It took Gunnar about three days to enjoy Brittany.
“Brettlands?” the teacher asked. “Why’re you going there?”
“I have three days of vacation,” Gunnar replied.
“Will you go by lestina or plane?”
“What?”
“Lestina?”
“Train.”
“Ah,” Gunnar said. It was confusing learning Icelandic the day before his departure.
“But there’s no plane to Brittany.”
“What do you mean?” the Icelandic teacher said. “Of course in Brettlands there’s —
“Oh, you mean Great Britain.”
“Jahoo, and you mean…
“Bretagne,” they announced together.
Gunnar was off to the northwest of France.
It’s impossible to relax the first day upon arrival, but a sea spa is what Gunnar’s doctor ordered.
“Juste sel, sea, marin,” the doctor announced.
“No vélo?” Gunnar asked. No bike?
“No, fin, yes, but I give you one prescription for your foot and knee.”
The doctor tore off a sheet of paper with a list of simple instructions. Sea salt ocean.
Gunnar and Julien drove off together in search of the famous, hidden spa. It was being renovated this year and Julien had always wanted to go, again.
“You won’t get bored?” Gunnar asked.
“It’s not a spa,” Julien said. “It’s an experience.”
The water was filtered ocean sea and salt, steamed up to above twenty, twenty five degree Celsius. In all suppositions, a remedy for an ailment, like those convalescent chalets in Switzerland.
“This is magical,” Gunnar said. He was floating in a pool overlooking islands in blue and emerald.
“Yes it’s France,” Julien said.
“Everything in France is beautiful,” they said simultaneously, one serious, one mocking.
The color was indeed special, Gunnar admitted.
“This far north,” Julien began, “blues to be as transparent as the Caribbean, I am poet, yes?”
“No,” Gunnar said. “But you appreciate beauty, and that’s enough.”
It’s hard to disappear from phones and internet connections but beauty will do that.
The sunset, for example.
When in Brittany, at 9:10p, the light falls and the boats scatter, and it’s just the sun in its final blaze.
Usually a sunset is pink, or yellow, or something, but tonight Gunnar saw it red rouge.
Simply it was just red. Or rouge, it makes the color of the sun almost two syllables. Rooo-j. The word lasts a little bit longer in French, and the attention span.
“Do you like it?” Julien asked. He was slouched in a chair, overlooking the window’s ocean.
“It’s more than like,” Gunnar said. “I… I…”
He was struggling to find the emotion for beauty.
It was a blazing red.
Simple comprehension was all that’s needed.
It overtook the phone, the internet, the sensations of anxiety and meaning.
He thought of his father’s bright pink painting and he understood now, why he bought it. He understood that people loved art and bought art, but he had never understood why certain pieces of art had more impact than others, until he saw—
“How can I say in French, that the sky is so red, that it’s calming me, that just looking out the window I don’t need anything else? I don’t even need a vacation. That I just want to take an ice bath of beauty all the time.”
Julien looked at Gunnar strangely.
“Roooj,” he said.