But then the work grew tedious and mind-numbing. My body soon became prisoner to this nocturnal hell punctuated by the sirens of the ships and the chants of the stevedores, the nights growing ever colder as winter drew in. We rolled cask after cask of wine across the ground, handling them carefully so as not to spoil the precious nectar contained therein, before stepping into the bowels of the iron beasts, which berthed at dusk and left early the next day, fully loaded, for a distant destination I knew only from the world map my schoolmaster had pinned to the wall. When I left work early each morning, I would watch the ships sailing out of port, zigzagging between the sandbanks of the Garonne estuary, and my heart was heavy as I saw them disappear from view, thinking of the sailors happy to be heading for distant lands.
My childhood dream remained intact. Deep down I couldn’t wait for it to finally become a reality. I never lost hope of one day being part of a crew and seeing the tropics. To console myself, I returned home to the bed still warm from Mathilde’s body. And there I fell asleep, sheltered from the din, dreaming of wide-open spaces and paradisiacal landscapes.
19
Three years passed in this way, me busy at the docks, Mathilde managing the caprices of Madame de Saint-Maixent. But one morning in 1952, destiny knocked at my door again. Is there an ingredient list for that dish called coincidence? A particular combination of places, moments, people, planetary alignments? Whatever it was, a magical cocktail of all these ingredients suddenly came together that day and changed everything.
I was about to leave the deck of a ship we had just loaded when a noise behind me made me jump.
“Pssst, over here!” whispered a voice.
I turned around but saw no one, only a heap of rusty containers. Looking over the guardrail, I noticed a woman in the prime of life waiting on the quayside, her arms crossed. She seemed troubled. Her face was lined, and the deep, dark bags under her eyes were laden with a despair she had difficulty masking. Her hair was pulled back into a hastily gathered ponytail that itself seemed to sum up her psychological setbacks.
“Young man,” came the voice again.
From the heap of rusty containers, a head appeared. A thick black beard covered most of the man’s face. Like the woman down on the quayside, he also seemed quite troubled.
“Come closer,” he whispered, barely audible.
“Me?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes, you! Hurry up, come here!” replied the man, irritated.
I approached him cautiously, wary of finding myself face to face with a complete lunatic. When I was a few yards away, he beckoned me to join him behind the heap of containers. I did so and beheld a hefty man wearing a navy-blue uniform. There were several stripes of braiding on his shoulders and a variety of colored medal ribbons on his chest. He must have been a highly placed officer, a fearless sailor who had confronted countless gales and angry oceans. So why was he hiding behind this pile of containers like an escaped convict on the run?
“You have to help me, young man,” he implored.
“Help you? To do what?”
“To hide!”
“Hide from what?”
“From the woman down there on the quayside. Did you see her?”
“Yes, I think so. The one waiting with her arms crossed?”
“Exactly! You have a good eye, kid, it’s a fine quality! Now, listen to me closely. She mustn’t come aboard this ship, do you understand?”
“Why not?” I asked, intrigued.
“Just do what I tell you. I’ll explain afterward!”
“All right. What should I do?”
“Block her way when she tries to come aboard.”
“And if she stays down there?”
“If she stays down there you’ve got nothing to do.”
“OK,” I said, not understanding what on earth was going on. “And what should I tell her, exactly?”
“Tell her she can’t come aboard because of a contagious disease, a virus brought back from the Canaries.”
“The Canary Islands?” I wondered aloud, thinking about the German officer’s daughter, Catherine.
“Yes, the Canary Islands, need me to draw you a picture?”
“No, no . . .”
“Well, then. Stand on the gangway and block her way until she leaves!”
“And what’s in it for me?”
The words shot instinctively out of my mouth. The man seemed disconcerted by the question, as if the power balance had shifted in my favor, something he wasn’t used to. After all, it was he who needed me, not the other way around. He stiffened his back and looked me straight in the eyes for a few seconds. Then he took a step toward me. The alcohol on his breath tickled at my nostrils.
“If you get me out of this fix, kid, you can ask me for whatever you like,” he declared.
“Very well,” I replied, satisfied with his answer.
I made for the gangway and began to walk down it carefully, my feet pressed to the wooden ridges that prevented one from slipping on the steep incline. The woman was still standing at the bottom of the gangway, arms crossed, watching me with furious eyes. As I descended, I began to imagine a plausible scenario between these two characters in the vaudeville we were now all three engaged in. I decided that the woman was either one who had been cheated on, or else the disillusioned lover come to bawl her distress to whoever might hear, kicking up a scene in order to blight the image of her sailor sweetheart. A clash seemed inevitable either way. When I was a few yards from her, she uncrossed her arms and seemed to transform into a viper trying to infuse me with the toxic venom of her words.
“You there!” she said coldly.
“Yes, madam?” I calmly replied.
“Go fetch me the ship’s captain!”
“For what reason, madam, if you please?”
“For the reason that I am his wife and I want to see my husband.” Her voice quivered with anger.
“That’s impossible, madam, I am sorry.”
“What do you mean, impossible?”
“The ship is in quarantine and the whole crew is stuck inside,” I lied rather unconvincingly.
“In quarantine? I don’t believe you!”
“I have orders not to let anyone through. This ship is infected with a virus brought from the Canary Islands, a highly contagious virus carried by rats,” I improvised to heighten the fear of possible contamination.
“Oh, really? What virus?” She was having none of it.
“We don’t know yet. In the meantime, nobody is allowed on board.”
“That’s yet another two-bit excuse dreamed up by my husband, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, madam, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, right. You’re all the same, a bunch of dirty liars.”
“No, really, I—”
“Just tell him I know everything! If I see him again, I’ll kill him!”
“Calm down, madam, please.”
“I’ll kill him, you hear me? I’ll kill him!” she screamed before collapsing to the ground.
She began crying hard, her face a twisted mask of rage and disappointment. Holding her head in her hands, she mumbled something, no doubt cursing the man who had caused her so much pain. She wept harder—heavy, meaningful sobs that seemed to come from the depths of her soul. Little by little I felt myself overcome by the immense despair of this cheated creature. Had I just been turned into the devil’s advocate? What kind of individual was he? A coward? How could a man who steered a ship across the waters of the globe be so scared of his wife? To my great surprise, I had discovered another paradox of humankind. I knelt beside the weeping woman and tried to help her to her feet.
“Leave me alone! You’re a liar, too, like him!”
“No, really, I—”
“I thought he was a good man. Look at me now, I’m waiting on this filthy quay while he’s with his mistress. I’m desperate,” she murmured between sobs.
“Not at all, madam. Please get up.�
�� I didn’t know where to begin.
“Leave me alone, or better still, throw me into the sea, I want to die,” she implored, crawling across the ground.
“Stop!” I yelled, grabbing hold of her with all my might.
“Let me die!”
All eyes on the port were now turned in my direction. I hung on to her, praying that someone would come help me, for the now completely hysterical woman was beginning to wriggle free of my grasp. For a moment I imagined what the watching stevedores and sailors must be thinking. I was scared they would take me for a lunatic attempting to rape this poor, struggling woman. I thought of Mathilde, my love, who would probably have been shocked to see me in such an outrageous position. I yelled for help, for someone to help me reason with this desperate woman who seemed ready to do anything to cease the suffering that was eating away at her. The stunned bystanders suddenly shifted out of their lethargy and came running. One of them grabbed the woman, allowing me to finally loosen the grip that was killing my hands. Once she had been entirely immobilized, she gave up and went limp on the ground. Her anxious husband observed the scene from the ship, clearly alarmed by the brutal treatment his wife had received. But he did nothing, no doubt seized by guilt, a spectator to the emotional degradation of his marriage: all those years of life together swept away by the desire for something new, for “fresh meat,” as sailors would say. The woman, now smeared with patches of black grease from the quayside, had stopped crying.
The swarm of bystanders gradually melted away, folks sarcastically remarking about the poor woman and her pain. But she seemed not to hear anything. Her spirit, broken by sorrow, had switched off. I quietly sat down beside her and contemplated the brown waters of the Garonne. Its flow carried all sorts of detritus in its long marathon to the ocean. Occasional objects would bob to the surface, and I recognized a shoe and a bicycle frame. Sometimes whole animal carcasses would float past like broken puppets. We both sat there, the cheated wife and the farm boy far from his fields, staring into the void of our lives.
The silence became oppressive and I felt that the woman wanted to open up. She told me the story of the captain and their marriage, which was no more, ever since she’d discovered his mistress’s torrid letters to him, that same husband who was watching us from the ship’s guardrail, concealed in the shadows. Whenever he was in port, the wife told me, the captain would entertain his mistress in his cabin. In that enclosed space smelling of the sea, they would indulge in all sorts of erotic games to which his wife only alluded, out of modesty. For a moment I pictured the old captain in his cabin, completely naked save for his bushy beard, chasing his mistress with a whip in his hand. I dismissed the abominable image from my mind.
A few minutes later, having fully unburdened herself, the woman thanked me kindly, got up, and staggered away, befuddled with sadness and disillusionment. I watched her leave with a heavy heart, aware that I had covered for the captain’s sexual indignities with my lies, I who was as faithful in love as a dog was to its master. I walked sadly back up the gangway, dragging my feet, crushed by guilt. On the ship’s deck, I found the captain sitting against the guardrail wearing a hangdog expression. What a craven fellow, I thought, going to sit next to him. We said nothing for a long while.
“Thanks,” he said quietly, staring down at the deck.
“It’s nothing,” I answered automatically.
“My wife has a tendency to exaggerate,” he declared, seeking to exonerate himself for his atrocious acts.
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
The captain stroked his beard.
“Life’s complicated, kid. At your age, you figure everything’s easy and will always remain so. But you’re wrong. Everything becomes complicated and sad. Time passes without you noticing, and then one day you wake up. You look at yourself in the mirror and see that your face is covered in lines. It has changed, aged. The face that looked back at you thirty years ago, when it was young and full of hope, has disappeared, evaporated, dissolved, just like your dreams. And when you realize that, all you can think about is reverting to what you once were.”
“So you cheat on your wife?” I asked, gazing into space.
“I couldn’t help myself. When I saw Patricia, I glimpsed the face of the young man I was thirty years ago, without wrinkles or scars, reflected in her eyes. I was unable to resist the call of youth.”
“And what do you see when you look in your wife’s eyes?”
My question disturbed him.
“I see myself old and ugly, abraded by time.”
“And what does that image evoke?”
“Death.”
“Are you frightened of death, Captain?”
He lowered his gaze.
“Yes,” he replied.
A tear formed in the corner of the old man’s eye, a tear that spoke volumes about his ability to contain his emotions, to bury them deep inside himself. Why the hell was all this so complicated? The mystery of life floated above our heads, above the ship, the region, the country, the whole world. There we were, devoid of experience despite the many years between us, simply fools whose only hope was to one day crack the secret of existence.
“I told you earlier that you could ask me for anything you wanted if you got me out of that tight spot,” the captain continued.
“Yes,” I replied, lost in my thoughts.
“I’m listening . . .”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the figure of the sailor at the port of Arzon twenty years before, his smile when he placed his cap on my head, the childhood dream he had triggered in me. Then came the image of Catherine Schäfer, her dead father, the trip to Frankfurt with Jean, the smile on the face of the concierge as she looked at the little girl’s photograph. It all came back to me. The captain had mentioned the Canary Islands a few minutes earlier, those same islands where Catherine’s mother had fled with her daughter upon learning of her husband’s death. All the puzzle pieces of my existence began to spin, twirling above an imaginary table, then interlocking one by one, first the corners, then the sides and the center, until everything was perfectly joined, aligned, significant. I turned to the captain and solemnly declared, in a confident voice: “I want to become a sailor too.”
At first the captain couldn’t believe his ears. He looked at me, amazed, as if dealing with a lunatic who had drawn no lessons from the drama that had just played out before him. He sighed, his body exhausted by all those years at sea, steering a course between icebergs, fighting against storms and deadly waves and other unbridled elements of nature that would never allow themselves to be tamed. Then he questioned me about my decision, asking how much I really knew about this profession—the toughest there was, according to him. He wanted to understand my motivations, to detect if this was no more than the passing whim of a young man hungry for adventure. When I told him briefly of my childhood memory, those bizarrely dressed strangers who had suffused me with this crazy dream, he smiled and conceded defeat. There was clearly nothing more to be done. A childhood dream is a perfectly oiled machine, which nothing and no one can obstruct, particularly in those who faithfully await their turn without rushing or wearing themselves out in vain.
The captain thought for a little while, frenetically stroking his beard as if this were the decision-making part of his coarse being. Then he stood up, extended a hand to help me to my feet, and agreed to enlist me on his ship, the Volcan de Timanfaya. He explained that the company that chartered his ship specialized in trade with West Africa and Asia. His routes took him to places like Bordeaux, Lisbon, Tenerife, Las Palmas, Abidjan, Durban, Bombay, Singapore, and Saigon. Apprentice sailors usually started out on the shortest routes in order to test their capacity to put up with separation from their families, as well as seasickness. After a few years, once they had built up enough experience and proved themselves, they would switch to a large freighter carrying considerable tonnage to more distant ports. They would see a significant rise in their salary but would spend much more time aw
ay at sea—sometimes over six months, which put off some sailors who feared the effect on their families. A sailor’s life was a strange paradox, the captain said, a conflicting mixture of frustration and freedom, where it was impossible to strike a balance. But it was exactly this mix that made sailors feel alive, he added with the air of a Greek philosopher. It was a hard job, he concluded, because one felt constantly frustrated at not seeing one’s children grow up, not being able to embrace one’s wife. But it was a rewarding profession that opened up the world, providing the opportunity to spend hours watching sea life and the sumptuous passing landscapes. He said he wouldn’t give up this sense of freedom for anything in the world. He thanked me and disappeared through a door that led off the deck into the steel colossus that would soon be my traveling abode.
I hurtled down the gangway with a light heart. As I walked home I thought of my mother, singing to herself in the mornings as she picked fruit in the family orchard. I began to hum one of her tunes. My father would have been proud of me, I told myself without being totally convinced. I quickened my step home. I couldn’t wait to tell Mathilde the news.
20
Three weeks later I prepared to embark aboard the Volcan de Timanfaya for the Canary Islands.
Pierre Gentôme didn’t seem surprised when I handed him my resignation. He merely shrugged and wished me good luck. However, before I left he added that his door remained wide open, should I ever change my mind. As for Mathilde, when I first told her, she burst with joy and pride at the idea that a high-ranking captain wanted to hire me for his ship. Her enthusiasm waned somewhat when she realized that I would have to spend several months a year at sea. It was as if she hadn’t realized that absence was one of the key characteristics of a sailor’s profession. As long as a dream remains just a dream, one doesn’t properly gauge what it requires of us.
Seasons of the Moon Page 10
