I looked at my wound in the light of a candle. The scratch had gone dark, almost purple.
People called me La Griffue, and they called me the horsain, the stranger, someone who was not born round here, the way they had called everyone who had come to live here before me. And all those who would follow. And they would follow.
Raphaël called me Princess.
For Lili, I was Miss.
For you, I was Blue. That name on your lips; that was what you called me. You said it was because of my eyes, everything that haunted them.
I warmed the palm of my hand by the candle flame and placed it against my wound. I planted matches in the wax.
For months I had been without you. Absence absorbed everything. It even absorbed time. Absorbed your very image. I sat there with my eyes staring at the rusty window frame. I planted more matches.
The candle, in the end, looked like a voodoo doll.
In the morning, the moorland seemed dead in the light of day. It was still raining and the wind was howling. It hurried over the surface of the water, tearing up long strips of oily foam that it splashed down again further along. Desolate packets. In the harbor, the boats struggled not to sink.
A car came down from the village then stopped. It turned around before reaching the quay.
This was the time of the turn, the moment of silence when the sea lifts up the waves and turns them over.
I slept. A few hours to catch up on my long sleepless nights. Nights gone by. Nights to come.
I drank some coffee. I rummaged in the cupboard, my arms full of piles of Paris Match, old issues, Grace Kelly’s wedding and Jacques Brel’s death. Black-and-white photographs. Old magazines. With them came dust, scraps of paper nibbled by rats. A bird skeleton. In one magazine I found a photo of Demi Moore. I put it aside to give to Raphaël.
I found a biography of Saint Teresa of Avila, and the diary of Etty Hillesum. Between the pages of a book, a postcard of a Hopper painting, a girl sitting at a table in a café. The walls painted green. I put the book away, kept the card. I went out into the hall. The wall on the north side was damp. Wetness was seeping all along the skirting boards, on the steps. There were white streaks on the walls, salt.
The light switch on the right. The wall was peeling away. The wallpaper was coming unstuck, entire strips of it, like curtains. Other doors opened on to empty rooms. An old telephone with a gray dial was on the wall at the very bottom of the stairs. It had been out of order for a long time. When we needed to make a call, we used the telephone box on the quay, you had to have a card. Otherwise, we could go to Lili’s or to the auberge in the port. Raphaël said that in an emergency you had to get down on your knees and pray. It made him laugh.
There was an entire row of wooden letter boxes nailed up in the entry. Raphaël’s name was on one of them: R. Delmate, Sculpteur. There were other names, labels that had been sellotaped, peeling off. An enamel plaque: Please close the door. It dated back to before, to the time when the house had been a hotel.
Then it was furnished rooms, afterward.
Everyone had left.
The labels had stayed. A stuffed dog sat enthroned on a shelf above the door. It was Raphaël’s dog. His name was Diogenes. Apparently he died of fear one stormy night, a long time ago. Fear had turned his stomach inside out. It happens sometimes, with dogs.
I went downstairs, step by step cautiously, my hand on the railing.
Raphaël was in the hall. He had opened the door slightly, he wanted to look outside, to see the façade of La Griffue. It was too dark out, there was too much wind. You could not even see the courtyard.
He closed the door.
He said, “We have to wait.” Then, when he saw my cheek, “What happened to you?”
I reached up with my hand.
“A flying sheet of metal …”
“Was it rusty?”
“A little bit …”
“Did you disinfect it?”
“Yes.”
He looked at my wound, wincing. He had spent two years in the slums of Kolkata. From time to time he would talk about what he had seen there.
“Are your vaccinations up to date?”
“I cleaned it with alcohol.”
He shrugged.
The television was on. Morgane was sleeping, curled up on the sofa, one hand closed over her mouth. With her round hips and heavy breasts she looked like a Botero sculpture. The rat was sleeping next to her, tucked against the thick folds of her belly.
Raphaël went over to his sister.
“I wonder how she can possibly sleep through such an infernal racket.”
He lifted a strand of hair that was in her face and tucked it behind her ear. An infinitely tender gesture. The strand slipped down again.
He turned away.
He made some coffee.
His gestures were slow. He had time. We all did, here.
Morgane smelled the coffee and yawned. She dragged herself over to us, her eyes half closed.
“Morning, you two.”
Her hair disheveled. Her skirt too short on her big thighs. She snuggled up to her brother.
“Bit of a racket last night,” she said.
“A bit, yes …”
I looked at them. I was just past forty. Raphaël a bit younger. Morgane was the youngest, she would turn thirty in July. A late baby, she said, the loveliest ones.
She took a sip from Raphaël’s cup. She often did that. I used to do it with you, too. Before. In the morning. I would press myself against you. I needed your warmth. Afterward, you got so cold, you could not take it any more.
Raphaël opened the door. We looked at each other and advanced, all three of us, strange survivors, our feet in boots. There were branches everywhere. Deep puddles. The wind was still howling, but it was not as strong. Max’s boat had held up, there it was, firmly in place under its shelter, wedged on its blocks.
We went round the house.
We went into the garden. On the ocean side. It smelled of salt.
I found the broken body of the huge gull that had crashed against my window. There were pieces of beams, remnants of crates.
The waves had subsided. The shore was covered with a fringe of thick yellow foam, and wherever you looked, there were clumps of seaweed like long tresses of hair flung down in disgust.
Old Nan was on the breakwater, her arms folded across her waist. She stood there, before anyone else, motionless, her crucifix in her hand, looking out to sea. She wore her storm clothing, a long black dress of thick cloth. Those who knew her said that in the cloth you could read words sewn with black thread. A thread of words. And that the words told her story.
Nan’s story.
People said too that she had had another name, but that the name had been taken away by her loved ones. Her dead, an entire family lost at sea. She was there because she believed that some day the sea would bring them back to her.
The first cars arrived. People from the village. A fisherman said that a cargo ship headed north had lost its shipment of planks, and that the wind was pushing them this way. The news spread. A tractor had parked by the side of the road, as near as possible to the beach. A few delivery vans. Max arrived. He kissed us all, because his boat had made it. He waited for the timber, next to a group of men, his hands in his pockets, his body somewhat lost in his big blue canvas jacket.
The men talked amongst themselves, never taking their eyes from the sea. I stared at the place where they were looking. The light hurt my eyes. Before, I used to live in the south. There had been too much light. My eyes were too blue. My skin too white. It burned, even in winter.
I was still burning. We all burn. From something else.
They arrived by the dozens, planks like bodies. Clear shadows lifted up on waves that were almost black, pitching shadows. Carried. Brought back, all of them, to men. Old Nan stepped forward. She was looking into the sea, into the troughs between the waves. She did not care about the planks.
Th
e men stopped talking. Or hardly at all. A few words, just the most important things. There were a few women with them. A handful of children.
The gendarmes were there too, writing down names. Number plates.
The cargo ship had dropped anchor, you could see it in the distance, it had stopped in the very place where its cargo had slipped off. A police launch had been sent from Cherbourg. Lambert was on the quay. Alone, off to one side, in his leather jacket. I wondered what he was doing there. I focused on his face through my binoculars. Square jaw, stubble. Thick skin, with a few deep wrinkles. His trousers were rumpled. I wondered whether he had slept at the Irishwoman’s place, or in his car.
On the beach the movement continued, of planks, of men. Smells of the seabed mingled with that of skin, and the stronger sweat gleaming on a horse’s chest.
I followed the men.
A car arrived. We all stopped together for a moment, captured in the yellow light of the headlamps. Lambert came over. The car’s headlamps lit up his face. Then the car moved on, and it was as if his face had been swallowed by the night.
I heard his voice.
He said, “This is what the end of the world must be like.”
Perhaps because of the noise, and these men, almost in the sea.
“Yes, like this … only worse,” I replied.
Old Nan turned away from the planks. She was walking from one man to another, peering at faces. Even the children’s faces, that she would squeeze between her hands, her gaze greedy, desperate, until she shoved them away and moved on to another. Even Max’s face. The children let her, they had been told, Don’t be afraid, she’s looking for someone. Here, everyone was afraid of her. Those who were not afraid avoided her.
The hem of her skirt had dragged in the water, and now it was dragging in the sand. When she saw Lambert, she forgot all the others. She grasped her heavy skirt with her hand. She came toward us, until she was right up against him. She looked at him, her eyes suddenly adrift beneath her too-white hair. With her hand she touched his face. She did it very quickly, and he did not have time to step back. She had warts on her fingers. She could have burned them off, there were a million ways to get rid of them, everyone knew them here, they called them apples, spit, piss … I think she had got used to her warts. Sometimes she would caress them. I have seen her lick them.
Lambert pushed her away.
“Fish eat eyes,” she said, in her cavernous voice.
She cocked her head to one side.
“On a moonlit night, blood rises to the surface. You can hear the cries …”
She gave a strange smile then turned away, as she had from the others, she took a few steps and then she came back, more troubled than mad, and she stared into his face again, going over it all, his forehead, his eyes, that is what she did.
She opened her mouth. “Michel …” She smiled, a smile both very brief and very fierce. “You’ve come back …”
Around us, the men went on with their work, indifferent.
“My name is Lambert.”
She gave her terrible smile again and shook her head, no, several times, a long swaying motion.
“You are Michel …”
She said it again, through the chalky creases of her lips.
Normally, she would cling to a face and then move on to the next one. With Lambert, it was different. A desire to touch him, a need. She caressed his cheek, again, and her smile, for a moment almost peaceful.
It was sickening to see her hand on his face, that contact, cold surely, with a stranger’s skin.
Lambert pushed her away, too roughly, and the men turned round. Nan said nothing, she nodded as if there were a secret between them. She turned away.
The wrinkled texture of her dress, the hem damp with sand.
Lambert stepped back. He was embarrassed by what he had done, and also because the men had stopped and were speaking in low voices.
Nan moved away, pulling her big shawl around her shoulders. She went to the water’s edge. At one point she stopped and turned round. I thought I could still see her smile.
“She’s like that sometimes,” I said.
“What do you mean, like what?”
“A bit mad.”
Lambert did not take his eyes off her.
“Her entire family was lost at sea, a shipwreck, on a wedding day. She was seven. When there are storms, she thinks that every stranger’s face is someone given back by the sea.”
Lambert nodded.
He was still looking Nan’s way.
“I think I know her story …”
He looked at me.
“I used to spend holidays here, a very long time ago … Can you tell me more?”
“The two families set off in a rowing boat for an outing. The weather was fine. Nan was too little to go with them. When the boat began to rock, the people who saw them from the shore thought they were messing about. First a woman fell overboard, then another. They were all seafaring people. The boat sank. Nan was on the quay, she saw everything, heard everything. Her hair turned white overnight.”
“Wasn’t there a dog on the boat?”
“A dog? Yes, there was.”
“My mother told me that story.”
He looked at the sea.
I looked at him. It was as if his features had been sketched hastily, almost at random.
Irregular lines in thick skin.
“It was a little dog,” I said. “It managed to swim to a rock. It clung to it … After that, I don’t know. They found the bridegroom’s body. Not the wife’s. Some say it was the other way round.”
We took a few steps along the shore. He wanted to know the end of the story. I told him that the dog had held on as long as it could, and that it had eventually been swept out to sea.
He nodded his head again and said, “They rang the bells. They always ring the bells for the dead.”
His face went strange when he said that.
“The sea swallowed them all, the way it swallowed the rowboat and the dog. And let them go again, one after the other … It lasted for weeks. There were the bodies it kept, neither the most beautiful ones nor the youngest. Others that it gave back.”
We continued to walk. The wind was cold, damp with spray. Max walked by us. He was carrying a long plank. Lambert’s gaze followed him for a long while, and he turned again toward the place on the shore where Nan was standing. The black of her dress merged with the black of the sea. From a distance, all you could see of her was the thick mass of her long white hair.
“Why did she call me Michel?”
“She confused you with someone. An uncle, a brother, who knows … ?”
He nodded. He stopped. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.
“And you, are you from round here?”
“No, but everyone will tell you that story, if you hang about long enough.”
He struck a match between his hands and lit his cigarette.
“Her white hair, it’s because of the melanin …” he said, letting out a first puff. “When you’ve had a fright, the melanin, the color goes away.”
His hair was graying on the sides and I wondered if he had ever been frightened.
At noon, I sat at my usual table, next to the aquarium. The lobster guardian! That is what the patron called me the first time I came. He had seated me there. The table for loners. Not the best one. Nor the worst. I had a view on the room and on the harbor.
Because of the storm, there was no daily menu. The patron had put up a sign: MINIMUM SERVICE TODAY.
He showed me the meat, some lamb chops cooking on the grill in the fireplace.
The gendarmes were leaning against the bar.
“Wrecks are providential for people round here!” said the patron.
The gendarmes did not reply. They were accustomed, and besides they had been born round here, their sector somewhere between Cherbourg and Beaumont. They knew everyone.
The patron brought me a few shrimps while I waite
d. A glass of wine.
I looked out the window, the planks kept on coming, the men were waiting.
Lambert was still on the quay.
Old Nan had vanished.
That evening, the sea took the planks back out, and we all met up at Lili’s. For a few hours, the men pressed against the bar, newcomers joining those who were already there. Kids bought handfuls of peanuts and went to eat them at the back of the room, leaning against the pinball machine. There was a smell of wool, and damp clothes steaming in the warmth.
Max was at the bar. Lili entrenched behind her counter. She was wearing her nylon dress with pink and white diamonds, and an apron tied over it.
When she saw me come in, she motioned, You alright? I nodded. I wove a way between the tables. It was full everywhere except at the back, where Old Mother sat. I made my way over there.
Lili has always said tu to me, even when she knew I was the woman staying at La Griffue. That I had come to observe the birds, that I had taken her father’s job. She did not talk about her father.
When she heard about the wreck, she had cooked up some vegetables, an entire stewpot, with bits of bacon and sausage fat. It was something she liked, the communion of men, there in her bistro. Sharing. A particular atmosphere of warmth, when tiredness was creeping on, and the men grew drowsy and went on talking to keep from falling asleep.
“Evening, Old Mother …”
That was what everyone called her, Old Mother. She did not look at me. She was lapping up her soup like a famished animal, hunched over, her eyes in her plate. She was so old, to me she was ageless.
You must not ask anything complicated of Lili when the bistro is full. If you wanted soup, you got two ladlefuls. Two euros a bowl. If you did not like soup, there was mulled wine or a little green liqueur that she poured into stemless glasses. If you did not like what she had, she would show you the door.
It was crowded. It was hot. I took off my jumper.
When Lambert came in, the men looked round. A stranger in the café. Lili looked up. I saw the moment their eyes met. For a few seconds they stared at each other, then looked away almost at the same time, and I sensed that they knew one another.
The Breakers Page 2
