Ocean Sea Page 7

  “Adams is not your real name.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “And how do you know?”

  “I can read too.”

  Adams smiled. He bent over, took his luggage, and went off toward his room.

  “The third door on the left,” yelled a voice from behind him that was once more that of a little girl.

  There were no keys. He opened the door and went in. It was not that he expected much. But at least he expected to find the room empty.

  “Oh, excuse me,” said Father Pluche, moving away from the window and instinctively adjusting his cassock.

  “Have I got the wrong room?”

  “No, no . . . it is I who . . . you see, I have the room above, but it gives onto the hills, you cannot see the sea: I chose it out of prudence.”

  “Prudence?”

  “Forget it, it’s a long story . . . The fact is, I wanted to see the view from here, but now I must be off, I should never have come, had I known . . .”

  “You may stay, if you wish.”

  “No, I will go now. You must have lots to do, have you just arrived?”

  Adams put his luggage on the floor.

  “How stupid, of course you have just arrived . . . well, I’m off, then. Oh . . . my name is Pluche, Father Pluche.”

  Adams nodded. “Father Pluche.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good-bye, Father Pluche.”

  “Yes, good-bye.”

  He slipped toward the door and went out. On passing by the reception desk—if we want to call it that—he felt obliged to mutter, “I didn’t know that someone would have come, I only wanted to see how the sea looked . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, Father Pluche.”

  He was about to go out, when he stopped, turned and retraced his steps, and, leaning slightly over the desk, asked Dira sotto voce, “According to you, might he be a doctor?”

  “Who?”

  “Him.”

  “Ask him.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as one who is dying to hear questions. He didn’t even tell me his name.”

  Dira hesitated a second.

  “Adams.”

  “Adams, that’s all?”

  “Adams, that’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  He would have gone, but he still had something to say. He said it in an even lower voice.

  “His eyes . . . he has eyes like those of an animal stalking its prey.”

  This time he had really finished.

  ANN DEVERIÀ WALKING along the shore, in her purple cloak. Beside her, a little girl called Elisewin, with her little white umbrella. She is sixteen. Perhaps she will die, perhaps she will live. Who knows. Ann Deverià speaks without taking her eyes off what lies before her. Before in many senses.

  “My father did not want to die. He was getting old, but he would not die. Diseases were devouring him and he, undaunted, clung on to life. In the end he did not even leave his room anymore. They had to do everything for him. Years like that. He was barricaded behind a kind of stronghold, all his, built in the most invisible corner of himself. He gave up everything, but he clung on ferociously to the only two things that really meant something to him: writing and hating. He wrote with difficulty, with the hand that he could still manage to move. And hated with his eyes. As for talking, he did not talk anymore, right until the end. He would write and he would hate. When he died—because finally he died—my mother took all those hundreds of scribbled sheets and read them, one by one. There were the names of all those he had known, one after another. And next to each one there was a minute description of a horrible death. I have not read those sheets. But those eyes—those eyes that hated, every minute of every day, right until the end—I had seen them. And how I had seen them. I married my husband because he had kind eyes. It was the only thing that mattered to me. He had kind eyes.

  “Besides, it is not as if life goes as you think it does. Life follows its path. And you follow yours. And it is not the same path. And so . . . It is not that I wanted to be happy, no. I wanted . . . to save myself, that’s all: to save myself. But I understood late the path one should follow: the path of the desires. One expects other things to save people. Duty, honesty, being good, being just. No. It is the desires that save. They are the only real thing. You stick with them, and you will save yourself. But I found this out too late. If you give life the time, it will turn things around in a strange, inexorable way: and at that point you realize that you cannot desire something without hurting yourself. That’s where everything falls apart, there’s no way out, the more you struggle, the more tangled the net becomes, the more you rebel, the more you hurt yourself. There’s no escape. When it was too late, I began to desire. With all the strength I possessed. You cannot imagine how very badly I hurt myself.

  “Do you know what is beautiful here? Look: we walk, we leave all those footprints on the sand, and they stay there, precise, ordered. But tomorrow you will get up, you will look at this enormous beach and nothing will remain, not a footprint, not a sign, nothing. The sea rubs things out during the night. The tide conceals. It is as if no one had ever passed by here. It is as if we had never existed. If there is, in the world, a place where you can fancy yourself nothingness, that place is here. It is land no longer, it is not yet sea. It’s not sham life, it’s not real life.

  “It’s time. Time that passes. That’s all.

  “It would make a splendid refuge. We would be invisible to any enemy. Suspended. White like Plasson’s pictures. Imperceptible even to ourselves. But there is something that undermines this purgatory. And it is something from which there is no escape. The sea. The sea enchants, the sea kills, it moves, it frightens, it also makes you laugh sometimes, it disappears every now and then, it disguises itself as a lake, or it constructs tempests, devours ships, gives away riches, it gives no answers, it is wise, it is gentle, it is powerful, it is unpredictable. But, above all, the sea calls. You will discover this, Elisewin. All it does, basically, is this: it calls. It never stops, it gets under your skin, it is upon you, it is you it wants. You can even pretend to ignore it, but it’s no use. It will still call you. This sea you are looking at and all the others that you will not see, but will always be there, lying patiently in wait for you, one step beyond your life. You will hear them calling, tirelessly. It happens in this purgatory of sand. It would happen in any paradise, and in any inferno. Without explaining anything, without telling you where, there will always be a sea, which will call you.”

  Ann Deverià stops. She bends over and takes her shoes off. She leaves them on the sand. She starts walking again, barefoot. Elisewin does not move. She waits until she has moved a few steps farther away. Then she says, in a voice loud enough to be heard, “In a few days I shall be leaving here. And I shall go into the sea. And I shall get better. This is what I want. To get better. To live. And, one day, to become beautiful like you.”

  Ann Deverià turns. She smiles. She searches for words. She finds them.

  “Will you take me with you?”

  THIS TIME there are two people seated on Bartleboom’s windowsill. The usual little boy. And Bartleboom. Their legs dangling over the emptiness below. Their gaze dangling over the sea.

  “Listen, Dood . . .”

  The little boy’s name was Dood.

  “Given that you are always here . . .”

  “Mmmmh . . .”

  “Perhaps you know.”

  “What?”

  “Where does the sea have its eyes?”

  “. . .”

  “Because it does have them, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where the dickens are they?”

  “The ships.”

  “The ships what?”

  “The ships are the eyes of the sea.”

  Bartleboom was flabbergasted. He really had not thought of that.

  “But there are hundreds of ships . . .”

  “The sea has hundreds of eyes. Yo
u can hardly expect it to get things done with only two . . .”

  Quite. With all the work it has to do. And as big as it is. There is good sense in all this.

  “Yes, but then, excuse me . . .”

  “Mmmm.”

  “And people who are shipwrecked? The storms, the typhoons, all that stuff there . . . Why ever should it swallow all those ships, if they are its eyes?”

  Dood looks almost a little out of patience, when he turns toward Bartleboom and says, “But you, . . . don’t you ever close your eyes?”

  Christ. He has an answer for everything, this boy.

  He thinks, does Bartleboom. He thinks and mulls things over and reflects and reasons. Then he suddenly jumps down from the windowsill. Toward the room, of course. You would need wings to jump down in the other direction.

  “Plasson . . . I must find Plasson . . . I have to tell him . . . blast, it wasn’t so difficult, all you had to do was think about it a little . . .”

  He searches feverishly for his woolen hat. He does not find it. Wholly understandable: it is on his head. He desists. He runs out of the room.

  “See you later, Dood.”

  “See you later.”

  The boy remains there, with his eyes fixed on the sea. He stays there for a little. Then he takes a good look to see that no one is around and suddenly jumps down from the windowsill. Toward the beach, of course.

  ONE DAY they woke up and nothing was there anymore. It was not just the footprints on the sand that had disappeared. Everything had disappeared. So to speak.

  Unbelievable fog.

  “It is not fog, only clouds.”

  Unbelievable clouds.

  “They are sea clouds. Sky clouds stay up above. Sea clouds stay down low. They come only seldom. Then they go.”

  Dira knew loads of things.

  Certainly if you looked outside it was rather a shock. Only the previous evening the sky had been full of stars, fabulous. And now it was like being inside a cup of milk. Not to mention the cold. Like being inside a cup of cold milk.

  “It’s the same in Carewall.”

  Father Pluche was standing there with his nose pressed against the windows, enthralled.

  “It lasts days and days. It doesn’t move an inch. There it’s fog. Decidedly fog. And when it comes you can’t make head or tail of anything anymore. Even in the daytime people walk around with a torch in hand. Trying to work things out. Not even that is much help, however. But at night you really don’t know what’s happening at all. Just think, Arlo Crut went home one evening, but he got the wrong house and wound up in the bed of Metel Crut, his brother. Metel didn’t even notice, he was sleeping like a log, but his wife certainly noticed. A man had slipped into her bed. Unbelievable. Well, do you know what she said?”

  And here, in Father Pluche’s head, the usual gauntlet was thrown down. Two fine phrases left the starting blocks in his brain with a well-defined finishing line ahead of them: that of finding a voice with which to come out into the open. The most sensible of the two, considering that this was still the voice of a priest, was certainly “Do it, and I’ll start screaming.”

  But this phrase was flawed by the fact that it was false. The other one, the true one, prevailed.

  “Do it, or I’ll start screaming.”

  “Father Pluche!”

  “What did I say?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Did I say something?”

  They were all in the big room that gave onto the sea, sheltered from that inundation of clouds, but not from the disagreeable sensation of not quite knowing what to do. Doing nothing is one thing. Being unable to do anything is another. It’s different.

  They were all a bit bewildered. Fish in an aquarium. The most restless of all was Plasson: in waders and fisherman’s jacket, he was wandering about nervously observing the sea of milk on the other side of the windows, a sea that didn’t move an inch.

  “It really does resemble one of your pictures,” noted Ann Deverià out loud from the depths of a wicker armchair whence she too was observing the great spectacle. Everything wonderfully white.

  Plasson carried on pacing backward and forward. As if he had not even heard.

  Bartleboom looked up from the book he was idly leafing through.

  “You are too severe, Madame Deverià. Mr. Plasson is trying to do something very difficult. And his pictures are no whiter than the pages of this book of mine.”

  “Are you writing a book?” asked Elisewin from her seat, in front of the large fireplace.

  “A sort of book.”

  “Did you hear, Father Pluche? Mr. Bartleboom writes books.”

  “No, it’s not exactly a book . . .”

  “It is an encyclopedia,” explained Ann Deverià.

  “An encyclopedia?”

  And they were off. Sometimes it takes nothing to forget the great sea of milk, even as it continues screwing you up. Perhaps all you need is the harsh sound of a strange word. Encyclopedia. A single word. And they were off. All of them: Bartleboom, Elisewin, Father Pluche, Plasson. And Madame Deverià.

  “Bartleboom, don’t be modest, tell the young lady that story of the limits, the rivers and all the rest.”

  “It is called the Encyclopedia of the Limits to be found in Nature . . .”

  “A fine title. I had a teacher, at the seminary . . .”

  “Let him talk, Father Pluche . . .”

  “I have been working on it for twelve years. It is a complicated business . . . to all practical purposes I study the point at which Nature arrives, or, better, where it decides to stop. Because it always stops, sooner or later. This is scientific. For example . . .”

  “Give the example of the copironus.”

  “Well, that was a rather particular case.”

  “Have you already heard the story of the copironi, Plasson?”

  “Look, he told me the story of the copironi, my dear Madame Deverià, and you had it from me.”

  “My goodness, that was a very long sentence, my compliments, Plasson, you are improving.”

  “Well then, these copironi?”

  “The copironi live on the northern glaciers. They are perfect animals in their way. They practically do not grow old. If they wished, they could live for eternity.”

  “Horrible.”

  “But be careful, Nature controls everything, nothing escapes her. And so here is what happens: at a certain point, when it is around seventy, eighty years old, the copironus stops eating.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. They stop eating. On the average they live another three years, in that state. Then they die.”

  “Three years without eating?”

  “On the average. Some resist for even longer. But in the end, and this is important, they die. It’s a scientific fact.”

  “But it’s suicide!”

  “In a certain sense.”

  “And according to you, we should believe you, Bartleboom?”

  “Look here, I also have a drawing . . . A drawing of a copironus . . .”

  “My goodness, you’re right, Bartleboom, you really do draw badly, really, I have never seen a drawing—”

  “I didn’t make it . . . it was the sailor who told me the story that drew it . . .”

  “A sailor?”

  “You had all this story from a sailor?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Oh, well done, Bartleboom, really scientific . . .”

  “I believe you.”

  “Thank you, Miss Elisewin.”

  “I believe you, and so does Father Pluche, don’t you?”

  “Certainly . . . it’s a very likely story, in fact, if I remember well, I have heard it before, it must have been at the seminary . . .”

  “One really learns loads of things in these seminaries . . . are there any for ladies?”

  “Now that I think of it, Plasson, you could make me the illustrations for the Encyclopedia, it would be splendid, would it not?”

  “W
ould I have to draw the copironus?”

  “Well, let’s forget about the copironus, but there are loads of other things . . . I have written eight hundred seventy-two entries, you could choose the ones you prefer . . .”

  “Eight hundred seventy-two?”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as a good idea, Madame Deverià?”

  “For the entry sea, I should perhaps do without the illustration . . .”

  “Father Pluche draws the pictures for his book himself.”

  “Elisewin, never mind . . .”

  “But it’s true . . .”

  “Don’t tell me we have another scientist . . .”

  “It’s a very beautiful book.”

  “Do you really write, too, Father Pluche?”

  “Not really, it is a rather . . . particular thing, it’s not exactly what you would call a book.”

  “Yes, it is a book.”

  “Elisewin . . .”

  “He never lets anyone see it, but it’s very beautiful.”

  “I say it is poetry.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you were close.”

  “Songs?”

  “No.”

  “Come, Father Pluche, must we pray you?”

  “That’s it, in fact . . .”

  “In fact what?”

  “No, I mean, apropos of prayer . . .”

  “Don’t tell me that . . .”

  “Prayers, they are prayers.”

  “Prayers?”

  “Adieu . . .”

  “But they are not like the others, Father Pluche’s prayers . . .”

  “I find it an excellent idea. I have always felt the lack of a good prayer book.”

  “Bartleboom, a scientist should not pray, if he is a real scientist he should not even think of—”

  “On the contrary! Precisely because we study nature, nature being none other than the mirror . . .”

  “He also wrote a very fine one about a doctor. A doctor is a scientist, isn’t that so?”

  “How do you mean about a doctor?”

  “It is entitled Prayer for a Doctor Who Saves an Invalid and at the Instant in Which the Latter Gets Up, Cured, the Former Feels Infinitely Tired.”

  “What?”

  “But that’s no title for a prayer.”