The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  Lambert made his way through the tables, he found a perch and Lili went on serving.

  Conversations resumed. All anyone talked about was the wreck, this one, and others, from the past. Women who would climb to the top of the cliff in the middle of the night, lighting fires, dancing all around, their skirts swinging. Old stories with strange names—Mylène, the lovely Béatrix, names that mingled with others, I listened to them, they talked about witches and toads, in the hubbub voices ran together, I heard talk of goublins and fairies, marsh harriers, newts in fountains, old oaks, red maples …

  The men told other stories, where women’s skirts caused boats to founder. The children eventually fell asleep, one after the other, they drifted off with their heads in their arms, or curled up on their mother’s lap. Even as they slept, their eyelids quivered. They had dreams of fire and treasures.

  Old Mother dipped her spoon into her bowl. She gave me a shifty look, her mouth slightly open.

  “And the old man?” she croaked.

  Lili said you must not ever answer her when she mentioned Théo.

  I said nothing.

  She insisted, “Where’s the old man?”

  “It’s nighttime …” I said.

  I turned and pointed to the window.

  “At night, old people don’t go out, they’re not cats.”

  She resumed her lapping.

  The little Stork slipped among the tables and came to press up against me. She was a strange little thing, a wild child with a fingerprint above her lip. A poorly operated harelip. She lived on a farm just below. She did not talk a lot. I had grown attached to her.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  She rummaged in her pockets and pulled out a handful of little yellow coins that she showed me, then she went to put her coins on the bar in front of Lili. Lili said a few words and the Stork nodded.

  People said that the mark on her lip was the fingerprint a goublin had made when she was only a few days old. Goublins are funny little creatures, in the same family as trolls and imps. People said the one who had marked the Stork came out of the rock at Câtet one night, and he had taken advantage of the fact that her mother was away to mark the little waif in her cradle.

  Children who have been marked in this way are ugly, but the fairies protect them.

  I turned my head. Lambert was smoking, listening to what the men were saying. He spoke to no one and no one seemed to notice him. Only Lili. Several times I caught her looking at his face. A lingering look.

  Here, everyone knew everyone else.

  She was not looking at Lambert as if he were a stranger.

  The Stork came back. She slipped between my chair and the wall. She opened her hand and showed me what she had bought, barley sugar, some boiled sweets and three little caramels wrapped in transparent paper.

  It was almost midnight when the men went away again, one after the other, their steps slow, and they scattered throughout the village.

  The Stork’s father was one of the last to leave. His soles seemed heavy. I met him on the path. He was holding the horse by the bridle, an enormous beast with a broad chest, the corpulence of an ox. The horse’s shoes scraped against the road.

  The father’s boots.

  The dog, following.

  And to the rear, the child, the Stork, walking with her hand on the cart. Her eyes almost closed. Staggering. On her feet, boots with laces that were too short and did not make it through all the holes.

  Lambert had left, too, alone in his car. He had headed down the road toward Omonville.

  I went down to La Griffue. On the way I met a man going the other way, pushing a cart, and farther along was a car, planks sticking out of its boot.

  Old Nan was no longer there.

  I walked along the quay. I saw the sheet of metal floating on the water, among the boats. A square of yellow light shone on the hillside, it was the kitchen window, where Théo lived.

  There was a light still in Raphaël’s studio. All I had to do was open the door. He was there, sitting at his table, his back to the wood stove. Five plaster heads were hanging from a beam just behind him by means of sturdy hemp ropes.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?”

  He turned and looked up at me, his eyes red with fatigue. Around him the floor was strewn with rubble, bits of plaster that had been crushed beneath his feet; it looked like chalk.

  He showed me the sculpture he was working on. A naked woman with a hollow torso, made more vulnerable still by the presence of a thin strip of rag which Raphaël had draped over her shoulders.

  “It’s just a maquette for now,” he said, as if to apologize for what he had done.

  The light gave the sculpture a deathly pallor. I looked away. Everywhere on the tables there were fragments of hands, heads. Faces with gaping mouths and hands with outstretched fingers.

  “Do you want some coffee?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  He did not give a damn about the storm and life outside. Only his work was important.

  “So what happened with the storm and all?” he said eventually, all the same.

  “Nothing … The cops came. Max managed to get some planks. Old Nan was there.”

  I told him that there was this man hanging about at the harbor, and Nan thought she had recognized him, that he had the face of one of her loved ones.

  He shrugged. “There are always men hanging about, lots of them, because of the sea.”

  “What are you going to do with all this paper?” I said.

  “Drawings …”

  “For Hermann?”

  “Yes …” He rubbed his eyes. “He wants them by the end of the month. A series in black and white … I’ll never get them done in time.”

  He drank his coffee standing up, and came over to smoke, walking round his sculpture.

  The night was not yet over. He was going to work some more.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. I looked at him. “You should go to bed, too.”

  “You can sleep for me, Princess …” He smiled. “Can you do that?”

  I could sleep for two. For a long time, I slept for two. For your sleepless nights, your long nights of pain.

  I went up to my room. I was cold. I had stayed too long outside, in the wind. I climbed blindly, one hand against the wall. Insects came out from the skirting boards. They were huge black beetles. I could hear them without seeing them, their legs. I could hear their shells crunching beneath my shoes.

  During the night, I thought I heard someone knock on the door, footsteps echoing, I opened, there was no one. It was the wind, haunting lamentations.

  I slept for a few hours.

  In the morning, the sky was white again, almost calm.

  I turned on the radio. No reception for France Inter. Or for R.T.L. I managed to get a crackling news update on a local station, but though I waited, they did not talk about the cargo ship.

  Max came through the door. That was what he did, he came round to the studio every morning right on nine, he came for a coffee with Raphaël.

  When he saw me, he hugged me, he always did, and kissed me with a resounding smack.

  Then he went to rub his hands above the wood stove. He lifted up his jumper and let the heat rise along his skin. His skin was white. A thin man’s skin.

  “The gendarmes said there were too many profusions of tons on the ship and the waves hit it broadside, that’s why the planks went toppling, as simple as that.”

  With the heat, his skin turned red.

  “They also warned everyone against transporting planks that still by law belong to the captain of the ship.”

  He slapped his stomach with the palm of his hand. He did that, and then pulled down his jumper. He went to get his cup from the shelf. It was a metal cup, full of a dark sludge, the patient accumulation of the innumerable coffees he had drunk since Raphaël had come here.

  A cup that he did not wash.

  He blew into it to remove the dust.


  “Some day, it will be so disgusting in there that you won’t be able to add a single drop,” I said, pointing to the sludge.

  He frowned.

  “You have to wash it,” I said.

  He scratched at the inside of the cup with a fingernail. A dark film came away, a mixture of scale and caffeine. The sound reminded me of the sheet of metal. Raphaël watched him.

  “And what did people say to that?”

  Max shook his head without taking his eyes from the cup.

  “They said it wasn’t theft because there’s no nominal proof.”

  “Nominal proof, is that what they called it?”

  Max shrugged. He poured coffee into his cup. He said that he too had taken planks from the sea.

  “I’m going to use them to reinforce the cabin and sides. And to gain in streamlining in case I need to pick up speed.”

  “Be careful all the same, if you make your tub too heavy, you’ll sink it!” said Raphaël.

  Max turned his head. He was looking toward the door. He was looking for Morgane. When it rained, she always lent him her dictionary. That was how he learned words. He would have liked to have taken the dictionary home, but she would not let him, so he would sit there reading it, on the floor, in the hall, with his back to the wall.

  “Wood doesn’t sink,” he murmured. “It has the faculty of buoyancy.”

  He took his watch from his pocket, a chronometer watch with a thick face, held to his belt loop with a length of twine.

  “Words are the sentence-invention of man.”

  Raphaël and I looked at each other. We nodded. After the nominal proofs, we were thinking that Max was off to a bright start for the day after a storm.

  “It’s sow-time,” he said at last, putting his watch away under his handkerchief.

  The sow belonged to the Stork’s father, but it was Max who looked after it. He made a little money doing that, and by cleaning out the stables, too.

  Max ran his hands through his hair, several times, dancing from one foot to the other, then he shook our hands.

  He went out into the hall. On his way, he peered into the kitchen. The television was on. Morgane’s bare feet hung over the end of the sofa. He eyed her stomach, her heavy breasts stretching the cloth of her dress.

  “Mornin’, Morg!”

  She raised a hand without turning her head. “Hey there, Creature!”

  Max opened his mouth, no doubt he would have like to have said something, but he hunched over and went out. He crossed the courtyard, his hands rammed deep into his pockets. On the quay, the fishermen watched him go by. One of them was pulling the metal sheet out of the water. Max paused. A sheet like that, even rusty, was something he could use on his boat.

  Max liked anything beautiful, that is why he liked Morgane. He also took an interest in stones and trees. He said that he could feel the light pulsing in the body of stones. He believed that the lives taken by the sea were what made the sea alive.

  His mother had loved sailors, the fishermen of Cherbourg, when they came home after months at sea. What a thirst there was in their hands! She had been a whore, and she had also worked for a stud farm inland, wanking the stallions. M. Anselme told me that. It was also what they said down in the harbor. Apparently men went crazy over her. She had thrown herself under the Cherbourg–Valognes when Max was ten.

  Raphaël sat down at the table again. “It’s the attachment of the depths,” he said, pointing to the door.

  I did not understand, so he explained.

  “Max, that’s what he calls it, the love he has for Morgane … The attachment of the depths.”

  At the end of the morning, I went to Cherbourg to do some shopping.

  Raphaël lent me his car, an old Citroën Ami 8, that he always left up on the village square, because of the spray. There was a hole in the floor, as wide across as your hand. He put a rug over it, but when you lifted the rug, you could see the road. The door on the driver’s side did not lock. Raphaël did not care, he left the key on the seat. He would lend his car to anyone who asked, all you had to do was top up the petrol and change the oil when the light came on.

  The village streets were still a quagmire, thanks to the muck tossed up by the storm.

  I parked the car in its usual spot. I caught a glimpse of Lambert, he was standing outside the cemetery fence, with a bouquet. Flowers, an entire armful of buttercups. You could not find buttercups here, you had to go to Beaumont, or Cherbourg.

  I saw him pull open the gate, go into the cemetery and walk down the path between the crosses. He went off to the left. He stopped near the wall, a plot that had been marked off by a row of flat stones and covered over with gravel. He leaned down and left his bouquet. The priest was standing outside the church. He watched Lambert. Three women were coming up the street along the pavement. They were arm in arm, close together, as if unsteady. They looked alike. They too lifted their heads and looked at Lambert. A stranger in the village, standing over a grave … They leaned their heads together. One of them had white eyes, and she was listening to what the other two were saying.

  Lambert stayed a few more minutes, took something from his pocket, and put it down next to the bouquet. After that, he left. He crossed the road and went into the house across from Lili’s place.

  It was a house where the shutters were always closed. I had never seen anyone in there. The garden was overrun by weeds.

  I remembered the odd look he had exchanged with Lili. I saw that it must be here that he had spent his holidays. I waited until he was out of sight, and then I went into the cemetery.

  Max looked after the tombs. He would rake the gravel, and pick up the pots and jugs. Every day, except when it was raining. He also cleaned up around Lili’s house. He did many other things for her, I had already seen him burning brambles, replacing tiles and oiling the hinges when the doors creaked. Lili had fixed up a two-room flat for him in the lower part of her house. She did it because they were cousins.

  I walked among the graves. The sun was opening the flowers in their vases. It dried the flagstones. And the gravel on the surface. Underneath, you needed only to scratch a bit with your heel, and you would find all the damp of the earth.

  Next winter the snow would cover it all. It would isolate the dead. Grant them a time of silence.

  Will I still be here in the winter?

  I went as far as the tomb with the buttercups. It was a very simple tomb, with a white wooden cross. A rosebush had been planted in the earth, and its branches were clinging to the wall.

  Two names were carved on the cross, Béatrice and Bertrand Perack, October 19, 1967. A plaque, To Paul, lost at sea. The photograph of a child on a medallion, under glass. It was the medallion that Lambert had taken from his pocket. The photograph of a very young child, scarcely two years old; he was wearing a striped polo shirt, embroidered at the top with a row of three little boats. The child was standing in front of a house, and you could just make out the clasp of a shutter behind him. He was staring at the lens. There was a shadow on the gravel, no doubt that of whoever had taken the photograph.

  The last planks that the sea brought in were thick and water-sodden, and nobody wanted them. They stayed on the beach.

  The gendarmes were still there on the quay. A journalist came from Saint-Lô. He filmed Lili. We saw her on the screen on the local evening news. She had taken off her apron, but she still held it in her hand, rolled up like an old rag. She stared at the camera and answered his questions.

  When the journalist spoke to her about the men who had gone off with the timber, her face clouded over.

  “The sea, giving back, in exchange for all the times it has taken away!” she said.

  The journalist seemed not to have heard.

  “Well, don’t these planks belong to someone?”

  “They belong to whoever finds them.”

  “Sometimes taking what you find can be stealing.”

  When she heard that, Lili no longer looked at t
he camera, but looked at the journalist, straight in the eyes.

  “What are you insinuating?” she said.

  The journalist was caught unawares.

  “What is in the sea, belongs to the sea,” Lili said. “And what belongs to the sea, belongs to man!”

  She tossed her apron on the counter. A glance at the camera. “Such a kerfuffle over a pile of bloody planks!”

  She left the journalist right there, and walked out of the field of vision. For a few seconds, on screen, all you could see were the bottles, the mirror, and the little blue Virgin with her holy water.

  Immediately afterward, they showed us the lighthouse with the planks floating, with some gentle music they had dug up playing in the background. It made you wonder why they had not just left the real sound of the waves.

  I went to the cliffs, taking the path along the shore. On the path, on the banks, everywhere, there was the same thick mud, a mixture of sodden earth and mushy plants. Seaweed had been wrenched from the seabed in great clumps, then washed in and torn up and scattered along the beach. It would take days for all of it to dry.

  I walked quickly. As it was the day after a storm, I wanted to check the nests, to see if they had held and how the birds were behaving. It was a wild place, certainly one of the most beautiful on the coast. In the summer, when the heather was in bloom, the moor would take on the colors of Ireland. I had not yet seen the summer here. Apparently there are days you can see horses in the meadows overlooking the beach at Écalgrain. Morgane said this was her beach, that it belonged to her. When she saw hikers, she would toss pebbles at them from up on the rocks.

  I continued along the path in the direction of the Nez de Jobourg. Colonies of birds went there to nest and mate, in complete freedom. Access to the property was forbidden. There were fences, signs. It did not stop the hikers from squeezing under the fences.

  In six months I had already chased a few of them off.

  The nests had held, all but one, that of a young pair of cormorants. The nest had been poorly built, impatiently put together, and the wind had ripped it away with the three chicks that were inside.