Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco Page B

dared ask him, “And what might be this prodigious medicine with which you think to save your savage?” He liked to reply, “My roses.”
    In the same way as a child might place a lost bird in the warmth of a nest made of cloth, Langlais placed Adams in his garden. An admirable garden, in which the most refined geometries kept the
explosion of all the colors under control, and the discipline of rigid symmetries ruled the spectacular, closely ranked flowers and plants from all over the world. A garden in which the chaos of
life became a divinely precise figure.
    It was there that Adams slowly became himself again. For months he remained silent, only docilely allowing himself to be taught a thousand precise rules. Then his absence began to become a vague
presence, punctuated here and there by brief phrases, and no longer tinged with the stubborn survival of the animal that had gone to ground within him. After a year, no one would have doubted, on
seeing him, that he was the most classic and perfect of gardeners: silent and imperturbable, slow and precise in his gestures, inscrutable and ageless. The clement god of a miniature creation.
    In all that time, Langlais never asked him anything. He exchanged few words with him, mostly to do with the state of health of the irises and the unpredictable changes in the weather. Neither of
the two ever alluded to the past, to any past. He was waiting, was Langlais. He was not in a hurry. On the contrary, he was enjoying the pleasures of waiting. So much so that it was with an absurd
touch of disappointment that, one day, while strolling in a secondary avenue of the garden where he happened to pass close to Adams, he saw him look up from a pearl-colored petunia and distinctly
heard him pronounce—apparently to no one—these precise words:
    “It has no walls, Timbuktu, because they have always thought, down there, that its beauty alone would stop any enemy.”
    Then Adams fell silent and looked down at the pearl-colored petunia once more. Langlais walked on, without saying a word, along the little avenue. Not even God, if he existed, would have noticed
anything.
    From that day, all of Adams’s stories began to flow out of him. In the most diverse moments and according to inscrutable times and liturgies. Langlais limited himself to listening. He
never asked a question. He listened and did no more. Sometimes they were mere phrases. Other times, authentic accounts. Adams narrated with a soft, warm voice. With surprising art, he measured
words and silences. There was something hypnotic about the way he psalmodized fantastic images. To listen to him was spellbinding. And Langlais was enchanted.
    Nothing of what he heard, in those tales, ended up in his tomes bound in dark leather. The Realm, in this case, did not come into it. Those stories were for him. He had waited until they bloomed
from the womb of a violated, dead land. Now he was harvesting them. They were the refined gift he had decided to offer to his own solitude. He imagined himself growing old in the devoted shadow of
those stories. And dying, one day, with his eyes full of the image, forbidden to any other white man, of the most beautiful garden in Timbuktu.
    He thought that everything would always remain so magically light and easy. He could not foresee that he would soon relate that man named Adams to something surprisingly ferocious.
    S OME TIME AFTER Adams’s arrival, Admiral Langlais chanced to find himself burdened with the disagreeable and banal necessity of staking his life
on a game of chess. Along with his little retinue, he was surprised in the open countryside by a bandit notorious in the area for his madness and the cruelty of his deeds. But in this case,
surprisingly, he was inclined not to treat his victims with ferocity. He held only Langlais and sent back all the others to see to the task of raising the enormous sum required for the ransom.
Langlais knew he was rich enough to buy back his