Léon and Louise

by Alex Capus

  Léon bought two baguettes, some carrots, leeks, onions, thyme, and a bottle of Muscadet from a grocer’s shop in the Rue de Paris. Then they fetched their bicycles and wheeled them down to the casino in the light of the setting sun. From there a wide boardwalk of oak planks led across the shingle beach and past a long row of whitewashed bathing huts. Behind them stood proud seaside villas with encircling verandas and white curtains that silently, airily billowed and subsided, billowed and subsided, as if they were breathing.

  Léon had noticed from the lighthouse that, far beyond the villas at the southern end of the beach, quite a lot of driftwood had collected. This he planned to use as firewood. It was growing chilly now. The last of the bathers had gone home to rinse the sea salt off their bodies and titivate themselves for dinner. Léon and Louise found a dry, sheltered spot between two big boulders at the foot of the chalk cliffs. They scraped away the pebbles until the sand was exposed, then spread out a blanket and Léon lit a fire of dry seaweed and driftwood. Meanwhile, Louise sat on the blanket hugging her knees and gazing out at the orange and lilac sea as if it were the most dramatic spectacle imaginable.

  ‘Let’s get the mussels,’ Léon said, rolling up his trouserlegs and taking the saucepan from his bicycle. ‘There should be some out there in the pools among the rocks, where those gulls are strutting around. The tourists never collect them, they prefer to buy them in a shop.’

  The gulls emitted angry screams and reluctantly spread their wings. They took a couple of hops and rose into the air after two or three wingbeats, were caught by the updraught and sailed up the cliff face to the green meadows above, only to dive back at once with their sharp beaks menacingly directed downwards, then go into a glide just before impact and soar into the air again.

  There were plenty of mussels in the rock pools, so the saucepan was soon full. Producing two knives from his pocket, Léon showed Louise how to scrape the algae and beards off the shells. Then they returned to their spot between the boulders. He flopped down on the blanket with a sigh. It had been a perfect day; his cup of joy was overflowing. But Louise remained standing. She paced irresolutely to and fro for a bit and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Come here and make yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘I won’t do anything to you.’

  ‘Be thankful I don’t do anything to you.’

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Like to do anything before it gets dark? Shall we go for a walk along the cliffs?’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Supper won’t be long.’

  ‘Shall I buy something?’

  ‘We’ve got everything,’ said Léon. All I have to do is slice the carrots, onions and leeks and boil them for a few minutes.’

  ‘Should I get something sweet for dessert? A couple of chocolate éclairs?’

  ‘It’s half-past nine,’ said Léon. ‘I’d be surprised if the pâtisserie is still open.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  She was back within half an hour. Meantime, the earth had rotated nightwards. The first stars were twinkling in the sky, the moon had not yet risen. Some dark clouds were drifting so low over the bay that the flashes from the lighthouse grazed their undersides.

  Léon removed the saucepan from the fire. He could hear shingle crunching under Louise’s feet behind him.

  ‘Supper’s ready. Did you get the éclairs?’

  She didn’t answer.

  He stirred the saucepan, fished out a piece of eelgrass and an empty shell. Then he felt Louise come up behind him and rest her hands on his shoulders. Her hair tickled his neck, her breath fanned his right cheek.

  ‘You tricked me.’ Her right hand released his shoulder, slid beneath his armpit and pinched his nose. ‘You did it deliberately – you played me like a fish.’

  ‘Your fingers will rot off in the night.’

  ‘Is it true, what it says on that slip of paper?’

  ‘Absolutely. For ever and ever,’

  Léon freed his nose from her grip, turned round and gazed into her green eyes, which were shining in the firelight. And then they kissed.

  6

  Léon couldn’t have known that, at the moment when he was woken by a steamer’s foghorn, half a million exhausted German soldiers were lacing up their boots in readiness for a final assault on Paris. If he had, he might have lain still at Louise’s side and not budged from the beach; then everything would have turned out differently. The air was cool and damp, the sky pale and misty. The tide had come in and gone out again, the shingle was glistening wet, the blanket fluff beaded with drops of dew. The spars of a sunken ship were jutting above the surface beyond the breakers.

  Léon looked up at the white chalk cliffs in which gulls were roosting in their nests and warming their beaks in their plumage, then higher up at the thin fringe of turf at the very top, above which leaden grey rain clouds were drifting in the wind. It would remain cold and damp on the beach until the warming sun appeared there towards midday. The longer he looked up, the more vivid his sensation that the clouds were not scudding past above his head, but that he himself and the beach and the cliffs were gliding along beneath the clouds.

  He propped himself on his elbows and studied the outlines of Louise’s slight form, which was rising and falling in time to the surf. Her dark, tousled hair resembled cat’s fur. He left her side and got up to fetch wood and kindle the fire again. When the fire was well alight he walked along the tideline, looking for things the sea might have washed ashore during the night. At the eastern end of the beach he found a red and white float, on the way back a plank two metres long and four scallops. He put them all down beside the fire. Then, because Louise was still asleep, he went down to the sea and stripped to his underpants.

  The water was cold. He waded out, dived under a breaker, and swam a few strokes. He tasted salt on his lips, felt his eyes sting in the familiar way, and turned over on his back, submerging his ears and letting himself be gently rocked by the waves. And all this while, at the same moment on the Chemin des Dames, the cloying bananalike scent of phosgene gas was creeping along the trenches for the first time in many months and turning into hydrochloric acid in the soldiers’ lungs. Tens of thousands of young men were literally coughing up their lungs while the survivors, unless artillery shells had blown them to bits, were fleeing in the direction of Paris with their eyes starting out of their heads and burnt, poisoned skin falling in strips from their faces and hands.

  Léon rocked on the waves, enjoying the sense of weightlessness, and gazed up at the sky, which was still wreathed in dark clouds. After a while he heard a whistle. It was Louise, who had sat up and was waving to him. He let the next wave carry him back to the shore, pulled on his shirt and trousers over his wet body and sat down beside her near the fire. Louise cut last night’s bread into slices and toasted them over the flames.

  ‘You snored a bit in the night,’ she said.

  ‘And you whispered my name in your sleep,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a bad liar,’ she said. ‘Some coffee would be nice now.’

  ‘It’s starting to rain.’

  ‘That’s not rain,’ she said, ‘just a cloud flying too low.’

  ‘The cloud’ll make us wet if we stay here.’

  Louise rolled up the blankets while Léon scoured the saucepan with sand. Then they pushed their bicycles back into the town. In the harbour there was a bistro that had already opened. It was called the Café du Commerce like Léon’s regular haunt. Three unshaven men in crumpled linen suits were standing at the counter sipping their coffees and studiously avoiding each other’s eye. Léon and Louise sat down at a table beside the window and ordered cafés au lait and croissants.

  ‘Oh, we’ve got into bad company.’ Louise indicated the counter with her half-eaten croissant. ‘Take a look at those chumps.’

  ‘Those chumps can hear you.’

  ‘Who cares? The louder we speak, the less they’ll think we’re talking about them. Typical Pari
sian chumps, they are. Parisian chumps of the first order, all four of them.’

  ‘An expert on the subject, are you?’

  ‘The one with the blue sunglasses, who’s hiding his face under his hat, thinks he’s at least as famous as Caruso or Zola, when his name’s Fournier or something similar. And the one with the moustache, who’s reading the financial paper and frowning – he thinks he’s Rockefeller because he owns three shares in a railway company.’

  ‘And the other two?’

  ‘They’re just high-class chumps who never say hello or talk to people in case they grasp what bores they are.’

  ‘People do get bored,’ Léon retorted. ‘I do sometimes, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s different. When you or I get bored it’s in the hope that something’ll change sometime. They get bored because they’re always hoping that everything will stay the same.’

  ‘To me they all look like perfectly normal family men. They’ve slunk out of the house on the pretext of going to the baker’s. Now they’re treating themselves to fifteen minutes’ peace and quiet before going back to their villas and rejoining their nagging wives and petulant children.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘The one in the blue sunglasses spent all night quarrelling with his wife because she doesn’t love him any more and he could happily have dispensed with that information. And the one with the newspaper is dreading the interminable afternoons on the beach, when he’s expected to play with his children and hasn’t a clue how to go about it.’

  ‘Shall we go to the fishermen’s café?’ asked Louise.

  ‘We aren’t fishermen.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Not to us, maybe, but to the fishermen. They’ll think we’re Parisian chumps, just because we aren’t fishermen.’ Léon drew the curtain aside and looked out of the window. ‘The wet cloud’s gone.’

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ said Louise. ‘Let’s go home, Léon. We’ve seen the sea now.’

  Permeated by sun, wind and rain showers, fresh sea air and a night without much sleep, Léon and Louise set out for home. Their route took them back along the same roads, across the same hills and through the same villages as they had seen the day before. They drank water from the same village fountain and bought bread from the same bakery. Their bicycles hummed along dependably, and before long the sun reappeared. All was as it had been the previous day, yet all was imbued with magic. The sky was wider, the air fresher and the future brighter. Léon felt he was truly awake for the first time ever – as if he had come into the world tired and the whole of his life hitherto had wearily traipsed along until this weekend, when he’d woken up at last. There was a life before Le Tréport and a life after Le Tréport.

  At midday they had some soup at an inn, then snoozed in a barn beside the road. And although all that had so far happened is pure legend, what began that midday, while they were asleep in the barn, is the account my grandfather often liked to give many decades later of how, at the end of May 1918, he became embroiled in the Great War for the first and only time. He always told his story with charming restraint. It was believable and accurate in every detail, even after countless repetitions, save for one little fib which every member of the family saw through. This was that, for reasons of propriety, Louise wasn’t a girl but a workmate named Louis.

  When Léon and Louise – or Louis – woke up after an hour’s nap in the barn, they heard, through its tiled roof, a distant rumble which they mistook for a thunderstorm. Hastily climbing down from the hay loft, they pushed their bicycles outside and rode off, their hair and clothes full of straw, in the hope of putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the approaching storm and getting to Saint-Luc before it descended on them.

  As it turned out, the thunder was not an atmospheric phenomenon but German artillery fire. The rumble developed into a series of crisp detonations. Then the air was rent by hisses, whirrs and howls, and the first columns of debris erupted beyond a small wood. Panic-stricken, they pedalled madly along the highroad while more columns of debris went up behind, ahead and beside them. They rode past a fresh, smoking shell-hole with the roots of a fallen apple tree jutting skywards from its lip. The air was filled with acrid smoke. They were completely disoriented. Since danger seemed to threaten them on all sides, any thought of turning round and going back was out of the question.

  Faster and faster they rode through the exploding countryside, Louise in the lead and Léon in her wake, and when the distance between them increased and she looked back enquiringly, he waved her on. ‘Keep going, keep going!’ he shouted. When she hesitated and seemed to be waiting for him, he lost his temper and yelled, ‘Keep going, damn it!’ So she resolutely stood up in the saddle and pedalled off.

  Louise had just disappeared over a rise in the ground when a cloud of smoke and debris spurted into the air at that very spot. Léon uttered a yell and pedalled madly uphill. He had almost reached the brow of the hill when the road exploded a stone’s-throw ahead of him. Debris flew tree-high into the air and a pall of brown smoke billowed outwards. At that moment an aeroplane appeared. It sprayed the road with machine-gun fire, then banked away just as Léon, travelling at full speed with two bullets in his stomach, rode blindly into the crater, where he lost a molar, consciousness, and, in the next few hours, a great deal of blood.

  7

  At half-past five on 17 September 1928, when Léon Le Gall hung up his laboratory apron in the locker, took out his hat and coat, and set off for home as usual, he never guessed that his life would take a decisive turn in the next few minutes. As he had a thousand times before, he walked along the Seine by way of the Quai des Orfèvres, conducting his usual survey of the second-hand booksellers’ stalls as he passed them, then crossed the bridge to the Left Bank and the Place Saint-Michel.

  This time, however, he did not for once walk on up the boulevard into the Quartier Latin and turn down the Rue des Écoles, where he lived with his wife Yvonne and their four-year-old son Michel on the third floor of No. 14, immediately opposite the Collège de France and the École Polytechnique, a new, airy, three-bedroom flat with parquet floors and moulded ceilings. This time he deviated from his usual route home by going down into the Place Saint-Michel Métro station and travelling two stops in the Porte d’Orléans direction so as to get some tartes aux fraises from Yvonne’s favourite pâtisserie. It was the end of the working day in all the French capital’s banks, offices and department stores, and the streets and the Métro were populated by thousands of men who looked indistinguishable in their dark or grey suits, white shirts and discreet ties. Many wore hats and most of them sported moustaches, some carried canes and many wore spats, and each was on his way from his very own desk to his very own kitchen table, whence, after his very own supper, he would retire to his very own wing chair and thereafter to his very own bed, where, if he was lucky, his very own wife would keep him warm throughout the night until, after shaving, he would drink coffee from his very own cup and set off once more for his very own desk.

  Léon had long ceased to marvel at the banal absurdity of this daily mass migration. For the first few years after he succumbed to the city’s gravitational pull, he had continued to suffer from nostalgia and found it hard to stomach the Parisians’ barking voices and aggressive self-infatuation, the roar of the traffic and the stench of the coal-fired central heating systems. He had constantly felt surprised to have become one of the hordes who trod the pavements day after day and flaunted their new suits, either sticking out their elbows or hugging the walls, many for a few months only but others for as long as thirty or forty years, some in the belief that the world had been waiting for them alone, others in the hope that the world would notice them yet, and still others bitterly aware that the world has never waited for anyone in the course of its existence.

  To Léon, who had then felt cut off from the world and imprisoned in his own thoughts, it had been a mystery how all the other fellows could slurp soup wi
th gusto and aspire to succeed in absurd professions, tell silly jokes and flirt with peroxide blondes, without feeling in the least bit hemmed in or cut off from the world. But then his first son Michel saw the light and loudly brought it to his notice that of course a man has to slurp soup, so a desire to succeed in absurd professions is not unreasonable in itself, and that this exertion is easier to endure if you occasionally tell a silly joke or flirt with a peroxide blonde. Besides, Léon simply hadn’t the time to feel cut off from the world and imprisoned in his own thoughts, which meant that a substantial number of philosophical questions pretty soon underwent a dramatic loss of urgency.

  Instead, he learned to appreciate the tenderness of an unaffected smile and the unaccustomed delights of an undisturbed night’s sleep, and after his first walk with wife and child and pram in the gossamer sunlight of the Jardin des Plantes he was so reconciled to life in the metropolis that he only rarely felt homesick for Cherbourg beach and longed only at quiet moments to relaunch the old sailing dinghy with his friends Patrice and Joël and take it out into the Channel.

  But Léon still thought of Louise every day. He was now twenty-eight years old. It was ten years since he had ridden into a shell-hole halfway between Le Tréport and Saint-Luc-sur-Marne. He had never managed to discover how long he lay there in debris and mud and his own blood, sodden by hours of rain, sometimes unconscious from the pain and sometimes roused by its intensity, before a khaki lorry adorned with a red cross came lumbering up at dusk and stopped on the edge of the crater. Two medical orderlies, who spoke a peculiar French and turned out to be Canadians, hoisted him out of the mud with practised hands, applied a pressure dressing to his stomach, and bedded him down in the back of the lorry with twelve wounded soldiers.

  ‘Wait,’ cried Léon, grabbing one of the orderlies by the sleeve. There’s someone else lying out there.’