The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  A sudden sharp cry, and then nothing. Silence again. A rabbit bolted down the path ahead of me. I walked. Walked again tonight, as on the first nights, when I wanted to leave you behind. I walked and walked, to exhaust my body. And even when it was exhausted, I still walked.

  That is what I did.

  And tonight, once again.

  I slept badly, tangled in my sheets. Or in my dreams.

  I struggled.

  The next morning, I found Raphaël sitting on the bench in the hall. His back to the wall. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and others that he had stubbed out on the bench.

  “You’ll set everything on fire,” I said.

  He looked up. He had been drinking. Or smoking. Or both at the same time. Unless it was the extreme fatigue that came over him after hours of work.

  I picked up the cigarette butts, and tossed them outside.

  “It’s cold, you shouldn’t stay there …”

  He did not answer.

  He pointed to the studio, the door wide open.

  “Have a look …”

  I went in. It was the smell that surprised me, whiffs of a wild beast, the impression I had of going into a cavern.

  The floor was littered with drawing paper, from the door the sheets looked blank, but when I went closer, darker lines appeared and I saw they were all covered with drawings. They were everywhere. I walked around the room. Some of the drawings were hidden by others. I moved them. There were some on the table, on the steps, too, some that Raphaël had done on his knees, an old man sitting on a base, abandoned in a torpor close to death. Half-naked souls, dressed in rags, ready to be submerged and yet saved. As if they had been spared. Everything was in shades of black and gray, an impression of dilution. In places, dust had stuck to the charcoal, you could see traces of it.

  I went from one drawing to the next.

  Everywhere, the same frail shoulders. The same dislocated limbs. A few rare landscapes.

  I counted over a hundred drawings.

  “One hundred and seventeen, to be exact …”

  Raphaël was holding to the wall in the door frame, transfixed, a lost look on his face.

  “Why did you make so many!”

  “I don’t know. I just did.”

  He raised his hand, it seemed heavy. His eyes looked as though they were bleeding.

  “Hermann is going to come and fetch them, he’s also going to take those sculptures …”

  I gathered up some of the drawings and took them over to the light. It had taken him only a few days, a few nights to do them, but what he had captured was excruciating.

  “No one will forgive you for this.”

  “Some people will understand!”

  “Yes, of course, some will …”

  All around, the strange crowd of plaster continued to murmur, beggars with black shadows, women whose hollow bellies opened on to raw flesh, twisted limbs, disproportionate, imperfect bodies.

  A carnage, that was the word that came to me. I told him so, “It’s a veritable carnage,” and he smiled.

  He sorted through the drawings, the ones he was going to give to Hermann, and the others, the most unbearable ones, he put to one side.

  When Morgane came to join us, she saw how exhausted he was. She put her face up to his. She looked at him, so close. She seemed to be breathing his breath.

  So fearful for him.

  So proud, too.

  She murmured something and moved away, and came over to me.

  She led me over to the stove, so that I would sit next to her on the old sofa.

  She seemed sad. Something had changed in her over the last few days.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  She hesitated. She tucked her legs under her, without answering. Raphaël went on sorting his drawings.

  Morgane let her head drop against my shoulder. She looked at her brother.

  “What is there, between Lambert and you?”

  “There’s nothing. We just met …”

  “That’s already something,” she said.

  “It should have been somewhere else, later, another place …”

  She said she would like to meet someone, not a casual encounter, but someone absolutely necessary to her life.

  An encounter that would change her, utterly and completely.

  I told her about you.

  In a hushed voice, almost a whisper.

  The words. It took time.

  At one point, Raphaël raised his eyes, looked at us.

  When I had finished telling her the story, Morgane took my hand and placed it against her face.

  “You’ve got to fuck now … Even if you fuck without love, but you’ve got to fuck.”

  She murmured it in my ear, never taking her eyes off Raphaël. I could feel the warmth of her breath on my skin.

  Outside, it was slack water. The sea at its calmest. The motionless moment, when the shore is bare. Odors of sludge rising from between the rocks, a sour stench. On the damp sand there were paw prints. Rotting seaweed.

  It was as I was on my way up to Lili’s that I saw the Audi parked outside the house. The gate was ajar.

  I walked past it a first time and then I came back. I hesitated, then I went through the gate. Lambert was by the fireplace, a log in his hands, lighting a fire. He turned his head. He did not say anything. He did not smile.

  He put wood in the flames and stood up straight. We looked at each other.

  I was angry with him. For leaving like that. For not saying anything.

  “You’re back …”

  That is what I said. In a strangled, swallowed voice.

  He came over to me.

  “Forgive me.”

  I wanted to hit him. With my fists. To be violent with him. I turned away. I was suffocating. I looked toward the door.

  He said it again, Forgive me, and I shook my head.

  I could not.

  “Forgive me …”

  He repeated it for the third time. He pulled me close to him, his hand a vice behind my head. He forced me to look at him. It lasted a short moment, and then he moved his hand, just his fingers, curled them around the scarf.

  “This is mine …”

  I backed away from him. Infinitely slowly. One arm, then the other, my torso, and then my entire self. I untied the scarf.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  He smiled.

  “I don’t think anything.”

  He went back over to the fire and put a log on top of the one already burning.

  He took his packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He tore the paper. He lit his cigarette.

  “I wanted to get away. I went as far as Saint-Lô. I walked.”

  That is what he said.

  I knew about walking. You do not walk for eight days.

  “What is there in Saint-Lô?”

  “Nothing, that’s the whole point. Afterward, I went home.”

  He inhaled his cigarette.

  “I needed to think about all that.”

  He sat down by the fire. Reached his hands out to the flames.

  I went to sit next to him. Like him, I looked at the flames. I could still feel the force of his hand on my neck. I wanted to ask him why he had come back.

  “What happened with Théo?”

  “Nothing … We talked.”

  “You talked … And then you left immediately afterward, in the middle of the night.”

  “In the middle of the night, yes.”

  He rubbed his hands in front of the fire. He had his eyes on the flames, with something very particular in his voice.

  “I remember when my mother asked me if I wanted a little brother. We were here, in front of this fireplace, sitting like this … I was thirteen years old, I had my habits. I said yes, to please her …”

  He fell silent.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket. I pulled out the photograph of his brother. I handed it to him.

  He took the photograph in his ha
nds.

  “You found it again … Where was it?”

  “At Nan’s … With other photographs of children. You mustn’t be angry with her.”

  “I’m not angry with her … Do you know why she did it?”

  I said I did not know.

  He went on looking at the photograph.

  “He took my fingers, like this, and played with them. I liked his hair.”

  I listened to him talk about his brother, my face in his scarf. The steam that came from my mouth clung to the woolen strands. The wool became damp. I breathed in the smell.

  “In my dreams, I have drowned so often, and I’m still drowning …”

  He gave a faint smile and then his expression vanished. He sat for a very long time with the photograph in his hands, poring over it.

  I gave him the report on the shipwreck, the carefully folded A4 sheet. He read it. When he had finished, he folded the sheet again, and put it together with the photograph.

  “Do you know why I came back?”

  He was turning the photograph and the folded paper in his hands.

  “There’s something that doesn’t fit … I don’t know what, but there’s something …”

  He turned his head away, his gaze suddenly impregnable. As if the fact that he was here frightened him. What he still had to do. To learn, perhaps.

  “I became a policeman so that I could get to the bottom of this sort of thing.”

  He said nothing more.

  I sat for a moment longer, then I got up. Before going out, I looked back.

  He was still gazing at the fire.

  I looked at him again, through the window. He had not moved. The same worry lines across his forehead.

  I went back down to La Griffue. He had held me close to him. An instant. A need of skin. That strength in his hands. You embrace stones when you have nothing left, I had known that.

  I did not want to think about him.

  I went into the yard. The man from the foundry was there, with his minivan. It did me good to see someone. He was delivering two sculptures cast in bronze, “The Sitting Thinker” and “The Wandering Woman of the Slums.” They set the sculptures in the studio.

  Hermann was there too. He had come on purpose. This was the first time I had met him. The bronzes were superb. He was walking around them. These were not the first sculptures Raphaël had had cast, but they were the biggest.

  Hermann said he would come back for the sculptures at the end of the week. He took the drawings with him.

  I went up to the emaciated face of “The Wandering Woman,” as if she were a sister in misery, her open sex, her wound. This immodesty… How did Raphaël dare? I do not know where he drew his strength from, what obscure part of himself fed this need to dig ever deeper. Uncompromisingly. I should have liked to have been able to live the way he sculpted. Of blood and flesh?

  Dare to be what I was.

  They left, the man from the foundry, Hermann. I stayed alone in the studio, I put my hands on the bronze hands, “The Wandering Woman,” whose hollowed cheeks and empty lips reminded me of the emptiness of my own womb. Of my nights. With you gone, the emptiness.

  This woman had carried her child in her arms. She had walked with him. She had nursed him, until someone tore the infant away. A shred of flesh. An arm. The way they had torn you from me. What do I still have of you? In the end, I could not cry any more. They made me sleep. For hours. For days. One morning, they opened the door. There was sunlight. They told me I was better.

  I asked for you. In churches, on my knees, although I believed in nothing. They had to lock me up again. Until you became a silence. An eternal shadow beneath my skin.

  I raised my head, slowly. There before me, “The Wandering Woman” seemed to be smiling to me. It must have been a trick of the light in the folds of her face. Where did she go, after they tore her child away from her? Was she able to love again?

  There were tears on my cheeks. I had not realized that I was crying.

  And yet I was: tears so salty that they made me feel sick to my stomach.

  Max was resting, sitting in the sun, his back against a cross. With his finger he was tracing the shadows of birds over the stone. He watched as I approached.

  “The roots must be able to have adequate breathing,” he said, indicating the ground he had turned up at the base of the flowers.

  The soil of the dead. How many nights did I wake up with its taste in my mouth? Where were my friends? My telephone, somewhere at the bottom of a handbag, unplugged for months. There were some whom I should call.

  Max pulled me by the sleeve.

  “Raphaël said that some day, there will be no more sun, we will get up, it will be morning and then it will be noon, and it will be dark.”

  He spat.

  “He said the flowers are going to die.”

  He took a piece of bread from inside his pocket, and began to gnaw at it.

  “Do you think that some day, when my boat goes to sea, Morgane will live with love for me?”

  He was staring at me, his head to one side, his gaze somewhat grim. “Raphaël says the thing is not possible, but Raphaël is not Morgane and he does not have all the knowledge.”

  He waited for me to reply. He was still scraping his teeth against the hard crust of bread. He could scrape like that for a long time.

  “I don’t have all the knowledge either, Max … but I think that this thing you want is not possible.”

  He nodded. A brief instant, his eyes were all white, as if rolled up inside his skull. I knew he was taking medication to deal with these absences.

  I put my hand on his arm.

  “Max?”

  It took him some time, several long seconds, before he came round. He rubbed his eyes, he put all his belongings in his bag, and he led me into the church. He wanted to show me two engravings, the one of the ship, the Vendémiaire, and the other of the submarine that had sunk it. He’d been talking about it already for several days. An accident that happened in 1912. The cross of the Vendémiaire that was located next to La Griffue was in homage to the sailors who had died that day. Max knew the story by heart.

  Nan came when we were still inside the church. We saw her when we came out, she was on her knees on the big square tomb. She was removing the withered flowers from the pots of begonias. She had done this every day from the time she was seven. She had grown up, grown old, bent over the dead. Where was the child that she had taken in?

  Max was looking at her, too.

  What was he thinking about? What did he know about the child who had abandoned her?

  I picked up some gravel and poured it back and forth from one hand to the other.

  “Do you remember the day you told me about your friend … ?”

  He smiled and nodded, a vigorous nodding of his head.

  “Do you remember the day he left?”

  “Yes … Max was very sad.”

  “And what about him, was he sad?”

  “I don’t know. He was leaving.”

  “Did he tell you why he was leaving?”

  “No. He was leaving …”

  Nan went on rubbing the slab, she paid no attention to us.

  “And your friend, did he have other friends?”

  “No, he was Max’s friend.”

  He frowned, as if he had suddenly recalled something.

  “One day, he cried. After that, he left.”

  I looked at him.

  “Why did he cry?”

  He went on following every one of Nan’s gestures, the slowness of her steps.

  “Who made your friend cry?” I said.

  “Lili.”

  “Lili? Do you know why?”

  He shook his head.

  He pointed at Nan.

  “She has made her hair loose-hanging, but today is not a shipwreck day.”

  I looked and saw that Nan’s hair was flying behind her, as on the day of a great storm.

  It was on leaving the cemetery that I n
oticed them, Lambert and Lili, they were in the yard to the rear of the bistro.

  I do not know what they said to each other. It looked as if they were arguing. They stayed for a moment longer, outside, and then afterward, Lambert left.

  M. Anselme drew up alongside and stopped the car. He rolled the window down.

  “I have very little time, but I wanted to tell you … My friend Ursula is coming for tea at my home on Saturday. Would you care to join us? Ursula is an excellent pâtissière, she always brings very good cakes.”

  He smiled at me with a knowing gaze.

  “We could meet early in the afternoon? She will tell you about the Refuge. Well, what do you think?”

  I told him I accepted his invitation. If the weather was fine, I would come on foot along the shore.

  He drove on for a few yards then stopped again.

  “By the way, why are you so very interested in the history of that Refuge? It’s only an old building! And those children, how could their fate possibly … ?”

  I tried to make my smile as luminous as his own.

  “I am like them … My mother gave me up at birth.”

  I would have liked my tone to be lighter, almost affectionate. My words sounded leaden. I felt myself blush.

  M. Anselme reached his hand out to my arm.

  “You don’t need to …”

  What did he mean? That I did not need to be ashamed? Of course not. Who would be ashamed of that?

  Old Mother peered through the strips of the plastic curtain. She watched me come in, her fingers fiddling with the plastic strips. They were sticky. Impregnated with everything that left the kitchen in the form of a vapor.

  She took a few steps and came up to me, her eyelids heavy.

  She was clutching her handbag.

  I sat down at the table.

  She took the chair opposite me. She was poised, her eyes down, slowly rubbing her hands one against the other. Waiting. Not speaking.

  Lili was not there, she was still in the yard. At the back of the garden. After her argument with Lambert, a need to walk.

  “What do you want?” I said to Old Mother.

  She did not answer.