The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  I talked to her about the farm. About Théo, a few sentences, and then about the yard, the house. She slowly sat up. Attentive to my every word. She made no sound, even with her teeth. I described our moments together at the table, and Théo’s steps when he went with me to the footpath. I did not say anything about the skylight, or about taking the detour to go by Nan’s place.

  She opened her bag and took out her wedding photograph. She showed it to me as if it were the first time.

  And I looked at it as if she had never showed it to me.

  Her eyes began to fill with tears. Thick tears, spilling only slightly. In the end, her eyes were like huge pools.

  To me it was beautiful.

  She took out another photograph and pushed it over to me. It was the one that Lili had taken down.

  I just had time to glance at it, the child standing slightly to the rear, little Michel, when we heard the door to the kitchen open and shut again with a slam.

  Chairs scraping. Old Mother put the photograph in her bag. Lili had come back. I could see her from behind, through the strips of curtain, slightly more stooped than usual.

  It was rare to see her like that.

  Then she saw us.

  “What are you two plotting?” she asked, going behind the bar.

  We did not answer.

  Old Mother went back to her place.

  Lili picked up the post and threw it on the table next to her catalogs. She would look at all that later. She wiped her glasses. Glasses that were already clean. She also wiped the counter.

  She was waiting for customers. She wanted the place to fill up.

  She said as much: “What are they doing, why aren’t they here today?”

  A collector from Dinard stopped at the studio and bought two bronzes from Raphaël, “Christ on the Cross” and also a “Beggar.” He said he was going to put the “Beggar” in his garden.

  Raphaël had already sold bronzes, but for works that size this was the first time. And two at once!

  With the money he would be able to cast other sculptures. Later, as soon as he could, he would cast “The Pleading Women.”

  “The Pleading Women” were his dream. For months they had had pride of place in the studio, three women joined together at their wombs, their hands raised, fingers spread, all the upper part of their bodies opened out. Their ascetic faces seemed to have been ravaged from within. They were imploring. Raphaël had fettered them, their bare feet held tight in the base as if, for some obscure reason, he refused to let them go.

  He ran his hand over the plaster.

  “All I need to do is sign them.”

  He took a nail from his pocket. He found a modest spot at the bottom of the base.

  He spat on the head of the nail and dug out the first letter, the R of Raphaël. R. Delmate. He blew on the dust. The print went deeper.

  This was the first time I had ever seen him signing his work. He explained that some artists sign directly in the bronze, they do it with a drill, a tool that looks like a dentist’s instruments He did not like that.

  I watched until he had written the last letter of his name.

  “How does it feel, to carve your name on your work?” I asked when he had finished.

  “I don’t bloody care about my name!”

  He put the date, the month and year. He rubbed the spot with his hand.

  “I have to do it. I try to be as discreet as possible.”

  He got up.

  “If I sell ‘Virtue,’ I’ll cast ‘The Seamstress of the Dead.’”

  He leaned his head to one side.

  His car was in the yard, the boot open wide, filled with blankets and cardboard sheeting. He called Max, and together they loaded the plasters.

  After that, Max went back to his boat. He was putting a final coat on the bottom of the hull, a very dark green, almost black.

  “You should wear a mask …” I told him.

  Everyone told him so. Raphaël too.

  He did not wear one.

  At the end of the afternoon Max turned up in the kitchen, holding his head between his hands. He sat down at the table. Morgane dis-solved two tablets in a glass of water.

  “We told you to wear a mask …”

  She stirred with a spoon, the water whirling the particles.

  “Drink it!” she said, because he was looking at her, not drinking, and the particles of aspirin were already sinking to the bottom of the glass.

  She had to stir it again.

  “This time you swallow it!”

  The next morning, Max finished painting the hull. He still had to varnish the cabin door and repaint the letters of La Marie-Salope. When he had done all that, he could set sail.

  He was practically weeping with joy. He had had the motor checked, and all the boat’s equipment. An official paper certified that La Marie-Salope was indeed seaworthy and could brave the tides.

  He kept the paper on him, always.

  He was still hesitating over what color to use to repaint the name. He wanted a color that looked good against the sea.

  He asked me what color the sea was and I told him that sometimes the sea was blue. That very often it was brown. But that it could also be black or metallic, or take on the color of the sky, and then you could not really tell what color it was.

  Max decided to paint the letters green, because green went well with all the colors I had just mentioned, even the indefinable colors of the sky.

  He asked us our opinion. Raphaël gave him a tube of paint and a brush and Max went back over the letters without trembling.

  That was also the day, or maybe it was the day after, that the Stork turned eight. Raphaël gave her a big box filled with pencils, felt-tips and pastels. When she saw it, she sat down with the box open on her lap, and she did not dare touch anything.

  After a short while, she opened a first felt-tip and sniffed the tip. She made a few tests on the smooth wood of the bench, and a few lines on the back of her hand. After that she spilled the box, and put the pencils and the rubber and the chalk into her pockets. She held the sketchbook that was inside close to her, and the little notebook, too, and she hugged Raphaël and left without saying where she was going.

  The next day, the Stork was there again, in the hall. Where she had sprung from, who knows, and she was again wearing the garment that was too big, but it had pockets to contain her treasure.

  Her hair tangled, one arm down at her side, she began to draw on the wall. A black streak that unfurled like Ariadne’s thread, a dark shaky line that the child drew and which went round the latch then outside to streak the white shutter. Then the black turned brown when the child changed her pastel. The little papers covering the colored sticks drifted into the brambles and caught on the thorns.

  The print of the soles of her shoes in the crumbly earth.

  Little grassy plants grew along the wall, heart-shaped, and their leaves secreted a fine layer of poison. All around, beneath the leaves, there were the cadavers of flies and bees and butterflies. Dozens of them lay there, curled up where death had caught them by surprise. Some were already decomposing. No one had ever been able to tell me the name of that plant, but I knew that from the humus of its victims it drew the energy to strengthen its roots.

  The Stork also drew on the hull of the boat, flowers in the shape of a heart or a sun. I wondered what Max would say when he saw the drawing.

  I also wondered what would happen to the drawing when the boat went to sea. The child had abandoned her felt-tips all round the boat, the pencils with their leads crushed, and caps scattered here and there.

  Did she know that those heart-shaped plants secreted death in order to live?

  The Stork’s empty box stayed on the bench. The plastic display case. The hollows where pencils could nest.

  And then one morning, everything had disappeared.

  On Saturday I went to Omonville. It was raining. I left Raphaël’s car in the car park next to the church. M. Anselme was waitin
g for me with Ursula, the two of them sitting in the conservatory.

  He was happy to see me. He took my hand.

  “We’ve been hoping you’d come.”

  Ursula had very short hair, extraordinarily black. Sparkling eyes. She held me close, infinitely affectionate.

  M. Anselme poured orangeade into the glasses, and cut three slices of cake. Figs were set in the dough, they looked preserved.

  “Do you like it?”

  The sweet seeds crunched beneath my teeth. I smiled. It was delicious. We ate slowly as we talked about the garden and the very pleasant life in Omonville, where the climate was so special that apparently no flowers ever froze. The village seemed to be an oasis of peace, far enough away from the fury of the sea, yet close enough to receive its energy.

  Ursula was discreet.

  M. Anselme was smiling.

  Ursula said a few words about the past there in Omonville, and also about the Refuge. She described the life of the children there.

  “You know, it was a special time, and things were simpler than they are today.”

  She had a large ring on one of her fingers, an enormous stone, and she played with it while she spoke.

  She looked at M. Anselme and me.

  “I’ve never known anyone to love children the way Nan loved them. She was often criticized, but she was the one who started the Refuge. She fought for it. The kids who turned up there were all miserable, each one more than the last. With the scant means she had at her disposal, she managed to make a nest for them.”

  “And Théo?”

  “Théo would come, then he didn’t come … He had the lighthouse to keep. And then, Old Mother was not easy to deal with. She didn’t like him visiting the Refuge.”

  “Which you can understand,” I said.

  “Why? That’s all bloody choirboy morality, a cheap way to feel good about oneself! There was some truly disgusting gossip going round about Nan. And there still is. You mustn’t listen to it. They would have worked well together as a pair, if they’d been left alone.”

  She had spoken heatedly. After that, she did not mention Théo.

  I was the one who insisted.

  “Why didn’t he just leave everything behind if he loved her so much?”

  She gave a short laugh.

  “They would have made their life impossible, that’s why! Old Mother was born here, her family have lived here for generations. Nan bears the cross for her loved ones, she sews shrouds. She’s between two worlds, and some people say she has the evil eye …”

  Ursula ran her hand through her hair.

  M. Anselme did not say anything. His chair slightly further back from the table, he sat listening.

  “Nan knew that she would not have children of her own, so when Michel came along, how to explain it … That kid was like a grub, just impossible to pep him up! No matter what you fed him, the best you had … The moment you let go of his hand, he headed straight for the sea. Who knows why? In the end, we let him. I always found him in the same spot, sitting on a rock. I don’t know if he was sad when I came to get him. We can’t be sure either what he would have done if I hadn’t gone to get him.”

  She rubbed a few strands of hair between her fingers.

  “One year, there was snow, and ice on the windows. The littlest children wet their beds, and it froze in the sheets.”

  She talked about that terrible winter, and how there was not enough food, the hot soups, the cold rooms. The smell of cooked cabbage that lingered everywhere in the corridors, as if it had impregnated the walls.

  “Do you remember when Michel arrived?”

  She shook her head.

  “No … I had just given birth to my youngest daughter. When I started work again, he had already been there a week, perhaps two.”

  She thought for a moment. The images were coming to her as she spoke.

  “The first time I saw him, he was in the courtyard, sitting in the sun. We knew nothing about him, just that he had been found in Rouen, on a pile of rags. Not even a name …”

  She took a swallow of orangeade, then put her glass down.

  I looked at her.

  “People say that Nan stole toys from the Perack house.”

  She laughed, but made no attempt to lie. She could have kept silent.

  Instead, she looked at me, her gaze very open.

  “And so what? Where is the harm in that? Who was going to use those toys, anyway? The children had to play with something.”

  “Why did she take the toys at night?”

  “Everything happens at night here, that’s the way it is. Did you go inside the Refuge?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at M. Anselme and me.

  “Why are you looking for that child?”

  “I’m not looking for him …”

  I had known refuges too, and they were all just like that one, with other smells, of damp laundry, dirty nappies. The stifling promiscuity that had made me so desperate for solitude.

  “It’s just that I was born like that, too …”

  That is what I said, like that, without parents, without anybody. She looked at me. I tried to smile. She nodded. There was a silence. She understood. That is what she said in the end, I understand.

  She told us some more.

  “Nan had prepared a room next to her own, in her house, but he always preferred to sleep with the others. He would get up during the night, and go barefoot back into the dormitory.”

  M. Anselme filled our glasses again.

  I listened to Ursula. I liked the precise way she had of telling the story, as if she wanted us to see it. The fragile silhouette of the child walking along the corridor, his feet in the dust, and Nan’s sad eyes in the morning when she found the empty bed. The door he had to push open.

  “Max was his friend, wasn’t he?”

  Ursula nodded.

  “Yes … particularly when they were little, but even afterward, when Michel went to the lycée, they stayed in touch.”

  “And you don’t know where he went when he left?”

  “No … it was a few weeks after he turned seventeen.”

  She fiddled with the ring on her finger.

  “Most likely, he went to Rouen … and then after that, elsewhere. He must have been looking for his family, at least that’s what we supposed. There were not many places he could look.”

  She pressed her hands together.

  “I was angry with him … Not for leaving, no, that I could understand, but for leaving us the way he did, without news.”

  Her voice trembled. You could sense her emotion stirring.

  “It’s been at least twenty years now … Nan kept his clothes in a little box, the clothes he was wearing when they found him … The last time I went to her place, she showed them to me again.”

  She looked at me for a long time.

  She said, “Those children are more difficult to understand than the others, they come here and they leave again in the same way, we don’t know why or where they came from. You just have to take them in.”

  Are those children more fearful than others? My throat was tight. I could no longer speak. M. Anselme put his hand on his friend’s arm.

  “And Théo, how did he get along with that child?”

  “They got along well. Even very well, I’d say. He may have been adopted, but he was Nan’s child … There was something very strong between them. When Théo wasn’t at the lighthouse, Michel spent his days with him at the farm. He wasn’t allowed inside the house, but he could go into the stables.”

  She turned her head and looked outside, her eyes lost for a moment in the flowers that grew in beds along the side of the conservatory.

  “Say what you like, but it’s with Nan that he should have had children.”

  She turned to us once again.

  “After Michel left, everything changed. Nan was no longer interested in the children. She had them placed with families, all of them, one after the other. The b
eds emptying, it was heartbreaking … One morning, the last child left, and she closed the shutters of the Refuge.”

  “And you?”

  “I …”

  It had begun to rain, steady drops on the roof of the conservatory. Ursula looked at her watch. It was late. We had talked for a long time.

  We all got up at the same time.

  Ursula’s car was parked nearby. I walked with her to the car. When she sat down behind the wheel, I asked her if she remembered the child’s surname.

  She looked at me, she did not need to think, no doubt she had known I would ask her this question. She was ready.

  “His name was Lepage, Michel Lepage.”

  I watched the car pull away.

  The rain was falling on my back.

  It seemed to me that all was well.

  Thus I had not asked my questions in vain. The Michel who was writing to Théo was indeed the child that Nan had taken in. A child who had grown up. How old would he be now? Forty?

  Max had been one of Michel’s refuges.

  The way you had been mine. All the time that I knew you. Loved you.

  I watched the windscreen-wipers beating. And then, when the rain stopped falling, I watched the sea, beyond the windscreen. I stayed there.

  The letters I had seen at Théo’s had been written by that child, grown up. A monastery, the ultimate refuge?

  The child who had grown up, had he become a monk? He was writing to Théo, and yet Nan did not seem to know where he was.

  I went back to the village.

  The road was blocked off. There were posters stuck up here and there, on doors, letters bright with color to say there was a village fête that evening. I left Raphaël’s car by the side of the road, near the wash-house.

  For days the sheep had been waiting for death, in a little pen, staring at the ground. I was there when they brought it up to the square. I saw the children clamber on to the walls. The dogs were howling.

  They killed it. An hour later, its skin was drying on the fence, and that evening Max turned the spit. He had spent the week cleaning the stained-glass windows, but you could not see them because of the dark. They would have had to have put lights on inside the church.

  A little group of musicians had set up on a podium. The children were dancing. A few couples. The Stork was off to one side with two other girls, showing each other what they had in their pockets. I walked round among all these people I did not know. I brushed against them. They were talking to each other. They had a shared history.