by Serge Pey
Our shack, surrounded by reeds and built on pilings, is cluttered with spare lumber, sheets of tarpaper, egg cartons, galvanized iron, and cardboard. Two large tires holding geraniums flank the gate in the fence.
There are two rooms in the shack. A radio set, a table, and straw chairs. A gas ring balanced on cinderblocks heats fish soup by the window. Three photos on the radio and a calendar are like eyes in the wall.
There is a dog in the house and a cat. The two of them sleep together by the door. The dog comes into the bedroom every morning and licks our faces to wake us up.
At the entrance a curtain of metal bottle tops waves back and forth. It ripples and jingles like small change when the tramuntana blows.
* * *
—
I am walking to the sea for the first time. Riffling the reeds and the airy scrub, the birds arouse the trees also. A man gives me his hand. Shadows shift ahead of us and catch up with us relentlessly in the pale light. Like a dog I am afraid of my shadow and I turn to bite it.
My father squeezes my hand more and more tightly. Suddenly we breathe in the smell of sardines and see the sun coming up behind the boats. We hear the sea. In fact we have been hearing it for a long time, but now its roar comes in full force.
I let go of my father’s hand and run off towards its noise and color. Then my father starts shouting:
“Stop! Come back!”
My father grabs my arm just as I am about to touch the froth spreading over the sand.
“Don’t touch the sea.”
Then he picks me up and holds me in his arms to watch the sea coming towards us.
Without realizing it we are contemplating something beyond the sea. An old rag. An island. No boats. No birds. All we really hear now is the sound of the foam on the sand. Saliva gathers in my throat as my father puts me down beside him on the sand. I feel the endless backwash of the sea between my toes.
My father kneels down next to me. He clasps my hands between his and slowly begins to talk to himself. I don’t understand right away what he is saying:
“We were two thousand.”
Then he repeats: “We were two thousand surrounded by barbed wire.”
I hear breathing. His, both of ours, and then that of something breathing beneath the sand. My father takes me by the shoulders, turns me towards him and tells me:
“This is where the soldiers guarded us, mounted on horseback.”
I understand the words. Barbed wire I have seen at the entrance to the village. And I know what soldiers are. I have seen soldiers. I know what two thousand means. Two times a thousand is a lot of men. Two thousand is all the birds, all the dogs, all the trees. Two thousand birds, two thousand dogs. But I do not know two thousand men. I know only my father who is just one man, born somewhere in a town in Spain, on Victor Praderas Street, behind a railroad station.
My father cups up sand with his hands.
“Just here a soldier went right into the sea on his horse.”
And again: “We were two thousand in that camp.”
The sun, like an egg yolk, has risen completely from the sea. The froth kissing our feet has begun to spit at our thighs. The yellow is turning redder on the horizon. The air is separating from the water and birds are being born in the air and don’t yet know how to fly.
My father says: “Listen, we’ll hear the sea…”
Seashells are the broken bones of men. I collect what belongs to me of death against death and I see doors on the sea that you open with women’s hair. I also see men pushing mirrors into the sea for the sea to admire its reflection in a Sunday way.
Seashells are the sun’s milk teeth that it leaves to the world every evening as it dies. All day long I am as old as the sun. I pick up a shell and listen to it to see if it is stronger than the sea.
I say to my father: “I’ve heard another sea.”
The shell hears the sea and understands the world’s secret things. The shell is also an ear ripped from the sun. This shell was here when my father was two thousand. And this bird. And this dog barking behind him. This sawtooth butterfly too, batting its wings on a rusty tin can.
A little higher now, the sun is an even redder egg yolk in the sky. I see a boat go past. Then two boats. The blue gets to be very far off over the sea.
“We were naked and the soldiers brought us here to shit – we had the runs.”
I know what the runs are. I had a stomach ache and it lasted quite a few days.
“This beach was our shithouse, and it was the sea that wiped our asses. Think of it: two thousand asses guarded by soldiers!”
I look at the sea that I can hear in the shell. I also hear words from the shack, the ones that escaped from the flypaper and turned into things for me like the words of the sea and the things of death.
In the shell I suddenly see a naked man squatting in the sea. I also see a soldier and then carts loaded with those who have died in the night. And then, too, other men squatting in the sea and more soldiers.
I go for a swim in the sea. Tomorrow too I’ll go for a swim. Swimming for three days in a row.
And then the sea falls into its trough of white feathers. The sea sinks deep into the sea. Sinks deep into the bird. Deep into the sky. I watch it digging a tunnel into the light.
I have been swimming three times.
Later I say to my mother in the cabin:
“My father, he was two thousand and shitting in the sea, guarded by soldiers.”
And my mother says to my father:
“What have you been telling this child?”
And my father replies:
“Nothing. I told him nothing.”
* * *
—
Several seas later. Twenty seas later, I return. Twenty years on.
There is no man beside me as I listen to the beach. Behind me are two thousand ghosts holding berets being marched along by soldiers. I step over bodies, radios, white chairs, and sandcastles. Beach towels have slipped off the bodies and dark glasses are heaped up on the sand like the skeletons of eyes that have never seen anything.
I bump into ghosts of the soldiers and the severed hooves of their horses. Amidst abandoned flags and pants I contemplate an old photograph on an umbrella handle.
I picture my father’s coffin descending into Terre-Cabade Cemetery in Toulouse. Now I am older than him, and it occurs to me that since he died I have grown old enough to be his father.
My father, under heaven, gave me the finest shithouse in the world. Hope has its cesspools just as despair does, and the sea is beautiful before me. The saliva of that blue beast continues to lick at my legs.
The shack my uncle knocked together behind the ice cream man a hundred meters from the camp is no longer there, nor are my aunt’s red geraniums, nor the three chairs my mother set up every night as a bed. But I hear a kid running around the shack and the tinkling of the curtain of twisted bottle tops the cat used to play with. The windmill in the sky no longer generates the power to light the bulb in the kitchen.
I think of the dozens of words dead on the flypaper above the table, and then of all those that escaped to create things for us and against us.
I look at the sea once again. I want to pull it up over the land like a flag. And I think that a flag made of water would flood the whole earth and drown all the people. And that this would be good for the earth and for the people.
Two birds are whistling back and forth and a file of women are carrying baskets of fish on their heads. The sea will never be a flag and I am proud of the sea.
I recognize the yellow yolk of the sun trembling in the clouds. The same one I saw for the first time all those seas ago. I know that it will give birth to a white bird.
My shadow sinks into my shadow and the sea sinks into the sea. Everything is in order. The sky tunnels through the light.
I turn and call my father in a low voice because that is how you are supposed to call the dead:
“Compañero…Compañero…”
Playfully I throw his black beret between two gulls that are squabbling over the center of the sun as though its glare was carrion.
I walk in the direction of the border, shoes slung over my shoulder, because nothing is yet finished and I still have work to do on the other side of the mountains.
Suddenly a third gull appears with the cry of a woman in labor and the sun begins to stir the wind. An unseen sky swallows itself in little sips of light.
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