rani was holding firmly to the folds of Ma's dress:

— But just look, Gringo — what's the matter with all of them?