Read Ocean Sea for Free Online Page B

give you back your daughter. Dead, perhaps. But if alive, then really alive.”
    Cynically precise.
    The Baron had remained motionless, with the letter in his hand, halfway between him and the doctor dressed in black.
    “You have no children, sir.”
    “That is a fact of no importance.”
    “But nevertheless you have no children.”
    He looked at the letter and slowly placed it on the table.
    “Elisewin shall remain here.”
    A moment of silence, but only a moment.
    “Not on your life.”
    This was Father Pluche. In reality the phrase that had set out from his brain was more complex and closer to something like “Perhaps it would be better to postpone any decision until after
having serenely reflected upon that which . . .”: something like that. But “Not on your life” was clearly a nimbler, quicker statement, and it was no great effort for it to slip
through the net of the other one and bob up onto the surface of the silence like an unforeseen and unforeseeable buoy.
    “Not on your life.”
    It was the first time in sixteen years that Father Pluche had dared to contradict the Baron in a question pertinent to Elisewin’s life. He felt a strange inebriation, as if he had just
thrown himself out of a window. He was a man with a certain practical spirit: given that he was already up in the air, he decided to try to take flight.
    “Elisewin shall go to the sea. I shall take her there. And if need be we shall stay there for months, years, until she manages to find the strength to face the water and everything else.
And in the end she shall return—alive. Any other decision would be idiotic or, worse, base. And though Elisewin is afraid, we must not be, and I shall not be. She cares nothing about dying.
She wants to live. And what she wants, she shall have.”
    It was hard to believe the way Father Pluche spoke. Hard to believe it was him.
    “You sir, Dr. Atterdel, you understand nothing of men and of fathers and children, nothing. And that’s why I believe you. The truth is always inhuman. Like you, sir. I know that you
are not mistaken. I pity you, but I admire your words. And I who have never seen the sea, to the sea I shall go, because your words have told me to do so. It is the most absurd, ridiculous, and
senseless thing that I might be called upon to undertake. But there is no man, in all of Carewall, who could stop me from doing it. No one.”
    He picked the letter up from the table and put it in his pocket. His heart was thumping like mad, his hands were shaking, and there was a strange buzzing in his ears. Nothing surprising about
that, he thought: it’s not every day you take flight.
    Anything could have happened in that moment. There really are times when the omnipresent and logical network of causal sequences gives up, taken unawares by life, and climbs down into the stalls
to mingle with the public, so that up on the stage, under the lights of a sudden, dizzying freedom, an invisible hand may fish in the infinite womb of the possible and, out of millions of things,
will permit one thing alone to happen. In the silent triangle formed by those three men, all the millions of things that could have exploded into being passed by in succession, but in a flash,
until, the glare having faded and the dust settled, one sole, minute thing appeared, within the sphere of that time and space, struggling with a certain modest reserve to happen. And it happened.
The Baron—the Baron of Carewall—began to cry, without even hiding his face in his hands, but merely letting himself slump back against the back of his sumptuous seat, as if defeated by
fatigue, but also as if freed of an enormous burden. Like a dead man but also like a man who had been saved.
    Baron Carewall cried.
    Cried his eyes out.
    Father Pluche, motionless.
    Dr. Atterdel, speechless.
    And that was it.
    T HESE WERE all things that no one ever came to know of in Carewall. But everyone, without exception, still tells of what