The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  He stopped and looked at the sea, its contours drowned in mist, the island of Alderney, so near.

  “We spent the day with Lili, in the rocks. Her mother had made us some biscuits.”

  We took the footpath, and retraced our steps. He was walking ahead of me. Suddenly, he stopped, almost brutally. I do not know why he did that.

  I bumped into his back.

  “Don’t stop like that,” I murmured, my hand against his jacket, the chill of the leather beneath my palm.

  I breathed in the smell of his jacket, the presence of a man. It was violent. I could have wrapped my arms around him, stayed there pressing against his back, offering him my skin as a possible answer to all his questions.

  I was not a possible answer.

  I moved away slowly.

  I took my hand away from the leather.

  I breathed in the air.

  He spoke, without turning round. “Do you know why we do that… ? Taking deep breaths, the way you just have.”

  I did not know.

  “It’s our cells,” he said. “They need to recharge their oxygen. We often do it after an emotion.”

  He turned round. He looked at me. What must I look like at that moment? What face did he see?

  He placed his hand on my cheek and I felt like biting him.

  Lambert dropped me off on the square. He was waiting for some visitors for his house. The baker had made the most of the sunny day, going round in her van to sell springtime croissants. A way of celebrating the arrival of the fine weather.

  She was parked outside the church.

  They were very special croissants, with a taste of orange. M. Anselme did not like them, he said the springtime croissants were surely delicious, but they did not have the taste you had the right to expect when you asked for a croissant.

  I bought several. I needed sugar. I wanted to take some to Morgane and Raphaël, too. I ate one on my way.

  Outside the gate to old Nan’s house there was a metal basin full of bits of stale bread, and peelings, and carrot tops. It was for the donkeys. There were a lot of basins like that here and there in the village. When I went by, Nan was at her door. She could have run away, to hide. She had loosened her hair, and she was brushing it in the sun.

  I showed her the bag, the croissants. She motioned for me to come in.

  The bench where she was sitting was made of a board set on stones. She looked at the bag.

  “These are springtime croissants,” I said, opening it to show her.

  She put down her brush, and slipped her hand into the bag.

  She began to eat, staring at the ground between her feet. When she had finished, she looked up at me and told me that the croissant was very good.

  She took another.

  I looked over at the Refuge. All the windows were closed. It did not seem so dreary, now that there was sunlight.

  “Théo showed me a photograph of you, by the tree, with the children …”

  She shook her head.

  “You were young … There was Ursula, too.”

  She smiled.

  I looked at her, and this face crisscrossed with wrinkles was superimposed upon the other face, so infinitely smooth and sweet, that I had seen on the photograph.

  The woman Théo had loved.

  I looked up.

  The little stone Virgin was still there above the door, in the niche in the wall.

  “Can we go in?”

  Nan took a handkerchief from her pocket, and wiped her hands, for a long time.

  “There’s nothing left in there, just dead rats and memories.”

  “I like memories.”

  I waited, then said, “Théo told me that that photograph had been taken right at the beginning, when you had just opened the Refuge.”

  “They were barns, before. Stables. My parents kept their animals in there … The walls, the rooms, we had to clean everything, empty out the hay loft to make bedrooms.”

  She rubbed her dress to get rid of the crumbs. Some of them stayed in the folds.

  “Do you remember the first child who arrived?”

  She nodded.

  “I remember all the children … The first one, they brought him to me, his mother didn’t want him any more … five years old he was. I’d never heard a child moan like that. He stayed six months, and then a family adopted him, a couple in Nantes. They came to get him by car… He wrote to me every year, at Christmas, he seemed to be doing fine, and then one Christmas I didn’t get any more letters, he’d hanged himself.”

  She took another croissant from the bag. “Why do you want to go in there?”

  “To have a look …”

  “There’s nothing to see. It’s been closed for twenty years … At night, there are stone martens running about. It must stink.”

  “I like smells.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Smells like that …”

  She sat for a while without speaking. I thought I ought to leave. I looked at her. I would have liked her to tell me who Michel was. I did not dare ask. Would she have answered?

  Suddenly, she raised her hand and pointed toward the Refuge.

  “There’s a passage all the way at the back, the last window before the barn. To get in all you have to do is push it open.”

  She held me by the arm.

  “If there are beasts in there, don’t go complaining …”

  “I won’t complain.”

  I crossed the courtyard to the place she had told me about. The window was loose. All I had to do was push it. I climbed over the sill. I found myself in a dark empty room. I had to wait for a moment for my eyes to get used to the darkness and I saw that this room led to another.

  In the other room there were tables. Nan was right, it stank—pongs of dead rat and dried droppings. I went over to the tables. In the wood there were knife marks. There were lines on the wall, too, clusters of five, crossed through, like in prisons.

  Flies had come to die there, under the window, hundreds of them, deprived of light, they must have banged against the shutter and died.

  A little light filtered through the openings in the shutters. At the very back of the building, a stone stairway led upstairs. The steps were covered in dust. Pieces of plaster that had come loose from the ceiling littered the floor in places. The stairway came out on to a long dark corridor. There were rooms on either side. The old hay lofts that Nan had talked about. I opened a door. The room was cluttered with iron beds. On one of the beds was a pile of old brown woolen blankets. I went over to the window. Through the gap, I could see the courtyard, the tree, old Nan sitting on her bench. The sea in the distance. The pastures. There had been life, and children, here; only silence remained.

  It is said that water remembers. And what about walls?

  I went back to the door.

  Before going out, I turned my head, and my gaze was drawn by something lighter in the darkness. It was a bed that was still covered in a sheet. The sheet was no longer white but it was light. I had not seen it on coming in. There was a toy there, on the floor, by the bed. I bent down.

  It was a little bear on four wheels, with close-cropped fur so worn in places that there was nothing left but the threadbare cloth. The axis of the wheels was rusty. One of the bear’s ears had been torn by teeth—a child or a rat? A little bit of horsehair stuffing was leaking out. There was nothing else in the room, only the little beds and this toy. How many children had come, one after the other, through this room, the ones arriving envying those who were leaving? What had become of all of them?

  I put the toy back on the bed. I had no right to keep it, and yet I found it hard to leave it there. I picked it up again. I turned it over. The wheels were set in a wooden board. I went back over to the window. The paint was gone. Where there were still traces, it was flaking. Under the board, between the wheels, was a label. The label was glued, partly torn, but legible, I turned the toy to the light. It was the same label as the one glued to the dr
um: Pain d’Épice, Toys, passage Jouffroy, Paris.

  I went back by Lambert’s place. I wanted to tell him about the little bear. Tell him that I had not taken it, but that it was there, in one of the upstairs rooms. I could not do that, be a thief as well.

  I walked through the garden. The key was in the door. I wanted to see the drawings again. All those rainy day drawings that I had gone through so quickly the day we ate the eggs. There was one I wanted to see again.

  It was dark inside. I switched on the light. The drawings were still in the box, and the box was at the end of the table. There was also a bowl, and a few books. A jumper over a chair. Lambert had made a fire. There were still some red embers. I placed some wood on the embers, and a sheet of newspaper rolled in a ball. All it took was a match.

  The drawing I was looking for was mixed in with the others. A drawing in gray pencil with just a touch of color, I had seen it that day, hardly noticed, but enough to remember, a little bear mounted on four wheels, his leather bridle colored red.

  I looked, and eventually I found it.

  It was the little bear I had seen at the Refuge. It was drawn on a sheet of thickly grained paper. The lines were neat and straight. It was not a child’s drawing, it had to have been Lambert’s mother. Next to the drawing were a few angry strokes, a sort of incoherent scribbling.

  I looked at the table. I tried to imagine the mother and child, close together, the scratching of the pencil, the rubber, the child watching, then trying in turn to make a clumsy drawing, and all the while, on the table before them, standing proudly, the little bear stuffed with horsehair.

  All the way at the bottom of the sheet, like on most of the other drawings, there was a date, August 28, 1967. They are still together, a mother and her son. They are drawing.

  Hardly two months left to live. They do not know it.

  Time for a few more drawings. A few more rainy days. I sat for a long time looking at that drawing. This story was touching on my own, causing everything with feeling to vibrate. In the end I put the drawings back in place, the way I had found them, one on top of the other in the box. I looked around. On the table, the ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. A forgotten match.

  Lambert’s jumper on the chair. I picked it up, held it. My face buried in its smell. Looking for another smell, another skin: yours. The weather had turned almost summery, with mild afternoons where you could stay strolling outside. The horse was better. Max was still working on his boat. He did not seem to be in any hurry to finish it. He went on catching butterflies and putting them in a cage, waiting for the chance to let them all fly out around Morgane. How was he going to choose the day?

  Morgane spent her days making her tiaras. She was fed up with it. She was also fed up with being a waitress at the auberge.

  She had had a fight with Raphaël.

  “What sort of desires do you have, then?” she asked, moving over slightly so that I could sit down next to her on the bench.

  “My desires … I don’t know … they’re not the same every day.”

  She nodded.

  “And today, what are your desires today?”

  I thought about you again. It came back to me quite suddenly, desire, the last time. I also remembered the white walls. The nurse’s voice, He’s feeling better today. Because you had got up. Your hands, placed on the table top. All is well, you murmured. Your expression was calm. I took your hand, and I licked the skin inside, that’s all. The nurse saw us, she smiled.

  I would have made love to your dead body when they took it away.

  “Your bloke, before, why didn’t it work out?”

  “It’s not that it didn’t work out.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “Nothing … It’s just a story.”

  “Give me the title. The title, that’s not the story.”

  “Later …”

  “I don’t want it later. Look at this, black lace from Chanterelle …” She showed me the dark trim on the underwear she had under her skirt.

  Raphaël came to join us. He sat with his back against the wall. In his blue pea jacket he looked like a gypsy. He was staring at Morgane. I do not know why they had argued.

  She had been on edge for some time.

  “Stop doing that!”

  “Doing what?”

  “Your skirt, when Max is around! I’ve already told you dozens of times.”

  Morgane shrugged.

  The sun was still shining, but above the sea the sky was black. A few broad swathes, getting ready. There was no wind, only a tension in the air. The clouds passed in front of the sun. Morgane moaned. Raphaël went back inside the house.

  We sat on a bit longer.

  “Was he a good fuck, the bloke you stayed with for three years?”

  “He was, yes.”

  She nodded. I turned away.

  “What’s good, for you?” she asked.

  I could not answer.

  I went back up to my room. I looked outside.

  Between the clouds, in the places where they had been torn: that stretch of sky and light—some people say you should never look there, for fear of seeing the Virgin’s face. They say there are women who saw her face and became wanderers. Doomed to go as far as the swamps, and they never came back. Raphaël had sculpted them.

  With the storm, the power went out. Raphaël was working by the light of candelabras, an entire box of thick candles he had found in one of the rooms on the first floor.

  The candle flames lit up the walls, the earthen statues. I saw him through the crack. I could also see my reflection in the mirror.

  I avoided my eyes.

  I went down to see Raphaël. The studio door was open. A little clay tightrope walker stood proudly on the wooden steps.

  He was working on another one that was placed on a base, covered with a damp cloth.

  I liked to watch him working. His damp fingers in the clay.

  “Have you been crying?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What’s that, then, if it’s not tears?”

  “It’s raindrops, Raphaël, all the rain on the window panes … or perhaps it’s the candles … the smoke hurts my eyes.”

  He wiped his hands on a rag. He picked up his jacket and rummaged in his pockets. He pulled out a little tin box. Inside, there were black pastilles, they looked like coffee beans. He handed me one.

  “Here, take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Temesta.”

  “I know Temesta, this isn’t Temesta.”

  “Just pretend that it is. Or Valium. You want to pretend it’s some Valium?”

  He slipped the pastille into my mouth. It was hard. His fingers were dry.

  Outside, night had fallen. In the silence which followed, I heard a ship’s horn.

  “Don’t bite it,” he said, putting the box back in his pocket.

  “What happens if I bite it?”

  “Don’t bite it,” he repeated.

  On contact with my saliva, the pastille went soft. It gave off a strong smell of sap. Prévert used to swallow pellets of hash, and he would drink a cup of coffee on top of it. Very strong coffee. He would let a little while go by, then he would take another half a pellet with half a cup of coffee as well. M. Anselme told me all that.

  “Your dead people …” I said.

  “What dead people?”

  “Those ones!”

  I pointed to his sculptures.

  “They’re not dead people,” he said.

  “That man nailed to his wooden post, he frightens me.”

  “He’s an Ephemera.”

  He picked up the tools that were lying about on the floor.

  “Where is Lambert?”

  “I don’t know …”

  He turned to me.

  “He’s a decent bloke,” he said.

  “I don’t want to carry anything any more,” I eventually said.

  “Who’s talking about carrying anything?”r />
  “The minute you love someone, you carry them.”

  “What rubbish! When you love, you love!”

  “Rilke said that …”

  “Who gives a toss what Rilke said!”

  Morgane came in.

  “No more television!” she said.

  She saw us.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  Because we were next to each other. She smiled sweetly.

  She was wearing a striped jumper that she had knitted during the winter with plastic needles. The jumper was very big. She wore it with yellow stockings. She collapsed in the armchair. Her legs tucked underneath her. She leaned over her stockings to scratch at the dirt that had stuck to her ankle. Her red nails in the mesh.

  She looked up at me.

  “You and Lambert were together at the cliffs … I saw you. Did he tell you what he’s doing here?”

  “He’s selling his house.”

  She went on scratching the dirt in the mesh.

  “Well he’s not just a bloke selling his house,” she said, spitting on her stocking. “That’s not all of it.”

  Raphaël came over to the table. He removed the damp cloth that was protecting the little clay sculpture.

  “Rilke said a funny thing about that …”

  “Who is this Rilke?” she asked.

  Raphaël chuckled.

  Morgane turned to me.

  “Will you tell me?”

  “He’s a poet, he wrote very beautiful things about life, desire, love …”

  “What sort of beautiful things?”

  “Things … He also said it’s impossible to live under the weight of another life.”

  Morgane adjusted her stocking.

  “Well, you’ll get nowhere if you start off like that!”

  Before going to sleep, I replayed all our nights, all of them, again and again.

  By early morning, the donkeys had gathered in the meadow along the little path that leads to La Roche. In the near darkness, they were like shadows. The horse was with them, not among them but in the same meadow.

  A faint wind brought odors of earth and moss. The little village streets were deserted. It was low tide. I had left the lamp on in my room.

  In the darkness, I could see the yellow cutout of light.