What Lot's Wife Saw Read online

  Book had already used his imagination to excise the annoying visitor and could see the unpainted wall behind him. He would have to get around to whitewashing it soon.

  “Mr Book, I have come to deliver an invitation. You have managed to attract the curiosity of my employers, who pay much better than The Times and demand much less. They kindly request you to follow me to their offices and they offer you this, to prove the utmost seriousness of their proposal.”

  He produced a cheque and laid it on the table, straightening its edges with his fingers. The youth’s employers would never request anything from Book – of this he had no doubt. Book did not touch the cheque, on the watermark of which he could discern the well-known trademark of the Consortium – the clasped hands – and waited to hear a more realistic explanation for this visit. The youth slowly pushed the cheque towards him.

  “My employers would like you to solve a ‘Book-type’ crossword.”

  Book glanced at the enormous billboard of the violet woman over the square, at the eye on the tip of her tongue that stared at him full of surprise, terror and guilty craving. What did Lot’s wife see? Three down?

  Under the advertisement, a group of deranged, ecstatic, red-eyed people sat cross-legged in front of their glass saltshakers and entwined their tongues.

  “I will follow you wherever you want,” Phileas Book said gloomily.

  2

  Letter of Xavier Turia

  Hermenegildo

  (page 4)

  Colonist’s File No.: 00456321

  Place of Birth: Valencia, Spain

  Position: Presiding Judge

  Administrative Level: B1

  Adopted Name: Bernard Bateau

  … The Colony is not visible from the sea. On this everyone agrees, even the most experienced mariners such as Captain Cortez, who has served the Consortium for twenty years and can navigate these violet waters with his eyes closed. Indeed, that is the best way to navigate the approaches, with eyes firmly shut.

  Young Lieutenant Richmond, who was serving under the orders of Cortez, was exhibiting all the symptoms that seamen show on their maiden voyage to the Colony, and did not look at all well on that Thursday. I am struggling to remember his expression, his gaze, the cadence of his voice, so that I can discover a deeper meaning in his intoxicated confession, if indeed there was a deeper meaning in his ranting. Your Excellencies will read this and judge for yourselves. I vow to write in this letter, word for word, all that was disclosed to me, without leaving the slightest bit out or adding a single thing, so help me God.

  As I was saying, after the four of us had safely delivered the Green Box, Richmond and I left the Governor’s Palace – it must have been nine-thirty by then. My daughter had previously delivered Lady Regina’s instructions: “Governor Bera is resting so be off with all four of you.” Bless her, my daughter’s manner is not the most tactful, and since Governor Bera employed her, to my great honour of course, to iron the Lady’s undergarments, she has become impertinent and does not show any respect for her father – my poor child. So we obeyed. I don’t know what the other two did, but Richmond and I left together. We must have been a fine sight – by God! – an old judge and a youthful Lieutenant, I with my gown, he in his uniform, looking for a table and a bottle to see us through the night – well, how else would we pass the time? The Guard had declared a curfew due to the impenetrable fog and so we were forced to seek shelter in a wine cellar in Hesperides, close by the Governor’s Palace, to wait there till dawn. Out in the streets, Captain Drake’s men were prowling about, fully armed, so we didn’t dare stick our noses out. The proprietor had not closed in time so he had been forced to spend the night in the cellar.

  “Do come in,” he said, “here’s your bottle. I will retire behind the bar and please be kind enough to wake me at dawn.”

  We slumped into our chairs and looked out the window at absolutely nothing. When the fog descends on the Colony you can only see your reflection in it.

  The floorboards of the wine cellar were filthy, the place stank of stale alcohol and the proprietor’s snores nauseated us. We were too spent to turn and look at each other. Our backs were aching from the carrying and our middles had come out in a rash from the rope that Cortez had used to tie us for the procession, so that we wouldn’t get separated in the fog and to help us keep in step. At times Cortez overdoes it, as he is an insufferable stickler for the rules. We rubbed our backs, filled our glasses and touched them without proposing toasts just to hear the clinks.

  Soon Richmond, warmed by the alcohol, was overwhelmed by an inner urge to unburden himself to me. No one ever forgets their first trip to the Colony, much less Richmond, whose freshly sewn Consortium insignia on his green uniform had lost none of its shine to the ravages of the salt.

  “Look, Bateau,” Richmond demonstrated, “this was how Cortez stretched his arm over the gunwale and wiggled his fingers so as to test the vapours of the sea. That was how he measured the density of the water and calculated the distance to the shore. His fingertips collected all the information necessary for navigation since he didn’t trust the instruments once he had entered the territorial waters of the Colony.” Richmond used his finger to press on his Adam’s apple to roughen his voice to the gravelly level of Cortez’s.

  “‘The compass goes mad with the magnets of the salt. The log sticks, the plumb line won’t sink, precluding the possibility of getting your bearings. Richmond, you must judge from the weight of the water as it sticks to your fingers, from its colour, its smell and from the morphology of the seafloor. Take note of what the sailor who studies the depths with the lamp tells you and mark the rises and dips of the submarine landscape, the mountains, the valleys, the buildings of sunken cities, on your map. If you are precise in your calculations, in three weeks you will see the Gates on your port side with the joined arms carved in relief on the Gate’s frontispiece. It will leap out at you without warning from the fog, so be prepared. Manoeuvre using the weights and make sure you pass between the great columns dead centre. You will know that you are right in the middle if you lift your head and see that the long stalactite that hangs from the pediment is hanging exactly over your main mast. It isn’t a stalactite, they just extended one elbow of the joined arms to help us sailors. Lock your wheel and steer a straight course. In three hours you can make out the first lights of the Colony.

  “‘Don’t expect anything impressive, like Paris, Vienna or the other ports of the Mediterranean. What you’ll see are small flames that waver like candles. Then you can heave a sigh of relief, thank your lucky stars that the fog didn’t swallow you and just sit back and wait. The towboats will come to you – the boatmen can see you before you can see them because visibility is better when one looks seawards from the Colony. They will come alongside and before you know it they will grapple you and attach the hooks to the rings on your bow. When it is made fast, they notify the supervisor with bugles. He waits in the harbourmaster’s hut and gives orders to the winch men to start hauling. Come out on the bridge to watch the docking, it’s worth it. The winch men sweetly reel in the tethered ship to the berth, like hauling a fish on a line. Meanwhile, the boatmen are constantly escorting you in so they can adjust your course with their poles if you go astray. Don’t worry and don’t hurry to tie up. Since the berths in the port are limited and the channels are narrow to the point of suffocation, wait until they secure you tight, fore and aft, especially a Correspondence Ship like this one here.

  “‘The Governor’s correspondence is the most valuable cargo for the Consortium. Anyone that you suspect of getting too close to the Green Box must be clapped in irons immediately – remember that. As soon as the boatmen unhook the lines from the rings, you know you are secure and you can toss out your hawsers towards the bollards. You must wait, though, for permission from the supervisor before lowering your gangway. The land here belongs to the Seventy-Five and you mustn’t even breathe without permission.’”

  Richmond got up from
his chair, the better to portray Cortez’s shape – as if I didn’t know it. He opened his shoulders wider and pulled on his cheeks to transform himself into the tall, broad, craggy Cortez, the scourge of mere ratings, whose hoarse baritone would cause one to jump, sweating, out of any slumber, months after disembarking.

  Cortez, if that is his real name (and who, apart from Richmond, that naïve young man, goes by their real name when they work for the Consortium?), dragged the Lieutenant by the nape of his neck, like a puppy, all around the deck so that he could keep his eye on him. The fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Visibility was down to half a metre, it was as if the clouds had descended and swallowed the vessel. The sea breeze, caustic like acid, etched one’s face, penetrated one’s clothing and caused one’s whole body to smart continuously. And Richmond, yes Richmond, who had been dreaming of this post for years, to sail to this violet sea and feast his eyes on the Colony, was growing more and more certain that he had committed the gravest mistake of his life and that he was heading straight to Hell – the place we call home.

  As soon as they had passed the Colony’s continental shelf, Cortez had ordered the engines to be shut down and the crew to hoist the sails. The ship became a sailing craft. At the same time he switched off the generator, plunging cabins and decks into darkness. Small fish-oil lamps were lit which stank unbearably. “Consortium Orders,” Cortez explained.

  They only allow fish oil as a source of energy, as it alone can be chemically tolerated by the ultra-sensitive salt. This salt is very idiosyncratic, vulnerable to electricity, to radiation, to the chemicals given off by all fossil fuels. The tiniest traces of all these are a threat to its violet colour, its exotic taste and to its fine aroma. The Colony is akin to a great greenhouse; it operates under controlled environmental conditions so that it may produce, without qualitative deviations, the valuable product which is sold like gold dust, by the ounce, even by the grain, in the cities of civilisation.

  The ship had taken a few hours to power its way across half the Mediterranean and three whole weeks, under sail, for the final few miles, which we now call the Dead Sea. The winds were weak and sickly, the water as solid as steel, the vessel at a virtual standstill. Richmond had felt his pulse drop in tune to the sluggish sea and sank into the hypnotic blindness of the fog, just as someone falls into lethargy. It didn’t matter whether his eyes were open or shut, he’d had to feel his way around to find the cabins, the bridge, the spokes of the ship’s wheel. He’d become indifferent to the time of day, as there was no variation between dawn and dusk. Even peoples’ voices had altered, or at least that was how he’d felt when he had been trying to match the sounds to a hidden face. The only sounds he could reliably recognise were the cough of the Captain, the lame step of the boatswain and the panting of the deckhands as they used scrapers to remove the violet frost from the deck. He wanted to undress so that they could scrape his skin as well, to peel away the violet crust which blocked his pores.

  Poor Richmond, once you are exposed to the violet, you will always carry it with you, even if you use a wire brush on yourself to your dying day.

  The deeper he sank into the fog, the less Richmond trusted his own senses. Nothing seemed normal anymore. The ship, forced up by the all-powerful buoyancy of the salty sea, seemed to be trying to leap out of the surface, and was exposing most of its belly. Cortez had given orders to retract the keel and to deploy the special fins which appeared around the ship’s waterline like the pleats of a skirt. The vessel sailed on, balanced on those petals, not ploughing through the water but dragged over it. It was impossible to tell what course they were on, in which direction they were pointing or how fast they were going – it was a bit like a bar of soap skidding on ice. Only Cortez’s experience had saved them from immobility. He would suddenly shift the ballast weight to extort some movement out of the unwilling conditions, he would trim the sails to perfection to catch the nearly non-existent wind, and miraculously he had somehow kept them moving. It was a sure bet that the Lieutenant would never forget that voyage.

  We must have drunk half the bottle by the time Richmond finally talked about what had been haunting him, about the youth. He leant towards me, his eyes filled with a mixture of inebriation and fear, and he whispered that he had seen him. He had definitely seen him. Cortez hadn’t believed him and had told him that he had been dreaming, but Richmond insisted that he had seen him.

  “Bateau,” he said, “I don’t know whether he was an angel or a demon, but he was standing beside me on deck, just before we reached the Gates.”

  Cortez had actually slapped him to knock some sense into him but Richmond had not been daydreaming. Cortez had bellowed that the Lieutenant had been hallucinating just like most of the seamen who visited those waters for the first time. In fact, the emanations of the violet salt are hallucinogenic and you must always take the pill that the Consortium prescribes to keep your mind anchored. Perhaps Richmond had forgotten to take his? “No, Bateau, I saw him and I can describe him.”

  Richmond rose from his seat again to describe the youth he had seen appear in the violet cloud, on the borders between illusion and reality, just before they reached the Gates. He placed the palm of his hand perpendicularly to his head. “He was this tall, twentyish with long, black, very curly hair, tied in a ponytail. He wore a red shirt and high black boots and from his ear a gold pirate’s earring gleamed. He was standing on deck next to me, leaning on the rail like me, as if he were my shadow. I wasn’t afraid of him, Bateau. I was more afraid of doing something awkward myself, believe it or not. Was he one of the crew? Impossible! Bateau, I’d never before laid eyes on that strange boy with the aura of belonging to the past.”

  “What did you do then, Richmond?”

  “For a time, neither of us moved, Bateau, we simply stood side by side, leaning on the rail, invisible in our cloak of fog. It was only the persistent gleam from his hoop that revealed his immobile presence to me.

  “Suddenly the youth murmured, ‘What did Lot’s wife see?’

  “I swear, Bateau, the question arose from somewhere within him and not from his lips. His lips hadn’t moved. You’ve read the Bible, Bateau … Boozy Bateau, how long has it been since you’ve been to church? God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, but to save Lot and his family under the condition that they should leave without turning their heads to see the destruction. Lot’s wife, we are told, curious like all women, couldn’t resist the temptation and her gaze wandered back … and God turned her into a pillar of salt. Salt …

  “The youth with the piratical earring licked his lips and tasted the salt that the sea breeze constantly deposited upon us, as if he was sensing the spirit of that woman who had succumbed to her curiosity. Bateau, I swear it, believe me, I tasted it along with him even though I hadn’t parted my lips. It was as if his tongue had somehow entered my mouth and mysteriously delivered the taste to me. I felt the roof of my mouth go numb, my saliva grow bitter, my gums on fire. We are sinning, I thought, but I could not work up the courage to cross myself.

  “The boy had wondered aloud, ‘What could she have seen to merit such punishment?’

  “No one ever found out, isn’t that right, Bateau? The reason why God turned her into salt was so that nobody else could ever find out what had actually happened to Sodom. The youth considered it curious that a God that is always demonstrative when angry, and arranges events so that his acts of retribution are amply witnessed, behaved like that. Why was He so secretive about the destruction of Sodom? Have you ever wondered why He turned her into a pillar of salt, Bateau? Is it that somehow salt is the cost of knowledge?

  “The fog suddenly thinned and for the first time I could see the eyes of the youth, eyes pitch-black like the darkest night. And then, you really won’t believe what happened, Bateau. He gripped the railing with such strength that for a moment I thought he would rip it off. But no, he just levered himself on his hands, drawing his legs upwards until his boots rested on the handrail an
d, balancing with confidence, stood upright, spread his arms wide as if nailed to a cross and launched himself into the violet sea.”

  Richmond had clambered onto the table to demonstrate the youth’s dive. Having risen on his toes and spread his arms wide, he precipitated from his perch with such force that his arms couldn’t prevent his jaw from staining the floorboards with blood. He spat a few teeth out, blinked through watery eyes and whispered, “Bateau, I swear to you, I saw him plunge into those waters a mile out of your port.”

  I asked him if he had reported all this to Captain Cortez and what his response had been. Richmond wiped the blood from his mouth and whimpered that the captain had reprimanded him, accusing him of not taking his pill, which was why he had been conversing with phantoms. He must have been affected by the posters advertising the Colony’s salt that the Seventy-Five had posted in all the cities of the civilised world, the posters of the violet woman who had no face but only a mouth and an eye that stared from the tip of her tongue. The eye that saw, the tongue that tasted the guilt of knowledge, the salt of punishment.

  “A masterful interweaving of symbols, a diabolically cunning advertisement if I were to judge by the sales of the salt,” growled Cortez, and he rapped Richmond’s temples with his knuckles. “The poster is infecting your nightmares.”

  The Lieutenant, however, was sure that there had been a stowaway onboard the ship and that he had been a witness to his suicide. Cortez had derided the suicide’s choice of venue as these waters refuse to drown you, whereas the open Mediterranean, like quicksand, will greedily suck in those wishing to part with life. He had used his finger, leaning over the railing to point out the hull’s bottom, exposed by the water. Here we have thousands of tons of vessel that fail to part these waters, so how could a few tens of kilos of humanity? The Lieutenant’s reported suicide would have bounced off the surface and then floated. But no, Richmond stuck to his story since he had seen the golden earring describe an arc through the air before disappearing into the violet depths.