Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir

by William Wharton

  I spend the rest of that day pulling out the floaters and spreading them on the bank. Chairs, tables, anything held together with glue, are no longer in one piece. I fish away, in and out, down and up, until dark settles over all and fatigue drags me to the ground.

  Just before the bakery closes, I buy a baguette for dinner. I sit on the berge and watch the sun go down behind me. The temptation is strong just to walk away and allow someone else to deal with this mess, write it all off.

  The evening is warm. I curl up and fall asleep. But I wake in the middle of the night with severe stomach cramps. My baguette goes out the way it went in and, simultaneously, the way it should come out. I accompany these gratuitous acts of my body with much grunting, groaning and feeble whining.

  When the morning finally comes, I put on some clothes and walk across to the Café Brazza, the same one Alfred Sisley painted several times when the river was in full flood. I’ll never look at those paintings the same way, beautiful as they are. I use the café phone to contact a farmhouse with the only phone near our mill. They’ll pass on a message to my family that I’m all right, but I’ll be staying up here awhile, trying to raise the boat. It sounds so simple. I give the message on the edge of tears, tears of self-pity.

  Back on the berge, I start my diving again. I’m now having the heaves out both ends. I didn’t know this was possible. There’s nothing in there anyway, and the river wouldn’t mind if there were. I’m as polluted as it is.

  I don’t eat lunch. It seems like suicide, and, as I said, I’m very short on money. Who’d pay for the funeral? Then I notice that my skin is peeling off in great slabs. I’m baby pink underneath. My beginning summer tan is turning a gray-black and slipping away. It falls off my head and face and droops like a veil over my beard. I feel miserable, shaking inside and trembling outside. But I am pulling the last floating things from the boat. After that, I’ll have a day or two of rest. I’m having blackout spells. Time mysteriously passes, and I find myself on the ground. For some reason, it doesn’t seem serious to me, that’s how far gone I am.

  The Royal Mounted Police Arrive

  The next part of this tale I didn’t experience directly. I was told about it ten years later under unusual circumstances.

  A Canadian-American family had rented a boat downriver, the same boat Pauline and Bob had rented. They were walking their five children along the chemin de halage. This is a dirt road beside the river, which, in the old days, was used for horses and mules to pull the barges up to the locks in Bougival. The barges were much smaller in those times.

  This family, out for a walk, looks over the edge of the berge and sees me, virtually naked, curled in the fetal position and moaning. The children insist their parents check to see what’s the matter.

  They’re shocked when I look up at them, or at least seem to, and speak English, American English. I don’t remember a thing, not what I said, none of it. The entire family, all seven of them, drag me down to their boat, actually carrying me part of the way. They put my heaving hulk into a bunk bed and try forcing food into me. Carol, the wife, pats cold cream over the bare red patches of my body.

  They’re sure I’d just managed to survive from the sinking boat they’ve seen in the water behind me. I remember none of this, either.

  I stay with these kindly people on their boat that night and the next day. But, on the third day, I’m conscious enough to explain the situation, how M. Teurnier will be coming to raise my boat and will be needing me.

  I force my way onto my feet groggily and stagger back to the chemin de halage, thence to the berge with the sunken barge. M. Teurnier and another man are already there. They have a truck pulling a small boat on a trailer. They stare at me. My basic French isn’t enough. Don, the Canadian husband and father of the family, has come with me. He’s afraid I’ll collapse. He speaks French well – at least it sounds good to me. This part I can vaguely remember.

  It turns out the river here is filled with sulfuric acid dumped at the Renault automobile plant upriver. M. Teurnier had assumed I knew this and so would be using a wet suit when I went into the river. He and the other man both look surprised that I’m alive. I know I must look like Lazarus risen from the grave with my gray skin flapping in pieces like a rotted grave shroud around me.

  They go to work immediately, Don helping where he can, while I stumble weakly around trying to be of some assistance. They nail a large canvas tarpaulin all around the roof of the boat, letting it float down with weights along the sides. Then they set up a humongous pump and begin pumping. Water spurts out of a six-inch-diameter exit pipe. It shoots up into the air and splashes down into the river with a tumultuous, continuous crashing noise. A crowd has gathered again to watch the excitement. In the mêlée, I can’t find Don. Later, I discover this was the day they were scheduled to depart, and despite the complaints of their children, he couldn’t stay. I’ve lost my translator and trusty worker, and don’t see him again for twenty years.

  The pump spouts water continually, but the boat, despite all this feverish activity, rises only a few inches, then settles back on the bottom, not unlike a beached, dying whale I once saw in California. They turn off the pump. I understand M. Teurnier saying to his brother that it must be a huge hole. They set up a second pump with an exit spout twice the size of the first. They turn this one on, and, with the two going, the boat makes a tremendous effort. The pumps make a horrendous racket, but the boat rises only slightly, then with what appears an overwhelming fatigue, settles back to the bottom. I’m weak and feeling much the same as the feelings I project into the boat.

  Les Scaphandriers

  Next, M. Teurnier begins to dress in a genuine diver’s outfit, a heavy canvas suit with oxygen tanks to feed a brass helmet over his head and face. He walks into the water, wearing weights around his neck, checks his hoses, pauses as his brother screws the helmet onto the top of the suit and clamps it. M. Teurnier signals with one finger to start the oxygen flowing and walks down and in, I presume through the same door I’ve been slogging in and out of during the few days I could work.

  He comes back to the surface every fifteen minutes or so and tells us with hand signals and head shaking that he’s found nothing, no hole. He gives the signal to start the smaller of the two pumps. Water is rushing out again. This time, after only about five minutes, he comes staggering up the slippery bank clasping something in his left hand. His brother turns off the pump and opens the helmet.

  M. Teurnier pushes his hand in front of my face, stares at me with his violet-blue eyes.

  ‘On vous a bien eu. ’

  I don’t know what this means any more than coule. A young woman on the bank shouts to me in British English. I listen hard after all the noise.

  ‘Monsieur, he says you have been had!’

  I also keep hearing another word that sounds like scafon drier or maybe that’s several words run together. I look up at her.

  ‘Monsieur, don’t you realize how lucky you are? They are scaphandriers and the work is very dangerous.’

  I look down at M. Teurnier. He seems to be embarrassed. I feel the rotted wood in his gloved hand. It’s like sponge. Maybe this is lucky, but it doesn’t seem like that to me. M. Teurnier undresses from his diving costume, stands briefly, shivering in his briefs, and dresses in his work clothes again. We walk across the street for a beer. I invite the young woman to join us. She’s somewhat leery, and I don’t blame her. I beg her to translate, she agrees and I order her a beer.

  She’s all excited, it’s as bad as Rosemary with this damned boat when she first saw it. She babbles on in English.

  ‘These men are called les pieds-lourds because of the heavy leaded shoes they wear. This equipe that’s working on your boat is famous. Originally, it was a father and his sons. The father started as a scaphandrier in 1912; they specialize in renflouage, that is, bringing up sunken boats such as yours. You should be very proud.’

  I don’t want to hear any more. This woman must be
mad. I stare at her.

  ‘How do you know all this? It seems like very specialized knowledge, especially for a young Englishwoman like you.’

  She smiles at me.

  ‘I am a student at I’Ecole des mines. Also, I have always had a special interest in underwater work. A friend of mine told me about your boat sinking, and I came here to watch.’

  Over the beer, M. Teurnier explains through the young woman that there is at least one completely rotten plank going from one side of the boat to the other. This is what blew out and caused the boat to sink.

  ‘But is it possible to bring it up again?’

  His answer translates into the idea of shoving some large sheets of plywood under the suspect section, pumping to see if the boat will come up, then inspecting the damage.

  The Surfacing Whale

  So, that’s what we do. M. Teurnier dresses again in his diving costume, forces pieces of plywood under the leaking sections, then gives the signal for the pumps to start.

  This time the boat starts rising and keeps on rising. Again it’s like a huge whale surfacing, only alive and well, more or less well. There are shouts of encouragement and applause from the village people along the bank. M. Teurnier stays down, manipulating the plywood until the hole or holes in the hull are covered. Within half an hour, the boat, filthy, waterlogged, has surfaced. M. Teurnier opens the only door to the cabin fully, and the last of the water flows out. I walk over the slippery gangplank and go inside. The entire interior is covered with dark brown mud, the consistency of thick creme fraiche, or nonemulsified peanut butter.

  Again, like a latter-day astronaut, he’s undressed by his brother and jumps into his regular French blues. We go back to the café. The young woman who has been translating and instructing me as to the mysteries of les scaphandriers says she has a class and must leave. I try paying for her help with nonexistent money, but, thankfully, she’ll take nothing, which is about what I have to offer. She wishes me good luck and bon courage. Good luck, courage and more is what I need, all right.

  We eat lunch at the nearest routier. Les freres Teurnier discuss what can be done. After a full bottle of wine and steaks with, frites, we drive in the truck to a building-supply house. M. Teurnier buys five sacks of premixed, quick-drying, anhydrous concrete. We drive back to the scene of the crime, remove the rotted parts of the guilty board and pour the concrete over the entire area, mixing it with river water. We keep building small dams to hold the concrete in place over the damaged sections. We watch to see if the water will seep through or around it. M. Teurnier keeps looking out one of the mud-smeared windows. Everyone, except me, lights up cigarettes. Then he points out the window. One of the plywood pieces is floating away. He pulls it in with a grappling hood, then manages to hook the other as it too loosens. He’s smiling. Finally, I understand what’s happening. Now there’s no longer the pressure of water onto the boat holding the boards against the hull, so it means the leak is effectively stopped – more or less, that is.

  We smile all around, a bottle of wine is brought out from the back of the truck and they somehow manage to open it with a bent nail. I don’t know what to do next. M. Teurnier takes his slug at the bottle and passes it on.

  He pulls me along with him to the boat just next to mine, downriver. He rings a bell hanging on the door, till somebody comes. It’s a very dignified-looking Frenchman. M. Teurnier rattles away in his Breton French. The man looks at me and speaks in French-accented, but clear, English.

  ‘I always knew that boat would sink someday, wooden bottom and no one taking care of it. You must remember, monsieur, you have bought a boat with a house on it, not a house with a boat under it. There is a big difference.’

  So I’m not ready for more lectures. M. Teurnier explains the problem, I can see from his pantomime. He does it even when he’s speaking French to another Frenchman. He looks at me. The man, whose name is M. Le Clerc, looks at me. He shrugs and then concentrates.

  ‘I do not believe any chantier, I mean slip, around here would take a noncommercial ship with a wooden coque for repairs. You could have a sabot, a metal shoe, made and slipped under your boat, but that would be very expensive. I do not really know, monsieur. Perhaps it is best to accept the loss and have the boat destroyed. It will be nothing but souci, trouble, otherwise.’

  His wife comes out with some cold white wine and frosted glasses on a tray with white napkins. She offers the tray around. I think of the bottle of red we’ve just slurped down, each wiping his lips on mud-encrusted sleeves of ‘blues,’ after drinking. Contrast, the punctuation of life.

  When we finish, M. Le Clerc gives us a slight bow of dismissal, his lovely, tall wife smiles and we leave. His boat is really a masterpiece of how one can live in style on the Seine. I look back. It lies low in the water, and the upper floor has amber translucent win-dowpanes all along its length. I find out later it was once a chapel. River people who worked on the Seine used to thank the river gods or whatever gods they could count on for help there.

  I pay M. Teurnier the two thousand francs, counting them out until there are only two bills left in my hand. He pulls a pencil from his ‘blues’ pocket and writes his name, address and phone number. With his thumb, he points to the boat, then with his finger points to his chest. I get the message: If I need help, call. They drive off. I hope one of them is the designated driver, but that doesn’t sound very French.

  An Impossible Task

  I spend two days checking everything to see if the boat’s still leaking. It seems OK. I hose down and clean out the interior, checking to see where the leaks were, and to a small degree, still are. Meanwhile, I’m cleaning all my furniture off in the river, trying to wash off the worst of the mud. Then, after I’ve dragged all the dried-out and falling-apart furniture, along with the mostly dry mattresses, sheets, and so forth back on the boat, I remount all the floating doors. I’m ready to leave. My raggedy skin has mostly peeled off, and I’m dead weary, sick and tired, with the boat, with myself.

  I stop by at the Le Clercs’ and ask if they’ll keep an eye on my peniche for me. They aren’t too happy about the idea, but agree to phone the farmhouse near the mill if anything goes wrong. I give them the number. They’re both worried about voleurs, that is, robbers. I hate to tell them, but at this point I’d be glad if somebody would come along and steal the entire shebang. I’ve investigated, and it would cost a minimum of fifteen hundred francs to have the boat towed away and burned. That’s what they do with witches and witchcraft anyway, isn’t it?

  ♦

  I sleep two days when I’m back with the family. The stone tent seems incredibly luxurious. I carefully try recouping my tan. When I arrived, my wife said I looked like a giant fetus, or a very premature baby. I feel damned premature.

  I decide the only thing, against all advice, is to try stopping the leak from inside the boat. What else? I ask my older boy, Matt, who’s in high school, if he will help me with it on weekends. It doesn’t seem to scare him. Ah, youth, good spirits and enthusiasm; we’ll lick those devils and witches yet.

  When we come back up to the boat from the mill, the hull has water in it, too much water for comfort, but it isn’t listing. We bail one whole day. After much asking around, we find a product guaranteed to be waterproof. Happily, Matt speaks excellent French. He has lived most of his life in France. He went to French schools for the first seven years of his education. Rosemary, my wife, speaks excellent ‘Ma Perkins’ French, as do most French teachers in American high schools, but I have virtually no skills in language. I can bumble about in French, German, Italian and Spanish, but can’t speak much of any of them. The happy part is that I understand much better than I speak, not always, especially in a complex area such as the resuscitation of our boat, unhappily.

  We buy fifty-liter canisters and wind up with twenty huge containers of this black, gooey, smelly stuff. We pull up all the regular flooring in the boat and pour this goop into the hold, smearing it with broad spatulas into
every nook and cranny. On top of this, we jam in panels of plywood smeared with it, then work in more of this black gunk over them, again everywhere we can reach. It seems as if it should work. Foolish optimism strikes again.

  We came home black as minstrels. The only thing we find that takes this goo off is turpentine. We give each other turpentine rub-downs with old towels. But around our eyes and in our cuticles and nails, including toe cuticles, we’re black as coal miners. Matt’s wonderful about it, going to school each Monday looking as if he’s just come up from some Texas oil well drilling operation. By Friday evening, just when we’re starting to look normal, we go back at it again. I can’t coax the girls, or my wife, near this messy operation. I don’t want to, it seems so futile. Some things are too much; this project comes in the ‘too much’ category.

  I manage to buy a small, used electric water pump. We attach an automatic float to turn it on, just in case water starts seeping in again. I have a length of plastic tubing to carry the water out the window and into the Seine, where it belongs. This allows me to sleep somewhat easier nights, but the jinxed boat continues to leak, not ‘sink-leak,’ but there’s persistent, consistent dripping, a small puddle of water floating on our ‘impermeable’ black coating each day. And we can not find from where it’s seeping. The whole affair is maddening.

  Then, one day, as we’re scraping and shoveling out mud from everything, checking our pump regularly, our summer renter of the boat arrives. She’s not drowned, she’s fresh in a pair of toreador pants and a flowered shirt. I scramble up the bank to find out how the boat sank, what happened; is she all right. She smiles. She explains in her delightfully accented French English.

  ‘Well, I woke late and went across the street for some croissants and a cup of coffee. I didn’t need to be at the foire until one. When I came back, the boat was on the bottom, oop la! I didn’t know what to do, and I was already late to work. So, I plucked one of the most beautiful roses from the bank and threw it onto the top of the boat. It was sort of like a Viking funeral, you see.’