11
A few geneaological sects maintain that the first inhabitants of the island were exiles who were carried there by the rising river. Tradition speaks of two hundred families confined in a multiracial camp in the slums of Dalkey, north of Dublin, who were rounded up and held in the anarchist neighborhoods and suburban areas of Trieste, Tokyo, Mexico City, Petergrad.
Aboard the Rosevean, a three-mast ship, with a Pohl-A-type propeller, in the north bay, according to Tennyson, they were carried backward in time on the river, by the freezing gusts of the January winds.
The experiment of confining exiles to an island had already been utilized before as a way to confront political rebellions, but it had always been used with isolated individuals, especially to repress leaders. The best-known case is that of Nolan, a militant of a Gaelic-Celtic resistance group who infiltrated the queen’s cabinet and became Möler’s right-hand man in the propaganda planning campaign. He was uncovered because he used meteorological reports to encode messages to the Irish ghettos in Oslo and Copenhagen. History recounts that Nolan was found out by chance, when a scientist from MIT in Boston used a computer to process the messages emitted by the meteorological office in the span of a year, with the intention of studying the infinitesimal weather changes of Eastern Europe. Nolan was exiled. He reached the island after drifting randomly for nearly six days, and then lived completely alone for almost five years, until he committed suicide. His odyssey is one of the greatest legends in the history of the island. Only a stubborn, Irish son-of-a-bitch could have survived that long by himself like a rat in this vastness, singing Three quarks for Muster Mark! against the waves, screaming it out loud, on the beach, always looking in the sand for the footprint of another human being, Old-Man Berenson said. Only a man like Jim could have built a woman to talk to during those endless years of solitude.
The myth says that he built a two-way recorder with the remnants from the shipwreck, and that with this he was able to improvise conversations using Wittgenstein’s linguistic games. His own words were stored by the tapes and reelaborated as responses to specific questions. He programmed it so he could speak to a woman, and he spoke to it in all the languages he knew, and at the end it became possible to believe that the woman had even fallen in love with Nolan. (He, for his part, had loved her from the very first day, because he thought that she was the wife of his friend Italo Svevo, the most beautiful madonna of Trieste, with that gorgeous red hair that reminded you of all the rivers of the world.)
After being on the island for three years, the conversations began to repeat cyclically, and Nolan became bored. The recorder started mixing up the words (“Heremon, nolens, nolens, brood our pensies, brume in brume,” it would say, for example), and Nolan would ask “What? What did you say?” It was around that time that he began calling her Anna Livia Plurabelle. At the end of the sixth year of exile, Nolan lost all hope of being rescued. He could no longer sleep properly, and he began having hallucinations, and dreaming that he was awake all night long, listening to the sweet, wireless whispers of Anna Livia’s voice.
He had a cat, but when the cat went up the hillside one afternoon and did not return, Nolan wrote a farewell letter, set his right elbow down on the table so his hand would not shake, and shot himself in the head. The first people from the Rosevean who went onshore found the voice of the woman still talking from the bifocal recorder. She barely mixed the languages, according to Boas, and it was possible to understand perfectly the desperation that Nolan’s suicide had produced in her. She was on a rock, facing the bay, made out of wires and red tapes, lamenting Nolan’s death in a soft metallic murmur.
I have woven and unwoven the plotlines of time, she said, but he has left and will not be back. A body is a body, but only voices are capable of love. I have been here alone for years, on the banks of every river, waiting for night to arrive. It is always daytime, at this latitude everything is so slow, night never arrives, it is always daytime, the sun goes down so slowly, I am blind, out in the sun, I want to tear off “the iron blindfold” from my head, I want to bring “the concentrated darkness of Africa” here. Life is always threatened by hunters (Nolan has said), it is necessary to build meaning instinctively, like the bees their honeycombs. Unable to ponder my own enigma, I conclude that he is not the one narrating, but rather his Muse, his universal song.
12
If the legend is true, the island was a large settlement for exiles during the period of the political repression following the IRA counteroffensive and the fall of the Pulp-KO. But there is no historian who knows the least bit about that past or about the time when Anna Livia was alone on the shore or about the time when the two hundred families arrived. There are no traces left attesting to any of these events. The only written source available on the island is Finnegans Wake, which everyone considers a sacred text, because they can always read it, regardless of the stage of language in which they find themselves.
In fact, the only book that lasts in this language is the Wake, Boas said, because it is written in all languages at once. It reproduces the permutations of language on a microscopic scale. It is like a miniature model of the world. Through the course of time it has been read as a magical text containing the keys to the universe, and also as the history of origin, and the evolution of life on the island.
No one knows who wrote it, nor how it got here. No one remembers if it was written on the island, or if it was brought on shore by the first exiles. Boas saw the copy that is kept in the Museum, in a glass box, suspended in nuclear light. A very old edition printed by Faber & Faber, over three hundred years old, with hand-written notes in the margins, and a calendar with a list of the deaths of an Irish family in the twentieth century. This was the copy used to make all the other copies that circulate on the island.
Many believe that Finnegans Wake is a book of funereal ceremonies and study it as the founding text of the island’s religion. The Wake is read in churches like a Bible, and is used for sermons in every language by Presbyterian ministers and Catholic priests. Genesis tells of a curse from God that led to the Fall and transformed language into the rough landscape it is today. Drunk, Tim Finnegan fell into the basement down a flight of stairs, which immediately went from ladder to latter and latter led to litter and with all the confusion became the letter, the divine message. The letter is found in a pile of trash by a pecking chicken. Signed with a tea stain, the text has been damaged by the long time it has remained in the trash. It has holes and blurred sections and is so difficult to interpret that scholars and priests conjecture in vain about the true meaning of the Word of God. The letter appears to be written in all languages at once and continually changes under the eyes of men. That is the gospel and the garbage dump whence the world comes.