Professor Cardamomo finally admitted that Malena would not speak to him again.
For seven years, Cardamomo
had captivated audiences around the world with his underwater streaming
of Him: An Odyssey through the depths of the sea, with celebrity guests.
He had achieved the maximum rating, 22 million people, at the raw octopus dinner with the royal family and the pop idol Godzilla.
But he had never ceased to divulge the mysteries and secrets of the sea, with a technology and observation capacity that his predecessor, Jacques Cousteau, would have envied.
Now everything made no sense because Malena was missing.
The seven years of the romance had coincided with those of her professional success.
Malena, meanwhile, had revealed herself to be a gambling addict, particularly addicted to pools.
When Professor Cardamom considered her from a distance, with the epistemological precision of his trips through the underwater platform, he could not explain to himself
how he maintained a relationship with a woman whose interests were directed towards the purchase of a paper number
, betting on infinitesimal probabilities, in exchange for nothing, without applying merit or talent.
Not even chance, which was not that depressing banality.
But when
Malena finally left him, and learned that he was living with a pool player
, she could only long for his warmth, his relief, the rhythm of his voice, the unpredictability of his movements alone.
All that was now part of the past: also her
streaming
program De ella.
For a year, Malena had insisted that he abandon the project:
she no longer wanted to share the submarine with strangers
.
But when Professor Cardamom decided to take a year off from her to spend it with her, the coronavirus pandemic arrived.
Malena argued that they were at risk of contagion on the submarine, due to the number of people who had visited it.
Professor Cardamomo replied that this deduction was unfounded from any point of view:
the probability of the two of them dying from coronavirus was even lower than that of Malena winning the pool
;
and nowhere would they be safer than in the submarine in the depths of the sea.
But Malena did not want to listen to reasons.
She emerged to the surface, and Professor Cardamom, exasperated, did not follow her.
The next thing Cardamomo knew was that Malena lived next to a betting shop, with the owner, in the Belgrano neighborhood.
Apparently, she hadn't even won the game.
Neither does Cardamom.
Maybe she had been lucky in love?
That was a conclusion for which all of her navigational and research instruments were useless, and for which she completely lacked observational ability.
On the contrary, he dedicated himself with a passion even unknown to him to his scientific vocation.
In the event of having renounced broadcasting, his professional substance acquired an unusual power.
He alternated trips to unexplored corners with individual diving to uninhabited shores.
He woke up talking to the sea, muttering, murmuring.
He understood underwater time, different from terrestrial time.
The rhythm and sensoriality, not only instinctive but directional, as if speaking about the meaning of life, about the creatures of the shadows.
All beings possessed a consciousness.
The expansion of meaning was much greater than its absence.
Even the rocks and corals seemed to emit some kind of sigh, to bet on a number that would never come up
, to share a kind of frustration.
Also relief or farewell.
But the discovery that struck him as if Malena had returned was the ability to communicate with the sea as a living entity.
From a series of microscopic verifications, the routine of his diving and twilight ascension on different virgin beaches, contact with native women of the southern 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 Cardamom's certain thoughts, which could have been summed up in words, not precisely 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 rose or fell 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 in peace.
The sea was a living being.
How had no one discovered it before?
Cardamomo took an astronaut leap in the humidity of the shore.
He felt a youth that had not accompanied him even when he was young.
The energy of a complete man.
Before communicating the scoop to the human race - more fearsome than any natural catastrophe - Cardamom made a pact with the sea, quite possibly a version of the one made by Noah after the Flood: no more tsunamis.
Cardamom had understood the maritime outpourings, and the sea, in turn, in its modality, corresponded to the reason of that single man.
It was an agreement.
The rainbow didn't 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
.
He sent him a WhatsApp audio, also an
attachment
with the documentation.
The response came sooner than expected.
Cardamomo woke up with a brief audio from Malena: yes, what she said was probably true.
AND?
What was the great achievement?
How did the conditions of humanity change, every day, if the sea was a living being or not?
Cardamom couldn't believe it.
For a moment, he distrusted his own epiphany.
But a week later, he found out from the news: the pool player announced in a massive press conference that the sea was a living being.
The pool player's last name was associated with glory, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he became richer in no time than he had ever imagined.
Ipso facto the poolman abandoned Malena: he appeared on the front page with the young princess who had dined on the submarine in the most viewed of the broadcasts.
A huge beauty, whether the maritime and terrestrial ones are considered.
Why did you tell him? Cardamomo asked Malena in a phone call, before she deliberately disappeared.
“I didn't think it was that important,” she replied.