Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online

happened
afterwards.
The sweetness of what happened afterwards.
    “Elisewin . . .”
    “A miraculous cure . . .”
    “The sea. . . .”
    “It is madness . . .”
    “She will get better, you’ll see.”
    “She will die.”
    “The sea . . .”
    The sea, as the Baron saw from the geographer’s charts, was far away. But above all—he saw in his dreams—it was terrible, exaggeratedly beautiful, terribly powerful, inhuman
and inimical: marvelous. Marvelous colors, odors never perceived, sounds unknown—it was another world. He would look at Elisewin and could not imagine how she could get close to all that
without disappearing into nothingness, dispersed in the air by the commotion and the surprise. He thought of the moment when she would turn, suddenly, and her gaze would receive the sea. He thought
about it for weeks. And then he understood. It was not difficult, at bottom. It was incredible that he had not thought of it before.
    “How shall we get to the sea?” Father Pluche asked him.
    “It shall be the sea that comes to get you.”
    And so they left, one April morning. They crossed fields and hills and at sunset on the fifth day they reached the banks of a river. There was no town, there were no houses, nothing. But on the
water, silent, there swayed a little ship. She was called the
Adel.
She usually sailed the waters of the Ocean, carrying wealth and want to and fro between the continent and the islands.
On the prow was a figurehead whose hair flowed from head to foot. The sails held all the winds of the faraway world. The keel had been observing the womb of the sea for years. In every nook,
unknown odors told the stories that the sailors wore transcribed on their skin. She was a two-master. Baron Carewall had commanded her to follow the course of the river from the sea to that
point.
    “It is folly,” the captain had written to him.
    “I shall shower you with gold,” the Baron had replied.
    And now, like a phantasm departing from any reasonable course, the two-master known as the
Adel
was there. On the little quay, where only insignificant little craft were usually moored,
the Baron clasped his daughter to him and said, “Adieu.”
    Elisewin said nothing. She covered her face with a silken veil, slipped a folded and sealed sheet of paper into her father’s hands, turned, and went toward the men who would take her on
board. It was almost night by then. It could have been a dream.
    And so Elisewin went down to the sea in the gentlest way possible—only a father’s mind could have thought of it—borne by the current, along the bends, pauses, and hesitations
that the river had learned in centuries of journeying; a great sage, the river was the only one who knew the gentlest, mildest, most beautiful way one could get to the sea without harming oneself.
They went down the river, with that slowness determined precisely by the maternal wisdom of nature, slipping gradually into a world of odors and colored things that, day after day, revealed, with
extreme slowness, the presence, at first distant and then ever nearer, of the enormous womb that awaited them. The air changed, the dawns changed, and the skies, and the shapes of the houses, and
the birds, and the sounds, and the faces of the people, on the banks, and the words of the people in their mouths. Water slipping toward water, a most delicate courtship, the bends of the river
like a lullaby of the soul. An imperceptible journey. In Elisewin’s mind, sensations by the thousand, but as weightless as feathers in flight.
    Still today, in Carewall, everyone tells the tale of that journey. Each one in his own way. And all without ever having seen it. But this does not matter. They will never stop telling it. So
that no one may forget how fine it would be if, for each sea that awaits us, there were a river, for us. And someone—a father, a lover, someone—capable of taking us by the hand and
finding that river—imagining it, inventing