The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  The principle of reality, you talked to me about that, before you left. You said, I want to confront it with you, without pain. But you knew nothing but pain, the last two months. Curled up on your bed, you no longer even knew that it was called pain.

  Lambert tossed a stick, far out.

  “And does it happen often, that the birds that were thinking of migrating change their minds?”

  “It happens …”

  He lit a cigarette, his face bent over his hands.

  “Let’s say tu to each other, it would be simpler, don’t you think?” he said, blowing on his smoke.

  “Simpler?” I shook my head. “No, let’s not say tu.”

  He remained silent for a moment. The geese flew away together, a beautiful chevron flight. They disappeared inland.

  We went on sitting, as if the geese were still there.

  “Just now, when you said, ‘I applied and …’ you didn’t finish your sentence.”

  “Nothing … I was accepted, and I left.”

  And you left. I didn’t tell him that.

  “You should always finish your sentences … At school, when I told the girls I had no parents, they felt sorry for me. There were some who even thought it was love. Doesn’t that happen with you?”

  “Does what happen?”

  “To have these waves of pity for someone?”

  “No, not with me …”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I suspected as much.”

  He threw some more sticks; they floated on the water. A few meters from us, a sandpiper was walking on the shore, its feet sinking into the soft sand.

  It was looking for sand fleas.

  A curlew on the rocks.

  The black shadow of an eider.

  “And did you find out how the drum ended up on the road?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  He smiled.

  He told me that a little girl had gone away with it, following the donkeys, banging on it with the drumsticks, and he had listened to the sound for a long while.

  “Max came to help me clear the brambles. He gives flowers to Morgane and to Lili. Does he give you flowers?”

  “Me? No …”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know … He’s not in love with me.”

  “He’s not in love with Lili, either …”

  He blew on his cigarette smoke.

  “So, the drum, who had taken it?”

  “It was Nan,” I answered. “She went into your house and stole it.”

  I just repeated everything Old Mother had told me, using her very words, not adding a thing. He listened to me. Afterward, he took a final puff on his cigarette and turned to look at Théo’s house.

  We got up off the rocks and went back on to the road.

  “You still haven’t been to see him?” I said, because he was looking over in the direction of Théo’s house.

  “No … But I will.”

  He took a few steps.

  “I know he’s to blame, even if sometimes I’d like to believe that it was the sea. That the sea alone took them. That would look better, wouldn’t it? Whereas that old madman …”

  He stuffed his hands deep in his pockets. A few days of La Hague had been enough to burnish his face.

  “It’s like a man who climbs mountains, if the mountain kills him, it’s better than if he’s victim of a teammate who lets go of him during a tricky maneuver …”

  “Is that why you haven’t been to Théo’s? Are you afraid it might involve a tricky maneuver?”

  He chuckled. He looked at me.

  “I went to see Théo, a long time ago. I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to kill him, too. The house is isolated, no one would have seen me, the perfect murder, it would have looked as if a prowler did it.”

  “There’s no such thing as a perfect murder.”

  “There is, believe me, and that would have been one.”

  “You would have been arrested, sent to prison.”

  “I was still under age.”

  “Why didn’t you do it, then?”

  “Because it subsided … the anger … the terrible anger … You need hatred in order to kill, or you need madness … You can’t understand …”

  I clenched my fists. Understand what? That one day you wake up and you do not cry any more? How many nights had I spent with my teeth in the pillow—I wanted my tears, pain, I wanted to go on moaning. I liked it better that way. I wanted to die, afterward, when the pain invaded my body. I had become an absence, a series of sleepless nights, that is what I was, a stomach sick with its own self, I thought I would die from it, but when the pain receded, it was something else I experienced. And it was not any better.

  It was the void.

  Lambert was still looking over toward Théo’s house. Did he feel guilty for being alive? Guilty that he had not gone with them that day? He told me he had come back here by train, a long time ago. Alone. He had wanted to see the sea again, the place where his parents had died.

  “The day you came back, did you talk to Théo?”

  “I went by his house. He was in the yard. He looked at me. He couldn’t know who I was. There was this little boy with him, leading a calf on the end of a rope … The calf was no bigger than he was. He came over to me, and Théo called him back. He came to see what I wanted. When I told him who I was, he didn’t want to talk to me. He said he had nothing to say to me, that it was an accident. That there were accidents at sea, it was something that happened. And I had heard one of the firemen say it was the lantern. I asked him if that was possible. He wouldn’t talk about it. I left again that evening.”

  “Why would he have done such a thing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you have any proof?”

  He shook his head. He said you had to beware of proof, that if you have a strong hunch about something, it must be for a reason.

  We went down to the quay. Max was by his boat. When he saw us, he ran over, caught Lambert’s hand and squeezed it very tight. His hand, and then my own.

  “We already saw you this morning,” I said.

  He knew that. He did not care. He dragged us over to his boat. The work was nearly finished. He said, “In a few days …” Unable to finish his sentence. Above us, the seagulls were crying, a rustling of wings, clacking of beaks, bird bodies brushing together. It was the tide coming in that made them like that. The birds were waiting for the fishermen to return.

  Max was annoyed by all their shrieking.

  “Boom!” he said raising his head.

  “What do you mean, boom!” asked Lambert.

  Max disappeared into the cabin and came back out with a rifle that he loaded as he was walking. He aimed into the flock and fired.

  A seagull fell. The others flew away. He came back over to us, calmly, his tall figure swaying, and in his hand, the rifle.

  “That’s it, boom!” he said.

  Lambert and I looked at each other.

  “It is deliverance from the infernal,” Max said, squinting.

  We nodded.

  We went to sit on the terrace, a table in the sun, and ordered two glasses of wine.

  Lambert had mentioned a child in Théo’s yard. A child leading a calf.

  Could it be it was the same little boy I had seen in the photograph at Lili’s?

  If it was, could it be the same Michel that Nan was looking for?

  “The little boy leading the calf—what was he like?”

  Lambert looked at me, astonished by my question.

  “I don’t know … he was a kid. Why do you ask?”

  “You don’t remember anything more?”

  “I hardly looked at him. I was there for Théo.”

  “And yet, you remembered him. Because he was leading the calf?”

  He thought for a moment. The sun made him wince, like on the day I first saw him, in the wind, during the storm.

  “I didn’t know that Lili had a little brother, th
at’s what surprised me …” he said in the end.

  For a long time he did not say anything, then eventually he shuddered, as if he could not change his thoughts.

  “And your cliff with the cormorants, I don’t suppose you could show it to me instead?”

  “Instead of what?”

  He got up.

  “Instead of nothing.”

  That was why we went off to the cliffs. We left the car in the car park at Écalgrain and continued on foot. We had decided to go and eat at La Bruyère afterward.

  Lambert was walking quickly, his feet firmly on the ground. Like someone who is used to it.

  When we came to the great cliff, we left the footpath and headed through the ferns, narrow passages with brambles on either side. Squat bushes for a few meters, and then the brambles gave way to low grasses singed by the winds. A dizzying drop. The sea far below.

  I had often come here, to forget.

  We stopped at the very top of the cliff, almost at the edge, two solitudes facing the sea, come again to the origins of the world. The sea ebbed, flowed, trees grew and children were born and died.

  Other children replaced them.

  And the sea, always there.

  A movement that needed no words. Stronger than anything. For months I had been losing myself in this landscape with the slowness of a hibernating animal. I slept. I ate. I walked. I wept. Perhaps that is why my presence here was possible. That it was acceptable. Because of my silence.

  “It’s here, the cormorants’ cliff,” I said.

  He walked ahead.

  I let him go. You had to be alone, the first time, to see it.

  He stood there, his arms by his body, facing the wind. Not moving. What was he thinking about? What scores had he come to settle?

  I sat down on a rock, a short way back. I would have liked to have had that photograph of the child in the yard, to show it to him. To ask him if he recognized the boy. But Lili had removed the photograph.

  Lambert turned round. He looked at me. With my hands I stroked a low wall of stones, the leaves of the ferns, their grainy spores crunching beneath my fingernails. Along these walls you could find a strange squat little plant that is called the bad-weed. Legend says that if you walk on the bad-weed, you will get lost on the moor, and wander for the rest of your days, unable to find your way back.

  You were my bad-weed.

  “The cormorants’ nests are against the cliff,” I said, pointing to the spot.

  I handed him my binoculars.

  The nests were poised on the rocks. As if hanging. Wild goats wandered among the brambles, grazing, their bellies in the ferns.

  There were many pairs of cormorants. I had numbered a dozen on this cliff and two more in the rocks a bit further along. Forty-two in all, including the ones I had found in the cove at Les Moulinets. Forty-two was a lot, but there had been more, before.

  This cliff was an important breeding site. Fishermen came there with their boats, cast their nets, and the birds got caught in them. We found their bodies, floating.

  The waves were breaking just below. The cliff trembled from the shock of them.

  “Silence doesn’t bother you?”

  He asked it without turning round. Because I had not said anything for a while, and because he must have spoken to me.

  I shook my head.

  I thought back on the first time I had seen him. He had just arrived. Lots of people go through here, some would like to stay, but La Hague spits them back out. Others, La Hague will keep. Years later they are still here, unable to explain why.

  Silence is part of the moor.

  And I was part of the moor. It had healed my wounds.

  Healed me of you.

  How many times had I come here to scream, standing on the edge of the cliff? Had Lambert understood the meaning of my silence? He examined me with his gaze, overwhelmed me, forcefully. A brutal contact. I did not move.

  It was pounding down there. The sea coming in. Its blows made the cliff vibrate from within. A strange pulsing.

  “If you lie with your stomach right against the earth, you will feel the sea pounding.”

  “You want me to lie down there?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  He smiled. He stretched out. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “It’s organic, you ought to be able to hear it.”

  He did not say anything.

  I got up. I went over to the edge of the cliff. The sea was covering the rocks. Stirring up the seaweed. Would I be able to stay here much longer? Morgane wanted to leave.

  On one of the rocks, two cormorants were beating their wings in the sun. Their plumage was an oily green, almost black. These two birds had been living as a pair for a few weeks. They did not have any eggs to watch yet; they were fishing together.

  I turned round. Lambert was still stretched out on the ground.

  “You’re seized up, if you’re seized up you can’t feel it.”

  “I’m not seized up …”

  He sat up. An earwig was clinging to the collar of his jacket.

  “Apparently male cormorants love their female for life,” I said.

  He brushed off the soil that had stuck to his knees.

  “They don’t live as long as men, it’s easier for them. Do you spend your time here?”

  “Here, and a bit further along.”

  “And you get paid for it?”

  It made me laugh.

  “I get paid, and I get a place to live.”

  He nodded. The earwig was still on his collar. Shepherds had gone mad because of earwigs, the beasts went into their skull while they were sleeping in the shade of a tree.

  “Once they’re inside, they nibble at your brain, and come out the other side …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I pointed to the earwig.

  “There is a hospital in Cherbourg that is looking after them, very nicely … What did you think, that day, when you saw Théo again, in the yard?”

  “I thought about hitting him. And then I thought about my mother… I thought that she would be sad if I did that, and afterward, I remembered that my mother was dead.”

  A black shadow plunged a few feet from us, and slipped beneath the surface of the water, quick and precise. It was a cormorant. Its black body mingled in the gray shimmer of the waves, millions of little incandescent lights. Usually they would stay underwater for a minute. The hardest thing was to find them again when they surfaced.

  “You’re not listening …”

  “I am listening … You were thinking about your mother, and you remembered that your mother was dead.”

  I looked at him. His gray eyes had become darker.

  He was hurting, somewhere.

  As I was hurting.

  “We’ve all had the roof cave in on us …” I said. “I have, so have you. We all have. Even cormorants, they—”

  “Some roofs are bigger than others.”

  I looked at him. His high, almost stubborn forehead.

  “A roof is a roof.”

  I snatched at the air. Dogs sweat through their tongue. And cats, how do cats sweat?

  I asked him, “Do you have any idea how cats sweat?”

  He did not know. Neither did I. One day, I counted the same bird diving over three hundred times in a row. Dives that lasted one minute and thirty seconds.

  I told him that. I was tired.

  It was getting tense between us. Too complicated.

  He looked over at the lighthouse.

  “Nothing has changed, the houses are the same, the moor … Sons resemble fathers, everything is the same, and yet … I would like to hate Théo, and yet I can’t any more.”

  “Is that what hurts so much?”

  No more of this unbearable suffering. The injustice of living when the others have died, the injustice of surviving.

  Still surviving. In spite of everything.

  In the face of death.

  And t
o find oneself laughing one day.

  A seagull flew over and the bird’s shadow slipped over Lambert’s face.

  “There was a time when I had to scream …”

  I looked down.

  I had screamed, too.

  I turned away from him. When you play Ludo, if you throw a six, you play again, if the dice falls on the ground, you say it is broken and you have to throw again. I have thought about that. And if the dice rolls on the edge of the board, you say it is broken and so there too you have to play again.

  In life, you do not get to play again.

  Before, I used to recite poetry to myself. I know Aragon by heart, and whole pages of Rilke.

  “That night, he put out the light. But I still don’t know why.”

  He was on about it again. As if stuck in his tunnel. Banging against it. I remembered the pipistrelle that came to bang against the walls, and I could not understand why. What torment was it caught up in? And there was the mare that went mad and banged against her walls, too.

  I was banging against walls, like her. I was afraid of loving. That is what your death had left me.

  “There isn’t always a reason why …” I said.

  “And sometimes reasons are disappointing, I know, that’s what I’ve been told a thousand times …”

  He took a long puff on his cigarette, the red ash burned down to the filter and went out.

  “My father knew the passes, he knew his sailing boat. He liked to sail at night, he wouldn’t have taken unnecessary risks, particularly not with Paul on board.”

  He said that. Not with Paul on board.

  He walked a short way along the footpath, his hands in his pockets. He was turning over the memory in his mind. Hunting for the detail. The footpath was narrow. Just here, the ferns vanished, giving way to scrawny little trees with black branches corroded by salt.

  “When they left, I stayed on the quay with Lili. We watched them sail out. They were headed for Alderney. Alderney is right there … I remember, my mother leaned over, made great gestures with her hat … It was a canvas hat with a red ribbon. That’s the last image I have of her: her hand and that hat.”