Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  It’s the year 1884, the impressionist movement is in full swing across Europe, and a young stockbroker by the name of Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin is not very happy at all. Stuck in a dead-end job, married to a Danish woman accustomed to the comforts of a decent, bourgeois life, and unable to tend to his beloved paints, he feels trapped, bound by conventions he cannot understand. His bohemian friends down in the quarter—Pissarro, Cézanne, and that Dutch oddball Van Gogh—see promise in him and urge him to devote himself full-time to his passion. After much arguing with his comfortably middle-class wife, he finally does, leaving behind the stock market forever. In the poverty that follows, she in turn leaves him, taking their five children right along with her. One can almost hear her voice berating him on her way out the door: “What the hell is the matter with you, Paul?” He sighs, he slumps beside his first half-finished canvas, he does not know.

  Gauguin is quite certain, however, that he needs to get out of Paris. Unable to find his artistic voice amid the ruins of his life, he decides to leave it all behind forever and seek inspiration in a place that might prove gentler on the spirit. After several years of struggling as a painter and bouncing around the artist colonies of France, he packs his bags and jumps a steamer bound for the French colonies in Polynesia. Settling first in Tahiti, and later the Marquesas, he at last finds the inspiration that had previously eluded him, in a place and among a people that set fire to his soul. In his new environs, his faculties flourish, and he produces painting after wondrous painting, helping to birth postimpressionism in the process. On May 8, 1903, a fifty-four-year-old Paul Gauguin finally bids the earthly firmament a final adieu and is buried in the Cimetière Calvaire, on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa. He never did come to realize the profound impact his paintings would have on the art world during his lifetime, nor could he have possibly known that seventy-four years later, when a traveling exhibition of his work happened to alight at the small but respectable Cleveland Museum of Art, a ten-year-old Barry Bleecker, brought there by his mother as a present for his birthday, would stand fixated and bewitched before the sun-ripened curves and alluring eyes of The Spirit of the Dead Watching and decide, with boyish determination, what he wanted to be when he grew up.

  A painter. Just like Monsieur Paul Gauguin.

  Years pass, times change, it is now 1973 in Paris, and a middle-aged chanson star named Jacques Brel is also not feeling very well at all. After several grueling decades of pouring his heart and soul into every performance, his will and body are both giving out. He knows he is not in good health, and his doctor only confirms what he has suspected for some time—his days on this earth are numbered. Against his doctor’s advice, however, the world-famous singer decides he’d rather spend his life’s dwindling remainder sailing around the world with his wife than wasting away in some hospital ward. He drops a sizable chunk of his fortune on a sixty-foot sailing yacht, tells his wife to pack her bags and bring along a bathing suit, and casts off into the great blue yonder. And as fate would have it, after puttering around the various ports of the globe, destiny blows him right into Atuona Bay, at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. And there, amid the blue honey water and white sugar sands and wide-open smiles of the native Polynesians, he knows he has finally found the place—not where he wants to die, but, rather, where he wants to live. Just like Gauguin before him, he had been searching for a land that was gentler on his spirit, only to discover an island that set fire to his soul. He is happier there than he has ever been in his life, and five years later, when the tumor he’d been trying to outrun finally catches up to him, his body is laid to rest in the very same cemetery on Hiva Oa as the bold postimpressionist who preceded him, their graves literally only yards apart. Jacques may have had some inkling of the great influence he’d had on the musicians of his day, but he would never come to know the full extent of his legacy—particularly that four years after his death, a nine-year-old Sophie Caroline Ducel would be sitting in her grandparents’ cottage deep in the Pyrenees, nestled snugly beneath the Brèche de Roland in the peaks of Gavarnie, singing along with her grand-père to an old phonograph record of “Dans le port d’Amsterdam”—his favorite song—while her dear grand-mère shelled beans for a cassoulet, too shy to sing but not too timid to hum.

  Two very different individuals indeed, ending up on the same remote island because of a common dream.

  17

  Barry and Sophie woke early the next morning, just before sunrise, to a sky that still held at its rim the faint ghosts of stars. Sophie rose first, crawling out from the palm shelter and stifling a yawn. Barry opened his eyes moments later, roused by the sound of her sipping water. He set the flare gun on the ground and swung his feet over the hammock’s side, letting them both land squarely on the dew-damp sand. He plunked in his contacts from the case in his pocket, stood up straight, and looked right at her; they had both slept soundly through the night for the first time since their arrival.

  “Bonjour,” she said, handing him the water bag.

  “Bonjour,” Barry replied in his best approximation of conversational French.

  “Ça va?” she asked.

  “Oui,” Barry answered, “ça va.” He skinned a pair of leftover bananas and handed one her way with a “Bon appétit”—which, to his surprise, she actually accepted. She said something back to him that was beyond his proficiency, but he took a strategic bite to disguise that fact. Together they chewed their starchy breakfast and watched the crowning of a newborn sun light up the waters, ushering in a whole new day.

  After their banana breakfast and separate trips into the palms to alleviate bodily necessities, Barry and Sophie decided that the first step in their plan would be to better organize the camp. The deflated raft was rolled up in the duffel bag and stowed away in the shelter for safekeeping, alongside the various elements of the survival kit—excluding the flare gun, which they both agreed should be kept on hand at all times. Water and bananas, their quotidian staples, would always remain by the entrance for easy access at night. And following the aforementioned trips into the trees, it was also agreed that a latrine ought to be dug, situated a good, hygienically responsible distance away from the camp. Using the plastic oars from the raft as shovels, they cut a shallow but functional toilette from the sandy soil, in a clearing surrounded by palms for at least a hint of privacy. Barry carted in a shirtful of sand to be used for covering up that which was left behind and had the honor shortly thereafter of putting the new facilities to the test. He would have killed for a National Geographic to look at but settled instead for a swarming gnat cloud and the knotty burls of old palm trunks—not quite the glossy images he was accustomed to, but about as geographic as it gets.

  The rest of the afternoon was devoted to conducting a survey of the island’s food sources. Of course, neither Barry nor Sophie was aware of the scientific names or natural histories of their potential foodstuffs; in some cases, they weren’t even sure that what they were looking at was edible. In a survival situation, however, primordial instincts kick in, and both began to see the world through a fresh pair of hunter-gatherer’s eyes.

  First and foremost, there were the ubiquitous bananas. Stubby, green, and riddled with buckshotlike seeds, they were close enough to the familiar Chiquita to be edible but still wild enough to propagate without assistance from man—which was precisely why, unbeknownst to Barry and Sophie, the ancient mariners of the South Pacific had planted them there in the first place. They attempted a rough census of their number but quickly realized that the banana plants were bountiful beyond counting. With a shared gulp and a sigh of resignation, they both came to the realization that the green bunches that surrounded them would essentially be their daily bread.

  It wasn’t all bananas, however. There was also the small grove of coconut palms on the island’s lee, with nuts rich in both milk and meat. A pass by the rocky cove revealed more maxima clams than Barry had initially estimated, not to mention a few strands of washed-up seaweed that did seem edible, i
f only they could find more of it. The boulder-studded mountain in the island’s middle was speckled with nests of the sooty tern, more than a few of which cradled a very edible egg. And of course, the waters around them did hold fish. Paddletail snappers out by the reef, black jacks that traveled in slow-moving schools, and even the occasional mahi-mahi. However, the only decent fishing spot on the island was the very same cove where that exceedingly large octopod—theatrically dubbed “Balthazar” by Sophie when Barry pointed the creature out to her—lurked in the shadows, ready to pilfer whatever bit on the line.

  And that was pretty much it. A few coconuts to contribute some much-needed electrolytes and lipids, the occasional clam to put a little protein in their diet, a sooty tern egg now and then to bump up the calorie count, the odd fish when Balthazar might happen to be sleeping, and other than that, bushel upon bushel of bright green bananas.

  Their food survey concluded, Barry and Sophie decided on a quick water break before scaling the mountain. Swatting gnats and fanning themselves with banana leaves, they made their way to the drinking pools at its base. They splashed water on the backs of their necks and faces, and they drank it in gulps from the cupped bowls of their hands. For comfort’s sake, Sophie briefly unfastened the rear clasp of her bra strap and scratched at a welt that had formed beneath it.

  “So tell me something,” Barry began, politely opting to avert his eyes. “How did your English get so good?”

  “I do not sink zat my English is zat good,” she answered with a mocking smile and a comically thick Maurice Chevalier accent.

  “It’s a lot better than my French.”

  “I could know five words, and it would still be better than your French.”

  “I sing a mean ‘Frère Jacques.’”

  “No, trust me, you don’t.”

  “Well, I’ll sing ‘Alouette’ next if you don’t tell me how you learned English.”

  “Please don’t. It was the Beatles.”

  “What about them?”

  “My parents loved the Beatles. I listened to Beatles songs all the time growing up. I memorized all the words. We all live in a yellow submarine. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Eleanor Bigby.”

  “It’s Eleanor Rigby. And there’s got to be more than Beatles songs.”

  She shrugged nonchalantly. “I guess there was Lisbon, too.”

  “In Portugal?”

  “Oui. I studied architecture there for my Erasmus year through a program with my university in Montpellier.”

  “But what does that have to do with English?”

  “I didn’t speak Portuguese. Nobody there spoke French. English was the easiest way to communicate. All of our classes were in English, too. Étienne was the only one in the city I spoke French with. That was actually when we started going out. I knew him from my university, but we weren’t together until our study abroad year in Lisbon.”

  She had never specifically mentioned her husband before. Barry felt a sharp pang of regret for bringing it up and had to imagine she did, too. He waited to be certain she would not choke up again before saying what he had been meaning to for quite some time.

  “I’m sorry, by the way. I can’t imagine what this must be like for you. He seemed like a very good person.”

  “Merci. He was. But honestly, I really can’t handle thinking about all that right now. So let’s talk about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like why you flew all the way to the Marquesas straight from the office to see the grave of Paul Gauguin. I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Barry blushed, suddenly self-conscious—he hadn’t told anyone the full story, and in hindsight it seemed utterly asinine. “It’s pretty stupid.”

  “Most of the things men do are. Just tell me.”

  He took a deep breath. “When I was a kid back in Cleveland, my mom took me to see a traveling exhibition of his work at the art museum. I loved it—something about it really made an impression on me, and I decided at that moment that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.”

  “Ooh, the impressionists made an impression on you. But let me guess. You didn’t become an artist.”

  Barry shook his head. “Nope. When I was eighteen, I sent my portfolio to Parsons, and I also applied to Princeton. I got into both, but everyone told me I should go to Princeton, so I did. And after graduation, I applied to an M.F.A. program at the School of Visual Arts, but also for a sales position on Wall Street. I was accepted by both, but everyone told me I should get into finance, so I did.” Barry cringed uncomfortably. “For twelve years.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened. I had pretty much given up. I hated my life, I was miserable, but I had security and comfort, and I was too scared to leave it behind and venture off into the unknown like that.”

  “Something must have changed, then.”

  Barry nodded. “It did. Last month, another Gauguin exhibition came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And like an idiot, I went.”

  Barry tactfully left out the part about the panic attack, and the hyperventilating, and the hour he spent weeping inconsolably in the museum cafeteria, while Ashley, still his girlfriend at the time, filed her nails and stared absently out the window.

  Sophie smiled with eyebrows fully arched—maybe there was more to this imbécile d’américain than she had thought. “Let me guess. You decided there, in front of all those beautiful paintings of half-naked Polynesian women, to finally quit and become an artist. In a fit of self-righteous enthusiasm, you bought some tubes of Sennelier, some brand-new Kolinsky brushes, and you flew out to see your idol Paul Gauguin, hoping to find inspiration like he did far away from civilization, lost among the palm trees.”

  Barry put his face in his hands and shook his head, tingling with embarrassment. “Yep. Pretty much.”

  “Well, congratulations. Mission accomplished. I’m not Polynesian, but you can paint me if you like.”

  “Find me some oil paints and brushes, and I will.”

  “Deal.” They exchanged ironic, amused glances, leaning back against the volcanic rocks, lost among the palm trees, at the very least. “It is very noble of you,” Sophie went on, “but you know, it’s a dead medium. Nobody paints anymore.”

  “Well, it will be even deader if nobody tries.”

  “English isn’t my first language, but I’m fairly confident that ‘deader’ is not a word. If something is dead, then it’s dead.”

  “Then maybe someone can revive it.”

  “And you’ll be the one to keep it alive?”

  “I don’t know. At the moment, I’m mostly worried about preserving my own life.”

  “Touché.” Sophie nudged him teasingly but approvingly with her foot. “So who do you like, then, besides Gauguin? Let me guess. You had a poster of Starry Night in your bedroom, and Monet’s floating lily pads. A little Pablo, perhaps?”

  “No way, Picasso was a phony. He just copied his starving artist friends and took credit for their work. He never suffered for his art.”

  “And you’ve suffered for yours, Mr. Wall Street banker?”

  She had a point. He winced at the insight. “No, I suppose I haven’t.”

  “All right, so no Picasso. Who else, then?”

  “Hopper, Balthus, Wyeth, John French Sloan, Hughie Lee-Smith,” Barry answered, rattling off the names like old friends. “And there’s a painting I love at the art museum in Cleveland by John Rogers Cox, but he’s not well-known.”

  Sophie did another one of her most disapproving puffs. “I’m afraid your tastes are a little old-fashioned for me.”

  “Then let me guess. Your bedroom walls were smothered in Warhols and Basquiats. You get hot for Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney.”

  “More like Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama, but you’re not far off. Anyway, I like photography more than paintings.”

  “Architects usually do. I’m sure you have a coffee table book of the
Bechers sitting in your living room, too.”

  “We don’t have coffee table books in France. C’est juste pour les Américains.” She voiced the last word with uncloaked disdain.

  “Too bad, they’re nice to look at.”

  “Coffee table books or Americans?”

  “Both.”

  There was a moment of tension strung taut as a tennis racket, and then they both dispelled it with a laugh. What did it matter, anyway? Barry reciprocated her nudge and rose to his feet.

  “Come on, let’s climb up to the top. We’re going to find another island and get the hell out of here.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll send you a coffee table book of Gauguin paintings as soon as we both get home.”

  “I don’t have a coffee table.”

  “Then I’ll send one of those, too.”

  Barry led the way, mounting the first round of boulders with two brisk lunges, lending Sophie a hand to help her do so as well. From that initial perch, they made their way with steady determination up the steep ledge of rocks. It was sweaty work, but once they had cleared the tops of the palm trees, the wind came in stronger, smelling fresher, of open sea and open sky. They stopped briefly to breathe it in, then continued on their way. Halfway up, the terns took notice, erupting with great squawks from their nests, circling above them in a wild frenzy. “Watch out for bird shit,” Barry shouted over his shoulder; Sophie puffed out her cheeks and smiled back up in reply. They proceeded onward and upward, with forethought and care, testing each rock before lending it their weight. Not that the ascent was terribly difficult, but they both knew no one would help them in the event of an accident. Sophie asked Barry if he could see any other islands. No, not yet, he answered, but we’re almost there. Ten feet above him, he could make out the summit, where the mountain’s steep sides flattened to a plateau—the crest of their island and the top of their world. Barry pushed himself up over it with his forearms as if climbing out of a swimming pool, Sophie did the same a moment behind him. They hobbled to their knees and stood upright; panting and squinting, they peered at the view their climbing had won them.