EDWARD GAUVIN

is the title of a short story by Bernard Quiriny, an excerpt of which I’d like to share with you, in these times when it has, tragically, with the environmental debacle of the “Crisis on the Coast,” once more become apposite. It was first published in 2008, in his collection Contes carnivores, which took Belgium’s top literary honor, the Prix Rossel. Its satirical drift is, I think, readily apparent, and reminds me of T.C. Boyle’s work. The quotation in “Gould’s pamphlet” is from Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

At two a.m., we made out a crowd and saw light coming from the beach below. Gould, who’d taken the wheel around Muxía, slammed on the brakes, parked the minibus and, elated, ran toward the sea shouting hurrahs. There were many people on the dunes; in broken English, Vincent and I asked two passersby if the oil had already been sighted. They nodded and gestured wildly to convey the scope of the disaster while a breathless Gould called out for us to hurry and join him.

We reached the beach at last. The spectacle was breathtaking. Everywhere around us bustled people in rubber jumpsuits, like astronauts; bulldozers growled, trucks towed trailers where petroleum pancakes were tossed by the shovelful. Before us, waves were sweeping in the first patches of fuel; despite the darkness of the hour, we made out the sticky black mud slowly covering the blond sand. The club members and I contemplated the scene, deeply moved, and I must admit I found all this magnificent. Better yet, I realized I’d adopted the poetic art of the Society for the Lovers of Black Tides in all its radicality: I surveyed these people rushing to and fro to remove the stain, I knew the disaster would ruin the landscape for twenty years to come, but I felt neither sorrow nor remorse. What could I do to contain the crude? These two arms and all my goodwill were useless faced with the tons of fuel that would spill out for weeks upon the coast, with the millions of sticky pancakes they’d be picking up for months. I had to surrender to reason: for want of being able to save Cape Finisterre, I might at least contemplate the beauty of the spectacle. I recalled Gould’s pamphlet: “A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can’t mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purpose, let us treat it aesthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way.”

I no longer remember which of us was the first to laugh. Nevertheless, that laugh infected us and even drew a few tears of happiness. I was the first to kick off my shoes, roll up my pants, and charge into the waves. My companions did the same, and we ran around in the oil like children in new snow.  I recall the delectable sensation of my feet soaking in the black glue and the obscene slap of my footsteps on the sand. Dumbfounded, people watched us frolic in the foul wallow the ocean had become, shouting, chortling, and hurling clods of clumped oil heavenward in mad hopes of soiling the immaculate moon itself.