“LISTEN TO ME, Elisewin . . .”
“No, don’t talk.”
“Listen to me.”
“No.”
“What will happen here will be horrible and . . .”
“Kiss me . . . it’s dawn, they’ll come back . . .”
“Listen to me . . .”
“Don’t talk, I beg you.”
“Elisewin . . .”
What can you do? How can you say what you have to say to such a woman, with her hands on your body and her skin, her skin, you cannot talk of death to one like her, how do you tell such a girl things she already knows and yet it is necessary for her to listen, to the words, one after another, and that even if you know yet you must listen, sooner or later, someone must say them and you must listen to them, she must listen to them, that young girl who is saying, “I have never seen that look in your eyes before.”
And then, “If only you wanted to, you could save yourself.”
How do you tell such a woman that you would like to save yourself and, even more, you would like to save her along with you, and do nothing else but save her, and save yourself, for a whole lifetime, but it’s not possible, everyone has his own journey to make, and in the arms of a woman you end up following a twisted road, which even you don’t understand that well, and when the right time comes, you haven’t the words to tell her about it, words that sit well, there, between those kisses and on the skin, there’s no way around it, and it’s some job searching for them in what you are and what you have felt, you can’t find them, they always have the wrong sound, they have no music, there, between those kisses and on the skin, it’s a question of music. And so you say something, but it’s wretched.
“Elisewin, I shall never be saved anymore.”
How do you tell such a man that now it is my turn to teach him something and between his caresses I want to make him understand that destiny is not chains but wings, and if only he still had any real will to live he could, and if only he really wanted me he could have another thousand nights like this instead of that one horrible night that he is heading for, only because it is waiting for him, that horrendous night, and has been calling him for years. How do you tell such a man that becoming a murderer will not help and that blood and pain will not help, it’s only a way of running at breakneck speed toward the end, when a time and a way to ensure that nothing finishes are here waiting for us, and calling us, if only we could listen to them, if only he could, really, really, listen to me. How do you tell such a man that he is losing you?
“I shall go away . . .”
“. . .”
“I don’t want to be here . . . I’m going away.”
“. . .”
“I don’t want to hear that scream, I want to be far away.”
“. . .”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
The truth is that it’s the music that’s hard, it’s the music that’s hard to find, to say things, there so close to each other, the music and the gestures, to dissolve the suffering, when there is absolutely nothing to be done anymore, the right music so that it may be a dance, in some way, and not a wrench, that going off, that slipping away, toward life and away from life, strange pendulum of the soul, redeeming and murderous, being able to dance it would hurt less, and that’s why lovers, all of them, seek that music, in that moment, within words, in the dust of gestures, and know that, if they had the courage, only silence would be music, precise music, a slow loving silence, glade of farewells and weary lake that finally runs into the span of a tiny melody, learned since the beginning, to be sung in a low voice.
“Farewell, Elisewin.”
A tiny little melody.
“Farewell, Thomas.”
Elisewin slips out from under the cloak and gets up. Her young girl’s body, nude, with only the warmth of an entire night upon her. She picks up her dress and moves over to the windows. The world outside is still there. You can do whatever you like, but you can always be sure that you will find it in its place, always.
It’s hard to believe, but that’s the way it is.
Two bare feet, young girl’s feet. They climb the stairs, enter a room, go toward a window, stop.
The hills are resting. As if there were no sea before them.
“WE SHALL LEAVE tomorrow, Father Pluche.”
“What?”
“Tomorrow. We shall leave.”
“But . . .”
“Please.”
“Elisewin . . . you cannot decide just like that, without warning . . . we have to write to Daschenbach . . . look, they’re not sitting there waiting for us every blessed day . . .”
“We are not going to Daschenbach.”
“What do you mean, we’re not going to Daschenbach?”
“We’re not going there.”
“Elisewin, let’s keep calm. We have come all this way because you must get better, and to get better you must go into the sea, and to go into the sea you must go to . . .”
“I have already gone into the sea.”
“Pardon?”
“I no longer have anything to get better from, Father Pluche.”
“But . . .”
“I am alive.”
“Jesus . . . what the devil has happened?”
“Nothing . . . all you must do is trust me . . . I beg you, you must trust me . . .”
“I . . . I trust you, but . . .”
“Then let me leave. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow . . .”
Father Pluche stands there, twiddling his astonishment between his fingers. A thousand questions in his head. And he knows very well what he should do. Few words. Clear. A simple thing: “And what will your father say?” A simple thing. And yet it gets lost on the way. There is no way of finding it again. Father Pluche is still there looking for it when he hears his own voice asking, “And how is it? . . . The sea, how is it?”
Elisewin smiles.
“Very beautiful.”
“And?”
Elisewin does not stop smiling.
“At a certain point, it ends.”
THEY LEFT EARLY in the morning. The carriage bowling along the coast road. Father Pluche let himself be jounced about on his seat with the same cheerful resignation with which he had packed his bags, said good-bye to everybody, said good-bye to everybody again, and deliberately left a suitcase at the inn, because when one leaves, one should always sow an excuse for returning. One never knows. He was silent until he saw the road turn and the sea getting farther away. Not a second longer.
“Would it be too much to ask where we are going?”
Elisewin was holding a sheet of paper firmly in her hand. She glanced at it.
“St. Parteny.”
“And what’s that?”
“A town,” said Elisewin, closing her hand over the paper.
“A town where?”
“It will take about twenty days. It’s in the country, near the capital.”
“About twenty days? But this is madness.”
“Look at the sea, Father Pluche, it’s going away.”
“About twenty days . . . I trust you have an excellent reason for making a journey of that kind . . .”
“It’s going away . . .”
“Elisewin, I’m talking to you, what are we going down there for?”
“We are going to look for somebody.”
“A twenty-day journey to look for somebody?”
“Yes.”
“Good heavens, then he must be a prince at the very least, or for all I know the king in person, a saint . . .”
“More or less . . .”
Pause.
“He’s an admiral.”
Pause.
“Jesus . . .”
IN THE TAMAL ARCHIPELAGO every evening a fog would come up that devoured the ships and restored them at dawn completely covered in snow. In the Cadaoum Strait, at every new moon, the water would retreat leaving behind it an immense sandbank populated by talking molluscs and poisonou
s seaweed. Off the coast of Sicily an island had disappeared and another two, not shown on the charts, had surfaced not far distant. In the waters of Draghar they had captured the pirate van Dell, who had preferred to throw himself to the sharks rather than fall into the hands of the Royal Navy. In his palace, then, Admiral Langlais was still cataloging with extenuating precision the plausible absurdities and the unlikely truths that reached him from all the seas of the world. His pen traced with immutable patience the fantastic geography of an indefatigable world. His mind was at rest in the precision of an unchanging day-to-day existence. Identical to itself, his life unrolled. And his garden lay untended, almost disturbing.
“My name is Elisewin,” said the girl, when she stood before him.
It struck him, that voice: velvet.
“I have known a man named Thomas.”
Velvet.
“When he lived here, with you, his name was Adams.”
Admiral Langlais remained motionless, holding the look in the girl’s dark eyes. He said nothing. He had hoped never to hear that name again. He had kept it far from him for days, months. He had a few moments in which to prevent its returning, to wound his soul and his memories. He thought of getting up and asking that girl to go away. He would give her a carriage. Money. Anything. He would order her to go away. In the king’s name, go away.
As if from afar, that velvety voice reached him. And it was saying, “Keep me with you.”
For fifty-three days and nine hours, Langlais did not know what had persuaded him in that instant to reply, “Yes, if you wish.”
He understood one evening, seated beside Elisewin, listening to that voice recite:
“In Timbuktu, this is the hour in which the women like to sing and make love to their men. They draw the veils aside from their faces and even the sun moves away, dumbfounded at their beauty.”
Langlais felt an immense, sweet fatigue steal upon his heart. As if he had wandered for years, lost, and finally found the road back home. He did not turn toward Elisewin. But he said quietly, “How do you know this story?”
“I don’t know. But I know that it is yours. This, and all the others.”
ELISEWIN STAYED in Langlais’s palace for five years. Father Pluche for five days.
On the sixth he said to Elisewin that it was incredible, but he had left a suitcase down there, at the Almayer Inn, incredible, really, but there was some important stuff in there, inside the suitcase, clothes and perhaps even the book with all the prayers.
“What do you mean, perhaps?”
“Perhaps . . . that is, certainly, now that I come to think of it, certainly, it’s in that suitcase, you understand that I absolutely cannot leave it there . . . not that they’re so wonderful, those prayers, for goodness’ sake, but, you know, to lose them like that . . . and considering that it’s a matter of a little trip of no more than twenty days or so, it’s not that far away, it’s only a question of . . .”
“Father Pluche . . .”
“. . . it’s understood that I would come back in any case . . . I’m just going to collect the suitcase, maybe I’ll stop to rest for a few days and then . . .”
“Father Pluche . . .”
“. . . it’s a question of a couple of months at most, perhaps I might pop in on your father, that is, I mean, ad absurdum, it would be even better if I . . .”
“Father Pluche . . . God, how I’ll miss you.”
He left the next day. He was already aboard the carriage when he got out again and, going up to Langlais, said to him, “Do you know something? I would have thought that admirals stayed at sea . . .”
“I would have thought that priests stayed in church.”
“Oh well, you know, God is everywhere . . .”
“So is the sea, Father, so is the sea.”
He left. And he didn’t leave a suitcase behind, this time.
ELISEWIN STAYED IN Langlais’s palace for five years. The meticulous order of those rooms and the silence of that life reminded her of the white carpets of Carewall, and the circular avenues, and the flowerless life that her father, one day, had prepared for her. But what had been medicine and cure down there, here was a clear certainty and a joyful recovery. What she had known as the womb of a weakness, here she was rediscovering as the form of a crystalline strength. From Langlais she learned that, among all possible lives, you have to anchor yourself to one to be able to contemplate all the others with serenity. One by one, she gave Langlais the thousand stories that one man and one night had sown in her, God knows how, but in an indelible and definitive way. He would listen to her, in silence. She would narrate. Velvet.
They never talked of Adams. Only once did Langlais, suddenly looking up from his books, say slowly, “I loved that man, if you can understand what that means, I loved him.”
Langlais died one summer morning, devoured by abominable pain and accompanied by a voice—velvet—that was telling him of the scents of a garden, the smallest and most beautiful in Timbuktu.
Elisewin left the next day. She wanted to go back to Carewall. It would take her a month, or a lifetime, but there she would return. Of what awaited her there, she could imagine but little. She only knew that she would keep all those stories within her for herself and forever. She knew that in any man she might come to love, she would seek the flavor of Thomas. And she knew that no land could obscure, in her, the mark of the sea.
All the rest was still nothing. To invent it—that would have been marvelous.
CHAPTER 2
Father Pluche
A Prayer for One Who Is Lost, and Therefore, to Tell the Truth, a Prayer for Me.
Have patience, do
O Lord Most High
For once again it is I.
So, things are
going pretty well here,
the fact is that
folk get by,
some better than others,
but one always finds a way
a way to manage,
you understand me,
but this isn’t the problem.
The problem is quite different,
if you have the patience to listen
to listen to me,
to.
The problem is this road
this fine road
this road that rolls
and unrolls
and upholds
but does not roll straight
as it could
and not even crooked
as it might
no.
Curiously,
it is falling apart
Believe me
(just for once you believe in me)
it is falling apart.
To sum up then
if sum up I must
there is
a bit here
a bit there,
a bit everywhere
taken
all unaware,
I surmise,
by an urge
to improvise.
Maybe.
Now, not that I want to play things down, but I ought to explain this business to you, which is man’s work and not God’s, when the road ahead of one falls to pieces, crumbles, loses its way, vanishes, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but it’s quite possible that you are not aware of this, it’s man’s business, in general, losing the way. Not God’s. You must have patience and let me explain. It will not take a moment. First of all you must not allow yourself to be misled by the fact that, technically speaking, it cannot be denied, this road that rolls, unrolls, and upholds, under the wheels of this carriage, effectively speaking, if we want to stick to the facts, is not falling to pieces at all. Technically speaking. It runs straight ahead, without hesitation, not even a bashful junction, nothing. Straight as a die. I can see that myself. But the problem, let me tell you, lies elsewhere. It is not this road, made of earth and dust and stones, that we are talking of. The road in question is another . . . And it doesn’t run outside but inside. Here inside. I don’t
know if you recall: my road. Everybody has one, you know this yourself, you, besides, who are not exactly extraneous to the design of this machine that we are, all of us, each in his own way. Everybody has a road inside, a thing that simplifies, moreover, the task of this journey of ours, and only rarely complicates it. Now is one of those moments that complicate it. To sum up, then, if sum up we will, it’s that road, the one inside, that is falling to pieces, has fallen to pieces, bless it, it can’t resist anymore. It happens. Believe me. And it is not a pleasant thing.
No.
I believe
it was
O Lord Most High,
it was
I believe
the sea.
The sea
confuses the waves
the thoughts
the sailing ships
the reason suddenly commits treason
and the roads
that were there yesterday
today mean nothing
So much so that I believe
I believe
that that idea of yours
of the Deluge
was
in fact
A brilliant idea
because
if you want
to find
a punishment
I wonder
if you could find
anything better
than leaving a poor devil
alone
in the middle of that sea
Not even a beach.
Nothing.
A cliff
An abandoned wreck
Not even that.
Not a sign
to understand
which way
to go
to go to die.
So you see,
O Lord Most High,
the sea
is a kind
of small
Deluge.
Family size.
You are there,
Ocean Sea Page 12
