The Map of Time Collection, page 171
“Are you saying that we possess that gift?” Jane asked, surprised. “If so, why were we never aware of it?”
“Because you had nothing to compare yourselves with,” replied Dodgson, after pausing to reflect. “Would a man who could see through walls be aware of his gift if he lived in a world where all the buildings were made of glass?”
From that moment on, Dodgson dubbed the inhabitants of the Other Side “Observers.” He referred thereafter to “Observer Dodgson” or “Observer Queen Victoria” so as to differentiate between them and their twins who lived in the theater on Dodgson’s side of the street. And in the days that followed, the Theory of Theaters came into its own, for they soon discovered they could use it to explain any doubts they had. It also fitted in well with the mathematical theories Dodgson and Wells delighted in elaborating, as a pastime more than anything else, even though this obliged Dodgson to grapple with the terribly advanced mathematics of the future and Wells to dust off his knowledge of one of the subjects he had found most boring at university. Nonetheless, with cheerful diligence they began to trace intricate mathematical maps that aimed to chart, the way ordinary maps did, the various highways and byways a traveler could take to go from one world to another, inventing formulas allowing them to work out the coordinates of any corner of the universe from its opposite end, as if the entire cosmos could be reduced to a single, formidable equation.
Alas, the first empirical proof of the Theory of Theaters came about because of an incident that left Jane very distraught. It happened five months after their arrival. Wells, Jane, and Dodgson had gone on an excursion to the meadows at Godstow with the daughters of the college dean, the young Liddell sisters, as was their custom after the good weather started. That day in particular was a golden afternoon in late spring. The sun was baking hot, the flowing waters made the reeds on the riverbanks rustle, and the three little girls were playing hide-and-seek while the grown-ups laid the picnic things out on a rug on the grass, chatting about this and that. Newton meanwhile rushed about chasing butterflies and, when he had grown tired of that, sniffed around the picnic baskets, trying to filch a cold cut, until Jane half jokingly shouted, “Shoo, disappear, greedy dog!” Upon which, as if he hoped to earn the title of most obedient pet in the world, Newton literally vanished. One moment he was there, his four paws planted on a corner of the rug, and the next he was gone. All that was left of him was the imprint of his four paws in the cloth. Jane had the impression she had magicked him away. She screamed. There followed an absurd, desperate search of the surrounding area, until finally they had to accept what they had at first been reluctant to believe: Newton had indeed disappeared before their eyes. After consoling Jane as best they could and making up a convincing excuse for the little girls, they returned to Christ Church with the aim of rethinking what had happened. Aided by several pots of strongly brewed tea, they arrived at the only possible conclusion: the cronotemia virus worked. And whilst for Jane this was no great consolation, Wells felt a surge of satisfaction.
Their research had not been so misguided after all. Newton’s disappearance proved that those infected with the virus could indeed jump, but only between the stages of a single theater. Apparently, what they couldn’t do, to employ Dodgson’s metaphor, was cross the street to the theater opposite.
That was why Newton hadn’t jumped when they injected him with the serum on the Other Side, because there was no other stage to jump to in their theater. Perhaps the virus only made it possible to jump between parallel worlds that together formed a single theater, reflected Wells. Good heavens! If only he had known, he wouldn’t have regarded the lack of results on the Other Side as a failure. He would have pursued his investigations, he would have made the necessary modifications to the serum in order to obtain that movement between theaters, he would have . . . But there was no point worrying about that now. There was nothing he could do in that primitive world where they had only just discovered fire. His moment had passed. He had done what he could, and so had the other Dodgson, and now he knew they had both of them been partly right . . . His world would simply have to get by without him, he told himself. However, the discovery that both branches of research had been on the right track made him more hopeful that in the future one of their successors might be able to perfect one of them.
And so, amid astonishing discoveries and golden afternoons, the Wellses gradually adapted to their new existence. The most difficult part was undoubtedly learning to live with the cacophony caused by randomness, that constant, irritating murmur in their heads whenever they had to make a decision: in other words, at every waking moment. But they soon devised a few strategies and mental techniques to help them put up with that continuous drone, and when either of them felt they were flagging, they could always count on the other’s support, or that of Dodgson, who never stopped watching over them. Fortunately, as the days went by, they found it easier to ignore that agonizing sensation. To their surprise, one of the activities that most helped them to control it was photography. That laborious process, with its antiquated alchemy that impregnated them with mysterious odors, became an unexpected balm for their exhausted brains. It was not uncommon for students and teachers alike coming out of an afternoon lecture to bump into Professor Dodgson and his two new friends lugging the heavy apparatus from one place to another, planted opposite Christ Church Cathedral’s imposing spire or the little sweet shop nearby, operating the gleaming camera, grappling with its various joints and hinges, like hunters laying a complicated trap with which to capture a fleeting glimpse of beauty before it faded.
The Wellses took several remarkably skilled photographs of the environs, in the words of Dodgson, who would marvel over the appearance on the light-sensitive plates impregnated with silver nitrate of herds of deer, the rectilinear courtyards of the colleges, the illustrious silence of their libraries, or the beautiful tree-lined pathway along the Cherwell, perpetually overrun by groups of idling students. It was an inexhaustible source of pleasure for Dodgson to try to appreciate his ordinary everyday reality from those fresh angles that gave it a magical air. But more than the surrounding world, Dodgson liked photographing the dean’s adorable daughters: the charming Lorina, little Edith, and Alice, the prettiest and most intelligent of the three, his favorite, and the one he would end up marrying in the world the Wellses came from. The photograph sessions with the girls were always a joy. Dodgson would open his costume box and take snapshots of them dressed as Chinamen, Indians, princes, or beggar girls, sprawling on divans or acting out complicated scenes from mythology, always aware that he was capturing for eternity a brief instant, a moment in their lives never to be repeated, a memory they would always return to when they were grown women. The Wellses soon realized that, apart from them, Dodgson did not cultivate many adult friendships. He appeared to feel at ease only in the company of little girls, perhaps due to his shyness, his stammer, or his dreamy nature. Boys terrified him, for they invariably poked fun at him, and he could never get along with them, but with girls it was different. Girls were sweet natured and thoughtful, they possessed a fragility that moved him to tears, and they aroused in him feelings of affection and protectiveness. But, above all, he knew what tone to use with them. It was so obvious to him that he was amazed no one else could see it, that the other adults, whether parents or teachers, spoke to girls the same way they spoke to boys, as if they belonged to one and the same race, a race of little people, when this was so clearly not the case. Girls required different treatment, and to any adult who provided that, the girls would not hesitate to give them their affection, astonished and grateful at having won the support of an older person. Consequently, Dodgson never seemed so happy to the Wellses as when he was surrounded by the Liddell sisters. With them he could spend hours chatting about a hundred and one nonsensical things. One afternoon, for example, during a boating trip, Wells and Jane heard him explain to the girls that they couldn’t sign off a letter “millions of kisses,” because at twenty kisses a minute, and if they were generous and fixed such an imprecise quantity at two million, it would take twenty-three weeks of hard work to be true to their word. Like the Charles from their universe, Dodgson seemed allergic to exaggeration.
And whenever they could, Wells and Jane were delighted to join those outings, in which Dodgson proved the most charming playmate imaginable; he shared the girls’ innocent pleasures, was hopelessly infected by their childish woes, and above all he told them made-up stories, which drifted idly on the summer breeze like shimmering soap bubbles. He narrated them with such ease and enthusiasm that when he finished, the girls, oblivious to how tired they were, would invariably exclaim, “Tell us another!” For the Wellses, those afternoons filled with laughter and games became another perfect way of silencing the persistent clamor inside their heads.
Ah, those were happy times—who could deny it?—despite the numerous difficulties the couple came up against in their daily lives, in particular Jane, who faced a further obstacle to her adaptation to that new world: the sorry role women were relegated to in society. At first she could scarcely believe the things Dodgson told her, or what she saw with her own eyes, for she could never have imagined anything like it. For hundreds of years, the Observers on the Other Side had made no distinction between men’s and women’s minds. Naturally, the two sexes saw the world differently, but that didn’t imply superiority or inferiority. On this side, in contrast, the only thing expected of Jane was that she be the new biology professor’s charming wife, that she occasionally invite the other wives to tea at their rooms in Merton College, or, at the very most, that she organize a women’s reading circle. Understandably, at the outset Jane rebelled against inevitably being cast in an inferior role, convinced she would never be able to resign herself to it. She even went to speak in person to some of the deacons at the various colleges in an attempt to persuade them to let her join one of the science departments, if only as a simple assistant. However, after their initial shock at her unusual request, they fobbed her off with polite excuses. One of them, while accompanying her to the door with paternal concern, even remarked, “My dear girl, I understand that you feel lonely—it is common among women—but if you are so keen on science, perhaps you would like to draw pictures of animals?” And his words, which an indignant Jane later repeated to her husband and the young Dodgson, became their catchphrase: whenever Jane argued against one of Dodgson’s or Wells’s theories during the course of a golden afternoon, they would respond with a mocking smile: “My dear girl, perhaps you would like to go and draw pictures of animals?” But this was harmless banter, which always amused Jane, and the days they spent together seemed to be filled with their intermingled laughter. And yet, as summer wilts beneath the onset of autumn, so that radiant joy was doomed to fade.
Three years after the Wellses arrived in that world, Dodgson was ordained deacon. He had done everything in his power to delay that first step toward his inexorable future, which was none other than to become a priest a year later, given that ordination into the ranks of the Church was obligatory for any professor at Christ Church. Yet, in his heart of hearts, Dodgson considered himself a layman. Naturally, he believed in God, and even went to church twice on Sundays, but he wasn’t convinced that his God was the same silent deity who inhabited the cold, dark cathedral and whose fearful rage must be appeased by tedious, plaintive, never-ending rituals. His difference of opinion with Dean Liddell on that point fueled the reservations of Mrs. Liddell, who no longer approved of the burgeoning friendship between her three daughters and that strange professor and his eccentric friends, whose mysterious past accompanied them everywhere. Her pretexts for sabotaging their boating trips, which had become something of a tradition, grew more frequent and more blatant, and the helpless Dodgson realized how increasingly difficult it was for him to maintain his friendship with the three little girls, and in particular with Alice. Even so, he refused to believe that this could be the beginning of the end. And yet so it proved. The golden afternoons were almost over, and that summer of 1862 was to be the beautiful swan song of those happy times.
On the afternoon of July fourth, a rowing boat manned by a clergyman, a married couple, and three small girls glided down a tributary of the Thames on the way to the village of Godstow. The sky was such a glorious blue it seemed to color the whole world, the boat slid gently over the tremulous mirror of the water, while the landscape seemed to be slumbering, so intense was the stillness, disturbed only by the splash of oars and three childish voices imploring, in ever more imperious tones, “Tell us a story, Charles, please.” And when he considered it convenient, Dodgson, who had been pretending to be asleep simply to infuriate them, stretched his limbs slowly and decided to indulge them. Accompanied by the sleepy buzzing of insects, he started to tell them the story of a girl called Alice who fell down a rabbit hole, and ended up in a wonderful world where the only rule seemed to be if you can imagine it, then it could exist. “Is that one of your made-up stories, Charles?” Wells, who was rowing at the stern, inquired with a mischievous grin. “O-Of course, George. I am m-making it up as we go along,” Dodgson replied, winking at him. And all day long, as they made their way downstream, and in the meadow where they picnicked in the shade of a golden haystack, Dodgson held both the little girls and the Wellses spellbound with his tale. The couple would grin at each other whenever they recognized one of their own adventures through the filter of Dodgson’s imagination. Wells couldn’t have been provided with a better example of a man using his imagination without the need to inhale fairy dust. Yes, Dodgson’s imagination took wing with only a golden light and three enraptured girls to help him. Later on, when they headed back to drop the children off at the deacon’s residence, Alice, the real Alice, the ten-year-old girl for whom Dodgson had invented that tale, took his hand in hers, and, gazing with unusual solemnity into his eyes, she said, as if for the last time, “I would like you to write down Alice’s adventures for me, Charles.”
And if there was one man in the world incapable of refusing a little girl’s request, that man was Charles Dodgson. He stayed up all night consigning to the page the weird and wonderful images with which he had tried to hypnotize Alice that afternoon, as though hoping to capture her attention forever. A few days later, he went to deliver the fruits of his wakeful night to her: a bundle of folios covered in the black scrawls of his long, curvy handwriting and sprinkled with his own illustrations, but Mrs. Liddell was having none of it. She was so adamant that from then on his meetings with the girls became as fleeting as they were intense, and so tinged with guilt, that, when they were over, Dodgson invariably sank into a depression. Wells and Jane did their best to console him, assuring him that Alice would one day grow into a woman, and if they knew her as well as they thought, she wouldn’t give tuppence about her parents’ opinion. All he had to do was remain in Christ Church, close to the girl, and wait until she turned into the uncomplicated, passionate woman they knew she would become. He must wait. Wait until he could marry her.
However, being able to see Alice for only a few fleeting moments each day tormented Dodgson, and, after grappling with his secret pain for a year, Christmas 1863 seemed to give him the perfect pretext to present her with the manuscript he had written for her, provisionally entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. At the insistence of the girls, above all Alice, who threatened to stop eating until she was a hundred if they didn’t let her accept her present, the Liddells were obliged to relent, although there was nothing to prevent them from receiving the young professor with unimaginable coldness. But Dodgson would not let himself be deterred by such an inauspicious beginning. He had gone to the Liddells’ house with a definite aim, and he was determined to carry it through. And so, at some point during the afternoon, between pitiful stammers and nervous digressions, he posed the following question to the self-righteous Mr. Liddell and the horrified Mrs. Liddell: “Might it be p-possible, s-seven or eight years from now, when Alice is a woman, and assuming she reciprocates my feelings, for you to consider, er . . . a u-union between us?” Despite Dodgson’s good intentions and the genuineness of his feelings, the effect was the same as if he had collected a barrow of cow dung and emptied it over them. And so the Liddells, who dreamed of marrying their pretty daughters into the aristocracy, if possible to someone of royal descent, replied without even conferring: “Never.” It was clear that never before had they agreed so firmly about anything.
Everyone acknowledged that, of all the blunders Dodgson had made in his life, this was undoubtedly his greatest. After Dodgson’s outrageous proposal of marriage, Mrs. Liddell resolutely forbade any more communal boat trips, or indeed any meeting that didn’t take place under her strict surveillance. Even so, during the months that followed, Dodgson remained hopeful that things would go back to normal. With childlike naïveté, he was convinced their golden afternoons would return, that summer would survive the onset of autumn, and he clung to those ideas, continuing to impart his lectures as best he could, yet increasingly prey to resentment and apathy. And where five years before the Wellses had wondered what they would have done without their young friend, now it was Dodgson’s turn to wonder what would have become of him without his friends from the Other Side. Wells and Jane strove to watch over him and, to cheer him up, reminded him that in the world they came from his love for Alice had overcome far greater obstacles. However, Dodgson would listen with a rueful smile before saying, “My dear sprites, I fear that in this theater the play will end very differently for me.” Fortunately, his revision of the manuscript of Alice’s adventures, and his search for a publisher, kept him occupied for a time. At last, on July 4, 1865, the third anniversary of the golden afternoon on which it was invented, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland was published by Macmillan under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. On that same day, Alice Liddell received her copy. And Dodgson waited anxiously for a thank-you letter that never came.
