The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  She smiled faintly.

  “The next day, I went to wait for Michel outside the school. The shipwreck, his parents, I told him everything.”

  She turned round.

  “I could tell you that I told him for his own sake, so that he’d know the truth … but that’s not true. If I told you it was for Lambert’s sake, or against him, that would be closer to the truth.”

  She lowered her gaze and looked over at her mother.

  “I did it for her, for everything he made her endure.”

  “How did Michel react?”

  “Well … He was already very … very mystical. I think for him that it didn’t change much, whether he had been abandoned or lost at sea… That evening, he came to the farm. He spoke with my father. He was young, seventeen at the time. I was thirty. He asked questions about his parents, the circumstances of the accident … He left a few weeks later, without telling anyone.”

  “Did he leave because of that?”

  “Because of that, or something else … I think he would have left no matter what, some day …”

  She opened the door, because there was some sun.

  She took her mother’s arm and led her outside to a bench. I watched her walking, with her burden of an old woman leaning on her arm. More a daughter than a woman. Desperately a daughter.

  Had she been able to love? Had she known how to be a woman? Such a need in her to destroy, to keep from dying from her own pain.

  “Lili?”

  She turned her head.

  “You told him about the shipwreck, but you didn’t tell him he had a brother?”

  She hesitated, a few seconds, I saw that instant where she did not know what she should reply, and she shook her head.

  I picked up the photographs that were still on the table. His forehead, the childlike stubbornness on his lips: did Michel look like Lambert? No doubt he did. Nan had not been so very mad to confuse the two. She knew how to recognize, in the older brother’s face, the younger brother’s features.

  Lambert hardly turned his head when I came in. He was looking at the fire. A fire that had gone out. The gray ash made a bed for a few pieces of charred wood that the flames had licked.

  I went over to him.

  I would have liked to have been able to touch him, hold him, give him my warmth. My hand, a few inches from his shoulder. He suddenly seemed so far away.

  “Does he know that I exist?”

  That is what he asked me. Without turning his head.

  I did not know what to reply.

  “It was for Paul that Nan came to steal the toys … Because they were his toys … She wanted him to play with them …”

  He looked around him, as if he were searching for Nan’s presence, the traces of her passing.

  “When I saw him in the yard that day, leading the calf, I didn’t recognize him. How can you explain that …”

  “You thought he was dead.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Yes, I did. But I should have recognized him … I should have looked at him! Instead, I looked at the old man. What did she say to you?” he asked, pointing to the terrace.

  I repeated Lili’s words to him.

  “Do you think my brother came into this house, afterward, when he found out? That’s what I would have done, I would have come here.”

  “Lili said he went to the grave. She didn’t say anything about the house.”

  He looked around him again.

  “Tomorrow, I’m going to go back to Nan’s place. Would you come with me?”

  He was happy.

  Tired.

  He was afraid.

  But he was happy.

  A daughter taking revenge on her father. Revenge, because she was not the favorite … Because there was an absence of love. Wherever she looked. A desperate quest. I thought of Raphaël’s sculptures, “The Pleading Women.”

  I wondered what he had understood about Lili to be able to sculpt those women. If he had understood anything or if it had come to him from elsewhere. From another story.

  Stories are alike.

  And there are always more stories. It does not take much, sometimes, an angelus ringing, people who meet, who are there, in the same place.

  People who might never have met. Who could have walked past and never seen each other.

  Walked past and never said anything.

  They are there.

  Théo took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. I had been there for a long time, and we had already talked a great deal.

  Lili had taken her mother to live with her, it was a few months after Michel left. She had taken everything away and Old Mother had followed. Théo had ended up all alone, in the big house.

  “Why didn’t you go and live with Florelle? There was nothing left to hold you back?”

  He shook his head, slowly.

  “It was too late … I got a first cat, a female. She had six kittens, they grew up, and then other cats.”

  He smiled. I think that was the last time I saw him smile.

  He got up.

  “Now I’m old, it doesn’t matter any more.”

  He walked over to a door that gave on to a windowless room. He disappeared inside. I heard another door creaking. He came back a moment later, with a little wooden box.

  He put the box on the table. All the letters he had received from the monastery were inside. He sat down again.

  “Michel wrote me a first letter shortly after he got there. I answered. He never tried to hide his whereabouts from us, but Florelle didn’t want to know. She thought he would come back by sea, like the first time.”

  He put his hand on the box.

  “Twenty years of personal confessions …”

  He pulled out a letter at random, and read it. He handed it to me. It was dated November of the year that had just gone by.

  Smooth handwriting, blue ink.

  My dear Théo,

  It’s snowing here.

  The snow is falling, whipped round by the wind, and it plasters the walls of the monastery. It’s very important, snow. It didn’t come like the other years. Usually, it comes the way the sea rises, with an ebb and flow. It falls, it melts, it comes again, it melts a bit less, then it covers the countryside in successive layers. This year, it came and settled all at once. Yesterday, I was able to go for a walk. It’s always an important date, the first time you can go out in the snow.

  I hope you are well at the moment, and that it is not too cold in your house.

  I am praying for you all.

  Michel.

  Théo folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and then put it away with the others. He pulled out another one. Behind us, all around us, the cats were dozing. I could hear the regular ticking of the clock.

  I read another letter. On some pages, at times, there were only a few words.

  I went out early this morning. Only animals had taken this path before me. Many had gone past, their tracks were all mixed up. I could tell there were wild boars, and deer, or stags, hares, dogs (their tracks are enormous, a wolf?).

  I read other letters. They all talked about the monastery surrounded by mountains. They did not talk about prayer, but about nature, bedrock. In one of the very first letters, Michel wrote, This monastery that was only meant to have been a way station has become the place of arrival. I am staying here, enchanted. The happiness of walking through the mountains. The wind at times, crashing. And the stars at night. In the evening, I write to myself, in my little notebook, everything that has filled me. Everything is so present.

  I cannot find the words to express it. Perhaps a profound intimacy.

  Kiss Mother for me.

  From the cupboard Théo took a photograph that he slid next to the letters.

  “That’s him … That’s Michel.”

  The lamp lit the photograph, the face of a man sitting at a table. Wearing a large light habit with a hood that fell on to his back. His hands were in front of him,
a book open on the table. Another book, smaller than the first one, was next to him, closed. A white bowl. He was looking down at the book. The light came in through the window, falling on the desktop, illuminating the bowl, an entire side of his face, while the other side remained in shadow. You could not make out anything else in the room except the man sitting at the window.

  “You must have seen him, the day of Florelle’s funeral.”

  I raised my head. I looked at Théo.

  Suddenly, the image came back to me, a man in a long black coat. He had stayed to one side, speaking to no one. A man with a thin face, and very light eyes. A taxi had dropped him off by the gate. Afterward, Old Mother arrived, and I no longer paid any attention to him, but when I left the cemetery, he had vanished.

  Théo nodded.

  “He arrived with the noon train and left again on the evening train. He came here, after the funeral. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. We talked. The taxi waited for him on the road.”

  Théo touched the letters lightly with his fingers.

  “How did he know about Florelle?” I said.

  “I called him, and he came.”

  I remembered. Strangely, everything began to fall into place, to take on its true meaning.

  “You called him that day you asked Lili for a telephone card, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that was the day. Nan had died the day before.”

  He turned his head and looked over toward the window. Night was falling. The yard was becoming a den of shadows with only the yellow eyes of the growling cats as they passed by, their bellies close to the ground.

  “I didn’t know whether he’d be able to come … When you call there, you know, it’s somewhat unusual … You leave a message, that’s all, and the monk who answers passes it on.”

  “Did you tell him that his brother was here?”

  “Yes. He knows he has a brother, I wrote to him about it, a long time ago.”

  “And he never tried to meet him?”

  “You’ll see, he’s an exceptional person.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He shook his head.

  “Michel has other brothers now … Such things don’t matter to him in the same way.”

  “Such things?”

  “Real life …”

  “And Florelle?”

  He looked up at me. His words came from the back of his throat, I could hardly hear them.

  “What, Florelle?”

  “Florelle, why did she look for him the way she did? Didn’t she know where he was?”

  “Yes, she knew … but she didn’t want to think about him in that way. The idea that he could shut himself away voluntarily. His vow of silence, too, she never read his letters. She wanted him to come back, but I knew very well that he would not.”

  He looked down at the photograph.

  His voice was a murmur.

  “He doesn’t speak, only a few hours in the entire week. He explains it in his letters, you’ll read them, the moments when he is allowed to speak. He says they are rare and precious moments.” He closed the box and pushed it over to me. “I have learned a lot from his letters. You’ll read them, won’t you, and then give them to his brother.”

  I picked up the box. What I had read made me want to read more.

  He took off his glasses, the lenses had steamed up.

  “His pendant, the clothes he was wearing when they found him, and the rope that was used to hold him to the dinghy, all of that is at Florelle’s house.”

  “Lambert searched, he didn’t find anything.”

  He sat staring into space.

  “Behind the dresses, at the back of the wardrobe.”

  Since Morgane’s departure, Raphaël no longer put the stone outside the door. You could go into his studio whenever you wanted. He saw me go by with the wooden box under my arm and he called out to me. I told him I was tired, he said that I would never be as tired as he was, he took me by the arm and led me over to the table. The ashtrays were full. The rubbish bins were overflowing.

  A little clay tightrope walker stood poised above all the mess, balancing on his rope.

  “Morgane sold one for me, almost the same. A bronze one! Hermann wants others, sculptures, too.”

  I looked at him.

  That afternoon, they had put in a telephone. He showed it to me, he was so pleased with that, too, Morgane would be able to call him every evening.

  He had news from her. She liked her job at the gallery, she had made a new friend, a girl her age she could go to the cinema with. She did not mention any boys. She had already sold two drawings and a bronze.

  She said her room was small, but that in five minutes she could be on the banks of the Seine. She had visited the Louvre.

  She did not talk about coming back.

  Raphaël told me all that, out of order, and he looked at the wooden box.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Some more of your bloody nests!”

  He sat back down at the table. The sleeves of his jumper were too short, I could see the thick veins running under his skin. He had knotted one of Morgane’s scarves around his neck.

  “Do you miss her?” I said.

  He gave a faint smile that faded into a wince. His hair was flecked with gray. He said it was the plaster.

  He looked up.

  “And how are you?”

  What could I tell him?

  “The Conservatoire du littoral is offering me a two-year contract.”

  “To do what?”

  “To monitor the shore between here and Jobourg. I would also have to go to Caen once a week.”

  “Will you take it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He turned round and looked at me.

  “If you say you don’t know, it means you will.”

  He forced a laugh.

  “So we’ll go on seeing each other, then!”

  I read the letters during the night. I read and I slept. And read some more.

  The letters contained a man. Words. A voice.

  Michel had left without taking anything with him, and he had walked for days. Cars stopped for him but he did not get in. He walked the entire way. He went through villages and women gave him food to eat. He slept at farms, with the animals. He arrived at the monastery in the early days of autumn. He had asked for hospitality.

  And now, he was a contemplative monk.

  In one of his letters, he wrote,

  I always have a notebook on me, to write down my impressions when I am out walking. So that I won’t forget.

  Sunday afternoon, it has just rung three o’clock. It is already time to settle in for the night. The sun has disappeared behind the peaks, the temperature is well below zero. I am in my bedroom study. My lair. Yesterday I put on my snowshoes and waded through nearly a meter of powdered snow.

  I thought about you, how you have never known such thick snow.

  Some day, you will have to come here.

  I read all the letters.

  In the morning, I put the letters back in the box and went up to look for Lambert.

  We went to Nan’s place, entered the way we had the first time, climbing over the windowsill, and we walked the length of the Refuge to the door of the house. Without speaking. Lambert went to the wardrobe and opened it.

  The dresses were all hanging one against the other, and he pushed them aside. They smelled of mothballs, and little white balls rolled out. The back of the wardrobe was cluttered with shoes, plastic bags that contained balls of wool, remnants of fabric.

  The cardboard box, like a shoebox. Lambert found it. He pulled it out. He put the box on the table. We looked at each other for a moment and he lifted the lid.

  The little polo shirt was there, folded on top of the rest, the blue and white stripes with the three boats. Lambert took it in his hands. He held it against his face.

  It was the polo shirt Paul was wearing when
he left for Alderney. The same polo shirt as when Nan took her photograph, and in the time in between he had become Michel. Why had she felt the need to make him wear the same clothes?

  Perhaps she thought it would reassure the child.

  Under the polo shirt there was a pair of green cotton trousers with a pirate badge sewn on the pocket. Newspaper articles. The paper had yellowed, the photographs were faded, but the text was still legible. At the very bottom of the box, there was the rope that Théo had mentioned, which had served to tie Paul to the dinghy.

  There was also the chain and the tag. Lambert showed it to me, the four names engraved behind.

  He clenched the tag in his fist.

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Nan loved him … she brought him up.”

  That was all I could find to say.

  He looked at me.

  “She wasn’t his mother.”

  “He knew that …”

  I took my hand away, then I put the wooden box on the table.

  Lambert looked at the letters.

  “They are for you. From Théo …”

  I went out. I saw his face through the window. He had opened the box.

  I walked all round the house. Before leaving, I wanted to find that little spot of earth where Théo had buried the child. He had described the place to me. A magnificent lilac bush had taken root in the soil. Pushing aside the branches closest to the ground, I found the little white cross.

  A child died, another one now bears its name. Had Michel come to meditate on this grave when he had found out his story?

  What should he be called? All the letters were signed Michel.

  I put my hand in my pocket. I took out a few smooth pebbles I had picked up on the beach. The two abalone shells. I left them all at the foot of the cross and carefully put back in place the one or two branches that my hands had parted.

  I did not know how to pray.

  At that moment I would have liked to have known how, of that I am sure.

  I took my notebook out of my pocket. I reread fragments of Paul’s letter that I had copied out during the night, words that had the strength of a prayer: