Ocean Sea Page 3

  “You must be Bartleboom, sir.”

  Bartleboom had really been expecting a wave. Or something of that kind. He looked up and saw a woman, wrapped in an elegant purple cloak.

  “Bartleboom, yes . . . Professor Ismael Bartleboom.”

  “Have you lost something?”

  Bartleboom realized that he was still bent over forward, a frozen contour of the optical instrument he had transformed himself into. He straightened up with all the ease he was capable of. Very little indeed.

  “No. I am working.”

  “Working?”

  “Yes, I am . . . I am engaged in research, you see, research . . .”

  “Ah.”

  “Scientific research, I mean to say . . .”

  “Scientific.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. The woman drew her purple cloak closer around her.

  “Shells, lichens, things of that kind?”

  “No. Waves.”

  Just like that: waves.

  “That is . . . you see there, where the water arrives . . . runs up the beach, then stops . . . there, precisely that point, where it stops . . . it really lasts no more than an instant, look there, there, for example, there . . . you see that it lasts only an instant, then it disappears, but if one were to succeed in suspending that instant . . . when the water stops, precisely that point, that curve . . . this is what I am studying. Where the water stops.”

  “And what is there to study?”

  “Well, it’s an important point . . . sometimes you hardly notice it, but if you think about, it something extraordinary happens at that point, something . . . extraordinary.”

  “Really?”

  Bartleboom leaned slightly closer to the woman. One would have thought that he had a secret to tell when he said, “That is where the sea ends.”

  The immense sea, the ocean sea, which runs infinitely beyond all sight, the huge omnipotent sea—there is a point where it ends, and an instant—the immense sea, the tiniest place and a split second. This was what Bartleboom wanted to say.

  The woman let her gaze run over the water that was slipping heedlessly to and fro across the sand. When she raised her eyes again to look at Bartleboom, they were smiling.

  “My name is Ann Deverià.”

  “Most honored.”

  “I, too, am staying at the Almayer Inn.”

  “This is splendid news.”

  As usual, the north wind was blowing. The pair of women’s shoes crossed what had been Bartleboom’s laboratory and moved a few steps away. Then they stopped. The woman turned.

  “Will you take tea with me this afternoon, sir?”

  Bartleboom had seen some things only at the theater.

  And at the theater they always answered:

  “It will be a pleasure.”

  “AN ENCYCLOPEDIA of limits?”

  “Yes . . . the full title is An Encyclopedia of the Limits to be found in Nature with a Supplement devoted to the Limits of the Human Faculties.”

  “And you are writing it . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “On your own.”

  “Yes.”

  “Milk?”

  Bartleboom always took his tea with lemon.

  “Yes, thank you . . . milk.”

  A cloud.

  Sugar.

  Teaspoon.

  Teaspoon stirring the tea.

  Teaspoon coming to rest.

  Teaspoon in saucer.

  Ann Deverià, sitting before him, listening.

  “Nature is possessed of a surprising perfection, and this is the result of a sum of limits. Nature is perfect because it is not infinite. If you understand the limits, you understand how the mechanism works. It is all a matter of understanding the limits. Take rivers, for example. A river may be long, very long indeed, but it cannot be infinite. If the system is to work, the river must end. And I study how long it can be before it must end. Five hundred thirty-six miles. That is one of the entries I have already written: Rivers. It took me a good while, as you can well understand, Madame.”

  Ann Deverià understood.

  “That is to say: the leaf of a tree, if you look at it carefully, is a very complex universe: but finite. The largest leaf is found in China: three feet nine inches broad, and more or less twice as long. Enormous, but not infinite. And there is an exact logic in this: a larger leaf could only grow on an immense tree, but the tallest tree, which grows in America, does not exceed two hundred fifty-eight feet, a considerable height, certainly, but entirely insufficient to support a number, even a limited one—because naturally it would be limited—of leaves larger than those found in China. Do you see the logic, Madame?”

  Ann Deverià saw the logic.

  “This is laborious research, and difficult, too, it cannot be denied, but it is important to understand. To describe. The last entry I wrote was Sunsets. You see, this thing about days ending is ingenious. It is an ingenious system. The days and then the nights. And then the days again. It would seem something to be expected, but there is genius in it. And at the point where Nature decides to set her own limits, the spectacle explodes. Sunsets. I studied them for weeks. It is not easy to understand a sunset. It has its own times, its dimensions, its colors. And since there is not one sunset, not one I say, that is identical to another, then the scientist must be able to discern the details and isolate the essence to the point where he may say ‘this is a sunset.’ Am I boring you, Madame?”

  Ann Deverià was not bored. That is, no more than usual.

  “And so now I have come to the sea. The sea. The sea ends, too, like everything else, but you see, here, too, it is a little like sunsets, the hard thing is to isolate the idea, I mean to say, to condense miles and miles of cliffs, shores, and beaches, into a single image, into a concept that is the end of the sea, something you may set down in a few lines, that may have a place in an encyclopedia, so that people, upon reading it, may understand that the sea ends, and how, independently of everything that may happen around it, independently of . . .”

  “Bartleboom . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Ask me why I am here.”

  Silence. Embarrassment.

  “I haven’t asked you, have I?”

  “Ask me now.”

  “Why are you here, Madame Deverià?”

  “To be cured.”

  More embarrassment, more silence. Bartleboom takes the cup, brings it to his lips. Empty. Forget it. He puts it down again.

  “To be cured of what?”

  “It is a strange malady. Adultery.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Adultery, Bartleboom. I have betrayed my husband. And my husband thinks that the sea air may cool the passions, and that the sight of the sea may stimulate the ethical sense, and that the solitude of the sea may induce me to forget my lover.”

  “Really?”

  “Really what?”

  “Did you really betray your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “A drop more tea?”

  PERCHED ON the last narrow ledge of the world, a stone’s throw from the end of the sea, that evening, too, the Almayer Inn let the darkness gradually silence the colors of its walls, and of the whole world and the entire ocean. So alone was it there, it seemed a thing forgotten. It was almost as if a procession of inns, of every kind and vintage, had passed by there one day, skirting the coast, when, out of tiredness, one had detached itself from the rest, and, as its traveling companions filed past, it decided to stop on that slight rise, yielding to its own weakness, bowing its head and waiting for the end. The Almayer Inn was like that. It had that beauty of which only the defeated are capable. And the clarity of frail things. And the perfect solitude of the lost.

  Plasson, the painter, had only recently returned, sopping wet, with his canvases and his paints, seated in the bow of the rowboat, propelled by a young lad with red hair.

  “Thank you, Dol. See you tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Monsie
ur Plasson.”

  How it was Plasson had not already died of pneumonia was a mystery. A man cannot stand for hours and hours in the north wind, with his feet soaking and the tide creeping up his trousers, without dying sooner or later.

  “First he has to finish his picture,” Dira had announced.

  “He will never finish it,” said Madame Deverià.

  “Then he’ll never die.”

  In room number 3, on the first floor, an oil lamp illuminated Professor Ismael Bartleboom at his ritual devotions, softly revealing their secret to the surrounding evening.

  My beloved,

  God knows how I miss, in this melancholy hour, the comfort of your presence and the balm of your smiles. My work fatigues me and the sea rebels against my stubborn attempts to understand it. I had not thought it could be so difficult to face. And I wander about, with my instruments and my notebooks, without finding the beginning of that which I seek, the access to any sort of answer. Where does the end of the sea begin? Or, indeed, what are we saying when we say sea? Do we mean the immense monster capable of devouring absolutely anything, or the wave foaming around our feet? The water you can hold in a cupped hand, or the abyss that none can see? Do we say everything with a single word, or with a single word do we conceal everything? I am here, a stone’s throw from the sea, and I cannot even understand where it is. The sea. The sea.

  Today I met a most beautiful woman. But be not jealous. I live only for you.

  Ismael A. Ismael Bartleboom

  Bartleboom wrote with a serene facility, without ever stopping and with a slowness that nothing could have disturbed. He liked to think that, one day, she would caress him the same way.

  In the half-light, with the long, slim fingers that had driven more than one man mad, Ann Deverià toyed with the pearls of her necklace—a rosary of desire—in the unconscious gesture she always made when sad. She watched the guttering flame of the oil lamp, glancing from time to time in the mirror, where the struggles of those desperate little glimmers of light sketched her face over and over. Leaning into those last little surges of light, she went over to the bed where, under the covers, a little girl slept all unaware of any other place; she was most beautiful. Ann Deverià looked at her, but with a look for which the word look is too strong, a marvelous look that is seeing without wondering about anything, seeing and no more, something like two things that touch each other—the eyes and the image—a look that does not take but receives, in the absolute silence of the mind, the only look that could really save us—innocent of any question, still not tainted by the vice of wanting to know—the only innocence that could prevent the hurt caused by external things when they enter the sphere of our sensibilities—to see—to feel—because it would be no more than a marvelous vis-à-vis, us and things, whereby our eyes receive the whole world—to receive—without questions, even without wonder—to receive—only—to receive—in our eyes—the world. A way of seeing known only to the eyes of the Madonnas, as, under the vaults of the churches, they watch the angel descend from skies of gold at the hour of the Annunciation.

  Darkness. Ann Deverià tightly embraces the little girl’s unclothed body, within the secret of her bed, plump with covers light as clouds. Her fingers run lightly across that incredible skin, and her lips search in the most hidden folds for the bland flavor of sleep. She moves slowly, Ann Deverià. A dance in slow motion, an adagio that loosens something in the head and between the legs and all over. There is no dance more precise than that, waltzing with sleep on the parquet of the night.

  The last light, in the last window, goes out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.

  Night over the Almayer Inn.

  Motionless night.

  BARTLEBOOM AWOKE TIRED and in a bad mood. For hours, in sleep, he had negotiated the purchase of Chartres cathedral with an Italian cardinal, and in the end had obtained a monastery in the vicinity of Assisi at the exorbitant price of sixteen thousand crowns plus a night with his cousin Dorothea and a quarter-share of the Almayer Inn. The deal, in addition, had been struck aboard a boat perilously at the mercy of the waves and commanded by a gentleman who claimed he was Madame Deverià’s husband and, laughing—laughing—admitted he knew nothing whatsoever about the sea. When he awoke, he was exhausted. He was not surprised to see, straddling the windowsill, the usual boy who, motionless, was looking at the sea. But he was distinctly surprised to hear him say, without even turning around, “Me, I would have told him what to do with his monastery.”

  Bartleboom got out of bed and, without a word, took the boy by the arm, dragged him down from the windowsill, then out the door, and finally downstairs, shouting, “Miss Dira!” as he rolled down the stairs to arrive finally on the ground floor where—“MISS DIRA!”—he finally found what he was looking for, that is, the reception desk—if we can call it that—and, in short, he arrived, clutching the boy close to him all the while, in the presence of Miss Dira—ten years old, not a year more—where he stopped, finally, with a proud demeanor only partly undermined by the human frailty of his yellow nightshirt, and more seriously undermined by the combination of that garment with a woolen nightcap, open mesh knit.

  Dira looked up from her accounts. The two—Bartleboom and the boy—were standing at attention before her. They spoke one after the other, as if they had rehearsed their parts.

  “This boy reads your dreams.”

  “This man talks in his sleep.”

  Dira lowered her gaze to her accounts once more. She did not even raise her voice.

  “Scat.”

  They scatted.

  CHAPTER 6

  BECAUSE BARON CAREWALL had never seen the sea. His lands were land: stones, hills, marshes, fields, crags, mountains, woods, glades. Land. There was no sea.

  For him the sea was an idea. Or, more correctly, an itinerary of the imagination. It was something born in the Red Sea—divided in two by the hand of God—then amplified by the thought of the Deluge, in which it was lost, to be found later in the bulging outline of an Ark and immediately connected to the thought of whales—never seen but often imagined—and thence it streamed back, fairly clear once more, into the few stories that had reached his ears of monstrous fish and dragons and submerged cities, in a crescendo of fantastic splendor that abruptly shriveled up into the harsh features of one of his forebears—framed and eternal in the gallery—who was said to have been a freebooter with Vasco da Gama: in his subtly wicked eyes, the thought of the sea took a sinister turn, caromed off some uncertain chronicles of piratical hyperbole, got entangled in a quotation from Saint Augustine according to which the ocean was the home of the devil, turned back to a name—Thessala—that was perhaps a wrecked ship or a wet-nurse who used to spin yarns of ships and wars, nearly surfaced in the redolence of certain cloths that had arrived there from distant lands, and finally reemerged in the eyes of a woman from overseas, encountered many years before and never seen since, to come to a halt, at the end of this circumnavigation of the mind, in the fragrance of a fruit that, they had told him, grew only along the seashore of the southern lands: and if you ate it you tasted the flavor of the sun. Since Baron Carewall had never seen it, the sea journeyed in his mind like a stowaway aboard a sailing ship moored in port with sails furled: inoffensive and superfluous.

  It could have remained there forever. But, in an instant, it was aroused by the words of a man dressed in black called Atterdel, the verdict of an implacable man of science called in to make a miracle.

  “I will save your daughter, sir. And I will do it with the sea.”

  In THE SEA. It was hard to believe. The polluted and putrid sea, receptacle of horrors, and anthropophagous monster of the abyss—ancient and pagan—ever feared and now, suddenly

  they invite you, as if for a walk, they order you, because it is a cure, they push you with implacable courtesy

  i
nto the sea. It is a fashionable cure, by now. A sea preferably cold, very salty, and choppy, because the dreadful content of the waves is an integral part of the cure, to be overcome technically and dominated morally, in a fearful challenge that is, if you think about it, fearful. And all in the certainty—let’s say the conviction—that the great womb of the sea may sunder the outer shell of the malady, reactivate the pathways of life, increase the redeeming secretions of the central and peripheral glands

  the ideal liniment for the hydrophobic, the melancholy, the impotent, the anemic, the lonely, the wicked, the envious,

  and the mad. Like the madman they took to Brixton, under the impermeable gaze of doctors and scientists, and forcibly immersed in the gelid water, shaken violently by the waves, and then dragged out again and, reactions and counter reactions having been measured, again immersed, forcibly, let it be well understood,

  eight degrees centigrade, his head under the water, he resurfacing like a scream and the brute force with which he frees himself of nurses and various personnel, excellent swimmers all, but this is absolutely useless in the face of the blind frenzy of the animal, who flees—flees—running through the water, nude, and screaming out the frenzy of that unbearable anguish, the shame, the terror. The entire beach frozen by the worrying disturbance, while that animal runs and runs, and the women, from far off, avert their gaze, although certainly they would like to see, and how they would like to see, the beast and his running, and let’s face it, his nudity, yes his nudity, his rambling nudity stumbling blindly in the sea, even beautiful in that gray light, of a beauty that perforates years of good manners and boarding schools and blushes to go straight where it has to go, running along the nerve paths of timid women who, in the secrecy of enormous immaculate skirts