Professor Cardamomo finally admitted that Malena would no longer speak to him. For seven years, Cardamom he had captivated audiences around the world with his underwater streaming: an odyssey through the depths of the sea, with famous guests. The maximum approval rating, 22 million people, was reached during the raw octopus dinner with the royal family and pop idol Godzilla.
But he had never stopped divulging the mysteries and secrets of the sea, with a technology and observation capacity that his predecessor, Jacques Cousteau, would have envied.
Now everything no longer made sense because Malena was missing. The seven years of their love affair had coincided with those of her professional success. Malena, meanwhile, had revealed herself to be a gambling addict, particularly addicted to billiards.
When Professor Cardamomo thought about it from afar, with the epistemological precision of his travels along the underwater platform, he couldn’t explain it. how he maintained a relationship with a woman whose interests were directed at purchasing a card number, betting on infinitesimal odds, in exchange for nothing, without applying merit or talent. Not even the case, that it wasn’t that depressing banality.
But when Malena eventually left him and discovered he was living with a billiards player, he could only long for his warmth, his relief, the rhythm of his voice, the unpredictability of his movements. All this was now part of the past: even his program streaming.
For a year Malena had been insisting that he abandon the project: I no longer wanted to share the submarine with strangers. But when Professor Cardamomo decided to take a year off to spend with her, the coronavirus pandemic arrived.
Malena argued that there was a risk of contagion on board the submarine due to the number of people who had visited it. Professor Cardamomo replied that this inference was unfounded from every point of view: The probability that the two would die from coronavirus was even lower than that of Malena winning the group.; and nowhere would they be safer than in the submarine in the depths of the sea.
But Malena didn’t want to listen to reason. She rose to the surface and Professor Cardamom, exasperated, did not follow her.
Cardamomo later learned that Malena lived next to a betting shop, with the owner, in the Belgrano neighborhood. He apparently hadn’t even won the game. Not even cardamom. Maybe she had been lucky in love? This was a conclusion for which all his navigational and search tools were useless and for which he completely lacked the power of observation.
On the contrary, he dedicated himself with a passion unknown to him to his scientific vocation. After giving up broadcasting, his professional substance acquired an unusual strength. He alternates trips to unexplored corners with individual dives to uninhabited shores. I woke up talking to the sea, mumbling, murmuring.
It included underwater time, which was different from land time. The rhythm and sensoriality, not only instinctive but directional, as if they spoke of the meaning of life, of the creatures of the shadow. All beings possessed consciousness. The expansion of meaning has been far greater than its absence. Even the rocks and corals seemed to let out a sort of sigh, betting on a number that would never come up., sharing a sort of frustration. Even relief or goodbye.
But the discovery that struck him as if Malena had returned was the ability to communicate with the sea as a living entity.
On the basis of a series of microscopic tests, of the routine of his dives and twilight ascents on various virgin beaches, of contact with indigenous women of the South Seas – and in the vortex of a decisive element of intuition -, Professor Cardamomo found himself one day maintaining a certain idea of dialogue with the sea. There was an answer.
To certain of Cardamomo’s thoughts, which could be summed up in words that were not precise but close enough to what it would be like to decode a guttural language, the sea responded with some kind of particular movement.
The waves increased or decreased in volume. The center curled, or the break approached Cardamom’s bare feet like a pet. He was a monster in a state of grace: an alien at peace. The sea was a living being. How come no one had discovered this before?
Cardamomo made an astronaut’s leap into the humidity of the shore. He felt like a youth that had not accompanied him even when he was young. The energy of a complete man. Before communicating the scoop to mankind – more fearsome than any natural catastrophe – Cardamom made a pact with the sea, most likely a version of the one made by Noah after the flood: no more tsunamis.
Cardamomo had understood the maritime effluxes, and the sea, in turn, in its modality, corresponded to the reason of that one man. It was an agreement. The rainbow did not come out. But Cardamomo received another inspiration: with this new paradigm, before winning the Nobel Prize and changing the history of humanity and things, he could recover Malena.
He would turn not only to his talent, but to the opportunity. Cardamom had won the universal lottery. She sent him a WhatsApp audio, also to attachment with documentation.
The response came sooner than expected. Cardamom woke up to a short audio from Malena: yes, what she said was probably true. AND? What was the big achievement? How did the conditions of humanity change every day, whether the sea was a living being or not?
Cardamom couldn’t believe it. For a moment he was wary of his own epiphany. But a week later, he learned it from the news: the billiard player announced at a massive press conference that the sea was a living being.
The billiard player’s surname was associated with glory, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and in a very short time he became richer than he had ever imagined.
Ipso facto the poolman abandoned Malena: he appeared on the front page together with the young princess who had dined on the submarine in the most watched programme. An enormous beauty, both maritime and terrestrial.
Why did you tell her?, Cardamomo asked Malena in a phone call, before she deliberately disappeared. “I didn’t think it was that important,” she replied.
Source: Clarin
