by Laura Resau
My heart is thudding. “How do we get there?”
“Hop in. Fifteen euros there, fifteen back.”
Wendell and I look at each other. “On y va,” he says.
I start climbing into the boat. My legs are so wobbly with anticipation that I lose my balance. I’m just starting to fall, when Wendell’s hand reaches out to the small of my back to steady me. And then, the moment I’ve regained my balance, his hand is gone.
It’s too loud to talk over the engine and wind, but halfway there, Maurice pulls over to a little cove and cuts the motor. “The Castle of If,” he says with a dramatic flourish. “In the fifteen hundreds, it was a fort to defend the city. Later, it became a prison. It’s famous for the story of The Count of Monte Cristo, written by Alexandre Dumas in the nineteenth century.”
“Can you tell us the story?” I ask.
“Oui!” he says, looking pleased. “A few hundred years ago, a young man named Dantes is falsely accused of spying and thrown into a cell in the Castle of If.” Maurice speaks slowly, savoring the story that he’s probably repeated to hundreds of tourists. “But it is in prison that he learns of a buried treasure.” He rubs his whiskers thoughtfully and adds, “You know, it’s not until one finds oneself inside the darkness of prison that one learns of hidden treasures.”
I’m not sure he’s speaking metaphorically. Maurice does look as though he could have gone to prison at some point. There’s a toughness to him, an edge.
I translate for Wendell, but he seems to understand enough to follow on his own. “What happens next?” he asks.
Maurice smiles triumphantly. “He escapes and finds the treasure. Then he disguises himself as a wealthy count and sets out to seek revenge on those who framed him.”
I jot down all this in my notebook, as sea spray speckles the pages. Maurice rambles on about Dantes’s adventures—which sound like a fifteen-hundred-page soap opera. When Maurice is about to turn on the motor again, I ask, “What else do you remember about Jimmy?”
“Ouf, he didn’t say much personal stuff. Nothing about his family or where he came from or his past or his plans for the future. But he was a great storyteller.”
“Do you remember any stories he told?” I ask.
“Oh la la la la. It was a long time ago, but here’s one I never forgot. It was late at night, Jimmy said, and he was walking on the docks. Did I mention he always had a guitar with him? Between customers he’d play. Beautiful music. Straight from the angels.” Maurice looks dramatically to the heavens. “So Jimmy was getting ready to go home in the dark. The docks were mostly deserted. Then a gang of thieves surrounded him. They demanded his money, but he had only a few coins. They got angry, said they were going to kill him. So he said, ‘Let me play one last song.’ ”
“I know a version of this folktale,” I say, wondering if J.C. was the one who first told it to Layla.
“Oh, but this is not a folktale. It’s a true story,” Maurice says. “It really happened to Jimmy.”
I look doubtfully at Wendell.
Maurice continues. “And the thieves said, ‘All right.’ So Jimmy played the most beautiful melody. He sang and he played and he brought them to tears. When it was over, they said, ‘Another one, another!’ And he played another. All night, he played to them, there on the docks. One by one those criminals drifted to sleep, and by dawn they were all sleeping like babies. And off Jimmy went, knowing that when things seemed bleakest, his song would burst forth and save him.”
Maurice gives us a knowing look. “See what I mean about treasures?”
“Treasures?” I ask, confused.
“At the darkest times—in prison or trapped by ruthless thieves—that’s when you find your treasure.”
At that, Maurice starts the engine and takes off into the blinding blue, toward the Château d’If.
Beads of salty spray coat my skin and the hum of the motor fills my ears. Wendell and I sit side by side on the small boat bench, wrapped in damp, musty life jackets. The sea wind whips through our hair as we squint ahead at the Castle of If, growing closer and bigger. It fills most of the island, which is otherwise desolate, just a few sparse trees, sand-colored rocks and crags. The castle itself is a mammoth, imposing fortress—a heavy rectangle in the middle and two thick towers visible on either side. Stone walls surround the island.
When Maurice docks, we step off the boat. The water is brilliant, mesmerizing—translucent shades of green and blue, light and dark, swirling together. Close to the rocks, the water grows wild, churning, white foam slapping the stone violently. If you were an escaped prisoner, not the kind of water you’d want to jump into.
Maurice ties the boat to the dock and says, “I’ll show you around.”
“Merci,” I say, wiping trickles of sweat and seawater from my cheeks.
Inside the fortress walls, he leads us up the stone stairs. At the ticket booth—a small room just inside the walls—we discover that no one has worked there long enough to know Jimmy. Apparently, he worked there before they’d computerized all their payroll records. There’s no record of him.
“Too bad he got fired,” Maurice says, shaking his head. “Or he might still be working here.”
“Fired?” I don’t like the idea of my father getting fired. “Why?”
“I’ll show you,” says Maurice, leading us across a desolate stretch of weeds and parched dirt toward the castle. His short, thick legs don’t seem well adapted to land. Under normal circumstances, I’d be asking this man questions about his take on life for my notebook. Sailors always have interesting perspectives. But now, all I want to hear about is my father. I want to squeeze out every last drop of memory of him.
Up close, I can tell from the tiny window slits that the château’s walls are many feet thick. We walk through the giant doors, through a museum and gift shop, and emerge into a stone courtyard with a well at its center, surrounded by cells.
“There haven’t been prisoners inside here for centuries,” Maurice assures us, as if we’re scared one might jump out at us.
The cells are refreshingly cool and dark inside. Scratched into the stone walls are words, symbols, names. Some etchings look ancient, some new. It’s hard to tell where the genuine prisoner graffiti ends and the tourist graffiti begins. I run my hands over the walls, lingering on the words that look oldest, deepest, most worn.
“Names, mostly,” Maurice comments.
“Makes sense,” Wendell says. “You’re stuck in here for years, you write your name to remember who you are.”
“Or who you were,” I add.
He nods. “Or who you might be if you ever get out.”
“Come upstairs,” Maurice says, and leads us up spiral stairs to the second story. We walk into a large, circular room inside one of the towers. A few slits in the massive walls form narrow windows—rectangular tunnels with patches of blue sky and sea at the end. Slivers of immense beauty.
Maurice peeks his head into the entrance of the tunnel-windows. “They say that homing pigeons delivered messages from the outside world. Those were the highlights of the prisoners’ days, those little notes from the pigeons.”
I study the window, just wide enough for a pigeon to fit through. Back in Aix, Madame Chevalier is probably sitting at her window, waiting for Maude’s next message. Does Madame Chevalier feel she’s in a prison? What’s stopping her from leaving her post by the window?
Maurice comes over, standing beside me. “This was Jimmy’s favorite cell. After closing time, he’d stay in here until he had to leave.” Maurice drops his voice. “Then he started sneaking in and staying here overnight.”
“Why?” This bothers me. It’s creepy.
Maurice shrugs, surveying the wall. “It’s around here somewhere,” he mutters.
“What’s around here?”
“The final straw! The reason why they finally fired him. He’d been missing work and coming late for a while, and then he did this thing. Imagine, a museum guard defacing a monumen
t historique!” Maurice points to a spot on the wall, announcing, “Et voilà!”
Wendell flicks on his flashlight, the tiny LED beam casting a circle of white light on the stone. He moves the beam toward Maurice’s fingertip. Now I can make out words scratched into the stone. They’re hard to decipher but look relatively recent.
It’s a list of some kind.
“It’s in Spanish,” I murmur. “Sea, sky, music …”
“Maybe his native language,” Wendell says. “Can you make out the fourth word?” I squint at it.
It looks like … Layla?
“Layla?” Wendell whispers.
“It’s really him,” I manage to whisper. Any last doubt is gone. “My father. He wrote this.” I run my fingers over the letters, tracing their smooth pathways.
Wendell pulls out his camera and starts snapping pictures. “But why this collection of words?”
“Maybe it’s a list of beautiful things in life,” I say. “Things worth getting out of prison for.”
“But he wasn’t in prison.”
“Maybe he felt like he was. In his letters to Layla, he seemed really depressed after she left him.”
“Understandable,” Wendell says in a raw voice. I can’t see his face, hidden behind his camera.
Suddenly, the darkness feels claustrophobic with its teasing slivers of blue light. I turn to Maurice. “Can we go on the roof?”
“Bien sûr.” He leads us up another staircase, through the doorway, into sunshine and wind. The view over the wall makes me catch my breath—the expanse of water and sky and unfathomable openness. There couldn’t be a more complete contrast, emerging from such darkness into such endless light.
I try to enter the state of my father’s mind when he wrote Layla’s name on the wall.
Sea, sky, music, and Layla. Were these his pigeons? His treasures? What gave him hope? What kept him going from day to day despite his sadness?
It’s sunset as we putter back to the port in Maurice’s blue dinghy. Golden orange light dances over the water, softly, gently, compared to the glaring light of midday. At the dock, as we climb out of the boat, I notice a word painted across the side in bright white letters. Mercedes. “Maurice, is your boat named after the car or a woman?” I ask.
He chuckles. “A woman. And not just any woman. The true love of Dantes, the one he was about to marry the day he was arrested. And nearly twenty years later, the only person able to see past his disguise as the Count of Monte Cristo, into his true self.”
“Did they ever get together?” Wendell asks.
“Dumas leaves it open to interpretation. But if you ask me, they do.” He winks. “True love is tough. It can survive for years and years, flowing underground like a spring. And now and then, you think it’s disappeared, but it’s been there all along.”
We pay Maurice, throwing in a big tip. Wendell and I take turns shaking his thick, rough hand, thanking him. I write his number in my notebook in case we have more questions, and then make one last-ditch effort. “Maurice, are you sure you don’t remember where Jimmy went? Or his last name? Anything else about him?”
Maurice thinks, studying his boat. “I’m sorry. It was so long ago.” He squints at me in the evening light. “Can I ask, mademoiselle, who is this man to you?”
“I’m the daughter of Layla. She’s the woman he fell in love with in Greece seventeen years ago.”
He stares. “He’s your—”
“Mon père.”
Maurice closes his eyes for a long time, as though he’s digging into every last cranny of his memory. “Jimmy wore a pair of silver sunglasses, the round kind. He kept a little Walkman clipped to his jeans. He wore his hair long and shaggy. Oh, and a necklace. Made of leather and shells and a nut from a tree. Said it protected him from the evil eye. Deer’s eye, that’s what he called the nut.”
I memorize each detail to write later in my notebook. Each detail is filling out a little piece of my father, until I almost have a picture of him.
“Bonne chance, mademoiselle. Bonne chance. He’s a lucky man, Jimmy. To have a daughter like you.”
For some reason, these last words push me over the edge. “Merci, Maurice,” I manage to say, just before turning to leave. Then the tears well up, warm and unstoppable, spilling down my cheeks. I walk faster and faster, wiping my face on my arm.
Wendell jogs beside me, trying to keep up. I wish he would put his hand on the small of my back, the way he did to catch me on the boat. I imagine his hand there, barely touching the curve in my back, as we walk in the dusk, toward the bus stop, keeping a meter’s distance between us, a space wider than an ocean.
On the way home on the bus, Wendell and I talk in the gathering darkness. My tears have stopped but my head’s still full of fuzz.
“So let’s go over what we know,” he says, in a reassuring, businesslike voice. “Maybe you should take out your notebook?”
I pull it from my bag and, feeling better already, turn to a new page. I write:
My father Jimmy
He loved Layla.
He was a romantic.
He played beautiful guitar music.
He loved the water and the sky.
His native language might have been Spanish.
He wore a black Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, round sunglasses, and a deer’s eye necklace.
We talk about the clues, examining them from every angle. Soon our conversation meanders, naturally and comfortably, to other topics—Madame Candelaria, Maurice, The Count of Monte Cristo.
“The Castle of If,” I say, musing. “What a perfect name.”
“Why perfect?” Wendell asks.
“A prison fortress made of ifs. Made of assumptions. Like the prison Jean-Claude’s made for himself. If he talks to his parents again, all his pain and guilt will come back. Or if he tells his friends about his past, they’ll think he’s terrible.”
Wendell nods. “Or if he lets himself love his parents, he’ll lose them, too.”
After that, we fall silent. I wonder which ifs have formed my own walls. If I become closer to someone, it will hurt more when I lose him. If I break up with him before I lose him, maybe it will hurt less.
Wendell leans his head against the window, lets his eyelids fall shut. It’s probably been hard, I realize, excruciating even, for him to be with me all day. He’s been so careful not to touch me or look at me too long or too closely.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I whisper.
I don’t think he hears me. Maybe he’s fallen asleep.
My mind wanders to my father and his dark cell and his music that calmed the hearts of criminals. I wonder about his love for Layla, and Dantes’s love for Mercedes, flowing underground for years. I wonder about true love, if that’s what J.C. had for my mother, even after one night. I wonder about Vincent and Madame Chevalier, and what their lives would have been like if they’d admitted their love years ago. I wonder about eternal life, if it would get boring, if you’d get sick of yourself and your thoughts and the world … or if things would seem new and different every day. I wonder if living forever would be terribly sad, always loving people, then leaving them behind. I wonder how you’d survive so many losses and still be able to love.
I let my eyes linger on Wendell’s face, which is only safe to do when he’s asleep. His face looks tender with car headlights passing over it. I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t broken up with him. There are oceans of things I don’t know about him, things I want to know. I watch him breathing rhythmically, a lock of hair fallen over his face. I look at him the way Vincent looks at his room full of dusty old treasures.
Steam rises from two small capuccino cups, swirling upward between Layla and me in the morning sunlight at Café Cerise. Layla’s listening carefully as I read my notes about Jimmy. She’s been unusually quiet since I came home last night. I gave her the highlights of my trip to Marseille, and her reaction was surprisingly subdued. She said she was tired, and I looked exhausted, and we co
uld talk about it later.
After reading the deer nut necklace item, I close my notebook. “Any of that jog your memory, Layla?”
She licks some cinnamon-specked foamed milk from her lip and tilts her head thoughtfully. “Well, obviously, J.C. wasn’t wearing sunglasses at night in the ocean. The necklace is a definite maybe. I am drawn to guys who wear necklaces.”
I can’t believe she’s taking this so lightly. It’s a huge, life-changing revelation. “But it has to be him, Layla! There’s the Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. The Greece connection. Not to mention he was so in love with you he wrote your name on a prison wall!”
“Okay, Zeeta. So it’s him. I’m just not sure what to say. You’re not really any closer to finding him. Yes, it’s nice he cared about me—”
“What if this was your shot at true love, Layla? And you missed it?”
“Oh, no. If it was true love, our paths will cross again.”
“Shouldn’t you try to make your paths cross?”
Layla fiddles absently with her tiny spoon, staring into space. “What if I try, and he’s some stuffy businessman now? Or a cheeseball politician? I’d rather leave it up to the universe.” She twirls her finger around her hair. “Anyway, we’re fine how we are. Completely fine. We don’t need a man to come in and ruin everything.”
“How do you know he’d ruin anything?”
She rubs her temple. “What if he doesn’t like how I’ve raised you, Z? What if he says I’m not a fit parent? What if he interferes? Tries to make you settle down somewhere? Makes me feel guilty for not doing it sooner?”
“Layla, he doesn’t exactly seem too stable himself. A normal man would just introduce himself without playing games.”
“But what if he has a good reason? What if he’s spying on us to see if I’m a decent parent? What if—” She looks at me, her eyes welling up.
I see it now. She’s trapped in her own castle prison of ifs. “What if what?” I ask.