Read Ocean Sea for Free Online Page A

were
sipping
it, those
same divine invalids who walked along the water’s edge imperceptibly dragging one leg, in an extraordinary simulation of a noble lameness that might exempt them from the everyday commonplace
whereby one foot is to be placed in front of the other. Everything was the cure. Some found a wife, others wrote poems, it was the same world as ever—repugnant, if you think about
it—that had suddenly been transferred,
for wholly medical purposes,
to the edge of an abyss abhorred for centuries and now chosen, out of choice and in the cause of science, as the
promenade of suffering.
    The
wave bath,
the doctors called it. There was even a machine, really, a kind of patented sedan chair for getting into the sea, it was for the ladies, obviously, ladies and young
ladies,
to protect them from indiscreet eyes.
They would board the sedan chair, closed on all sides by curtains in muted colors, and then they would be carried into the sea, for a few
yards’ distance, and there, with the sedan chair almost touching the water, they would step down and take the bath, as if it were a medicine, almost invisible behind their curtains, curtains
in the wind, sedan chairs like floating tabernacles, curtains like the vestments of a ceremony inexplicably lost on the water; from the beach it was a sight to be seen. The wave bath.
    Only science
can do
certain things, this is the truth. To sweep away centuries of disgust—the horrendous sea womb of corruption and death—and invent that idyll that little
by little spreads to all the beaches of the
    world. Healing like
    love. And now this: one day on the beach at Depper a wave washed up a boat, ruined, little more than a wreck. And there they were, those who had been seduced by illness, scattered along the
interminable beach, each one immersed in his marine coitus, elegant traceries on the sand as far as the eye could see, each one in his own bubble of emotion, lust, and fear. Regardless of the
science that had called them there, each one descended from his heaven to pace slowly toward the wreck that hesitated to run aground in the sand, like a messenger fearful of arriving. They came
closer. They pulled it up onto the sand. And they saw. Laid out on the bottom of the boat, with gaze upturned and arm outstretched to proffer something that was there no longer, they saw:
    a saint.
It was made of wood, the statue. Colored. The mantle fell as far as the feet, a wound ran across the throat, but the face, the face knew nothing about this and it reposed,
meek, on a bed of divine serenity. Nothing else in the boat, only the saint. Alone. And everybody instinctively raised his eyes, for a moment, to scan the surface of the ocean for the outline of a
church, an understandable idea but also an irrational one, there were no churches, there were no crosses, there were no paths, the sea is trackless, the sea is without explanations.
    The gaze of dozens of invalids, and beautiful, distant, consumptive women, the ratlike doctors, assistants, and valets, old peeping Toms, the curious, fishermen, young girls—and
a
saint.
Bewildered, all of them and him. Suspended.
    On the beach at Depper, one day.
    No one ever understood.
    Ever.
    “Y OU WILL TAKE HER to Daschenbach, sir, it is an ideal beach for the wave bath. Three days. One immersion in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Ask for Dr. Taverner, he will procure you all that is necessary. This is a letter of introduction for him. Take it.”
    The Baron took the letter without even looking at it.
    “She will die of it,” he said.
    “It is possible. But highly improbable.”
    Only great doctors can be so cynically precise.
    Atterdel was the
greatest.
    “Let me put it this way, my lord: you can keep that little girl in here for years, to walk on white carpets and sleep among flying men. But one day an emotion you cannot foresee will carry
her off. Amen. Or you can accept the risk, follow my orders, and trust in God. The sea will