ONE MORNING, WHILE airborne, you lost your way, as people do in life, without ever being quite aware that they are lost but drifting bit by bit into a zone where their bearings are gone; first the countryside was not what you expected, then the river which ought to have come into view did not, and finally the heat haze which hung over the Po valley crystallised into a more unyielding, impenetrable opaqueness. Any minute now I’ll be out of this, you thought, and the minute passed, then another, one by one the windows of the plane turned frosty white and you came to realize that there was no way out of that hot, daytime mist. It is not the case that people lose their way on the instant, the process will be underway over time, you had, in reality, already got lost earlier, at the last checkpoint, when you called Air Traffic Control confirming your position as the spot where you ought to have been as per flight plan; pure nominalism, the victory of the plan over reality, since you were nowhere near there. At that point, you made a descent to a lower altitude, following closely a railway track, but when the line came to a halt in a little village, you were reduced to flying low over the village station in an effort to make out its name, but the name, glimpsed as you flashed by at speed, was of no great help; wherever you were, you were lost and climbing once more into the haze, you lost your bearings more comprehensively until you found yourself where you are now, which is to say, you have no idea where. The last sure position was Abeam Boa, a nautical point on the map a dozen or so miles to the east of Bologna, on the longitude of various tiny huddles of houses – Budrio, Medicina or San Lazzaro di Savena, who could say?– the one indistinguishable from the other; the village name not being written on the house roofs; no one ever heeded Rodchenko when he proposed that the roof become a heaven-facing façade which would offer aviators something more than the monotony of rows of tiles. This occurred in the Thirties, but the roof-façade never caught on after that, roofs have remained uniform, as uniform as the villages which do not carry names on their roofs, and as a result you were lost, and lied about your fix to Air Traffic Control.
Fear is composed of liquids in the act of drying up, you stared at the altimeter, you grabbed at the map, searching wildly for those dark-coloured areas in shades ranging from warm yellow to dark brown, where the mountain peaks are clustered; if you were off course to the northeast, Monte Venda should be there, if to the north, the Lessini mountains and the Pre-Alps should make an appearance, but you would hardly have time to see a cliff face emerge from the whiteness in front of the windscreen. It was the first time you had got lost in a plane and, not having yet acquired expertise in instrument flight, you celebrated the event with a phrase produced spontaneously by the mind, the phrase ran, “I do not want to die,” a phrase which came so naturally that of its own accord your voice spoke it aloud, as though it were the voice of another person reproaching you for exposing him to such a situation. In order to cheat death I must climb, you immediately thought, it is senseless to plough blindly forward. And climb I do, in spirals around the vertical axis of my present position; if I manage to hold perfectly the centre of the rotation, if I do not waver on the first or second loop, I am safe. You read on the map the heights of the most likely peaks, adding another thousand feet for safety, and started to climb towards the five thousand mark. In the opaque darkness of the sky, in the infinity of space, slowly drifting upwards in fibrous mist, you closed yourself inside the safety cylinder of your circling flight. All around, everything prickled with invisible menace, with each circle you reduced the radius to reduce the threat, or that was your hope, but each circle was never-ending. Fog is infertile cloud, so Aristotle held, place no trust in that all-permeating, all-enveloping substance, water of that sort is only humidity, not impregnating rain which sows life in the fields and swells the course of the rivers. Fog is a backdrop, fog lurks; on fields, in the space between earth and sky, fog is sterile, the trusty crony of crime. Unconscious crimes, indifferent to the fog, but crimes nonetheless.
Such were the thoughts in your mind as you kept an eye on the instruments, variometer five-hundred-feet climb-rating, sixty knots for the steep ascent, turn-and-slip indicator with ball centred and needle tilted for two-minute turn. And yet, when you are not flying, you are fond of fog, when a fog descends on the city, you respond first to its scents and changing noise patterns, you feel yourself irresistibly drawn by the night and the mists, like a dog called to heel by its master’s whistle. That apart, what did you know about fog, pilot? – that it is born of a coincidence, a coincidence of dew temperature and air temperature, temperatures which you studiously avoided asking the meteorological office to check before take-off. You could, of course, do so now, you could ask Air Traffic Control Board if they had any information on the mist, on how widespread it was, on what height it reached, but then you would have to clarify other matters with the Board, so you put it off. Board: philosophically, a concept not amenable to definition, but merely to clarification; Board, one and indivisible but distinct from all others; Board, intelligible and loveable in and of itself alone. Even the Air Traffic Control Board could be understood in these terms; in the last analysis it is the disembodied voice grasped in the mist, the unseen voice speaking from earth, the reversal of the higher and lower orders, with us poor mortals wandering lost in the skies and the Immortal at peace on Earth, a pursuing eye in the dark inside the luminous dial of the radar tracers. Eye for eye, Board for Board, there is nothing to be seen here, you caught yourself muttering nervously to yourself; the mind was protecting itself from terror by generating a brand of nonsense which resembled the “white vision,” that gentle flooding of light which those who pass through death but make their return claim to have witnessed at the last moments, the ultimate analgesic with which the mind gives you its final embrace even as it extinguishes itself and prepares to depart.
Outside the windows, the fog seemed to come to life in thick, darting, smoky forms; it took you some time to realize that these were not crags, trees or bodies looming out of the darkness, about to collide with you, but swirls and empty volumes of the humid mass; you leaned over towards the instrument panel, you looked upwards in the futile hope that the light of the sun might dilute that glutinous brightness, but instead, as you climbed, the opaqueness, growing ever darker, turned a gloomier grey. The pitching and rolling of the plane increased, there were sudden updrafts and downdrafts and a yawing from side to side, swinging the aircraft around without allowing it to bank, sending it into a flat roll around an imaginary vertical pivot bored through from the top, as though it were a fish on a skewer. You rammed down your foot the moment you heard the propeller roaring as it bit into the air at a different tempo, you rammed down your foot to regain balance. Had you any idea where you were? Clear of the fog, certainly, but not in the open sky; you had gone directly from fog to cloud without as much as glimpsing a patch of blue, and there you were in the heart of a cloud, a cumulus to judge by the turbulence shaking the plane and by the dark surroundings, as livid grey as a bruise. And just how much did you know then about a cumulonimbus, pilot?– that it held everything inside it, strong rising and falling air currents, rain and hail, the prospect of instant ice; that a cloud of this sort is produced when the air freezes to dewpoint, and the idea of dew as a thermic reference point, the idea that dew was related to events of might and menace so much greater than itself, dew which has always been consolation, relief, comfort . . . well, it was not easy to credit. In summer, you had been able to fly round a storm because you had seen it in good time, some miles off you had made out this congested, cylindrical squall stretching from earth to sky, as humid and opaque as a jelly fish, sometimes so precise and fixed in mass that it is possible to circumnavigate it, flank it with one wing, keeping it to the east, since virtually everything in our skies moves from west to east. But this time you had blundered into cloud without knowing where it came from, and not imagining where that sky might end.
The aircraft was buffeted by gusts of wind from below which raised it onto its side only to let it fall with a dull thud against fresh layers of rising air, as though it were dropping into the furrow of a wave so hollow that the sea itself seemed to have run dry. You had instinctively reduced velocity when you felt the plane twist and turn, you had already lost all sense of direction long before, and after all those climbing turns and that turbulence you had less idea of bearing than ever; you could no longer delay making contact with Air Traffic Control. Hand on microphone, gaze fixed on the blackness of the sky, you worked out what to say. In reality, the words had already shaped themselves in your mind into one natural, grand sentence: “Treviso radar, I do not want to die. I repeat, I do not want to die.” Aeronautical jargon, however, leaves no space for wishes, not even for heart-felt wishes, only for positions and directions, although this might well turn out to be an advantage, considering that the terror of being lost in the midst of those clouds was now more or less equal to the fear of having to admit as much to Air Traffic Control. To discover where you are, or to be located again from the ground, all you have to do is own up to your present, miserable condition without wasting a second searching for the aeronautically most accurate, and least humiliating, formula. Call Air Traffic Control, call at once, while you dither, things at this end are getting out of hand, any time now you will fall prey to those illusory sensations which until now you have only read about in the handbooks you flick through last thing at night, before dropping off. You refuse to give in, you simply refuse to face the fact that you are lost, you are still putting the final touches to the words, you fail to notice that the plane is falling on one side, until finally you switch on and declaim in the most impersonal, flat tone you can manage: “Treviso radar, India Echo November is no longer in Victor Mike Charlie. Request a Quebec Delta Mike.”
If your aim was to take cover behind a wall of words, you have carried it off. Treviso radar is the authority you are calling, a military authority as it happens, India Echo November is the abbreviated name of this poor machine lost in the skies, Victor Mike Charlie, VMC, are the initials for Visual Meteorological Conditions, so you are no longer flying in meteorological conditions of visibility. They might believe that you were not to blame for ending up in fog and cloud, that the state of the sky, the cosmos around you, just happened to alter, that visibility was snuffed out, that previously excellent conditions faded as inexplicably and suddenly as lights fail in a house. (Away from flight and the present situation, in the domain of everything else, you would have detested such a use of words as a way of hiding behind “objectivity” and “putting on a brave front”; for years you had heard people speak in this style, using words as though they were precious stones. Through objectivity, that is through omissions, they managed to attribute to things a plausibility they could never possess, making them appear the opposite of what they really are.) The Quebec Delta Mike, QDM, you requested is a dated term of the old Q code, the code used by Faggione and Buscaglia. Nothing in the world is more conservative than aeronautical and maritime jargon, QDM, qudimike, an old term much loved by pilots, a term redolent of home comforts but it is untranslatable because these are not initials but three letters which codify and seal the following, life-saving question: be kind enough to inform me of the direction I must follow if I am to reach my destination, destino in Spanish, the only language in which the geographical goal coincides with the completion of the individual, personal adventure.
“India Echo November. Position?” replied the voice at the other end. Air Traffic Control’s voice was Neapolitan, military and impassive, seemingly emerging from nowhere.
He’s got you there. Now what can you say? Where are you? Once more you attempted to play for time, the aircraft tossed about, the sky grew darker by the minute, the voice repeated with a touch of alarm: “India Echo November. Are you receiving? Over.”
“Affirmative . . . Four fifths . . . India Echo November has left Abeam . . .” This much was true, you had left Abeam Boa, but when, how much time previously, and for where? In addition, you were supposed to declare your new altitude. “Levelled at five thousand.”
“What do you mean at five thousand?” – Neapolitan Air Traffic Control came back immediately, shaken rudely awake. “You’re at five thousand? You should have told us if you were going up to five thousand. It’s your responsibility to inform us of any change of altitude . . . Do you have a transponder?”
“Yes, we have a transponder.” Of course you had the automatic reply mechanism to radar signals, but the royal plural had a merely grotesque, hypocritical and pretentious ring in your present solitude; all those “do you all have?, we have,” were designed to give the impression of a full crew, the co-pilot busying himself with inserting the four-figured code the moment it was transmitted, the engineer keeping his eye on the levels, the navigator in charge of the route, the radio operator overseeing communications with the world at large.
“Squawk ident Six Four Six Seven,” Air Traffic Control insisted.
“Ident Six Four Six Seven.” You insert the four figures into the instrument, you observe the panel light flickering, a sign that the radar equipment is interrogating the metallic mass in the sky perceptible to it alone, but holding you inside it: the transponder replies, and on the ground, in the luminous dial which records the traces, the indeterminate point which corresponded to your plane lights up with the number 6467: no longer indefinite, you are now distinct, individualised, singular and knowable.
‘Sorry about the altitude,” you proceed in the plural, “we’ve left Victor Mike Charlie. We’d be glad of a Quebec Delta Mike for the Chioggia VOR,” indicating that you always think it’s better to climb to a safe height before making radio contact.
“The qudimike’s One Zero Three,” concedes the Neapolitan voice, in a business-like tone.
One hundred and three. You began a one-hundred-and-three-degree turn, heading southeast, a turn in the clouds in the midst of non-stop bumpiness and updrafts, Air Traffic Control could see where you were and where the VOR was, relativity of positions, inevitability of positions, as in the classical conundrum on free will; two people, each unaware of the other, are heading for the same street corner, a third party at a window sees them approach and foresees the collision but can do nothing to prevent it, destiny is foresight minus the power of intervention. At that moment of your life, destiny was a one-hundred-and-three-degree rotation, and on that figure on the face of the gyroscopic compass, pulling out of the turn, you halted, or rather, in the general shambles, attempted to halt, the body of the plane.
It was then, looking at the artificial horizon, that you realized the plane was rolling to one side and had almost overturned. You drummed one finger on the instrument, it must be out of order, you felt the plane to be perfectly horizontal and level after the completion of the turn; you peered through the windscreen for confirmation, but everything outside was grey and opaque, giving no fixed point for checking; turning back to the instrument panel, you became aware that the ascent ratings given by the variometer were extremely high while velocity was falling. You could not make out what was happening to the plane, you still seemed to be maintaining perfectly level flight, but was it possible for the entire instrument panel to have broken down all at once? You wondered if, as you travelled through the clouds, ice had formed on the instruments’ external airducts, but you could not remember the means by which each instrument, once it stops receiving the air it requires, indicates position. A pilot in an emergency situation can only make effective use of five per cent of what he knows, says Bruno, and if he knows very little at the best of times, what will he be like when the odds are against him? That’s why, every night, before going to sleep, you used to read the handbooks leading to further qualifications, and from one of the pages on instrument-flight, flicked through when you were half asleep and the book about to drop from your hand, you managed to regurgitate the notion of illusory sensation. These sensations had to do with the perception of space, they were a function of the fluids in the canals of the auricular labyrinth, whose flow is determined by a movement which causes them to stimulate the cilia in the ear walls and alert us to our own position. So, pilot, you carry flight instruments inside your ears, except that your instruments are a little slower; those dense, bodily fluids move more slowly than does the turning aircraft, the cilia in the labyrinth take note and transmit, all in order but all delayed, and so produce a false present in the mind while the aircraft, and your body, are already living in the future, in a different position. You are not at all straight and level, as you believed, and as a true horizon would confirm to you; sight being pre-eminent, a visible line between heaven and earth would override any other representation of things, and then you would realize, if the clouds were ever again to open, the position you really are in – sitting over to one side inside a plane tilted over on one wing, nose pointing upwards. Be a believer in instruments, Bruno used to say with that ironic imperative he loved to use, if you can’t see out, never raise your eyes from the panel, place your trust in instruments alone, and you indeed began to believe and trust blindly, peering at dial hands and figures, constantly tugging at levers, working at pedals and columns until the control column, after a bout of odd vibrations, all of a sudden went limp and weak in your hands, and you knew exactly what was wrong, oh yes, this time you had no doubts; this was a stall, you were going into stall. I do not want to die, your voice rang out loud and clear, I cannot die here, it would clash with my survivor’s nature, and while you were speaking or thinking or yelling these words, the aircraft plummeted, tumbling over on its side.
It is hard to say how you fell, or which was the right and which the wrong way up, and for that reason, or perhaps on account of hearing the Neapolitan ask on your radio, – “India Echo November, any problems?” – this on seeing you on the radar screen lose a thousand feet in three seconds, whatever the reason, as you fell with no above and no below, your mind filled with images of Cola Fish, the water-child so dedicated to the waters of the sea that his own mother cursed him – “May you turn into a fish” – and from that day he lived as a fish, or as near to being a fish as may be, submerged in the water for hours on end as though in his natural element, with no need to rise to the surface for air. In order to travel, he permitted himself to be swallowed by one of the giant fish with whom he was acquainted, and he journeyed in its belly just as you were journeying towards the abyss in the damp belly of the great cloud; once he had arrived at his destination, he slit open the fish’s stomach with his knife, and emerged into the water to carry out his enquiries as the King’s agent. The King was curious to know about the sea bed and Niccolò, after an investigative sojourn in the deep, returned to report that it consisted of coral gardens scattered with precious stones, and with piles of treasure, weapons, human skeletons and bric-à-brac from shipwrecks randomly dispersed throughout. The King then ordered an investigation into how Sicily was supported in the water, and Cola Fish re-emerged to report that the island rested on three columns, one of which was broken. The final enquiry commissioned by the King concerned Cola Fish himself; how far under water could marine man venture, and to demonstrate the reliability of the experiment, he was to bring back a cannon ball fired from the Messina lighthouse for that very purpose. Cola accepted, he would carry out these orders if the King insisted, but he would never be seen again. The King did insist, Cola plunged into the sea after the cannon ball which sank rapidly in the water, found it in the deepest part of the ocean, picked it up, but when he raised his head to begin his ascent, he saw that the waters above him were firm and unmoving. He realized that the space he had come to was peaceful, silent and waterless. It was impossible to reach the waves again, impossible to swim. Cola ended his life there. That was the tale you had read in Benedetto Croce, filtered through countless variants, from Gualtiero Mapes to the pre-Don Quixote Spanish tradition, from the version collected by Athanasius Kircher for his Mundus Subterraneus to the one versified by Schiller. A man trapped at the bottom of the sea in an air bubble, this had always been the aspect which had made the deepest impression on you, and these were the fancies which flashed through your mind as you tumbled through three thousand feet in a matter of seconds; what exactly was it like to have water above and air beneath, to have everything topsy turvy, upside down, but with one extra, unexpected margin for further survival? So, when the blood rushed back to your brain and you became yourself again, both Croce and the Cunto de li Cunti had made way for one single word, overspeed, the point at which velocity causes structural break-up.
“India Echo November, any problems?” broke in our Neapolitan Hegelian once again, “India Echo November! . .” The most incongruous aspect was that unremarked detail of the underwater air bubble, highlighted in none of the standard versions of the tale; no one had thought it worthwhile to linger over that unprecedented reversal of conditions, scarcely any different from the condition you were in as you rolled around, kicking frantically like a baby in an effort to locate the pedals and interrupt the rotation of the plane, which had now gone into tailspin.
You cut back the engine, letting the plane go into nose-dive, how much more could you lose? – very little according to the altimeter. You pulled at the control column, gently, although your inclination was to grab it hard towards you, you pulled gently so as not to go into irreversible free fall, you prayed that the surfaces would grip the air. To you, everything seemed to be simultaneously accelerating and moving with painful slowness, and when the column reacted to your grip, you responded with incredulity, opening the throttle until the instruments recorded a, still wavering, stability and a near normal speed.
“India Echo November, you’ve gone and changed altitude again. Four hundred now. Any chance of you keeping us informed?” sighed Air Traffic Control over the radio.
“I’m sorry, Treviso. We’ve been through a bad patch of turbulence.”
“Strong turbulence? Right. All OK, yes?”
“Yeah. Stabilised at . . . one thousand. Could we have a fresh qudimike?”
“One two zero,” came the reply. “Climb to three thousand.” After a pause,
“Twenty-six miles from VOR.”
“Copied. India Echo November.”
Sunt etiam fluctus per nubila, as Lucretius had it, there are even waves in the clouds, which is why lightning is extinguished in the skies like red-hot metal dipped in water; you were flying through invisible airwaves and rain-drops which the propeller downdraft crushed, dried instantly and spread out on the windscreen as though they were transparent, fast-flying insects. You regained altitude, flying into a less dense grey, you journeyed on in the opaque body of cloud; the nebulosity, as it increased, reflected flickering anti-collision strobe lights on the wingtips, flashbulbs for souvenir photos of clouds, snapped from their insides, and with you in the thick of it. Although without training in the subject, you managed to get the electronic equipment working, you watched the radio-signals from ground which brought the instruments to life in a flurry of blips and blurs, and the radio-signals from space, digital numbers in a calculator which questioned satellites and supplied answers in terms of compass-degrees. Not that everything made sense to you, but you felt calmer and better protected, by both Air Traffic Control and the Cosmos. The approach in QDM was a repetitive procedure, requiring you to make a radar call every two minutes, and to say “Treviso, India Echo November for a qudimike;” Air Traffic Control replied with three numbers which you immediately put into the gyrocompass, adjusting direction.
Meteorology always appeared to you a science of disappointment, not because the reality failed to match the forecasts, but because its ordered classifications, which seemed a guarantee of something quite precise and measurable, inevitably gave way to a continual, totally elusive flux. Perhaps meteorology was the science of both forecasting and disappointment. In your early days of flying, you kept yourself as far from clouds as a sailor from icebergs, but later, when you understood that they would be part of your landscape as an airman, you made an effort to get to know them, or at least recognise them, but not the way you had done as a boy with minerals and plants, or with declensions, endings and cases, because there was no definite image which corresponded to the definition of a cloud; the aeronautical handbooks were useful but too assertive, Aristotle too much the cosmogonist, and a cloud was never quite what it was supposed to be. The only one who had really understood and accepted this was Luke Howard, the Englishman who gave clouds their names. He was the first to decide they should be named cirrus, cumulus, cirrostratus or cumulonimbus. He alone had understood that a cloud is neither an object nor a state but a constant transition which should be described as such, and for this reason, he entitled his book On the Modifications of Clouds. Goethe dedicated an ode to him.
“Treviso radar. India Echo November looking for a qudimike.”
“India Echo November, your QDM’s one one seven.”
“Copied.”
A new bearing, slightly more northerly. Howard’s terminology in Latin would have read Cirrus: nubes cirrata, tenuissima quae undique crescat, (“parallel, flexuous or diverging fibres, extensible in any or in all directions,” in his own words). In this modification, the clouds seemed to have minimum density, maximum elevation and the greatest variety of extension; they began in the upper skies as the slenderest of threads, drew themselves out, attracted others at each side, produced yet others in a growth pattern which seemed at one moment totally random, but seemed at others to be following a meticulously precise direction, perhaps parading silently before the moon. The modification of the cirri is to all appearances an immobile modification, but it is in fact linked to swirling movements in the atmosphere; in humid conditions, cirrus clouds might well descend from higher altitudes, changing into cirrostrati, nubes extenuatae sub-concavae vel undulatae, (“horizontal or slightly inclined masses, attenuated towards a part or the whole of their circumference”). A fresh modification can be produced by the lowering of the cirri fibres, by their massing together in an unstable complex of mobile shapes, making them more compact at the centre and more fragmented towards the extremities.
“Treviso radar. India Echo November requesting a qudimike.”
“India Echo November, one one zero as requested. Fourteen miles from VOR. Maintain course.”
In the one cloud, cirrostrati could alternate with cirrocumuli, nubeculae densiores subrotundae et quasi in agmine appositae, (“small, well defined roundish masses, in close horizontal arrangement”), a modification produced by one cirrus, or a small group of cirri, breaking up as a consequence of the dispersal of the fibres into several more restricted masses, each well rounded and distinct; the texture of the cirrus as such would no longer be discernible, the change occurring all at once in the inside, or progressively from one extremity to the other; the new modification would produce a beautiful sky, with numerous, different clusters of tiny clouds which would then, in hot weather, evaporate or modify once more into a cirrus or cirrostratus.
“Treviso radar. India Echo November requesting qudimike.”
“India Echo November, one one zero the QDM. On course for Charlie. Report back.”
“Roger.”
Words and clouds, Air Traffic Control’s readings coincided (you noted with surprise) with what, as you struggled to steady the needles and blips of the radio-beacon signals, was coming up on your own instruments, clouds and words, research into clouds had been underway for thousands of years while only recently had it been possible to fly inside clouds, to see them from inside, but the rub is that once inside a thing it can no longer be seen, it has to be imagined from the outside, so, as you passed through the now abated storm at three thousand feet above earth, you caught only muffled lightning flashes, making the clouds seem like the storm’s glowing innards. Had it been a storm at sea, you would have had to endure the howl and roar, but here, in your plane, you were cocooned and cut off from the elements, you were the storm, you were caught in its eye; for you there was no more to it than a series of soundless bumps, sudden drops and automatic adjustments, overridden by the noise of the propeller. You tried to leave the cumuli behind you, nubes cumulata, densa, sursum crescens, (“convex or conical heaps, increasing upwards from a horizontal base”), that is, the clouds appeared to be of denser structure, were formed in the lower atmosphere, were equipped with a nucleus around which the rest consolidated, had an unevenly shaped lower layer and were topped with cones and pinnacled spheres. Before raining, the cumulus swelled up to reveal a surface marked by jagged flakes and bulges; sometimes a cirrostratus would swiftly coil around the upper part, like the brim around the crown of a hat, leaving the pre-existing cumulus distinguishable and intact inside it. This was, however, a mutation of short duration, since the cirrostratus would quickly turn more dense and dispersed, so that while the upper part of the inner cumulus could spread out and flow into it, the base would proceed as before, allowing the convex bulges to move to a new position beneath and beside it. This in its turn permitted the formation of a huge cloud, the cumulo-stratus, nubes densa, basim planam undique supercrescens, vel cuius moles longinqua videtur partim plana partim cumulata, – the type of cloud which you had in all probability blundered into – where the cumulus pierced the interstices of the clouds above, giving the whole, if seen on the horizon, if seen by Howard, the appearance of a snow-covered mountain range, dotted with peaks, darker buttresses, lakes, valleys, rocks and crags; rather than a cloud, a complete synthesis in the sky of the landscape.
“Treviso radar. India Echo November for a qudimike.”
“India Echo November, your QDM’s one zero eight. Drifting slightly to south. Nine miles from VOR.”
Nine miles, that is, at current speed, two and a half minutes; you had further reduced speed, unwittingly, not so much because of the turbulence as because of an illusion that you needed room for manoeuvre, or evasion, in the face of some unexpected obstacle; be sincere, you still don’t trust instruments, and perhaps not the Air Traffic Control people or the satellites either, so you keep to a speed just above the stalling speed you had dropped to earlier on. How odd that around the same time you had twice come across the same images of an aeroplane stalling; the identical photo taken in a wind chamber of a spiral of air whirling on a wing top had appeared both in aeronautical handbooks, where it was depicted as the most appalling of events, the worst that could befall a pilot and thus to be avoided at all costs, and in up-to-date physics textbooks, where it was exalted as a remarkable example of Chaos theory; certainly you were honoured that a stall was considered by contemporary thought as a “critical point phenomenon,” and that in the white vapour indicating the separation of the flowing wisps of cloud and the wing top – a photographic reproduction of the uncontrollability of turbulence – some had seen the ancient consubstantiality, the ancient concurrence of order and disorder, oh yes, there was one part of you which participated enthusiastically in the wonder that a butterfly beating its wings in New York could lead to etc, etc . . . you were a lover of chance and coincidence, but you were the one beating the wings, pilot; order and disorder, separated by no more than quantity, by a curve before which and beyond which lay the realm of the one and of the other, chaos containing order containing chaos, rather like the white, green and yellow curves in your instruments which indicated stalling speeds, the curve of speeds within which your aeroplane was an aeroplane, but under and over which it was so no longer. Your job was to remain lord and master of those tiny confines, assuming that your wish was to get to the VOR, and perhaps even to return home.
“India Echo November, you’re over Charlie. Descend from three thousand to one thousand five hundred. Report when in visual contact with ground or water.”
“Roger.”
In no other place was the spoken word so vital as in the skies, nowhere else was it devoured with such greed. Flight had its own alphabet, a lesser alphabet like Braille or Morse, an alphabet with no ambition to coin words, a simple phonetic alphabet composed neither of symbols translating letters nor of letters making up words, but which used only common words to spell out, beyond all possibility of error, the letters of the everyday alphabet: a lexicon at the service of an alphabet and not vice versa, Bravo for B, Sierra for S, six people’s names, Juliet, Charlie, Mike, Oscar, Romeo and Victor, two dances, the fox-trot and the tango, two nations, Quebec and India, one city, Lima, two ethnic groups, Yankee and Zulu, one hotel, one liqueur, one uniform, one month, November, to represent the rest, one clinical analysis, the x-ray. A spoken alphabet, so ordered to deny anyone the liberty to indicate a letter by a favourite activity of their own, perhaps F for Flamenco rather than Fox-trot, the dance which, together with the Tango, had always been considered the only dance acknowledged by radio operators throughout the world. Although at the beginning this language had seemed to you overblown and extravagant, you had gradually come to appreciate its value; it had to be precise every time, since, uniquely, there would never be a second chance for correcting error or misunderstanding. The most unreal of languages, with the maximum of density in the minimum of words, embodying the maximum of imagination, each word having to designate instantaneously a geography of trajectories, positions, intentions, of starting points and destinations, as now, when Air Traffic Control mentions another flight coming up on your radio beacon, asks if you were listening, if you copied, if you understood. Words with consequences, then, dealing with matters of life and death and requiring a high quotient of intellectual honesty; any attempt at lying would immediately cause Air Traffic Control to abandon the procedural jargon and come out with a direct – “You sure?” Your message had invariably the same structure, who you are, where you are coming from and going to, where you are when speaking, where you will call from next and when; the reply from Air Traffic Control was of the same standard type – I know where you are, I know where you are bound, this is your position and this is the position of other planes, here is what you have to do, here is where I am expecting you to check in next. Sometimes, talking into the radio in flight, the line would go dead, you stopped receiving replies, and there would be no knowing at which end the breakdown had occurred; you then found yourself obliged to issue blind messages, messages launched into the air, the procedure to be followed when, receiving no reply, not hearing a voice, you could not be sure if someone was hearing you and you were not receiving him, or if it was your radio that was no longer transmitting.
“India Echo November? Why have you not commenced descent?”
I’ll tell you why. It’s because to break through clouds or fog from above is always frightening, especially in the early days, so it’s easier to circle over the VOR, maintaining your altitude. You stare at the dots and hands on the instruments as they rotate or disappear, you want to be totally certain, the radio beacon is a platform of cement and aerials at sea level, situated on a strip of coastline, you will make a vertical, circle by circle, descent.
“Treviso radar, India Echo November. We’re circling over Charlie.”
“Go ahead, circle, circle . . .”
And you circled, circled, exiting from the clouds in concentric circles, as you had ascended so you would descend, five hundred feet a minute; clouds in painting had always had the function of linking or separating heaven and earth, a curtain or a lift, it all depended, someone might emerge from the clouds to speak, or someone might ascend from down there. What a problem clouds presented! When the Chinese wanted to paint them, they filled their mouths with white powder and blew on a sky previously sketched in ink on the page, as though the portrait had to be made of the same material as the subject.
“India Echo November, you back in Victor Mike Charlie?”
“India Echo November? Can you see . . .” Air Traffic Control’s voice rang out again.
You had eyes only for the altimeter, five hundred, four hundred, three hundred.
The sea appeared quite suddenly at the end of the last circle, and alongside it the city and your final destination, more glittering and bright than it had ever appeared to you before.