10.
What fish there are to fish! I’ll list me a list, a fish list. Listen, fish, I call you all. I call you drum and loach, I call you lamprey and smelt, I do not forget pomfret or turbot, halibut, pike, trout. Eel, bass, chub, cod, carp. Mackerel and dory and blowfish and blackfish and whitefish. Bream and brill! Gar and barb and goby. And what, fish, are you made of? Of other things: catfish, dogfish, boarfish, mudfish, ponyfish, swordfish, tigerfish, elephantfish, frogfish, goatfish, trumpetfish, rainbowfish, rockfish, boxfish, hagfish, jawfish, handfish, bonefish, and lungfish.
Sole!
Flounder!
The ill-faced one has been moving my things! Twice he has hidden Tugthus’s log. I have found it at last—and not where I left it.
Next, I fear it shall take the tinderboxes away.
Ill-face is upon me!
Here I am?
Who wrote this? I did not write this.
I did.
Where are you?
Everywhere.
Are you true?
You waste the page! I shall run out of pages. Get off my paper!
Stain! I’ll have no more white.
Help! Who shall help?
Help!
Mama. I look for help to my mama. I have made her, here, in good ship’s biscuit. A hint of blue about her, she looks in pain but very beautiful. Is that how she was? I can’t be sure. She seems to me a little Virgin-like. I have given her hair from some fishing net that came in with the post. I think it quite fetching.
I am so happy to have her here, though her face is slipping. Mother, the blue lady. It is something like love. Better. I am better now.
I have no more ship’s biscuit.
I have opened the final candle crate.
There is no neat plot to a man’s life. There are endless days, which are as like as twins. Mornings and afternoons and nights, one after the other, no true escape but only the calendar to show that the day is gone, and here comes another to take its place. The changes, when they come, are mostly gradual. Weather changes the scenery, yes it does—but not here. Here all is constant. Sometimes, true, there is a sudden movement, a genuine swift progress and then there is violent change, but then the slowness comes back again.
Of late a strange blackness is come upon the Maria, as if she is burnt. I think, surely, this must just be the blackness of the stomach I live in, nothing more. But it seems to me very like a spreading burning, and I have begun to wonder if it is the work of the ill-face. This blackness is not yet in the cabin, so I sit here, where I can ignore it well and think on other things.
When my father died, it was suddenly. His heart was done with him; it was exhausted, the poor old muscle-pump, and refused to go on, like a conductor walking out, and all the instruments quitting in his wake. Such a dear thing, life. Suddenly no movement. What was alive and moving changes its color and loses all assertion; it retreats and becomes mere matter. It grays so quickly, I have seen it. There he was. Father on the floor, then Father no longer, something other instead: a sculpture of Father. But Father himself had left the scene.
“Babbo!” I screamed.
No answer.
“Babbo,” I whispered.
How to get him comfortable afterward? Tidy him up. There now.
Babbo. And so I must go on, fatherless. It has happened before; it was always going to happen. Still, it hurts.
The business, as I’ve said, was in ruins. Great debts, it was discovered, and in the drawers and in the ledgers a broken business was found. Was it my doing that broke all the plates? I was heir to nothing very much, and so there was nothing to keep me from giving in to woodwork. I left Collodi. An itinerant carpenter or else the workhouse. And then, along the way, so carefully did I work upon wood that, in my great urge to become a great someone, I became a father myself. And there again, the pain, the joy.
Give me one minute more with my son, just one minute more, and then I’ll close my eyes and keep them shut. Oh, but he must not come. Shark, have you forgot?
Suddenly it came to me: the answer might be found in the shark’s stomach.
I took a wooden club from the Maria and hastened down onto the sharkfloor. There it was, thrashing in the thin water.
An octopod. Flinger of ink. Writer of darkness.
I killed it.
I slapped it hard against the Maria just to make sure. Even so there was modest movement. But then it stopped.
I said a brief prayer.
Then, looking at what I’d done, I picked up the body and laid it down on the captain’s table. I pulled the head and the tentacles out of the body cavity. The other innards came, too, as if they were curious. In the gutting I found the creature’s ink sac, small and silverish. There are two sacs to every squid: the main one, in the body, and a smaller sac behind the eyes. I held them up before the captain’s ink bottle and cut. The ink slugged out.
Here is ink enough. I’m not done with writing yet. I have ink enough!
And yet, after I slept, I woke and saw it: the ill-face had been here again. There’s black shadow in the room, which I am certain was not here before.
Not just the squid, then. Darkness, down here, from without and within.
He’ll not hurt Tugthus and his card-backed people, I thought. I’ll see to that. What noise he makes, though! How the Maria calls out in her distress.
I do not know very much of Captain Tugthus, but I have some of his small possessions, for now they are mine. One day I should like very much to return them to him, but I do not dwell on that. What I do find myself preoccupied by, now I keep more and more to his rooms, is precisely Harald Tugthus himself, who he was, who he is. This I cannot answer, for he does not stand forward, though I call to him often enough. He left no picture of himself. But I have proof of his exact dimensions in the clothes he has left me. Captain Tugthus still has his trousers here, and his jacket. I have shirts of Tugthus. I know what undergarments touched the limbs and parts of Tugthus. But do I then know the shape of Tugthus?
How the ship calls out; it is never silent now. The snaps, the groans, such arguments amongst the wood. And the blackness—the blackness is spreading sure.
Oh, being more and more inside the captain’s two rooms, I have found a hair of Tugthus! What could be more precious? I squint at it in my brave candlelight and I ask it: Please, please, give me something more! Give me knowledge! What is it I demand? Only this: Tell me, please, the color of Tugthus’s hair. Was he dark or fair, perhaps already graying; had time stamped him? Did he curl up top, I wonder. Were you disorderly, or did you part? You did not crop, and I am so pleased by that, for you are no felon, Harald.
So, with hair held tight between right thumb and forefinger, I approach the flame—not too close, for hair does love the flame and will perish by it in an odorous instant. So then, reveal yourself!
It is red!
Oh, Tugthus, you are a ginger nut!
Somehow I have always known it. For you, you see, are like as a candle to me. I warm myself by your fire. Hearth Harald.
This makes you pale, sir.
Freckled? Perhaps. Or have you, over time, lost those little dots of joy, of youth? Your eyes, then, a bright blue? No, green I should say. I am coming to know you now. I see your hat—it has known the exactitude of your headtop, it has covered up red like a candlesnuffer. Yes, yes, I know you better now.
Where shall I place this sacred line of red? I shall trap it within glass, in a bottle from the medical chest. I tied the hair to a weight and let it drop in there, safe now, perfectly imprisoned. There it is, held beneath a stopper, in my museum.
Exhibit
A hair of a redheaded human (Capt. H. Tugthus)
Here I place a collection of your things—the whole costume, all the outer covers, even without the main creature within. With this red hair, with the small toothmarks around your pen, with the bottle of schnapps you left me half-finished (now fully gone), with the curves of your handwriting—I think that I am ready.
Come, Tugthus! I summon you. Captain Harald, let me know you. I have the hair; I have the clothes; come fill in the great blank, the desired unknown. Here, come here with paint, come here on wood. Don’t be shy, not to me.
I wrenched a panel, a little Maria, from the chart room wall, and made him:
And he is not my only company. I have, too, this woman living here with me.
And I will place her here, in the book, for good keeping.
Of all the possible faces I might not perhaps have chosen this one, but here she is. She is very faded, poor lady. I wonder if she is still living; I do hope so, but there is something about her that says perhaps not. She seems to be fading away, though her presence is keenly felt. She is a strict dame, of that there can be no doubt. And I like her for her strictness, for she says to me, in her peevish glare: Come, sir, do make the most of it, shall you?
This woman, I can see, knows her Bible excellent well. She may not be a deliverer of humor. I suspect she spends her life at scowl, and that the scowl, after long rehearsal, has made a permanent home upon her face. She has also, I do wonder, a certain care for pastry, as she does lean a little toward stoutness. Black is her favorite color, though I cannot tell what she is mourning. She is not my woman, but she is a sensible presence here. I think even the ill-face is a little scared of her.
Her name? Yes! Of course. It is Mrs. Tugthus. How old they were when they met, I do wonder, and when they first loved. When I think of her as the captain’s wife I am filled with a great tenderness toward her. She keeps her house very tidy—physiognomy instructs me in this—and she inspires me to it as well. If she commands a thing, then it must be so.
We do share her a little, Harald and I.
I see her in the streets of Copenhagen; I have never been there myself, but her foreign face brings a little of the city to me, and now I am an international!
Proper lady. Good lady. Your eyes the lightest blue. Strict lady. My lady of the shelf. This faded image was held and regarded many a time by Harald. Her image, on the card, is so weak that I fear it might desert me. Was it the intensity of Harald’s gaze that made her so faint? I should miss her terribly should she fade altogether. In her quiet conviction, she gives me hope. Don’t go, please don’t go.
Dear lady, thank you for your patience and for your sternness, for I do need some shaking up. You give me courage.
Harald’s other photograph, here inserted
You see how Harald looks after me? Here is Harald’s other picture, two of two. Here is a younger lady, not fading like the Mrs T. but clear upon the card. How determined the face, but I have found in study, a little uncertainty in the eyes. Does she lack confidence? I do like her clothes. This young woman is very well cared for. She must be, I think, the daughter. Oh happy Harald, to have such a child in your life. For truth, Miss Tugthus looks to me an excellent daughter, dutiful and fond and good. One who would never run away. And what thorough clothing does she wear, what care in dress. What buttons are these!
I am most privileged to have these two in my life, in the chart room and the cabin, in the belly with me. They give me much strength. Miss Tugthus looks away from me, out to her future, which I hope is full of love. I think it will be, I have every confidence in her future. But it is Mrs. Tugthus who is kinder, to my mind, for she looks straight at me and in her attention there is communication.
It is dialogue, you see, twixt her and me.
A great splot of ink. Where did that come from? It wasn’t here a moment ago. It will not wipe off. I do not love it. How came it here?
