Le Viel Homme de la Mer
The old man was in love.
It had been many, many long years since he had been in love. The very first time was on a trolley, in a seaside town, when he wore a plain brown suit that hung around him limply because he was an ill-paid errand-boy to the men in offices all around the town and had no money to buy himself tailored clothes. His trousers were rolled up at the cuffs, and his sleeves weren't quite long enough, so that from below his elbow to his bony wrists his pale, soft skin showed, and a brown cloth-strap watch slipped up and down along his wrist, all the while showing the time seven minutes slow. As the trolley turned a corner, he held tightly to the pole, and happened to glance beside him.
There was a young woman sitting, with her hands neatly in her lap, wearing the kind of white and pink summer dress all girls wore on their way to the beach, to stroll up and down in the sand, to wade in the waves just a little and maybe, if they were younger, bend over and catch sand crabs in their fingers, and, if they were older, hope for young men to see them and offer to take them on sailboat rides or buy them ices. This young woman had honey-coloured hair that curled around her ears and down under the collar of her dress, and blue eyes that looked at her hands cautiously, shyly, as though it were her first trolley ride and she was afraid of missing her stop or accidentally staring at a stranger.
It was a week-end, and the old man, then a young man, was hoping to go down to the seaside and sit on a pier somewhere and wonder what to do with himself, how to make his fortune, where to go, how to be famous. He wanted to draw things in the sand with a piece of stiff grass, and fill up his pockets with shells, or watch the sun setting over the water or the people laughing and sunning and swimming. He wanted to take off his glasses and run his hands through his hair and stand in the surf and pretend he was everything, pretend there was music swelling behind him and he was Everything, and the whole world was watching him to feel the surge of triumphant gladness when the music drew him up and threw him level with the moon.
When he saw the young woman, suddenly he had no desire to do that. He merely wanted to go home for a long, long time, and make himself marvellous, and come back when he thought he could stand where he was and smile suavely if the young woman looked at him. As it was, he turned his face away and then, at the next stop, when the young woman got up, he held out his hand to help her up and said, only a little nervously,--
"Let me help you, miss."
"Thank you very much." She smiled, and got off, and was gone.
The young man never saw her again.
A few years later, he lived in another town; he got a job, made money, made a name for himself, met a sweet-natured, laughing girl at a party hosted by his employers, and began to take her out on Saturdays. They went to see the talkies and before that had dinner, and her name was Angela. The young man thought she was very beautiful.
They stopped walking out together after a few months, because he was too shy and she was too laughing and excited, and they assured each other it was all right, and they understood their differences. The young man gave her a bracelet as a good-bye gift, and it never occurred to Angela that it shouldn't be done that way. She bought him a new hat and they occasionally saw one another at the park or at the movies, accidentally, where they waved and said hello.
The young man took a few girls out after that, but mostly he liked his own company better than anyone else's, because other people made him nervous. He walked around the city in the evening and liked watching the fountains at all the monuments and important buildings, and feeding the geese that wandered over the city commons, and going to the library and reading thick, dusty books in between the shelves until the librarians began to shut off the lights and lock the doors.
One day he met a young woman at an art exhibit that came to the city for a few weeks, and began to talk with her about painters and sculptors whom he had learnt about in the dusty library books. She knew only a few of the things he did, but hundreds more that he didn't, and they talked for hours. That was the second time he fell in love. He married the young woman after some time, and they made each other happy. They had children, and read books, and the young woman became a middle-aged woman who wrote columns for the newspaper, and the young man became a middle-aged man who worked as a clerk in a bank; and they were happy. The middle-aged man was happy.
He lived. He was not always happy, and he was not always sorrowful, and he loved his children, and he was in love with his wife for many years. After a time he came to love her rather than be in love with her, but she had already done the same, and it didn't affect them. He kissed her cheek when he came home from work, and she smiled at him.
She smelled of dried flowers and spice cabinets full of bottles and jars.
After many years, she became an old woman, and she died. The middle-aged man was now an old man, and his children went away. He lived by himself with photographs and television and newspapers and modern things that had come into his house, like a microwave oven, like an electric razor, like a telephone that had no cord. At night he dreamt of Burma-Shave ads along the highways, and of his wife. In the daytime he read magazines and wandered about the house looking at the clocks and wondering why his wife wasn't in the living room or the kitchen the way she usually was.
One Christmastime, his children told him, quietly and seriously, that they were going to take him to a nursing home, because they lived far away and he must be looked after. The old man smiled and shook his head and repeated the words 'nursing home' in a curious voice. Soon after that, he was surprised to find himself living in a much smaller room which had everything he needed in it.
There was a bed, and a chair, and a bureau; a table and a television and a wall for his photographs. Through one door there was a bathroom with a sink and toilet and place for his soap and his electric razor (except that had been taken away from him a long time ago) and his toothbrush. He was surprised to be gone from home, but he liked all the things he had, and he settled in to the routine of the place. A woman came and told him when it was time for breakfast and lunch and supper, and the rest of the time was his. He slept and dreamt of Angela and the hat she'd given him, and the seaside.
But now, now, he was in love again. The old man had fallen in love again.
She was a young woman with honey-coloured hair, like the young woman on the trolley, and her eyes were green and bright. They were smiling eyes, and she had a smiling face, a face that didn't remind him of anyone else. There was always something to make him think of his wife, or Angela, or the young woman on the trolley, in every woman's face; but not the girl he was in love with. He had never seen anyone like her before.
She brought him the medicines that he took every day, and said good morning and good evening in a sweet voice. He liked the way her glasses and her watch glinted in the light from his reading lamp, and he liked the way she felt warm when she hugged him, and he liked the smell of her hair, which he couldn't help smelling when her chin was on his bent shoulder as she hugged him. It pleased him. She was a happy thing, and he hadn't seen anyone smile the way she did since he had come, which was because he didn't leave his room except for meals.
She remembered his name.
He was still shy and nervous as he had always been, secretly, even after all those years. He clasped her hand when she offered it, but he never told her that he loved her. He didn't know how.
He noticed when she wore the same shirt on two Mondays. He noticed when her watch was suddenly replaced with a different one, and three weeks later she began to wear the old one again. He noticed when she got sunburned on her face, or lost a freckle, or didn't put on her eye makeup. His whole self was taken up in noticing, because he loved her so much and he wanted to notice everything about her.
He tried and tried, but he couldn't remember her name. He tried to remember it letter by letter; he tried to write it down; he couldn't remember it. Finally he gave up. She never seemed to mind.
Then, one day, when she hugged him, he felt a funny sort of surge of feeling, the feeling of loving her, so big and full inside him that he couldn't think of anything else but her. For the first time in his life, he did something daring. He kissed her cheek. She just smiled at him, and went out again, like always, but after a little while, a different woman came into his room.
The old man was sitting in his chair and thinking about the young woman he was in love with, how her cheek felt when he kissed it and how filled up it felt inside him to see her. He didn't notice the woman until she said his name several times, but he looked up at once when he did.
She asked whether he had indeed kissed the young woman. The old man, wanting to blush a little, nodded his head. He couldn't understand why the woman was asking him, but she said something else and he tried to pay attention, although it was very difficult and very confusing.
"Why?" she said.
The old man didn't know what to say. He looked at his hands, he looked at his stomach, he looked at the woman. He sighed, and she repeated the question. At last he said--he nodded--he said,--
"I love her."
"Why?" asked the woman.
"I love her," he said.
"Why do you love her?" asked the woman.
"She smiles. She holds me." He gestured awkwardly with his arms, trying to explain the hugs. He wanted to sleep.
"Thank you," said the woman, and she left.
And the young woman did not come back after that. A different woman brought his medicines.
He missed her. He looked out the window because he wanted something to notice, and he didn't have her changing clothes any longer. He frowned at the birds and squirrels and trees as though he were trying to think of the answer to a difficult question. Sometime he didn't quite feel like eating because he was trying to think of the young woman he was in love with, and his head hurt with thinking. He slept in his chair, and dreamt of the young woman on the trolley being the young woman he loved, and the days went by. The leaves on the trees kept falling, and he couldn't think why.
Then, after a while, he began to feel tireder, and it was even harder to think of things. He wanted less to eat, because he was too tired to eat it, and he liked his chair very much. He sat in it for long, long hours, sleeping and dreaming and looking out the window. He couldn't think of anything else to do, but often faces went through his mind, and he thought he recognised them. The young woman on the trolley, Angela, his wife, the young woman he loved.
One day, the old man died.
The young woman he was in love with still worked in the nursing home, and she knew that he was dead. She watched them changing the bedding on his bed, and taking his photographs, which he'd long ago stopped recognising, off the walls, and his soap out of the bathroom. She watched them clean his room and smiled at the new woman who began to live there.
But when she was home, she cried, because she loved everyone in the nursing home; she loved the old man. She was never in love with him, but she loved him, and she cried because he was gone.
And that was enough.
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