by Jane Delury
Don’t be bitter, she wanted to say, that isn’t like you.
“I’ll go slower,” she said. She helped him upright.
She was in line for the ferry at eight thirty. The ocean looked calm, the horizon cloudless. Herman had fallen asleep before they got to Le Palais and was snoring now, a slow, rattling sound. When his head slipped on the window, Charlotte pushed it back gently against the seat. A car drove into the space behind.
At a quarter to nine, the ferry from Quiberon still hadn’t docked to let off passengers, at ten to nine neither. Charlotte started to worry. Herman sighed in his sleep. He looked as pale and thin as paper, curled up against the car door. At nine, when still no ferry had appeared, she turned off the engine and lowered the window for Herman.
She walked down the aisle formed by waiting cars to the ferry building. From the doors, she sensed a commotion. Workers in hooded slickers were rushing around with walkie-talkies. Passengers waited, smoking, talking, looking distressed. A group of them stood under a television that had been tuned to the news.
“Quel désastre,” someone said.
The tanker that had sunk in the Bay of Biscay the night before had cracked in two and was spilling “des milliers de tonnes de pétrole” into the bay.
“Is that why the ferry is late?” Charlotte asked a man.
“Je suppose,” the man said. “Quel merdier. And the oil is on its way here.”
Behind the ticket desk, a woman with acne-pitted cheeks was watching the television through the glass. She slid back the window without looking at Charlotte.
“Will the ferry make it here soon?” Charlotte asked.
The woman glanced at her and then looked back at the television. The port in Quiberon was a mess, she said. “Comme vous pouvez imaginer, madame.”
“But when will it arrive?”
The woman looked at her coldly. “Vous n’êtes pas d’ici, n’est-ce pas?”
“Non,” Charlotte said. “What does that matter?”
“If you were from here, you would understand what this spill means. And you would be less worried about a late ferry.”
She shut the window. People had lined up behind Charlotte. A baby was crying. “Catastrophe écologique,” the television said. Charlotte tapped on the window. The woman was talking to a man in a uniform with stripes on the shoulders who had come into the office. Charlotte felt a rise of the energy she’d woken up with from the dream, a force beyond her control, making her pull off the stones. She tapped on the window again. “Mon mari est malade,” she said, then repeated it louder.
The woman shook her head, but the man leaned around her and opened the window.
“Je peux vous aider, madame?” he said.
“My husband is ill,” Charlotte repeated. Her head was spinning. “We need to get to Quiberon.”
“If there is no ferry, there is no ferry, you see,” the man said. “There is little that we can do.”
“But will it come?”
“You say your husband is ill. Shall I get help? Is this an emergency?”
“Non,” Charlotte said, her head spinning faster. “Not an emergency.”
“We can help you move your car out of the line if you don’t want to wait.”
“Charlotte,” a voice said from behind her. “What are you doing?”
When she turned around, she saw a dying man. He was out of breath, and his skin had a strange, clammy hue. His bald head gleamed in the fluorescent lights, his eyes sank in their sockets. Behind him, people waited in line, looked at the television, got coffees from the machines against the walls, ashed their cigarettes. They pulled stray threads from their sweaters, chewed gum, breathed, swallowed. This man, he was dying. Il meurt, she thought.
“There was an oil spill in the bay,” she told Herman. “It’s holding up the ferry.” She started to cry.
“We’ll wait,” Herman said. “Come back to the car, sweetheart.”
He took her arm, but she didn’t move.
“It’s all right,” she said. “We can turn around if you want to.”
It took a half hour to move the car out of the line with the help of the ferry workers. When they got back home, Herman said, “Let’s go to the beach,” but his legs wobbled on the first step down the cliff. Charlotte helped him over to the patio and into one of the plastic lawn chairs. She went inside for a blanket and made two cups of tea. Through the window, the cow had drifted out of view again. As the tea steeped, she turned on the radio. A sheen had appeared on the surface of the bay near the place where the tanker had sunk.
Outside, she laid the blanket on Herman’s legs and gave him his cup of tea.
“Tiens,” she said. “Careful, it’s hot.”
She sat down next to him and took his hand. Tomorrow, at dawn, when she went down the steps, she’d find black sand, rocks as slick as rubber, ashy foam on the ocean, and gulls that struggled to open their wings. Now, though, there was the silver water, the curtains of cliffs, the pale spread of the beach, and the sun, bright and clueless, in the middle of the sky.
Nothing of Consequence
1975
They came to Madagascar—women, all educators—to train a group of French teachers from around the island. They were housed in the living quarters of an abandoned coconut plantation and conducted their classes in warehouses still dusty with copra. By the second week, the red soil had colored their soles, and the sun, their faces. Though in the classroom they were as rigorous as they were back home, their minds drifted. Lessons on the imperfect, discussions of Orientalism, were interrupted by thoughts of what would be served for lunch or whether a driver might be hired for an excursion to the rain forest. They returned to themselves when a student raised a hand.
One man in particular impressed the women from the start because he never made an error in construction or conjugation, and he listened to their explanations with a critical tilt to his head. Unlike the other students, who wrote in pencil, Rado Koto took notes with a fountain pen. He was young, in his twenties, but he walked in his youthful body as if borrowing it on the way to an older one. A lycée teacher in the capital, he intended to live one day in France and pursue “sa poésie.”
At the first night’s dinner, after punch coco and before fish curry, Rado sat down next to Bernadette, who, since the orientation in Paris, had barely cracked a smile or revealed anything about herself except that her husband had been dead a year and that she found Colette underrated. She was the most taciturn and the least attractive among them. The boldness of her blunt chin and large mouth might have made for pretty ugliness during her youth but in late middle age made her look plain. She wore collared shirts, buttoned just below her clavicle, the sleeves rolled over her elbows. Judging by the measure of her chignon, her hair would fall to her shoulders.
As Bernadette spoke to Rado, she fiddled with the corner of her napkin. Now and again she laughed, which the women had never heard her do, not even that afternoon when they’d attended a performance of a dance troupe in the nearby village and were all brought onstage for a lesson. Rado laughed with her. The solitary line that marked his brow deepened, and his teeth showed, as they didn’t in the classroom. Neither of them got up to help bring the dishes out from the kitchen until, the plates being cleared, Bernadette looked around apologetically and announced that she and Rado would fetch the pudding. The next evening, and the next, Bernadette and Rado seemed always to be leaving for the kitchen or talking over their untouched food. Their discussions could be overheard in snatches: Rimbaud’s Catholicism, the lyrics of Prévert, nothing to raise suspicion in the director, hunched over his plate at the other end of the table, necktie tucked into his shirt front. But the women interpreted what he ignored. In the communal bathroom, on the path to meals, and evenings, over tisanes, Bernadette and Rado became the subject of hushed conversation.
The coconut, he told her, as she followed him into the plantation, could travel for hundreds of miles on the ocean, even washing up on the shores of Antar
ctica and Ireland.
“Vraiment?” she asked.
He smiled. “There is no fooling you, is there?”
“Maybe if you were a botanist. Instead of a poet.”
At dinner, the third night, he had shown her his notebooks of verse, which he hoped to publish in France, since on the island there was no press. She recognized the force of will it must have taken for him to go to university, having grown up in a one-room house with eight brothers and sisters, fated to work in the nickel mines or on vanilla plantations. But his writing seemed to her to have no heart, all corroded tin roofs under the cruel sun, waves that stabbed, the bitterness of tree frogs. Although he’d grown up poor, he hadn’t known suffering. Despite the beauty in his lines, this showed.
“I used to hide in the coconut fronds when I was supposed to be doing my chores,” he said.
“You would have done better living in France. Oaks and pines give good cover.”
“You did that too?”
“Don’t all children? I spent half my time off the ground as a girl.”
Rado stopped to pull a frond blade from the heel of his sandal. She imagined him shirtless and barefoot while she sat between her parents in the church of Benneville, her baby sister, Charlotte, on her lap, trying to keep still as the priest gave his warnings about sin and damnation. But no, she realized, calculating the difference in their ages, that wasn’t right. When Rado was a boy, she was carrying babies and groceries up the steps of her apartment building in Paris. When Rado’s voice was starting to change, she was years into her fine, dull marriage, sitting at her kitchen table with a stack of papers to grade, ignorant of the affair her husband had recently ended.
Only Bernadette’s roommate protested the rumors. “Who knows what’s going on in your room when you aren’t there,” one woman said, and the roommate said, “Reading.” She saw what the others didn’t see: Bernadette tossed in her sleep; she changed into her nightgown in the bathroom and slept with the sheets pulled up to her chin. If Bernadette got up at night, it was only to go down the hall to the bathroom. She never took long. And was it so terrible, anyway, that Bernadette had something she looked forward to in the morning, something that made her check her face in the mirror? The mirror was small and low on the wall, the light poor, and as the roommate walked into the room, Bernadette was bent toward the glass, cupping her cheeks as one might those of a child. This the roommate didn’t mention, but a few days later, when one of the women cornered her to let her know that Bernadette was now smoking Rado’s cigarettes, the roommate said she was starting to be reminded of The Crucible.
“I am becoming the subject of gossip,” Bernadette told Rado.
He laughed and took her hand to help her over a fallen tree, an unnecessary gesture that closed her throat. She could smell his body through his clothes: a stiff white shirt, a pair of creased pants, the apparel of a schoolboy. If she had been another kind of woman, she would have wanted to take him to the shops on the avenue Montaigne to pick out scarves and sweaters.
“It’s the same for me,” he said. “When I go back to my village, the women in the market spread rumors about me. A chorus of hoopoe birds.” He stopped so that she could move ahead on the path. “Les huppes ici sont jalouses de toi.”
“What do I have to envy?” The hope in her voice made her cringe.
“A university professorship.”
“Not everyone wants that. And it’s only part-time.”
He understood nothing of the Éducation nationale. She had told him that she taught at a lycée and a course in the continuing studies department of the university, so he imagined her to be a professor. She saw it happen the first night, the way his eyes stopped roaming. She didn’t correct him.
The ground turned from grass to sand. Ahead was the ocean.
“The whales are migrating,” Rado said. “You can see them from here.”
“Really,” she said flatly, and then laughed. “I’m sorry. Animals have never been my thing.”
“We will never own a dog together, then.”
Although she knew he was teasing, she felt blood rush to her face, one of the symptoms her husband complained about in the early stage of his illness. Flushing. Shortness of breath. Dizziness. Pain near the heart. Was that why he was brought back to his mistress in those days? Why he disclosed the affair? “I’ve always loved only you,” he told her from the hospital bed, and she hadn’t said, “I’ve only loved one man, and he was a boy, a long time before you.” Instead, she kissed his pale lips and said, “Je te pardonne.”
Rado was telling her about the song of the indri lemur, which sounded like that of a humpback. “A whale in a tree,” he said, and she knew that he wished he had his notebook. She felt irritated.
“I saw a snake this morning on the reef,” she said.
He lowered his hands—he had been charting the course of an invisible lemur through the canopy above—and fumbled in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “You’re lucky,” he said. “You wouldn’t want a bite from one of those.”
“Do you believe in omens?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Ni aux tabous.”
The boy that she’d loved was named Gabriel. He lived with his parents on a small farm outside of Benneville. Les Italiens, the neighbors called them. She met him the spring she turned fourteen. She had been going to the forest after school to avoid heading home to her mother’s judgments over her hair not being right, the ink stain on the hem of her skirt, her unkempt nails, her general lack of elegance. Meanwhile, Charlotte, with her big eyes and cheeks, was perfect, like the dessert she’d been named for: creamy and sweet and plump. And she didn’t talk, so she couldn’t talk back.
One afternoon, she turned down the trail that led to the stone walls of the old Léger estate and saw a boy jimmying open the lock on the gate with a pocketknife.
“Ne t’inquiète pas,” she said when he turned around. “I haven’t seen anything.” She assumed from the bag over his shoulder that he was poaching rabbits. He had a pale, thin face with full lips, and bushy hair that sprouted from under a cap. He pushed open the gate and took off the cap, gesturing with it for her to pass by.
“It’s ten o’clock,” he said, in broken French. “The widow and her maid have gone to mass and the gardens are open to visitors.”
They met there every afternoon for the next two weeks. They sat in the pergola, under the lacy umbrella of wisteria that kept out a summer rain. They put ivy crowns on the heads of the muses, and tried to hit the chimneys with burrs from the chestnut tree. Gabriel took her to the back wall of the manor and showed her fossils in the stone. She leaned in and licked the curl of a shell, and he did the same.
The third week, he kissed her as they drank from the fountain. By June, they were stripping off their clothes before they’d got through the gate. There was a soft patch of grass near the topiary. After, they’d lie curled up together. He whispered to her in Italian, and she imagined what he must be saying. When they heard the clunking sound of the widow’s car, they grabbed their clothes and ran into the forest.
Some of the women mentioned the situation, as they called it, to their husbands when they phoned home from the director’s office, left to them after he’d gone to bed. His quarters were on the floor above, and as they talked through the crackle of static, the women thought of the director and kept their voices down for fear that he might be listening. The husbands barely reacted. Twenty years earlier, upon hearing about Bernadette, the husbands might have worried about their own marriages. Twenty years earlier, at the airport in Paris or Lyon, the husbands would have kissed their wives longer. A few of the women became angry upon hanging up. Bernadette might have it right. What if they found a student of their own? Broke rules in all directions. Right there in the classroom, against the map of Europe, or, like Bernadette, on the beach, where they supposed she and Rado went.
From where Bernadette stood with Rado, the reef looked smooth as a rug, but up close it was a web of crag
s and holes. The water was layered, a crust of cold and warmth below, the reverse of the students, whose smiles hid gentle disdain. Four-Eyes, Old Chicken, Good Girl. Rado had told her the nicknames that the students coined for their teachers. Back home, Bernadette had friends like the women, friends who held her hand at her husband’s funeral, called daily in the following weeks, took her to weekend houses in Normandy, and, after a decent interval for her to grieve, would want to invite her to dinner with divorced and widowed men. Friends who worried about her, about the way she picked up and ran off, as they called it, giving them notice only a week before.
Earlier, her roommate had asked her for the third time if she’d like to go swimming, and Bernadette agreed, not wanting to tip into rudeness. Also, this was something to fill the morning until Rado was free. Bernadette went right into the water, while the roommate, winded from the walk, said she would rest first with her book. When Bernadette kicked to the surface, having seen the snake coiled in a crevice, the roommate raised her eyes.
Looking down, Bernadette saw that in her escape, the knot of her bathing suit had come undone. She was naked to the waist. “Why not?” the roommate called, and untied her own halter. Bernadette covered herself back up with a quick knot to her bathing suit straps.
“It was an accident,” she told her roommate, “but yes, why not?”
Later, back at the compound, before they parted ways, the roommate said, “Do you really care for him?” Though her voice was hard, her face wasn’t, and it occurred to Bernadette now, as Rado lit her cigarette, that the roommate might not have been fishing at all but instead giving a warning.
If Bernadette hadn’t held herself apart, hadn’t taken on airs, the women might have felt sorry for her. Rado, in the end, would move on. He was interested only in Bernadette’s connection to the university system, though his hope was false, since she was, after all, a vacataire, not a real professor. He would have been better off with the one who came from Lille and ran a feminist press and had friends in the right places. Or with the prettiest one, whose smooth skin and tight figure they all envied. If Bernadette and Rado ended up together, since these things sometimes happened (there was talk of the friend of a friend who after a stint with a medical nonprofit married a man from the Congo), Rado would expect Bernadette to wait on him like a slave. Seen in this light, they were victimizing each other.