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entire beach frozen by the worrying disturbance, while that animal runs and runs, and the women, from far off, avert their gaze, although certainly they would like to see, and how
they would like to see, the beast and his running, and let’s face it, his nudity, yes his nudity, his rambling nudity stumbling blindly in the sea, even beautiful in that gray light, of a
beauty that perforates years of good manners and boarding schools and blushes to go straight where it has to go, running along the nerve paths of timid women who, in the secrecy of enormous
immaculate skirts
    women. The sea suddenly seemed to have been waiting for them forever. To listen to the doctors, it had been there, for millennia, patiently perfecting itself, with the sole and precise intention
of offering itself as a miraculous unguent for their afflictions of body and soul. Just as, while sipping tea in impeccable drawing rooms, impeccable doctors—weighing their words well in
order to explain with paradoxical courtesy—would tell impeccable husbands and fathers over and over that the disgust for the sea, and the shock, and the terror, was in reality a seraphic cure
for sterility, anorexia, nervous exhaustion, menopause, overexcitement, anxiety, and insomnia. An ideal experience inasmuch as it was a remedy for the ferments of youth and a preparation for wifely
duties. A solemn baptism for young ladies become women. So that, if we wish to forget, for a moment, the madman in the sea at Brixton
    (the madman carried on running, but out to sea, until he was lost to view, a scientific exhibit that had eluded the statistics of the medical school to consign itself spontaneously to the belly
of the ocean sea)
    if we wish to forget him
    (digested by the great aquatic intestine and never returned to the beach, never spewed back into the world, as one might have expected, reduced to a shapeless, bluish bladder)
    we could think of a woman—of a woman—respected, loved, mother, woman. For whatever reason—
illness
—brought to a sea that she would otherwise never have seen and
that is now the wavering needle of her cure, an immeasurable index, in truth, which she contemplates but does not understand. Her hair hangs loose and she is barefoot, and this is not a mere
detail, it is absurd, along with that little white tunic and the trousers that leave her ankles exposed, you could imagine her slim hips, it is absurd, only her boudoir has seen her like this, and
yet, like that, there she is on an enormous beach, where there is none of the viscous, stagnant air of the bridal bed, but the gusty sea breeze bearing the edict of a wild freedom removed,
forgotten, oppressed, debased for a whole lifetime as mother, wife, beloved woman. And it is clear: she cannot not feel it. That emptiness all around, with no walls or closed doors, and in front of
her, alone, a boundless ex citing mirror of water, that alone would already have been a feast for the senses, an orgy of the nerves, and everything is yet to happen, the bite of the gelid water,
the fear, the liquid embrace of the sea, the shock on the skin, the heart in the mouth . . .
    She is accompanied toward the water. Over her face there falls a sublime concealment, a silken mask.
    On the other hand, no one ever came to claim the corpse of the madman of Brixton. This has to be said. The doctors were experimenting, this must be understood. Some unbelievable couples were
walking around, the patient and his doctor, delicate invalids of exquisite elegance, devoured by a disease of divine slowness, and doctors like rats in a cellar, seeking clues, evidence, numbers,
and figures: scrutinizing the movements of the disease in its bewildered flight from the ambush of a paradoxical cure. They were
drinking
the sea water, things had gone that far, the water
that until the day before had been horror and disgust, and the privilege of a forlorn and barbarous humanity, skin burned by the sun, humiliating foulness. Now they