The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  It was already drizzling when I arrived at the farm. The sow was in the yard, her trotters in the mud. The moment she saw me, she came over. I put my face right up against her damp gaze. Her nice flat head between my hands.

  “You’re all dirty, you pretty thing …”

  Her eyes were soft, swollen with tears, but the tears did not flow.

  The little Stork was inside the house. She saw me and tapped on the windowpane. I looked at her. The Stork was the biggest of the children, but I do not think she was also the eldest. I had often seen their father hitting them, smacks he gave them with the flat of his hand. The two eldest resisted. The little ones went flying. They would grow up. They would leave.

  The father had given them their nicknames, Eldest, Snotty-nosed, the littlest one was Pisser. There was also the Willow. He had strange eyes. He didn’t go to school. The cows, too, had names, Marguerite, Rose … When the father looked at their calves, he saw meat. The price they would fetch per kilo on the butcher’s slab. I do not know what he saw when he looked at his kids.

  In the midst of all that, the mother was a timid shadow; sometimes I caught a glimpse of her in the yard.

  I went on my way.

  It was the slack hour at Lili’s. The light above the bar was lit. I went up to the door. About to put my hand on the latch. Through the window, the drawn curtain, I saw Lili. She was sitting at one of the tables. She was talking to Lambert. I saw their profiles. There were glasses between them.

  Raphaël was on his knees, his cheek against the plaster womb. He said he could think for hours about a gesture that would take a few seconds.

  “I’ll stop for now,” he said, wedging a cigarette between his lips.

  He dipped his hands into a bowl full of gray water. Drops fell on the floor. With his hands still wet, he smoothed the flat of the hips, the fragile hollow of the groin that he worked with his thumb, and then he stood up. He took a few steps to the side and then back, revealing the still imprecise body of a sculpture, a hollowed-out womb expressing the violence of childbirth. Her mouth was closed. Mute. Her breasts stretched. There was almost no face. Her ravaged flesh expressed what mattered. The wire framework he had used as an armature was still visible here and there on the womb.

  He stood further back.

  “What do you think?”

  He took my hand and led me over to the womb.

  “You feel that? She’s imploring.”

  All around, the studio looked like a vast field of ruins, Raphaël the sole survivor.

  He let go of my hand and lit another cigarette from the burning butt of the first one.

  “Ten years I’ve been trying to sculpt desire! Ten years I’ve been getting it wrong, and today, look, I’ve managed.”

  I walked around the sculpture. Long thin legs met under a mass of moist flesh, seeming to radiate all the energy.

  All the rest of the body—head, torso, limbs, even her breasts—were only there to exacerbate still further the force of desire.

  “Morgane told me you were making drawings …”

  He raised his hand as if he were brushing away an annoying insect.

  “Later! Later!”

  He sat on the steps, his body broken with fatigue. His neck bent.

  I filled two cups with the hot coffee he had made a short while earlier. I put one by his hand. He had dry plaster on his face. His hair disheveled. His mouth twisted. He looked at the cup.

  A sudden beauty had come over him, to be that close to madness.

  The cup was an additional weight, something impossible to lift. I saw his hand, his fingers round it, hardly closed. The cup slipped and the coffee spilled.

  The dark stain, immediately swallowed by the dust.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  I picked up the cup.

  The studio had been invaded by an oppressive, mute crowd, hounded by the blinding light of the halogen lamps. The last sculpture reigned over the others, their sister, testifying to the same obsession, to make justice from injustice, to make passion from poverty.

  And to make desire from absence.

  That was the furrow Raphaël was plowing.

  “You look like your sculptures.”

  He lifted his head.

  In his gaze there was a mixture of tenderness and pain, a light that is peculiar to those who live their lives with infinitely greater intensity than others. It hurt to look at him.

  I turned my head away.

  Raphaël closed his eyes.

  “I’m not to blame …”

  I wondered if he meant his sculptures, or what his face had become.

  Raphaël slept for an hour, his back against the wall. The hour after that, he made us beignets.

  An old table was set up in the garden, in the sun. I brought down some wine.

  The beignets were good, gorged with jam. You bit into them and they exploded in your mouth. Max came and joined us. He was happy. He had got hold of an old fishing net at the fish market in Cherbourg. The net was spread out across the middle of the garden. He had to mend a few holes. When that was done, he could hang the net from the stern of his boat. In the meantime, he spent hours caulking the planks on the hull with a sort of thick, tar-smelling paste he spread with a spatula.

  Max explained that when everything was done, he would still have to fill the hold with water to make sure the boat was watertight.

  After that, he fell silent, and stared at the traces of sugar on Morgane’s lips.

  The sun warmed our backs. There were a few strollers on the quay. I wondered whether it was Sunday.

  We talked about Lambert. Morgane said she had seen him at Lili’s, at the beginning of the afternoon, when she was on her way to Beaumont. She went in just long enough to buy a loaf of bread. He was there.

  “Did he know Lili, before?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  She held her beignet between two fingers. A little jam dribbled down the side.

  “They must have known each other, since he spent his holidays here.”

  After that, the jam ran down her fingers.

  Raphaël looked at us, rocking on his chair.

  “The way you behave … Morgane speaks to you, you hardly answer. Are you always like that?” he said.

  “It’s atavistic,” I said.

  “Ata what?”

  “Atavistic. Hereditary. In my family we’re all taciturn.”

  Morgane did not like it when we argued. She said as much, “Stop arguing!” and gave her brother a resounding kiss on the cheek.

  She put her arms around his neck and cuddled against him for a moment.

  “The day you’re fed up being a sculptor you can become a pâtissier.”

  She raised her head.

  “Look, we’ve got a visitor!”

  It was the little Stork, she was at the gate. Raphaël watched as she came over. He pulled a notebook from his pocket. He drew the waif, her figure, in a few quick strokes.

  On the wall, above him, rosebuds that had been closed for a long time had opened in the sun. There were a dozen or so already, clinging firmly to the branch, braving the wind.

  The child came over to us.

  When she saw the drawing, she looked at Raphaël as if he were a god.

  “Some day I will sculpt you,” he said, putting the notebook away in his pocket.

  The Stork dipped her hand into the basket, took a beignet, and went to share it with her dog.

  “Do you know someone called Michel?” I said.

  Morgane and Raphaël looked at each other.

  “Michel what?”

  “Lepage.”

  Raphaël shook his head. He turned to his sister.

  “Does that ring a bell with you?”

  “No. Who is it?”

  “That’s why, I have no idea.”

  I hesitated. I was not sure I felt like talking to them about all that, Théo, the letters.

  I just described the strange encounter that had taken place be
tween Nan and Lambert on the morning of the storm. I also told them about the photograph pinned to the wall at Lili’s place.

  “You could see Lili with her parents, and just behind them, a little boy that Lili called Michel.”

  Raphaël took a long swallow of beer. He looked at me, with a mocking smile on his lips.

  “You must really be bloody bored …”

  “I’m not bored.”

  “Well then, what else is it?” he said, rolling his eyes to the sky.

  After that, he and Morgane looked at each other, and it made them laugh.

  Max went to sit on the ground, by his net, and began to mend the holes in the weave. To stitch them, he used thick nylon thread.

  “Tom Thumb.”

  That is what he said.

  The first time I heard it, I did not pay much attention. That is what he did, come out with words one after the other, just like that, several times in a row, not really knowing why he chose one word rather than another. We began to clear away the plates.

  Max still had his head bent over his net, his legs spread, and he said the name again, Tom Thumb, with rather wearying regularity.

  “Can’t you say something else?” I said when I passed him, the plates in my hands.

  He looked up at me, his fingers lost in his stitches. He was wearing a dark sailor’s jumper, and a kerchief round his neck. He smiled. “Michel, that’s Tom Thumb!”

  I put down the plates.

  “You know someone who’s called Michel?”

  He said yes, nodding his head, and bent over his net.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. Not looking at me. He did not know.

  “You mean you know him, but you don’t know who he is?”

  Again he shrugged.

  “Do you know if that’s who Nan is looking for when she’s on the beach?”

  Max did not reply. Raphaël was listening to us.

  “Why are you interested in all that?” he said, crushing his beer can between his fingers.

  Questions, answers, a complicated knit of lies and truths. Things said out of synch, things said only in part, things that never would be said. All the shades of something you could only see staring into the sun.

  I had learned that with the cormorants.

  When a cormorant swallows a fish, it is always head first. The stomach digests in stages. One day, I found a dead cormorant, I gutted it, and inside its stomach, half of the fish it had just swallowed was still intact whereas everything else was in a pulp.

  I tried to explain this to Raphaël.

  “When you stop asking yourself questions, you die …”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Too cerebral …”

  Morgane was laughing, her back to the sun.

  Max got up.

  “He was of extreme littleness,” he said, taking the last beignet from the plate.

  He looked at it, he looked at Raphael, he put the beignet in his pocket and he rubbed his hands.

  “That’s what I always said, Hello Tom Thumb! Afterward, he did manage to grow up to be a normal altitude, but I went on saying, Hello Tom Thumb.”

  He dragged his net into the sun.

  “It’s a continuation of the name, even when things change, you have to respect it.”

  “Where did he live, this Tom Thumb?” I asked.

  He pointed over toward the houses at La Roche. Raphaël shrugged.

  Max sat down at the table.

  “We had the same positioning at the school, his elbow here and mine just next to it.”

  He grabbed me by the sleeve and made me sit down next to him, to show me how they were, two schoolboys side by side.

  “We shared the same observance of sayings and of the great knowledge.”

  He laughed quietly, behind his hand, his fingers spread.

  “Tom Thumb had greater capacity,” he said, banging his hand against his skull. “He said my capacity was not as vast, but just as deserving.”

  I looked at him. The memory seemed to make him happy.

  “Tom Thumb was right,” I said. “Your capacity is very deserving.”

  He blushed, confused.

  I asked him if he knew where he was and whether his parents still lived here, but to all that he replied that he did not know.

  “His surname, do you know that? Could it be, Lepage?”

  He looked at me.

  “Max doesn’t know such things.”

  Max immersed himself in his fishing net, and I took in the glasses that had remained on the table.

  “I used to be a hairdresser, before,” Raphaël said, slipping his fingers into my hair.

  In six months my hair had grown, rebellious. I did not comb it.

  “Were you really a hairdresser?”

  “Ask Morgane.”

  “No need …”

  He went to get his box. He had everything he needed in it, scissors, razors, an electric shaver. “If you want me to cut it for you, you have either to come with your hair wet, or I’ll cut it dry.”

  “I don’t like to have it cut dry.”

  He spread his hands. I went back up into my bedroom. My face in the mirror. I ran the water. I washed my hair in the sink, killing my back. I stood up, my neck burning. I wrapped a towel around my neck and went back down. Raphaël was waiting for me.

  In the yard it stank of tar from the product that Max was using on the hull of his boat. The tin was there, a few meters away, and the brushes.

  Raphaël shouted.

  “Can’t you put your bloody stuff elsewhere!”

  He made me sit down on the box.

  “Haven’t you got something rougher?” he said, when he touched the towel.

  I had my back against his belly, his hands on my neck. Contact.

  “Relax,” he said.

  He untangled my hair with a long-toothed comb.

  “What did you wash it with?”

  “I’m out of shampoo.”

  “What did you wash it with?” he insisted, pulling my head back to oblige me to answer.

  “Soap …”

  He let me go.

  “You didn’t rinse it properly,” he said.

  “It’s not easy in the sink.”

  I let my head go. The cold blade against my skin, I heard the biting sound of the scissors. I closed my eyes. Locks fell.

  “Not too short, alright?”

  “Not to worry.”

  He cut the sides.

  The Stork came crawling under the table, between my feet, she gathered up my hair.

  “I used to have a poodle,” said Raphaël, pointing to the Stork’s dog that was staring at us with his submissive eyes.

  Raphaël went on cutting, not speaking. I thought about what Max had said. Michel and Max must be about the same age, forty years old, perhaps a bit more. Was he the one who was writing to Théo? That large, careful handwriting.

  Raphaël ran his fingers through my hair.

  “How’s that?”

  “Don’t you have a mirror?”

  I ran my hand over my hair. It was no better. No worse. He did not have a hair-dryer, either. He rubbed it with the towel.

  “You’ve cut it rather short, haven’t you?”

  “It’s the fashion, Princess, the fashion.”

  I ran my hand over it again. “Didn’t you miss bits on the side?”

  “That’s the fashion, too,” Raphaël said.

  He smiled.

  The Stork came over to look.

  “What happened to your poodle?” I said, as I got up.

  “It was the illegal immigrants in Cherbourg, they ate it.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Must be they were hungry.”

  “To eat a dog, that’s disgusting.”

  Raphaël laughed. So did the Stork. And even Soft Spot began to yap, running around the courtyard with her belly to the ground.

  I laughed along with them. Afterward, I sat for a long t
ime outside, on the bench, my head in the sun.

  In the evening, in the courtyard, the light of the stars, caught in the waves. Trembling lights. As if drowning.

  The mist was coming in from the sea. It had set sailors off course, sunk boats. Ships’ captains gone mad with the inability to see.

  A cargo ship in the distance, headed for England. The foghorn sounded at regular intervals, like a phantom bell chiming. I could no longer see anything of the houses at La Roche. Nothing of the beach. Even the birds had fallen silent. Only the lights of that cargo ship far offshore, and in the sky, a few night birds flying over La Hague like shadowgraphs. They were migrating birds. For several days now they had been arriving in their dozens, their flight impeded by the fog. Why were they flying like this, so close to the house? The birds did not stop, they continued south, toward the Camargue in all likelihood, and Africa, perhaps. They were headed for my former countries.

  A wing brushed my window. The bird shook itself, a moment of intoxication in the cruelty of its own fear. Was it my light that was drawing them? It was only a faintly luminous point, but in this thickness of fog it must have given them the illusion of a beacon.

  Hundreds of birds died in lights. Birds like giant insects, crushed. I switched off my light. I looked through the window.

  Théo had said, You ought to go and spend a night out there, get someone to drop you off.

  Out there, the lighthouse.

  I put my face right up to the windowpane. The lighthouse was circled with darkness, defying the waves and the night.

  Birds’ behavior changed when there was fog. It changed when there were storms. The behavior of men changed, too.

  Had Théo put out the lamp the night of the shipwreck? A lighthouse pulses with flashes from a lantern as strong as a heart. A heavy, throbbing pulsation.

  That lamp, like a multitude of halogen lamps gathered into one single beam, where the sailors relentlessly turn their gaze.

  The Stork had crept all the way into the back of the henhouse, into the dark place of nests where the hens lay their eggs. She waved to me. I went through the gate and followed her. There was a smell of feathers. In the half-light my fingers grazed straw, droppings, on the wooden bars of the perches.

  The Stork was rummaging in the bottom of the boxes, bringing up eggs that looked white to me.

  She laid the eggs in her basket.