English translation copyright © 2011 by Edith Grossman

At night the sea and the sky are one and even the earth becomes confused with the dark immensity that envelops everything. There are no chinks. No breaks. No breaches. Night is the best representation of the infinitude of the universe. It makes us believe that nothing has a beginning and nothing has an end. Especially if (as is the case tonight) there are no stars.

The first lights appear and the separation begins. The ocean withdraws to its own geography, a veil of water that conceals deep-sea mountains, valleys, ravines. The ocean bottom is a chamber whose echoes never reach us, least of all me, during the small hours.

I know that day will destroy the illusion. And if dawn never breaks again, then what? Then I’ll think the ocean has stolen my form.

The Pacific really is a tranquil ocean now, as white as a large basin of milk. The waves have warned it that earth is approaching. I try to measure the distance between two waves. Or is it time that separates them, not distance? Answering this question would solve my own mystery. The ocean is undrinkable, but it drinks us. Its softness is a thousand times greater than earth’s. But we hear only the echo, not the voice of the sea. If the sea were to shout, we would all be deaf. And if the sea were to stop, we would all be dead. There is no unmoving sea. Its perpetual motion gives oxygen to the world. If the sea doesn’t move, we all suffocate. Not death by water but by asphyxiation.

Dawn breaks and daylight determines the sea’s color. The blue of the water is merely a dispersion of light. The color blue means that the solar sphere has conquered the clarity of the water, providing it with a covering that doesn’t belong to it, that isn’t its skin, if in fact the ocean also has skin… What will the new day illuminate? I’d like to give a very fast answer because I’m losing the words to tell you, the survivors, this tale.