Shipwreck with Painting

Could I have known it was a painting? And even if I had known it, that moment was certainly no time for reflection. It was floating, that's all, bobbing along like all the other bits of wreckage, including a wicker basket and a hatbox, and what a hatbox veiled in wisps of fog was doing skimming along the fat waters of that leaden sea was no more surprising than what a painting might be doing there, except that the hatbox would not have supported me and the painting would; so long and narrow as it was, it might just hold me. I grabbed it and it sank a little, then I rolled onto it and, though slightly submerged, it kept me afloat. I didn't know it was a painting, nor could I have cared less just then, all I knew was that there was nothing left around me: no ship, no friends, and no night anymore either.

The sky gradually grew light, even the fog cleared, and low, imposing clouds scudded by. The icy water was numbing my back, I turned over, my cheek touching the white, porous, translucent surface on which I was lying. My eye was so close to the fabric that I could follow its rough contours, craters and reliefs and deep channels that the sea, each time it swelled, filled with droplets that slid into my eye, tears coming in. I lay that way I don't know how much longer, at least enough time to regain my strength, then I pushed myself up, tensing my arms, the way you sometimes raise yourself up over a lover to see every part of her. There was no doubt about it; it actually was a painting. But not white, not entirely white as I had thought; emerging from beneath the white were brown and orange streaks and yellowish patches like moss. How long had I been in the water? Had the painting rusted? Perhaps those colors weren't coming to the surface, but were instead the depths of the painting, its past, having aged, white-haired, into white. It was an apparent white, a terminal white; concealed in its depths, as in the depths of the sea that kept me on its surface, was a fact, a fact of color, progressively faded by a white film of glaze. But what fact? And why on earth, in such a precarious situation with everything else to think about, was I so interested in that white, which was not white after all? I had a vague feeling that if I were able to decipher the story of that white I would also know who I was and why I was there. Since as important as the painting was, indeed the only means of survival available to me, I still had to figure out what I was doing there in the sea, atop a painting, and more importantly how I would come out of it alive.

Looking at the horizon of that glowering sea filled me with horror. I started from the beginning again: the veil of glaze was not actually coating what lay beneath it, there was no mystery, either veiled or unveiled, rather that white was a result, it was the terminus for a voyage of colors, recounting a journey full of scoriae and pigments during which the colors, as they progressed, blended with one another, until finally becoming white. So there were no depths and no surface either, no before and after, better yet they were one and the same thing, perfectly coexistent in their story. In the end light too is made that way, resulting from the superimposition of different colored waves that the eye does not separate, but homogeneously perceives as white, a warm white of blended colors. What light, what waves? The light and waves around me were a uniform grayness, leaden and ominous, better not to look, better to hold on to the painting, which was holding me. I turned onto my back; among the clouds...