The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  A postcard lay on the table, a view of the Colosseum in Rome.

  “It’s from my parents, you can read it …” said Morgane.

  A few words scribbled on the other side.

  Greetings from Rome. We had a bit of rain last night, but yesterday we were able to visit St. Peter’s and this afternoon we’re going to the Forum. We’ll be back on Monday. Hugs and kisses. Papa, Maman.

  Morgane shrugged.

  “They travel a lot …”

  I reread the card. Their words, strangely distant. I found it very hostile. Morgane must have realized. She threaded her pearls and looked at me from under her lashes.

  “We go to see them from time to time. We leave early in the morning and come back in the evening. Last time was for Christmas. We didn’t stay long.”

  She threaded several pearls in a row.

  “Next time we go will be in July, for my thirtieth birthday.”

  Raphaël came out of the bedroom, his hair tousled, and he shouted because we had woken him up. He slid his hand over her shoulder, an infinitely tender gesture, and that gesture sent me back to my solitude, the enormous fault-line between your presence and absence. He saw the card. He picked it up and read it. He put it back down without making any comment.

  Morgane let her head slip against her brother’s side. I do not know how they ended up here, the pair of them. I know that Raphaël arrived first, and then Morgane came to join him. They were brother and sister, and they looked at each other like lovers.

  That need they had to be close, to touch. Between them, always, gestures that pushed the boundaries of tenderness, and there was something extremely sensual in the way they touched, so lightly. It troubled me to look at them.

  Raphaël pulled away from his sister. He opened a beer and went to drink it standing by the sink.

  “You still here?” he asked, turning to Max.

  Max smiled. The time he could spend looking at Morgane seemed to cancel all other time.

  He said as much. “Time with Morgane, that’s the temporary cancelation of all the adverse time.”

  Morgane shrugged.

  Max looked furtively over at the dictionary. That made him dream, too, all those words locked up in so little space. When Morgane kicked him out, he took the dictionary against his chest and went to sit in the corridor.

  That is what he did.

  Until Morgane kicked him even further out.

  The window that looked out on to the garden was wide open. The sun came in and with it, a tiny butterfly with blue wings.

  “Do you think they fuck?” Max said, watching the insect flying in the light.

  Raphaël turned. “Who are you talking about?”

  “The butterflies.”

  “And why wouldn’t they fuck!”

  “You can see cats, dogs … But butterflies, you don’t see them.”

  “They do it at night.”

  Max shook his head. “At night they are in the peaceful state of sleepfulness shared by all species.”

  “Maybe they don’t fuck,” Raphaël said.

  “Everybody …”

  “Not flowers, Max!”

  “Not everybody,” I said.

  There was a silence, a few seconds.

  “And fish, how do they do it then, fish?” Morgane said, dipping her hand again into the bag of pearls.

  It was Raphaël who answered. “There are species where it’s the male who lets go on to the eggs, once they’ve been laid.”

  “Have you studied nature?”

  “A bit.”

  “When was that?”

  “Before, when I was in love with Demi Moore, it must go back to … I subscribed to magazines.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing, but in those days I used to read a lot.”

  Max was listening to them. He was smiling. Fucking, he knew what that was. A bloke from the village took him every Thursday to see the girls in Cherbourg.

  I had known, too.

  The fault-line remained, a wrenching absence from my sex to my womb. There were nights when I woke up and had the impression I had been engulfed by this void. I ended up on the floor, outside my sheets, always.

  That day, in the long corridor, while they were talking about you, you turned away from them. You looked at me, and you made that gesture with your hands, the way you always did when we parted, your fingers clasped in front of you. We are together, that was what the gesture meant, I’m keeping you, I’m keeping you with me. You found the strength to smile. And afterward, yes, they took you away.

  But before that, you smiled.

  The doors closed.

  It stank of ether in that corridor.

  Max had begun to scrape his teeth over his nails.

  “’Course they fuck,” he said.

  He looked at the three of us, one by one.

  “But I wonder just how the female manages the correct positioning with her wings.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He spat out the little piece of fingernail he had been chewing on.

  “Lili says, if you touch the powder on the wings of a butterfly, it dies… And if a butterfly beats its wings here, a thing of grave consequence can happen on the other side of the earth. Something as serious as a hurricane.”

  “You’re getting worked up over nothing, Max! And who gives a fuck about your butterfly-fucking? It’s not our species.”

  “Lili said …”

  “Who gives a fuck what Lili says?”

  Max looked down.

  Morgane smiled.

  “You should go and do a bit of work … If you were working, you wouldn’t be asking yourself all these questions,” Raphaël said.

  “I am working …”

  “Working, you?”

  “The sow, the boat … And I put the brilliance on the stained-glass windows …”

  He scratched his head very ferociously. “I am in incessant work … always.”

  “Incessant work, yeah really, and I roam over the moor at night with a butterfly net!”

  Max looked up, astonished.

  “What d’you catch?”

  “Stars …”

  Raphaël put his beer down on the sink. He went over to the door. As he went by the table, Max grabbed him by the sleeve.

  “Maybe we should kill them …”

  “Kill who?”

  “The butterflies, since there’s so much sufficiency in the single beat of a wing?”

  Raphaël looked around him, puzzled.

  “Sufficiency?”

  “The sufficiency of the hurricane!”

  “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “I’m not! It’s true!” Max said, his forehead a network of frown lines.

  “From there to killing butterflies …”

  “Well, what shall we do?”

  Raphaël opened the door. He thought for a moment.

  “We don’t do anything, Max … We look at them.” And then, after a few seconds: “There’s happiness to be found in looking at butterflies.” He went over and placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We don’t want to go around killing happiness, now do we, Max?”

  I spent the day on the cliffs at Jobourg. I had my nooks in the rock, places where I could go to earth. I left my traces, handprints carving hollows. And other traces, too, piles of little pebbles. Mounds of earth. Small pyres, like Indian tepees. When I was too bored, I would set fire to them.

  In the beginning, several times, I carved your name in the stone.

  I had seen some chicks hatch a few days earlier. I saw them again. They had already grown. Their bodies were still covered in down, but they poked their beaks out of the nest and swallowed everything their parents gave them. The crows hovered. They were patient. The slightest error, and they would attack.

  I went home at the end of the afternoon. Théo was watching for me. He gave me a little wave. The last time I had seen him, I had asked him to talk to me about Nan, and he had left t
he room without a word.

  He was waiting for me.

  He was wearing his work clothes. And a thick blue canvas jacket, closed with a single button. He made me come into the house. There was something almost impatient in his eyes. Had he been afraid I wouldn’t come back? He set out two glasses on the table. Some bread, thick slices. He filled the glasses.

  “It’s hard on the legs, coming back, huh?”

  “It is, yes …”

  He went to fetch a plate where he had prepared some cheese. I was thirsty. My throat dry. I drank some wine. One glass. Too quickly.

  A cat miaowed outside, behind the window. It had a skin disease, its fur was falling out in clumps. Théo saw it. He said that some day he would take the rifle and kill it.

  The rifle was there, sitting in the corner between the cupboard and the wall. Cartridges in the drawer. Kill it before it could pass its mange on to the others. You just had to find the right day.

  “I’ve already had to do it in the past, you know …”

  “What would you do if you no longer had your cats?”

  He thought about the question, not for long. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “No doubt I’d live with the mice.”

  We looked at each other and began to laugh. It was so good, suddenly, this laughter between us, over nothing. It seemed to me that I was seeing Théo as he must have been long ago, the strength of his face, when he was still young and he loved Nan.

  We stopped laughing, but we still had the laughter in our eyes.

  On the table, his hand was trembling with an uncontrollable movement. We heard some croaking outside. It was the toad that lived near the garden pond. Théo told me that there used to be someone haunting the pond. For a long time, he would find candles burning on the flat stones, and he did not know who had lit them.

  He told me other stories. The little cat was dozing, curled in a ball, on the table.

  I heard the ticking of the clock.

  We talked about the cormorants. Almost all the eggs had hatched, and the crows waited.

  He wanted to know the color of the chicks and the size of the nests. We talked about it for a long time. He also wanted to know if the snakes had come out.

  Cheese rind was piling up on the table.

  The wine had warmed me up. And the laughter. I would have liked our words to have enabled us to confide in each other. The little white cat stretched out a paw and placed it on Théo’s hand. He didn’t move. He was watching her.

  The newspaper was on the table. On the front page, a photograph of a polluted beach north of Brest. Birds covered in oil. I pulled the paper over. I read the article.

  Théo waited for me to finish.

  “I used to see plenty of dead birds, when I was in the lighthouse, at night, because of the lamp … On stormy days, it was the wind that drove them against the glass.”

  He said it in a very quiet voice, as if sharing a secret.

  I left my hand on the newspaper.

  “At night out there, you can’t imagine. It was like hell, sometimes.”

  He looked at my hand where it lay on the photograph in the newspaper, a dead bird, you knew it must stink.

  “I remember the currents, when they turned, it made you think of snakes. The waves, yawning like mouths. When the storm was at its height, they were crashing all around you. The lighthouse would sway. How often did I think we wouldn’t get out alive.”

  He looked up at me. He had small, deep eyes, luminous.

  “When the weather was fine, we would hang colored cloths from the window. That was our way of giving news to the people on land.”

  His voice trembled, as if bearing witness to the deep ties that bound an old man to his lighthouse.

  “Did you stay there for long spells?”

  “A week at a time, sometimes two. But I could stay longer, I always volunteered when someone was needed. Someone was often needed, particularly during the winter months.”

  He smoothed the table top with the palm of his hand.

  His hand was in the light. Marked. It too bore witness to La Hague.

  “They brought supplies over by boat. Sometimes, with the current, the chaps couldn’t come alongside. We had reserves, and ship’s biscuits, and barrels of water …”

  He got up and walked over to the back of the room. There was another table there that served as a desk. He opened one of the drawers, shoved his hands into the mass of documents that had accumulated there, no doubt for years, and brought out a photograph of a mare. He told me she was called La Belle.

  “This mare belonged to my grandfather’s grandfather … He rented her out for the entire construction of the lighthouse. For months she went round in this wheel … The movement worked the hoists and carried up the stones.”

  The horse was photographed next to the lighthouse, by the wheel. There was a man next to her, and a date, 1834.

  Théo took a pencil from the table and sketched the system of hoists. He shoved the drawing over to me.

  “The mare stayed out there until the end. When they no longer needed her, they brought her back to her pasture. It was too late …”

  “Too late?”

  “She’d gone mad.” He nodded. “She would walk straight ahead, one step, then another, like when she was in the wheel, and she would only stop when she ran into a wall. She’d shake herself off, and then head off in the other direction. At the end, she was on her knees. They had to put her down.”

  He swept up the breadcrumbs scattered on the table, and made a little heap.

  I did not like that story. I said, “Why did you tell me that?”

  “Well, may as well …”

  “Oh, really?”

  He smiled.

  I stayed for a moment with the image of the mare who had gone mad. Bumping into walls.

  “And until what year did you keep the lighthouse?”

  “Until 1968.”

  “And after that?”

  “There was work on the farm, Old Mother couldn’t do it all herself. Lili didn’t give a damn about animals. She was already helping out at the bistro.”

  1968 … The Perack shipwreck had been the year before. Was that the reason he had stopped?

  “You were young in 1968 …”

  He slid the crumbs over to the edge of the table. Some of them fell. A cat came over to sniff them. Not hungry enough, it turned away.

  “Were there other keepers after you?”

  “For twenty years, yes … And then the lighthouse was automated and they took the men away.”

  I looked at him. I waited. I did not know if I could go further. If I dared.

  “Did you stop because of the accident?”

  He sat there for a moment staring in front of him. He got up. He went over to the window.

  “There’s the lighthouse. And then there are all the things around it, which are people’s lives. But before anything, there’s the lighthouse.”

  I thought he was going to add something, and that it would have something to do with the Peracks’ death.

  Was it too early? Was there really something to add?

  All he said was, “Some mornings when I wake up and the wind is blowing very hard, it feels as if I’m still out there.”

  The weather was overcast. For three days it had been like that, space without light, heavy with a silence that made the presence of others unbearable. I was tired. I could not face any more walking. Could not face the moors.

  I went to lose myself at Lili’s. Not that I really wanted to. More out of habit.

  When I went in, the Stork was perched on a chair and she was looking at the photographs pinned to the wall. Lili had given her a glass of grenadine syrup and milk. With her finger, the child tracing the contour of each photograph.

  Lili was next to her, explaining.

  “That dog was the ugliest dog of all, but the females were all in love with him. He had hundreds of puppies. All the dogs in La Hague are his children.”

  Th
e waif turned to Lili. Her big astonished eyes.

  “Even my dog?”

  “All of them, I tell you.”

  The Stork looked very closely at the physiognomy of the dog with its strange ugliness. “Is he dead?”

  “Dead? Why should he be dead? No … He’s somewhere, he went off, we don’t know where.”

  “Will he come back some day?”

  “Some day … He might.”

  Lili looked at the photograph.

  “And then again, he might not. Who can tell?”

  The Stork nodded. She pointed her finger at another photograph.

  “And this lady, here, who’s this?”

  “It’s my mum … That was a long time ago.”

  The child turned round. Old Mother was in her armchair. She observed her for a while, just as she had observed the dog. She did not say anything about Old Mother.

  “And that man, is he your dad?”

  “Yes. And that’s me, there.”

  Lili straightened up, and pointed to the glass of milk.

  “You should drink it while it’s still cold.”

  The waif stayed with her finger on the photograph.

  “And who’s that?”

  “Who’s who?”

  Lili came back over to her. She leaned closer.

  “A little boy who came from time to time to talk to the animals in the stable.”

  “Was he nice?”

  “Yes …”

  “Did he play with you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Lili hesitated. “I was bigger than he was.”

  “And his mum, where was she?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t have a mum.”

  The Stork frowned. Her face suddenly grave.

  “What was his name, that little boy?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “He didn’t have a name?”

  “Yes, of course he did … all children have a name.”

  Lili moved away from the photograph. “Michel … His name was Michel.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I hadn’t even noticed that photograph was still there …”

  She went back behind the bar, put a few things away, and then disappeared for a moment in the kitchen. I heard the sound of dishes.

  Michel … I had heard that name recently. I did not need to think for long. It was the name Nan had uttered so urgently the day of the storm, when she went and stared Lambert in the face and she had thought she recognized him. That name, heard twice. Was it a coincidence? The photograph was too far away from my table for me to see the child’s face.