It was 3:00
AM
in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. He was a twenty-four-year-old world wanderer, recently arrived on a merchant vessel. He was also blind drunk, and this was the last time he would ever to drink to excess. Although he did not know it then, as he swayed in a back alley, fumbling with his fly, desperate to pee — his life’s epiphany was on its way. Mere days separated him from his first encounter with the incomparable White Queen who was to seize his soul.
Every one of those days in the Land of Fire brought its own dire trials. Later, these seemed to him both right and fitting. He had to prove himself worthy. Fate had prepared a plot for him, and like the initiates in ancient rituals, he must undergo gruelling tests of body, intellect, and spirit. If he passed, he would glimpse the holy of holies. And if he failed . . . But Harry had not failed. And the trials to test his fitness had been gruelling indeed. First, as he rocked in that dark alley over a steaming puddle of his own urine, he was set upon by thugs. Harry was young and strong. But he was also terribly drunk. He was alone, and there were three of them.
He was badly beaten, a rib and his left cheekbone cracked, and dark bruises laid upon his flesh that took on the most surprising shapes — the outlines of animals’ heads and of the world’s land masses. The White Queen’s lineaments dominated his upper left thigh. Looking down at himself, he saw the pipe-like peninsula veering southwest that made the plum discolouration unmistakably Antarctica.
There were other trials before he could make the fateful trip south.
After the beating, he stumbled to an exposed stretch of beach where he lay in a stupor, perilously dehydrated by the excess of alcohol he had pushed through his system. By the time his rescuer appeared, Harry was already in danger, his concussion compounded by the disorientation of hangover.
She was swathed head-to-toe in old white flannel sheeting. Only her eyes were visible through a slit in the cloth woven round her face. He thought at first she was Death come to claim him, a kindly, white-figured Death who hid her ravaged features out of courtesy.
Certainly Harry felt ready to die. He had been in the clutches of delirium, where a swarm of devils trod and pricked his flesh, seeking ever-new and tender spots to press their searing brands. When he felt her cool compress on his parched lips, and became aware of her white form shading him from the sun, the emotions that heaved in his chest so overawed him that he came close to passing out again. First came the surge of hope, so fierce it was electrifying, and his tongue tried to move in his mouth, but could not. His entire being seemed to rise up in answer to her pity, her tender ministrations, and the consoling clucking sound she made as she knelt closer to tend to him. Her compassion washed over him and made him want to weep, not for himself, but because her succour restored his faith in humankind, and in some unquenchable spark of goodness that would endure no matter how brutish and callous the world might appear.
In her eyes, he believed he saw a most rare and beneficent light. Yet he was never actually able to see her full face. She kept it covered for his entire stay with her. He was probably only a few days in her white-washed room, with its rudimentary bed, table and chair, and the pallet on the floor where he lay, his bruised and battered flesh anointed with her salves. But he so thoroughly committed the room’s dimensions, gradations of whiteness, and sloping shadows to heart, that it became a perfect eidolon of the healing sanctuary.
Harry fell in love with a woman who remained largely invisible to him. He could not even properly discern the shape of her nose, cheekbones and chin beneath the wrappings of thin cloth. He did see her hands, with their strange pigmentation, pale blotches against dun brown. Her eyes and eyebrows both had a dark lustre, and so in his semi-delusion, and later in moments of alert wakefulness, he imagined her stepping naked toward him out of the tumbled swathes of cloth, so consummately lovely that his loins were on fire, and his heart yearned to know and worship her. He plotted his love-making carefully. He would begin by kissing her feet; then attentively, sensually, cover every inch of her with kisses, and as their two bodies entwined, they would literally rise. Harry had believed in those days in levitation, just as fervently as he did in the insuperable powers of love. These were certainties he had inherited from his mother.
But he was never to be granted carnal knowledge of his saviour-nurse in Ushuaia. Harry was never to see her face, or her breasts, or even her naked feet. Once his flesh healed, and his vigour and equilibrium returned, he began to venture out after dark for brief rambles about the streets. But always, the locus of her white room and obscured beauty pulled him back, his heart brimming with an emotion that far surpassed mere gratitude, and his head buzzing with awkward phrases in his ragged Spanish. “
Te quiero
.
Te amo. Toda la vida
.” What were the magic words that would spring the hasp that had so far prevented their discovery, one of another? How was he to reach her?
The fact was they had never spoken. She tended him in utter silence. When needed, she gestured to show him her intent. It did not occur to him until his third night circling her sanctuary, that she might be mute. So young was he then, and so thoroughly besotted, he was convinced the heat of his passion could cure her, melt away whatever flaw had undone her voice. He rehearsed for himself, with growing delight, the flute-like sounds she would make when at last they were joined together. In his imagined hearing, her voice resembled birdsong, buoyant, unforced, and with a trill that drew from him a joyous laugh in response.
On the third night of his rambles, he found her door barred to him. At first, he thought it was a mistake. He knocked. He rattled the latch. He called to her through the square iron grille set high in her white-washed door. He called and called until one after the other, all the doors in the narrow street opened. Someone hissed. A rock caught him sharply between his shoulder blades, winding him. From inside the room, he heard her move: a drape of cloth whispering against the floor, a sigh so heavy it seemed to invade his own chest. He saw the flat of her piebald hand pressed against the grille; then she thrust her forefinger through, the tip of her nail narrowly missing his eye.
“
Vete
,” she growled. “Go.
Allez
.
Ist genug
.”
Harry stood outside the door, chastened and chastised, a virile young man gone weak at the knees. Once again, Harry swayed in a Tierra del Fuego alley-way, this time because his heart was broken. He remembered childhood stories his mother had read him of people whose hearts cracked at the exact moment they experienced a crushing loss. This sound he had always imagined like the snap of dry tinder. He and his mother lived in the country, and one of his tasks as a boy was to gather kindling, and to break it so that it fit the belly of the stove. Now he felt it was he who was ready for the stove’s belly. He stumbled off down the alley, looking back once to see if her finger was still thrust through the grille. He saw only a narrow, gloomy corridor, its separate doors barely distinguishable. This was an image he folded into memory, and reworked over the years, so that in his last glimpse of his saviour’s street, her door stood out with a dazzling whiteness. Her threshold’s ivory gleam was nothing less than an assurance of paradise.
Harry had no idea, as he stumbled over parched ground toward a hostel where he would decide his next move, that this was the crux of his own life’s plot. He did not recognize then the significance of the trials he had just undergone, beaten, ill, broken-hearted, and how they had prepared him for his life’s abiding passion.
Where was there for him to go next but south, to the ends of the earth? He was ignorant then: he pictured a continent bleak and unforgiving, in whose frigid glaciers he might see reflected the death of his own spirit. Spurned by the Tierra del Fuego healer and still grieving for his mother, he was a young man bent on self-annihilation, at least symbolically; on a mortification of the flesh in a land so long ice-locked, it had banished greenness.
These were his thoughts as he stood on the deck of the boat travelling south to an imagined glacial graveyard.
The appearance of the legendary bird was Harry’s first sign he might be wrong. Its luminous whiteness, extraordinary wing span, and faultless sailing on the wind were all so sublime, it was the word “angel” leapt first to his mind. An angel, despite the hooked bill and the unfathomable eye which challenged him to recognize its primordial power. “I have seen God,” the bird seemed to say to him. “I have been here since the first days of Creation.”
Harry, who was mesmerized, did not doubt it. He knew a portent when he saw one. And so it was the albatross, emblazoned on the polar air, which ushered Harry into a transfiguring passion of the kind many people yearn for, but few find. From that welcoming omen, he progressed step by step through a land and seascape that filled his eye, smote his heart, and made him anew. He recognized he was blessed to have discovered his life’s truth so early. He was one of those who are born to love a landscape far more than they ever could another person. The spell of the Great White Queen was an inescapable bondage, and if in her service he sometimes experienced anguish and physical pain, he bore them willingly, for they were his fate and the making of him. After that first journey south, he could no longer conceive of who he was without her.
The first lung-f of her air hit his blood stream with a revivifying rush.
Within days of his arrival, he contracted himself to one of the scientific crews who were resident year-round in Antarctica. Twenty years later, he had himself become a specialist in the bitter business of mapping his Beloved’s decline. But he long continued to nourish the hope that she would survive, for her glories were as infinite as her dangers. Harry never forgot that beneath her gleaming surface lay fissures that had swallowed down far better men than he.
He recognized he was fortunate. The Great Queen treated him more kindly than she did others. Unlike some of his colleagues, Harry’s fillings never fell out once exposed to the frigid air; his wounds healed speedily where others’ did not; and he was in no danger of the emotional wreckage that each year reduced several of their company to the proverbial “toast.” There was nothing to be done for those unravelled by the rigours of the polar dark and barrens but send them home.
Harry was legendary for his staying power and ability to rise above the fractiousness that inevitably beset the base in the gruelling months of endless winter darkness. He was able to navigate successfully the schisms, cliques, and shifting pragmatic alliances. With rare exceptions, everyone liked and trusted Harry. On the other hand, his colleagues gave him lots of room. They instinctively recognized his need for solitude. Thus he was seldom plagued by midnight chatterers, or the self-proclaimed party animals forever seeking some new way to “blow off steam.” When Harry closeted himself away or ventured out to walk alone in the freezing blackness, some of his colleagues assumed he was working on a book, or a pet theory. The more romantic among them speculated that he nursed a broken heart. Only his immediate superiors guessed the truth: that Harry was so in thrall to the glacial White Queen, she had become the reason for his existence.
In extremis, he thinks. I was happiest at the farthest reach of the world. The last place to be mapped and explored. The last to be polluted. The first to disintegrate visibly. In extremis. Once, the ice of Antarctica was two miles thick. But a hole in the sky triggered a melt of her immaculate emerald-hearted ice.
Harry saw the ice go. At first, he was fired with zeal. His reports to his superiors contained warnings as dire as any Old Testament prophet’s. He watched the Southern Ocean rise and feared for the fate of the world. He found himself caught in Noah’s horrific dilemma. He perceived the Inundation was inevitable, but no one was listening. Gradually, his zeal turned to anger and then his anger to anguish. In extremis. His Beloved was disappearing and there was no way he could stop it happening. Increasingly, Harry could peer down into vast rents in her glittering surface and see her mystery crudely exposed.
Yet the more her drab rock heart was revealed, the more he loved the continent that had consumed over two thirds of his life. His passion was now inextricable from his grief. He had been in the grip of this thorny paradox once before, hypnotized by the inexorable power of beauty in decay. This was when he wandered round the murky maze of crumbling Venice, just a few years before the pressure of the rising Adriatic became too much and the city’s rotting foundation at last gave way. Harry was still a young man then, and his fascination with the fragile, sodden city perplexed him deeply. By the time he visited Venice, the city’s art treasures had been removed for safekeeping. It was always
aqua alta
. Harry walked the wooden trestles set above the flowing streets and saw everywhere the rude red brick exposed, the exquisite creamy façades of salmon, ochre, and olive fallen away in great patches, and black mould creeping up to the roof tiles. Was he privileged or cursed, he wondered, to see one of the most fabled cities on Earth in the throes of death, blighted and covered with sores? He was both, he realized, for there was no escaping either the adoration or the dread such an imminent death inspired.
When, so many years later, he witnessed his Queen of Continents wasting away, the adoration and the dismay were intensified to such a pitch, Harry felt that impossible thing: his heart moved in his mouth. And the words he spoke aloud shocked him, for he had not understood until that moment the full extent of his passion. Once spoken, these words become an incantation without which he could not begin his day. It was as if they were now written into his cells. Clone him and his twin would rise up in the morning and speak them.
Salve Regina. Exsulto stellam maris
.
His daily incantation summons an imaginary light that conceals the gaping wounds of Antarctica; an elusive balm that restores for one instant at dawn her primitive blinding-white glory, her immaculate being.