Ocean Sea Read online

  women. The sea suddenly seemed to have been waiting for them forever. To listen to the doctors, it had been there, for millennia, patiently perfecting itself, with the sole and precise intention of offering itself as a miraculous unguent for their afflictions of body and soul. Just as, while sipping tea in impeccable drawing rooms, impeccable doctors—weighing their words well in order to explain with paradoxical courtesy—would tell impeccable husbands and fathers over and over that the disgust for the sea, and the shock, and the terror, was in reality a seraphic cure for sterility, anorexia, nervous exhaustion, menopause, overexcitement, anxiety, and insomnia. An ideal experience inasmuch as it was a remedy for the ferments of youth and a preparation for wifely duties. A solemn baptism for young ladies become women. So that, if we wish to forget, for a moment, the madman in the sea at Brixton

  (the madman carried on running, but out to sea, until he was lost to view, a scientific exhibit that had eluded the statistics of the medical school to consign itself spontaneously to the belly of the ocean sea)

  if we wish to forget him

  (digested by the great aquatic intestine and never returned to the beach, never spewed back into the world, as one might have expected, reduced to a shapeless, bluish bladder)

  we could think of a woman—of a woman—respected, loved, mother, woman. For whatever reason—illness—brought to a sea that she would otherwise never have seen and that is now the wavering needle of her cure, an immeasurable index, in truth, which she contemplates but does not understand. Her hair hangs loose and she is barefoot, and this is not a mere detail, it is absurd, along with that little white tunic and the trousers that leave her ankles exposed, you could imagine her slim hips, it is absurd, only her boudoir has seen her like this, and yet, like that, there she is on an enormous beach, where there is none of the viscous, stagnant air of the bridal bed, but the gusty sea breeze bearing the edict of a wild freedom removed, forgotten, oppressed, debased for a whole lifetime as mother, wife, beloved woman. And it is clear: she cannot not feel it. That emptiness all around, with no walls or closed doors, and in front of her, alone, a boundless ex citing mirror of water, that alone would already have been a feast for the senses, an orgy of the nerves, and everything is yet to happen, the bite of the gelid water, the fear, the liquid embrace of the sea, the shock on the skin, the heart in the mouth . . .

  She is accompanied toward the water. Over her face there falls a sublime concealment, a silken mask.

  On the other hand, no one ever came to claim the corpse of the madman of Brixton. This has to be said. The doctors were experimenting, this must be understood. Some unbelievable couples were walking around, the patient and his doctor, delicate invalids of exquisite elegance, devoured by a disease of divine slowness, and doctors like rats in a cellar, seeking clues, evidence, numbers, and figures: scrutinizing the movements of the disease in its bewildered flight from the ambush of a paradoxical cure. They were drinking the sea water, things had gone that far, the water that until the day before had been horror and disgust, and the privilege of a forlorn and barbarous humanity, skin burned by the sun, humiliating foulness. Now they were sipping it, those same divine invalids who walked along the water’s edge imperceptibly dragging one leg, in an extraordinary simulation of a noble lameness that might exempt them from the everyday commonplace whereby one foot is to be placed in front of the other. Everything was the cure. Some found a wife, others wrote poems, it was the same world as ever—repugnant, if you think about it—that had suddenly been transferred, for wholly medical purposes, to the edge of an abyss abhorred for centuries and now chosen, out of choice and in the cause of science, as the promenade of suffering.

  The wave bath, the doctors called it. There was even a machine, really, a kind of patented sedan chair for getting into the sea, it was for the ladies, obviously, ladies and young ladies, to protect them from indiscreet eyes. They would board the sedan chair, closed on all sides by curtains in muted colors, and then they would be carried into the sea, for a few yards’ distance, and there, with the sedan chair almost touching the water, they would step down and take the bath, as if it were a medicine, almost invisible behind their curtains, curtains in the wind, sedan chairs like floating tabernacles, curtains like the vestments of a ceremony inexplicably lost on the water; from the beach it was a sight to be seen. The wave bath.

  Only science can do certain things, this is the truth. To sweep away centuries of disgust—the horrendous sea womb of corruption and death—and invent that idyll that little by little spreads to all the beaches of the

  world. Healing like

  love. And now this: one day on the beach at Depper a wave washed up a boat, ruined, little more than a wreck. And there they were, those who had been seduced by illness, scattered along the interminable beach, each one immersed in his marine coitus, elegant traceries on the sand as far as the eye could see, each one in his own bubble of emotion, lust, and fear. Regardless of the science that had called them there, each one descended from his heaven to pace slowly toward the wreck that hesitated to run aground in the sand, like a messenger fearful of arriving. They came closer. They pulled it up onto the sand. And they saw. Laid out on the bottom of the boat, with gaze upturned and arm outstretched to proffer something that was there no longer, they saw:

  a saint. It was made of wood, the statue. Colored. The mantle fell as far as the feet, a wound ran across the throat, but the face, the face knew nothing about this and it reposed, meek, on a bed of divine serenity. Nothing else in the boat, only the saint. Alone. And everybody instinctively raised his eyes, for a moment, to scan the surface of the ocean for the outline of a church, an understandable idea but also an irrational one, there were no churches, there were no crosses, there were no paths, the sea is trackless, the sea is without explanations.

  The gaze of dozens of invalids, and beautiful, distant, consumptive women, the ratlike doctors, assistants, and valets, old peeping Toms, the curious, fishermen, young girls—and a saint. Bewildered, all of them and him. Suspended.

  On the beach at Depper, one day.

  No one ever understood.

  Ever.

  “YOU WILL TAKE HER to Daschenbach, sir, it is an ideal beach for the wave bath. Three days. One immersion in the morning and one in the afternoon. Ask for Dr. Taverner, he will procure you all that is necessary. This is a letter of introduction for him. Take it.”

  The Baron took the letter without even looking at it.

  “She will die of it,” he said.

  “It is possible. But highly improbable.”

  Only great doctors can be so cynically precise.

  Atterdel was the greatest.

  “Let me put it this way, my lord: you can keep that little girl in here for years, to walk on white carpets and sleep among flying men. But one day an emotion you cannot foresee will carry her off. Amen. Or you can accept the risk, follow my orders, and trust in God. The sea will give you back your daughter. Dead, perhaps. But if alive, then really alive.”

  Cynically precise.

  The Baron had remained motionless, with the letter in his hand, halfway between him and the doctor dressed in black.

  “You have no children, sir.”

  “That is a fact of no importance.”

  “But nevertheless you have no children.”

  He looked at the letter and slowly placed it on the table.

  “Elisewin shall remain here.”

  A moment of silence, but only a moment.

  “Not on your life.”

  This was Father Pluche. In reality the phrase that had set out from his brain was more complex and closer to something like “Perhaps it would be better to postpone any decision until after having serenely reflected upon that which . . .”: something like that. But “Not on your life” was clearly a nimbler, quicker statement, and it was no great effort for it to slip through the net of the other one and bob up onto the surface of the silence like an unforeseen and unforeseeable buoy.

  “Not
on your life.”

  It was the first time in sixteen years that Father Pluche had dared to contradict the Baron in a question pertinent to Elisewin’s life. He felt a strange inebriation, as if he had just thrown himself out of a window. He was a man with a certain practical spirit: given that he was already up in the air, he decided to try to take flight.

  “Elisewin shall go to the sea. I shall take her there. And if need be we shall stay there for months, years, until she manages to find the strength to face the water and everything else. And in the end she shall return—alive. Any other decision would be idiotic or, worse, base. And though Elisewin is afraid, we must not be, and I shall not be. She cares nothing about dying. She wants to live. And what she wants, she shall have.”

  It was hard to believe the way Father Pluche spoke. Hard to believe it was him.

  “You sir, Dr. Atterdel, you understand nothing of men and of fathers and children, nothing. And that’s why I believe you. The truth is always inhuman. Like you, sir. I know that you are not mistaken. I pity you, but I admire your words. And I who have never seen the sea, to the sea I shall go, because your words have told me to do so. It is the most absurd, ridiculous, and senseless thing that I might be called upon to undertake. But there is no man, in all of Carewall, who could stop me from doing it. No one.”

  He picked the letter up from the table and put it in his pocket. His heart was thumping like mad, his hands were shaking, and there was a strange buzzing in his ears. Nothing surprising about that, he thought: it’s not every day you take flight.

  Anything could have happened in that moment. There really are times when the omnipresent and logical network of causal sequences gives up, taken unawares by life, and climbs down into the stalls to mingle with the public, so that up on the stage, under the lights of a sudden, dizzying freedom, an invisible hand may fish in the infinite womb of the possible and, out of millions of things, will permit one thing alone to happen. In the silent triangle formed by those three men, all the millions of things that could have exploded into being passed by in succession, but in a flash, until, the glare having faded and the dust settled, one sole, minute thing appeared, within the sphere of that time and space, struggling with a certain modest reserve to happen. And it happened. The Baron—the Baron of Carewall—began to cry, without even hiding his face in his hands, but merely letting himself slump back against the back of his sumptuous seat, as if defeated by fatigue, but also as if freed of an enormous burden. Like a dead man but also like a man who had been saved.

  Baron Carewall cried.

  Cried his eyes out.

  Father Pluche, motionless.

  Dr. Atterdel, speechless.

  And that was it.

  THESE WERE all things that no one ever came to know of in Carewall. But everyone, without exception, still tells of what happened afterwards. The sweetness of what happened afterwards.

  “Elisewin . . .”

  “A miraculous cure . . .”

  “The sea. . . .”

  “It is madness . . .”

  “She will get better, you’ll see.”

  “She will die.”

  “The sea . . .”

  The sea, as the Baron saw from the geographer’s charts, was far away. But above all—he saw in his dreams—it was terrible, exaggeratedly beautiful, terribly powerful, inhuman and inimical: marvelous. Marvelous colors, odors never perceived, sounds unknown—it was another world. He would look at Elisewin and could not imagine how she could get close to all that without disappearing into nothingness, dispersed in the air by the commotion and the surprise. He thought of the moment when she would turn, suddenly, and her gaze would receive the sea. He thought about it for weeks. And then he understood. It was not difficult, at bottom. It was incredible that he had not thought of it before.

  “How shall we get to the sea?” Father Pluche asked him.

  “It shall be the sea that comes to get you.”

  And so they left, one April morning. They crossed fields and hills and at sunset on the fifth day they reached the banks of a river. There was no town, there were no houses, nothing. But on the water, silent, there swayed a little ship. She was called the Adel. She usually sailed the waters of the Ocean, carrying wealth and want to and fro between the continent and the islands. On the prow was a figurehead whose hair flowed from head to foot. The sails held all the winds of the faraway world. The keel had been observing the womb of the sea for years. In every nook, unknown odors told the stories that the sailors wore transcribed on their skin. She was a two-master. Baron Carewall had commanded her to follow the course of the river from the sea to that point.

  “It is folly,” the captain had written to him.

  “I shall shower you with gold,” the Baron had replied.

  And now, like a phantasm departing from any reasonable course, the two-master known as the Adel was there. On the little quay, where only insignificant little craft were usually moored, the Baron clasped his daughter to him and said, “Adieu.”

  Elisewin said nothing. She covered her face with a silken veil, slipped a folded and sealed sheet of paper into her father’s hands, turned, and went toward the men who would take her on board. It was almost night by then. It could have been a dream.

  And so Elisewin went down to the sea in the gentlest way possible—only a father’s mind could have thought of it—borne by the current, along the bends, pauses, and hesitations that the river had learned in centuries of journeying; a great sage, the river was the only one who knew the gentlest, mildest, most beautiful way one could get to the sea without harming oneself. They went down the river, with that slowness determined precisely by the maternal wisdom of nature, slipping gradually into a world of odors and colored things that, day after day, revealed, with extreme slowness, the presence, at first distant and then ever nearer, of the enormous womb that awaited them. The air changed, the dawns changed, and the skies, and the shapes of the houses, and the birds, and the sounds, and the faces of the people, on the banks, and the words of the people in their mouths. Water slipping toward water, a most delicate courtship, the bends of the river like a lullaby of the soul. An imperceptible journey. In Elisewin’s mind, sensations by the thousand, but as weightless as feathers in flight.

  Still today, in Carewall, everyone tells the tale of that journey. Each one in his own way. And all without ever having seen it. But this does not matter. They will never stop telling it. So that no one may forget how fine it would be if, for each sea that awaits us, there were a river, for us. And someone—a father, a lover, someone—capable of taking us by the hand and finding that river—imagining it, inventing it—and placing us on its flow with the buoyancy of a single word, adieu. This, really, would be marvelous. Life would be sweet, any life. And things would not do harm but, borne on the current, they would come closer; first one could get very close to them and then touch them and only at the end let oneself be touched by them. Let oneself be hurt by them, even. Die of them. It does not matter. But everything would be, finally, human. All that is needed is someone’s imagination—a father, a lover, someone. He would be able to invent a way, here, in the midst of this silence, in this land that will not speak. A clement way, and a beautiful one. A way from here to the sea.

  BOTH MOTIONLESS, eyes fixed on that immense stretch of water. Unbelievable. Really. You could stay there for a lifetime, understanding nothing, but still looking. The sea ahead, a long river behind, and finally the ground beneath one’s feet. And those two there, motionless. Elisewin and Father Pluche. Like a spell. Without so much as a thought in their heads, a real thought, only amazement. Wonder. And it is only after minutes and minutes—an eternity—that Elisewin, finally, without taking her eyes off the sea, says, “But then, at a certain point, does it end?”

  Hundreds of miles away, in the solitude of his enormous castle, a man holds a sheet of paper close to a candle and reads. Few words, all on one line. Black ink.

  Do not be afraid. I am not. I who love you. Elisewin
.

  The carriage will pick them up, then, because it is evening, and the inn awaits them. A short journey. The road that skirts the beach. All around, no one. Almost no one. In the sea—what’s he doing in the sea?—a painter.

  CHAPTER 7

  IN SUMATRA, off the north coast of Pangei, every seventy-six days there would emerge an island in the form of a cross, covered with lush vegetation and apparently uninhabited. It would remain visible for a few hours before plunging back beneath the sea. On the beach at Cascais the local fishermen had found the remains of the ship Davemport, wrecked eight days before, on the other side of the world, in the Ceylon sea. On the route for Farhadhar, mariners used to see strange luminous butterflies that induced stupefaction and a sense of melancholy. In the waters of Bogador, a convoy of four naval vessels had disappeared, devoured by a single enormous wave that had appeared out of nowhere on a day of flat calm.

  Admiral Langlais leafed slowly through those documents that arrived from the farthest-flung corners of a world that evidently clung to its follies. Letters, extracts from ships’ logs, newspaper clippings, police reports, confidential reports, embassy dispatches. All sorts of things. The lapidary coldness of official communiqués or the alcoholic confidences of visionary seamen all crossed the world just the same to arrive on that desk where, in the name of the Realm, Langlais would take his goose-quill pen and trace the boundary between that which, in the Realm, would be considered true and that which would be forgotten as false. From the seas of the world, hundreds of statistics and rumors arrived in procession on that desk to be swallowed up by a verdict as fine as a thread of black ink, embroidered with a precise hand on leatherbound books. Langlais’s hand was the womb in which they all went to lay their journeys to rest. His pen, the blade beneath which their labors bared their necks. A clean, precise death.