Ocean Sea Read Online Free PDF

necklace—a rosary of desire—in the unconscious
gesture she always made when sad. She watched the guttering flame of the oil lamp, glancing from time to time in the mirror, where the struggles of those desperate little glimmers of light sketched
her face over and over. Leaning into those last little surges of light, she went over to the bed where, under the covers, a little girl slept all unaware of any other place; she was most beautiful.
Ann Deverià looked at her, but with a look for which the word
look
is too strong, a marvelous look that is seeing without wondering about anything, seeing and no more, something
like two things that touch each other—the eyes and the image—a look that does not
take
but
receives,
in the absolute silence of the mind, the
only
look that
could really save us—innocent of any question, still not tainted by the vice of
wanting to know
—the only innocence that could prevent the hurt caused by external things when
they enter the sphere of our sensibilities—to see—to feel—because it would be no more than a marvelous
vis-à-vis,
us and things, whereby our eyes
receive
the whole world—to receive—without questions, even without wonder—to receive—only—to receive—in our eyes—the world. A way of seeing known only to the eyes
of the Madonnas, as, under the vaults of the churches, they watch the angel descend from skies of gold at the hour of the Annunciation.
    Darkness. Ann Deverià tightly embraces the little girl’s unclothed body, within the secret of her bed, plump with covers light as clouds. Her fingers run lightly across that
incredible skin, and her lips search in the most hidden folds for the bland flavor of sleep. She moves slowly, Ann Deverià. A dance in slow motion, an adagio that loosens something in the
head and between the legs and all over. There is no dance more precise than that, waltzing with sleep on the parquet of the night.
    The last light, in the last window, goes out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of
sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.
    Night over the Almayer Inn.
    Motionless night.
    B ARTLEBOOM AWOKE TIRED and in a bad mood. For hours, in sleep, he had negotiated the purchase of Chartres cathedral with an Italian cardinal, and in the
end had obtained a monastery in the vicinity of Assisi at the exorbitant price of sixteen thousand crowns plus a night with his cousin Dorothea and a quarter-share of the Almayer Inn. The deal, in
addition, had been struck aboard a boat perilously at the mercy of the waves and commanded by a gentleman who claimed he was Madame Deverià’s husband and,
laughing—
laughing
—admitted he knew nothing whatsoever about the sea. When he awoke, he was exhausted. He was not surprised to see, straddling the windowsill, the usual boy who,
motionless, was looking at the sea. But he was distinctly surprised to hear him say, without even turning around, “Me, I would have told him what to do with his monastery.”
    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