Wonder (13 page)

The head of the mathematics department came and took him to the teachers’ lounge, a room with massive leather armchairs and sofas and subdued lighting. It was dominated by a huge stone fireplace that had on its chimney, engraved in block letters, the words:
PROVE EVERYTHING
, a motto that seemed aimed at him specifically. He wavered for a moment under that burden, seated across from the department head who asked for black tea, then set out to explain in a kind, fatherly tone tinged with impatience, that Edward must undertake to address himself
to his pupils
and to
explain mathematical and philosophical notions to them
in such a way that they would
understand
them and could
pass their examinations
. He pronounced certain words slowly, articulating them as if Edward were hard of hearing or simple-minded.
Mortified, the young teacher assented. The second class was slightly less disastrous. Only twenty-three of the young men who’d appeared the week before returned that Tuesday morning, most of them looking sullen. With nearly two dozen pairs of eyes focused on him, Edward started the roll call and limp hands went up as he read out the names on his list. He marked an
X
next to the absent, noticing without realizing it that 62.666 percent of his students were missing.

Those seated in front of him, wearing the regulation grey jacket and trousers, white shirt, and bowtie, seemed resigned.

“Welcome to this class in natural philosophy, where we shall study in particular the relations between nature and mathematics,” said Edward without taking a breath. From the tiers of seats, no reaction. Next came a lengthy explanation in which he did his best to present in simple terms the necessary relationship joining mathematics to the natural world from which it stemmed and that it could at the same time depict, model, and explain. A young man in the front row yawned. Those sitting by the windows were looking outside, where squirrels chased each other in the branches of the oak trees. The rest were staring blankly at him.

“Very well,” he concluded. “First and foremost, an exercise that will allow me to assess your knowledge and
your skills.” Quickly, he wrote an equation, a sublime variation on the Pythagorean Theorem. As a child and an adolescent, he had spent hours admiring its simple harmony and exploring its seemingly endless ramifications.

“Some of you may be familiar with Fermat’s Last Theorem …” he ventured. If that was so no one breathed a word. A tall, thin student in the back row was staring at the door with a kind of desperation, as if cursing the moment he’d come through it. “It couldn’t be simpler,” Edward went on, speaking to his chalk. “This equation is true if
n
equals 1 or 2. For any other whole number other than zero, it is false. If you would, gentlemen, figure a way to prove it.”

It was of course impossible, at least in so short a time; generations of mathematicians and scholars of all kinds had done their best to find a way to demonstrate the theorem for which Fermat had jotted hastily in his copy of
Arithmetica
that there existed a simple proof which he could not set out in detail because the narrow margins of the book were too small to contain it. Edward himself had tried for nights at a time but had come up with nothing satisfactory. What was surprising, now that he thought about it, was that no one had ever thought of
challenging Fermat’s claim. Maybe he tended to embroider the truth. Or he’d wanted to play a trick on someone, or else had been quite simply wrong. Be that as it may, Edward was curious to see what the twenty-three students in front of him would do with it during the hour granted them.

At the end of the class, all placed the fruit of their labour on his desk, some handing him thick bundles, others a single sheet. The results varied: an unsettling number of students maintained, in a manner more or less woolly but some apparently sincere, that they’d been able to resolve the enigma (one punctuated his demonstration with a triumphant
QED
); others admitted defeat after mere minutes and had been content to spend the rest of the hour doodling (among them was one who had handed in a rather accomplished drawing of a squirrel eating a hazelnut); three had submitted a perfectly blank sheet; and surprisingly, two had been able to prove how the equation was false when
n
equalled 2.

At the third class there were only fourteen students facing Edward. He returned to each of them the exercise from the week before, with annotations and comments. (The student who’d executed the drawing of a squirrel received a mere passing grade for his demonstration but, moved by a need for justice, Edward had given him a “very good”
for his sketch.) When he started to explain why none of them – regardless of what they thought – had been able to demonstrate Fermat’s Last Theorem, he suddenly had a brand-new hunch. It was as if he had always considered the problem in the form of a two-dimensional image that had all at once acquired a third one, leaving the page, as it were, and floating in the air. He could now observe the formula from angles whose existence until then he could not even imagine. Leaving his explanations unfinished, he undertook immediately to note on the board whatever came to mind. Stoically, the students took out journals, Latin translations, and drawings of fauna they had observed, and busied themselves with them till the end of the class.

The department head came back a few hours later, in a foul mood. “I thought we’d already discussed this,” he said to Edward, who was gazing, motionless, at the board now entirely covered with formulas, calculations, and notes. “Your task is to prepare the students to
pass their exams
. Not to make them
waste their time
on
insoluble
theorems and then ignore them. I do not care to arrive at this point with my teachers, but things cannot go on like this … Unless we are aware of a
profound change
in your teaching methods, we will regretfully …” Noticing that Edward wasn’t listening he broke off and looked up at the
board where were written the first steps of a demonstration at once simple and subtle and perfectly elegant. For a moment it took his breath away.

Getting his wits back, the department head inhaled deeply and suggested amiably, as if it were what he’d been intending to propose from the outset: “Why not forget about classes for a few months, dear colleague, and devote yourself instead to research, since that seems to suit you better.” Only at that moment did Edward seem to become aware of his presence.

“Excuse me?” he said, blinking.

Edward didn’t give a hoot that Garance had not yet found a servant to fix their meals and clean the parlour, where everything aside from the two instruments was covered with a thin coating of dust. Never would he have considered reproaching her for not seeing to it that curtains were hung at the windows, or not doing the food shopping, nor did he make a fuss over eating cold ham twice a day every day of the week.

The house on Alderney Street was a cheerful shambles where notebooks and scraps of paper darkened with formulas and fragments of musical scores littered armchairs, tables, and counters, along with small stones in
various shapes and colours. Edward collected these and presented them to his wife as others would have offered some silly emerald necklace or a dull diamond ring: tourmaline, which when heated became all by itself a magnet; a tiger’s eye with shimmering stripes; two sorts of feldspar, which she liked even more when he told her their names were respectively moonstone and sunstone. Each possessed its own crystalline voice. Of them all, however, her favourite was obsidian. This was a piece of vitrified lava, of a black as dense as the darkness of a hundred nights superimposed in fine layers, mirror smooth, sharp, at once the opposite and the sister of ice. Alone among the stones it was silent, as if the fire that had given birth to the mineral had at the same time snuffed out the breath that lived within.

These stones were to be found on chests of drawers, on carpets, even in their shoes or between their sheets where Garance gathered them. She liked to make them shine brightly in the sunlight and to turn them over and over in her palm until they were exactly the same temperature as her fingers. At the same time, Edward was trying to decipher the musical scores with their scattering of small black marks, just as he used to study the equations of Euler and Gauss. He suspected they described a phenomenon that he had a hunch led if not to the answer, then at least to the question that had been bothering him
ever since childhood, even though twenty years later, he still did not know how to name it. Like its occupants, the small house was suspended between heaven and earth, between music and mineral.

G
ARANCE DETECTED THE SECRET SONG IN ALL
things, the intimate, hidden voice; equally alive and inanimate, multiple and singular, infinitely large and ultra small, all in the same way. While she adored music it was not for rest or entertainment or even as a pleasure for the senses, but rather because it offered a respite, substituting a series of predictable, organized sounds for the perpetual flurry she lived in from morning to night, and that followed her into her dreams: the silky swishing of a bird’s wing by which you recognized it as much as by its song; the silent call of the snail; the minuscule rustle of a blade of grass bowing in the wind; the pattering of raindrops, each unique, like snowflakes; the tiny sound print of water on earth; the minute crackling of a shoe on the gravel underfoot, that’s due not so much to the pebble rubbing on the sole as to inner tensions that pass through rock and hold it together. All forces similar to those that drove the stars above their heads, the singular song of each reverberating in the night, each echoed by those
of all the others, similar too to the muted underground rumbling of the planets.

One day Edward asked her to describe that harmony of the spheres. She replied with a question: “Have you ever heard a whale sing?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” she admitted. “But I’ve heard it described. It’s a strange cry like a combination of many voices, and in it you hear all together water, salt, bones, and flesh, a cry that’s at once a lament, a love song, and an invitation to play.”

“But the whales are alive,” Edward objected. “Heavenly bodies are inanimate.”

“But they still turn, don’t they? They attract and repel one another, they’re born and one day they will die.”

“I meant, they haven’t all been given the gift of life.”

“I know what you meant. But maybe our definition of life is too narrow.”

She thought about that for a moment, then went to the cupboard to fetch eight crystal goblets the elder Mrs. Love had brought them, horrified by the absence of proper stemware in the home of her son and daughter-in-law. She filled each one to a different height and made them chime by striking them gently with her fingernail.

“Imagine that instead of eight goblets there are millions,” she said. “And that they all chiming at once and that the song of each creates new harmonies in all the others.”

“Is that what you hear in heaven?”

“It’s what I hear in the earth.”

With mischievous pleasure, Garance gave her husband some writings of Pliny the Elder. Edward didn’t know what to do with them. Though obviously dictated by a genuine passion for knowledge, they were riddled with errors, misinterpretations, and fabrication; they seemed to him to belong in equal parts to science, which he revered, and literature, which he had learned early on to mistrust. Unable to condemn them as lies once and for all, he obviously couldn’t give them credit either, though he did discover in some passages a kind of truth that had little to do with the rigour and precision he generally prized above all else.