The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  Afterward, the sun was hidden and it began to get cold. Morgane came back from the beach. When she got to the cross, she saw us, and gave us a big wave, from a distance, but she did not come over.

  “Whoever did your hair? You have holes … here and then here …”

  He said that without looking at me. Afterward we each went our own way.

  We did not go to the restaurant that evening.

  I stayed alone for a moment on the beach. Between some rocks I found a marble. I slipped it into my pocket.

  The next day, when I ran into the little Stork, I gave it to her.

  She looked at my face through the marble, and then at the courtyard, the trees, she looked at the dog.

  She spent the morning playing with it, and when I saw her again that afternoon, she told me she had lost it.

  She remembered very well the moment when she had had it and then the moment afterward when she no longer had it. And yet it was a pretty marble. She had never had one like that. We looked everywhere for it, in the yard, in her boots.

  We turned over the crate full of seashells to see if the marble had fallen to the bottom. We found snail’s shells, and beetles’ carapaces. We listened to the sea pounding in the shells. We sang for a bit and we forgot about the marble.

  I don’t know why I mentioned the marble to Théo, but when I did, his eyes lit up.

  “Follow me.”

  He led me down the hall. He began to climb the steps of the wobbly staircase where a series of basins had been set out. He went up slowly, one hand holding to the railing. On the first landing, he stopped to catch his breath.

  “From up here, you can see the sea …”

  The little white cat went a few steps ahead of us. We came up under the roof, into a sort of huge attic cluttered with old furniture and boxes.

  “Mind your head!”

  The beams were very low. The floorboards were in a terrible condition. In the angle of the roof, under the skylight, there was a little pile of white bones that Théo shoved to one side with his foot.

  “It’s the owls,” he said. “They make their nests, you can’t stop them.”

  The bones were white, so fine they looked like needles. Next to the bones, there was a skull. A rat? Field mouse? A little wooden stepladder had been placed under the skylight.

  “From here, when the weather is clear, you can see all the sea … You can see the lighthouse, too.”

  He climbed up on the stepladder and raised the window. He stayed for a moment up there, his head in the wind, his eyes in the sky. His legs were trembling because of the effort required to stand there without moving.

  I looked around me. Lost, forgotten objects, uncomfortable chairs, parasols from another era … All around there was an accumulation of things that were strange to each other, and yet connected by a sort of emotional complicity. What was in all those boxes? What secrets? What mysteries? Perhaps nothing but old clothes. The clutter of attics sometimes resembles that of memories.

  “Your turn now …”

  Théo climbed down, and I took his place, my hands against the tiles, my head in the roof.

  I could see the pastures and the sea, the sea everywhere, massive, powerful. The low sky gave it a metallic hue. Fécamp was just there beyond that estuary. And England opposite … To the left, the houses of La Roche. I could see the roof of the Refuge among the others, it was longer. The light tiles next to it, Nan’s house. I looked. The wind was drying my eyes. La Hague is not a land like others. Few people live here, it is hostile to humans. I was learning from this land every day, the way I had learned from you. With the same sense of urgency.

  I finally closed the skylight. Théo was waiting for me, sitting on a box.

  He watched me come over.

  “In the beginning, I spent hours here. I even forgot to eat. On my feet, behind that skylight, as if I were in my lighthouse.”

  He got up.

  “The sea is a sickness, you know …”

  His slippers shuffled against the floor. He opened the door to a cupboard, then a drawer, and he took out a little leather case.

  “This case comes from Holland, it belonged to a ship’s captain, his name is written here, look. Sir John Kepper … His boat sank.”

  The lid was held to the sides with two little silver clasps. He opened them. The marbles were inside, in velvet niches. One of the niches was empty.

  “The marble you found might be the one that is missing …”

  He put the box down on the crate.

  “If you found it once, you’ll find it again.”

  He held an agate up to the light. “Sometimes, objects survive and it’s men who die.”

  “Sir John Kepper? Isn’t he the one who haunts the house across the street from Lili’s?”

  “Rubbish, all that! Ships sink, and their captains with them …”

  “Lili said that …”

  “To hell with what Lili said!”

  He put the agate back in its place, and took out another marble that he rolled in his palm. It was a wooden marble, very light. There were also bone marbles and others in porcelain.

  A second tray was hidden under the first one.

  “These ones are actual marble, the two you see there are terracotta, and this one, the most precious, is a real agate from Venice.”

  He placed it in my hand. The marble was soft, almost warm. The light from the era had been caught in the varnish.

  “An antique dealer in Cherbourg explained all that to me. He wanted to buy the box. I could never bring myself to sell it, perhaps because of that missing marble …”

  He put the box back in its place. “If you find the marble, the box will be yours.”

  He closed the door to the big wardrobe.

  “You know where it is. If I’m no longer here, all you have to do is come and get it … Now, let’s go down, it’s cold up here.”

  The little white cat came out from behind an old pram, looking sheepish. Spiders’ webs clung to her whiskers. She came down with us. She jumped from one step to the next. When she got too far ahead of us, she stopped to wait for Théo.

  He put his hand on the railing. The last step.

  “You ran into Florelle the other day here, as you were leaving. It was raining.”

  He took his cane and went down the hall. He opened the door that led into the kitchen. He collapsed on a chair. The long walk had tired him.

  He sorted through the boxes of medicine that were on the table. Chose a transparent flask that contained little blue capsules.

  “She’s the one I should’ve married. Why don’t we do what we ought? What are we afraid of? At the age of ten I was already in love with her.”

  He swallowed a capsule with some water and left his chair to go and sit in the armchair.

  “You know what they call her here? The Survivor! Simply because she didn’t die with the others.”

  The little cat came to rub up against him. The other cats watched, their eyes half-closed, indifferent to the extra attention she received.

  He winced.

  “They made her grow up in the shadow of all her dead. At the age of ten she was already going down the road to sweep their graves. She was at every mass, every prayer. I never saw her wear anything but those black dresses.”

  He talked to me about her for a long time.

  Nan had had the same destiny as the vestal virgins, condemned by the community to be the guardian of her dead. The vestal virgins were chaste. Had Nan been? I looked at Théo’s hands. The hands of an old man; hands that had once been young. Could one love without caressing? Without that desire?

  “From the skylight I could see the roof of her house, I could see her yard. Her light, in the evening, I knew whether she was still up.”

  I nodded.

  “You loved Nan and you married someone else.”

  He smiled.

  “Old Mother was pregnant.”

  He looked up at me.

  “I didn’t love he
r. I haven’t loved Lili, either.”

  He said it without emphasis, but his voice broke, as if hindered by some remnant of anger.

  “So many times I thought of leaving them. I would have had to leave La Hague, too, and the lighthouse. I was a coward … That’s what you think, isn’t it? I was a coward, and now I’m going to die.”

  His hand was trembling on the armrest. He looked at it as if it did not belong to him.

  “Nan never married?”

  “Never.”

  He picked up the little cat and put her on the floor. He disappeared into the next room. The cat watched as he moved away. She went cautiously up to the wood stove. Underneath, between the iron legs, there was an old woolen jumper. The little cat went up to it, sniffed it. Then she lay down on it, her paws tucked under her chest. When Théo came back, she was like that, eyes half-closed, enjoying the heat of the stove.

  Théo sat back down across from me. He had brought back an album; now he placed it on the table and turned the first pages. He pointed to a photograph.

  “That’s Florelle, outside the Refuge …”

  You could see the building, the large windows wide open to let in the sunlight. By the door, four children were holding hands. A young woman was standing next to them. She wasn’t looking at the lens, she was looking at the children.

  She was young, thirty years old, beautiful, but her expression was solemn. Was Nan so beautiful because Théo loved her? To one side, slightly further back, another woman in an overall was holding a basin in her arms.

  “That’s Ursula, she did the cooking at the Refuge.”

  A shadow on the ground, that of the tree in the courtyard. Above the door, in the niche in the wall, the stone Virgin seemed to be watching over them.

  Théo turned the pages. He showed me other photographs of Nan. He talked about life at the Refuge, how cold it was in the winter. Only one room was heated, the big common room, the rest of the time the children would go back to their beds holding a stone wrapped in a cloth against their bellies, a stone that they had heated in the fire.

  There was a very fine photograph of the common room, with the children at their tables and Nan among them.

  Théo told me that the Refuge had been closed for nearly twenty years now, but when I asked him why it had closed, he looked at me, and did not reply.

  When I left, he was still looking at the photograph.

  I went to Lili’s to fill in my charts. It did not take very long to do, but it was boring. Usually I would do it on rainy days. I was already behind, I could not wait any longer. I sat down in my usual place, and immediately saw that there was a photograph missing from the back wall. The one where you could see Lili and her parents, and the child she had called Michel. She had not replaced the photograph with another one, and there was a square of wallpaper that was lighter. Dirty gray around it. The mark of the four drawing pins.

  Lili followed my gaze. She did not say anything. I did not ask her anything.

  The Stork was there, playing at blowing against the window, her hot breath, and in the condensation she wrote her name, the Stork, and above it, a line, and another line, and a circle, another line connected to the circle, and that name was hers, too, her first name, the one she had been given when she was born, Ila.

  The name disappeared. She blew again, and in the place of letters, she drew suns.

  M. Anselme had explained to me that Ila was the name of a virgin warrior, the daughter of the god Odin, one of the most famous gods in Norse mythology.

  The Stork liked it when you told her the story of her name.

  She came to stand across from me. What was I like at her age? Was I just as silent?

  “Two crows lived perched on the shoulders of the god Odin,” I said, pulling her close. “On this shoulder, there was the crow of memory and …” I touched her left shoulder, “… on that one, there was the crow of thought.”

  The child shivered.

  I put my hands together to mime the bird’s flight.

  “The crows flew off every morning to visit the world. At night, when they came back, they told the god Odin about everything they had seen and heard.”

  With her gaze the Stork followed my hands as they flew above her. She waited, both happy and impatient, for me to tell her what happened next, right up to the last sentence, the very last of the story, when I told her that the god’s daughter had her name.

  To keep her waiting in suspense, I let a long silence settle over us.

  “And the god’s daughter was called Ila.”

  She smiled, and in her eyes was the image of herself, the daughter of a god. She blew on the window and I wrote the name of Odin there for her.

  She looked at the name. With her finger, she went back over the letters.

  “And you, shouldn’t you be at school, now?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s Saturday …” she said.

  “You have a lot of Saturdays in your week …”

  Her strange face … Her cheeks were round and soft. Her ravaged mouth made her even more beautiful to me, like her skin steeped in the smell of earth.

  No doubt she sensed that no day in her life would ever be powerful enough to make the daughter of a god out of her. And yet. What was inside her? What treasures in her destiny?

  I slipped a coin into her hand.

  “Go and buy some sweets.”

  She went to cling to the bar, and I went on filling in my charts.

  Lambert crossed the road. When she saw him, the Stork went over to the window. She crushed her hand, her face, against the glass. He saw her, too. He placed his finger on the other side of the window.

  He blew and wrote his name in the condensation, Lambert, but he wrote it backward so that the Stork could read it.

  She blew again too. She thought, then wrote, Stork.

  Lambert shook his head. He wrote, Ila. She pointed to the dog and wrote, Soft Spot. He looked up at me, nodded, and wrote, Blue.

  Lili shouted at us, because, after all, she was the one who had to wash the windows.

  M. Anselme arrived while she was still shouting. Lambert came in with him. He apologized for the window. He ordered a glass of wine and some peanuts. Lili pointed to the dispenser.

  “Self-service for the peanuts.”

  He filled a saucer with peanuts. He put his glass on the table and sat down opposite me, next to M. Anselme. He pushed the saucer into the middle of the table.

  He looked at my charts.

  “What’s new up on your cliffs?”

  “I found eggs, three white eggs striped with blue veins … That was yesterday, just before the Nez de Jobourg. I also saw a superb bird that I’m not familiar with. I drew it. I also did a plate, just the three eggs.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s this chart?” he said, pointing at one of the reports.

  “It’s for the cormorants, a report about the time they spend fishing and the time they spend resting.”

  Entire afternoons, glued to the chronometer.

  I dabbed my finger in the salt in the saucer. Behind the bar, Lili was looking at us. I do not know if she was listening.

  When Morgane arrived, we were still looking at my graphs. She walked across the room and went to lean against the pinball machine, without saying hello to anyone. The pinball machine was out of order. She put on some music, and danced in front of the jukebox.

  Lambert was watching her. M. Anselme, too. Lili brought M. Anselme’s tea. She put it on the table.

  He said, “I remember your mother. I sometimes shared a few words with her, here, by the roadside, and on the quay, too, when she watched your father setting out.”

  He took a swallow of tea.

  He talked about the power of men.

  And the power of women.

  Lambert turned to me. There were pale glints in his eyes, like little crushed stars.

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think that … it’s the power they
have to give birth that makes women stronger.”

  He took a sip of wine.

  “Did you get a good mark in philosophy at the baccalauréat?”

  “I think I did …”

  “You think, or you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I didn’t even get a mark … not even naught. I was off the subject.”

  He smiled.

  His father had already been dead for a long time when he took his baccalauréat exam. I thought about that and felt myself blushing. When I blush I get red patches on my neck. I feel it burning. That makes me blush even more.

  He put his fingers on the rim of his glass. He was still smiling, faintly.

  “My father, I don’t know if he was ever off the subject … Oh, he must have been, yes … Like everyone.”

  “What did he do, your father?” I said.

  “Philosophy teacher.”

  He emptied the peanuts into the palm of his hand.

  “Always in his books. I don’t remember much about him.”

  Morgane came to join us.

  “I’m interrupting a conversation!”

  Lambert nodded, and M. Anselme moved over to make room for her.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  She looked through the drawer in the table, pulled out a wooden case with a set of little plastic horses, and shoved it over to Lambert.

  “Unless you’d rather play snakes and ladders?”

  We looked at each other. We would rather do nothing at all. She started a game of patience, paying no attention to us, four rows of seven, turning the cards over one after the other. She lost the first round.

  M. Anselme looked longingly at her. He ordered four glasses of wine, so he could stay and look at her.

  With his finger Lambert stopped the drops of cold condensation that were running down his glass. Morgane glanced at him.

  “So we’re not so badly off here, then?”

  He did not answer.

  “If there were four of us we could play a tarot …” she said. “You know how to play!”

  “Memories from the lycée …”

  She handed out the cards. She asked him if he minded if she said tu to him, and he said no, he didn’t mind.

  She went on talking to him as they played.

  “Lambert … Wasn’t there one in the Bible with that name … The child went before and the dog followed … Lambert of Assisi?”