The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  Jobourg, 4.

  Beaumont-Hague 10, via the D 90.

  Via the D 45, Saint-Germain-de-Vaux 0.7.

  Omonville-la-Petite, 5.

  Cherbourg via coast road, 30.

  I knew it all by heart.

  “This isn’t your usual time!” Lili said, on finding me there.

  She went behind the bar. We looked at each other. What was there to say?

  “What would you like?” she said.

  “I don’t know …”

  What had she gained from telling the truth to Michel? Would things have been more difficult for her had Théo gone to live with Nan?

  “Would you like some nice hot vermicelli?”

  “Vermicelli?”

  She pointed to the bowl, the alphabet noodles.

  I nodded.

  She poured a piping-hot ladleful into an earthenware bowl.

  She came to me, with the bowl in her hands. She was looking at me. Scrutinizing me. She glanced outside, the closed shutters.

  Her father had left.

  She had been silent for years, and to go on living she would have to keep that silence.

  “Did you spend the day at the cliffs?”

  That is what she said.

  She did not say anything about Théo. And yet it was the day when I usually took the bag of food for him.

  The bag was there, hanging from a nail. Nothing in it. Would she find the strength, some day, to take it down?

  “You have the eyes of the moor,” she said, putting the bowl down in front of me.

  Eyes of the moor, the eyes of a wanderer.

  “A whole day on watch by the sea, it felt good …” I said eventually.

  She looked at me again. She was willing to talk about birds so that she would not have to talk about her father.

  “And what did you count?”

  I took the notebook out of my pocket, slowly, trying to swallow my saliva that had suddenly become dry.

  I opened the notebook.

  I showed her.

  “469 gannets, 3 common scoters, 71 terns, 2 oystercatchers, 3 gulls and 46 sandwich terns.”

  She stood up straight, her tea towel in her hand.

  And then she put the towel over her shoulder.

  “You counted all that?”

  “All that.”

  “And what’s your conclusion?”

  I closed the notebook.

  I looked at her. Her eyes like slits. Her father’s eyes.

  “That oystercatchers are rare,” I said.

  I got into the habit of spending an hour or two at Lambert’s place, at the end of the afternoon. I lit a fire. I made coffee, too. I waited for him to come back.

  I finished his bottle of whisky.

  Michel’s letters were on the table. I read them all again.

  I do not know if the house had really been sold. There were no more visitors.

  When I left, I put the key over the door.

  At the end of the day, I went to Théo’s place to feed the cats. I filled their bowls. I made them a fire. I put the radio on, too, so they would hear some noise.

  I wound the clock and I waited, sitting at the table, until the hands got stuck, and when the moment came, those two minutes of motionless time, I thought of you.

  Sometimes, one of the cats would jump on to my lap, curl up in a ball and go to sleep. I no longer dared to move. Time went by.

  The little white cat that Théo loved so much had still not come back.

  A little white hull in the distance. Max sailed for a long time along the coast as far as the cape of La Loge, between the coastguard station at Goury and Port-Racine. A few minutes longer, then the boat headed out to sea, until it was no more than a spot of light between the sky and the sea. And then it vanished. The Stork was following it with her gaze. She would have liked to have gone away with him. To go to sea, too. She watched him for so long that she was sick to her stomach. It was the sickness of those who stayed on land and watched the boats sail away.

  The sickness of those who look on as others live, the same pain. The same nausea.

  “Later, when you’re grown up, you will go away too.”

  She looked at me with her big eyes. Her mouth with its crushed lip.

  “When is later?” she said.

  I took her by the hand.

  “I don’t know. Soon …”

  Her hand was warm, curled up in mine.

  “Soon, that’s too far away!” she murmured.

  “It will come quickly.”

  She ran off. She was gone, all the way to the far end of the meadow, her dog following her shadow. She went further and lay down on a patch of low grass, in the light. Her mouth open, her arms spread wide. She pulled up her jumper to bare her tummy.

  Children grow more quickly in the light, like plants, flowers. I’d heard Lili say that, but she was talking about moonlight.

  Moonlight or sunshine … The Stork had lain down to escape from her childhood, to reach tomorrow more quickly.

  I followed the boat in the distance through my binoculars. Max was at the helm. The gull was on the roof. It went everywhere with him, on land as well as on the boat. He caressed it the way you caress a cat. He taught it how to speak. Simple words. He said that seagulls were capable of learning to speak. Other fishermen said so as well.

  Max rarely spoke about Morgane.

  Several times, Raphaël had called out him, to tell him that she was on the telephone. He had come. He had listened. He hardly said a thing. His gaze was detached, as if no longer seeing her had helped him to love her less.

  Raphaël no longer called him now when Morgane was on the telephone.

  The cats were getting used to Théo’s absence. When I got there, they came over to me, rubbed themselves against my legs. They ate what I put in their bowls.

  They allowed me to caress them.

  Some of them purred.

  I stayed for an hour or two.

  I aired the house.

  The little cat had still not come back.

  I wrote a first letter to Théo, I told him that everything was fine.

  The telephone rang, I was in the corridor, on my way back up. It was almost dark. Raphaël called out to me. I could hear Morgane’s laughter at the other end of the line. She was talking fast. She seemed happy. She wanted to know how the sea was. I opened the curtain. I looked outside, toward the lighthouse.

  “It’s high tide.”

  “And the colors?”

  The sky and the sea the same gray, slightly brown, it was the wind, it was blowing from the east, it stirred up the silt. The heather was already fading on the hill.

  I described it all to her.

  “There are seagulls flying above the beach. The lighthouse has not been lit yet. It’s a matter of minutes.”

  “Will you look, will you tell me when the light comes on?”

  I stared at the lighthouse. The weather was changing over by Alderney, there would be mist.

  I told her that Max had gone fishing. That he had tamed a seagull. That the rat was fine.

  I went on to the landing, I wanted her to hear the seagulls. To hear the wind, too.

  “Yesterday, Max saw dolphins swimming at Le Blanchard. Raphaël saw them, too.”

  “Dolphins!”

  Morgane could not believe it. She wanted us to take photographs, and send them to her.

  I heard footsteps behind me.

  “What were they doing, the dolphins?” she said.

  “I don’t know … Max said there were more than ten of them. They swam in the currents following the boat.”

  “Raphaël saw them, and he didn’t tell me!”

  “Raphaël doesn’t care about dolphins.”

  “You say the rat is doing all right?”

  “He’s fine, yes …”

  “And you, are you all right?”

  The footsteps, the smell of the leather jacket. I sensed them before I saw them, a rough pounding in my heart.

 
; “And you?” she insisted, because I had not answered.

  “Me …”

  He was there, behind me, almost against me. I could feel his breath against my neck. He wrapped his arms around me. Closed them. His hands. I could feel his heart beating in my back.

  “I didn’t see the dolphins,” I mumbled.

  Morgane’s voice mingled with the throbbing of my blood, asking me if the lighthouse was lit yet. It was not.

  He put his hand on my belly. His hand, all of it. And then his hand on my face. My cheek against his hand. My lips against his palm, on the inside, my entire mouth held.

  I breathed in his hand.

  Inside it, my lips against his dry palm. To the verge of stifling. Not saying a thing.

  My neck against his shoulder. I waited for my heart to grow calm. It took me a few seconds, and then afterward there was an infinitely gentle time where I could move again and place my hand on his arm, and then yet another moment when I could turn round and look at him. This man who had his arms around me: it was not you and yet I was in peace. I burrowed my face against him. My lips against his jumper. The warmth beneath the wool. My hand slid down, found its way to the place it so loved with you, between the jacket and the jumper, a fearful little creature, found its place, and nestled there.

  “You’ve come back.”

  He held me tighter, and at last I could close my eyes.

  It was dark. The sea rose, breaking against the lighthouse, bursts of short, heavy waves. The weather was stormy. The air was already electric.

  In the room. My face reflected in the mirror. The wound from the piece of sheet metal had completely disappeared and yet, when I came in from the cold, you could still see the trace of it, a light mark that disappeared as soon as my skin got warm.

  A transient trace.

  A red shadow.

  A memory.

  Lambert was sleeping.

  I looked at him.

  And then I went out.

  I went to finish the night on the sofa, in Raphaël’s studio. A night of vague dreams, it seemed to me that I was calling you. I pulled the blanket over me. It had been lying about on the floor. It smelled of dust and plaster.

  In the morning, Raphaël found me there. He asked no questions. He made some coffee. He just said that the weather was rainy, and that I should not have wrapped myself in such a dirty blanket.

  I went to walk on the beach. A seagull was perched on the very top of the roof, staring at the sea. When it saw me, it let out a shrill cry and flew off, its wings spread, it went to graze the surface of the water almost in front of me. The cows gathered by the fence, they had spent the night there, they were ruminating, their heads turned toward the village. Humans were waking up there. The first lights.

  I walked as far as the cross. A clump of little centauries had taken root at the base. You could find them in bloom here, even in winter.

  It began to rain. A few drops. I looked at the sky. The rain at the end of summer is never like the autumn rains. It is fiercer, it batters the seashore, digs into the slopes with the strength of a jealous woman.

  The old men are saying that this winter will be a winter for snow.

  I went back to La Griffue. I looked up. There was a light on in my bedroom.

  I picked up a pebble. A little pebble of black granite, on the side there was a light-colored scratch, an impact the shape of a star. I closed my fingers around it gently, and slipped it into my pocket.

  Lambert stayed for a week, and then he left again. He came back ten days later.

  He left again.

  On each of his trips, he went to see Michel. When he came back, he talked to me about him. About their meetings, only a few hours a day. He would have liked to have stayed longer, but the rules of the monastery would not allow it. On his last visit, he had been allowed into the cloister, the more private area, reserved for the monks. A moment of conversation in a windowless cell. They had drunk water. They had eaten a few biscuits.

  They had talked.

  Those visits, however brief, made him happy.

  I knew now that I could love other hands, desire another body; that is what I had found again with him, the desire, but I also knew that I could no longer love like before.

  Sharing nights.

  Your death had severed me from that.

  Did Lambert understand?

  He watched as I left him. He did not try to keep me there.

  He spoke to me several times about the house he had in Le Morvan, an old mill by a stream. He did not tell me anything more about it, simply that he would like to show me the place.

  He left again.

  It was good, like that. I was learning to wait for him.

  There were troubling silences between us.

  One day, he took a letter out of his pocket, a letter he had received from his brother. In this letter, Michel spoke at length about forgiveness. He said that forgiveness was not forgetting, that you had to know how to follow that path, and he quoted a sentence by John Paul II: The man who forgives understands that there is a greater truth than himself.

  That night, I told him about you. We were in his car. Beyond the windscreen was the sea.

  He loved me that night, afterward. At his house. In his room, a bed with white sheets. He loved me the way that you knew how to love me, that same manner, just as absolute.

  In the night I got up and went to lean against the wall under the skylight. The sky was full of stars. I thought that one of the stars might be you.

  Sounds in the night. Rustlings, light whisperings.

  I turned round and I watched him breathing, the man who had just loved me.

  I sat down, my back to the radiator. From the pocket of my jacket I took the little notebook that never leaves me. I turned the pages, I went through all the drawings up to the pages that followed, the last ones, the white pages, and I began to write our story.

  The next day, Lambert told me he was going back to see his brother, and that if I wanted, I could go with him. It was the end of September. The fine days were over. The wind had begun to blow from the west, bringing moisture, banks of fog from the sea. Flakes of foam that it ripped from the waves and tossed against my windows. Even on days with sun it was cold.

  We set off very early in the morning. When we left Auderville, it was already raining. There were drops clinging to the windows. We put on some music. We talked about Michel.

  Shortly after Caen, I pointed to the countryside, I told him, Françoise Sagan lived somewhere over there. He did not give a damn about Sagan, but I told him about the manor house all the same.

  A few years ago, I came here with you. We had ventured into the grounds. Sagan was there, in an armchair, her body protected from the cold by a blanket. And yet it was summer. She was asleep.

  The following year, when we came back, she was dead.

  Lambert pulled over after Dozulé and I drove.

  With my hands on the wheel, I thought about Sagan and that day. Thoughts without sadness. We had not had many other holidays, after the ones spent in Normandy.

  By ten o’clock the light was stronger, but the sky remained gray. We stopped, a place on the autoroute that was called Fleury-en-Bière. We drank coffee, and after that, Lambert drove.

  The car lulled me. His voice. He talked to me about his brother, and the peace that he had been feeling since he had found him again.

  Just beyond Bessey-en-Chaume, we stopped for lunch.

  Afterward, I took the wheel.

  At one point, Lambert pointed to the forests, far in the distance, and told me that Le Morvan was there, beyond the expanse of trees.

  We kept on driving.

  We stopped again.

  And set off again.

  I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, I saw mountains. We were very near Grenoble.

  While I was asleep, Lambert had covered me with his jacket. My warmth beneath it, preserved. I looked at him. He smiled at me.

  We left the autoroute.
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  We drank hot chocolate in a town at the foot of the mountains, just before we entered the gorges. Lambert explained that in the old days, it was from here that the monks set out, on foot, to make their solitary way to their place of withdrawal. They went all this way.

  We talked about Michel, who had set off from much further away. We looked at a stream running between the houses.

  We got back into the car, a very narrow road against the side of the mountain. On our right there were gorges, with a stream running at the bottom. We went through tunnels dug in the rock. There were waterfalls. There was water seeping everywhere, on the road and also against the sides of the mountain. Lambert told me that this road was called the road of Le Désert. That sometimes you could see lynxes here.

  We did not see anybody.

  We arrived in Saint-Pierre, it was nearly dark.

  Lambert had booked two rooms in a hotel in the village, the Hôtel du Nord.

  His room was number 4. I had number 16, it was not on the same floor. We had dinner in a little restaurant, we ordered ham with hay, a specialty that the waitress recommended. We drank a bottle of good wine. He told me about the pathetic investigations he had to conduct when he was in Dijon. Sordid stories. I told him I liked sordid stories, and that made him laugh.

  He told me about the period in his life when he was a militant, hoping he could change the world.

  Afterward, we walked around the narrow streets, holding each other close, it was even colder than in La Hague, but here there was no wind.

  I was the one who went to him that night. His door was not locked. All I had to do was open it. He was standing by the window. He did not say anything. He was waiting for me.

  The next morning, it was late when we got up. We had a quick breakfast, in an empty dining room.

  Lambert wanted to show me a little church, a place that was called Saint-Hugues, there were several paintings hanging inside, a way of the cross. The painter was called Arcabas. The colors he used, like gold.

  We stopped to feel the icy water flowing from a waterfall. We saw trout.

  Afterward, we took the road to the monastery.

  We left the car in a car park a bit lower down. Ours was the only car.

  A path went through meadows. It was lined with very old trees, their roots broken through to the surface, sinewy across the ground. We could not see the monastery, it was at the end of the path. Surrounded by mountains. Already enclosed.