The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

“I didn’t say I fancied him.”

  She looked at him again.

  “Full lips, rather sad eyes … it’s strange, all the same … What do you think he’s doing here? Oh, it looks as though he’s seen us …”

  “Give those back, Morgane!”

  “Don’t panic! He can’t see us, we’re too far … Anyway, he’s looking at the sea, we’re in his sightlines, that’s all.”

  On the other side of the fence, the cows turned their heads. It was as if they too were looking in his direction.

  We saw Lambert again a bit later on. He was on the shore and he was trying to grab a case that was floating on the water. It was a cello case. It had been there since morning, almost ashore. The sun grazed the sea. It was as if the crests of the waves were on fire.

  Max came over.

  “Do you think it’s his?” he said.

  Raphaël shook his head. “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’d put more vigor into it.”

  “What’s that, vigor?”

  “Vigor … passion, desire, Max!”

  Desire, Max knew. He ran his fingers over his teeth and looked over at Morgane.

  The case was bobbing about.

  Lambert touched it, but was unable to get hold of it.

  “He shouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know … It’s odd, a case like that floating on the water … There might be a dead body inside.”

  “It’s too small, a case like that …”

  “A skull, then?”

  Raphaël nodded and looked at the sky, his mouth half open.

  “Yeah, maybe … Or bits of a corpse … Maybe there’s even a cello!”

  Max decided to go and see.

  He came back with the case. “There was nothing in it!” He opened it. “The great emptiness of the things of absence,” he said.

  “And what are you going to do with it?”

  “Put it in the sun to encourage complete evaporation of the water and restore the velvety on the inside.”

  “Velvet, Max …”

  He carried the case to the house and opened it up to the sun.

  “It can be a tool case for all the big utensils for the boat.”

  We were expecting flocks of scoters, formations of several hundred birds that stopped in La Hague before migrating further south.

  I went to watch for them on the path between Écalgrain and La Roche. I waited. The birds did not come. I found a dead cormorant. When I got back, I called the Centre from the call box in the harbor. Someone from Caen would come to fetch the bird’s corpse. I posted all my charts.

  Night fell. I did not feel like going home. I spent too much time on the moors. Sometimes it got to me. I was beginning to dream of outdoor cafés, sunlight. Of the cinema.

  The vet was in the yard at Théo’s. He had come to look at one of the cats that was weeping tears like glue. The poor creature bumped into everything. They got hold of it, and the vet cleaned its eyes with some cotton soaked in a yellow liquid. He left a bottle. “Twice a day,” he said. “If you don’t want it to die blind.”

  M. Anselme drove by, and stopped when he drew level with me. He rolled the window down. He did not have time to talk, he had to get back to feed his tortoise.

  He was already late.

  His tortoise was called Chelone. He had given it the name of a young girl that Jupiter had punished. M. Anselme had often promised to tell me the story.

  I leaned against the door.

  “You were supposed to tell me the story, about Chelone,” I said with a smile.

  “Now?”

  He looked at his watch.

  His tortoise was used to being fed every evening at five o’clock sharp. If he was not back, the creature would flip over, press its head against a wall, and not move from there until the next day.

  It was nearly five. But he stopped the engine all the same.

  He got out of the car. He held me by the arm and we took a few steps. He was wearing a cream-colored suit and a tartan tie. The young people who were in the little car park nudged each other when they saw him go by. They were making fun of him.

  “Did you know that Jupiter married his sister Juno?”

  No, I did not know that.

  He went on. “In those days, marriage between brother and sister didn’t bother anybody; on the contrary, it was considered good form … To celebrate their union, Jupiter invited everybody, gods, men, animals, anything on earth that was alive was there. Only one person refused his invitation, a young woman who answered to the gentle name of Chelone. When he found out, Jupiter was enraged, and to punish the insolent young woman, do you know what he did?”

  I shook my head.

  “He turned her into a tortoise.”

  We stopped outside Lambert’s place. Smoke was coming out of the chimney. Brambles that had been cleared were piled up against the wall. There was a sign hanging from the fence, FOR SALE, with the telephone number of the notary in Beaumont painted in red. I do not know if Lambert was there. I did not want him to see us. Or to find us there. I took M. Anselme by the arm, and obliged him to turn round. We went back to his car. The young boys revved the motors on their mopeds.

  “It’s your suit,” I said. “That’s why they’re making fun of you.”

  “They’re not making fun.”

  “They are making fun, M. Anselme …”

  He looked at me, astonished.

  “What’s wrong with my suit?”

  I shrugged.

  “Nothing … but it’s a suit.”

  “So?”

  “You are in La Hague, here.”

  He opened the car door. It was not the young people’s laughter that had hurt him, it was me, the fact I had sided with them.

  Before closing the door, he looked at me, his expression grave.

  “You know, I’ve had a lot of tortoises, and I’ve called them all Chelone. And I’ve always worn suits. A bove ante, ab asino retro, a sulto undique caveto! Just tell them that, if their laughter upsets you!”

  He slammed the door. He started the engine, and lowered his window.

  “I like to think that one of my tortoises might have been a descendant of that same Chelone.”

  I went into Lili’s place and ordered a hot chocolate. With a lot of sugar. I felt ill at ease because of what had happened with M. Anselme. I felt like going back out and pelting those kids, with the same rage as Morgane when she pelted the hikers.

  I did not do anything. I drank my hot chocolate. At the bar, fishermen were talking about the sea. They said they had to go further and further to get the fish. Cormorants were eating the fish. They said that because I was there. These fishermen killed the cormorants. I knew that. They bought transparent nets. The fish did not see them, and were caught in them. And the cormorants, too. They killed dozens of them, beautiful birds, caught in their nets.

  They said they had to make a living. Very quickly, the conversation became stifling.

  I held my bowl in my hands. Warm steam. The sugar calmed my anger. My numb limbs.

  I began to feel drowsy.

  I swore I would ask M. Anselme to forgive me.

  I looked up. Photographs had been pinned on the wall beside me, bear-leaders, fire-eaters. There were also some old postcards of La Hague, the way it used to be. Lili said that during her childhood, families of acrobats from the east used to go round the cape on their way south. They would stop on the square. The photographs were black and white. Sometimes passing tourists wanted to buy them, but Lili was not selling.

  There used to be a photograph of Prévert. Someone had come and stolen it. A couple with a little girl. The little girl was drinking grenadine syrup with a straw. It was the mother who was sitting nearest to the photograph.

  Lili also had a book that Prévert had signed, from the days when her grandmother ran the café. The book was put away in the drawer under the till, with the gun. M. Anselme would have
liked to have bought the book, but, same thing, Lili was not selling.

  The fishermen went on talking. They had got here long before I had. And would leave after me. They did not give a damn about the cormorants. Only the sea mattered, how many times they had put out to sea, ridden the waves. That is what they said, The waves, you ride them like you ride a woman! They made gestures, their obscenity made them laugh. They talked about girls, the ones they went to find in the city. Girls from the east, whose grip was not exactly innocent, that is what they said, bragging a bit. In time they ordered another round of beer.

  “Alcohol helps you through the winter …”

  “Winter is over,” Lili said.

  Lambert arrived shortly afterward. He walked past my table. His features were drawn. He stopped for a moment.

  “Good evening.”

  His hand slid over the back of the chair. I thought he was going to sit down. His jumper smelled of wood smoke. The fishermen looked at him. So did Lili. He did not sit down.

  “What are you reading?” he said, pointing to the book I had open in front of me.

  “Coetzee.”

  “Hmm … And what is Coetzee’s story about?”

  “It’s the story of a professor who falls in love with one of his students. It ends badly.”

  He nodded. His hand was still on the chair.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the girl, she’s not very honest, she accuses him of harassment.”

  He nodded again, smiled, and put the chair back in its place.

  “Enjoy your reading, then.”

  He said that and went to sit at another table, a bit further toward the rear. I do not know what he ordered, because Lili went to sit down across from him, and after that I left.

  I saw Lambert again the next day, leaning against the fence, his hands in his pockets. He was looking at the bed that had pride of place in the courtyard at the little Stork’s place. It was a bed with iron bars, and an old bed base. In the summer, the dog slept on it. Curled up. In the winter, he went underneath, made it his kennel. In extreme cold, he went into the barn.

  Lambert took an apple from his pocket. The sow was there, on the other side of the fence. She was following his every gesture, the knife, the apple, the skin. Right down to the pips, which he removed. He gave her one quarter, and then another, and still another, the whole apple in the end; after the last quarter, he folded up his knife, and headed down the path leading to the coastguard station.

  He was walking slowly. Sometimes, he stopped, looked at the stones, the meadows. He would start walking again and stop a bit further along as if he were gathering the memories he had of the path. I followed him for a moment with my binoculars.

  I thought of going to join him. To talk with him. Ask him what he remembered. I had already seen him in other places, looking about in the same way, attentive. I do not know what he would have said if I had joined him, or whether he would have been pleased about it.

  I looked into the courtyard and thought that next spring, the big chestnut tree that grew there would surely have enormous blossoms.

  Morgane stabbed the prongs of her fork into a piece of potato. She looked up. She pointed to Lambert’s house. Some of the shutters were open.

  “I saw him, he went to the lighthouse, by way of the coastguard station. And he’s been cutting brambles in his garden.”

  “Are you spying on him?” I said.

  She nodded her head this way and that. She had put black eye-shadow on her eyelids, a thick powder that gave her burning eyes.

  “No … But I’m bored.” She made a face. “Don’t you get bored?”

  I did get bored. I even got fed up with birds and wind. Fed up with being here, outside all the time in that perpetual noise. Fed up with counting eggs and nests.

  Morgane fiddled with what she had left on her plate, holding her fork with her fingertips. Her nails were painted with red varnish. In the middle of each nail she had glued a little black pearl. When she moved her fingers, the pearls danced.

  I looked at her. It was more than boredom, it was absence.

  Sometimes I would scream from the top of the cliff. I screamed at you, at life. You were still too present. The sorrow had to go away. That is what I had wanted from La Hague, to help me get free of you. I do not know if it had freed me. In Avignon, our cafés, our streets, I saw you everywhere. Even in the flat. The last nights, I could not sleep there any more, I went to a hotel.

  Morgane pushed back her plate.

  The rat crawled down her arm, then stopped, its claws digging into her. It didn’t put a single paw on the table.

  Lili was setting the tables, she was expecting customers at noon. She glanced over at the rat. And then outside, because a car had just pulled up on the opposite side of the street, next to the pavement. A man and a woman got out of the car, they looked at the house and also at the very top, the roof, the dormer window. They opened the gate and went into the garden.

  Lili took out a basket, the checkered napkins for regular customers. For people passing through, she used paper napkins.

  A first fisherman came in, he had his billy-can with him. He ordered a carafe of wine and went to sit at a table in the back. He came in to eat where it was warm. Lili let him. She let people smoke, too. She only shouted if they did not use the ashtrays to stub out their cigarettes.

  Everyone left, Morgane, the fishermen.

  “A quick break,” Lili said, collapsing on her chair.

  She looked over at me. She was not surprised to see me still sitting here, she was used to it. I was lingering, and I did not know how long it might last.

  Lili’s formica table, with six legs, was pushed in the corner next to the bar. That was where she piled up her invoices, and her catalogs, from La Redoute, Les 3 Suisses …

  She picked up a catalog and turned the pages. Her pencil stuck between her teeth. Her head resting on the palm of her hand.

  She began to fill out an order form, doing her calculations separately, the subtotal with the discounts, and then she turned some more pages.

  “They all have discounts, but you can still find differences for the same item …”

  Old Mother was dozing by the television. Gently snoring. The car was still across the road. The couple had left to walk round the village.

  “Viscose, do you like viscose? Doesn’t it make you sweat?”

  I hadn’t a clue. All my clothes were cotton.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I finished the newspaper.

  The upstairs shutters were open. Lambert must still be inside. Maybe he was waiting for the couple to come back.

  Lili had her back to me, leaning over her order, I heard her adding, thinking, for and against, trying to work out whether she would come out ahead. She really wanted everything, but wondered whether she needed it. And then she was hesitating over the colors. She crossed a lot of things off, too …

  She ended up choosing what was cheapest, but cheapest was not what she liked best. She crossed some more things off. In the end, she could no longer work out her special offer.

  She sat there turning the pages.

  I could have asked her questions about Lambert, but I think she would not have answered.

  Eventually I went out.

  I came upon the couple a bit further up the street, taking pictures of the sea.

  The next morning, I went to see the plovers Théo had told me about. I went by way of the cross for the Vendémiaire, which sank 1912, and to reach the coastguard station I walked along the top of the dyke, a long wall built with thousands of pebbles. On one side was the sea; on the other, sodden meadows, a sort of swampland of salt water where a few animals still managed to graze.

  Walking on the meadow was not easy, the soles of my shoes slipped, my ankles turned. It was a state of permanent loss of balance, a sort of exhausting staggering. It took a long time to cross. Beneath my feet stones rubbed, knocked together. I could have taken the paved road, but
for nothing on earth would I have left the sea front.

  After the dyke, I was back on the path. Silence. There were no cliffs here, only flat coastland. The plovers were a bit further along, a colony of a dozen or so birds nesting in the rocks. The tide was rising. The battery on my watch had died. I did not know the hour, only sea time. I sat down on the beach.

  No plovers had been attacked. I did not notice anything in particular.

  I stayed for a bit more than an hour and then I went home.

  In the evening, I heard the foghorn, the deep echo over the sea, at regular intervals, a muted groan like a phantom knelling. Like a heartbeat. The sound grew fainter, faded, but was never entirely stifled.

  The tap on the sink was dripping. The sound of water mingled with the foghorn. Even if I turned the tap tight, the water continued dripping. I stuffed a rag in the bottom of the sink.

  I curled up in bed. It was Sunday. An odd-numbered day. The 31st: odd because of the 3 and the 1, and the next day would be the first. Two odd numbers following one another, every other month.

  I did not like Sundays. Or holidays. It went back to my childhood. I always fell ill at Christmas, strange fevers, no doctor was ever able to explain it to me.

  In the morning, Raphaël was waiting for me by his door.

  “You alright?” he said.

  Because of the way I looked, no doubt, the bags under my eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Why?”

  He did not insist.

  They say here that sometimes the wind is so strong it tears the wings from butterflies.

  Old Mother was scratching the oilcloth with her fingernail. She had been doing it for a while, since Lili had gone up into the attic to hang out the laundry.

  “Where’s the old man, then, why isn’t he here? It’s his time, after all …”

  She must have said it ten times. I glanced over at the clock. She was right, it was his time.

  “He’ll be here,” I said.

  She went on staring at the door. She rubbed her face with her hand. Her skin was dry; it made an unpleasant sound, like paper.

  “Stop rubbing like that!”

  When she got annoyed, Lili would put on a tape of “Bambi” for her. I did not know where the tape had got to.