Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco Page A

inexorably elsewhere. Langlais did not even wrest a glance from him. Nothing.
    Langlais stood there staring at him in silence for a while. Then he made a gesture that admitted of no objections. They heaved Adams up from the chair and dragged him away. Langlais watched him
as he departed—his feet dragging on the marble floor—and had the unpleasant sensation that, in that moment, on the approximative charts in the possession of the Realm, Timbuktu was also
slipping farther and farther away. For no reason, one of the many legends surrounding that city came to mind: that the women, down there, kept only one eye uncovered, wonderfully painted with
colored earth. He had always wondered why ever it was that they should hide the other eye. He got up and idly moved over to the window. He was thinking of opening it when a voice, in his head,
froze him as it pronounced a clear, precise phrase:
    “Because no one could hold their gaze without going mad.”
    Langlais whirled around. There was no one in the room. He turned back toward the window. For a few moments he was unable to think of anything at all. Then he saw, filing by in the avenue below,
the little escort that was taking Adams back to nothingness. He did not wonder what he should have done. He simply did it.
    A few moments later he was standing before Adams, surrounded by the amazement of the onlookers and slightly wearied after the fast run. He looked him in the eyes and in a low voice said,
“And you, how do you know?”
    Adams did not seem to have even noticed him. He was still in some strange place, thousands of miles from there. But his lips moved and they all heard his voice say, “Because I have seen
them.”
    L ANGLAIS HAD COME across many cases like that of Adams. Sailors whom a storm or the cruelty of pirates had hurled onto the coast of an unknown
continent, hostages to chance and the prey of peoples for whom the white man was little more than a bizarre animal species. If a kind death did not take them swiftly, it was one kind of atrocious
death or another that awaited them in some fetid or marvelous corner of incredible worlds. Few were those who came out of such situations alive, picked up by some ship and reconsigned to the
civilized world bearing the irreversible mark of their catastrophe. Mindless wrecks, human detritus returned from the unknown. Lost souls.
    Langlais knew all this. And yet he took Adams with him. He stole him from wretchedness and took him into his palace. In whatever world his mind had gone to hide, there he would go to find it.
And he would bring it back. He did not want to save him. It was not exactly like that. He wanted to save the stories that were hidden inside him. It did not matter how much time it would take: he
wanted those stories, and he would have them.
    He knew that Adams was a man destroyed by his own life. In his mind’s eye, Adams’s soul was a peaceful village sacked and dispersed by the savage invasion of a dizzying number of
images, sensations, odors, sounds, pains, words. The death he simulated, to look at him, was the paradoxical result of a life that had exploded. An uncontrollable chaos was what crackled away below
his silence and his immobility.
    Langlais was not a doctor, and he had never saved anyone. But his own life had taught him the unpredictable therapeutic power of precision. It could be said that he treated himself with
precision. It was the medicine that, dissolved in every sip of his life, kept the bane of bewilderment at bay. He thought that Adams’s unassailable distance would have crumbled only under the
patient daily drill of some precision. He felt that this should be, in some way, a
gentle
precision, only tinged with the coldness of a mechanical rite, and cultivated in the warmth of a
little poetry. He searched for this for a long time in the world of things and gestures that had its home around him. And in the end he found it. And to those who, not without a certain sarcasm,