Читать книгу Silk - Alessandro Baricco - Страница 16

10.

BALDABIOU knew all these stories. In particular he knew a legend that turned up repeatedly in the accounts of those who had been there. They said that that island produced the most beautiful silk in the world. It had been doing so for more than a thousand years, following rites and secrets that had achieved a mystic precision. What Baldabiou thought was that it was not a legend but the pure and simple truth. Once, he had held between his fingers a veil woven of Japanese silk thread. It was like holding between his fingers nothingness. So when everything seemed to be going to hell because of the pebrine and the infected eggs, what he thought was:

‘That island is full of silkworms. And an island that no Chinese merchant or English insurer has managed to get to for two hundred years is an island that no infection will ever reach.’

He didn’t confine himself to thinking this: he said it to all the silk producers of Lavilledieu, after calling them together at Verdun’s café. None of them had ever heard talk of Japan.

‘We should cross the whole world to buy healthy eggs in a place where when they see a foreigner they hang him?’

‘Hanged him,’ Baldabiou clarified.

They didn’t know what to think. An objection occurred to some.

‘There must be a reason that no one in the world has thought of going there to buy eggs.’

Baldabiou could bluff by reminding them that in the rest of the world there was no Baldabiou. But he preferred to say things as they were.

‘The Japanese are resigned to selling their silk. But the eggs, no. They hold on to them tightly. And if you try to carry them off that island, what you do is a crime.’

The silk producers of Lavilledieu were – some more, some less – gentlemen, and would never have thought of breaking the law in their own country. The theory of doing so on the other side of the world, however, seemed to them eminently sensible.