Neptunes Garbage

... A tender reunion with the sea, which had prepared for him, during these months of absence, new buttresses of sedimentary algae, ocean straw cushions on which to sit, dream, reflect ... He climbed one of those hairy promontories and slowly glanced over the prodigious harvest of household debris that she had scattered for him on the beaches, and which called out to him, as far as the eye could see: each color a voice. "My Christmas present," he said, his throat tight.

He loved it, this landscape. He loved this abominable pollutant and colorful jumble more than Venice or Marrakech, more than Louis Pons, Escher or Piranesi, more than the attics, the flea markets, the souks of his childhood. The whole history of art vanished in the face of the reality of this scrapped empire, its promised land.

"I'm there," he said, and he smiled fondly at the sight of the few crates full of relics he had had to leave on the rocks at the end of the summer for lack of time, and who, for lack of amateurs, were still waiting for him. Radiant as a tramp the day after the holidays, he was about to indulge his ultimate, absolute passion: to scavenge Neptune.

Here, already, a small red plastic rifle, wounded in the butt, paled by time ... Over there, a child's sandal that its run through the blades of winter had reduced to a sort of mineral flower , of a petrified orchid which stuck its black tongue out of its shriveled sole ... Further on, the skeleton of a small apple-green truck, and nearby, a mountaineer's galoche who stared hatefully at him with his thirty-six steel eyelets, holding captive with its studded jaws a naked little doll, blind, with nylon hair erect in fear and one arm of which, raised to the sky, seemed to call for help.

— Excerpt by Herbert Pagani