The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Read online

  I don’t know what to make of it all. I listen to Luc as he tries to depict every detail of his marvellous vision, but I can’t get the scarlet image of the disembowelled Pig out of my mind. How long before the body is discovered and people find out, I wonder? Should I talk my friend into giving himself up or persuade him to make a run for it? Would it be better perhaps to hide the corpse, bury it somewhere, and erase all the traces? In any case, Luc won’t listen to me. He’s not concerned. He states he won’t leave his hideaway at the Cove ever again. He will live here from now on with the iguana to keep him company and with me, whenever I feel like coming to see him. He says he has the waterfall to quench his thirst and the ocean for all the rest, he won’t need anything else, he’ll be happy here, he’ll be able to paint, to dream, and live with complete freedom the solitary existence he loves so much. Poor Luc. He thinks he’s safe at the Cove. He imagines people will forget about him after a while, that he’ll elude the search and escape into a timeless world, but he’s obviously fooling himself. Yet he knows the police have dogs capable of picking up the scent of an oddball hiding out in the deepest reaches of the Gigots, that they have boats, helicopters, and whatever it takes to find someone, but he couldn’t care less. Whether the Pig’s carcass rots away among the parts of his blasted motor or the police come to get him is all the same to him. From now on, he will live solely to dream and to return to Ftan. Nothing else matters anymore.

  Reality is no longer Luc’s problem, but it’s still very much mine, and more so every minute because we haven’t set foot in the house for a whole day now. I’m sure Mama is giving me a good tongue-lashing in her thoughts and I really can’t let her fret any longer. I have to go home. But I wonder what reason I should give for Luc’s absence. They’ll quiz me and I’ll have to say something. How can I explain to them that my friend has decorated the beach with his fake father’s guts, and thinks he’s a fish?

  * * *

  I was greeted tensely by three grim faces and found myself before a real family tribunal. I was charged with attempting to worry the whole household to death. They demanded to know where Luc and I had spent the night and, first of all, where my accomplice might be hiding instead of appearing before this court. I was at a loss to reply because of the oath of secrecy regarding the Cove’s mysteries, so I invented some clumsy story about suddenly deciding to camp out, but it didn’t take me long to see I was only making matters worse. They threatened to keep me locked up in my room until I came clean. I knew I’d never be able to keep up the lying, so I made up my mind to confide in my mother and told her in private what had happened. I would have given anything to spare her the horror of that confession, but it was impossible to phrase things delicately, and the shock was brutal. I described Luc’s anguished mental state to Mama and struggled to convince her it was urgent for me to go and join him so I could look after him, but she was too shaken. She said she needed time to think and sent me off to bed.

  It’s dark now and I can’t stop wondering about Luc. What is he up to all by himself at the Cove? Is he brooding over my not being back yet? Does he believe I’ve abandoned him? But perhaps I worry for nothing — he’s probably sound asleep already, dreaming like a happy little tadpole about the Great Medusa.

  28

  Mama came to see me very early to let me know what she’d decided: she was giving me twenty-four hours to bring Luc back. After that, she would notify the police. But I promised that wouldn’t be necessary because I was going to bring him home, even if I had to tie him up in a sack. With the help of my grandfolks, who knew nothing but imagined the worst, Mama packed a bag with food for me. Then, on the verandah, she gave me some last-minute advice, made me swear I wouldn’t do anything foolish, and instructed me as well to pass on a message to her little clown: she wanted him to remember we all loved him dearly, and to please hurry home. After smothering me with kisses, she let me go, as worried-looking as if I was heading out on an expedition to some distant, unexplored land.

  I was determined to force Luc out of his shell. Now that I’d had time to think things over, I was convinced the authorities wouldn’t be so cruel as to throw my friend in jail. They’d be moved when they heard his pitiful story and show leniency. They might even commit him to our care, which would be the best solution, of course. I kept rehearsing my arguments as I made my way through the Gigots, and felt quite confident I’d be able to reason with my friend, but as soon as I got there, I saw it wasn’t going to be as simple as that, because there was a wacky wind blowing over the Cove. Luc was feverish, elated. He was hopping about like a cricket while he waited for me, desperately anxious to tell me he had finally found his mother.

  He says he met her in Ftan last night and that she’s a mermaid. She is the City’s queen, he explains, and invited him into her byssus palace, at the very heart of the tendrilled domain. He says he now understands everything, that he actually knew all along, and he berates himself for coming so many times to within a hair’s breadth of the truth without being brave enough to accept it. He blames himself for being so stupidly unaware that all his dreams were calls, messages his mother sent him through the iguana. He says everything is beginning to make sense now that he has seen her, talked to her, that everything has become clear, that he finally knows who he really is. He is the result, he claims, of the involuntary union of that young royal mermaid and the Pig who caught her in his net one night. He is the hybrid fruit, the child of that loathsome embrace, whom his mortified mother reluctantly abandoned on the shore after his birth. He isn’t Luc Bezeau, he tells me, but Fngl Mgl’Nf, the exiled prince of the Shimmering City, doomed to creep upon the earth among the plodders on account of those foreign genes that prevent him from living below the waves. But in the same breath he declares that this will soon be put right and that his bitter, unnatural fate is already receding into the past, because the gliders are coming to get him — an escort has been dispatched by his mother to bring him back to her. He says they won’t be long now, they should already be soaring over the Grand Banks, cleaving swiftly through the dark, phosphoric waters, and will soon be entering those of the Gulf. He tells me they will get here at the seventh tide and wait for him at the Île aux Oeufs, the island that used to have a lighthouse and is now a bird sanctuary in the middle of the river, miles away from anywhere. Luc says there will be magi among them who will be able to uncover his Ftan characteristics. They are going to teach him how to break out of the plodder chrysalis. They will assist him in his transformation. They will recompose his being and restore its aquatic essence. They are going to operate on him so he can breathe freely underwater. And then he will glide away with them, travel in their company beneath the surface of the ocean and join his mother. He swears it’s all true, that he is going to Ftan, that Fngl will soon be returned to his people.

  He is casting off the moorings. The rope of friendship he and I have twisted together still ties him to the world, but I can read in his hollow gaze that even this bond won’t be able to hold him back much longer. Glider or not, he definitely needs a doctor, and I did my best to talk him into coming home with me, but I might as well have been pontificating into an echo chamber. Even Mama’s message failed to sway him — he merely asked me to explain to her that he couldn’t run the risk of getting caught, because he was to meet his own mother at a fixed time that couldn’t possibly be changed. My friend is adrift. The worst of it is that he appears perfectly reasonable. He says he can understand my skeptical attitude. He admits it’s all very hard to believe, that it sounds insane, and this is why he suggests I judge for myself — he wants me to go with him to the Île aux Oeufs. He wants me to see the gliders with my own eyes, to admire their powerful beauty, to find out that they are absolutely real. There, on the Île aux Oeufs, he’ll say goodbye to me, but he quickly adds that there’s no reason to be upset by this parting, because we are going to keep in touch thanks to the iguana. Besides, he’ll often come to visit me in dreams, and also in person when he can, on days when
spring tides surge against the shore.

  He hovered in front of me, waiting for my answer, impatient to hear if I agreed to come to the island with him. For a brief moment I toyed with the idea of physically overpowering him, but my chances of success were so slim that I decided against it. I asked, instead, for a little time to think things over, and while he went off to play in the waves I consulted the iguana. I begged the lizard to intervene, to stop sending out at the very least those demented dreams that were creating such turmoil in my friend’s mind. But the saurian merely smiled. A sphinx of the South Seas. A mangy Mona Lisa, will-o’-the-wisps dancing in her eyes.

  * * *

  In the tranquil silence of the cave, I felt my thinking becoming clearer and a conclusion presenting itself: since I could neither reason with Luc nor coerce him, I had to go to the island with him. I had to pretend I shared his delusion, play along with him.

  * * *

  I suggested to Luc we make a new pact: I would come along to the Île aux Oeufs and not stand in the way of him leaving with the mermen, provided he promised to return home with me without making a fuss if, for some reason or other, the water beings didn’t show up. The arrangement suited him — that’s how sure he was he would pull it off. And we clutched claws on that, performing the crab, mutually convinced we had clinched the deal of the century. It certainly was the nuttiest deal of the century.

  * * *

  I couldn’t tell Mama in person because she wouldn’t have let me leave again, so I went over to the house under cover of darkness and slipped a reassuring letter under the door in which I asked her to trust me and give me three more days. The first tide is ebbing. Now we only need to wait for the seventh.

  29

  Time flows lazily along at the Cove while Luc gets ready to leave. He has a lot to do. He began by sorting through the hundreds of notebook pages on which he’d scribbled his haiku in glider language, then he hurriedly finished his fresco, signing it with fluid hieroglyphs spelling out his name and rank in Ftanese. Now, he’s preparing himself for the transformation and is totally engrossed with this approaching rebirth. He imprints the beach with unfamiliar dances — sinuous, ritual choreographies — then squats in his iguana crouch in the middle of the foreshore and meditates, singing throat songs that remind me of those of the Inuit.

  Five more tides…

  * * *

  He is constantly awake, yet doesn’t appear the least bit tired. Sleep passes him by, but in any case he no longer needs it to dream, because he is now so securely connected with the world of Ftan that all he has to do is close his eyes to get there. This is how he can track the journey of the queen’s messengers, those awe-inspiring mermen speeding towards him with clouds of frightened plankton billowing in their wake. And at night, over the fire, he conjures up the cerulean mermaid who reigns over the swaying town. He translates for my benefit the sweet chats they have together. Then he’ll wax lyrical again about the splendours of the City, its serpentine lanes vibrant with budding life, the peaceful ways and noble virtues of the aquatic nation. He makes it sound like the Garden of Eden and I’m getting caught up in it, believe in it — it’s all so beautiful, so simple. I know perfectly well this whole glider thing is only poetry, fragile poetry, the chimerical invention of an unbridled imagination, but what good would it do to say this to him and start a useless argument? The near future will teach Luc that Ftan is merely a construct of his mind, and if we have to sail the swells all the way to the Île aux Oeufs for this, then off we go.

  * * *

  He has given me the iguana. Having to leave behind his old dream master saddened him, but how could he possibly take him along to where he is going? I promised to look after the lizard, but I’m wondering in fact what to do with him, since all he’s been doling out to me lately are eerie, incomprehensible mirages in which penetrating bird’s eyes alternate with sea-green visions of sunken ships. Could the dream machine be out of order? Overheated, perhaps, as a result of Luc’s visionary bulimia? Anyhow, from now on I am responsible for the reptile, and Luc has strongly advised me to take excellent care of him, since he will soon be the only mental link between us.

  * * *

  With the rising of the fourth tide, the weather suddenly changed. The air thickened. The sky grew dim. The clouds began to seethe, the wind snapped at its own tail, and a storm broke — a mere prelude to a more terrible wrath. Fearing that his departure might be jeopardized, Luc stepped up to the edge of the hungry waves and improvised a frenzied makusham*. From the mouth of the cave, I could see him bellowing into the pandemonium and dancing in the downpour like a crazed faun. That galvanized gargoyle shrouded in sea spray hurled abuse at the convulsing elements, ordered them to cease their struggle and calm down, while flashes of lightning took his photograph. He roared terrible, blood-curdling pleas in the face of the chaos. He refused to yield, since his identity, even his very life, hung in the balance. At last, as the night wore on, he succeeded in driving the storm away. In its place a dense fog drifted over the weary sea, but Luc couldn’t really complain since he had probably caused it himself by leaping about like that. A side effect.

  Now, not a breath of wind rippled the ocean, but the weather remained unsettled. Luc felt it was too risky to wait. He meditated close to the iguana one last time, then gave the order to leave. Doubly protected by darkness and mist, we slipped out of the Cove and made our way to the beaches at Ferland. We still needed to solve our transportation problem since, on the map, the Île aux Oeufs rises out of the Gulf a good fifteen kilometres from the shore — a bit far for a swim. But Luc had planned ahead, and after leaving me to cool my heels all by myself for an hour in the thick soup that enveloped the old jetty at Pointe-Rouge, he came chugging towards me in his diver friends’ Zodiac. I jumped aboard, choosing to believe he had permission to borrow that sacred skiff, and we disappeared into the bowels of the fog without so much as a compass to guide us.

  30

  Should gas bubbles invade the central nervous system (the brain and the spinal cord) — usually as a result of a diver’s too rapid return to the surface — neurological decompression sickness will occur. This type of accident can be extremely serious if treatment isn’t begun promptly.

  It was teeming with birds. They were everywhere. High up on the bluffs and crammed into each pore of the island’s brow were gulls and sterns, kingfishers, puffins, and some cormorant too. Even around us, they bobbed on the waves like decoys. We had come to a land inhabited by birds. No wonder it was called Île aux Oeufs — it must be swarming with eggs.

  After meandering all day long through the fog, we were about to reach our destination. After oblivion, after the erratic north, after staring at the surface of that foam-flecked water, thinking we would drift on forever like lost astronauts, the Île aux Oeufs had suddenly emerged, right in front of the bow, looming out of the thick cotton wool like a mossy skull, so close already we almost bumped our noses. A Jurassic tortoise. King Kong’s dead body off our shores. A giant lobster from the long-gone era before TV. Île aux Oeufs — our own, private Easter Island, a sliver of the Galápagos belonging to no one but us, the iguana’s young disciples.

  The strangest thing about the birds was their silence. Not a squawk rose into the air. Not a feather either, for that matter. The birds were dazed, stunned by the unusual sight of our arrival, amazed at our wingless audacity. But not at all intimidated, though. They didn’t even move out of our way, floating about us like stupid bathtub toys we had to try and steer around. It looked as if they didn’t want us to get through. The island itself was rugged, harsh, covered with tall, gullied forms. A mass of proud protrusions and faults, sitting haughtily on its viscous sides as though suddenly frozen in the middle of an upward thrust, a primordial surge, an effort to attack the horizontal stillness of the waters. We coasted over the reefs’ crumbling fangs and other pitfalls cloaked in swirling seaweed. Dodging shoals and treacherous eddies, ignoring the round, wild bird’s eyes that stripped our souls
as we went by, we slipped past the island’s western coast. And there, on a guano-speckled headland besieged by hordes of clawed and spluttering demons, we saw before us the tall, fog-ringed shape of the old lighthouse. It must have been ages since the melancholy leviathan’s sweeping beam thrilled solitary rorquals; that pleasure had been stolen by the other skeleton-like robot, the hazy terminator towering a bit further away. But even if it was haunted now only by gulls and the ghosts of the drowned, that grim dungeon of the antisouth continued to stand.

  The abandoned lighthouse was where we were bound, the appointed meeting place. At its base, a spit of grey sand was tenderly washed by the sea, and this is where we drew alongside it, wading through slimy water topped with shivery caps of froth. We didn’t need to talk. We had nothing to say. While I tackled the job of setting up camp, Luc wandered off to explore the beach; then he perched on top of a slab of rock to smoke and read the weather. His clam face showed no emotion, but I could tell from the gleam in his Asiatic gaze that he was inwardly stamping his feet.