Measuring The World Part 2

Humboldt thought. No, he said, he was sorry. A hill whose height remained unknown was an insult to the intelligence and made him uneasy. Without continually establishing one's own position, how could one move forward? A riddle, no matter how small, could not be left by the side of the road.

From now on they traveled at night so that he could do his measuring undisturbed. The coordinates on their maps needed to be fixed more precisely than had been done to date. These Spanish maps were inaccurate, Humboldt explained. One wanted to know where exactly one's horse was headed.

But we know that, cried Bonpland. This was the main high road and it went to Madrid. Who needed more than that?

It wasn't a question of the high road, Humboldt replied. It was a question of principle.

As they approached the capital the daylight took on a silvery tint. Soon there were almost no more trees. The middle of Spain was no basin, Humboldt explained. Once again the geographers were wrong. It was much more of a high plateau and had once been an island that towered up out of a prehistoric sea.

Obviously, said Bonpland, taking a pull from his flask. An island.

Madrid was run by the minister Mariano de Urquijo. Everyone knew he was sleeping with the queen. The king was powerless, his children despised him, the country thought him a joke. It couldn't be done without Urquijo, for the colonies were closed to foreigners, and there had never been an exception. Humboldt sought out the Prussian, the Belgian, the Dutch, and the French amba.s.sadors. At night he learned Spanish.

Bonpland asked if he ever slept.

Not if he could help it, replied Humboldt.

After a month, he succeeded in being granted an audience with Urquijo in the Aranjuez palace. The minister was plump, nervous, and full of worries. Because of a misunderstanding, and perhaps also because he had once heard mention of Paracelsus, he thought Humboldt was a German doctor and enquired about an aphrodisiac.

Beg pardon?

The minister led him to a dark corner of the stone hall, laid a hand on his shoulder, and lowered his voice. It wasn't about satisfaction. His power over the land rested on his power over the queen. She was no longer a young woman, nor was he a young man now.

Humboldt blinked and looked out of the window. In the white midday glare the park spread out its unreal symmetry. A jet of water rose sluggishly over a Moorish fountain.

There was still much to do, said Urquijo. The Inquisition was still powerful, there was a long way to go before the abolition of slavery. People were plotting in every corner. He didn't know how long he could hold up. Literally. Was he making himself clear?

Slowly, balling his fists, Humboldt walked over to Urquijo's desk, dipped the quill into the ink, and wrote out a prescription. Cinchona bark from the depths of the Amazon, extract of poppies from central Africa, Siberian moss from the high plains, and a flower that had entered legend from Marco Polo's account of his travels. Make a strong decoction of the above, and draw off the third infusion. Drink slowly, once every two days. It would take years to gather all the ingredients. Hesitantly he handed Urquijo the piece of paper.

Never before had foreigners received such doc.u.ments. Baron von Humboldt and his a.s.sistant were to receive every kind of support. They were to be sheltered, handled well, given access to whatever interested them, and could travel in any ship belonging to the crown.

Now, said Humboldt, they just had to break through the English blockade.

Bonpland asked why the doc.u.ments talked about an a.s.sistant.

No idea, said Humboldt absentmindedly Some misunderstanding.

Was there time to correct it?

Humboldt said that was a bad idea. Pa.s.sports like this were a gift from heaven. One didn't question them, one took them and set off.

They took pa.s.sage on the first frigate that was leaving La Coruna for the tropics. The wind was blowing hard from the west and the seas were heavy. Humboldt sat on deck in a folding chair. He felt freer than he had ever been. Luckily, he wrote in his diary, he was never seasick. Then he had to throw up. But this was a question of will! With utmost concentration, interrupting himself only occasionally to hang over the rail, he wrote three sides on how the departure felt, the night falling over the sea, and the lights of the coast dwindling away in the darkness. He stood beside the captain until daybreak, watching him navigate. Then he fetched his own s.e.xtant. Round about noon he began to shake his head. At four in the afternoon he laid his equipment aside and asked the captain why he worked so imprecisely.

He had been doing it for thirty years, said the captain.

With all respect, said Humboldt, that astonished him.

One wasn't doing it for the mathematical exercise, said the captain, one wanted to cross the sea. So one followed the degree of lat.i.tude, more or less, and sooner or later, there one was.

But how could one live with it, said Humboldt, grown fractious because of his struggle with seasickness, when accuracy meant nothing?

Easy said the captain. And besides, this was a free ship. If someone didn't like something, he was welcome to leave.

Shortly before Tenerife, they sighted a sea monster. In the distance, almost transparent against the horizon, the body of a snake rose from the water, coiled itself twice, and stared at them with eyes that showed in the telescope as being made of gemstones. Filaments as thin as beard hair hung down around its jaws. Seconds after it submerged again, everyone thought they must have imagined it. Sea mists, perhaps, said Humboldt, or bad food. He decided not to write anything down.

The ship stayed anch.o.r.ed for two days while they took on fresh supplies. While they were still in harbor, they were surrounded by a group of loose women who reached for them and groped their bodies, laughing. Bonpland wanted to allow himself to be abducted by one of them, but Humboldt called him sharply back to order. One of the women stepped behind him, two naked arms wrapped themselves around his neck, and her hair cascaded over his shoulder. He tried to pull himself loose, but one of her hooped earrings had snagged in one of the clasps of his tailcoat. All the women laughed, and Humboldt didn't know where to put his hands. At last she jumped back, giggling. Bonpland was smiling, too, but when he saw Humboldt's expression, he turned serious again.

There's a volcano over there, said Humboldt, his voice shaking, there's not much time, we can't drag our feet.

They hired two guides and began to climb. Beyond a wood of chestnut trees were ferns, then a sandy plain full of whin and furze. Following Pascal, Humboldt worked out their alt.i.tude by measuring the air pressure. They spent the night in a cave that was still filled with snow.

Stiff with cold, they bedded down in the shelter of its entrance. The moon hung small and frozen in the sky, the occasional bat swooped past, and the shadow of the summit was etched on the cloud cover below them.

All of Tenerife, Humboldt explained to their guides, was a single mountain jutting up out of the sea. Didn't this interest them?

Frankly, said one of them, not that much.

Next morning they established that not even the guides knew where they were going. Humboldt asked if they had never even been up here before.

No, said the other guide. Why would they have?

The summit was encircled by a field of scree that made it almost impa.s.sable; every time they slipped, stones went rattling down into the valley. One of the guides lost his footing and broke the water bottles. Thirsty, with lacerated hands, they reached the summit. The crater of the volcano had been cold for centuries, its floor covered with petrified lava. The view stretched away to La Palma, Gomera, and the mist-shrouded mountains of Lanzarote. While Humboldt examined the peaks with barometer and s.e.xtant, the hostile guides huddled on the ground, and Bonpland, chilled to the bone, stared off into the distance.

In the late afternoon, parched, they reached the gardens of Orotava. Humboldt, stupefied, was face to face with the first plants of the New World. The sight of a hairy spider sunning itself on the trunk of a palm tree filled him with shock and delight. That was when he first noticed the dragon tree.

He turned around, but Bonpland had vanished. The tree was gigantic, and certainly thousands of years old. It had been here before the Spaniards, and before the ancient tribes. It had been here before Christ and Buddha, Plato and Tamburlaine. Humboldt held his watch up to his ear. It carried time within itself as it ticked away, while this tree warded off time: a crag against which its river broke. Humboldt touched the deeply corrugated trunk. High above, the branches opened out, and the twittering of hundreds of birds pierced the air. Tenderly, he stroked the bark. Everything died, every human being, every animal, every moment. Only one thing endured. He laid his cheek against the wood, then drew back and glanced around horrified in case anyone had seen him. He quickly wiped away his tears and went in search of Bonpland.

The Frenchman? An angler down at the harbor pointed toward a wooden hut.

Humboldt opened the door and saw Bonpland's naked back over a naked, brown woman. He slammed the door shut, hurried to the ship, not pausing when he heard Bonpland's running footsteps behind him, nor slowing when Bonpland, his shirt thrown over his shoulder and his trousers over his arm, breathlessly excused himself.

If it ever happened again, said Humboldt, he would consider their collaboration at an end.

Oh come on, Bonpland panted, pulling his shirt on as he ran. Sometimes the feeling just came over a person, was that so hard to understand? Humboldt was a man too.

Humboldt told him to think about his fiancee.

He didn't have a fiancee, said Bonpland, climbing into his trousers. He didn't have anybody!

A man is not a beast, said Humboldt.

Sometimes, said Bonpland.

Humboldt asked if he'd never read Kant.

Frenchmen don't read foreigners.

He didn't want to discuss it, said Humboldt. Any more of it, and they would go their separate ways. Could he accept that?

Good G.o.d, said Bonpland.

Could he accept that?

Bonpland murmured something incomprehensible and b.u.t.toned his trousers.

Some days later, the ship crossed into the tropics. Humboldt laid aside the fish whose air bladder he had just been dissecting in the dimmed light of an oil lamp, and looked up toward the clearly delineated pinpoints of the Southern Cross. The constellations of the new hemisphere, only partially mapped yet. The other half of earth and sky.

Without warning, they entered a swarm of mollusks. The flow of red jellyfish moving against them was so strong that the ship slowly lost headway. Bonpland fished out two of the creatures. He felt strange, he said. He didn't know why, but something here wasn't right.

Next morning there was an outbreak of fever. It stank abominably belowdecks, the sick moaned at night, and even the open air smelled of vomit. The ship's doctor had brought no cinchona bark: too newfangled, bloodletting was tried and true, and much more effective! A young sailor from Barcelona bled to death after the third round. Another was in such a state of delirium that he tried to fly away, flapping his wings several times before he plunged and would have drowned if they hadn't immediately let down a boat and managed to capture him. While Bonpland lay sick in his hammock, drinking boiling hot rum and incapable of doing any work, Humboldt cut up the two mollusks under the microscope, checked the air pressure, the color of the sky, and the temperature every fifteen minutes, dropped a plumb line every half hour, and entered the results in a thick logbook. This in particular, he explained to Bonpland as the breath rattled in his throat, was no time to give in to weakness. Work helped. Numbers banished disorder, even the disorder of fever.

Bonpland asked him if he himself hadn't felt the tiniest hint of seasickness.

He didn't know. He had decided to ignore it, so he didn't notice. Of course he had to vomit from time to time. But he really didn't pay attention any more.

That evening the next corpse was consigned to the water.

This was making him uneasy, Humboldt told the captain. The expedition couldn't be put at risk by a fever. He had decided not to go with them to Veracruz, but to leave the ship in four days' time.

The captain asked if he was a good swimmer.

Not necessary, said Humboldt, at around 6 a.m. in three days they would sight some islands, and a day later they'd reach dry land. He had done the calculations.

The captain asked if there was nothing he could go and carve up.

Wrinkling his brow, Humboldt asked if the captain wanted to make fun of him.

Not at all, but just to remember the gulf between theory and practice. Calculations were splendid in themselves, but this wasn't a school exercise, this was the ocean. No one could predict currents and winds. The first sight of land simply didn't lend itself to such precise timing.

In the early morning of the third day, the outlines of a coast began slowly to appear in the mist.

Trinidad, said Humboldt calmly.

Hardly. The captain pointed to his chart.

That wasn't accurate, said Humboldt. The distance between the old and new continents had obviously been calculated erroneously. No one had yet measured the currents with exact.i.tude. If it was acceptable, he would transfer himself to terra firma early tomorrow morning.

They disembarked at the mouth of a large river. Its flow was so powerful that the sea seemed to be made up of foaming freshwater. While three boats transported the cases of their equipment to land, Humboldt, dressed in immaculate Prussian uniform, saluted the captain and took his leave. He was barely in the boat that was carrying them toward the land that swayed sluggishly up ahead before he began to write to his brother to describe the light air, the warm breeze, the coconut trees, and the flamingos. I don't know when this will arrive, but see to it that you get it into the newspaper. The world needs to learn of me. I doubt very much that I am of no interest to it.

THE TEACHER.

If anyone asked the professor about his early memories, he was told that such things didn't exist. Memories, unlike engravings or letters, were undated. One came upon things in one's memory which one sometimes was able, on reflection, to arrange in the right order.

His memory of the afternoon when he had corrected his father as he counted out his pay felt lifeless and secondhand. Maybe he had heard the story too often; it seemed manipulated and unreal. Every other memory had to do with his mother. He fell, she comforted him; he cried, she wiped the tears away; he couldn't sleep, she sang to him; a neighboring boy tried to beat him up, but she saw, ran after him and managed to catch him, trapped him between her knees and hit him in the face until he had to grope his way home, bloodied and deaf. He loved her beyond words. If anything happened to her, he would die. It was no mere figure of speech. He knew he would never survive it. That was how it had been when he was three years old, and thirty years later it was no different.

His father was a gardener, his hands were almost always dirty, he didn't earn much, and when he spoke, it was either to complain or to give orders. A German, he kept saying as he wearily ate his potato soup in the evening, was someone who never lolled. Once Gauss asked, Was that all? Was that all it took to be a German? His father thought it over for so long that it beggared belief. Then he nodded.

His mother was buxom and melancholic, and aside from cooking, washing, dreaming, and weeping, he never saw her do anything. She could neither read nor write. He had become aware quite early on that she was aging. Her skin loosened, her body became shapeless, her eyes steadily lost their sparkle, and every year there were new wrinkles on her face. He knew this happened to everyone, but in her case it was unbearable. She was wasting away before his eyes, and there was nothing he could do.

Most of his later memories were of slowness. For a long time he had believed that people were acting or following some ritual that always obliged them to pause before they spoke or did something. Sometimes he managed to accommodate himself to them, but then it became unendurable again. Only gradually did he come to understand that they needed these pauses. Why did they think so slowly, so laboriously and hard? As if their thoughts were issuing from some machine that had first to be cranked and then put into gear, instead of being living things that moved of their own accord. He noticed that people got angry when he didn't stop himself. He did his best, but often it didn't work.

He was also troubled by the black marks in books which seemed to say something to most grownups, but not to his mother or him. One Sunday afternoon, what are you standing there like that for, boy he got his father to explain some of it: the thing with the big bar, the thing that stuck out at the bottom, the half circle and the whole circle. Then he stared at the page until the unknown things began to complete themselves of their own accord and suddenly words appeared. He turned the page, this time it went faster, in a few hours he could read and that same evening, the book, which was boring moreover and kept talking about Christ's tears and the repentance of the sinful heart, was finished. He brought it to his mother so that he could explain the marks to her too, but she laughed and shook her head sadly. That was the moment when he grasped that n.o.body wanted to use their minds. People wanted peace. They wanted to eat and sleep and have other people be nice to them. What they didn't want to do was think.

The teacher in school was called b.u.t.tner and liked to beat people. He liked to pretend he was strict and ascetic, and only sometimes did his face betray how much he was enjoying it. His favorite thing was to set them exercises which they had to work at for long periods and still were almost impossible to solve without mistakes, so that at the end there would be an excuse to bring out his stick. It was the poorest area in Brunswick, none of the children here would go on to high school, and no one would ever do anything other than manual labor. He knew that b.u.t.tner couldn't stand him. No matter how silent he stayed, and how much he tried to answer slowly like all the others, he could feel b.u.t.tner's mistrust, and he knew the teacher was only waiting for a reason to beat him a little harder than the rest.

And then he gave him the reason.

b.u.t.tner had told them to add up all the numbers from one to one hundred. It would take hours and was impossible to do, even with the best will in the world, without making a mistake in the addition which would be a cause for punishment. Go, b.u.t.tner called, no lolling around, get going, now! Later Gauss would no longer be able to say whether he had been tired that day or simply thoughtless. Whatever the case, he had not been in control of himself and three minutes later was standing with his slate which had one line written on it, in front of the teacher's desk.

So, said b.u.t.tner, reaching for his stick. His glance fell on the answer, and his hand froze. He asked what that was supposed to be.

Five thousand and fifty.

What?

Gauss lost his voice, he cleared his throat, and sweated. He only wished he was still in his seat counting like the others who were sitting there with their heads down, pretending not to listen. Adding every number from one to a hundred, that was how you did it. A hundred plus one equals a hundred and one. Ninety-nine plus two equals a hundred and one. Always a hundred and one. Ninety-eight plus three equals a hundred and one. You could do that fifty times. So, fifty times a hundred and one.

b.u.t.tner was silent.

Five thousand and fifty Gauss said again, hoping that for once b.u.t.tner would understand. Fifty times a hundred and one equals five thousand and fifty He rubbed his nose. He was close to tears.

G.o.d d.a.m.n me, said b.u.t.tner. Then he said nothing for a long time. The muscles in his face were working; he sucked in his cheeks and stuck out his chin, he rubbed his forehead and tapped his nose. Then he sent Gauss back to his place. He was to sit down, be quiet, and stay behind after school was over.

Gauss drew breath.

One word, said b.u.t.tner, and it'll be the stick.

So after the last lesson Gauss appeared in front of the teacher's desk, his head bowed. b.u.t.tner demanded his word of honor, swear by the all-seeing G.o.d, that he had worked it out by himself. Gauss gave it to him, but when he tried to explain that there was nothing to it, that all you had to do was look at a problem without prejudice or a set way of thinking, and the answer would come of itself, b.u.t.tner interrupted him and handed him a thick book. Higher arithmetic: one of his hobbyhorses. Gauss was to take it home and go through it. Carefully. One creased page, one stain, one finger mark, and he'd get the stick, so help him G.o.d.

Next day he gave the book back.

b.u.t.tner asked what that was supposed to mean. Yes it was difficult, but you didn't give up so quickly!

Gauss shook his head and wanted to explain, but couldn't. His nose was running. He had to sniff.

So what was going on?

He'd finished it, he stuttered. It had been interesting, he wanted to say thank you. He stared at b.u.t.tner, praying this would be enough.

n.o.body was allowed to lie to him, said b.u.t.tner. This was the hardest mathematical textbook in German. n.o.body could study it in a day, and most particularly not an eight-year-old with a running nose.

Gauss didn't know what he was supposed to say.

b.u.t.tner reached uncertainly for the book. He should get ready, because now he was going to ask him questions!

Half an hour later he was staring blank-faced at Gauss. He knew he wasn't a good teacher. He had neither the vocation nor any particular abilities. But this much was clear: if Gauss didn't go on to high school, he, b.u.t.tner, would have lived in vain. He looked at him up and down, eyes swimming, then, presumably to control his emotions, grabbed the stick and Gauss received the last beating of his life.