There was some coffee left in a saucepan. I heated up two cups. I put one down in front of Théo.
I pulled up a chair and sat down.
He looked up at me. His eyes were red. With pockets of tears.
“How was it?”
What could I say? I saw the black hole again. The hole in broad daylight, and black all the same.
I talked about the people who had been at the church and the ones outside. I did not say anything about Old Mother appearing, nor about Lili’s absence. I pushed the cup closer to him.
“There were flowers,” I said.
I took my cup. I lifted it to my lips. The reheated beverage was vile. I drank it anyway.
“Max said the grave is well located, and he’ll plant some irises in the soil.”
He looked at me. It was devouring him, his need to know. To hurt himself, exhaust himself. I lowered my head. I wanted to talk about something else. His gaze kept bringing me back. Like an obsession, his need to hold tight to the other person.
Even when that other person has been buried, we would like to be able to go with them. The last time I saw you, your last morning, in that room where you could no longer see any light. That day, I looked at you, for a long time. The doctor said, He won’t come back. I did not understand. He explained. He was an old doctor. He let me look at you.
I pointed to the coffee.
“Drink …”
He took a sip. He could not swallow it. He clenched his fists.
“That bloody rowing boat! I knew it ought to be burned …”
Two tears ran down his cheeks. They were fat tears, heavy and round.
“You don’t burn rowing boats …”
I wanted to talk to him about Michel, but I no longer had the will.
I looked away.
“I’ll go now.”
Raphaël sold “Virtue” to a collector in Saint-Malo.
“‘Virtue’! Can you imagine?”
The bronze would be collected during the week. He led me all the way to the back of the studio to show it to me. Next to it, “The Seamstress of the Dead” seemed to be waiting.
“I’m going to cast her, too.”
“If you cast her, you won’t want to sell her. She’ll be too beautiful.”
“I’ll cast her, I’ll sell her, and I’ll make others!”
He led me to other sculptures. He wanted to work on his idea of the great tightrope walker. Morgane was listening to him. She had wrapped a scarf around her forehead. She was looking at her brother as if something were taking over, inside her. Something she had not chosen, that she had to submit to all the same.
She turned to me.
“I saw Lambert again, he was in the harbor … He’d just got back from Alderney. I think he was looking for you.”
I did not answer.
She did not insist.
She stayed silent for a long time.
“That bloke … Your bloke … You can’t spend your life—”
“Be quiet.”
She said nothing more. For a moment, not long.
“You know what? It’s your clothes. You’ll never find a guy wearing clothes like that.”
“I never said I wanted to find one.”
She shrugged.
“No one can see your breasts under your jumpers. I could lend you some tops that are a bit more … Huh, Raphaël, don’t you think she dresses like a tramp?”
“Leave her alone …”
She clicked her tongue against her palate.
“You see, if I were you, I—”
“You aren’t me.”
She smiled.
“Yes, but if I were you …”
I went by the farm. I saw the Stork’s father loading manure into a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was heavy. He pushed it and went to empty it on to a big pile that was in the middle of the yard. The sow followed him.
One of his kids was crawling around the sow. In the pastures, the cows had their hooves in mud. At one point, the father raised his head. He looked at me. His gaze did not bother me.
The child went on crawling in and out between the sow’s legs. He had empty eyes, slow gestures. He climbed on to the sow’s back and fell off on the other side.
A child who was growing up like a cat.
The Audi was parked a bit further up the street. I thought I might find Lambert at home. The door was open.
I called out.
I went in.
He had a fire going. I waited for him by the fire, sprawled in one of the armchairs. I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, it was dark. He was sitting at the table. He was looking at me.
“That way you have of sleeping …”
No doubt because I had dozed off, or perhaps he had spoken to me without my hearing.
“Was it nice, Alderney?” I said.
“How did you know that?”
“Everyone knows everything here.”
He went to fetch his packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket. His matches. He pulled up a chair and came to sit beside me.
“It was nice, yes.”
He took off his shoes, his feet on the stone. He lit his cigarette.
“I wanted to eat some sea bream, but I couldn’t find any.”
“Is that why you spent two days there?”
“Not that, no.”
He talked about Alderney, he told me that his parents used to go there often. That they had had friends there.
He turned to me.
“Sea bream … Doesn’t that tempt you?”
I shook my head. “I have something to tell you …”
He waved his hand.
“Later …”
“No, not later.”
He tossed his cigarette into the fire.
“Yes, later.”
He settled into his chair, his neck against the back of the chair, his legs stretched out. He closed his eyes.
“I have to steal a cigarette from you.”
He waved, pointed to his jacket.
I got up. I went over to the jacket. I touched the leather. I took out the packet.
In the same pocket there was a photograph. I took it over to the light. It was the photograph that had stayed pinned to the wall at Lili’s for so long, the black-and-white photograph, you could see Lili and her parents, and little Michel in the background.
This photograph had been in Old Mother’s handbag. I don’t know how he had managed to get her to give it to him. Nor why he had done it.
I put it back in its place.
Lambert still had his eyes closed. It looked as if he were sleeping. Perhaps he was pretending.
I went out to smoke on the steps. It was drizzling over Alderney way and drizzling on the sea, too. Between the islands and the lighthouse. The sun slipped in and out of the clouds, a few rays scratching the surface of the sea, you could see them again in the pastures, lighting the tree trunks. Everywhere, the tall grasses vibrated with red hues. For a moment, on the steeper slope of the hill, it looked as if the ferns were on fire.
And then the shadow took over. In the distance, in a single movement, the sky spewed a long flow of black ink on to the line of the horizon, and the sun disappeared.
Lambert slept for an hour and then he woke up.
“I was promising you sea bream, wasn’t I, or was I dreaming?”
“You weren’t dreaming.”
He got to his feet.
“Will you wait here?”
He went out.
He came back a quarter of an hour later with two magnificent sea bream.
“Don’t move.”
He cooked them with herbs. I could hear the butter sizzling in the frying pan.
At one point, he turned his head, and looked at me over his shoulder.
“Did you have something to tell me?”
“No, nothing … Nothing important.”
He nodded.
He slid the spatula under the fish, lifted them gently and turned them. He added som
e lemon juice.
He let it cook some more without taking his eyes from the fish and then he turned off the flame.
He slid the sea bream on to the plates. He told me that it was Max who had caught them. With the tip of a knife, he cut into the flesh, and removed the bones.
“Next time, I’ll invite you,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Do you cook?”
I shook my head.
“… But it’s good at the auberge.”
“The auberge can’t be as good as at home.”
That is obvious, I thought.
He gnawed at the lemon, right down to the skin. It gave me an acid taste in my mouth. He went over to his jacket, took out the photograph, and came back and put it down in front of me, on the table.
He pointed with his finger.
“You must recognize this photograph, it’s the one that was at Lili’s. And this is the child that Nan adopted. The same Michel she thought was me.”
I looked up at him. What had he understood?
He began to eat his sea bream.
“Don’t you like it?” he said, because I had not touched mine.
“Yes …”
“What’s wrong then?”
I hesitated to reply.
He looked at me. I turned my head away.
I do not know what he had sensed, but he would have to go to the depths of the truth all by himself. The way I had done.
How far had he got?
Had he spoken to Nan?
Now Nan was dead, who would he have to turn to?
He pointed to the sea bream.
“You ought to try to eat it before it gets cold.”
A sharp pain, at the back of my neck.
When I left him, the mist had parted. The sky was clearing, brighter. And then the light departed. Perhaps that is what drove people mad here, this absence of light. Gloom, long before and long after the night.
And the space of the sea, without limits.
Hermann came to get “Virtue.” He took two other little plaster statues, Raphaël called them “Solitude.” Hermann wanted to try to get him an exhibition in Paris, to show both the sculptures and the drawings. It was an ambitious project.
For a while now, Raphaël had not been sleeping much, just a few hours a night. Sometimes, he slept in the afternoon. His sleepless nights made him gaunt. Life in the outside world was no longer important to him. The space of the studio had become his life. Another life. And it seemed as if only this life mattered.
Morgane was suffering. I heard them arguing several times that week. One morning, I went down, and Morgane was crying.
Raphaël was in the studio, standing by one of the “Thinkers,” and they were staring at each other. Looking at them, I wondered who was contemplating whom.
Raphaël’s face was lined with fatigue. He said that even when he was sleeping he was sculpting. That the plaster was shaped in his sleep.
“Rue de Seine, can you imagine! I’m having an exhibition on the rue de Seine!”
He was happy.
He wanted to get back to work right away, to get going on new things.
“I’m in the process of understanding …”
He had a project for an angel with clipped wings. A stone creature, that would be both real and evanescent.
“I’ve been looking for it for so long … I think I’m getting close now.”
And then the idea for the tightrope walker. He said that all the other sculptures had been created just so that he could get to that one.
He took the plaster of “The Seamstress” to Valognes. He also took one of the little tightrope walkers.
The door to the studio stayed wide open. The door without the stone. During his absence, the studio was an empty, silent temple.
I went in.
I walked through the shadows of the petrified silhouettes, their dry wombs open, without modesty. The silence of women. Those faces were anonymous and yet I seemed to know them. Their hands with stone fingers. I went up to them. Without fear. Raphaël’s sculptures were my sisters, they were my pleading women.
The silence in the studio was of a piece.
There were traces of plaster on the floor, where “The Seamstress” had stood. The mark from the base. Raphaël’s jumper.
Max burst into the studio.
“Have you seen Raphaël anywhere in the divinity?”
“In the what?”
“In the divinity!”
“Vicinity, Max, the vicinity … He’s gone to the foundry, he took ‘The Seamstress.’ He told you. He waited for you, too. You had promised to go with him.”
He looked round.
He rubbed his forehead with his hands.
“You have a problem?” I asked.
He did not know. It was Raphaël who knew when there were problems and when there were not.
“It’s the fuel, I don’t have enough for the boat!” he explained at last.
He took three steps toward the door.
“The harbormaster said I have enough to go out to sea, but not enough to come back. He won’t let me leave if I don’t have fuel for the return.”
“He’s right.”
“He took the key to the boat!”
He nodded his head several times.
“He did that, so that I wouldn’t activate the ignition of the engine.”
“What do you want Raphaël to do about it?”
“Raphaël is validity on earth.”
“Validity on earth?”
It made me laugh. “How many liters do you need?”
He did not know that either. The harbormaster had made a mark on the gauge and Max had to fill it up to the mark.
“It’s a foamy night!” he said, pointing to the sea. “On foamy nights, there are porgies!”
I took a note out of my pocket, but it was not money that he wanted.
Eventually he left.
He went back up to the village. He went round all the houses, with a bucket and bottles. He asked for fuel for his boat. He promised fish in return, or sharks’ teeth. He promised everything. Some people emptied a few liters directly into his bucket. Others did not give him anything.
Max stank.
Lili did not want him in the bistro. She did not want him to go out to sea.
She gave him some food, outside.
Max went back into the narrow streets. He knocked at other houses, went through other doors. By evening, the fuel had reached the mark.
The founder brought “The Seamstress” back the next morning. She was wrapped in a sheet. It took them some time to get her out and lift her back to the studio.
They put her on her base. I was there when they removed the sheet. The dark patina vibrated in the light. As soon as the light changed, the patina shifted to gray-brown hues, almost red. It took very little, a cloud beyond the big window that looked out to sea.
Now that she was here, it seemed impossible to part with her.
When Hermann arrived, the atmosphere became tense, Raphaël no longer wanted to sell his sculpture. Hermann needed it, however, for the posters of the exhibition.
“Your ‘Seamstress’ will reign over it!”
He had planned everything.
Except this.
“I won’t have the exhibition without ‘The Seamstress’!” he said in the end, slamming the door.
That evening, the patron of the auberge came to get Raphaël, Hermann was asking for him on the telephone, it lasted for a while. And then from the telephone box, after that, because the patron was fed up with their endless conversation, they spoke some more and Raphael finally capitulated. “The Seamstress of the Dead” would go to Paris, to be exhibited and sold if someone wanted her.
He shook his head.
“It’s my first exhibition, I have to show the best I have. If I sell her, I can cast others.”
Morgane exploded.
“You’re not a beginner! He has no right to treat you like that!”
<
br /> She threw a magazine across the room. The pages flew open with a loud rustle.
“I can’t see why you give in so easily!”
Raphaël picked up the magazine. Since he had taken his decision, he seemed very calm, almost indifferent.
“The main thing is that she exists.”
He smiled. “I have other ones inside me.”
“There will never be another seamstress!”
It lasted for a while, the two of them. Morgane would not calm down.
A draft of damp air came up from the ground. On some of the older sculptures, the plaster was flaking off, all you had to do was touch it with your finger; a scarcely visible erosion and yet very persistent. The sculptures were in danger. Raphaël knew it. They would all crumble if he did not cast them.
He ran his hand over his sister’s face, her anger impossible to calm.
“It’s not such a big deal …”
Morgane stepped back, as if scorched by his hand.
“Come on …” He pulled her, held her against him, tight.
“You are beautiful when you get angry …”
He talked to her for a long time, one hand in her hair, the way you calm a young child.
Max left at the crack of dawn, I heard his engine start. By the time I got to the quay, the boat was already leaving the harbor, still on smooth water, but already in the pass. I ran to the breakwater, waving my arms. I do not know if he saw me. He was looking straight ahead, proud, he was a sailor, not a great sailor, but a man on his boat. The pass he was taking was Le Blanchard: he was going to navigate through it for the first time.
A pass like a wall.
A baptism, with the waves waiting for him. They came and were caught under the hull. Ahead of him, they rose up, several pounding assaults. Beneath the boat they made troughs of black water, roiling ferociously. La Marie-Salope heeled over.
Max held the wheel, heading straight for the open sea, the boat absorbed by the light, as if swallowed by it. It became a spot, hardly whiter than the crest of the waves, so far away that no matter how I squinted, I no longer knew if it were Max on his boat or a whitecap, or my eyes clouding over from staring into the light like that.
I sat down, my knees tucked up, my head on my arms. I kept watching the spot on the sea where Max had disappeared.
He had not gone out aimlessly. The fishermen had told him where he could find porbeagles. To strike them, he would need some luck. He would find his first shark just like that, and afterward he would scour the area. There will be times when he will be exactly where he should be, and it is the sharks that will not be there. Other times, it will be the other way round. And one day they will both be in the same place and Max will get his porbeagle.
The Breakers Page 32