Ocean Sea (4 page)

Bartleboom observed.

Within the imperfect circle of his optical universe, the perfection of that oscillatory motion formulated promises doomed to be broken by the uniqueness of each individual wave. There was no way
of stopping that continual alternation of creation and destruction. His eyes sought the ordered and describable truth of a certain and complete image, but instead they wound up chasing after the
mobile indeterminacy of the coming and going that deceived and derided scientific inquiry.

It was annoying. Something had to be done. Bartleboom arrested his eyes. He trained them ahead of his feet, framing a patch of silent and motionless sand. And he decided to wait. He had to stop
chasing that exhausting to-ing and fro-ing. If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, etcetera, etcetera, he thought. Sooner or later—within the frame of that gaze imagined to possess
scientific rigor—there would arrive the exact outline, trimmed with foam, of the wave he was waiting for. And there it would be permanently impressed in his mind. And he would
understand
. This was the plan. With total abnegation, Bartleboom fell into an emotionless immobility, transforming himself, so to speak, into a neutral and infallible optical instrument.
He was hardly breathing. The artificial silence of the laboratory fell over the fixed circle delimited by his gaze. He was like a trap, imperturbable and patient. He was waiting for his prey. And,
slowly, his prey arrived. A pair of women’s shoes. High, but women’s shoes.

“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.”

“A
N 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?”

P
ERCHED 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, Monsieur 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.

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.

B
ARTLEBOOM 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.”