Ocean Sea (6 page)

“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.

T
HESE 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.

B
OTH 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.

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

I
N
S
UMATRA
, 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.

T
HIS 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.

O
R
,
FOREVER
, a serene life.

T
HIS 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