Adrien Bosc - Constellation

X …, December 26. — The operator manning the wireless telegraph station on Sable Island captured a message fragment transmitted on Sunday night at such and such time by the … The message said essentially, “Something is wrong,” but it gave no indication of the plane’s position at the time, and due to the extreme weather conditions and consequent interference, the operator was unable to understand anything more or engage in further communication .

The message was transmitted on a wavelength of 625 meters; given the strength of the signal, the operator believed the plane to be within a radius of 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, of Sable Island .

The magic scroll seems like the kind of artefact that you find in fairy tales as the object of a quest. It emerged from the beyond, this fragment of carved wood, bearing a message that has to be deciphered. And now, the Tale of the Guadagnini Scroll , where the head of a violin passes from hand to hand, from the Azores, to Brazil, to a television studio at the Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, on a broadcast called Le Grand Échiquier , to be identified by the last violin maker to have varnished the instrument thirty-three years earlier. Varnish, ultimate secret, apothecary’s concoction, which Marcel Vatelot prepared in private on Sundays, away from prying eyes, according to a recipe that he gave his son only on his deathbed. Antonio Stradivari, for his part, took his varnish formula to the grave.

That leaves a mystery. What happened to Ginette Neveu’s famous Stradivarius, a violin made in 1730 by Omobono Stradivari, son of the Cremona master? That old violin in the hands of an Azorean fisherman, and which the investigators, blinded by the gold and tortoiseshell of the bow, thought was unnecessary to recover, so “old” did it seem, was it Ginette Neveu’s famous Stradivarius? Lévis-Mirepoix, the Air France inspector, had ingenuously told the Vatelots, “Oh, you know, it looked so old!” As the days passed, the mystery surrounding the famous violin thickened. Because of the instrument’s exorbitant price, it seemed unthinkable not to look into it. The insurance company did just that. Three days later, two experts, accompanied by an interpreter, went to São Miguel Island, to the village of Algarvia, to look for the lost violin. The investigators followed Lévis-Mirepoix’s directions, questioned the fisherman. He claimed he didn’t remember, that he had never owned a violin like that. After searching the village from top to bottom, combing the slopes of Mount Redondo, the experts went away empty-handed. The mystery turned into a legend. In the Azores, the old people tell the story that, in the 1950s, a madman went around scraping at the strings of a violin, the hamlet’s secret, they embroider the story constantly, add details, he disappeared, he sold the instrument, which ended up in the United States, a rich trader bought it for a heap of gold. No one really knows.

On November 6, 2013, at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, the consignment company Artemisia puts up for auction Marcel Cerdan’s suitcase, found on the slopes of the mountain. The sale excites a small circle of specialist collectors. The rectangular suitcase of cream-colored leather, worn and threadbare but intact, bears the initials “E.C.” under a crown, representing, by the catalog’s account, a symbol of the love between Cerdan and Piaf. They supposedly discovered the suitcase in a secondhand store, one day when they were wandering in New York, and were surprised to find the singer’s first name and the boxer’s last together, which they hoped someday to unite. A scuffed label from the Cunard White Star shipping line was plastered to the back of the suitcase, a memento of a transatlantic crossing in 1946. On the fiftieth anniversary of Édith Piaf’s death, the media made much of this story, tagging it “the suitcase of love.” Bidding was expected to ramp up quickly above the estimate of five thousand to ten thousand euros. Only the reporter for L’Équipe noticed that the dates were wrong, the two lovers met in 1946 but didn’t start their idyll until January 1948, the crossing never happened. It’s a fake. The investigative report reveals the hoax on the morning of the sale, the suitcase finds no taker.

I’d made a note, on the plane that carried me to Lisbon, of a passage from a poem by Blaise Cendrars, “Fernando de Noronha”:

From afar it appears a cathedral sunk of old

Up close

The island’s colors are so intense that its green grass is gold

I found this a faithful description of the Azores, the thrusting upward of volcanic rocks, thousand-year-old stalagmites, whose quirky shapes form the reefs’ architecture. And this green, which is everywhere, flamboyant, the soil fertile with lava and the landscapes stamped with motifs from Douanier Rousseau, virgin forests and a setting sun. Yet the Azores in no way resemble the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, where the tropical green drops to the turquoise blue of the lagoons. Twenty-one islands, scattered more than three hundred miles from Recife. In the investigation report of the Paris-Rio crash, a surprising link surfaced. Aircraft AF447 took off from Antônio Carlos Jobim Airport in Rio de Janeiro on the evening of May 31, 2009. At 2:14 a.m. on June 1, the plane disappeared off the radar. The Brazilian authorities organized an immediate search, but the first bodies were not pulled from the water until five days later. The aircraft, lying on the ocean floor at a depth of twelve thousand feet, could not be found. The first human remains were repatriated from the airport at Fernando de Noronha. The unknown crash site and the depth of the ocean slowed search efforts. Only in April 2011 was AF447 found. On May 16, the precious black boxes were recovered. The bodies were transported to the island for DNA and dental-record identification, 12 crew members and 216 passengers, including Silvio Barbato, conductor of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra in Rio. On June 16, the vessel Île de Sein , responsible for body recovery in the Atlantic, landed at the port of Bayonne carrying 104 French victims, who were later transferred to the Institut Médico-Légal in Paris.

On September 28, 1915, during the French offensive in Champagne, Corporal Blaise Cendrars loses his right arm. During a feverish night of writing on September 1, 1916, he recovers his inspiration, a text that will become The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame . Under the sign of the constellation Orion, the phantom limb ascends to the sky, where, as his muse, it inspires him with the elastic verse of modern times, and the poet of the left hand is born. Orion, the blind giant, betrayed by Oenopion, is guided eastward by the child Cedalion on his shoulders in search of the sun’s rays, which the oracle has said would heal him. His death from the sting of Artemis’s scorpion raises him to the heavens. Scorpio and Orion side by side as constellations. Blaise transposes onto the Greek myth the personal myth of his sidereal hand. Torn from him, cast into the muddy morass of the paths of glory, it joins the nebulae of Orion like the five fingers of the hand. Enchantment, assumption of a writing hand that joins with Betelgeuse, the major star of the astral theme sparkles.

All during the war, I saw Orion over the parapet

When the Zeppelins came to bombard Paris they always came from Orion