Ocean Sea Page 5

  THIS PRESENT INFORMATION is to be held as un founded, and as such it is forbidden to divulge it or cite it in the charts and documents of the Realm.

  OR, FOREVER, a serene life.

  THIS PRESENT INFORMATION is to be held as veracious, and as such will appear in all the charts and documents of the Realm.

  He would judge, Langlais. He would compare the evidence, weigh up the testimony, investigate the sources. And then he would judge. He lived in daily contact with the specters of an immense collective fantasy where the clear gaze of the explorer and the haunted look of the shipwrecked produced images that were sometimes identical, and tales that were illogically complimentary. He lived among marvels. For this reason a preestablished and maniacal order reigned in his house while his life flowed along in accordance with an immutable geometry of habits that came close to the holiness of a liturgy. He defended himself, did Langlais. He bound up his own existence with a web of extremely elaborate rules capable of cushioning the dizzying effects of the images to which, every day, he opened his mind. The hyperboles that reached him from all the seas of the world subsided against the meticulous dike delineated by those minute certainties. One step farther on, the placid lake that was Langlais’s wisdom awaited them. Still and just.

  From the open window there came the rhythmic sound of the gardener’s shears as he pruned the roses with the certainty of Justice intent on handing down redeeming verdicts. A sound like any other. But that day, and in Admiral Langlais’s head, that sound communicated a decidedly precise message. Patient and obstinate—too close to the window to be accidental—in it could be heard the memory of a commitment. Langlais would have preferred not to listen to it. But he was a man of honor. And so he laid aside the pages that told of islands, wrecks, and butterflies, opened a drawer, took out three sealed letters and placed them on the desk. They came from three different places. Although they bore the distinguishing marks of urgent confidential correspondence, Langlais, out of baseness, had let them lie for several days in a place where he could not even see them. But now he opened them with a crisp, formal gesture, and forbidding himself any hesitation, he set to reading them. On a leaf of paper he noted down some names, a date. He tried to do everything with the impersonal neutrality of a royal accountant. The last note he took read

  The Almayer Inn, Quartel

  Finally he picked up the letters and got up and went to the fireplace, where he threw them into the prudent flames that kept watch over the indolent spring of those days. While he was watching the fire crumple the affected elegance of those missives that he had never wished to read, he distinctly perceived a sudden and thankful silence from the open window. The shears, until then as tireless as the hands of a watch, had fallen silent. Only after a little did the gardener’s footsteps engrave themselves in the silence as he moved away. There was something precise about that departure that would have amazed anyone. But not Langlais. He knew. Mysterious for anyone else, the relationship that linked those two men—an admiral and a gardener—no longer held any secrets for them. The custom of a familiarity made up of many silences and private signals had guarded their singular alliance for years.

  There are many stories. That one came from long before.

  ONE DAY, six years previously, they had brought into the presence of Admiral Langlais a man who, they said, was named Adams. Tall, robust, long hair hanging down to his shoulders, skin burned by the sun. He might have seemed a seaman like so many others. But they had to hold him up; he was unable to walk. A disgusting ulcerated wound marked his neck. He remained absurdly motionless, as if paralyzed, absent. The only thing that suggested some vestiges of awareness was his gaze. It looked like the gaze of a dying animal.

  He has the look of an animal stalking its prey, thought Langlais.

  They said that they had found him in a village in the heart of Africa. There were also other white men down there: slaves. But he was something different. He was the tribal chieftain’s favorite animal. He would stand on all fours, grotesquely decorated with feathers and colored stones, tied by a rope to the king’s throne. He would eat the scraps that the king threw to him. His body was tormented by cuts and blows. He had learned to bark in a way that amused the sovereign hugely. If he was still alive, that was probably the only reason why.

  “What does he have to say?” asked Langlais.

  “Him? Nothing. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t want to talk. But those that were with him—the other slaves—and also those who recognized him, at the harbor . . . well, they tell some extraordinary tales about him; it’s as if he had been everywhere, this man, he is a mystery . . . If you were to believe all they say . . .”

  “What do they say?”

  He, Adams, motionless and absent, in the middle of the room. And all around him the bacchanal of memory and fantasy that exploded and frescoed the air with the adventures of a life that, they said, was his / three hundred miles on foot in the desert / he swears that he saw him change into a Negro and then become white again / because he trafficked with the local shaman, it was there that he learned how to make that red powder which / when they captured them they tied them all to one huge tree and waited until the insects had covered them completely, but he began to speak in an incomprehensible tongue and it was then that those savages, suddenly / swearing that he had climbed those mountains where the light never disappears, and that’s why no one had ever returned sane from there, except for him, who, when he came back, said only / at the Sultan’s court, where he had been taken thanks to his voice, which was beautiful, and he, covered with gold, had to stand in the torture chamber and sing while they went about their work, and all so that the Sultan would not hear the disagreeable echo of the cries of the tortured but rather the beauty of that song which / on Lake Kalabaki, which is as big as the sea, and there they believed that it was the sea, until they built a boat out of enormous leaves, the leaves of a tree, and used it to sail from one shore to the other, and he was aboard that boat, I could swear to it / prospecting for diamonds in the sand, by hand, chained and naked, so that they could not escape, and he was in the middle of them, just as it’s true that / they all said that he was dead, carried off by the storm, but one day they were cutting the hands off a man, before the Tesfa Gate, a water thief, and so I had a good look, and it was him, yes, him / and that’s why he calls himself Adams, but he has had a thousand names and one fellow, once, met him when he was known as Ra Me Nivar, which, in the language of that place, meant The Man Who Flies, and another time, on the African coasts / in the city of the dead, where no one dared enter, because there was a centuries-old curse, which made the eyes explode of all those who

  “That will do.”

  Langlais did not even raise his eyes from the tobacco jar that he had been nervously toying with for some minutes.

  “Very well. Take him away.”

  Nobody moved.

  Silence.

  “Admiral . . . there is another thing.”

  “What?”

  Silence.

  “This man has seen Timbuktu.”

  Langlais’s tobacco jar became still.

  “There are people prepared to swear to it: he has been there.”

  Timbuktu. The pearl of Africa. The marvelous city that may not be found. The chest of all treasures, the home of all barbarian gods. The heart of the unknown world, the citadel of a thousand secrets, the fantastic realm of all wealth, the lost destination of infinite journeys, the source of all waters and the dream of any heaven. Timbuktu. The city that no white man had ever found.

  Langlais looked up. Everybody in the room seemed enthralled by a sudden immobility. Only Adams’s eyes continued to roam, intent on stalking an invisible prey.

  THE ADMIRAL QUESTIONED HIM for a long time. As was his habit, he spoke with a voice that was severe but mild, almost impersonal. Only a patient procession of brief, precise questions. He did not obtain a single answer.

  Adams kept silent. He seemed forever exiled to a world that was ine
xorably elsewhere. Langlais did not even wrest a glance from him. Nothing.

  Langlais stood there staring at him in silence for a while. Then he made a gesture that admitted of no objections. They heaved Adams up from the chair and dragged him away. Langlais watched him as he departed—his feet dragging on the marble floor—and had the unpleasant sensation that, in that moment, on the approximative charts in the possession of the Realm, Timbuktu was also slipping farther and farther away. For no reason, one of the many legends surrounding that city came to mind: that the women, down there, kept only one eye uncovered, wonderfully painted with colored earth. He had always wondered why ever it was that they should hide the other eye. He got up and idly moved over to the window. He was thinking of opening it when a voice, in his head, froze him as it pronounced a clear, precise phrase:

  “Because no one could hold their gaze without going mad.”

  Langlais whirled around. There was no one in the room. He turned back toward the window. For a few moments he was unable to think of anything at all. Then he saw, filing by in the avenue below, the little escort that was taking Adams back to nothingness. He did not wonder what he should have done. He simply did it.

  A few moments later he was standing before Adams, surrounded by the amazement of the onlookers and slightly wearied after the fast run. He looked him in the eyes and in a low voice said, “And you, how do you know?”

  Adams did not seem to have even noticed him. He was still in some strange place, thousands of miles from there. But his lips moved and they all heard his voice say, “Because I have seen them.”

  LANGLAIS HAD COME across many cases like that of Adams. Sailors whom a storm or the cruelty of pirates had hurled onto the coast of an unknown continent, hostages to chance and the prey of peoples for whom the white man was little more than a bizarre animal species. If a kind death did not take them swiftly, it was one kind of atrocious death or another that awaited them in some fetid or marvelous corner of incredible worlds. Few were those who came out of such situations alive, picked up by some ship and reconsigned to the civilized world bearing the irreversible mark of their catastrophe. Mindless wrecks, human detritus returned from the unknown. Lost souls.

  Langlais knew all this. And yet he took Adams with him. He stole him from wretchedness and took him into his palace. In whatever world his mind had gone to hide, there he would go to find it. And he would bring it back. He did not want to save him. It was not exactly like that. He wanted to save the stories that were hidden inside him. It did not matter how much time it would take: he wanted those stories, and he would have them.

  He knew that Adams was a man destroyed by his own life. In his mind’s eye, Adams’s soul was a peaceful village sacked and dispersed by the savage invasion of a dizzying number of images, sensations, odors, sounds, pains, words. The death he simulated, to look at him, was the paradoxical result of a life that had exploded. An uncontrollable chaos was what crackled away below his silence and his immobility.

  Langlais was not a doctor, and he had never saved anyone. But his own life had taught him the unpredictable therapeutic power of precision. It could be said that he treated himself with precision. It was the medicine that, dissolved in every sip of his life, kept the bane of bewilderment at bay. He thought that Adams’s unassailable distance would have crumbled only under the patient daily drill of some precision. He felt that this should be, in some way, a gentle precision, only tinged with the coldness of a mechanical rite, and cultivated in the warmth of a little poetry. He searched for this for a long time in the world of things and gestures that had its home around him. And in the end he found it. And to those who, not without a certain sarcasm, dared ask him, “And what might be this prodigious medicine with which you think to save your savage?” He liked to reply, “My roses.”

  In the same way as a child might place a lost bird in the warmth of a nest made of cloth, Langlais placed Adams in his garden. An admirable garden, in which the most refined geometries kept the explosion of all the colors under control, and the discipline of rigid symmetries ruled the spectacular, closely ranked flowers and plants from all over the world. A garden in which the chaos of life became a divinely precise figure.

  It was there that Adams slowly became himself again. For months he remained silent, only docilely allowing himself to be taught a thousand precise rules. Then his absence began to become a vague presence, punctuated here and there by brief phrases, and no longer tinged with the stubborn survival of the animal that had gone to ground within him. After a year, no one would have doubted, on seeing him, that he was the most classic and perfect of gardeners: silent and imperturbable, slow and precise in his gestures, inscrutable and ageless. The clement god of a miniature creation.

  In all that time, Langlais never asked him anything. He exchanged few words with him, mostly to do with the state of health of the irises and the unpredictable changes in the weather. Neither of the two ever alluded to the past, to any past. He was waiting, was Langlais. He was not in a hurry. On the contrary, he was enjoying the pleasures of waiting. So much so that it was with an absurd touch of disappointment that, one day, while strolling in a secondary avenue of the garden where he happened to pass close to Adams, he saw him look up from a pearl-colored petunia and distinctly heard him pronounce—apparently to no one—these precise words:

  “It has no walls, Timbuktu, because they have always thought, down there, that its beauty alone would stop any enemy.”

  Then Adams fell silent and looked down at the pearl-colored petunia once more. Langlais walked on, without saying a word, along the little avenue. Not even God, if he existed, would have noticed anything.

  From that day, all of Adams’s stories began to flow out of him. In the most diverse moments and according to inscrutable times and liturgies. Langlais limited himself to listening. He never asked a question. He listened and did no more. Sometimes they were mere phrases. Other times, authentic accounts. Adams narrated with a soft, warm voice. With surprising art, he measured words and silences. There was something hypnotic about the way he psalmodized fantastic images. To listen to him was spellbinding. And Langlais was enchanted.

  Nothing of what he heard, in those tales, ended up in his tomes bound in dark leather. The Realm, in this case, did not come into it. Those stories were for him. He had waited until they bloomed from the womb of a violated, dead land. Now he was harvesting them. They were the refined gift he had decided to offer to his own solitude. He imagined himself growing old in the devoted shadow of those stories. And dying, one day, with his eyes full of the image, forbidden to any other white man, of the most beautiful garden in Timbuktu.

  He thought that everything would always remain so magically light and easy. He could not foresee that he would soon relate that man named Adams to something surprisingly ferocious.

  SOME TIME AFTER Adams’s arrival, Admiral Langlais chanced to find himself burdened with the disagreeable and banal necessity of staking his life on a game of chess. Along with his little retinue, he was surprised in the open countryside by a bandit notorious in the area for his madness and the cruelty of his deeds. But in this case, surprisingly, he was inclined not to treat his victims with ferocity. He held only Langlais and sent back all the others to see to the task of raising the enormous sum required for the ransom. Langlais knew he was rich enough to buy back his freedom. What he could not foresee was whether the bandit would be patient enough to wait for all that money to arrive. For the first time in his life he felt the pungent odor of death upon him.

  He spent two days blindfolded and shackled in a cart that rolled along unceasingly. On the third day they made him get out. When they took off his blindfold, he found himself seated in front of the bandit. Between the two men stood a small table. On the table, a chessboard. The bandit’s explanation was laconic. He would give him one chance. One game. If he won, he would be freed. If he lost, he would be killed.

  Langlais tried to make him see reason. As a corpse he was not worth a
penny, why throw away a fortune like that?

  “I didn’t ask you what you thought about it. I asked you for a yes or a no. Make haste.”

  A maniac. This one was a maniac. Langlais realized he had no choice.

  “As you wish,” he said, and looked down at the chessboard. It was not long before he realized that the bandit’s madness was of a brutally astute variety. Not only had he taken the white pieces—it would have been foolish to expect the contrary—but the man was playing with a second queen neatly ensconced in place of the king’s bishop. A curious variation.

  “A king,” explained the bandit, indicating himself, “and two queens,” he added mockingly, indicating the two women, beautiful indeed, who were seated beside him. This pleasantry unleashed unrestrained laughter and wholehearted yells of approval among the onlookers. Less amused, Langlais lowered his gaze, thinking that he was about to die in the stupidest manner possible.

  The bandit’s first move brought with it the return of absolute silence. King’s pawn forward two squares. It was Langlais’s turn. He hesitated for a few moments. It was as if he were waiting for something, but he did not know what it was. He understood only when, within his head, he heard a voice pronounce with magnificent calm, “Knight to the file of the king’s bishop.”

  This time he did not look around. He knew that voice. And he knew that it was not there. God knows how, but it was coming from far away. He took the knight and placed it in front of the king’s bishop’s pawn.

  By the sixth move he was one piece up. On the eighth, he castled. By the eleventh he was the master of the middle board. Two moves later he sacrificed a bishop, which allowed him to take the first of the opposing queens in the next move. He trapped the second with a combination that—and he realized this—he would never have been capable of without the precise guidance of that absurd voice. As the resistance of the white pieces gradually crumbled, he sensed that the bandit’s ferocious rage and bewilderment were growing. It got to the point where he was afraid to win. But the voice granted him no respite.