Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir

by William Wharton

  We finish before it’s dark. I try to give Gaston some money, but he makes it clear he’s already been paid. This took some pantomime, but we manage. He won’t take any extra money for a drink either. We’ve worked the gas bottles back to his car, and he’s in a hurry to go home. He probably has a family and didn’t get home until after nine or ten last night. We agree to come back to work Monday morning. I’m not learning much French, but before long I’ll be giving pantomime like Marcel Marceau.

  A Quick Visit, Then Back to the Grind

  The next day is Saturday, so I bring Rosemary and the kids out to see what we’ve done. They’re all impressed. Everybody’s starting to divide up the different sections as to where they’re going to sleep. I don’t tell them how far in the future that will be, if ever.

  Gaston has taken the rowboat back to wherever he found it, so we push our way out in the little plastic dinghy that came with the original boat. We put an old army blanket over the sharp edges so everyone can climb in through the window. Even Rosemary manages the maneuver. Matt, with his broken ankle, makes it, too. We all have on boots or old shoes. It’s fun wandering around in the blackness of the hold with just the light punctuation from the windows we’ve cut. It seems almost blacker now than it was without the windows. That’s blacker, not darker.

  I’m worried how I’m going to work out a way going from the upper boat down to the lower one and vice versa. This will be a good problem. I locate from an interior oil spout exactly where the hatches have been cut on the deck of the metal boat and then try to estimate where they’d come out in relation to the upper boat. I want the stairway to come down from what had been the entry room, where our youngest, Camille, might sleep. I’ll need to do some careful measuring, and then it will mostly be by guess and by God and by Gaston, more hit and miss than anything, hopefully more hit than miss.

  ♦

  On Monday, we go right to work. Gaston has already brought the bottles down and is lighting the torch. He starts to finish off the long center divider he was working on Friday. Then he moves over and begins on the windows I’ve marked. He’s finished by noon. He’s in even more of a hurry than before. When the last window makes its sharklike slide into the water, he looks around, shrugs to see if there’s anything else I want cut out. I point to the hatch opening I’m hoping to use as a way down from the upper boat.

  With no qualms, he prepares to cut it out. It’s over his head, so I signal ‘wait,’ dash out the window on the plank to the berge, up the rickety gangplank into the wooden boat and grab the one chair that for some reason didn’t fall apart too badly. I’ve glued it as best I can. I retrace my route and bring it in to him. He checks it for steadiness. He’s already marked with blue chalk where he intends to cut through. I nod my head and smile.

  Then he starts. It’s much more hellish than cutting on the side. The sparks and bits of hot metal drop onto his helmet and mask. He’s also taken a neckerchief from his back pocket and wrapped it around his mouth and nose. Every few minutes, he lowers his arms. That torch must be deadly heavy. There’s nothing I can do except watch and wonder. One thing I’m wondering is why he doesn’t cut from the upper boat.

  But he manages. He cuts out an additional foot to the hatch, which makes it about five feet long. He then motions me to go upstairs, just over him. I make the same running, sliding, jumping, climbing, across-the-gangplank maneuver, and when I get there, he’s already burned a hole through the wooden hull and upper floor. It’s within six inches of where I’d hoped it would be. Of course, the deck is on fire. I stamp it out, feeling like the boy who stood on the burning deck, but I’m no boy! He burns another hole so now we can see each other. I stamp this fire out, too.

  All by hand motions, I show him where I want the hole cut through the wooden bottom of the upper boat. I’ve gone into the kitchen and filled a muddy pot with water, with which I keep dousing the flames, trying not to pour too much water on Gaston.

  And, believe it or not, he cuts the entire hole out that way. This part is solid oak and would have taken days to cut with a handsaw. I make sure all the charred wood is wet, the fires out, then run down into the hull again. He’s putting his things together. I help him with the hoses and tanks. He points to his watch and makes a sign to me pumping his fist in the air. I figure it out. He’s in a hurry.

  We push, roll, slide the tanks and equipment up to his 2CV. When he closes the back doors, he takes a minute to look down at the boat, the windows. We can see through to the other side now. He smiles. I’m smiling, too. I can’t believe he did it. He puts out his hand and we shake. He looks at his watch again. I imagine he has some other job to do this afternoon, maybe some other fool with an impossible task.

  He’ll probably eat the sack lunch he has on the front seat of his deux chevaux. I don’t know, I’m only guessing. I’ve already brought out my wallet and tried to give him money again, but he pushes me off. And when he pushes, he really pushes; I almost fall over. I watch him roar down the chemin de halage backward. He turns at the boathouse and he’s gone.

  ∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧

  Five

  Getting Up in the World – and Down

  I’m dead pooped again, mostly from sheer nervousness. I didn’t actually do that much, but it’s all so fast, beyond my control. I sit on the bank staring at my boat, or boats. I slide down and winch in the boat another few inches, then go down inside the wooden boat and look through the hole he’s just cut. I try figuring how I’ll build the staircase. The first thing I’ll need will be a ladder. I know a place in the next town, called Le Pecq, where I can most likely find one.

  First, because the hardware store won’t be open yet, I go across the street to that café Sisley painted all those years ago, in 1876. I order a jambon beurre – a ham sandwich with butter on half a baguette. I order a beer with it and try settling down, both physically and mentally. I start trying to figure how to estimate the angle and length of the staircase. It’s a nice little problem in geometry, except I don’t know all the measurements; but I can come up with some idea. I have a pencil and paper as well as a tape measure in the trunk of the car.

  I pay my bill, walk over to my car to check what tools I actually have, then start off for Le Pecq. No matter, I’m definitely going to need a ladder. Climbing in and out of my window from the little plastic bobbing dinghy, or that big humping beast Gaston borrowed from somewhere, would just be asking for trouble.

  I calculate the height from floor to ceiling to be about eight feet at that spot. The top of the metal boat curves up slightly there toward the bow, so it’s generally higher inside. If I can find a three-, or better yet, a four-meter ladder, it should do. This is going to burn another hole in my pocketbook.

  The hardware store has just opened when I arrive. I’m their first customer for the afternoon. I explain what I want by imitating a man climbing a ladder. The woman at the counter motions me to follow her. This hardware store is like a warren, a series of houses and courtyards joined together. We weave our way through it all, and she shows me a big drum with heavy rope.

  My pantomime wasn’t as good as the Teurniers’, but I spot some ladders at the back of the store. I point, she smiles and imitates my motions for climbing a ladder, shakes her head, then does a much more effective simulation, impossible to confuse her interpretation with rope climbing. I imagine the French are naturally good at mime.

  I buy a five-meter aluminum ladder and she gives me some rope to tie it on the roof. She also rips off a piece of red paper from a box and pantomimes tying it to the end of the ladder. I smile and take it along with the bill. I may be getting up in the world, but I’m down in the pocketbook.

  I’m careful going out with the ladder, watching front and back so I don’t wipe anybody out. I’ve seen too many Laurel and Hardy movies. I make it to the car about a block away. I have a minimum rack on my minimum car, and when I tie the ladder onto it, even with the front of the ladder sticking way forward over the hood, the back
end sticks out almost another two meters. I tie my piece of red paper onto the end. If some cop in a bad mood sees me, I’m in trouble. But what else is there to do? And this is only the beginning!

  But, by some miracle I do make it to the boat OK. I climb the hanging old broken gangplank into the upper boat with the idea of lowering my ladder into the hold, but there’s not enough clearance. I need to go through the window on the plank again, only holding a ladder this time. It’s getting worse and worse. Finally, I do something smart. I lean the ladder on the bank and swing it out onto the lip of the window. Then I monkey-crawl along it into the boat. I pull the ladder in behind me. I consider this brainstorm a good omen.

  The ladder is just the right length. Now I have reasonable access to the lower boat from the upper, so I go up and back down a few times. I’ve been singing an old song, one my father used to sing, which goes: ‘Close the doors, they’re coming through the windows, close the windows, they’re coming through the doors.’ I don’t remember any of the other words, so I find myself singing that ditty over and over again with gusto. The metal boat has great acoustics.

  I’ve brought along with me in my back pocket the rope with which I tied the ladder onto the car roof. Another good omen. I didn’t think of it or plan it, but I take the advantage. I tie the rope to a nail sticking out from the burned-through boat bottom. I lower myself down the ladder, letting out the rope as I go. I keep walking back and forth with the other end of the rope, trying to decide where I want the foot of the ladder to be. At the same time, I’m estimating the angle that will minimize the steepness and still allow a person with reasonable acrobatic ability, and a bit of ducking, to come down through the passage between decks.

  No matter what, with this hole and this angle, I’m going to have both problems, a steep, almost ladderlike staircase on which one will need to do a quick duck.

  Building the Ladder of Success

  This is before I think of the big problem. Where am I going to find two heavy beams of wood long enough to match the length of my string. It turns out I’ll need boards four meters long (that’s about thirteen feet). I estimate I can just about make it work with twenty-centimeter steps. I measure the angle and distance over and over again, but that’s what it comes to. I consider a spiral staircase, but I could never figure that out, and buying one would cost as much as the whole boat.

  So I crawl out on my ladder again and go down to a large building materials place at the end of our village. Most of the wood they have is for constructing roofs of buildings. I drive my car in, park and start wandering around with my tape measure, searching for boards that are long enough. It’s an immense, open yard.

  When I’m about to give up, a worker, probably Portuguese, not French, strolls over to me. I try telling him what I want. Luckily, I know the numbers better than most words and I know meters. He motions me to follow him. We go into another shed and there they are, roof beams. He points out the four-meter ones. They’re about three inches by ten inches, serious! I show him with my fingers ‘two’ and say ‘deux.’ He shakes his hand at the wrist in the usual motion to indicate expensive in any Latin country. When I ask ‘Combien?’ he points past my shoulder to the office.

  It’s a madhouse in there, mostly professional builders. Finally I work my way to the counter. By now, I’ve drawn out, with one of their pencils, what I want. The clerk starts paging through catalogues with rows of sizes and prices. He holds up his fingers for first four, then two. I nod. He writes down two prices, according to the quality of wood. I choose the lesser one, lesser but not enough less. He starts filling out an invoice. He does all the figuring on an old-time Monroe calculator.

  He comes up with a number significantly larger than what I’d expected. I’d forgotten about the TVA, that is, value-added tax. I search deeper in my wallet and have enough, barely enough. I pay. He gives me the invoice and waves me out to the yard. I show the invoice to the first man I’d spoken to, the yard man, and he motions me to bring my car up close. When I pull up in my little Hillman Husky, he almost falls over laughing. I show how I still have rope from my ladder purchase. He makes a movement to indicate the roof will cave in. I convince him I’ll take them one at a time. He shrugs, lifts one end of one of the beams and I the other.

  He’s right. The roof could very easily cave in. We lower it onto the rack, and the rack buckles against the roof of the car. I start tying it in place. He helps. I have the piece of red paper I used for the ladder. I tie it on. I try to get across how I’ll be right back for the other beam. He smiles and nods his head. I scrunch as I climb into the car. I can see the headliner is already buckling. Rosemary is going to kill me, she loves this little English car we bought on her sabbatical.

  Going slowly, about five miles an hour, I make my way back to the boat. The entire auto is creaking and groaning. I pull up as close to the boat as possible. Then I twist and pull until one end of the board is on the ground. The other end I lower slowly, thinking all the while, ‘use your knees, keep your head up.’ I still need to go pick up that second beam, and if my back goes out I’m in big trouble.

  I leave the beam at the top of the berge on the chemin de halage. Nobody’s going to run away with it.

  I climb back in the car and punch the bent roof back into place from inside. This time I take with me the blanket I’d spread over the window edge to keep from being cut by the sharp metal. I throw it in the car. No use making more scratches and dents in the roof than necessary. Maybe I’ll need to sell this car to pay for the boat materials, who knows?

  The yard worker seems surprised when I come back. We lift the beam same as before and tie it down. The roof kinks in a little deeper this time. I give the guy ten francs for helping me. That’s all I have left.

  I creep out of the yard in first gear, carefully going over the small curb as I slide out, avoiding all the monster trucks pulling up to the yard with hundreds of sacks of cement There are huge trailer trucks, piles of lumber, tiles, plywood. It’s a regular maze. Next to them, I look like a mosquito buzzing around water buffalo. But I do make it down to the boat, where I reenact my unloading scene, lowering the beam from the roof of the car. This time the roof pops up on its own.

  The old gangplank to the upper boat is completely ripped up. We took it off when we pulled the wooden boat out to the marriage with the steel hull. It’s filthy with dried river mud, and I’ve just barely muscled it to the edge of the water. So, I see, it’s the up-the-ladder-and-through-the-window trick again.

  I push the ladder out the window to the bank, climb out on it and monkey-crawl across it. When I’m up on the deck, I look down through the hole of the upper boat into the lower boat, make some mental calculations and realize I’ll never be able to push this stairway down the hole even if I could get the beams up on deck; there isn’t enough clearance. I’ll need to go through the window again and somehow drag the beams back with me. This turns out to be quite an operation.

  I slide one of the beams down the bank using gravity, friction and my puny strength. I try edging it up onto the sharp sill of a middle window and almost fall into the river doing it. In fact, I’m wet with mud and water up to my knees. I do, however, with a last desperate effort, catch the beam onto the edge of the window. As a reward, I slide down the bank into the water up to my waist. I sit, sweating like a pig on my upper parts and shivering on the lower. I pull myself together, climb out of this acid bath.

  After a few minutes rest, I begin edging, pushing, bit by bit, sliding the beam over the sharp-cut window edge and into the lower boat. It’s about here I realize I could have just slid the beam over the ladder into the window. But then, I must recognize, planning ahead isn’t my style. I muscle up and push the rest of the beam in, so about three feet of it is in the boat.

  I stand there looking at it, then stare back at the other board up on the edge of the quay. I keep reminding myself that Rome wasn’t built in a day; at this point I’m surprised anything has ever gotten built anywhere. />
  But I slog up the hill again and do the same dragging and hauling of the other beam down to the edge of the water. My intention is to slide this beam on top of the first, thus not have the miseries I’ve just survived. After some considerable struggling to keep the second board lined up on the first one, this works out fine. I give a few more cranks on the winch, pulling the back end of the boat closer to shore. I’ve discovered that by some kind of river magic, just leaving the boat sit there alone, even without my feverish shoveling, seems to wash away the sandbar and, so, bit by bit, I’ve been able to pull that end of the boat closer in to where I want it. Also, I find I can slide the top beam into the boat. The bottom beam is tougher because it’s caught on the rough edges of the window, but I manage. Now for some brain work as well as brawn. First I take a little rest.

  I scramble up the bank onto the chemin de halage. There’s a smiling, well-built man standing there watching me. He puts out his hand to shake. My hands aren’t too filthy, so I take his hand. It turns out he runs a little restaurant just across the Rue de Paris, the main drag through Port Marly. He and his wife run it. His wife cooks and he serves. They have one son. As soon as he catches on to the low quality of my French, he slows his down and enunciates so I can understand. I guess running a restaurant you learn to do that.

  We have a nice chat. He tells me he’s been watching me with my struggle. He’s a black-belt judo instructor and gives lessons to the kids in the village. Most guys I know who do that kind of stuff are hard-nosed, martial arts and all that, but this fellow is real laid-back, easy to talk to.

  He says he’s been coming over once in a while to watch me, and it’s much to be doing by myself. He volunteers to come give a hand if I ever find myself with something I can’t handle. That’s what I call neighborly. But I’m ready to face up to the beams again. We shake and I slide down the berge.