Ocean Sea (5 page)

Bartleboom got out of bed and, without a word, took the boy by the arm, dragged him down from the windowsill, then out the door, and finally downstairs, shouting, “Miss Dira!” as he
rolled down the stairs to arrive finally on the ground floor where—“MISS DIRA!”—he finally found what he was looking for, that is, the reception desk—if we can call it
that—and, in short, he arrived, clutching the boy close to him all the while, in the presence of Miss Dira—ten years old, not a year more—where he stopped, finally, with a proud
demeanor only partly undermined by the human frailty of his yellow nightshirt, and more seriously undermined by the combination of that garment with a woolen nightcap, open mesh knit.

Dira looked up from her accounts. The two—Bartleboom and the boy—were standing at attention before her. They spoke one after the other, as if they had rehearsed their parts.

“This boy reads your dreams.”

“This man talks in his sleep.”

Dira lowered her gaze to her accounts once more. She did not even raise her voice.

“Scat.”

They scatted.

CHAPTER 6

B
ECAUSE
B
ARON
C
AREWALL
had never seen the sea. His lands were land: stones,
hills, marshes, fields, crags, mountains, woods, glades. Land. There was no sea.

For him the sea was an idea. Or, more correctly, an itinerary of the imagination. It was something born in the Red Sea—divided in two by the hand of God—then amplified by the thought
of the Deluge, in which it was lost, to be found later in the bulging outline of an Ark and immediately connected to the thought of whales—never seen but often imagined—and thence it
streamed back, fairly clear once more, into the few stories that had reached his ears of monstrous fish and dragons and submerged cities, in a crescendo of fantastic splendor that abruptly
shriveled up into the harsh features of one of his forebears—framed and eternal in the gallery—who was said to have been a freebooter with Vasco da Gama: in his subtly wicked eyes, the
thought of the sea took a sinister turn, caromed off some uncertain chronicles of piratical hyperbole, got entangled in a quotation from Saint Augustine according to which the ocean was the home of
the devil, turned back to a name—Thessala—that was perhaps a wrecked ship or a wet-nurse who used to spin yarns of ships and wars, nearly surfaced in the redolence of certain cloths
that had arrived there from distant lands, and finally reemerged in the eyes of a woman from overseas, encountered many years before and never seen since, to come to a halt, at the end of this
circumnavigation of the mind, in the fragrance of a fruit that, they had told him, grew only along the seashore of the southern lands: and if you ate it you tasted the flavor of the sun. Since
Baron Carewall had never seen it, the sea journeyed in his mind like a stowaway aboard a sailing ship moored in port with sails furled: inoffensive and superfluous.

It could have remained there forever. But, in an instant, it was aroused by the words of a man dressed in black called Atterdel, the verdict of an implacable man of science called in to make a
miracle.

“I will save your daughter, sir. And I will do it with the
sea.
”

In
THE SEA
. It was hard to believe. The polluted and putrid sea, receptacle of horrors, and anthropophagous monster of the abyss—ancient
and pagan—ever feared and now, suddenly

they invite you, as if for a walk, they order you, because it is a cure, they push you with implacable courtesy

into the sea. It is a fashionable cure, by now. A sea preferably cold, very salty, and choppy, because the dreadful content of the waves is an integral part of the cure, to be overcome
technically and dominated morally, in a fearful challenge that is, if you think about it, fearful. And all in the certainty—let’s say the conviction—that the great womb of the sea
may sunder the outer shell of the malady, reactivate the pathways of life, increase the redeeming secretions of the central and peripheral glands

the ideal liniment for the hydrophobic, the melancholy, the impotent, the anemic, the lonely, the wicked, the envious,

and the mad. Like the madman they took to Brixton, under the impermeable gaze of doctors and scientists, and forcibly immersed in the gelid water, shaken violently by the waves, and then dragged
out again and, reactions and counter reactions having been measured, again immersed, forcibly, let it be well understood,

eight degrees centigrade, his head under the water, he resurfacing like a scream and the brute force with which he frees himself of nurses and various personnel, excellent swimmers all, but this
is absolutely useless in the face of the blind frenzy of the animal, who flees—flees—running through the water, nude, and screaming out the frenzy of that unbearable anguish, the shame,
the terror. The entire beach frozen by the worrying disturbance, while that animal runs and runs, and the women, from far off, avert their gaze, although certainly they would like to see, and how
they would like to see, the beast and his running, and let’s face it, his nudity, yes his nudity, his rambling nudity stumbling blindly in the sea, even beautiful in that gray light, of a
beauty that perforates years of good manners and boarding schools and blushes to go straight where it has to go, running along the nerve paths of timid women who, in the secrecy of enormous
immaculate skirts

women. The sea suddenly seemed to have been waiting for them forever. To listen to the doctors, it had been there, for millennia, patiently perfecting itself, with the sole and precise intention
of offering itself as a miraculous unguent for their afflictions of body and soul. Just as, while sipping tea in impeccable drawing rooms, impeccable doctors—weighing their words well in
order to explain with paradoxical courtesy—would tell impeccable husbands and fathers over and over that the disgust for the sea, and the shock, and the terror, was in reality a seraphic cure
for sterility, anorexia, nervous exhaustion, menopause, overexcitement, anxiety, and insomnia. An ideal experience inasmuch as it was a remedy for the ferments of youth and a preparation for wifely
duties. A solemn baptism for young ladies become women. So that, if we wish to forget, for a moment, the madman in the sea at Brixton

(the madman carried on running, but out to sea, until he was lost to view, a scientific exhibit that had eluded the statistics of the medical school to consign itself spontaneously to the belly
of the ocean sea)

if we wish to forget him

(digested by the great aquatic intestine and never returned to the beach, never spewed back into the world, as one might have expected, reduced to a shapeless, bluish bladder)

we could think of a woman—of a woman—respected, loved, mother, woman. For whatever reason—
illness
—brought to a sea that she would otherwise never have seen and
that is now the wavering needle of her cure, an immeasurable index, in truth, which she contemplates but does not understand. Her hair hangs loose and she is barefoot, and this is not a mere
detail, it is absurd, along with that little white tunic and the trousers that leave her ankles exposed, you could imagine her slim hips, it is absurd, only her boudoir has seen her like this, and
yet, like that, there she is on an enormous beach, where there is none of the viscous, stagnant air of the bridal bed, but the gusty sea breeze bearing the edict of a wild freedom removed,
forgotten, oppressed, debased for a whole lifetime as mother, wife, beloved woman. And it is clear: she cannot not feel it. That emptiness all around, with no walls or closed doors, and in front of
her, alone, a boundless ex citing mirror of water, that alone would already have been a feast for the senses, an orgy of the nerves, and everything is yet to happen, the bite of the gelid water,
the fear, the liquid embrace of the sea, the shock on the skin, the heart in the mouth . . .

She is accompanied toward the water. Over her face there falls a sublime concealment, a silken mask.

On the other hand, no one ever came to claim the corpse of the madman of Brixton. This has to be said. The doctors were experimenting, this must be understood. Some unbelievable couples were
walking around, the patient and his doctor, delicate invalids of exquisite elegance, devoured by a disease of divine slowness, and doctors like rats in a cellar, seeking clues, evidence, numbers,
and figures: scrutinizing the movements of the disease in its bewildered flight from the ambush of a paradoxical cure. They were
drinking
the sea water, things had gone that far, the water
that until the day before had been horror and disgust, and the privilege of a forlorn and barbarous humanity, skin burned by the sun, humiliating foulness. Now they were
sipping
it, those
same divine invalids who walked along the water’s edge imperceptibly dragging one leg, in an extraordinary simulation of a noble lameness that might exempt them from the everyday commonplace
whereby one foot is to be placed in front of the other. Everything was the cure. Some found a wife, others wrote poems, it was the same world as ever—repugnant, if you think about
it—that had suddenly been transferred,
for wholly medical purposes,
to the edge of an abyss abhorred for centuries and now chosen, out of choice and in the cause of science, as the
promenade of suffering.

The
wave bath,
the doctors called it. There was even a machine, really, a kind of patented sedan chair for getting into the sea, it was for the ladies, obviously, ladies and young
ladies,
to protect them from indiscreet eyes.
They would board the sedan chair, closed on all sides by curtains in muted colors, and then they would be carried into the sea, for a few
yards’ distance, and there, with the sedan chair almost touching the water, they would step down and take the bath, as if it were a medicine, almost invisible behind their curtains, curtains
in the wind, sedan chairs like floating tabernacles, curtains like the vestments of a ceremony inexplicably lost on the water; from the beach it was a sight to be seen. The wave bath.

Only science
can do
certain things, this is the truth. To sweep away centuries of disgust—the horrendous sea womb of corruption and death—and invent that idyll that little
by little spreads to all the beaches of the

world. Healing like

love. And now this: one day on the beach at Depper a wave washed up a boat, ruined, little more than a wreck. And there they were, those who had been seduced by illness, scattered along the
interminable beach, each one immersed in his marine coitus, elegant traceries on the sand as far as the eye could see, each one in his own bubble of emotion, lust, and fear. Regardless of the
science that had called them there, each one descended from his heaven to pace slowly toward the wreck that hesitated to run aground in the sand, like a messenger fearful of arriving. They came
closer. They pulled it up onto the sand. And they saw. Laid out on the bottom of the boat, with gaze upturned and arm outstretched to proffer something that was there no longer, they saw:

a saint.
It was made of wood, the statue. Colored. The mantle fell as far as the feet, a wound ran across the throat, but the face, the face knew nothing about this and it reposed,
meek, on a bed of divine serenity. Nothing else in the boat, only the saint. Alone. And everybody instinctively raised his eyes, for a moment, to scan the surface of the ocean for the outline of a
church, an understandable idea but also an irrational one, there were no churches, there were no crosses, there were no paths, the sea is trackless, the sea is without explanations.

The gaze of dozens of invalids, and beautiful, distant, consumptive women, the ratlike doctors, assistants, and valets, old peeping Toms, the curious, fishermen, young girls—and
a
saint.
Bewildered, all of them and him. Suspended.

On the beach at Depper, one day.

No one ever understood.

Ever.

“Y
OU WILL TAKE HER
to Daschenbach, sir, it is an ideal beach for the wave bath. Three days. One immersion in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Ask for Dr. Taverner, he will procure you all that is necessary. This is a letter of introduction for him. Take it.”

The Baron took the letter without even looking at it.

“She will die of it,” he said.

“It is possible. But highly improbable.”

Only great doctors can be so cynically precise.

Atterdel was the
greatest.

“Let me put it this way, my lord: you can keep that little girl in here for years, to walk on white carpets and sleep among flying men. But one day an emotion you cannot foresee will carry
her off. Amen. Or you can accept the risk, follow my orders, and trust in God. The sea will give you back your daughter. Dead, perhaps. But if alive, then really alive.”

Cynically precise.

The Baron had remained motionless, with the letter in his hand, halfway between him and the doctor dressed in black.

“You have no children, sir.”

“That is a fact of no importance.”