Ocean Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

shores, and beaches, into a single image, into a concept that is
the end of the sea,
something you may set down in a few lines, that may have a
place in an encyclopedia, so that people, upon reading it, may understand that the sea ends, and how, independently of everything that may happen around it, independently of . . .”
    “Bartleboom . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “Ask me why
I
am here.”
    Silence. Embarrassment.
    “I haven’t asked you, have I?”
    “Ask me now.”
    “Why are you here, Madame Deverià?”
    “To be cured.”
    More embarrassment, more silence. Bartleboom takes the cup, brings it to his lips. Empty. Forget it. He puts it down again.
    “To be cured of what?”
    “It is a strange malady. Adultery.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Adultery, Bartleboom. I have betrayed my husband. And my husband thinks that the sea air may cool the passions, and that the sight of the sea may stimulate the ethical sense, and that the
solitude of the sea may induce me to forget my lover.”
    “Really?”
    “Really what?”
    “Did you really betray your husband?”
    “Yes.”
    “A drop more tea?”
    P ERCHED ON the last narrow ledge of the world, a stone’s throw from the end of the sea, that evening, too, the Almayer Inn let the darkness
gradually silence the colors of its walls, and of the whole world and the entire ocean. So alone was it there, it seemed a thing forgotten. It was almost as if a procession of inns, of every kind
and vintage, had passed by there one day, skirting the coast, when, out of tiredness, one had detached itself from the rest, and, as its traveling companions filed past, it decided to stop on that
slight rise, yielding to its own weakness, bowing its head and waiting for the end. The Almayer Inn was like that. It had that beauty of which only the defeated are capable. And the clarity of
frail things. And the perfect solitude of the lost.
    Plasson, the painter, had only recently returned, sopping wet, with his canvases and his paints, seated in the bow of the rowboat, propelled by a young lad with red hair.
    “Thank you, Dol. See you tomorrow.”
    “Good night, Monsieur Plasson.”
    How it was Plasson had not already died of pneumonia was a mystery. A man cannot stand for hours and hours in the north wind, with his feet soaking and the tide creeping up his trousers, without
dying sooner or later.
    “First he has to finish his picture,” Dira had announced.
    “He will never finish it,” said Madame Deverià.
    “Then he’ll never die.”
    In room number 3, on the first floor, an oil lamp illuminated Professor Ismael Bartleboom at his ritual devotions, softly revealing their secret to the surrounding evening.
    My beloved,
    God knows how I miss, in this melancholy hour, the comfort of your presence and the balm of your smiles. My work fatigues me and the sea rebels against my stubborn attempts to understand
     it. I had not thought it could be so difficult to face. And I wander about, with my instruments and my notebooks, without finding the beginning of that which I seek, the access to any sort of
     answer. Where does the end of the sea begin? Or, indeed, what are we saying when we say
sea?
Do we mean the immense monster capable of devouring absolutely anything, or the wave
     foaming around our feet? The water you can hold in a cupped hand, or the abyss that none can see? Do we say everything with a single word, or with a single word do we conceal everything? I am
     here, a stone’s throw from the sea, and I cannot even understand where it is. The sea. The sea.
    Today I met a most beautiful woman. But be not jealous. I live only for you.
    Ismael A. Ismael Bartleboom
    Bartleboom wrote with a serene facility, without ever stopping and with a slowness that nothing could have disturbed. He liked to think that, one day, she would caress him the same way.
    In the half-light, with the long, slim fingers that had driven more than one man mad, Ann Deverià toyed with the pearls of her