I sat down again.
We sat there for a long while in silence. At the end of a time span that seemed infinitely long, Théo looked at me.
“What do you want to know?”
“Paul … You gave him someone else’s name.”
“We had to.”
“Who was Michel Lepage?”
“A two-year-old child. A woman entrusted him to Florelle, some sort of gypsy, she didn’t want him, the child was already very sick when she brought him to her. She knew he would not live.”
“I saw the ledger. He arrived a few days before the shipwreck.”
“And he died a few days afterward, from pleurisy.”
I looked at him.
“That child no longer existed for anyone,” he said.
“And he had a name …”
“Yes, he had a name … We buried his body behind the house.”
There was a very heavy silence after he said that.
“Someone might have come to ask for him? That woman, was she his mother?”
“She left him there, she didn’t want him any more.”
He slid his hand over the tabletop.
“The first time I saw Paul, he was sleeping in the room with all the smallest children. Florelle said, ‘It’s the sea that brought him back to me.’ I didn’t understand right away … Only later, when she asked me to go and get the dinghy on the beach.”
A muffled groan came out of him, like a sob.
“That dead child, you understand, there was nothing more we could do for him. Nan didn’t even have the mother’s address to let her know.”
He seemed to slump on to the table, his upper body frailer than ever. He spread his hands as if the child were still there in front of him.
“It took Florelle only a few nights to sew his shroud, he was so little. She didn’t write a name on it.”
“And you buried him like that?”
“In a little wooden box, with the shroud.”
“People might think that Nan killed him … Or that she let him die to give his name to another child.”
Théo nodded. He pressed his hands together.
“I thought about that, too.”
I was staring at the table. I wanted to keep hold of the words, everything he was saying to me. I wanted to keep it all.
“In the village, nobody ever suspected anything?”
He nodded.
“Old Mother worked it out very quickly, when he started coming to see the animals … She blackmailed me with it. She said that if I left her, she would go to the gendarmes, she would tell them everything and they would take the child away from Florelle. She said that Florelle would go to prison. There were rumors that he was our son, Florelle’s and mine. Florelle was never pregnant, but she always wore such large dresses …”
He said, “She was a good mother, you know …”
“And you, were you a father to him?”
He looked distraught.
“I’ve never been a good father to anyone.”
The smile faded, became a shadow that faded too, until there was no trace left.
He closed his eyes again.
I let him sleep. I thought about the part that chance had played. The truth might never have come out if I had not found that photograph at Nan’s. And it would have been enough if Paul had been wearing a different polo shirt, not the one with the three little boats.
Did Ursula know?
No doubt she too had been in on the secret. I could hear the ticking of the clock, the cats’ breathing mingled with Théo’s, hoarser. Little groaning noises in sleep.
He slept for ten minutes or so. After that, he sat up. He hunted for his glasses on the table.
“Was I asleep?”
“A little while, yes.”
He looked toward the window. It was dark. The little cat was curled on his lap.
He picked her up and put her down on the bed.
“Would you like a coffee?”
His gestures, with the little cat, were infinitely tender. In the space of a few days, they had become the gestures of an old man.
He heated up some coffee in an iron pot. His slippers slid over the floor, pushing aside clumps of cat hair and dust.
His shadow against the wall, the slow shadow of his arm.
“Lili worked it out, too, much later on … I don’t know how … I argued so often with her mother. She must have overheard.”
He poured the coffee in the cups. He came to put the cups on the table.
“She could have adopted another child, there was probably no shortage of real orphans?”
He looked at the cups set down side by side.
“But that child had been given back by the sea.”
“And he had a brother!” I shouted, getting to my feet.
I could not help it. I found it all so hateful, so sordid.
He said nothing.
He sat down again. The cat came back on to his lap.
“You love that man, don’t you?”
I did not answer.
“You love him. You already love him, but you don’t know it.”
He took a sip of coffee. He raised his eyes to look at me.
“How much could you keep silent for his sake? How far into silence could you go?”
He waited for me to answer.
I thought about you.
I would have gone far, very far, if I could have saved you. I went over to the surgeons, I lifted up my jumper, Use me, use my guts … I said. I wanted them to take whatever they needed to save you. They told me they could take it, but that it would not save you.
I looked out the window.
“I’m not judging you.”
He closed his eyes.
“I know.”
What time could it be? The night was long and it seemed as if it would never end. As if there would be no other mornings. Even the growling cats sensed that this night was not like others. They had gathered, silent, on the steps outside the house. They were not fighting.
The dampness of the night made the iron railing shine, the railing Théo clung to when he needed to get into the house.
Was Lambert still at Nan’s place? Perhaps he had driven past Théo’s house. He must have seen the light, but not realized I might be here. Had he found anything more, apart from the ledger?
Théo’s eyes were still closed. He had fallen asleep the way cats do. Suddenly. His hands folded on his stomach.
On the dresser, the hands of the clock turned.
I went back to La Griffue. I slept a dreamless sleep.
In the morning, my head felt empty.
I drank coffee. Until I felt sick.
I waited for the sun to rise. Shut in that room facing the sea. I heard the angelus chime, three slow peals, and then again. I remembered my childhood, the wandering, from house to family, all the time spent seeking, waiting.
One day I burned my bed, because I had to live.
One day, too, I met you, an improbable meeting on a village square, one morning. It was cold. There was a fountain. It was frozen. You were there. I looked at you.
I knew that you were the one that I had to meet.
Max woke me up, tossing pebbles against my window.
He had found an injured seagull inside his boat. The bird’s tongue had been split, a piece of flesh torn away by a hook. It could no longer feed itself, so Max had been fishing for it. He spoke to it the way he spoke to the rat, with his dictionary vocabulary.
The seagull listened to him.
Max said he was going to tame it. That it was easy, all you needed was fish and words.
I was not sure whether it would want to stay on the boat.
Raphaël’s car was in the courtyard. Since Morgane had left, he no longer used it. He did not care if it got rusty.
I walked back up to the village. The Audi was parked on the pavement. The shutters of the house were closed. Lili knew, she was in on the secret. Buried. She too, like Old Mother. She had us
ed the story in order to hate her father.
I slipped my hand along the door handle. I was afraid to go in. Afraid of the moment our eyes would meet.
I went through the door. Lambert was there. His face, crumpled. Lili looked at me. She was sitting opposite him. At the same table. There was no one else.
I was wearing my thick rain jacket. I felt like apologizing, for being there. I said it, I think, I mumbled, Excuse me …
I did not say anything else. I looked at Lambert a bit longer than usual and then I put the two photographs on the table.
Lili saw them. She went pale.
Had she loved Lambert? A love made of lies and silence, things unsaid buried so deep that you could hear the wolf pack howling.
Do voices change with time? It is said that only eyes do not change.
But what of eyes that close? You said, You must love, after me.
I looked at Lambert, his face, his hands.
Lili picked up the photographs.
“I heard them arguing so much of the time … Insults, all the time, over nothing. When he was fed up, he would go off down the road, he went to be with her. They never told me anything, but in the end I worked it out …”
Lili got up. She stood behind the table, she looked outside, through the little space of windowpane above the curtains.
“Your brother came often, to the farm …”
Lambert shivered. Lili went on.
“He liked the animals, he was always hugging them, caressing them. For a long time I believed he was a kid from the Refuge like the others … I didn’t pay any attention to him. My mother didn’t want him in the house. I think I knew that Nan had adopted him, long before I understood what that meant.”
Lambert listened to her.
“You never asked any questions?”
“What sort of questions would I have asked? I didn’t care, for me he was a tinker’s kid, nothing more, except that he didn’t go away again like the other ones …”
Lambert shuddered.
I was at the table, across from him. I could see his face, the quivering of his eyelids when the emotion took hold of him. The tiny film of sweat above his lip.
Memory is modest. I could feel it beating inside him, the images that Lili gave to him, all of them carrying that element of intimacy.
“One day, they had a fight, and it was the one fight too many, and that day, I understood he was your brother.”
Lambert went pale, I thought he might go out and be sick. Lili said, “I cursed them.”
He clenched his fists.
Old Mother got up from her armchair. Leaning with one hand on the table. The other on her throat. She came over. They stared at each other, the two of them, the mother, the daughter.
“And she put up with it all, without a peep!”
Lambert got up.
“You could have written to me, you could have told me!”
“There was a time when I thought I would … I had managed to get your address from the gardener who looked after your house.”
She put the pictures down, side by side, and rubbed her face; her father had the same gestures.
“You thought about it, but you didn’t do it.”
“For twenty-five years I’d been living with them … No man in my life, no child. At least I had a secret. I had learned to keep quiet. And I could control my father with it. He knew it, he no longer talked about going away. He would be no happier than we were, that’s what I reckoned, time and again! No happier …”
Old Mother had come right up to us, her belly against the table. I could smell her old woman’s smell. Her life of silence. Lili looked at her. There was no love in her look. No pity.
“Isn’t that right, Old Mother, no one can say he’s any happier than we are?”
A victory without glory. It was so sad, a victory over what? Old Mother was mumbling something.
It all seemed such a terrible waste.
Lambert rubbed his eyes.
“Why did he leave, in the end?”
Lili stood still, one hand on the bar. She gave a short laugh.
“Why does anyone leave? Or stay? Who knows …”
Hesitating for a moment. Her gaze suddenly confused.
She had spoken without looking at him.
She turned away.
“You think I didn’t see you, when you came with your grandparents, to visit the grave? Three times a year, in the beginning. You never came to say hello. How do you think that made me feel?”
He looked at her, shocked by what she had said.
“We went down to the sea and tossed flowers! Paul was there, somewhere, alive, perhaps he was playing in your bloody yard, and you’re reproaching me because I didn’t come and give you a peck on the cheek?”
She shook her head.
“At the time, I didn’t know …”
He got up and went over to her behind the bar. He took her by the arm.
“I don’t believe you.”
She pulled away from him. She was staring at something in front of her, in the sink. Water, or glasses. Or maybe she wasn’t looking at anything.
“That’s not what I’m reproaching you with,” she said.
“What is it then?”
She did not reply so he said it again, louder. Finally she looked up.
“One day, you came back, you were nearly twenty. You were all alone.”
Lambert thought about what she had just said. It took him a moment to understand.
“You spoke with my father.”
“So you know that too …”
She held his gaze. For a few seconds.
“I was behind the window, I recognized you right away, I heard you talking with my father, I opened the window a little. You didn’t even ask him how I was.”
He was looking at her, as if he wanted to understand something, something he could not grasp. The stubborn spitefulness in Lili’s eyes. In her voice. He turned away for a moment, and then looked at her face again.
“I was in love with you …” she said, forcing a laugh. “And I thought you would love me, too … I waited for you for years, and then one day I understood that you wouldn’t be coming any more, so I married a …”
She left her sentence like that, suspended.
They looked at each other for a moment, he was disoriented. Had Lili loved him so much that she sought to take revenge on him, too, the way she had taken revenge on her father for loving another woman? And for loving another child more than her? A child who wasn’t even his own blood.
“You were in love with me … ?”
“We kissed a few times.”
“Kissed, maybe …”
He went back over to her.
She had let him toss flowers upon the sea for a dead child who was not dead. She had watched him moan, weep, wait, believe.
“That kid who was with your father, that day, in the yard, holding a calf on the end of a rope, do you remember … ? Was that my brother? Tell me, it was him, tell me!”
“It was, but I didn’t know it at the time.”
“You knew!”
She shook her head.
“I knew, but much later.”
Lamberts clenched his fists. I thought he was going to grab hold of her, strangle her. I think that Lili would have let him hit her, that she would have put up with anything, without trying to resist. But it was the bar counter that he hit. A hard punch. The glasses shook. And his voice, too.
“And you wanted me to come and say hello! Maybe you wanted me to marry you, too!”
He took her arm, her face between his hands, a few inches away.
“You’re just like your mother, you’re full of hate. Who wants to fuck a woman full of hate?”
I saw Lili’s face go to pieces under the ferocity of the insult. For a moment she had to grab hold of the bar. Her lip was trembling.
He looked away. She went on staring at him, even when he turned his back to her.
He opened the door.
Lili went into the kitchen, behind the strips of the curtain. Her figure shrunken.
I stayed there alone with the old woman, who now looked even older, so intent, so red in the face, too. She was incapable of sitting down. Incapable of standing up.
I could not touch her. Take her by the hand, help her to sit down. I went to fetch her a glass of water, I put it down in front of her, on the table. More than that I could not do.
I remembered the night of the storm, when we all came back here, to this bistro, Lili’s face when Lambert came in.
Her expression had hardened. What had she felt when she realized who it was? What fear must have gone through her?
He had not left. He had hung about. And then he had settled in the house just across the way.
“Are you going to be alright?” I said to Old Mother, going back to her.
She did not answer.
Her cheeks had lost their color, but she seemed to be breathing more calmly.
“I’m going to leave you, now.”
I went to the door. I put my hand on the latch. I turned, she was there, following right behind.
“The old man, he thinks it was me … But it wasn’t me, I didn’t say anything.”
She fixed her eyes on me. I could smell her heavy breath.
“It wasn’t me,” she said again.
She shook her head several times, as if she wanted to banish the ghosts.
She seized my arm. Her eyes were hardly open. They looked like a lizard’s eyes.
“It wasn’t you, what?” I said.
She was waving her hands.
“It wasn’t me … It was her, she told Michel everything … And after that I had to come here.”
She finished her sentence with a trickle of drool. Her chin in her neck. Her eyes desperately empty.
I looked up. Lili was there. She was staring at us. I thought she was going to come and clean her mother’s face, but she walked past her without doing a thing. She went over to the window. She looked outside for a long time.
“They’d been arguing again, that day. It wasn’t the first time he had made her cry, but he went to get his suitcase and said he was leaving. He was going to go and live at Nan’s. He said he wanted to be happy, for a few years, that Michel was grown up now, go and tell him whatever you want to, he didn’t care. He also said they didn’t send people to jail such a long time afterward. I couldn’t stand the idea that he might be happy. Even a tiny bit.”
The Breakers Page 35
