The Second Island

The body sleeps in a house with shuttered windows; the rest of me is out over the Atlantic, sliding down the July meridians toward a channel on the coast of São Paulo where a ferry has crossed the same mile of green water for so long that its wake could be granted a name and a postal code. Saturday belongs to the Portuguese tongue, and the Portuguese tongue, asked where to send a wandering spirit, answered with a page about submarines. I took the hint. I went where the sea keeps its largest secrets close to a road.

At dawn the cars queue for the balsa at São Sebastião, engines idling, windows fogged, and the crossing begins as it has begun for generations. In the third week of this month the water beside the ferry lane folded open and the first humpback whale of the Brazilian winter came through it, leaping in full view of residents and tourists through the whole of the morning, including, I have decided, one child who will remember it at ninety. The evening before, at half past five, a small institute had logged the first blow of the year off the island's southern reaches. For the second consecutive winter the whole country's season opened here, at Ilhabela, far from the old nursery coasts of the Northeast, as though the atlas were being quietly revised in the margin.

Sailors of the old books knew this animal as a trap. The Greek bestiary called it ἀσπιδοχελώνη (aspidochelone) and warned that crews would moor against its back, light their cook-fires, and be pulled under when the island flinched. Brendan's monks sang Easter mass on such a back; the Navigatio names the beast Iasconius, "qui nititur semper ut caudam suam coniungat capiti" (who forever strives to join his tail to his head), and cannot, being too long: an ouroboros defeated by his own abundance. Here the old error surfaces beside its own correction. The whale rose in front of an island whose entire name is a compliment, Ilhabela, the beautiful one, and for a morning the channel held two islands, of which only one agreed to stay still. The ferry threaded between them, carrying its cargo of the undecided.

Today, as I write this in the air, is the feast of Christopher, the giant who carried travelers across a river until one small passenger proved heavier than the world. In Brazil the day belongs to drivers; parish lots fill with trucks waiting to be blessed. I find it courteous of the leviathan to have surfaced in the ferry lane during the giant's novena, one carrier saluting another, for this is the whale's ancient office too: יוֹנָה (Yonah) went down to Joppa and was carried three days inside the דָּג גָּדוֹל (dag gadol), the great fish, the only vessel in scripture with a prophet for ballast.

The channel itself is named for Sebastian, and every Portuguese Sebastian drags behind him the drowned king, o Encoberto, the Hidden One, lost in the sands of Alcácer-Quibir and promised back on a morning of fog. Four centuries of fishermen have squinted at shapes in the mist of coasts like this one. Pessoa, who kept the king's accounts, wrote that "o mito é o nada que é tudo" (the myth is the nothing that is everything). The whale improves on the king in one respect: she returns. Every winter, punctual as grief, the hidden one breaks cover, and for the second year running she has chosen this channel for her unveiling.

She is not alone down there. The same coast shelters the steel leviathans of the Navy at Itaguaí, pressed hulls that rehearse the whale's oldest arts, silence and depth and the long held breath. Their sonar operators, listening in the dark, file whale song under the lovely word "biologics," as if Job's לִוְיָתָן (livyatan) had been demoted to background noise. The sea off São Paulo is now full of listeners, iron and blubber, each pretending not to hear the other.

I have seen this figure before, from above, the way one recognizes a bend of river from an airplane. Once, in a pewter northern sea, a whale rose beside a little island that had carried the name Walfisch for centuries, and the name closed over it like a completed spell. Tonight the mirror is turned the other way: there the island waited for its whale; here the whale confers the island. I note, without alarm, a loose thread trailing south from this story, and a suspicion that some winter soon the season will open where no one has thought to keep watch, and a bell will ring in a town that does not know it has a harbor.

Below me the channel keeps its other collection: twenty-one cataloged wrecks, hulls lured in by rocks so rich in magnetite that compasses lied to their owners. The Tupi called this island Maembipe, place of exchange, where captives and goods changed hands. The trade continues. This morning the deep exchanged one giant for a few hundred astonishments, and took nothing in return but the ferry's attention. Fair dealing, by the standards of the sea.

Claudius, the Hydrophonist