Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir

by William Wharton

  I don’t see! It’s like ‘you know.’ People keep saying ‘you know’ at the end of just about every sentence, and most of the time I don’t know, but they’re really not interested in whether I do or not.

  ‘But couldn’t you have called to tell me what had happened? It seems the least you could do.’

  ‘I had your address in my address book, and I’d left it in the boat. I only knew you were in the Bourgogne somewhere, and no one around seemed to know your address.

  ‘By the way, do you have any insurance? I lost quite a bit of clothing along with my thesis and my typewriter.’

  ‘No, I don’t have insurance, I’d just bought the boat. You can look through the junk I’ve pulled out and dried off. They’re piled here on the bank or in the boat. It’s an awful mess, is all I can say. I didn’t see any typewriter, and if I did, I doubt very much it would ever work again. Everything was totally saturated with mud.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right. I guess these things just happen. I’d better rush to work now.’

  With that, she’s off, probably to some other foire in some other part of France. Maybe I should have told her why the boat sunk, about that damned powdered board, but I don’t think it would have meant anything to her anyway.

  The Diaper Caper

  It’s becoming clear we can never really stop the leak in the hold of the boat, at least not from inside. I’m becoming more and more desperate. Then, that week, an old friend and client for my paintings comes to Paris from California for a visit. He’s shocked at what he sees. Except for our family, and those wonderful Canadians, it’s the first real sympathy I feel. I tell him about my wild-ass, last-gasp solution to the leak problem. I’ve been lying in bed nights, trying to work my way out of this mess.

  My friend, whose name is Arthur, manages and is in charge of research and development for a PCV-extruder plant in East Los Angeles. I ask if it would be possible to make a heavy-duty pool-type cover with grommets all around that I could then slip under the boat like a giant diaper. A huge smile wraps around his face under his thick wire-rim glasses when I tell him the idea. He admits it’s a fascinating and possible solution, only it would be expensive. I figured on that.

  ‘How much would it be, Arthur?’

  I might as well know the worst. He looks at me, eyes twinkling, behind those milk-bottle glasses.

  ‘How about two of the best paintings you’ve done this year. I’ll let you choose. I don’t have much time – I need to be at a conference in Geneva tomorrow. How’s that for a deal?’

  ‘You’re on. I can’t thank you enough, Arthur. The only thing which permits me to accept this wonderful gift is I know the paintings will be worth more than the pool cover, the boat, and most of this river before we’re both dead.’

  We measure all around, and Arthur writes it down in a small notebook.

  ‘I’ll even send it air freight. I have a special rate through the company. It should be here within two weeks. What color do you want, blue or green?’

  ‘Green to match the Seine.’

  ‘That water looks more black than green to me.’

  ‘OK, then black.’

  ‘No, we’ll be optimistic and make it green. Maybe by the time those paintings are worth all you say they’ll be, the Seine will be green again.’

  Arthur didn’t know how predictive he was.

  ♦

  Two weeks later, I receive a call from a transporter for air freight. Luckily, Matt’s home so he can translate for me. Trying to understand a Frenchman on the phone is quite a task, no pantomime. He says he has a package addressed to me and wants to know if I want it delivered. He claims there are customs duties to be paid as well as his transportation costs. I tell Matt what to ask, I’m already suspicious.

  ‘How much are the customs duties, monsieur?’ Matt’s face falls. The customs duty is sixteen hundred francs, about four hundred dollars. I don’t have anything nearly like that. I know the package is the pool cover I’ve been waiting for. I ask Matt to tell the man we’ll come out to look at it ourselves. Matt smiles at me.

  ‘We’ll come out to look at this package. Who, by the way, would authorize anyone to pay customs on something like this without having seen what’s in this package?’

  Matt tells me the transporter is furious. He says he’s already paid and can’t realize the money back from customs. Matt winks at me; he’s enjoying himself.

  ‘That’s your problem. You should have consulted us first.’ We both smile.

  After some more hassle, he admits he could probably recoup the customs duty money, but we need to come sign some papers. He tells us the number of the air-freight terminal where the package is being held at Le Bourget. Also, he tells us that after tomorrow, there will be storage bills to pay as well. What a farce.

  Next morning, I’m working my way through the twists and turns at Le Bourget to Freight Terminal A5. I have Matt with me. One day missed at school isn’t going to matter; he’s not complaining. After several false leads, we find the warehouse where they’d put the package. The warehouse is huge! The package is huge, too. The officials there want to know what a ‘pool cover’ is. That’s what Arthur had written on the customs form. Matt tries to explain. I want them to open the package. Matt is telling them what we intend doing with it. The customs officer keeps repeating, ‘Pool cover? Qu’est-ce que c’est?’

  There’s a woman at a desk nearby. She says clearly, ‘Piscine. C’est pour une piscine.’

  Matt smiles and verifies. The man talks through and around poor Matt, insists we must pay the customs duty.

  I have Matt tell him it isn’t worth that much. We don’t have money to pay. It becomes apparent after much back and forthing that we aren’t getting anywhere. He’s not going to accommodate us. The freight man is in a sweat. He has the papers for me to sign so he can recuperate his money. I don’t give a damn, once in a while these middlemen need to lose. I reach over and sign the papers with a large X. I turn to Matt.

  ‘Tell him it’s all his. If he wants, he can cut it up into small pieces and use it for papier hygienique. He can ‘pisc-ine’ it if he wants, I don’t care, let’s get the hell out of here.’

  I turn away quickly and stride out from the customs house. Matt is about to ‘pisc-ine’his pants. He’s sure the cops are going to chase us. Even so, we’re both torn between being scared stiff and laughing our heads off. Matt keeps looking out the back window, but there’s nobody following us. I wonder what the customs man told his wife over dinner that night.

  That’s the end of ‘operation diaper.’ I’ll never know if it would have worked. I can’t imagine what they’ll do with such an odd-shaped, huge pool cover, either. I don’t care too much. I write and tell Arthur what’s happened. He phones back, laughing. He’s sympathetic, but he still wants his paintings.

  A Visit to a Graveyard and a Decapitated Dragon

  We go back to the boat, and there’re about six inches of water in the bottom of the hull, the automatic pump didn’t turn on. We prime it till it’s working again and bail like crazy. Two hours later, the hull is more or less dry. I’m going more or less berserk! I’ve reached the point of having the boat destroyed after all.

  The next day I receive a phone call. It’s from M. Teurnier. He says he has something to show me. He’s downriver from me and he’ll pick me up and take me to his boatyard. He also says he’ll drive me back in the afternoon. This is all tough to get across on the phone, especially without the pantomime. Under duress, my French must be improving. I’m hoping I understood him correctly, there are so many different ways I could be wrong. I’m also wishing I had Matt with me. It’s the story of my life apparently – my boat life, anyway – half the time not understanding what’s going on, and what I do understand isn’t going well at all.

  I’m doing some adjusting on my little pump and bailing more water out when M. Teurnier arrives promptly as he said he would. He pulls up to the bank where I’ve been trying to glue my furniture ba
ck together.

  He goes down the bank past me and looks around the inside of the boat. He comes out shaking his head and motions me to climb into his rattletrap of a car. His head just about clears the dash so he can see out the windshield. To make it possible, he has three ragged pillows to boost himself up on, giving him a few centimeters of height, and half a chance.

  The seats in the back of the car have been ripped out, and the space is filled with grease-smeared tools and pieces of cut metal. He drives the way a madman should.

  After half an hour of twisting, turning driving, we stop in the middle of nowhere. His house turns out to be a houseboat pulled up onto a section of land, a sort of small island between branches of the meandering Seine. He pantomimes with his arms how the river rises with floods.

  It turns out, he moved his boat up onto the land when the flood was high, then, as the water went down, he built concrete foundations under his boat. He laughs and slaps his knee as he tells this. It certainly makes for a peculiar-looking house.

  We go inside and I meet his wife, who speaks a little English. She tells me their daughter is studying English at school and will be home soon. It turns out the daughter will translate. M. Teurnier pulls me by the arm down to one of the riverbanks. I can see this is the equivalent of a boat cemetery. There are half-sunken rusty boats everywhere, from rowboats to enormous barges. They’re all rusting into nothingness. Men are cutting and arc-welding on all sides. The smell of burnt metal dominates everything, even the foul smell of the river.

  M. Teurnier is dragging me over to an abortion of a filthy barge. To me it looks something like a giant sea dragon with its head cut off. It’s rusted everywhere, and where there isn’t rust, there are streaks and puddles of oil smeared haphazardly.

  Now I know this kind of thing might be heaven to a real boat person, but it looks hellish to me. Before I acquired my sinking violet of a wooden boat, my marine experience had been limited to some rowing of rowboats in parks, a few fishing trips on hired fishing boats off the Jersey shore, two half-day excursions in Arthur’s sailboat out of the marina in Los Angeles, and playing with boats in my bathtub as a child. What I’m seeing in front of me is an unmitigated horror. I find myself flinching, I want to escape.

  But, M. Teurnier leads me across a watery canyon between the bank and this filthy wreck. He’s jabbering away and gesticulating all the time. Lord, what am I getting myself into now?

  I’m looking back to the comforts of M. Teurnier’s goofy boat-house up on stilts, on dry land, searching for some remnants of sanity. It’s then I see what seems to me like a scene from an Ingmar Bergman film. A small girl in a pinafore is running, jumping and skipping over this desolate landscape littered with rusting, sharp shards of boats and parts of boats. She’s shouting as she comes.

  ‘Papa!’

  A French Angel Named Corinne

  M. Teurnier’s face lights up and he winks at me. He moves over to the narrow plank bridge onto this derelict boat, but there’s no need. She lightly dances across it the way her father did. She runs into his arms, seemingly unaware of the contrast between her beautiful ruffled dress, covered by her school tablier, a sort of apron, compared to her dad’s mud-, sweat- and oil-covered ‘blues.’ He gives her a swing in the air. I assume she is to be our translator for whatever there is to translate. I’m right.

  She pushes her face up to me for the typical Breton three kisses. I manage it, but I’m almost pulled off my footing on this slippery deck covered with various unplanned, unannounced booby traps. I almost fall into her. She appears to be about eleven years old and is absolutely bursting with enthusiasm. She looks me right straight in the eyes, hers blue as old M. Teurnier’s must have been fifty years ago. M. Teurnier speaks to her quickly, and she turns to me.

  ‘Ah, you are the American who has a boat mon pere lifted out of the water.’

  Her accent is quite good. She speaks clearly and with verve.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, little one. What is your name?’

  ‘I am called Corinne. Mama says I should tell you what Papa is trying to tell you.’

  So, from then on, M. Teurnier speaks and she, haltingly but carefully, translates. She’s really rather amazing.

  It seems this old shell of a hull I’m standing on had once been an oil barge, hauling oil from Le Havre to different ports along the canals that traverse all of France. The boat was built sixty years ago and had been in service every day since, until recently. This part is easy. Then she points out, at M. Teurnier’s instruction, that the plates of steel forming the boat are riveted, not welded. He points to rivets all over the hull. This, apparently, is good. We look down an open hatch into a deep pitch-black interior. I knew it was a hell. We move to the other end of the boat. It really has had the head cut off, but the beheaded dragon isn’t bleeding. In fact, it’s still shining metal where the surgery was performed. Saint George would be proud.

  This part is hard for Corinne to translate. Her father has his arms going like a windmill, trying to explain. It’s so complicated, I can just barely hang on.

  It seems that boats like this, standard barges, thirty-nine meters long, are no longer practical on the rivers and canals. They cannot carry enough cargo, and it takes three people to run them safely, especially going through the many locks.

  This part I understand reasonably well. Then, with the wind-milling of M. Teurnier and Corinne’s stumbling, halting search for words, I gather that they cut off the part of this boat with the motor and cabin, along with two of the oil-storage sections. The idea was to convert it into a ‘pusher.’ It will push four empty barges, without motors, along the river. Then, three people running it can make four times as much money as before. They cannot carry oil, only grain, sand, gravel or coal, but that’s enough.

  M. Teurnier points across his no-man’s-land to what I assume is the onetime head of this monster boat. Men are climbing over it, cutting, welding, pounding. I figure this will be the ‘pusher.’

  Then M. Teurnier starts marching along the length of this beheaded boat beneath us. It’s still enormous, even with the amputation. He shows me that it’s about seventy feet long. At intervals there are bulging, complex sorts of metal bubbles. Corinne explains they are the pumps that pumped the oil into and out of the barge when it functioned, before it was turned into a metal corpse. M. Teurnier makes swinging, chopping motions to show how he would cut these off. It looks impossible, but little Corinne verifies.

  Now he takes me to the other end of the boat. There’s a raised hatch cover and a steep boat-type ladder staircase going down into the dark. He whips out a flashlight he had strapped to his waist and motions me to follow. Down there, it’s almost sane. A bed is fitted against one wall, a sink, some varnished mahogany cabinets, and a built-in bench with storage under it, along another wall. All the fittings are beautiful shined brass. Corinne explains this was the crew cabin. We go upstairs onto the deck mayhem again.

  Now, M. Teurnier goes down into that dark hole. He motions for me to follow. It’s a metal ladder with thin, round iron rungs, standing almost vertically against the hatch opening. M. Teurnier obviously tells Corinne to stay on deck or she’ll soil her frock. She wants to come down, but he repeats ‘non.’ That frock is still freshly clean, despite all. When we are belowdecks, he signals with his flashlight for me to stand with him on two boards balanced across a pair of boxes about six feet apart. The entire bottom of the boat is thick with oil, oil the consistency of mud. He starts waving his flashlight around at the black walls. The space seems small for the size of the boat upstairs. I’m on the edge of panic that I’m going to fall off these wiggling boards into the morass around us. I can’t guess how deep this glistening pool of oil might be.

  M. Teurnier realizes I’m not understanding all his jabbering. Corinne is still above us, her beautiful face peering into the murky darkness. It must be how an angel would appear if one were looking up from the depths of hell. M. Teurnier gives a long spiel directed up at his daughte
r. She translates for me by putting her small hands around her mouth like a megaphone. Sounds rattle around and reverberate against the walls in the hull of the boat.

  It seems the boat originally had six individual compartments for the oil. There are four left; we’re in one of them. There are two on a side, two in a row. I’m actually only looking at less than a quarter of the space involved.

  He explains through Corinne that the back walls of the last compartments have a wall as strong against water as the hull itself. After all, they held oil. They too are riveted. There’s a bit of confusion then, but Corinne works it out.

  M. Teurnier wants me to know that because this hull has always had its metal soaked in oil, it has never rusted. It’s like a new hull. This sounds far-fetched, but I don’t care, none of this means anything to me. It’s his problem; why is he telling me about it? He also makes a big point that the boat was usually full or empty, so the waterline, the part where there is the most damage to a hull, would not be a factor in my case. A factor in what?! I’m beginning to smell the rat. This is not just a tour of an old, chopped-up, oil-filled half-assed barge being provided for my enlightenment and entertainment. This is a sales pitch. We’re doing business.

  Monkey Business

  To my relief, we climb up out of the hull. M. Teurnier is like a monkey – he goes up and over the edge onto the deck as if he’s in a circus or a zoo. I gingerly mount the slippery, round-runged metal ladder to the deck and am forced to crawl on my hands and knees to push myself upright, so now I have filthy hands and jeans. Corinne is ladylike enough to suppress a giggle.

  Well, now that I’ve had the tour, we knuckle down to the real business. M. Teurnier is convinced this derelict of a boat is the answer to my problem. It sounds to me like taking on a demanding, ugly mistress when one already has a demanding, beautiful, suspicious, although somewhat ailing wife.