I walked up the passageway, taking care not to slip on the damp floor, and ventured out toward the bridge. A few sailors were gathered there, stunned by the desolation before them. The bridge had been ripped off, leaving a gaping hole into which the sea had poured. The ship was listing heavily to port, suggesting there was still a considerable amount of water in the hold. At the bow, a long section of guardrail had been swept away by the impact of the waves. The engines were silent. We were drifting at the mercy of the currents. There was no sign of any help on the horizon, only the flat blue expanse of the sea.
“Where’s the captain?” cried one of the dozen sailors standing on deck.
Nobody replied.
“We need to radio a Mayday!” he went on. “Who knows how to work the radio?”
“It’s broken, I already tried,” replied another wearily.
“My God, what are we going to do? What stores do we have left?”
“Most of them are flooded, and the access passageways are blocked.”
“What about fishing rods?” piped up a younger guy.
The others shook their heads.
“But we can find something to serve as a line, and there’s plenty of wreckage up here we can use for poles. Everyone start looking and let’s see what we can find. If we do nothing, we’ll die!” This from one of the older crew, who was still clearheaded enough to take command.
We set to it, motivated by the idea of finding something to eat. We spent hours combing cupboards and lockers, all accessible passageways, first-aid kits, anything that might contain useful items. An awful stench hung in the air: the decomposing corpses of sailors drowned or fatally injured during the storm.
I made my way down a half-flooded passageway, pushing past several floating bodies. The smell was so bad I nearly vomited and had to cover my nose and breathe through my mouth. I reached a cabin, its door wide open. Inside I saw a corpse bobbing facedown on the surface of the water. I hurriedly rummaged through the upper lockers, wanting to spend as little time as possible in this place of death. Taking a deep breath, I plunged beneath the water to reach the lower lockers. As I turned to check the last one, something glinted in the sunlight streaming through the porthole, a slender silver chain hanging from the man’s neck. In an instant I realized this was Martín floating in front of me on his belly, mouth wide open. A scream of terror emerged from my throat, sending a cascade of huge bubbles bursting to the surface. I grabbed my friend and turned him over so his mouth was out of the water, as if that could change anything. His face was puffy and swollen from the water and from being bashed about.
I retched, yellow bile spurting onto the surface of the water in front of me. The outgoing, effusive Spaniard, my best friend for over ten years, was now a lifeless, decomposing corpse. It was too much for me. I pushed through the water and back into the passageway. Once on deck, I stretched out and shakily inhaled the fresh air. My chest was constricted with sorrow for poor Martín. Above me, the sky was a cloudless blue. Let me see Mathilde and Jeanne again, I silently implored, feeling as if I had swum to the surface after spending a very long time underwater holding my breath.
Something clicked in my brain, reactivating long-dormant synapses. After swiftly running through the film of my childhood, I realized that my dream was not to become a sailor. It wasn’t the freedom of a life on the ocean waves that had enchanted me when the sailor placed his hat on my head thirty years before, but the novel experience of a man treating me with warmth and kindness, something my father had obstinately refused me. In truth, my journeying across the oceans was a flight from the ghosts of my childhood, an attempt to forget that period of my life during which my heart was smashed countless times on the rocks of incomprehension. My dream was not to flee but to love—to be a good father to my daughter, whose own childhood I was missing out on. It was high time I looked after both her and Mathilde properly, whatever the cost. Praying that I would see them again and hold them close, I opened my eyes to life for the second time.
A siren sounded in the distance. Turning to look, I saw a ship cutting through the sea in our direction. Had the heavens heard my prayer and granted me redemption, or was it yet another stroke of luck? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Everything is intertwined anyway. The other sailors began yelling and gesticulating wildly at the approaching vessel. We had all been granted a second chance.
FULL MOON
Sometimes, a delightful satisfaction awaits us at life’s crossroads. It glides overhead, wings outstretched, and seems huge when viewed from below. Like that mythological bird I’d dreamed of as a kid, the phoenix reborn from its ashes, it bears us off heavenward to explore new horizons, new ways of thinking.
Up there the air is pure and the view, astounding. You’re surprised to find yourself breathing calmly, daydreaming, savoring the sun’s caress on your skin, the soft breeze, nothing but blue as far as the eye can see. Yesterday’s storm has moved on. The torrential rains have stopped falling and now flow as a tranquil river.
Down on the ground, a few curious onlookers watch you, armed with binoculars, trying to decipher the mystery of this satisfaction. Others pay you no mind, caught up in the whirlwind of life that’s weakening the craft they’re paddling, often going nowhere.
You would love to stay up there and never know suffering again, listening to the murmur of stars being born, and contemplating the smile of the full moon. But the bird flies off into the distance and out of sight, in search of new prey to conquer, and the dark years return.
28
The next twenty-five years were the mellowest of my life. Not long after our repatriation, our ship was towed to the nearest port, where a marine-insurance expert inspected every inch of it. His verdict was indisputable. The vessel was deemed to have been so dilapidated even before the cyclone that it had been unsuitable for commercial use. The shipping company was ordered to make huge compensation payouts to the surviving sailors and the families of those who had perished, as well as to cover the retraining costs of those traumatized sailors who wished to pursue another profession. It was a notable victory of the proletariat over the bosses. The paradox was that we had plied the seas on that ship for ten years without anyone, be it the company, the captain, or the authorities, ever worrying about its obsolescence.
Of all the conclusions I had drawn from life, I was struck by one in particular. When it comes to money, man—this cognitive machine that adapts to survive—suddenly loses the ability to anticipate future catastrophes, ignoring the essential nature that has made him what he is. In these periods of forgetfulness or blindness caused by materialism, money distorts man’s mind by short-circuiting his fraternal leanings, annihilating his foresight. We sailors were the victims of this narrow-minded capitalism, and it sickened me to think that if fate had dealt me a less fortunate hand, my daughter would have been deprived of a father and my wife of a husband.
In memory of my late friend Martín, I joined the resistance, so to speak, becoming a spearhead of this proletarian rebellion. I attended the various court cases and told the same story a thousand times to whoever would listen, be it the distraught jury or the appalled members of the press. Soon the affair became a national scandal. The shipping company tried to buy my silence, but I refused and denounced their attempts at corruption, which only added fuel to the controversy surrounding this tragedy. As a result, we were all compensated even more generously, which allowed me to put enough money aside to pay for my daughter’s studies.
It was I who went to tell Martín’s mother of her son’s death; I insisted on it. The old lady, who lived alone in a gloomy apartment, stared at me with vacant eyes. She simply nodded without really taking it in, inoculated against grief by a life that had slipped through her fingers. When I handed her the compensation check a few months later, she simply put it in the pocket of her blouse out of habit.
Martín had been buried at sea, but we had a marble gravestone placed in a Bordeaux cemetery. On it I added a personal inscription: To Martín, my bes
t friend. A fine rain streaked the face of the small memorial the day we dedicated it. Drops gathered in the indentations of the inscriptions before spilling over the edges. I laid a jasmine wreath in memory of his Carmen, that mysterious woman he’d told me about before he died.
True friendship is close to love, but without the carnal lust. I thought of all those nights spent with Martín in the privacy of our cabin, those stories he’d conjure to make his life seem more exciting. When night fell, he would talk without pause, gesturing wildly to illustrate his words. He smoked cigarettes by the porthole while sipping Rioja wine, for which he had a particular affection. Quite the character, that guy. I recall us running through the streets of Las Palmas with María, like scared kids fleeing imaginary specters. Poor María, where was she now?
For a moment, the sight of his floating, swollen corpse came back to me. I felt choked with guilt at not having been able to save him. My dream where the giant fish shot me in the chest had haunted my nights ever since his death. Mathilde comforted me with all of her tenderness. My beautiful Mathilde, with her love whose source would never run dry. I shunted the image of his corpse from my mind. That wasn’t the Martín I had known, the one singing, dancing, brimming with life. Tears ran down my face. I grasped Mathilde’s hand, as well as Jeanne’s, already a teenager. “Gracias, amigo, que descanses en paz,” I murmured. Then the three of us left the cemetery, walking toward our bright future together.
Shortly after I left the shipping company, Madame de Saint-Maixent, who was extremely well connected, introduced me to a local politician from the Bordeaux aristocracy, a man always impeccably dressed in the most elegant suits. He found me a job as head of security at the Bordeaux exhibition center. I easily found my feet in this new job, which afforded me the opportunity to sit and daydream when things weren’t too busy.
Around that time I also began writing a book recounting the adventures of a sailor in love with the wide-open sea, a mixture of autobiography and fiction. When my family had gone to bed at night, I would sit in my quiet study, lit by a dim lamp, writing the exciting story of this reluctant hero of modern times. I loved my little nook, a corner of paradise where my creativity and imagination could run free. I enjoyed romanticizing my past. It provided a new equilibrium in my life, as if each letter, each line, each paragraph fed my thirst for self-expression. Then, when I was worn out by the intellectual effort and could write no more, I would slip into bed beside Mathilde’s warm body and drift off to sleep, praying in the dark that this period of my life would never end.
During those years, I also took advantage of the greater leisure my new job provided to make up for lost time with Jeanne.
Raising a child is a science, the theory and practice of which are like day and night, contradictory yet complementary. On paper, we sketch a perfect building with solid foundations in a style all our own. But when construction commences, nothing goes according to plan. A worker gets injured, there’s a shortage of cement, the bricks are of poor quality, and a whole floor looks like it could collapse at any moment. We urgently review the plans and modify them as best we can, hoping the structure will hold. Sometimes the sumptuous palace we had imagined on paper turns out to be an ordinary dwelling, devoid of originality, blending into its surroundings. Sometimes it’s the other way around, and as modest as the design appears on paper, it proves to be a masterpiece, envied by colleagues who lack such talent, such divine inspiration. And sometimes the sketch and the end result are similar, and we congratulate ourselves on having taken a more realistic approach, one without delusions of grandeur.
With Jeanne it was different. I had been absent far too long to have had much influence. Instead, Mathilde had been her primary role model. All I could do was attempt to tweak some of the details. But as the months passed, I finally managed to enter my daughter’s world, to carve out a place for myself in her life and increase her esteem for me. I listened to her with interest, absorbed by what she said, never interrupting or dismissing her opinions, nor attempting to convince her otherwise. I built a relationship of trust with her, careful to do the opposite from my father. I didn’t want my daughter to repeat my mistakes, to be bruised by adolescence, that key phase in the development of a human personality. I therefore redoubled my efforts and my vigilance as she grew older.
Sitting comfortably in my office one evening, my pen moving swiftly over the paper in front of me, I heard a gentle knocking at the door. I stopped writing and got up to open it. Jeanne was standing there in her pajamas, her eyes red from crying.
“What is it, my darling?” I asked, concerned.
“Papa, I’d like to talk to you about something.”
“Of course, you can talk to me about anything you like. Sit down, I’ll get you a blanket.”
I pulled a thick quilt from a cupboard and wrapped it around her.
“So tell me, what’s up?”
“I think I’m in love,” she said, lowering her eyes.
“But that’s wonderful—why are you crying?”
“Because this boy doesn’t love me.”
My daughter’s face was pained. Teenagers often have a carefree look in their eyes that adults lose with age, gnawed at by the difficulties of daily life, the accumulation of disappointments and hardships. In the light from my little desk lamp, Jeanne resembled Mathilde as a young woman, patiently sewing under the tree in her garden. I was suddenly seized with anguish at the relentless passing of time, which either destroys or embellishes everything in its path—depending on your view. With superhuman effort, I managed to contain the tears of melancholy welling up inside me.
“How do you know he doesn’t love you, Jeanne?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“He doesn’t notice me, it’s like I’m invisible.”
“Is that sufficient proof he doesn’t love you?”
My question troubled Jeanne. She looked up. Her almond eyes, so similar to my wife’s, bored into mine. She thought for a few seconds, perhaps considering the situation from a new angle.
“Yes . . . Well, I think so. If he loved me, he’d look at no one else but me, as I do him!”
“Perhaps he doesn’t behave the same way you do. Perhaps his way of loving is different from yours—he feels something for you but doesn’t want to show it.”
“You think?”
“Of course. Some people avoid other people’s gaze for fear of being unmasked. Looking someone in the eye means exposing oneself, revealing one’s fragilities. Some men hate doing that, my darling, because they don’t want to show their sensitivity, their feminine side. It’s frowned upon in the adult world.”
“So maybe he loves me too?”
“That’s for you to find out, by stimulating his buried feminine side,” I said, praying that the boy in question was indeed in love with my daughter.
“How do you expect me to do that?”
“By letting your heart speak. Think of a way to make him understand what you feel.”
“And if he doesn’t love me?” she asked, embarrassed.
“At least you’ll have tried your best. It will be painful at first, but that will pass and you’ll come out of this experience stronger. And anyway, between you and me, how could anyone not love a girl like you? Look at you, you’re magnificent, intelligent . . . If I were that boy, I wouldn’t think twice, believe me!”
We both laughed. What joy to see that smile on her face, to hear my daughter laugh, I thought, very much the proud, happy father, a role that suited me perfectly. The study door opened and Mathilde popped her head in.
“What are you two scheming?” she asked roguishly.
“Nothing. We’re simply talking, like two civilized adults.”
Fresh peals of laughter emerged from the pair of us.
“You’re just in time, Mathilde. I was going to tell Jeanne a story.”
“A story?” Jeanne looked offended. “I’m too old for stories, Papa!”
“We’re never too old for stories, my treasure, belie
ve me.” I smiled. “Sit down with us, Mathilde.”
That evening I told my daughter about my childhood, my adolescence, my youthful dream of becoming a sailor, how I met her mother—who had also not paid any attention to me at first. I told her about the German officer, our encounter in the forest, his premature death, and the photograph of his daughter; my army service and Jean the actor, our trip to Frankfurt, my disappointment; then my voyage to Las Palmas, Martín, María, the pictures of her son, Manuel; my travels across the world, the cyclone that took my best friend’s life; and finally, the book I was writing. Jeanne looked at me with admiring eyes, occasionally turning to her mother to confirm my retelling of various events. When I had finished, Jeanne—the girl who was “too old for stories”—plied me with questions, forgetting all about the boy she was in love with. She wanted nothing more than to know the end of my tale, and offered to help me find this Catherine Schäfer, whose trail I had lost in Spain.
“And María, what happened to her? We need to do all we can to find her, Papa. Your story is wonderful, worthy of a novel, you must write it!”
I smiled, recognizing in her eyes the same spark of life that glowed within me, the same drive to action, the same perseverance. Jeanne Vertune was a perfect mixture of her parents, at once calm yet passionate, intelligent yet naive, enigmatic yet expressive. Life had given me a priceless gift, a daughter with sparkling eyes who would carry the thread of love from which she herself was woven.
29
I was rounding a street corner in Bordeaux when I saw the poster. It was stuck in a shop window and depicted two grinning faces that seemed familiar. Beneath the photograph were the words:
YES, SIR!
A STAGE PLAY
WRITTEN BY AND STARRING
JEAN BRISCA AND MARC DANTOUGE
Amazed, I realized these were my Paris actor friends. They were on tour across France and were performing their play in Bordeaux that very night, at a theater close by. I went straight to the box office and bought three tickets, aiming to surprise my two old friends by slipping backstage after the show and introducing them to Mathilde and Jeanne.
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