Ocean Sea (9 page)

“I am fed up with pornography.”

Then he left. No one would find him anymore.

Bartleboom knew nothing about any of these things. He could not know them. That is why, there on the shore of the sea, having exhausted all small talk about the weather, he ventured to ask, just
to keep the conversation going, “Have you been painting long?”

On that occasion, too, Plasson was laconic.

“Never done anything else.”

Anyone listening to Plasson would have concluded that there were only two possibilities: either he was intolerably haughty or he was stupid. But there, too, you had to understand. One curious
thing about Plasson was that when he talked, he never finished a sentence. He could not manage to finish one. He would arrive at the end only if the sentence did not exceed seven or eight words. If
not, he would get lost halfway. For this reason, especially with strangers, he would try to limit himself to brief, succinct propositions. And it should be said that he was talented in this sense.
Of course, this made him seem a little superior and irritatingly sententious. But it was always better than seeming vaguely doltish, which was what regularly happened when he launched into compound
sentences or even only simple sentences, as he could never manage to finish them.

“Tell me, Plasson: Is there anything in the world that you manage to bring to a conclusion?” Ann Deverià had asked him one day, pinpointing the heart of the problem with her
customary cynicism.

“Yes: disagreeable conversations,” he had replied, getting up from the table and going off to his room. He had a flair, as has been said, for finding brief replies. Real flair.

Bartleboom did not know these things, either. He could not know them. But he was quick to understand them.

Under the midday sun, Plasson and he seated on the beach, eating the few things that Dira had prepared. The easel stuck in the sand, a few yards away. The usual white canvas, on the easel. The
usual north wind, on everything.

A cloud obscures the sun. The sudden cold catches you by surprise. Bartleboom puts his woolen hat on again.

Agreed: it was a little contrived. But it worked. It was only a question of getting him under way again. Every time. With patience. Bartleboom, as can be deduced from his singular love life, was
a patient man.

Magic: this time he got started again on his own.

Bartleboom said nothing.

The sun came and went, between one cloud and the next. It was the north wind, as usual, which organized the silent spectacle. The sea carried on imperturbably reciting its psalms. If it had
eyes, it was not looking in that direction at that moment.

Silence.

Minutes of silence.

Then Plasson turned to Bartleboom and said, all in one breath, “And you, sir, what are you studying with all those funny instruments of yours?”

Bartleboom smiled.

“Where the sea
ends
.”

Two pieces of a puzzle. Made for each other. In some part of the heavens, an old Gentleman, in that moment, had finally found them again.

“What the devil? . . . I
said
that they couldn’t have disappeared.”

“T
HE ROOM IS
on the ground floor. Down that way, the third door on the left. There are no keys. No one has them here. You ought to write your name
in that book. It’s not obligatory, but everybody does it here.”

The register with the signatures waited open on a wooden bookrest. A freshly made bed of paper that awaited the dreams of other people’s names. The man’s pen barely brushed it.

Then he hesitated a moment, motionless.

“If you want to know the names of the others, you can ask me. It’s hardly a secret.”

Adams looked up from the register and smiled.

“It’s a nice name: Dira.”

The little girl was stunned. She instinctively shot a glance at the register.

“My name isn’t written there.”

“Not there.”

It was already hard to believe she was ten, that little girl. But when she wanted, she could seem a thousand years older. She fixed Adams smack-dab in the eye, and what she said, she said with a
cutting voice that seemed to belong to a woman who, wherever she was, was not there.

“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.

A
NN
D
EVERIÀ 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.”