IV.

     To tell the truth, Seely wasn’t as self-sufficient as she tried to appear. She’d all but abandoned her manuscript, her past life having come to seem as irrelevant to her as it was to the parade of passing acquaintances who struck up conversations with her at the Café Maritim and who, finding her socially awkward and shy, moved on. In fact she’d become unmoored, her sense of identity receded from her, as nebulous now as the horizon line beyond the bay of Cadaques. She’d look in the mirror and puzzle over her own image. She knew she was foundering among ragged longings, aches, and ambiguities, a set of feelings and circumstances she didn’t understand.

                                                                                 …

     She stood on the farthest rock and bent to put on the plastic sandals that would protect her feet from the sea urchins on the ocean floor, then tightened the rubber band round her long plume of fair hair, encircling it a third time. As she poised for a dive, she glanced in the direction of Cadaques, its distant buildings like a disordered stack of white boxes on a shelf. This was always a long, paralyzing moment—between the known and unknown, self-possession and abandonment—whose spell she doubted each time she could ever break. For this moment she came so late in the day, when the air was chilly and all the bathers had gone home. If her leg were to cramp, if a current were to carry her out, there wouldn’t be anyone one to save her, no witness even to tell what happened.

     She slammed against the water, as into a wall of ice, her muscles clenched and breath locked in her chest. When she tried to float on her back, she inhaled nosefuls of stinging water, the sea was so choppy. She paddled around, growing numb, until finally, resolutely, she swung right arm over left and headed out toward the horizon.

     Half an hour later she clambered out again. The only warmth of the day was left in the massive gray slabs of rock that angled diagonally into the sea. She threw her towel aside and pressed her body against the heated stone, hugging it, cleaving to it, as to the body of a lover, feeling her rigid limbs dissolve. From time to time she shifted her cheek, trying to find a smoother spot on the rough stone. As she grew drowsy, she imagined she could distinguish all the varied and minute sounds that comprised the wild stillness around her.