Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page A

it—and placing us on its flow with the buoyancy of a single word, adieu. This, really, would be marvelous. Life would be
sweet,
any
life. And things would not do harm but, borne on the current, they would come closer; first one could get very close to them and then touch them and only at the end let oneself be touched by them.
Let oneself be
hurt
by them, even.
Die of them.
It does not matter. But everything would be, finally,
human.
All that is needed is someone’s imagination—a
father, a lover, someone. He would be able to invent a way, here, in the midst of this silence, in this land that will not speak. A clement way, and a beautiful one. A way from here to the sea.
    B OTH MOTIONLESS , eyes fixed on that immense stretch of water. Unbelievable. Really. You could stay there for a lifetime, understanding nothing, but
still looking. The sea ahead, a long river behind, and finally the ground beneath one’s feet. And those two there, motionless. Elisewin and Father Pluche. Like a spell. Without so much as a
thought in their heads, a real thought, only amazement. Wonder. And it is only after minutes and minutes—an eternity—that Elisewin, finally, without taking her eyes off the sea, says,
“But then, at a certain point, does it end?”
    Hundreds of miles away, in the solitude of his enormous castle, a man holds a sheet of paper close to a candle and reads. Few words, all on one line. Black ink.
    Do not be afraid. I am not. I who love you. Elisewin.
    The carriage will pick them up, then, because it is evening, and the inn awaits them. A short journey. The road that skirts the beach. All around, no one. Almost no one. In the
sea—what’s he doing
in
the sea?—a painter.

CHAPTER 7

    I N S UMATRA , off the north coast of Pangei, every seventy-six days there would emerge an island in
the form of a cross, covered with lush vegetation and apparently uninhabited. It would remain visible for a few hours before plunging back beneath the sea. On the beach at Cascais the local
fishermen had found the remains of the ship
Davemport,
wrecked eight days before, on the other side of the world, in the Ceylon sea. On the route for Farhadhar, mariners used to see
strange luminous butterflies that induced stupefaction and a sense of melancholy. In the waters of Bogador, a convoy of four naval vessels had disappeared, devoured by a single enormous wave that
had appeared out of nowhere on a day of flat calm.
    Admiral Langlais leafed slowly through those documents that arrived from the farthest-flung corners of a world that evidently clung to its follies. Letters, extracts from ships’ logs,
newspaper clippings, police reports, confidential reports, embassy dispatches. All sorts of things. The lapidary coldness of official communiqués or the alcoholic confidences of visionary
seamen all crossed the world just the same to arrive on that desk where, in the name of the Realm, Langlais would take his goose-quill pen and trace the boundary between that which, in the Realm,
would be considered true and that which would be forgotten as false. From the seas of the world, hundreds of statistics and rumors arrived in procession on that desk to be swallowed up by a verdict
as fine as a thread of black ink, embroidered with a precise hand on leatherbound books. Langlais’s hand was the womb in which they all went to lay their journeys to rest. His pen, the blade
beneath which their labors bared their necks. A clean, precise death.
    T HIS PRESENT INFORMATION
is to be held as un founded, and as such it is forbidden to divulge it or cite it in the charts and documents of the
Realm.
    O R , FOREVER , a serene life.
    T HIS PRESENT INFORMATION
is to be held as veracious, and as such will appear in all the charts and documents of the Realm.
    He would judge, Langlais. He would compare the evidence, weigh up the testimony, investigate the sources. And then he would judge. He lived in daily contact with the specters of an immense