The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(56)

Since Reynolds had left for New York, his friend would send him long missives keeping him abreast of his news, although it was obvious that his true reason for writing was to relate the sorry state of his soul. And so the explorer was able to observe the life of his only friend begin to change shape. In his first letter, Allan told of his expulsion from West Point. This had caused a fresh altercation with his stepfather, of such violence that Allan had decided to seek refuge at the home of his aunt, Maria Clemm, in Baltimore. He made up his mind to devote himself to writing short stories, since he had been greatly discouraged by his relative lack of success with the publication of Al Aaaraf, the long poem he had written during his sojourn on the Annawan. However, Reynolds soon realized that those bland details were merely a polite preamble, and what Allan really wanted to share with him were the sinister nightmares his brain engendered in the dark. He told him of dreams filled with immeasurable horrors: ships crewed by dead men, ladies with dazzling teeth that, prey to some mysterious malady, rotted away in front of his eyes. He even saw himself tortured by the Spanish Inquisition or putting out the eyes of a cat with a quill pen, only to hang the creature without remorse. Such was his state of anxiety that sometimes when he ventured out of the house he thought he saw himself. These monsters, which have with such subtlety infiltrated my dreams, he wrote disconsolately, cause me to awake in the middle of the night in a fit of anguish, my heart beating wildly, bathed in an icy sweat, although I confess I have never written as much as at present. Nor would I wish to banish these nightmares, for I fear they are the only way I have of diminishing the horror that fills my wretched soul, a horror which I have at last understood how to convey to paper, as authentically as if I were writing in my own blood.

Reynolds had smiled wistfully as he put away this letter from Allan. The Martian had cast an ominous shadow over their souls, and yet Reynolds could not help feeling glad that at least in Allan’s case this had fallen on astonishingly fertile ground. For his part, it merely prevented him from gazing innocently at the stars and caused him to be irrationally suspicious of anyone who looked at him with curiosity. It made Reynolds happy to imagine his friend in Baltimore, doted on by his aunt and intent upon making a name for himself as an author whilst trying to keep hardship from his door.

Two years later, when his own fears had all but faded, Allan wrote to him at last with some good news: My dear friend, I am pleased to be able to tell you that one of my stories has won a literary prize. It seems that hard work does indeed pay off, something I had begun to doubt. Although in this instance, the prize has only filled me with a feeling of joy and confidence without delivering me from poverty, in whose grip I am now firmly held, for you should know that my stepfather has passed away and left me none of his money. And so, no inheritance will save me from the eternal shipwreck that is my existence. But do not concern yourself on my behalf, my friend, for although I do not even possess a suit in which to go out to eat, life has not beaten me yet. You, better than anyone, know that I am a survivor, and in a few days from now, I shall have found refuge in the best sanctuary possible: my cousin Virginia. Yes, my dear friend, I want you to be the first to know: Virginia and I are to be married, swiftly and in secret.

Reynolds was not surprised by the blow that Allan’s stepfather had dealt from the grave, yet he would never have guessed that the gunner would decide to marry his cousin Virginia, a girl scarcely thirteen years of age. However, such an extraordinary marriage seemed to bring Allan luck, for not long afterward he moved to Richmond, where he took up a post offered him on the magazine the Southern Literary Messenger. Even so, Reynolds soon learned that it was becoming increasingly common to see his friend stumbling drunk out of the seediest taverns, and his aunt and Virginia were finally forced to move to Richmond to keep him from the demon drink. Thanks to their loving ministrations, Allan appeared to return to normal.

It was then Reynolds received a letter in which the gunner announced that in view of the growing popularity of maritime adventure stories, he had begun writing a novel inspired by their experiences in the South Pole. The novel, which was called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was serialized a few weeks later in the Southern Literary Messenger. Reynolds read each fresh installment with a heavy heart, for those pages obliged him to dredge up memories of their days in the Antarctic. And yet they no longer inspired fear in him, only a strange regret, for he realized that the exhilaration of that horror was something he would never have experienced in the comfortable mediocrity of his life as a journalist: he had conversed with a Martian, chased it, fled from it, trapped it in the ice, not to mention killing a man and saving another one’s life. Those were not things people often did. And yet he, Reynolds, had done them, however dreamlike it seemed to him now, and although when the time came he would be buried as a simple lawyer, his body would face eternity with a mysterious Martian symbol engraved on the palm of its hand.

Allan’s tale began with the voyage of a whaler, the Grampus, to the South Seas. In addition to certain rhythmic similarity between the author’s name and that of his eponymous hero, there were other autobiographical elements in the story, some of which clearly referred to their journey: part of the action took place in a hold as suffocating as the one the monster from the stars had chosen as its hiding place, and one of the characters was an Indian named Peters. However, all comparisons between the novel and their failed expedition ended there, for in the second installment, which described their journey to the Antarctic Circle, Allan had let himself be guided solely by his imagination, perhaps fearing he would lose impetus were he to recollect the truth: after several lurid, violent passages, in which the ship avoided icebergs and various crew members showed symptoms of scurvy, they managed to reach an island where they encountered a tribe that tried to take them captive. The finale to that grisly show had the crew sailing south on a milk-white ocean beneath a fine shower of ash, and just before plummeting over a gigantic waterfall, they glimpsed a mysterious, dazzlingly white figure, larger than any creature living on Earth.