Measuring the World (8 page)

But he saw Johanna quite often now. It seemed as if she had always been somewhere nearby, only hidden from him by camouflage or lapses in his attention span. She walked ahead of him in the street, and it was as if his wish that she stop was enough to make her slow her step. Or she sat in church three rows behind him looking tired but concentrated as the pastor laid out their future damnation if they failed to make Christ's suffering their own, his cares their cares, his blood their blood; Gauss had long since given up wondering what this was supposed to mean, and was quite aware of how sarcastically she would look at him if he turned around now.

Once they went for a walk outside the town with her silly, perpetually sniggering friend Minna. They talked about new books he didn't know, how often it rained, the future of the Directory in Paris. Johanna often answered him before he'd finished speaking. He thought about seizing her and pulling her down onto the ground, and knew for sure that she could read his thoughts. Did they have to go through all this hypocrisy? Of course it was necessary, and when he accidentally touched her hand, he made a deep bow, as the nobility did, and she made a curtsey. On the way home he wondered if the day would ever come when people could deal with one another without lying. But before he could pursue that thought, he realized that every number could be expressed as the sum of three triangular numbers. Hands shaking, he groped for his pad, but he had left it at home by accident, and had to keep murmuring the formula softly to himself until they reached the next inn, where he tore a slate pencil out of the waiter's hand and scrawled it down on the tablecloth.

After that he never left his rooms. The days turned to evenings, the evenings to nights, which soaked up watery light in the early hours until day began again, all of it apparently as a matter of course. But it wasn't, death could arrive in a flash, he had to hurry. Sometimes Bartels came, bringing food. Sometimes his mother came. She stroked his head, looked at him with eyes swimming with love, and flushed with joy if he kissed her on the cheek. Then Zimmerman appeared, asked if he needed help with his work, saw his look, and went his way, mumbling in embarrassment. Letters from Lichtenberg, Büttner, and the secretary of the duke arrived; he didn't read any of them. Twice he had diarrhea, toothache three times, and one night such violent colic that he thought here it was, God wouldn't permit him to do this, the end was near. Another night, science, his work, his whole life all suddenly seemed strange and superfluous to him because he had no friend and no one apart from his mother to whom he meant anything. But that too passed, like everything else.

And then one rainy day, he was finished. He laid down his pen, blew his nose with extreme precision, and massaged his forehead. Already the memories of the last months, all the struggles, the decisions, the intellectual effort, were a thing of the past. They were the experiences of someone he suddenly no longer was. In front of him was the manuscript that this previous self had left behind, hundreds of tightly written pages. He leafed through it and asked himself how he could have pulled it off. He recalled no inspiration, no flashes of illumination. Just work.

The costs of having it printed meant he had to borrow from Bartels, who was almost penniless himself. Then there were problems when he insisted on reproofing the typeset pages personally; the idiot of a bookseller simply didn't understand that no one else was capable. Zimmerman wrote to the duke, who disgorged a little more money, and the
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae
could appear. He had just turned twenty and his life's work was done. He knew: however long he remained on earth, he would never be able to achieve something comparable again.

He wrote a letter requesting Johanna's hand in marriage, and was refused. It was nothing to do with him personally, she wrote, it was just that she doubted anyone could exist side by side with him. She suspected he absorbed life and strength from the people around him the way the earth absorbed the sun or the sea absorbed the rivers, and that his company would condemn her to the pallid semi-unreality of a ghostly existence.

He nodded. He had expected this answer, if not its excellent underpinnings. Now only one thing remained.

The journey was a nightmare. His mother wept so copiously when they said goodbye that he might have been leaving for China, and then, although he had sworn he wouldn't, he wept too. The coach set off, and to begin with it was crammed with evil-smelling people; a woman ate raw eggs, shell and all, and a man kept up an uninterrupted stream of jokes that were blasphemous without being funny Gauss tried to ignore it all by reading the latest issue of the
Monthly Correspondence Concerning the Advancement of Global and Celestial Knowledge.
The astronomer Piazzi's telescope had captured a ghost planet for several nights in a row, but before anyone could plot its course, it had vanished again. Perhaps an error, but then again perhaps a planetoid wandering between the inner and outer planets. But soon Gauss had to fold the newspaper away, as the sun was going down, the coach was jolting too much, and the egg-eating woman kept peeping over his shoulder. He closed his eyes. For a time he saw marching soldiers, then a firmament crisscrossed with magnetic lines, then Johanna, then he woke up. Rain was falling from a dull morning sky, but night was not over yet. The thought of more days and more nights, eleven and twenty-two respectively, beggared the imagination. Traveling was a horror!

When he reached Königsberg he was almost out of his mind with exhaustion, back pain, and boredom. He had no money for an inn, so he went straight to the university and got directions from a stupid-looking porter. Like everyone here, the man spoke a peculiar dialect, the streets looked foreign, the shops had signs that were incomprehensible, and the food in the taverns didn't smell like food. He had never been so far from home.

At last he found the address. He knocked; after a long wait a dust-enshrouded old man opened the door and, before Gauss could introduce himself, said the most gracious gentleman was not receiving visitors.

Gauss tried to explain who he was and where he'd come from.

The most gracious gentleman, the servant repeated, was not receiving. He himself had been working here longer than anyone would believe possible and he had never disobeyed an order.

Gauss pulled out letters of recommendation from Zimmerman, Kästner, Lichtenberg, and Pfaff He insisted, said Gauss again. He could well imagine that there were a lot of visitors and that self-protection was necessary. But, and he must say this unequivocally, he was not just some nobody.

The servant had a think. His lips moved silently, and he didn't seem to know what to do next. Well, he murmured eventually, went inside, and left the door open.

Gauss followed him hesitantly down a short, dark hallway into a little room. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the half-light before he saw an ill-fitting window, a table, an armchair, and in it a motionless little dwarf wrapped in blankets: puffy lips, protruding forehead, thin, sharp nose. The eyes were half-open but didn't look at him. The air was so thick that it was almost impossible to breathe. Hoarsely he enquired if this might be the professor.

Who else, said the servant.

He moved over to the armchair and with trembling hands took out a copy of the
Disquisitiones
, on the flyleaf of which he had inscribed some words of veneration and thanks. He held out the book to the little man, but no hand lifted to take it. The servant instructed him in a whisper to put the book on the table.

In a hushed voice, he made his request: he had ideas he had never been able to share with anyone. For example, it seemed to him that Euclidean space did not, as per the
Critique of Pure Reason
, dictate the form of our perceptions and thus of all possible varieties of experience, but was, rather, a fiction, a beautiful dream. The truth was extremely strange: the proposition that two given parallel lines never touched each other had never been provable, not by Euclid, not by anyone else. But it wasn't at all obvious, as everyone had always assumed. He, Gauss, was thinking that the proposition was false. Perhaps there were no such things as parallels. Perhaps space also made it possible, provided one had a line and a point next to it, to draw infinite numbers of different parallels through this one point. Only one thing was certain: space was folded, bent, and extremely strange.

It felt good to utter all this out loud for the first time. The words were already coming faster, and his sentences were forming themselves of their own accord. This wasn't just some intellectual game! He maintained that … He was moving toward the window but a horrified squeak from the little man brought him to a halt. He maintained that a triangle of sufficient size, stretched between three stars out there, if measured exactly would have a different sum of its angles from the hundred-and-eighty-degree assumed total, and thus would prove itself to be a spherical body When he looked up, gesticulating, he saw the cobwebs on the ceiling, in layers, all woven together into a kind of mat. One day it would be possible to achieve measurements like that! But that was a long way off, and meanwhile he needed the opinion of the only man who wouldn't think he was mad, and would definitely understand him. The man who had taught the world more about space and time than any other human being. He crouched down, so that his face was level with the little man's. He waited. The little eyes looked at him.

Sausage, said Kant.

Pardon?

Buy sausage, said Kant to the servant. And stars. Buy stars too.

Gauss stood up.

I have not lost all my manners, said Kant. Gentlemen! A drop of spittle ran down his cheek.

The gracious gentleman was tired, said the servant.

Gauss nodded. The servant stroked Kant's cheek with the back of his hand. The little man smiled weakly. They went out, the servant said goodbye with a silent bow. Gauss would gladly have given him some money, but he had none. At a distance he heard dark voices singing. The prison choir, said the servant. They'd always mightily disturbed the gracious gentleman.

In the coach, jammed in between a pastor and a fat lieutenant who tried desperately to draw his fellow travelers into conversation, he read the article about the mysterious planet for the third time. Of course you could calculate its course! All you had to do was start from an ellipse rather than a circle when making your approximations and then go about it more skillfully than these idiots had done. A few days’ work and you'd be able to predict when or where it would appear again. When the lieutenant asked his opinion about the Franco-Spanish alliance, he didn't know what to say.

Didn't he think, asked the lieutenant, it would be the end of Austria?

He shrugged his shoulders.

And this Bonaparte person?

I'm sorry, who? he asked.

Back in Brunswick he wrote another proposal to Johanna. Then he fetched the little bottle of curare from the poison cupboard at the Institute of Chemistry. Some researcher had recently sent it across the ocean along with a collection of plants, stones, and papers crammed with notes, a chemist had brought it here from Berlin, since when it had just been standing there, and nobody knew what to do with it. Apparently even a tiny dose was deadly. They would tell his mother he had had a heart attack, without any warning, nothing to be done, God's will. He summoned a messenger from the street, sealed the letter, and paid for it with his last coins. Then he stared out of the window and waited.

He uncorked the flask. The liquid had no smell. Would he hesitate? Probably. It was the kind of thing you didn't know before you really tried it. But he was surprised to feel so little fear. The messenger would bring her refusal and then his death would be no more than a move in a chess game, something heaven hadn't reckoned on. He had been sent into the world with an intellect that rendered almost everything human impossible, in a time when every task was hard, exhausting, and dirty. God had tried to make fun of him.

And the other possibility, now that the work had been written? Years of mediocrity, earning one's bread in some degrading fashion, compromises, fear and vexation, more compromises, physical and spiritual pain, and the slow erosion of all faculties on the way to the feebleness of old age. No!

With astonishing clarity he became aware how violently he was trembling. He heard the roaring in his ears, observed the twitching in his hands, listened to his breath as it came in short gasps. He could almost find it funny.

A knock at the door. A voice, vaguely like his own, called, Come in!

The messenger came, pressed a piece of paper into his hand, and waited with an impertinent look for a tip. He found one more coin at the bottom of the bottommost drawer. The messenger threw it into the air, made a half turn, and caught it behind his back. Seconds later, he saw him running down the alley.

He thought about the Last Judgment. He didn't believe any such event would happen. Those accused could defend themselves, and many questions posed in rebuttal would make God quite uncomfortable. Insects. Dirt. Pain. The inadequacy of everything. Even time and space had been bungled. If he found himself before such a court, he would have a few things to say.

His hands numb, he opened Johanna's letter, laid it aside, and reached for the little flask. Suddenly he had the feeling that there was something he had overlooked. He thought. Something unexpected had happened. He closed the bottle, thought harder, still couldn't work out what it was. Then suddenly it dawned on him that what he had read was her acceptance.

T
HE
R
IVER

The days in Caracas passed swiftly. They had to climb Silla without a guide, because it turned out that not a single native had even set foot on the twin peaks. Bonpland's nose soon wouldn't stop bleeding, and their most expensive barometer fell down and broke. Near the summit they found petrified mussels. Strange, said Humboldt, the water could never have been that high, so it must indicate an upward folding of the earth's crust, i.e., forces from its interior.

Up on the peak, they were persecuted by a swarm of furry bees. Bonpland threw himself flat on the ground, while Humboldt remained upright, sextant in hand and the eyepiece against his insect-covered face. They were crawling over his forehead, his nose, his chin, and down inside his collar. The governor had warned him that the most important thing was not to touch them. Or breathe. Just wait them out.

Bonpland asked if he could lift his head again.

Better not, said Humboldt without moving his lips. After a quarter of an hour, the creatures detached themselves and whirred off in a dark cloud into the sunset. Humboldt admitted it hadn't been easy to hold still. Once or twice he had been close to screaming. He sat down and rubbed his forehead. His nerves were not what they had been.

To bid them farewell there was an open-air concert in the Caracas theater. Gluck's chords rose into the darkness, the night was huge and full of stars, and Bonpland had tears in his eyes. He didn't really know, whispered Humboldt, music had never said very much to him.

They set off toward the Orinoco with a train of mules. Around the capital the plains stretched away unbroken for thousands of miles, without a tree or bush or hill. It was so bright that they had the sense they were walking on a glistening mirror, with their shadows below them and the empty sky above, or that they were reflections of two creatures from another world. At some point Bonpland asked if they were still alive.

He didn't know either, said Humboldt, but one way or the other, what could they do except keep going?

When they first caught sight of trees, swamps, and grass again, they had no idea how long they had been traveling. Humboldt had difficulty reading his two chronometers, he had lost any sense of time. Huts appeared, people came to meet them, and only when he had asked several times about what day it was did they believe they had been walking for no more than two weeks.

In Calabozo they met an old man who had never left his village. In spite of this he possessed a laboratory: glass vessels and bottles, metal equipment for measuring earthquakes, humidity, and magnetism. Plus a primitive machine with pointers that moved if anyone in the vicinity told a lie or said something stupid. And an apparatus which clicked and hummed and made sparks fly between dozens of little wheels rotating against each other. He was the one who had discovered this mysterious power, the old man cried. That proved he was a great scientist!

Doubtless, replied Humboldt, but—

Bonpland poked him in the side. The old man cranked harder, the sparks crackled louder and louder, the voltage was so strong that their hair was standing on end.

Impressive, said Humboldt, but the phenomenon was called galvanism and was known around the world. He too had something with him that produced the same effects, but much stronger. He showed the Leyden jar and how rubbing it with a hide would produce the tiniest branching flashes of lightning.

The old man scratched his chin in silence.

Humboldt clapped him on the shoulder and wished him all the luck in the future. Bonpland wanted to give the old man money, but he wouldn't take any.

He couldn't have known, he said. They were so far from anywhere.

Of course, said Bonpland.

The old man blew his nose and repeated that he couldn't have known. Until they were out of sight, they saw him standing bent over in front of his house, looking after them.

They came to a pond. Bonpland pulled off his clothes, climbed in, stopped for a moment, groaned, and then sank his full length. The water was full of electric eels.

Three days later Humboldt wrote down the results of their investigation with a numb hand. The animals could deliver shocks without even being touched. The shock produced no sparks, no reaction on the electrometer, no deviation of the magnetic needle; in short it left no trace except the pain it delivered. If one seized the eel in both hands or held it in one hand while holding a piece of metal in the other, the effect was stronger. It was the same if two people held hands and only one of them touched the animal. In this case both felt the shock at the same moment and with the same force. Only the front of the eel was dangerous, eels themselves were immune to their own discharges. And the pain itself was immense; so strong that it was impossible to tell what was happening. It expressed itself in numbness, confusion, and dizziness, only afterwards was it recognizable, and it continued to grow in memory; it seemed more like something that belonged to the outside world than to one's own body.

Satisfied, they continued their journey. What a stroke of luck, said Humboldt again and again, what a gift! Bonpland was limping, and there was no feeling in his hands. Days later, sparks were still dancing across Humboldt's field of vision when he closed his eyes. For a long time his knees were as stiff as an old man's.

In the high grass they came upon an unconscious girl, maybe thirteen years old, in torn clothes. Bonpland dripped medicine into her mouth, she spat, coughed, and then began to scream. While he talked at her soothingly Humboldt walked impatiently up and down. Rigid with fear she looked from one to the other. Bonpland stroked her head, and she began to sob. Someone must have done something appalling to her, he said.

What, asked Humboldt.

Bonpland gave him a long look.

Well, whatever it was, said Humboldt, they had to get on.

Bonpland gave her water, which she drank hastily. She wouldn't eat. He helped her to her feet. Without a sign of gratitude she pulled herself free and ran away.

Must have been the heat, said Humboldt. Children got lost and passed out.

Bonpland stared at him for a while. Yes, he said. Probably.

In the town of San Fernando they sold their mules and bought a wide sailboat with a wooden superstructure on the deck, provisions for a month, and reliable weapons. Humboldt made enquiries about anyone who might be familiar with the river. He was directed to four men seated in front of a tavern. One of them was wearing a top hat, one of them had a reed sticking out of the corner of his mouth, one of them was festooned with brass jewelry, and the fourth was pale and arrogant and didn't utter a word.

Humboldt asked if they might know the channel that ran between the Orinoco and the Amazon.

Of course, said the man with the top hat.

He had already traveled it, said the man with the jewelry.

Him too, said the man with the top hat. But it didn't exist. All a rumor.

Humboldt, confused, said nothing. Well anyway, was his final remark, he wanted to measure this channel, and he would need experienced oarsmen.

The man with the top hat asked what the prize was.

Money and knowledge.

The third man used two fingers to remove the reed from his mouth. Money, he said, was better than knowledge.

Much better, said the man with the top hat. And besides, life was so damn short, why gamble on it?

Because it was short, said Bonpland.

The four of them looked at one another, then at Humboldt. Their names, said the man with the top hat, were Carlos, Gabriel, Mario, and Julio, and they were good but they weren't cheap.

That was all right, said Humboldt.

He was followed to the inn by a rough sheepdog. When Humboldt stood still, the dog came up and pressed its nose against his shoe. When Humboldt scratched him behind the ears, he hiccuped, then whimpered with pleasure, fell back, and growled at Bonpland.

He liked him, said Humboldt. Obviously he had no master, so he'd take him along.

The boat was too small, said Bonpland. The dog was rabid and smelled bad.

They would soon get on with each other, said Humboldt, and let the dog sleep in his room at the inn. When the two of them arrived at the boat the following morning, they were as easy with each other as if they'd always been together.

Nobody had said anything about dogs, said Julio.

Further south, said Mario as he straightened his top hat, where the people were mad and talked backwards, there were dwarf dogs with wings. He had seen them himself.

Him too, said Julio. But now they'd died out. Eaten by the talking fish.

With a sigh, Humboldt used sextant and chronometer to determine the position of the town; once again the maps had been inaccurate. Then they cast off.

Soon all traces of the settlement were left behind. They saw crocodiles everywhere: the animals were floating in the water like tree trunks, dozing on the bank or gaping their jaws wide, and on their backs little herons walked around. The dog jumped into the water. A crocodile swam at him immediately, and as Bonpland pulled him back on board, his paw was bleeding from a piranha bite. Lianas brushed the surface of the water and tree trunks leaned out over the river.

They moored the boat and while Bonpland gathered plants, Humboldt went for a walk. He clambered over roots, squeezed a way between tree trunks, and brushed the threads of a spider's web out of his face. He detached flowers from stalks, broke the back of a beautiful butterfly with a skilled hand, and laid it lovingly in his specimen box. Only then did he notice that he was standing in front of a jaguar.

The animal raised its head and looked at him. Humboldt took a step to the side. Without stirring, the animal lifted its lip. Humboldt froze. After a long time it laid its head down on its forepaws. Humboldt took a step back. And another. The jaguar watched him attentively, without raising its head. Its tail switched in pursuit of a fly. Humboldt turned. He listened, but he heard nothing behind him. Holding his breath, arms pressed tight against his body, head down on his chest, and his eyes fixed on his feet, he began to move. Slowly, step by step, then gradually quicker. He must not stumble, he must not look back. And then he couldn't help himself, he began to run. Branches reared into his face, an insect smacked against his forehead, he slipped, grabbed hold of a liana, one sleeve got caught and tore, he struck branches out of his way. Sweating and out of breath, he reached the boat.

Cast off immediately, he panted.

Bonpland reached for his gun, the oarsmen got to their feet.

No, said Humboldt, cast off!

These were good weapons, said Bonpland. They could kill the animal and it would make a wonderful trophy.

Humboldt shook his head.

But why not?

The jaguar had let him go.

Bonpland muttered something about superstition and untied the ropes. The oarsmen grinned. Once in the middle of the current, Humboldt could no longer understand his own fear. He decided to describe events in his diary the way they should have happened: he would claim they had gone back into the undergrowth, guns cocked, but had failed to find the animal.

Before he had finished his account, the skies opened. The boat filled with water and they steered hastily for dry land. They reached it to be greeted by a naked, bearded man so covered in filth as to be almost unrecognizable. This was his plantation, for a fee they could spend the night.

Humboldt paid and asked where the house was.

He didn't have one, said the man. He was Don Ignacio, he was a Castilian nobleman, and the whole world was his house. And these were his wife and daughter.

Humboldt bowed to the two naked women and didn't know where to look. The oarsmen attached expanses of fabric to the trees and cowered down underneath them.

Don Ignacio asked if there was anything else they needed.

Not at the moment, said Humboldt, exhausted.

None of his guests, said Don Ignacio, would ever suffer want. With dignity he turned on his heel and walked away. Raindrops pearled on his head and shoulders. It smelled of flowers, wet earth, and manure.

Sometimes, said Bonpland reflectively, it struck him as an absolute enigma that he was here. Indescribably far from home, dispatched by nobody's ruler, simply because of a Prussian he'd met on the stairs.

Humboldt lay awake for a long time. The oarsmen kept on whispering wild stories to one another which lodged in his brain. And every time he managed to banish the flying houses, threatening serpent women, and fights to the death, he saw the eyes of the jaguar. Alert, intelligent, and pitiless. Then he came to again and heard the rain, the men, and the dog growling anxiously. At some point Bonpland arrived, wrapped himself in his blanket, and immediately went to sleep. Humboldt hadn't even heard him leave.

Next morning, with the sun high in the sky, it was as if it had never rained, and Don Ignacio said farewell to them with the gestures of a chatelain. They would always be welcome here! His wife gave a perfect court curtsey, and his daughter stroked Bonpland's arm. He put his hand on her shoulder and pulled a strand of hair off her face.

The wind was as hot as if it were coming out of an oven. The growth on the banks was getting thicker. White turtles’ eggs lay under the trees, lizards clung like wooden ornaments to the hull of the boat. Reflections of birds kept moving over the water, even when the sky was empty.

Remarkable optical phenomenon, said Humboldt.

Optical had nothing to do with it, said Mario. Birds were constantly dying at every moment, in fact they did little else. Their spirits lived on in their reflections. They had to go somewhere and they weren't wanted in heaven.

And insects, asked Bonpland.

They didn't die at all. That was the problem.

And indeed, the mosquitoes came interminably. They came out of the trees, the air, the water, they came from all sides, filling the air with their whining, stinging, sucking, and for every one that got squashed, there were a hundred more. Not even thick clothes thrown over their heads brought any relief, the creatures just stung right through the material.