It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything.
The naked bosom
Mr Palomar is walking along a lonely beach. He encounters few bathers. One young woman is lying on the sand taking the sun, her bosom bared. Palomar, discreet by nature, looks away at the horizon of the sea. He knows that in such circumstances, at the approach of a strange man, women often cover themselves hastily, and this does not seem right to him: because it is a nuisance for the woman peacefully sun-bathing, and because the passing man feels he is an intruder, and because the taboo against nudity is implicitly confirmed; because half-respected conventions spread insecurity and incoherence of behavior rather than freedom and frankness.
And so, as soon as he sees in the distance the outline of the bronze-pink cloud of a naked female torso, he quickly turns his head in such a way that the trajectory of his gaze remains suspended in the void and guarantees his civil respect for the invisible frontier that surrounds people.
But – he thinks as he proceeds and resumes, the moment the horizon is clear, the free movement of his eyeballs – in acting like this, I display a refusal to see; or, in other words, I am finally reinforcing the convention that declares illicit any sight of the breast; that is to say, I create a kind of mental brassière suspended between my eyes and that bosom that, from the flash that reached the edge of my visual field, seemed to me fresh and pleasant to the eye. In other words, my not looking presupposes that I am thinking of that nakedness, worrying about it; and this is basically an indiscreet and reactionary attitude.
Returning from his stroll, Palomar again passes that bather, and this time he keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, so that his gaze touches with impartial uniformity the foam of the retreating waves, the boats pulled up on shore, the great bath-towel spread out on the sand, the swelling moon of lighter skin with the dark halo of the nipple, the outline of the coast in the haze, gray against the sky.
There – he reflects, pleased with himself, as he continues on his way – I have succeeded in having the bosom completely absorbed by the landscape, so that my gaze counted no more than the gaze of a seagull or a hake.
But is this really the right way to act, he reflects further. Or does it not mean flattening the human person to the level of things, considering it an object, and, worse still, considering as object that which in the person is the specific attribute of the female sex? Am I not perhaps perpetuating the old habit of male superiority, hardened over the years into a habitual insolence?
He turns and retraces his steps. Now, in allowing his gaze to run over the beach with neutral objectivity, he arranges it so that, once the woman’s bosom enters his field of vision, a break is noticeable, a shift, almost a darting glance. That glance goes on to graze the taut skin, withdraws, as if appreciating with a slight start the different consistency of the view and the special value it acquires, and for a moment the glance hovers in mid-air, making a curve that accompanies the swell of the breast from a certain distance, elusively but also protectively, to then continue its course as if nothing had happened.
In this way I believe my position is made quite clear, Palomar thinks, with no possible misunderstandings. But couldn’t this grazing of his eyes be finally taken for an attitude of superiority, an underestimation of what a breast is and means, a somehow putting it aside, on the margin, or in parenthesis? So, I am relegating the bosom again to the semi-darkness where centuries of sexomaniac puritanism and desire considered as sin have kept it . . .
This interpretation runs counter to Palomar’s best intentions, for though he belongs to a human generation for whom nudity of the female bosom was associated with the idea of amorous intimacy, still he hails approvingly this change in customs, both for what it signifies as the reflection of a more broad-minded society and because this sight in particular is pleasing to him. It is this detached encouragement that he would like to be able to express with his gaze.
He does an about-face. With firm steps he walks again towards the woman lying in the sun. Now his gaze, giving the landscape a fickle glance, will linger on the breast with special consideration, but will quickly include it in an impulse of good-will and gratitude for the whole, for the sun and the sky, for the bent pines and the dune and the beach and the rocks and the clouds and the seaweed, for the cosmos that rotates around those haloed cusps.
This should be enough to reassure once and for all the solitary sun-bather and clear away all perverse assumptions. But the moment he approaches again, she suddenly springs up, covers herself with an impatient huff, and goes off, shrugging in irritation, as if she were avoiding the tiresome insistence of a satyr.
The dead weight of an intolerant tradition prevents anyone’s understanding, as they deserve, the most enlightened intentions, Palomar bitterly concludes.
The sword of the sun
When the sun begins to go down, its reflection takes form on the sea: from the horizon all the way to the shore a dazzling patch extends composed of countless, swaying glints; between one glint and the next, the opaque blue of the sea makes a dark network. The white boats, seen against the light, turn black, lose substance and bulk, as if they were consumed by that splendid speckling.
This is the hour when Mr Palomar, belated by nature, takes his evening swim. He enters the sea, moves away from the shore, and the sun’s reflection becomes a shining sword in the water stretching from the shore to him. Mr Palomar swims in that sword or, more precisely, that sword remains always before him; at every stroke of his, it retreats, and never allows him to overtake it. Wherever he stretches out his arms, the sea takes on its opaque evening color, which extends to the shore behind him.
As the sun sinks towards sunset, the incandescent-white reflection acquires gold and copper tones. And wherever Mr Palomar moves, he remains the vertex of that sharp, gilded triangle; the sword follows him, pointing him out like the hand of a watch whose pivot is the sun.
“This is a special homage the sun pays to me personally,” Mr Palomar is tempted to think, or rather the egocentric, megalomaniac ego that dwells in him is tempted to think. But the depressive and self-wounding ego, who dwells with the other in the same container, rebuts: “Everyone with eyes sees the reflection that follows him; illusion of the senses and of the mind holds us all prisoners always.” A third tenant, a more even-handed ego, speaks up: “This means that, no matter what, I am part of the feeling and thinking subjects, capable of establishing a relationship with the sun’s rays, and of interpreting and evaluating perceptions and illusions.”
Every bather swimming westwards at this hour sees the strip of light aimed at him, which then dies out just a bit beyond the spot where his arm extends: each has his
own
reflection, which has that direction only for him and moves with him. On either side of the reflection, the water’s blue is darker. “Is that the only non-illusory datum, common to all: darkness?” Mr Palomar wonders. But the sword is imposed equally on the eye of each swimmer; there is no avoiding it. “Is what we have in common precisely what is given to each of us as something exclusively his?”
The sailboards slide over the water, cutting with sidelong swerves the land wind that springs up at this hour. Erect figures hold the boom with arms extended like archers’, competing for the air that snaps the canvas. When they cross the reflection, in the midst of the gold that enshrouds them the colors of the sails are muted and the outline of opaque bodies seems to enter the night.
“All this is happening not on the sea, not in the sun,” the swimmer Palomar thinks, “but inside my head, in the circuits between eyes and brain. I am swimming in my mind; this sword of light exists only there; and this is precisely what attracts me. This is my element, the only one I can know in some way.”
But he also thinks: “I cannot reach it: it is always there ahead, it cannot be at once inside me and something inside which I am swimming; if I see it I remain outside it, and it remains outside.”
His strokes have become weary and hesitant; you would think that all his reasoning, rather than increase his pleasure in swimming in the reflection, is spoiling it for him, making him feel it as a limitation, or a guilt, or a condemnation. And also a responsibility he cannot escape: the sword exists only because he is there; and if he were to go away, if all the swimmers and craft were to return to the shore, or simply turn their backs on the sun, where would the sword end? In the disintegrating world the thing he would like to save is the most fragile: that sea-bridge between his eyes and the sinking sun. Mr Palomar no longer feels like swimming; he is cold. But he goes on: now he is obliged to stay in the water until the sun has disappeared.
Then he thinks: “If I see and think and swim the reflection, it is because at the other extreme there is the sun that casts its rays. Only the origin of what is matters: something that my gaze cannot face except in an attenuated form, as in this sunset. All the rest is reflection among reflections, me included.”
The ghost of a sail passes; the shadow of the man-mast flows among the luminous scales. “Without the wind this trap put together with plastic joints, human bones and tendons, nylon sheets, would not stand up; it is the wind that makes it a craft that seems endowed with an end and a purpose of its own; it is only the wind that knows where the surf and the surfer are heading,” he thinks. What a relief it would be if he could manage to cancel his partial and doubting ego in the certitude of a principle from which everything is derived! A single, absolute principle from which actions and forms are derived? Or else a certain number of distinct principles, lines of force that intersect, giving a form to the world as it appears, unique, instant by instant?
“. . . the wind and, obviously, the sea, the mass of water that supports the floating and shifting solid bodies, like me and the sailboard,” Palomar thinks, in a dead-man’s float.
His upside-down gaze now contemplates the straying clouds and the hills clouded with woods. His ego is also turned upside down in the elements: the celestial fire, the racing air, the water-cradle and the earth-support. Can this be nature? But nothing of what he sees exists in nature: the sun does not set, the sea does not have this color, the shapes are not those that the light casts on his retina. With unnatural movements of his limbs, he is floating among phantoms; human forms in unnatural positions, shifting their weight to exploit not the wind but the geometrical abstraction of an angle made by wind and the tilting of an artificial device, and thus they glide over the smooth skin of the sea. Does nature not exist?
The swimming ego of Mr Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of fields of force, vectorial diagrams, bands of position lines that converge, diverge, break up. But inside him there remains one point in which everything exists in another way, like a lump, like a clot, like a blockage: the sensation that you are here but could not be here, in a world that could not be, but is.
An intrusive wave troubles the smooth sea; a motorboat bursts forth and speeds off, spilling fuel and skipping on its flat belly. In greasy, multicolored glints the skin of oil spreads out, rippling in the water; that material consistency lacking in the glint of the sun cannot be doubted thanks to this trace of the physical presence of man, who scatters excess fuel in his wake, detritus of combustion, residues that cannot be assimilated, mixing and multiplying the life and death around him.
“This is my habitat,” Palomar thinks, “which it is not a question of accepting or rejecting, because I can exist only here, within it.” But if the fate of life on earth were already sealed? If the race towards death were to become stronger than any possibility of rescue?
The wave flows, a solitary breaker, until it crashes on the shore; and where there seemed to be only sand, gravel, seaweeds and minute shells, the withdrawal of the water now reveals a margin of beach dotted with cans, peanuts, condoms, dead fish, plastic bottles, broken clogs, syringes, twigs black with oil.
Lifted also by the motorboat’s wave, swept off by the tide of residue, Mr Palomar suddenly feels like flotsam amid flotsam, a corpse rolling on the garbage-beaches of the cemetery-continents. If no eye except the glassy eye of the dead were to open again on the surface of the terraqueous globe, the sword would not gleam any more.
When you come to think about it, such a situation is not new: for millions of centuries the sun’s rays rested on the water before there were eyes capable of perceiving them.
Mr Palomar swims under water, surfaces; there is the sword! One day an eye emerged from the sea, and the sword, already there waiting for it, could finally display its fine, sharp tip and its gleaming splendor. They were made for each other, sword and eye: and perhaps it was not the birth of the eye that caused the birth of the sword, but vice versa, because the sword had to have an eye to observe it at its climax.
Mr Palomar thinks of the world without him: that endless world before his birth, and that far more obscure world after his death; he tries to imagine the world before eyes, any eyes; and a world that tomorrow, through catastrophe or slow corrosion, will be left blind. What happens (happened, will happen) in that world? Promptly an arrow of light sets out from the sun, is reflected in the calm sea, sparkles in the tremolo of the water; and then matter becomes receptive to light, is differentiated into living tissues, and all of a sudden an eye, a multitude of eyes, burgeons, or reburgeons . . .