The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  The Audi came down the village road. It slowed. It went by me and stopped a few meters further along.

  The window was rolled down.

  “Want to get in?”

  Drops of dew shone on the roof. I put my hand there, it left a mark. My five fingers in the moisture.

  I got in.

  Lambert was staring at the road, at the darkness on the other side of the windscreen. He did not look at me.

  He stank of alcohol.

  “Did you come to my place?”

  “Yes. I wanted to see the drawings … I didn’t touch anything.”

  He switched off the engine.

  “The drawings …”

  He laughed. “In that case …”

  “I found another toy at Nan’s, with the same label as the one that is on the drum … A little bear on wheels … I found the drawing.”

  He laughed again.

  “You’re having fun! And what does that prove?”

  He was right, it did not prove a thing, except that Nan had gone into his house to take the toys, and that Lili’s mother was not so crazy.

  He leaned back against the headrest.

  “You know what I did, while you were playing with your cuddly toys? I went to see the old man.”

  He pointed, in the darkness, toward the place on the hill where Théo’s house was.

  “He greeted me with a gun. He didn’t want me to come in.”

  “The whisky, was that before or after?”

  He chuckled.

  “After.”

  He was staring at the place on the hill.

  “I shook him a little bit … Not hard, but he went on insisting he hadn’t put out that bloody light!”

  “Shook him in what way?”

  “Not as hard as I would have liked to, when I left he was still on his feet.”

  “And what if he was telling the truth?”

  “The truth! He stinks of lies when he talks about that night … He oozes them. It’s a smell I recognize.”

  “The smell of lies?”

  He turned to me, and gave a nasty laugh.

  “I used to be a policeman.”

  He rammed his head back against the headrest.

  “I know, it always has this effect … I should say anything but, undertaker, tax collector! Even a killer on the run would sound better.”

  He leaned toward me. His face a few centimeters from mine.

  He pulled me toward him, immobilized my head, my face between his hands, like a vice. He made me look at him.

  Just look at him.

  And then he opened the car door, on the passenger side.

  I went up to see Théo. There had been a catfight in the yard. When I got there, they were still growling. I saw yellow eyes, defiant in the dark.

  It was late. This was not my usual time.

  “I was going by …” I said.

  Théo looked at his watch.

  “You were going by …”

  He switched off the television.

  “Today is my day for visits.”

  He walked over to the window. The two tomcats who had been fighting were there. One of them was a squat gray animal. The other one, who seemed wilder, had a bit of his ear torn off. The female they had been fighting over was lying stretched out on top of the wardrobe. Indifferent.

  Théo turned away. “Was he worried?”

  “Yes, a bit.”

  He opened a bottle of wine that was on the table. He filled his glass. He put his hands around the glass and looked at the wine inside.

  “He says you put out the light on the night of the wreck.”

  “I know what he says!”

  He grumbled, a string of inaudible words. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. Connected to a wire, it lit the table but showed nothing of his face. There was dust around the wire and on the glass of the bulb.

  “You’re on his side …”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side …”

  He rubbed his face, several times, with his hands.

  “He just turned up here, mad as a hatter … started asking me the same questions, all the time! What does he expect me to say? The lamp was lit, that’s what I told him, the truth. He grabbed me by the collar …”

  “He says you aimed your rifle at him.”

  “A man’s got to defend himself …”

  The rifle was there, in the corner, propped between the wall and the buffet.

  Théo’s hands were in the light, joined together.

  “What happened to him is a great misfortune, but there have been other misfortunes … What more do you want me to tell him? It’s never a good thing to stir up the past.”

  A yellow cat came to miaow outside the window. It was a cat with strange eyes. Théo got up, opened the window, and the cat jumped inside.

  Théo remained standing.

  “Those nights in the lighthouse, no one can understand … I remember one young lad they sent out there with me. He hadn’t asked to come, it’s just someone was needed and it landed on him … He was a little fellow, he was afraid of the sea. For days he stayed crouching like an animal between the bed and the wall. Not even on the bed … All scrunched up on the floor, with the sweat freezing his back … Pale as death. He was just a kid. I thought he’d get over his fear. I took his watches. I didn’t sleep. Neither did he. When I saw that the fear wasn’t leaving, I told them ashore. They didn’t come and get him. The kid threw himself into the sea on Christmas Day, when I wasn’t watching.”

  His hands closed over each other. The darker gnarls of his veins. Their shadow on the expanse of the table.

  “There are lots of stories about lighthouses, stories about men … I could tell them to you. Two mates who died because of a gale that went on too long, they died of hunger. They’d boiled the soles of their shoes trying to survive until the others came out to relieve them … Only they never came.”

  The little white cat rubbed against him. She jumped up on his lap.

  “Right after the war, there was one bloke, he’d got the gas at Verdun, he only had a scrap of lung left. What was missing, he’d already spat out up there in the trenches … The rest, he finally coughed it away out there, with all those steps to climb.”

  That evening, for the first time, he talked to me about the lighthouse, that secret, unimaginable life. He told me about the women who got themselves taken out with the supplies, and the fishermen would fetch them in the morning.

  He smiled.

  It was already late at night, and he was still talking.

  Had Nan ever gone out there to join him? Their love, far from anyone, in the middle of the sea.

  He said he had had a cat out there. But there are always cats in lighthouses. He remembered the first female, very well. She had had a litter, five kittens. In the bed, they looked like rats.

  At the end, when he walked with me to the door, he said, “Your Lambert needs someone to blame, so he won’t give up. The best thing would be for him to go away from here.”

  It was late when I got back to La Griffue.

  I was tired.

  I had been cold on the walk back, even walking quickly, my arms folded. I sat for a moment on the floor with my back to the radiator. My knees up against me. My arms around them. I felt the heat penetrating the weave of my jumper.

  I closed my eyes.

  One day, you said to me, You’re going to have to forget me … and you made love to me with your voice. No, first of all you made love to me with your voice and afterward you said, You’re going to have to forget me. You have to start now, while I’m still alive, that’s what else you said.

  That it would be easier, afterward.

  I found myself outside.

  You were inside. Behind your walls. I screamed. In my bedroom, that night, I bit my hand so hard it bled, I wanted to stifle the cry. Another night. A night without you.

  I slept there, rolled in a ball against the radiator, my hands over my belly. I woke up early.

  I
t was raining.

  I worked on my plates, my drawings of pipistrelles, scoters, the watercolor of the big owl I had started more than ten times.

  I worked doggedly. The format of the sheets, always the same. I drank liters of coffee. At noon, Morgane came and knocked on the door. I did not answer. I did not want to see anyone. That’s what I shouted. She didn’t persist.

  She went back downstairs.

  I heard her talking to Raphaël, later, about me.

  At the end of the day, I went out. I went back up to Lili’s. It was not raining any more but it was too late to go to the cliffs. I was still cold. I needed to see some faces. To hear some voices.

  Lambert was there, sitting with M. Anselme. And Morgane. When she saw me, she looked away. There were some men at the bar, a few fishermen.

  I took off my jacket.

  I sat at their table.

  M. Anselme was asking Lambert whether he knew how to suppose. I knew what this was. An absurd tirade from Prévert’s “Adventures of the Stool.”

  I put my jacket on the back of the chair. M. Anselme took my hand and kissed my fingertips. He looked at my face, his forehead worried. Yet I had put on some makeup, a little bit of sand-colored powder and some gloss on my lips.

  He turned again to Lambert.

  “You still haven’t answered me, do you know how to suppose?”

  “Yes, no … maybe …”

  I struck a match. I held it between my fingers, as long as I could, until the flame licked my skin. I blew it out.

  “Tell him you know how to suppose, he will go on all by himself …”

  Lambert looked puzzled.

  “Yes, I know how to suppose …”

  That was all that M. Anselme wanted. He rubbed his hands, pleased.

  Their voices came to me from a distance.

  I listened to them and went on burning my matches.

  “Well, suppose I’m in the street instead of being here, and follow my reasoning. Do you follow?”

  “I follow.”

  “So I’m in the street, sitting on a bench, a woman walks by, I get up and I follow her. Are you still following me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good! Now. In French, we would say, rather, Prévert did say, Je suis donc un homme qui suit une femme. Si je suis une femme, je ne suis pas un homme, puisque c’est une femme que je suis.”

  It made me smile, I knew it by heart. Ever since I had known M. Anselme. I struck another match.

  Lambert turned to me.

  “Is this Prévert again?” he said.

  “It is.”

  I looked at him.

  “You were a policeman before, but you aren’t any more?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Why was I a policeman before, or why am I not one any more?”

  “Both.”

  “I did it for thirty years. I learned to run fast. And to make people confess. And then one morning, I’d had enough … but I was good.”

  He looked at me, his smile faintly mocking.

  “You don’t like the fact I was a policeman, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t say it, but you don’t like it.”

  He leaned over. I remembered his hands holding my face in a vice-like grip.

  “The only one I didn’t manage to get a confession out of is old Théo … but I haven’t said I was giving up. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “When you force someone to confess, it’s not always a confession.”

  He nodded.

  M. Anselme was talking about a drive he went on with Prévert.

  “One day, we went to get carrot tops at the covered market at Cherbourg. For his guinea pig … All four of us, Prévert, Trauner, my father and I. It was winter. There was snow …”

  “Isn’t that rather far to go, Cherbourg, for a few carrot tops?” Morgane said, looking up from her crossword puzzle.

  M. Anselme smiled.

  Lambert turned to me.

  “I’ve been thinking about your business with the cormorants,” he said in a low voice. “The fact that there are fewer than before … The reprocessing plant isn’t very far from here, is it? Could there be a connection?”

  “There could be, yes, but there have been measures. There are fewer emissions.”

  “If there are fewer emissions, there should be more birds?”

  I sipped my chocolate.

  M. Anselme glanced at the clock. It was his time. He got up. He left three euros on the table. Three euros for the coffee, that’s the way it was. At that rate, it’s more expensive than Paris, Lili would say.

  He put his coat on over his jacket.

  Morgane went over to the pinball machine and we were alone.

  “Are you feeling better?” I said, referring to the alcohol he had put away the night before.

  Purple shadows under his eyes.

  He shook his head.

  “No. Did you go to see him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And, nothing … He’s fine.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “What do you want him to tell me? The same thing he told you, nothing more.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “I don’t know …”

  I looked up at him. He was looking at me, too. I thought about the man that Nan was looking for. I don’t know what it was that intrigued me about that story. It was an obsession, the way I went after it.

  Lili had removed the photograph, as if she were afraid of something.

  “The child who was leading the calf … you said that Théo had called out to him. You don’t remember his name?”

  He looked at me, flabbergasted.

  “That was forty years ago!”

  “Yes, of course … but there used to be a photograph there, behind you, where that light spot is.”

  He turned round.

  “You could see Lili with her parents, and a little boy. His name was Michel, he was a child from the Refuge. I think he is the one that Nan is waiting for.”

  “So?”

  “So, nothing …”

  “Could it be their child, Nan and Théo’s?”

  I shook my head. “Nan doesn’t have a child.”

  He listened to me. Without laughing. Without even smiling. I talked to him about the letters.

  “Envelopes addressed with a pen, lots of them … They were all handwritten by someone whose name is Michel Lepage.”

  He put his head in his hands.

  “What exactly are you getting at?”

  I looked deep into his eyes.

  “I think that the child in the photograph and the one you saw are the same child. I also think that Théo knows where to find the man that Nan is looking for. They’ve been writing to each other for more than twenty years.”

  The female cat that the two tomcats had been fighting over died. Théo found her, stiff, in the ditch just below his house. When I got there, he was standing over her. Her flank was hollow, already gutted by death. A little patch of pink tongue emerged from between her teeth.

  Théo lifted her up.

  “Poison! That’s what some people do.”

  Her mouth was open. A bit of drool there, transformed into a yellow crust at the corner of her mouth. One eye staring at a spot in the courtyard.

  Théo took the animal behind the house, to the end of the pasture, where he had buried all the other cats. A shady spot beneath tall trees. A place of moss and ferns.

  The two males followed him. They were walking side by side, almost touching.

  I followed them. Théo put the cat down in the grass and rolled up his sleeves.

  “I’ve buried a few, in my time …”

  He dug. Under the grass the earth was dark, almost black. Crumbly. A moist earth.

  The two toms sat next to each other, very straight, at an equal distance from the female. They followed the movement of the pickaxe with thei
r eyes, the little pile of earth that grew by the old man’s feet.

  When the hole was deep enough, Théo looked at them. He said a few words in a rough patois, picked up the female, and threw her into the hole. He filled the hole with earth. A little mound that he flattened with the pickaxe. The entire time, the tomcats did not move. They stayed next to the hole.

  Théo and I went back to the house. To the kitchen. He stuffed the wood stove with the logs that were next to it. His movements were slow.

  A pad of letter paper lay open on the table, with a pen on it. The page was partly covered in a fine script.

  Next to it was a letter Théo was answering. The letter was open, the envelope beside it.

  Théo came back to the table. He shoved the letter to the end of the table and we talked about the cats.

  We drank some wine.

  I asked him if he remembered someone called Tom Thumb. “A friend of Max’s, they were at school together.”

  He shook his head. He said he did not remember.

  He was lying.

  We talked about other things.

  When I went back out, the two cats were still beside the hole. They did not turn their heads, even when Théo called to them, showing them their bowls.

  Monsieur Anselme was listening to me, his elbows on the table, his head between his hands.

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I went to the cliffs.”

  He smiled at me.

  “God must be surprised to find you there so often.”

  He leaned over, parted the curtain, and looked outside. A clear sky, without a cloud, he said it would be a good day to go to the coastguard station. That’s what he said, “Why don’t we go to see Prévert’s tree? It’s such a special tree! Jacques liked it very much. He would be pleased to know that someone still visits it.”

  I agreed.

  We went out. He took my arm.

  By the path, three little girls were inventing a circle game. They had put their dolls in the middle of the circle. They went round and round, quick little steps, first one way, then the other.

  We stopped to look at them.

  “Prévert liked children very much. Personally, I find them a bit too noisy.”

  The little girls continued to go round.

  Turn, turn, little girls

  Turn around the factories

  Soon you’ll be inside