The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(54)

And so, there in the modest cabin of the ship ferrying them back to America, they shook hands on what neither ventured to describe as a gentlemen’s agreement, for theirs was clearly a pact between cowards. Both men realized that keeping such a transcendental truth from the world might be considered a shameful betrayal of the human race, and yet both believed they could easily live with that on their conscience. And so they agreed to lie. And if as he watched over the gunner, Reynolds evaded their rescuers’ questions by supplying the occasional snippet of their ordeal, and when Allan awoke he added all that was necessary in order to elaborate a tale as fantastical as it was plausible. They spent entire evenings embellishing it with further details, most of them the product of Allan’s prodigious imagination, smoothing out any contradictions until they had produced such a solid, incontrovertible truth they ended up believing it themselves.

However, during the voyage, surrounded by the expansive silence of the ocean, Reynolds and Allan did more than invent the story that would protect their lives: they also resumed the intimate discussions they had begun on the Annawan, sealing the friendship with which Fate had chosen to bind them together. Without knowing why, they talked until the early hours, each eager to reveal the innermost parts of his soul to the other, perhaps because each had saved the other’s life. And, as though he considered the gunner had earned the right to know everything about him, one night Reynolds even confessed the secret he should have taken with him to his grave. This was tantamount to placing his fate in the gunner’s hands, yet the explorer knew that if there was one man in the world incapable of betraying him, it was Allan. Thus, in the same fearful whisper with which his mother used to tell him tales of graveyards filled with ghosts and goblins, Reynolds told the gunner his darkest secret: Captain MacReady was not the first man he had killed; he had already killed someone else before he joined the Annawan. But not with a gun. No. That time he had simply opened a window. When Reynolds had finished telling him how he had ended Symmes’s life, Allan’s gaze wandered for a moment. Reynolds wondered whether his somber eyes were envisaging that unknown hotel room in Boston, in which a wretched man lay abandoned on the floor while the snow wove an icy blanket over him. Then he looked straight at Reynolds with that half grin of his, which made him look at once younger and older, and said, “My dear friend, if one day you are judged for this in Heaven, I only hope I can be there to help you invent a good excuse.”

Reynolds beamed, pleased that Allan had not condemned his act. No man was a complete saint or a complete sinner, the gunner must have thought, and however much Reynolds tried to convince himself that what had happened in the Antarctic had made a new man of him, that he had emerged from that savage catharsis an honest, upright individual, no one changed completely, except in bad novels. To think that would be as absurd as to believe he had come through the experience knowing how to play the violin.

For his part, Allan seemed equally forthcoming, and as Reynolds looked on affectionately, the gunner poured out every detail of his young life with the same jubilant despair with which he spilled his soul onto paper. He traced a portrait in which he himself tried to decipher what kind of man he had been in those distant days when he had encountered terror only as a product of his ghoulish imaginings. The explorer listened spellbound, admiring the gunner’s ability to conjure up images whose vividness made his own memories seem pale by comparison. Thus Reynolds could picture him swimming with his sleek, amphibian body six miles up the James River to emulate his hero Byron; becoming enamored of Mrs. Stanard, the frail mother of a friend, whom he converted into his muse, until she was swallowed up by the murky waters of insanity; crying with rage after every argument with his stepfather, who was determined that he become a lawyer, no matter that each night by the light of a candle he struggled to compose the verses that would turn him into a poet; writing love letters to the young Sarah Elmira Royster, which, he would later discover to his fury, her father had intercepted before they could set her heart aflame with their declarations of ardent love. It was the portrait of a rebellious youth, to whom his parents had left nothing save the corrupt blood of a consumptive; an avid reader and a brilliant student burdened with a troubled soul; someone left intoxicated by a single sip of alcohol; a poet who had just finished a lengthy ballad called Al Aaraaf when the Martian had descended from the stars to plague their nights with bad dreams, and in passing—for every cloud has a silver lining—to inspire a novel he had already begun to forge in his mind, which, he was certain, would turn him into a writer. Why else had he escaped from Hell? Why else indeed, Reynolds concurred.

And so the two men came to know each other better even than they knew themselves, and in that friendship they found a refuge from the loneliness that invaded them after discovering that Man was not the only inhabitant of Creation. However, as they drew closer to their destination, the two men ceased talking about the monster from the stars. To begin with they did this out of caution, to avoid any slipups when they reached America, and then later on because they became so used to the story they had invented that they accepted it is as true. Reynolds did so consciously, relieved that those fearful memories had begun to fade; but the unhealthy zeal with which Allan appeared to devote himself to keeping up the farce began to worry Reynolds. He even began to fear for the gunner’s sanity when in the middle of a conversation at which no one else was present he alluded to that apocryphal story as though it were the true one. As the days went by, Allan seemed more and more nervous, distant, transparent even, as though his mind were wearing imperceptibly thin, like a hallway carpet. It worried Reynolds, who had still not made up his mind to confront the gunner about it, for fear of making things worse. Be that as it may, on reaching America, both men were able to relate their story unflinchingly to the army of journalists awaiting the arrival of the only surviving members of the Great American Expedition to the South Pole. For long hours, in slow, strained voices (as if remembering what had happened still reverberated in their souls), they described all they had experienced since the day they sailed from New York Harbor in search of the passage to the center of the Earth.