The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Read online

  ‘Your bones are going to turn white in the tropical sun.’

  It slid out of his mouth like a felt bootie over a waxed floor. And it struck me that this happened to be the first time I heard Luc speak, but what surprised me wasn’t so much what he said, but the sonority of his voice, which sounded solemn, amazingly mature. I’m sure Canuel was flummoxed by that tropical bit, but he took the cryptic allusion to his bones seriously and shrank back even more. Luc stood up and walked away from the invertebrate while keeping the other cretins, stunned by the unfamiliar sight of a fearsome Mongolian, at a respectful distance. Canuel hauled himself back onto his feet with difficulty. He felt his throat and tried to bark something out, no doubt an order for a massive attack, but the only sound he managed to produce was a squeak resembling that of an asthmatic mouse. Picking up the tatters of his smashed authority, he pointed a vindictive index finger at us. Then he turned on his heels, which were accompanied by the rest of him as he staggered away, followed by his bewildered werewolves.

  We had conquered the Cyclopes. I was too flabbergasted to rejoice, and Luc wasn’t exactly in a triumphant mood either. As soon as the defeated bullies had disappeared, he put his knife away in his boot and proceeded to inspect his bottles, assessing the damage. Reassured at last about the condition of his glass treasures, he turned towards me. I expected a word of thanks or something like that, at the very least some sign that we were in this together, but all I got was a sidelong, reptilian glance, as if he blamed me for sticking an unwelcome nose into his business, thereby forcing him to reveal the fiery secret of his innermost nature. He picked up his bags and stepped into the convenience store, leaving me standing there as if I were the last, irrelevant pin left in a tedious bowling game. Anger surged through me. I couldn’t get over it. I thundered all the way home, cursing the Mongolian’s immeasurable arrogance, but railing especially against myself and my stupid humanitarian move.

  The nerve of him to go on ignoring me! Didn’t I stick out my neck so far for him it almost got snapped off? Does he think incurring the wrath of the Cyclopes is no big deal then?

  * * *

  The night glowed red with bloody premonitions. Hour after hour, my anxious mind conjured up the various forms — each one more harrowing than the next — Canuel’s retaliation might take. I saw his telescopic stare homing in on me. I pictured horrifying surgery sessions without benefit of anaesthetic and blasted Luc for being so hideously ungrateful. But daybreak shed a different light on his apparent callousness. When I went out onto the verandah, I found on the bottom step an object he’d obviously left there specially for me: an engraved seashell with a painted lizard on it just like the ones he sketches on everything. It’s a pretty little thing, precious no doubt in the mind of its creator, and when I held it up to the first rays of dawn for a better look, I understood it was a present, a token of his gratitude.

  6

  Luc doesn’t waste words. He belongs to that breed of taciturn zebus that make good monks and rodeo champions. He’s a kind of insulated dreamer, but after a while you get used to his clam-like ways as well as that solitary-confinement mug of his, and you even begin to find him amusing. The two of us have performed ‘the crab,’ clutched claws to seal a pact. More than anything else, it’s an alliance against the Cyclopes, because those horrible brutes are still on the prowl. We come across their troll tracks here and there, but so far they haven’t attacked. Could it be that Canuel is afraid of crossing swords for the second time with Zorro of the Beaches? Has he perhaps dropped our duo of disagreeably bristly hedgehogs from his menu? It could also just be a strategy to get us to let down our guard — perhaps all he’s waiting for is an opportunity to squeeze us into individual packets. Not being mind readers, we prefer to see ourselves as the ingredients of a potential recipe and not take any chances. We only travel as a team now and spend our days behind a martial façade. To deter the enemy, we’ve stockpiled a quantity of slings and clubs made out of bits and pieces of two-by-fours. To Luc’s trusty knife, I’ve added the baby machete my uncle Hugues sent me from Africa for Christmas. Even though all is quiet on the war front in this month of June, we do our best to look wide-awake and mean — indigestible.

  The crab is a set of unspoken rules, a way of living together which we invent as we go along. Our partnership isn’t limited to a joint defence; we now go bottle hunting together. And there’s no better time for this than June, when the caplin wriggle all night long spellbound in the torches’ glow. Every evening, a great snake of fire uncoils along the shore, and worshippers of the tiny fish hover around a hundred pyres. It’s a plebeian crowd, made up of all the various categories of mankind: bowlers who’ve just wrapped up a tournament, carousing Knights of Columbus, Americans on vacation, mulish old hippies who wreck our fences as they try to rustle up more firewood, flabbergasted European tourists brandishing trout nets, and real fishermen too — boots up to their waists, armed with salebardes.

  Luc and I prospect for business. Sauntering from one tribe of merry gypsies to the next, we chat with anyone about anything, but particularly about miraculous catches, while out of the corner of our eye we check out the liquid supplies. Because these wondrous fishermen are unfailingly thirsty. They strew about the right kind of bottles, the returnable kind, the ones we can get good money for and, in anticipation of the following day, we note the locations of the more substantial lots, mapping out in our minds the long journey through the wilderness. You have to know how to save your steps, since hunting means collecting scattered booty. It’s a bit like trapping, only less cruel. Or more Icelandic: our bottles are like the eiderdown the local people gather there — fragile, difficult to ferret out, always richly deserved. Because beautiful as they may be, the beaches can be long. You need sturdy calves as well as guts, but you have the satisfaction of walking away with a full bag, the joys of free enterprise — and the profit, of course. At five cents a crack, it quickly adds up to a tidy little sum. Ambition overtakes us. We already want to expand, widen our market, increase the rate of production. We don’t even wait for daybreak anymore to go hunting: last night we took advantage of the excitement generated by the first batches of caplin to slip into the tents of some plastered college students and swipe two cases of beer. We emptied them into the parched sand while taking the odd sip, proud to be doing such a booming business. This week I made twelve dollars. I blew it on candy. Luc is less childish — what doesn’t go up in cigarette smoke, he saves. He stashes his loot in an old tyre buried at the foot of the Gigots, that granite outcrop bordering the bay to the west, not far from his place.

  * * *

  He lives in a dilapidated yellow trailer that badly needs a new paint job. Plonked down in the middle of a bald yard, the shack is surrounded by lobster pots, punctured buoys, and car skeletons, but the shabbiness of the setting is redeemed by a magnificent, unbroken view of the sea. I haven’t seen his mother, but his father owns a red truck that’s being eaten away by rust and actually looks quite a bit like him — he’s a big, dishevelled, red-haired guy, kind of a former sumo wrestler who wears revolting undershirts and seems as decayed as his vehicle. Physically, he and Luc appear to have nothing in common, other than the cap-wearing gene, but it’s difficult to make a proper comparison because of the distance. For we always give Luc’s place a wide berth and, whether his father is in evidence or not, he’ll quickly drag me off in another direction.

  Old Bezeau is a fisherman. That’s how he earns his living and Luc often goes out with him. Through my binoculars I can see them riding the swells in their large boat. They croon to the cod for hours on end, haul in the occasional halibut, or follow a school of mackerel, and with their strong sea-fishing rods they’ll pull in a full load of these silvery streaks. When they get back home, it’s Luc who handles the job of cleaning the catch and arranging the portion that’s going to be sold in a refrigerated container at the back of the truck. You should see him cutting up a fish! He does it the way he serves mass — the same effici
ency, the same depth of concentration. Keeping out of sight at the crest of a dune, I watch him slice his herrings with expert precision and I realize just how close Canuel came to ending up on a fish-and-chips platter. Luc is a true master of the knife. With the flick of a wrist, he will slit a fish’s belly, then smoothly scoop out the guts in one handful and fling them gracefully to squadrons of frenzied gulls. But first of all, he takes care of the head… All those heads he lops off, which tumble into the steel garbage can as from a tireless guillotine. I can’t help adding, multiplying. This instinctive bit of mental arithmetic is actually a helpful dodge; it stops me from brooding over that other head, the one that is missing from the casket. That detached way Luc goes about it, the unrelenting pace, that awful inertia of a locomotive’s wheel. Seeing Luc in action means grasping how destiny works and knowing that everything boils down to a question of scale. Why should my father’s fate have touched the heart of the Guy who Runs the Show, when even a village oddball like Luc can behead an entire population of lower creatures in just one hour?

  Mesmerized, I watch him cut and cut like a king to the heart of a subject. And I feel a sudden urge to clamber down and seek the advice of that Jivaro who is such an ace at getting rid of huge stacks of heads without batting an eyelid. But I restrain myself because I know he would be embarrassed. That’s what the crab means too: a pact to keep silent on certain things, a gentleman’s agreement by which we undertake to avoid all sensitive or awkward topics. Unlike Luc’s herrings, we aren’t going to spill our guts. We will be tight-lipped and honourable, sphinx-like. He stays out of my private business and I don’t want to meddle in his. Even though I’m tempted, I am not going to quiz him about his ambiguous relationship with Mona Daigneault, the widow who wears those sensational bikinis, whom he goes to see every Saturday to cut the lawn or repaint bits of her fence. In the same way, the crab forbids me to question him about his intriguing solo hikes into the Gigots. These swallow him up for hours on end. At the risk of busting my face, I once tried to follow him into that maze of rocks and aggressive bushes, but the mountains have trails only he knows about, and soon, useless scout that I am, I lost my way. I had to backtrack without having the slightest clue what he might be doing up there, and we never talk about it since that’s taboo. Luc is like those Russian dolls, one secret fits into another. He’s a gumball — soft at the centre, I’m sure, but with a thick shell that takes you forever to suck. You have to accept him like this, with his cloaks, his closed doors, his dark hidden dungeons.

  * * *

  Luc likes to break the rhythm of the hunt’s repetitive phrase. He inserts parentheses. This morning we swam all the way to the Tila Maru, a stranded ore carrier adorning the shallows at Pointe-Rouge, and explored the sharp-edged bowels of that rusted hulk. Yesterday, we outwitted the slack vigilance of a Gothic watchman and sneaked into the Silent Domain, where our macaw-like shrieks shattered the expensive peace and quiet of people who had come from afar to get away from it all. Each day there is a new adventure, another wacky plan: we’ll parachute water-beetle commandos into the tadpole populations of Jules’s marsh and cause epic battles in the hollows, we’ll scour the spinal stretches of the Cap-aux-Os for dinosaur tracks, then go and listen to the lunar song of that haunted fault at the base of the Gigots into which a little girl is said to have fallen many years ago. Fed by these novel images Luc lifts from the warp and weft of an unfamiliar story, a new, fabulous, multidimensional vision of the beaches begins to form in my mind. I follow close on his heels and pretend I am a German tourist. I let him be my guide. I can tell he’s trying to open a door to his soul for me. Being the sort of lock-jawed tridacna clam that he is, Luc explains himself better without words, by showing me through his private universe. It’s his way of communicating, of tightening up our moorings and consolidating our alliance.

  While scanning the beaches together, we discover their numerous peculiarities, but observe, as well, certain undocumented species of the local fauna. There’s the mysterious Madame Fequet. Her nubby curtains open only in the evening, when she sends coded signals to a furtive crabber who delivers cases to her by rowboat. There’s Monsieur Groulx. He goes and sits down at the end of the old jetty every day to eat his orange and wait for a fiancée who told him she would meet him there eons ago but never showed up. There’s Arthur, the door collector, who’s always drilling holes in the walls of his big place so he can add yet another entrance, slowly transforming his home into a dangerous Gruyère. And then there’s Father Loiselle, who stuffs his face all day long in the kitchen of the presbytery. As well as his spectacular bulimia, he has another claim to being special: he is Luc’s friend. We often stop by to say hello, a courteous gesture we turn to our advantage by gorging on doughnuts and winkles. The priest has a serious circumference problem, but he says it’s not his fault: it’s because of the deplorable rivalry pitting all the cooks in the realm against one another — that conspiracy of the knife-and-fork, that plot to damn him by the sin of good living! Buried beneath meat pies and game pies, bombarded with buttery salmon and porpoise stews, crushed by blackberry tarts, French fritters, and fried bacon strips, the poor servant of the Guy who Runs the Show capitulated a long time ago, knowing he is doomed to the digestive torments of Hell. This doesn’t stop Luc from holding him in high esteem. Loiselle is a man of great wisdom in his eyes; his respect for him is galactic. The good priest shows concern for Luc’s welfare. He always inquires after his health and wants to know, too, how things are going at home — an issue he seems to feel some anxiety about. Luc’s father is never mentioned in so many words, but I can guess he looms large at the heart of this uneasiness. One senses there is friction between the ecclesiastic and the fisherman, and Luc has revealed to me this is because of his altar-boy job. His father detests religion in general and Loiselle in particular. It drives him wild that Luc has gone over to the enemy and he demands an end to it, but Luc won’t give in because he is fond of the priest. And so, in spite of paternal opposition, he continues to don his skimpy white vestment every Sunday and vows he’ll keep it up, out of loyalty, if nothing else, to the first person ever to call him his son through the grille of the confessional-box.

  * * *

  Mama is Nelligan’s frosty garden, that ice-sheathed pond lying north of any Norway, and there is no sign of an imminent thaw. I find comfort in the thought that I’m not alone in this ordeal, since Luc has a mother who has shipped out, too. She left soon after he was born. Disappeared, leaving only a name: Chantal Bouchard. Does Luc blame her, I wonder, for having abandoned him? He doesn’t seem to, but he must miss her a lot, because he tries hard to remember her, conjuring up all kinds of different faces. In an exercise book, he collects mothers. In it, he has pictures he’s cut out of magazines and catalogues, collages of photos in which he’s hybridized Snow White and Vampirella, and combined the Virgin Mary with old Playboy centrefolds. It must be tempting to create an ideal mother for yourself, and Luc isn’t exactly holding back. Perhaps he imagines himself, just for fun, living first with one, then with another, dipping as he pleases into that maternal harem. His mother book contains drawings as well; they are portraits, all showing the same sad, lovely face of a young woman with her hair streaming in the wind. When we visit Father Loiselle, Luc gets out his latest sketches and asks for his opinion, because at the time of Luc’s christening the priest slightly knew the vanished Chantal and he agrees to guide Luc’s pencil with whatever recollection he still has. Were her eyes like this? No, more like that. What about the curve of her eyelids? And what shape were her lips? Father Loiselle answers as best he can, and afterwards, taking advantage of a break during the hunt, Luc will bend over his exercise book to touch up that same portrait yet again, to try to improve it by proxy. Sometimes a feeling of helplessness overwhelms him and he tears up the page. Other times, when he’s in a cubist mood, he will draw a strange surrealist mother, half woman half fish, and then her hair will float among the waves. Anyhow, it’s still a dreary game; Luc kn
ows very well that paper mothers, even hundreds of them, can never equal a real one, whether she has shut up shop, as has mine, or not.

  7

  Even though we bagged precious little today, it was a big day for Luc because he tasted his first chocogrunts. I knew Grandmother had baked some before she headed out to a meeting of her sand-golf club, and I’d planned the attack. Taking advantage of Grandfather being busy, we stole into the house like smoke-shrouded djinn and drifted with spellbound nostrils all the way to the kitchen, where the tasty delights sat waiting for us. They were cooling on the counter — plump, enticing, so irresistible that we wolfed them all down before slinking off around the back. But I wasn’t going to get off lightly. What a sermon at suppertime! Grandmother was appalled to have come home to a kitchen swarming with crumbs. To top it off, as if the culinary crime weren’t heinous enough in itself, she had seen me slip out with Luc. She was utterly perplexed. With so many children from good, decent families living in our neighbourhood, she just couldn’t understand why I’d chosen to team up with the ‘Bezeau boy,’ that filthy ragamuffin, that living violation of all the rules of hygiene and propriety. We argued loudly. Fortunately, Grandfather happened to be on my side and finally, after much quibbling, Grandmother acknowledged that perhaps Luc wasn’t quite the pariah she had made him out to be. She admitted he couldn’t be blamed for what he was, since, after all, he hadn’t picked his father, and his altar-boy position might constitute proof of certain moral standards. She didn’t forbid me to see him again, but I had to make a whole string of promises, such as never to set foot in his place, and to take exceptional precautions because of the possibility of contamination.