Pedro and the dense silence of the fishes

His name was Simon, the son and grandson of fishermen from Bethsaida. He himself was a fisherman in Capernaum. This beautiful Portuguese word – which today means ‘warehouse’ and ‘chaos’ – was the name of a village in those days. A particularly anthropomorphic God approached the boat, greeted the fisherman and asked him to get rid of that name and replace it with a patronymic of his own making. He ordered him to leave the Lake of Genesaret. He ordered him to leave the cove. He ordered him to let down his nets. He gave him a name – Peter.

The suddenness and strangeness of this baptism began to cloud and disturb the acoustic environment in which Simon had been immersed until then. These new syllables, to whose sounds he would now have to respond, the expulsion and burial of the old syllables that had named him, the repression of emotions and the abandonment of the little fables that had gradually become associated with these sounds during his childhood, were sometimes betrayed by certain involuntary and unexpected behaviors: a dog barking, crockery breaking, the sea rising, a thrush, a nightingale or a swallow singing, would suddenly make him burst into tears.

According to Cneius Mammeius, Peter once confided to Judas that the only regret he had regarding his former occupation was not the boat, nor the cove, nor the water, nor the nets, nor the intense smell, nor the light that remains trapped in the scales of the fish when they die in that kind of fright: Peter confided that what he missed about the fish was the silence. The silence of the fish when they die, the silence during the day, the silence at dusk, the silence during the night's work, the silence at dawn when the boat returns to shore and the night slowly fades from the sky, along with the freshness, the stars and the fear.

One night in early April of the year 30, in Jerusalem, in the courtyard of the High Priest Annas, father-in-law of Caiaphas, it was very cold. Servants and guards were sitting around. They were stretching out their hands toward the fire. Peter sat among them, also rubbing his hands near the brazier, warming his shivering body. A woman approached. He thought he recognized the features of her face in the incandescent glow emanating from the flames. In the courtyard, the day was dawning in that late winter and damp mist. A rooster suddenly crowed. Peter was startled by the sound, which immediately revealed something that Jesus of Nazareth had said to him—or at least something that Peter suddenly remembered him saying. He walked away from the fire, from the woman, from the guards, to the portico of the courtyard of the high priest, and at the door, under the vault, he burst into tears. They were bitter tears. Tears that the evangelist Matthew calls bitter.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Peter says to the woman in the hall. He repeats: Nescio quid dicis (I don’t know what you’re saying). The woman pulls back her hood in the cold April night. She says: “Your words betray you.” ( Tua loquela manifestum te facit .) I don’t know what the words manifest, he repeats. They are his tears. He repeats: This is my life. Nescio quid dicis . I don’t know what you’re saying. I don’t know what I’m saying, but everything is manifest.

I don't know what you are saying, but the day dawns. I don't know what the language makes manifest, but for the second time the cock begins to raise the hoarse and terrible song that manifests the day. Nature barks the dawn in the form of a cock: latrans gallus . Under the portico, in what remains of the night, flevit amare . He wept bitterly. Amare , a verb meaning to love, can also be an adverb meaning 'bitterly'. No one knows, while speaking, what he says.

Jorge Luis Borges used to quote a verse that Boileau had translated from Virgil: le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi . In fact, it is the verse from Horace that precedes the carpe diem of Ode XI – dum loquimur, fugerit invidia aetas – and in it Borges evokes the river that is reflected in Heraclitus' eyes as he crosses it. The man's eyes have changed less than the water that passes by. They are both equally dirty. No one sees the river in which he bathed before he existed.

In Luke, the scene of denial is inevitably more Greek than in the other evangelists: a circle of guards and servants, all seated in the middle of the courtyard around the fire. Peter tries to enter the circle that recalls scenes from the Iliad and tries to warm his body in the contiguous solidarity of men, rather than in the heat rising from the brazier of that April dawn in the year 30. But Luke goes a little further: he merges both scenes, that of denial and that of tears. He piles one on top of the other like two sediments in the same geological layer: Et continuo adhuc illo loquente cantavit gallus (And at that moment, while he was still speaking, a cock crowed.)

From a loquimur … The cock’s crow is a “stumbling block” at the heart of the acoustic experience of language that Peter stumbles upon, as indeed it does with his name. The harsh crow that announces the dawn plunges him into another level of himself: the level of Jesus, the level of Peter, the level before Peter (the level of Simon), the level before Simon. “It is not only your face, or the features of your face, or your body that betray you,” said the servant, “but your language that betrays you.” The Greek text says: “Your lalia makes you visible.” The Latin text says: “Your loquela makes you manifest.”

Within the acoustics that betray him, deeper than the very name he betrays (Jesus), deeper than the very name he betrayed (Simon), resides the small portion of acoustics that language cultivates, which suddenly refers to the immense bark of nature and to the narrowest stretch of animal song from which human language has drawn its small vessel of particular sounds.

In the servant's ears, the language betrays Peter in at least three different ways: through the accent, through the typically Galilean features, through the change in voice due to Peter's fear at the questions being asked. Peter's fear, captured by the rooster's crow, constitutes a harsh acoustic shock that catches in its net a fish, older than the fisherman himself, a face always older than the light, and melts them into tears.

Worn sandals, bitter tears under the portico and an upside-down cross are the precious heritage of Peter's successor and of whoever loves the silence of fish.