The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Page 2

  * * *

  My grandfolks form an odd couple. He is kind of a stiff beanpole next to whom even a scarecrow would look elegant, while she’s a bubbly little thing, always impeccably turned out. The son of a real post-office employee of Her Remote Majesty — complete with sleigh, dogs, and big frosty beard — Grandfather served the queen himself when he was young; he was the village telegrapher. He still takes care of the local mail in an office adjoining the house, and in his spare time he smokes a legendary salmon — sweet, aromatic flesh that melts in your mouth as though it were the pulp of an exotic fruit. Grandfather enjoys telling scary tales. In the evening, when we make a fire on the shore, he crams my head full of the most dreadful lies and other fabricated true stories in which daring sailors and fearless trappers challenge a whole pantheon of primitive deities. He’ll take advantage of the occasion to uncap a few of the beers he hides in his salmon smokehouse. Because, by grandmotherly decree, all alcohol is forbidden in the house, owing to the overindulgence the old man is supposed to have been guilty of in earlier days. But he’s much more temperate now; he sticks to three or four bottles of beer which he knocks back in an inconspicuous way.

  Grandmother tends to be acerbic. With her husband, she’s not very gentle, but on poor, darling little me she lavishes an inexhaustible amount of affection, and it feels good to snuggle up to her outdated perfume. Grandmother runs a tight ship at home. For her, hygiene is a cardinal virtue. When I come back from a swim in the summer, she forbids me to step inside until, on the look-out for some treacherous grain of sand, she has inspected even the spaces between my toes, and Grandfather himself is often forced to take off his clothes on the verandah when he returns from the smokehouse. Grandmother is proud, and concerned about her appearance. She keeps track of all the new fashion trends, and her husband’s sloppy dress upsets her. What a disgrace for her to have to be seen in public on the arm of that caveman! She would love to take him shopping in Villeneuve, but that’s a pipe dream because the mere sight of a shopping mall makes Grandfather break out into a cold sweat.

  She knows he is storing bottles in his lair. At least she has the satisfaction of having purged the house of them. She would like to root out his cigarette smoking, too, but since he’s adamant on that point, she shifts the battle onto the psychological level: with the foil from his empty packages, she is making a lead ball which gets bigger from year to year, symbolizing the relentless progression of the cancer that will carry him off some day. Grandfather refuses to let this frighten him; he lights up as soon as she produces her ball, and he accuses her of mental cruelty. She retaliates by rebuking him for his recklessness. In return, he reproaches her for bossing him around, to which she replies that he’s nothing but a stubborn old caribou. Clashes of this kind happen often, and things can get ugly. Lacking her gift of the gab, Grandfather is always the first to run out of verbal ammunition. From then on, he only answers in Morse, an idiom she doesn’t know, which allows the old man to express himself with a crudeness that would otherwise be unacceptable. I happen to know the code, and this puts me in the difficult position of being the interpreter. I do my best to come up with euphemisms. I’m the UN peacekeeper; I try to prevent the situation from getting out of hand, but my ability to intervene is laughable, and their squabbles often turn into wholesale massacres. She will call him a drunkard, he calls her a bingo addict. She condemns his grubbiness, he berates her meagre charms. Thus, they climb the smooth rungs of the deliberate-insult ladder until they reach the high plateau of the supreme outrage: she blurts out that he is senile; he retorts that she’s nothing but a nosy old snoop. No allegation in the world could possibly affect either party more deeply. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t justified. It’s true that Grandfather is subject to crazy ideas that can only be explained by his advanced age. He does occasionally see German submarines slip by offshore and reports them to the coast guards who politely promise to look into the matter. It’s no less a fact that Grandmother, under cover of darkness, often tiptoes down into the post-office to steam open certain letters from women in our neighbourhood. But when they arrive at this level of viciousness in the expression of the truth, all contact is broken off. Grandfather slams the door and heads for the smokehouse to get sloshed, while Grandmother starts sewing furiously, swearing that she’d rather cut her own throat than speak to him again.

  But they’re never able to remain angry for long. The following day, Grandfather comes knocking on the door and offers his apologies, as well as a bouquet of flowers. Grandmother accepts the flowers but never the apologies, and invites him instead to sit down to eat one of his favourite dishes. On those evenings, I go up to bed early so as to leave them alone for a bit and, at night, through the partition wall, I can hear their bed creaking. I know that soon the recriminations will start pouring out again, but for now they’ve called a truce. For a little while, a few days perhaps, they will love each other, craziness and all, and verses from the Song of Solomon will be murmured in quiet corners of the house.

  * * *

  Apparently, my school year is in serious jeopardy. My grandfolks want to enrol me in the village school. I have nothing against that. Actually, I couldn’t care less; I’m too busy dwelling on my unhappiness to be interested in such trivialities. I am stewing in a sombre juice. I try to be strong, but this darkest hour of my fractured existence seems to go on for ever. I have lost interest in the job of living. All I’d like to do is sleep and rest in peace myself, but even that is denied me, because I am constantly attacked by horrible night terrors.

  I dream about that spot, fifty-four kilometres north of here. In my nightmares it is a shifting maze with walls of nocturnal gusts of wind. It’s a labyrinth whose floor is spanned by glittering rails, where I wander about, frozen like a rat, searching for the exit. Worst of all is that thing I hear prowling around nearby corridors. That Jurassic creature tooting its horn, and searching, too. I move forward, because that’s better, but I die at the thought of meeting its stare. I run away, trying to burst out of the dream, and at long last I’m propelled into the anguish of my bed, thinking I still hear the monster roar beneath my window and feeling the whole house shake at its approach. Then there’s only my bed, and finally just me.

  It’s like that every night. My dreams are sick. The only remedy is outwitting sleep. Rather than facing the Minotaur of Kilometre 54, I take refuge in my books and break all reading records. I’m a voluntary insomniac and often emerge as the winner of this endurance test that pits me against the night. The first glimmer of dawn is my reward, daybreak my ephemeral trophy.

  4

  In the hope of saving whatever formal education I have left, my grandfolks finally sent me to school. I don’t see any point to it since May is almost over, but I’ve agreed to go just to please them. They probably want to get me out of the house, make me see people my own age, take my mind off things. Let’s reassure them: let’s act as if things were getting back to normal.

  * * *

  There was only one unoccupied desk in the sixth grade, at the very back, with a radiator and view of the sea, next to Luc Bezeau. That’s how we ended up being neighbours, cousins almost, by force of institutional spatial realities. This kinship, mind you, is simply a figure of speech, because Luc has reacted to my arrival with utter indifference. I accept this fate and resign myself to gazing all day long at his ‘what planet is this?’ profile. He just doesn’t look with-it. That prow-like face, pierced by hypnotic gimlet eyes. He’s definitely out of place among the rosy young Vikings, crammed with vitamins, who fill the school. On top of this, there’s the aroma of forgotten cod that hovers about him at all times. I hope he won’t suddenly decide to take off his boots...

  * * *

  In his own way, Luc is a model student. He always maintains an Olympian calm; he’s the champion of silence. Never, ever, does he goof off or create an uproar. Actually, he never opens his mouth, and the teacher is careful not to question him, as though she knew he wouldn’t answer
anyway. Between the two of them, some kind of cause-and-effect relationship is at work, but the other way around. Luc doesn’t try to find excuses, he lives inside his bubble without bothering anyone. Glued to his desk, completely still, he looks out of the window at the sea for long stretches of time or stares down at his eraser as though he were doing his best to make it levitate. The rest of the day, he draws — he’s a talented sketcher. His margins are full of skilfully rendered fish and lizards. Sometimes he also jots down a few lines of poetry in a peculiar alphabet he has perhaps dreamt up himself. It’s unreadable but it must mean something, because you should see him labouring away with his tongue sticking out as he polishes his useless haiku! No doubt about it — an active mind lurks beneath that weird shell. In any case, he’s smart, because even though he often misses school, his marks are among the best. He reads a lot: he chooses huge tomes at the library, science books ahead of the curriculum, mainly stuff on marine biology.

  * * *

  I’ve given up trying to cross the canyon of mistrust that separates our desks, but my eyes keep being drawn to him. I can’t help it; I study his clown-like noggin with an entomological interest and wonder what thoughts might be fermenting in such a receptacle. But Luc remains as indecipherable as his poems. His eyes avoid meeting mine. He erases me from his field of vision. I should do the same and concern myself with what’s happening on the blackboard instead, but his stubborn denial of my existence is beginning to look like a provocation, a challenge I have to meet — it’s a question of pride, of asserting myself, of taking my revenge by laying siege to him. It’s comforting to know that his coldness isn’t just directed towards me. The distance he puts between us isn’t more galactic than the one he keeps between himself and all of mankind. Luc behaves as if nothing or no one had any importance, as if he were the only real inhabitant of a virtual universe. During recess he stands apart and traces arabesques and mystical circles in the gravel with his toe. I think it’s some kind of illness — a mental one or something to do with Molière — which is called misanthropy. I don’t know if it’s genetic, or because he might have been rejected at the very beginning, or if Luc has actually chosen to exclude himself from Ferland’s young people, but, whatever the reason, he’s certainly the most unpopular guy in our school. Nobody would dream of inviting him to their birthday party, and he wouldn’t go anyway. A voluntary castaway, a singlehanded sailor, that’s what he is.

  * * *

  The Cyclopes do seek Luc’s company, but of all the unwelcome associations, this is definitely the one he could most easily do without. The Cyclopes are a gang of deranged louts who are into gas fumes and heavy metal. Their leader is Réjean Canuel, a huge rocker whose duds swarm with skulls and swastikas and who’s repeating sixth grade. He boasts about having a real uncle doing time in the Port-Cartier penitentiary. The boss takes a sadistic delight in hounding the young crowd on the beaches, but Luc is the beneficiary of his special attention. He has nicknamed him ‘the Mongolian’ because of his oriental gaze and has made him his official fall guy, the one you kick around, the one you taunt. Not a day goes by without Luc having got a taste of it: they toss his cap into the can, they stuff old fish into his locker, they dump the contents of his schoolbag into a garbage pail. Legends circulate about his Cyclopean misadventures: mention is made of a certain bottle of laxative they’re supposed to have forced him to swallow, and also of an entire day he is said to have spent shut up inside the school’s trash container. It’s reported that Canuel’s favourite sport involves taking off Luc’s clothes in the winter and chasing him all the way home. These rumours should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. Yet the mere sight of the Aryan enthusiasm with which Luc is being harassed is enough to give the most unlikely stories an aura of plausibility.

  He puts up with all this as if it were quite normal. His strategy is to not react. Never, ever, does he run away or make the mistake of defending himself. You never see him complaining or begging them to stop. After they’ve tripped him up, he simply gets back onto his feet and continues on his way. If they shove him into a garbage bin, he waits for his tormentors’ hilarity to subside, then extricates himself calmly from the refuse. When they pound him a bit too hard, his eyes flash and his fists clench, but the fire never spreads, the explosion never takes place. His stoicism is remarkable but has the serious disadvantage of irritating Canuel and stimulating his viciousness. In the peaceful but stubborn resistance Luc puts up against him, the young cock-of-the-walk thinks he detects an element of arrogance, and he may be right. In any event, he has vowed he’ll make his fall guy break down before the school year ends. To see Luc cringe, to hear him moan — that’s the wish he’s trumpeting about. He has made this a point of honour, and it seems unlikely that Luc will be able to hold out for very long. Yet nobody considers intervening. This is understandable, really: who would want to risk his neck for a dirty dog like him? Bystanders prefer simply to get used to the sight of him being tortured. They pretend they’re witnessing an experiment designed to establish the humiliation tolerance limits in the common Mongolian.

  I wouldn’t want to be in his shabby boots. To think I used to believe I had the monopoly on bad luck! Until now, I just couldn’t imagine anyone having been born under a more ominous star than my own, yet it is so; Luc is the temporarily living proof of it. I wish I knew how to put an end to the odious corrida, but I’m exactly like the others — chicken, fearful, too worried about my own survival. Since I don’t have the guts to do something, I simply observe all this as though it were a conflict in some foreign country, while deep down feeling vaguely ashamed. I keep telling myself that in every school in the world the life of scapegoats such as Luc is governed by a natural law he has no choice but to submit to, like the rest of us.

  5

  As the school year draws to a close, doubt takes root in the minds of those who have bet on the Cyclopes, for even though the full force of his evil genius has been brought into play, Canuel is unable to break the Mongolian. Day after day, Luc resists like a bulletproof robot. I have no idea how he does it. Could it be related to his father, who is crazy, so they say, and who supposedly puts him through the mill? Does he train at home perhaps? The fact is that he takes it all, endures treatment that should have turned him into a quivering jellyfish a long time ago. In his own way, he’s admirable. Seeing him standing there while bombs rain down on him, with a flimsy umbrella of patience as his only defence, is a beautiful sight. It teaches us all a good lesson. The example of his courage pushes me to probe my inner self in search of a similar resource and awakens a dim yearning — a desire for power, a taste for action, a wish to be just as strong and invincible as he is. Strange, isn’t it? Who would have thought the Mongolian could become a source of inspiration?

  * * *

  I don’t know what finally drove me to intervene. The need to pay Luc back a moral debt because he is making me feel stronger? A wave of pity? A sudden itch to do something heroic? A death wish? Perhaps all these things were intermingling in the unconscious regions of my personal geology, simmering away in my interior magma, that brew of volatile urges so ready to erupt. In any case, I stepped forward to come to Luc’s defence.

  Yet it was a beautiful Saturday in June, not a suspicious-looking cloud in the sky, one of the first truly euphoric days of summer. I was just coming out of Langlois’s convenience store with a goodly supply of humbugs, thinking only about my imminent glucose orgy, when I spotted Luc and the jeering Cyclopes who were surrounding him. They’d waylaid him as he came back up from the beaches with the bounty from a fruitful hunting expedition: two big bags filled with precious bottles. The one-eyed monsters intended to impose a tax on the Mongolian’s load, and since he didn’t have the basic good sense to agree with them, they’d undertaken to murder him at a leisurely pace, beginning with the extremities and paying particular attention to the soft parts. Honestly, I don’t know what came over me, but when I saw all of them go at poor Luc at the same time to tear him ap
art, I was actually weak enough, impulsive enough, to advance towards them to protest. I didn’t realize until after the fact just how foolish that was.

  Already, I regretted my move, but it was impossible to undo: I was caught in the eye of the Cyclops. An astonished stare at first at such audacity, but the novelty seemed to appeal to Canuel, who was no doubt already assessing my fall-guy potential. As for Luc, that commodity about to be rendered unusable, he looked clueless, totally zonked out. Since no one ever stood up for him, he didn’t know how to react, I suppose. Meanwhile, Canuel had gone beyond the pensive stage and, flashing his famous shark-like grin, he swaggered quickly towards me. I tried to back away, but one of his cronies, a big idiot melodiously called Bacaisse, tripped me up, so that, already defeated and repentant, I toppled over like a tree in Témiscamingue. The king of the cannibals leaned over me. He looked famished enough to swallow me hook, line, and sinker, and I clenched my teeth, waiting for the pain to begin. But just when my windshield was about to be shattered, an amazing thing took place. Luc, that human punching bag, that advocate for nonviolence, our local Gandhi, all of a sudden turned into a ferocious creature. Struggling like a wildcat on a hot stove, he somehow got away from the muscleman who restrained him, launched himself at my predator, knocked him over, and held him down on the ground. The apes howled, then there was a collective but brief rush towards the fighting pair, abruptly cut short by the sight of a knife that had materialized out of nowhere and was being held at Canuel’s throat by Luc. The young Nazi was pale as a ghost. He kept desperately swallowing his Adam’s apple. Was he going to be treated to the tracheotomy of his dreams? He peed in his jeans, but no one laughed because we were all on the point of doing the same thing. Luc pressed down on the blade and I thought this was it, that he yielded to the temptation to give the brute a second life as a loaf of Wonder Bread. But, in the end, he merely spoke, uttering these weighty words in the terrified lout’s face: