The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Page 12

  He talked about meeting Chantal, who had just married the fisherman Bezeau and had recently arrived in the village, a devout young woman whose confession he heard every Sunday. He had become her spiritual advisor. This is how he’d got wind of the couple’s problems: Bezeau’s alcoholism, his violent nature, the lack of money. That’s why he had offered Chantal work as a housekeeper at the Seamen’s Centre. Bezeau had objected at first, but the priest promised to keep a watchful eye on her, and the financial benefits appeased the fisherman’s injured pride. Chantal started her new job. The priest drove Chantal to the Centre in the morning and brought her back to the village at the end of the day. Happy to get away from her four walls, the young woman carried out her duties with zeal. The economic situation of the Bezeaus stabilized; the fisherman’s mood seemed to be evening out as well. A year went by in this fashion. But then there had been that day, and that unthinkable, incomprehensible, terrifying thing…

  One late afternoon, when Loiselle returned to the Centre after running his errands, he found poor Chantal in the billiard room. She had been attacked by sailors who had blindfolded her and then used her. But she begged the priest not to call the police. She refused to be taken to the hospital. Above all, she didn’t want her husband to know. And Loiselle promised not to say anything. They both acted as though nothing had happened. Chantal showed extraordinary strength; she seemed to be able to get over the ordeal, to recover without noticeable after-effects, and perhaps life would have gone back to the way it was before, if, a few weeks later, she hadn’t found out that she was pregnant. Shaken, the young woman went to ask for the priest’s moral support. She was afraid to tell Bezeau the truth, so she thought she might pretend the child was his, and Loiselle agreed that, in these exceptional circumstances, one was allowed to break the vow of honesty binding husband and wife. So they risked it: Chantal announced to the fisherman that he would soon be a father, and the immense pride Bezeau displayed confirmed their belief they had done the right thing.

  This is how Luc was born, and the priest christened him while thanking heaven profusely for supplying such a convenient solution. But these praises turned out to be premature, for, one month later, Chantal came to see him in a state bordering on panic with the news that her husband harboured doubts about the child’s legitimacy. It was because of his odd appearance, that peculiar oriental gaze, that dark complexion and pitch-black hair, which surprised the fisherman when he first laid eyes on the child, since they didn’t correspond to anything one might see in his own family or his wife’s. Bezeau had been casting suspicious looks at the baby, uttering caustic references to those DNA tests one heard so much about these days. Chantal didn’t know how much longer she would be able to keep up the pretense, and Loiselle listened to her carefully as she voiced her fears because his mind was beset with similar worries: in spite of all their precautions, rumours about what had happened were going around the port. There seemed to have been witnesses to the rape. The story had leaked out, and the possibility of it reaching the fisherman’s ears couldn’t be ignored. All this led them to face up to a difficult but inevitable obligation: when Chantal asked Loiselle for guidance, he recommended she tell her husband the truth. She agreed it was the only thing to do, provided she could muster up the strength. Loiselle, determined to support her to the end, offered to take care of it and summoned the fisherman.

  The priest no longer needed any prodding. Chalk-white, sweat pouring down his body, he was relieving himself of a heavy burden of silence and the words tumbled out as though swept along by a spring breakup of the soul. He told us how he’d received Bezeau in this very parlour. How he’d cautiously revealed what assaults had resulted in Luc’s birth, and, in hopes of arousing the fisherman’s pity, described the agonies his mother had endured. The priest thought he had succeeded. That evening, when he accompanied poor, stunned Bezeau to the door, he honestly thought he had made it quite clear to him where his duty lay both as a Christian and as a husband. But he underestimated the fisherman’s natural paranoia and, the following day, when Loiselle went to see the couple to give them his spiritual assistance, a completely different man loomed in the doorway. A raging, inebriated man, mad with smashed pride. A violent man who refused to believe his wife was innocent. He accused Chantal of having been a willing participant in the gang rape, of having provoked it, and he even suspected the priest of having taken part in it. He swore he’d been deceived and vowed he wasn’t going to be conned like this. Loiselle tried to reason with him, but Bezeau brandished his rifle and chased the man he held responsible for his misfortune out of the house. The priest had to retreat, while Chantal and her baby, both in tears, were left behind. He called the police, then prayed that the fisherman’s agitation would abate and, with the passing of time, he might begin to understand, learn to accept what had happened. But the fury continued and things only got worse.

  Bezeau was no longer in his right mind. Oblivious to his wife’s distress, haunted by the child’s strange dark features, he turned into a habitual drunk. He rejected the despicable bastard and demanded he be renamed. The house became a cloister where no one was allowed to enter, where Chantal was held prisoner. Loiselle would take advantage of the rare occasions when the fisherman put out to sea to visit Chantal so he could pray with her and comfort her, but the young woman was wasting away in that stifling atmosphere of confinement and constant accusation. Threats were uttered with regard to the child: Bezeau snarled he was going to wring his neck, and Chantal was even afraid to fall asleep, since he might seize the opportunity to carry out his plan and strangle the baby, this son whom she loved in spite of everything. Loiselle urged her to contact a centre for women who are the victims of domestic violence, encouraged her to leave the fisherman and move into town, but she seemed to think this was impossible, he wouldn’t let her, he would retaliate. She felt defeated. First the rape, the pregnancy and motherhood, then fear and sleepless nights — all this had exhausted her and thrown her into a depression from which she was unable to recover. Her ordeal blocked her horizon, prevented her from seeing past the next hour, past immediate survival, beyond the care of the child. And in the end the priest felt paralysed and helpless, too.

  One night in July, he found her on his doorstep with the child, distraught, soaked from head to foot. She was swollen and terrified, incapable of telling him what had happened. Loiselle called the police again. They picked the fisherman up and remanded him in custody for twenty-four hours. Luc and his mother stayed overnight at the presbytery, and the priest did his best to shake her out of her lethargy, but her mind was too distracted. She had been crushed by the fisherman’s acts of cruelty and had begun to think it was all her fault — that she was solely accountable for her fate and everything that had occurred. She believed she deserved this suffering, and none of the priest’s denials were able to enlighten her tortured soul. She had spent the following day praying in church. She appeared resigned when Bezeau showed up in the evening to reclaim his family, and quietly followed him. The next day, the sea had carried her off…

  Now, the only sound was the wash of the surf at the window. The priest had fallen silent, and the sea was having the last word, just as it did that night in Luc’s distant past, just as it has every single night all over the world. The priest had buried his face in his hands. Luc sat totally still. He was a clenched-fisted statue, a scrawny Thinker, eyes shimmed with tears, the rigid embodiment of the ankylosis that had infected us all. Each moment’s slender filaments entwined with those of the next. A thickening haze of time drifted along the walls. I felt the urge to explode, but there was this stillness pressing on me as sluggishly as freshly poured concrete, pushing me down into the cracks of the sofa, and there was that overpowering emptiness, that silence worthy of Ancient Egypt flowing like a resin and trapping us in its amber. This seemingly permanent stasis was shattered by the priest as he began to speak once more. He announced he had something to give to Luc. He hauled himself out of his chair and left the ro
om. We heard the stairs protesting, then Loiselle came back down again with a yellowed envelope. He explained he had found it in his mailbox the following day, shortly before Chantal’s clothes were discovered on the beach. He had meant to wait until Luc came of age before delivering it to him, but now that he knew…

  The envelope, already open, was addressed to Luc. It contained a letter he skimmed through, while the priest, wringing his hands, expressed his compassion and recalled the investigation that had been made and the evidence proving that Bezeau had spent the night in a bar in Villeneuve, which obviously cleared him. The letter slipped from Luc’s fingers. His eyes had gone dead. I picked the letter up while Loiselle went on talking all by himself. It was a letter from her. A letter in which she told him she loved him immensely, but also a letter saying goodbye, in which she explained she had no strength left to go on living. She was sorry to abandon him like this and asked him to forgive her. She promised she would watch over him from above, where she would dwell from now on. Luc let out a croak and I felt him going limp beside me. He slumped into my arms like a rag doll. He looked transparent, astral; he was barely breathing. I called out his name and shook him. I wanted to get some sign of alertness from him, but he was nothing but raw despair and all he could do was moan. The priest had thrown himself down on his knees to try to revive him as well, stupidly cutting off his oxygen supply. And as if he weren’t being enough of a nuisance already, he chose that particular moment to give in to a fit of self-accusatory lunacy: he implored Luc to speak, to answer, and confessed to having failed in his duty, and he asked him to forgive, to understand. Whimpering like a huge beaten dog, he begged to be absolved and raved on and on, too moronic to notice he was jabbering into the void. I ordered him to stop talking such bullshit and, since he didn’t snap to it, I gave him a shove. The priest leapt to his feet, then bolted sputtering from the room. I wasted no time lifting Luc up, because he needed to be taken off somewhere, anywhere at all, just so long as he got out of that bewildering madhouse. In the kitchen, the dishevelled priest was waiting for us with a plate of date squares he wanted Luc to eat so he’d cheer up. I yelled at him to get out of the way and, though I’ve no idea how, we ended up outside.

  I remember the swirling stars and my friend’s weight on my shoulder. I walked onto the beach. I set Luc down at the bottom of a dune to give him time to get his breath back and gather his thoughts. The salty air did him good: he was breathing better, he began to move again. He stammered out preposterous things about insolent lighthouse keepers, about foghorns that moaned on and on, and about indignant belugas. After a while he started to cry. A real Niagara. Engulfed, desolate and adrift, his mouth wide open, he called his mother. He looked as though he’d been beamed up to a far-off planet of pain. He kept saying it was impossible, she couldn’t be dead. He refused to accept that what he’d so stubbornly believed had been an illusion. The priest’s story was only a smoke screen, a pack of lies, of course; as for the letter, it was a forgery written by Loiselle himself to fool him. His mother couldn’t possibly have abandoned him and gone off and drowned herself like that. The sea wouldn’t have allowed it. And, anyway, she must have survived since her body was never found — wasn’t that proof enough? And yet he knew. He was hanging on by his fingernails to that business about the corpse the sea had never washed ashore, but it was merely the final spasm of a dying hope, because Luc knew very well that mothers weren’t like whales, they didn’t necessarily beach themselves when death was near. He knew a mother was a weightless little thing that the tides didn’t really have a hold on. He knew she could be summoned by the open sea, never to return, and carried off a long way away, into the depths, where her hair might get tangled up in the wrack and she would come to rest among the anemones.

  I was crying too, because tears are contagious and I was shaken by the unfairness of it all. Luc would never see his mother’s face or bask in her soft embrace. Never, ever would he drop pretty seashells in her lap, or snuggle up in her warmth, or hear the pearly words only a mother knows how to say. Love was dead. But at least he still had hatred, a throbbing hatred I could feel and put a name to. A hatred of fathers — whether they were real or fake. A hatred for the dirty Pig who had sunk his teeth into love’s throat and lay snoring this very minute in the stinking yellow house. A hatred for that unknown sailor who had come from the ends of the earth to violate love with his good-for-nothing friends, then shipped out again not having any idea, not even an inkling, of the consequences. And an even fiercer hatred of a village it was a pleasure to picture going up in flames, of a pack of cowards who had let love wither without stepping in. Hatred was something to hold on to. It could sustain you. It was better than nothing. At least it gave you a reason for living.

  Luc’s eyes finally dried up and he sat rocking, robot-like, while the sea, that mother-snatcher, glittered slyly as if nothing had happened. Luc coiled up on the side of the dune, utterly spent. I covered him with my sweater and settled down to keep watch. Soon, I heard the gentle lapping of his merman jargon, and that made me happy because it meant he was swimming with his fellow creatures. Luc had found refuge in the familiar waters of his dreams. I knew that there at least he was released from grief. Poor old screwball. Why did he have to find out? How I wished someone had stumbled upon him on the beach one morning, in a Moses basket swept onto the shore by the waves, without any clues about his family! Everything would have been so much simpler. So many tragedies would have been avoided.

  The night changed into a different costume. The moon hid its languid face behind a mask of cloud. I meant to take Luc back home, but I must have been more exhausted than I thought, because I zonked out too. I had a weird dream. There was that golfer, the one Luc says he sees on the beach some nights. It was a tall, skinny guy, his head wrapped in darkness. He came from the west and paced up and down the shore with long, even strides, swivelling around like a compass on his spindly wading-bird legs. Every now and then he would stop and, with a driver made of pure light, hit phosphorescent balls he’d send soaring high into the sky, among the stars. His visage remained concealed by a patch of opaque blackness, but his sweeping motion was noble, and the luminescent arcs he drew in space were flawless. Oh, the perfection of that golfer’s swing…

  I woke up flabbergasted with the rising sun beating down on my face. The night had quietly slipped away, and so had Luc, leaving beside me only the imprint of his body. A sinister premonition took hold of my mind. I started out for the Gigots where I thought I might find him. Trudging along, I envisioned the anxious, sleepless night my mother and my grandfolks must have lived through. Luckily, I didn’t need to go by our house — where they’d surely be on the lookout for me — but I couldn’t avoid the Pig’s place. I was still quite a distance away from it when a commotion among the gulls attracted my attention. They were wheeling around just above the trailer, clogging the sky. They’d go into a dive and swoop down quarrelling onto the shore as though fighting over a few succulent scraps of cod. As I came nearer, I saw what was lashing them into such a frenzy: it was in fact a heap of guts, but they couldn’t possibly be those of a cod or even a halibut. They had to be at least the entrails of a shark…

  Luc was sleeping in the cave with the iguana under his arm. His eyes were open, yet he was asleep. Spattered with blood that wasn’t his own, he lay dreaming and gibbering in the language of Ftan. His knife was still in his hand.

  27

  Luc’s gaze slides past mine without making contact. Something seems broken inside. When he woke up, he went to wash himself in the ocean. He cleansed himself of all that dried blood in the most matter-of-fact way, just as though it had been ordinary dirt. He doesn’t want to talk about what happened at the Pig’s place. Actually, it’s not worth mentioning as far as he’s concerned. He already sees it as a minor incident compared to what took place while he was dreaming. Because he went to Ftan.

  Luc has reached the Shimmering City. He says it’s the result of what he did in the yellow
house: there’s no doubt the Pig had to die for it to become possible. But the beast has been defeated and the death turns out to be justifiable because Luc was finally able to glide along the swaying avenues of the tendrilled town. He has seen Ftan. He now knows the city is a gigantic medusa, a colossal Portuguese man-of-war to whose tentacles cling like clustered eggs an infinite number of transparent ascidians, serving as the aquatic beings’ dwelling places. He has entered Ftan, the living symbiotic city that is fed by mermaids while it protects these sirens in return from the ocean’s predators. Ftan, which towers above you like a purplish sky with its mucous monuments and inverted minarets meandering in the currents. Ftan, teeming with anemone gardens, with groves of undulating algae. Luc has seen all these things and does his best to describe them to me, but plodder language doesn’t have words that can convey Ftan’s liquid, pulsating beauty. I would need to borrow his eyes for the fleeting duration of a dream. Anyway, he himself has visited only a tiny part of the City; he just barely had the time to explore its gelatinous suburbs, because once again the vision ended too soon. But he says his next dream will take him to the throbbing heart of the tendrilled domain, all the way to the luxuriant centre where mermen gather. Meanwhile, however, the sun is trying his patience. Luc would like to zap it, fast-forward it. He curses this wheezy day as it creeps along in the Cove. He implores it to give way to the exuberant night and the shifting boulevards of the spellbinding city of sea nymphs.