“I told you that Father Pluche’s prayers are not like the others.”
“But do they all have titles like that?”
“Well, I made some titles a bit shorter, but that’s the idea.”
“Tell us some others, Father Pluche . . .”
“Oh, so now you are interested in prayers, eh, Plasson?”
“I don’t know . . . there is the Prayer for a Little Boy Who Cannot Say the Letter R, or the Prayer of a Man Who Is Falling into a Ravine and Doesn’t Want to Die . . .”
“I don’t believe it . . .”
“Well, obviously it is very short, a few words only . . . then there is the Prayer of an Old Man Whose Hands Shake, things like that.”
“Extraordinary!”
“And how many have you written?”
“A few . . . they are not easy to write, every so often one feels like it, but if inspiration will not come . . .”
“But roughly how many?”
“For the present . . . nine thousand five hundred and two.”
“No . . .”
“Fantastic . . .”
“Good heavens, Bartleboom, your encyclopedia is a little notebook in comparison.”
“But how do you do it, Father Pluche?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yesterday he wrote a very beautiful one.”
“Elisewin . . .”
“Really.”
“Elisewin, please . . .”
“Yesterday evening he wrote one about you, sir.”
Suddenly everybody fell silent.
Yesterday evening he wrote one about you, sir.
But she did not say it looking at one of them.
Yesterday evening he wrote one about you, sir.
She was looking elsewhere when she said it, and it was there that everybody turned, taken by surprise.
A table, alongside the glass door at the entrance. A man seated at the table, a spent pipe in his hand. Adams. Nobody knows when he arrived there. Perhaps he has been there for a moment, perhaps he has always been there.
“Yesterday evening he wrote one about you, sir.”
Everyone remained motionless. But Elisewin got up and went over to him.
“It is called the Prayer for a Man Who Does Not Want to Say His Name.”
But gently. She said it gently.
“Father Pluche thinks you are a doctor.”
Adams smiles.
“Only now and then.”
“But I say that you are a mariner.”
All silent, the others. Motionless. But they did not miss a word, not one.
“Only now and then.”
“And here, today, what are you?”
Adams shakes his head.
“Just somebody who is waiting.”
Elisewin is standing in front of him. She has a precise and very simple question in mind:
“What are you waiting for?”
Only five words. But she cannot say them because a second before she does, she hears a voice murmur in her head, “Don’t ask me, Elisewin. Don’t ask me, I beg you.”
She stands there motionless, without saying anything, her eyes fixed on those of Adams, which are as silent as stones.
Silence.
Then Adams looks up above her head and says, “What wonderful sunshine today.”
On the other side of the windows, without a groan, every cloud has died, and the clear air of a day resuscitated from nothing breaks out with blinding force.
BEACH. And sea.
Light.
The north wind.
The silence of the tides.
Days. Nights.
A liturgy. Motionless, come to think of it. Motionless.
People like the gestures of a ritual.
Something other than men.
Gestures.
The breath of the evanescent daily ceremony, they are transformed into oxygen to form an angelic surplace.
Metabolized by the perfect landscape of the seashore, they are converted into figures like those on a silk fan.
More immutable with every day.
Placed within a stone’s throw of the sea, their becoming is their passing away, and in the interstices of an elegant nothingness they receive the solace of a temporary nonexistence.
On that trompe-l’oeil of the soul there floats the argentine tinkle of their words, the only perceivable ripple on the still surface of the ineffable enchantment.
“DO YOU THINK I am mad?”
“No.”
Bartleboom has told her the whole story. The letters, the mahogany box, the woman who waits. Everything.
“I have never told this to anyone before.”
Silence. Evening. Ann Deverià. Her hair down. A long white nightgown hanging to her feet. Her room. The light flickering on the walls.
“Why me, Bartleboom?”
The Professor is mangling the hem of his jacket. It is not easy. Not easy at all.
“Because I need you to help me.”
“Me?”
“You.”
A man weaves great stories, that’s a fact, and can go on for years believing in them; it does not matter how insane they are, and improbable, he carries them around, that’s all. You can even be happy, with things like that. Happy. And it might never end. Then, one day, something snaps in the heart of the great fantastic contrivance, and all of a sudden, for no reason, it breaks without warning and you are left standing there, unable to understand how it is that that fabulous story is no longer with you, but ahead of you, as if it were another person’s folly, and you are that other person. All of a sudden. Sometimes it takes a mere nothing. Perhaps only the emergence of a question. That can be enough.
“Madame Deverià . . . how shall I be able to recognize her, that woman, my woman, when I meet her?”
Perhaps only an elementary question that emerges from the subterranean lair in which it was buried. That can be enough.
“How shall I recognize her, when I meet her?”
Quite.
“But in all these years, have you never asked yourself this?”
“No. I knew that I would recognize her, that’s all. But now I am afraid. I am afraid that I shall not realize. And she will move on. And I shall lose her.”
He was really burdened by a world of anguish, was Professor Bartleboom.
“Teach me, Madame Deverià, how I shall recognize her, when I see her.”
Elisewin was sleeping by the light of a candle and a little girl. And Father Pluche, among his prayers, and Plasson, in the whiteness of his pictures. Perhaps even Adams, the animal stalking its prey, was sleeping. The Almayer Inn was sleeping, rocked by the ocean sea.
“Close your eyes, Bartleboom, and give me your hands.”
Bartleboom obeys. And instantly he feels that woman’s face under his hands, and her lips as they play with his fingers, and then the slim neck and the nightgown opening, her hands guiding his along that warm and very soft skin, and they clutch them to her, to feel the secrets of that unknown body, to clutch that warmth, before drawing them back up to her shoulders, among her hair and once more between her lips, where his fingers slip back and forth until a voice comes to stop them and write in the silence:
“Look at me, Bartleboom.”
The bodice of her nightgown has slipped down to her lap. Her eyes smile with no embarrassment.
“One day you will see a woman and feel all this without even touching her. Give your letters to her. You wrote them for her.”
A thousand things are buzzing around Bartleboom’s head while he withdraws his hands, holding them open, as if closing them might cause all to escape.
He was so confused when he left the room that he thought he saw, in the half-light, the unreal figure of a most beautiful little girl, hugging a large pillow, at the foot of the bed. With no clothes on. Her skin white as a sea cloud.
“WHEN DO YOU want to leave, Elisewin?” says Father Pluche.
“And you?”
“I don’t want a
nything. But we must go to Daschenbach, sooner or later. It is there that you must take the cure. This . . . this is not a good place to get better.”
“Why do you say so?”
“There is something . . . something unhealthy about this place. Haven’t you noticed? That painter’s white pictures, Professor Bartleboom’s endless measurements . . . and then that lady who is so very beautiful and yet alone and unhappy, I don’t know . . . not to mention that man who waits . . . what he does is wait. God knows for what, or whom . . . Everything has stopped one step short of things. There is nothing real, do you understand this?”
Elisewin kept silent and thought.
“And that’s not all. Do you know what I have discovered? There is another guest in the inn. In the seventh room, the one that seems empty. Well, it’s not empty. There is a man in there. But he never comes out. Dira did not want to tell me who he is. None of the others has ever seen him. They take his food to his room. Does that seem normal to you?”
Elisewin said nothing.
“What kind of place is this, where there are people who are invisible, or they go backward and forward ad infinitum, as if they had an eternity before them to . . .”
“This is the seashore, Father Pluche. Neither land nor sea. It’s a place that does not exist.”
Elisewin gets up, she smiles.
“It’s a world of angels.”
She is about to go out. She stops.
“We shall leave, Father Pluche. A few more days and we shall leave.”
“SO LISTEN CAREFULLY, Dol. You must watch the sea. And when you see a ship, you tell me. Understood?”
“Yes, Monsieur Plasson.”
“Good lad.”
The fact is that Plasson’s eyesight is not up to much. He can see close up, but not things at a distance. He says that he has spent too much time looking at rich people’s faces. It ruins the sight. Not to mention everything else. And so he looks for ships, but he cannot find them. Perhaps Dol will succeed.
“It’s because the ships pass by far out, Mr. Plasson.”
“Why?”
“They are afraid of the devil’s footsteps.”
“That is?”
“Rocks. There are rocks off the entire coast around here. They are close to the surface, but you can’t always see them, by any means. So the ships stay well out to sea.”
“All we needed was rocks.”
“The devil put them there.”
“Yes, Dol.”
“Really! You see, the devil used to live down there, on Taby Island. Well, one day a little girl who was a saint took a boat and after rowing for three days and three nights she arrived at the island. Very beautiful.”
“The island or the saint?”
“The little girl.”
“Ah.”
“She was so beautiful that when the devil saw her he was scared to death. He tried to chase her away, but she didn’t budge. She just stayed there looking at him. Until one day the devil really couldn’t stood it any longer . . .”
“Couldn’t stand it.”
“Couldn’t stand it any longer and, howling, he ran and ran, into the sea, until he disappeared and no one ever saw him again.”
“And the rocks, where do they come in?”
“They come in because for every step that the devil made as he ran away, a rock came out of the sea. Everywhere he set foot—bingo!—up popped a rock. And they’re still there today. They are the devil’s footsteps.”
“A good story.”
“Yes.”
“Can you see anything?”
“No.”
Silence.
“Are we going to stay here all day?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“I liked it better when I used to come for you in the evening with the boat.”
“Keep your mind on the job, Dol.”
“YOU COULD WRITE a poem for them, Father Pluche.” “Are you saying that seagulls pray?”
“Certainly. Especially when they are about to die.”
“And do you never pray, Bartleboom?”
Bartleboom adjusted the woolen hat on his head.
“I used to pray, once. Then I made a calculation. In eight years I had taken the liberty of asking the Almighty for two things. Result: my sister died and I have still to meet the woman I shall marry. Now I pray much less.”
“I do not think that . . .”
“Numbers speak clearly, Father Pluche. The rest is poetry.”
“Quite. If only we were a little more . . .”
“Don’t make things difficult, Father Pluche. The question is a simple one. Do you really believe that God exists?”
“Well, now, exists strikes me as a slightly excessive term, but I believe he is there, that’s it, in a world all of his own, he is there.”
“And what difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference, all right, Bartleboom, and how. Take for example this story of the seventh room . . . yes, the story of that man at the inn who never leaves his room, and all that.”
“So?”
“No one has ever seen him. He eats, it would seem. But it could easily be a trick. He might not exist. Made up by Dira. But for us, in any case, he would be there. In the evening the lights are lit in that room, every so often sounds are heard, you yourself, I have seen you slow down when you pass that room, you try to see, to hear something . . . For us that man is there.”
“But it’s not true, and then again he’s mad, that one, he’s a . . .”
“He’s not mad, Bartleboom. Dira says he is a gentleman, a real gentleman. She says he has a secret, that’s all, but he is a completely normal person.”
“And you believe that?”
“I don’t know who he is, I don’t know if he exists, but I know that he’s there. For me he’s there. And he is a frightened man.”
“Frightened?”
Bartleboom shakes his head.
“Frightened of what?”
“DON’T YOU GO down to the beach?”
“No.”
“You don’t take a walk, you don’t write, you don’t make pictures, you don’t talk, you don’t ask questions. You are waiting, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why don’t you do what you have to do, and get it over with?”
Adams looks up at that little girl who speaks with a woman’s voice when she wants to, and at that moment she wants to.
“I have seen inns like this one in a thousand different parts of the world. Or perhaps I have seen this inn in a thousand different parts of the world. The same solitude, the same colors, the same fragrances, the same silence. People come here and time stops. For some it must be a feeling akin to happiness, don’t you think?”
“For some.”
“If I could turn back, then I would choose this: to live in front of the sea.”
Silence.
“In front of it.”
Silence.
“Adams . . .”
Silence.
“Stop waiting. It’s not so difficult to kill someone.”
“BUT ACCORDING TO YOU, shall I die, down there?”
“In Daschenbach?”
“When they put me in the sea.”
“Come on . . .”
“You come on, tell me the truth, Father Pluche, don’t joke.”
“You will not die, I swear it to you, you will not die.”
“And how do you know?”
“I know.”
“Oof.”
“I dreamed it.”
“Dreamed it . . .”
“Listen to me, then. One evening I go off to sleep, I slip into bed, and when I am about to switch off the light, I see the door open and a little boy comes in. I thought he was a porter, something like that. And instead he comes up to me and says, ‘Is there anything you want to dream of tonight, Father Pluche?’ Just like that. And I say, ‘The countess Varmeer having a bath.’ ”
“Father Pluc
he . . .”
“It was a joke, wasn’t it? Well, he says nothing, smiles a bit, and off he goes. I fall asleep and what do I dream of?”
“The countess Varmeer having a bath.”
“That’s it.”
“And how was she?”
“Oh, nothing, a disappointment . . .”
“Ugly?”
“She only looks slim, a disappointment . . . However . . . He returns every evening, that little boy. His name is Ditz. And each time he asks me if I want to dream of something. And so the day before yesterday I said to him, ‘I want to dream of Elisewin. I want to dream of her as a grownup.’ I fell asleep, and I dreamed of you.”
“And how was I?”
“Alive.”
“Alive? And then what?”
“Alive. Don’t ask me anything else. You were alive.”
“Alive . . . me?”
ANN DEVERIÀ AND BARTLEBOOM, seated beside each other, in a beached boat.
“And what answer did you give him?” asked Bartleboom.
“I gave him no answer.”
“No?”
“No.”
“And what will happen now?”
“I don’t know. I think he will come.”
“Are you happy about that?”
“I want him. But I don’t know.”
“Perhaps he will come here and take you away, forever.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Bartleboom.”
“And why not? He loves you, you said so yourself, you are all he has in life . . .”
Ann Deverià’s lover has finally discovered where her husband has confined her. He has written to her. In this moment he is perhaps already on his way toward that sea and that beach.
“I would come here and I would take you away, forever.”
Ann Deverià smiles.
“Tell me again, Bartleboom. With exactly that tone of voice, I pray you. Tell me again.”
“DOWN THERE . . . there it is, down there!”
“Down there, where?”
“There . . . no, farther to the right, that’s it, there . . .”
“I see it! I see it, by God.”
“Three masts!”
“Three masts?”
“It’s a three-master, can’t you see?”
“Three?”
“PLASSON, how long have we all been here?”
“Since time immemorial, Madame.”
“No. Really.”
“Since time immemorial, Madame. Really.”
“ACCORDING TO ME, he’s a gardener.”
Ocean Sea Page 8
