The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  I thought of going back down to La Griffue.

  Lambert came out of his house. He walked along the dance floor and disappeared for a moment behind the dancers. He went by a first time, very close to me, almost touching me. He was looking elsewhere. He did not see me.

  I could have made a sign, he would have turned round. Perhaps. I hugged the wall even closer. I was one of those people you do not see. Not beautiful enough. Not ugly enough either, probably. Somewhere in between. Already as an adolescent, when I went to parties, it was the others who danced.

  He went by a second time.

  I bought a raffle ticket. A sugared waffle. I slipped the ticket in my pocket. And then he came over. From the side.

  “Have you been here for long?”

  I said no, that I had just arrived. He told me he had changed the glass on the frame and put the medallion back on the grave.

  He went to buy a waffle, he wanted one after seeing mine. Morgane was there, on the dance floor, she was dancing with a young man. She was wearing a black sleeveless top, her shoulders bare despite the chill, the rat curled against her neck.

  I looked at them.

  Lambert was looking at them, too.

  “People who desire each other are always more beautiful. It’s enough to make you want to desire, just to be beautiful like that.”

  That is what he said. He went on eating his waffle. At one point, he asked if I wanted to dance, there was almost no one on the floor. I said no, it was not my thing, and he said it was not his thing either, but after all, it was a dance.

  He finished his waffle, took my arm, and led me on to the dance floor. He held me close to him. It was a slow dance.

  “Lili knew …” he murmured into my ear.

  “Lili knew what?”

  “About her father, that he’d put out the light.”

  I felt his hands against my back. I did not know where to put mine.

  “Relax, everyone is looking at us.”

  He said it without taking his eyes from the dance floor. He was a good dancer, I am sure he was lying when he said it was not his thing. Other couples joined us.

  “Is that why you were arguing?” I said.

  “Did you see us?”

  “From the street, yes …”

  Morgane had stopped dancing, and she disappeared down a side street with the boy. She waved to me.

  Everywhere we looked, the girls were beautiful. They had fastened crêpe-paper flowers to their hair.

  “Do you know the story about the two goldfish that go round and round together in their bowl?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, they go round, and round … and after a while one of them stops and asks the other one, What are you doing on Sunday?”

  It made him laugh.

  At the time, I thought it was stupid, but afterward, I laughed, too. I was still in his arms. Around us, boys were looking for girls, and girls were waiting for boys. Sixteen-year-old boys holding fifteen-year-old girls, swearing to love each other for life. They swore it with their eyes closed.

  I envied them.

  The music stopped.

  We left the dance floor. Lambert lit a cigarette.

  Morgane had disappeared with the boy hanging on to her.

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  He held me back by the arm.

  “I told you there was something that didn’t match up … The last time I danced here, I was thirteen, it was in summer.”

  “Is that what doesn’t fit?”

  “No, that’s not it. But that summer, my mother was wearing a white dress, and my father was dancing with her. I remember my mother’s white dress, but not her face. I’ve forgotten her voice … Sometimes, at night, I dream about her, and I see her again. I see her the way she was before, as if death did not exist.”

  I stayed beside him. He was smoking, looking at a couple kissing.

  “The place where I used to work, before, there was a girl, she always said yes when you asked her for a kiss. It was nice.”

  That is what he said.

  After talking about his mother.

  The music stopped again and everything froze, suddenly, on the dance floor. Someone asked for silence, because the raffle-drawing was about to start. It was the priest who won the sheepskin, he went up on the podium to get it. He said he was going to put it at the foot of his bed. That was the first prize.

  There were other prizes after that one.

  I won a hand-knitted cardigan. I did not go to fetch it. I was holding the crumpled ticket between my fingers. They repeated the number several times, through the loudspeaker, looking at all the people in the crowd. Then they went on to the following prize. The cardigan stayed on the podium. I opened my fingers and the ticket fell on the ground.

  Lambert leaned over to me.

  “Her name was Nicole, the girl who kissed me. It’s not a very nice name, is it, Nicole? And she wasn’t very pretty either, so I suppose her name suited her.”

  He said that, and stepped on the ticket.

  The music started again. Children ran in front of us. There were a lot of people, suddenly too many people.

  He pointed to his house.

  “From the dormer window up there, you can see the sea.”

  That was what he said. From the dormer window, up there.

  We looked at each other. Five minutes later, we were in the garden, and went into the house. We did not even turn on the lights.

  The door leading upstairs creaked. Lambert went first. I followed him. You could not see a thing. We banged our feet against the steps. It made us laugh.

  We laughed quietly.

  It was fun to go up like that, unable to see anything. The sounds from outdoors came through the walls, firecrackers so loud you might think they had been set off in the courtyard, just there, below the windows.

  We went into a room. He bumped into something and swore. He went on, one hand ahead of him, and pushed open the wooden shutter protecting the dormer window. The light from outside lit up his face. I said, “At Théo’s place there’s a skylight like this one.” The air was damp. We leaned out and looked at the street, just below us, the dancers, the musicians, and the sea in the distance.

  The beam from the lighthouse.

  And the dancers again.

  It felt good up here. High up. It was very tempting to think that up here you could be better or freer than elsewhere. Stronger, too.

  “You know, that man that Nan mistakes you for …”

  “Later …”

  “No, now.”

  He stepped back. He looked at me.

  “Now? Alright.”

  He went to sit at the back of the room. I heard a mattress creak. I stayed by the window.

  “About the man, I know where he is.”

  I told him about my meeting with Ursula. About the Refuge, the letters Théo received from the monastery. The child who left, and no one could say why.

  I was talking, and I could not see him. At one point, I saw the red burst of a flame when he lit a cigarette, and then the flame went out.

  I waited for him to say something, but he did not say anything.

  I too fell silent.

  He got up and closed the shutter. I heard the sound, the little iron hook, and the rustling of his jacket.

  We found ourselves in the dark again. Our eyes got used to it. We could see each other faintly, the outline of our faces.

  He stayed like that for a while, next to me, not moving, then he said, “I think maybe that story is none of our business.”

  He did not say anything else. We went back downstairs.

  He went with me to the door.

  There was no more music. No more dancers. People were all headed down to the harbor, to see the fireworks they were going to set off above the sea. We stayed there, on the doorstep, watching people go by.

  “Aren’t you coming …”

  He shook his head.

  He was going to sleep here
, in one of the rooms, in the new sheets he had bought in Cherbourg.

  When I got to the gate, he called me back.

  “That photograph you talked about, the one that was pinned up in the room, you said Lili was going to get it for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she hasn’t, yet?”

  I looked at him.

  “No …” I answered.

  I took three steps.

  “It’s in Old Mother’s bag.”

  “And you haven’t tried to get it?”

  “No. Why, should I have?”

  He nodded, and I went off toward the harbor.

  I followed the people walking along the road. Most of them were families, with children. A noisy, happy little crowd.

  I stopped outside the farm so I would not be caught among them. A sick ewe was stretched out in front of the barn door. The Stork’s father had separated her from the others. For two days, she had been tied with a rope to a nail. Almost outside. The cats were circling around her.

  The sow went nowhere near her. She could smell death. She didn’t like it.

  At midnight, they set off the fireworks. Young men climbed on to boats and tossed flowers on to the water. The waves buoyed the flowers. Projectors lit them. The air was mild. I was not sure whether I felt good.

  I think I was feeling the need to be with someone. I wandered round on the quay for a moment.

  I went back up into my room. Late in the night, I heard an accordion, dance music from the square had started up again, and I thought that Lambert would probably not be able to sleep.

  La Hague, a few hours before the rain. Stormy weather. My skin can sense the smell of sulfur. It always could. It can sense the lightning coming, hours before the first flashes.

  That is the way it is with skin.

  Some skin.

  I got up late. It felt too good in the sheets. I could not tear myself away.

  Max was beneath the shelter, by his boat. He was ready to go to sea, that is what he said, just a matter of choosing the right day.

  “Will you take me as far as the lighthouse?” I asked him, leaning out of my window.

  He looked up.

  “The currents have the dangerousness of the breaking waves. No one can go.”

  “But people used to go, before?”

  He scratched his chin and looked at the lighthouse. The currents were black, as if they had been spewed out by the night.

  “I have to ask Raphaël.”

  When I went up to him, he was frowning. He was putting his tools away.

  “I always ask Raphaël, for everything.”

  I did not insist.

  I went down to the shore. A little bird with a yellow beak was pecking at sand fleas.

  The solitary imprint of my soles.

  My shadow, insignificant, on the road.

  Morgane came up to meet me.

  “Why don’t you move on?” she said at last.

  I hesitated before replying.

  “I feel good here … These few square miles are enough for me.”

  I was lying. They were not enough. They were no longer enough.

  “And you?”

  “I’ll never leave without Raphaël.”

  “And the boy I saw you with at the fête?”

  “That was nothing. He’s from Beaumont.”

  We came back along the quay. The sea was coming. We could hear the water lapping.

  “The fellow who gives me work said that later, if I like, I can buy a moped and come and sell dresses in his boutique in Cherbourg.”

  “Haven’t you got your license?”

  “No, but I do know how to drive.”

  I looked at her. The wind was blowing her hair on to her face. A little bubble of saliva was trapped in the fold of her lip. She was beautiful. I did not feel jealous. At another time, no doubt, her youth would have been unbearable.

  “Are you looking at me?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m getting old,” she said, making a face.

  “Certainly you are!”

  “I’m going to be thirty, do you realize!”

  It made me laugh. She cocked her head to one side.

  “Still, I think I ought to lose weight … Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Neither do I, that’s why I don’t, as long as I don’t know.”

  “It’s going to rain,” I said.

  She looked out toward the lighthouse. We went through the garden and into the house.

  She took the rat out of her pocket and put it on the sofa. She went over to the window. “It’s not raining …”

  “It’s just that the sky is so gray.”

  “Gray, that doesn’t mean rain.”

  She sat down at the table, looked over her latest crown, adjusting what was not right. She did not feel like working. She said, “I’m fed up with doing this!”

  She went and stood next to the window.

  The rat climbed on to the table, and went into its box. I picked up a pearl. The rat showed its teeth.

  “Now it’s raining,” she said.

  She turned to me. “You were with him yesterday …”

  “Yes.”

  She picked up her crown.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  She cut the thread with her teeth. She threaded several pearls one after the other, tying knots in between them. Strands of hair swept across her face. She tucked them back, but they were rebellious strands, and they fell forward again. I liked watching her, her hands around the pearls.

  She eventually put the diadem down. She looked down at her hands. Her nails, the skin gnawed.

  “Sometimes, I think I should get away from here.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. Drowning for an instant, and then the tears spilled over. She crushed them with the back of her sleeve. It happened so suddenly. There were tears on the table, too.

  She tried to erase it all with a smile. She spread her hands.

  “I can’t do a thing without him.”

  What could I say to her? I wanted to put my hand on hers. She withdrew. She did not want me to touch her. That is what we all believe, that we will never be able to manage without the other person. And then the other person leaves, and we discover that we can do masses of things that we had not even imagined. Different things, and it will never be the way it was. I tried to explain all of that to her.

  That you can go on, after all.

  She was sniffling.

  I talked to her about you.

  Like a thorn thrust deep in my flesh. Sometimes I forget you. And then all it takes is a gesture, the wrong movement, and the pain returns, absolutely alive.

  Sometimes, too, the pain is not there and I am the one who goes looking for it. I find it, I awaken you.

  Familiar pain.

  We seek consolation with tears too.

  Morgane dried her tears. She tried to smile.

  The door opened, it was the little Stork. She had been caught in the rain. She had found Raphaël’s jumper in the corridor and she put it on. It was far too big for her. It reached down to her calves. Her head was hidden in the collar. She came up to us, swaying from one foot to the other, her arms spread wide. I could hear her breathing through the weave of the jumper.

  Morgane took a packet of biscuits from the cupboard. She called Raphaël. He did not want to talk about his work. He did not want to tell us anything about what he was doing. He was working.

  He put his hands on the Stork’s head. “What are you doing in my jumper, then?”

  He told us that in two days’ time a journalist from Beaux-Arts would be coming to take a look at his work.

  In the afternoon, they launched Max’s boat. First on to the rails, and then they let it slip slowly.

  When it reached the water, the boat heeled over. We were afraid.

  And then it was afloat.

  It is not every day that a boat is put b
ack in the water, so people from the village had come down to see. There were other people there too, that we did not know.

  The patron of the auberge grilled some baby shrimps. Lili brought sandwiches. She served sparkling wine in plastic glasses. She had changed the color of her hair, a red that was slightly too red, and there were streaks of it on her neck.

  Standing on the quay, we all toasted fair winds to La Marie-Salope.

  Morgane took a photograph of Max with the fishermen and another one of him standing on the deck of the boat. The brand-new paint job sparkled in the sun.

  Lambert was there, too.

  He was looking for a rubbish bin, a bag, somewhere to throw his glass. He could not find anything. He kept the glass in his hand.

  He came over to me.

  We did not look at each other. We were looking at the boat.

  We were looking at Max, at the sea. The breakwater, like a rampart keeping out the storms. Old Mother was there too, she had come down by car, she needed to lean on things, she was wobbly. She hesitated between sitting down and holding on. Her eyes were wide open, it was not every day that she could see the sea.

  Lili was handing out mulled wine. Pieces of orange floated on the surface. Slices of lemon. She filled our glasses, first mine, then Lambert’s.

  Lambert held her by the arm.

  “There was a picture at your place, on the wall.”

  She looked up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Apparently you took it down. I’d like to see it.”

  Lili looked at him abruptly, almost brutally. And then she looked at me.

  I turned my head. I lowered my eyes.

  Old Mother was next to us. You might have thought she was smiling, but it was the light.

  Lambert and I went to drink our wine over by the boats.

  Max thanked everybody for their indulgence, and for other things, too.

  We eventually found a rubbish bin and threw away our glasses.

  Before leaving me, Lambert said, “I think I’ve found someone for the house.”

  In the evening I painted the door to my room with what was left of the Hopper green. I left the window open to let the smell out.