The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Read online

  Poor Grandmother. I’m not surprised Luc baffles her. And to think that she’s only judging him by his appearance, she doesn’t even have a clue about his real eccentricities. Panic would strike at her heart if she saw us smoking away like a pair of old sailors and practising knife-throwing on that dummy pieced together from old buoys, which Luc has nicknamed Canuel. Or if she knew about our daredevil games and all those crazy acrobatic feats we indulge in among the steep crags at Pointe-Rouge. In Grandmother’s eyes, Luc is a cactus, a censored version of the ugly duckling, without the swan at the end. She’s unable to see beyond his exterior, but can you really blame her? To discover Luc’s graceful side, you need to go for a long hike with him and watch him saunter along, free as the breeze. To understand his particular beauty, you have to throw him into the water and see him swim with the voluptuous exuberance of a seal. The gangly limbs and spatula-shaped feet that on dry land give him a penguin-like waddle, turn into natural flippers then and allow him to cleave confidently through the waves. Even his skin seems to grow supple under the briny caress of the gentle sea. Luc dives as joyfully as a porpoise and possesses a phenomenal amount of wind. If he wanted to compete in the apnoea tournaments held in July at the mouth of the river, no one would have a hope of beating him — certainly not I, since timing myself in the bathtub is as far as I’ve progressed.

  The ocean courses through Luc’s veins, and when he stops to gaze at it, you would think he was peering into himself. Entranced, he will kneel down at the water’s edge and forget about everything else. From his throat will rise a series of fluty clucks, tongue-clickings, yelps like those of a sea lion. While he converses with the ocean in this way, don’t try to speak to him; he won’t even know you exist. He seems to be privately celebrating some primitive, elemental mass.

  Anything to do with the Gulf’s living organisms attracts his attention. Thanks to the books he reads, he can differentiate just as easily between species of fish and birds as between the various types of molluscs or algae. He is training himself, in fact, to classify them. The biological tree’s complexity doesn’t scare him; like a clever monkey, he leaps confidently from branch to branch in that mangrove swamp of phyla, suborders, and genera. He rarely needs to refer to the littoral-fauna guidebook he carts around in his satchel. Often, just for the fun of it, he’ll ask me to open the book and pick any family of crustaceans or echinoderms, of which he then proceeds to reel off the various members down to the last subspecies, and he’ll transform this gobbledygook into a marching song, some kind of rap in time with our footsteps. Mesodesma arctatum — siliqua — costata — ascophyllium nodosum — strongylo dröbachensis…

  * * *

  I took advantage of them being at sea to slip over to their place. I know their lair is forbidden territory, but that sinister hovel drew me irresistibly, and since the door was unlocked…

  The shabbiness of the abode hit me square in the face. The trailer is filthy, with sand everywhere and country music wailing away on the radio. The kitchen counter crawls with dirty dishes. Fishing tackle lies about on the furniture among empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. In the living room there are two sagging armchairs, a massive old Spanish TV, a medieval VCR, and scattered all over the place are the parts of a half-dismantled outboard motor. The bathroom is a cesspool. The smell alone would be enough to shorten Grandmother’s life. In comparison, Luc’s bedroom looks quite tidy. The walls are covered with fish and photos of Cousteau. But his father’s den is filled with breasts and prehistoric odours. As I headed back towards the bay window in the living-room, I trained my binoculars on the open sea to make sure they were still fishing. They were definitely there, at the end of the lens — mites tossing and pitching on a Smurf skin. While I watched them, a glitter caught my eye. It flashed through my mind that they must have binoculars as well, that they could spot me, so I made a lightning-quick exit.

  Luc sees to it that his father’s path and mine never cross, and that suits me just fine. I picture him as a kind of dragon, and everything I hear about him sharpens that image. When Luc talks about his father, he calls him ‘the Pig’ and one can tell very quickly that he’d rather not owe anything to his genes. As far as I know, the Pig fritters away his life in the taverns of Villeneuve. His words are hard, like the palms of his hands, and his gestures rough. Luc is confined to drudgery, which he performs without grumbling because one needs to eat after all and have a roof over one’s head come January. The Pig beats him regularly and hard. Notified by the teacher, inspectors from the Children’s Aid Society have come to our school to question him a couple of times, but were unable to press charges, since Luc refuses to testify. He has explained to me why, but I’m not quite sure I understand: he knows he could have his torturer put behind bars if only he agreed to talk, but that is exactly what he doesn’t want. He’s afraid he would be deported, placed in a foster home in Villeneuve. And the very thought of such an exile fills him with anguish because he needs the sea to live. He’s convinced he wouldn’t survive far away from it, he would suffer the same fate as a crab lost in the wilds of the Sahara. So he puts up with it. He is biding his time until he’ll be old enough to settle his scores with the Pig. He’s used to it, after all. He’s able to take a lot of punishment; kicks and insults are nothing new to him. The only thing he can’t tolerate is the Pig attacking the good name of the woman who has run away. And the animal knows it. He takes advantage of it. The filthy Pig does it on purpose...

  * * *

  Luc knows divers, real frogmen. They work at the port of Villeneuve but prefer to live in Ferland in a rented cottage. There are three of them: Joël, Marc, and Luigi — bearded, brawny, strapping fellows, haloed with a heroic aura. Luc thinks they have the most wonderful job in the world. He does their shopping at the convenience store. In return, they let him hang around their place in the evening and listen in while they evoke the splendours and perils of the deep, the friendly behaviour of minkes, the fear of being mistaken for a seal and gobbled up by a killer whale. On Saturdays, when they look after their diving suits, Luc bombards them with questions, for he is dying to find out how these work. He’d give anything to have a go, but they can’t let him on account of the law. Luc has no intention of getting arrested because of such pranks, so he has decided to buy his own diving gear. That’s why he has been squirrelling away his bottle money. The problem is that at the current price of a diving suit, it will take him forever to scrape together the necessary amount, and Luc wonders sometimes if it wouldn’t be simpler to learn to inhale and exhale directly into the water, like a fish. He asks for my opinion and, worst of all, he seems serious. Why not? he insists. Isn’t Homo sapiens descended from the great primordial water salamander if you put things in their proper perspective? And what are lungs, from a Darwinian point of view, if not highly developed gills? He keeps at it, wants to know what I think, but I’m careful not to encourage such nonsense. He will let it go in the end and start talking about something else as he continues to inflate his tyre and yearn for that blessed day when at long last he’ll be able to afford the diving suit of his dreams. While waiting to be rich enough to imitate whales, he makes do with admiring them. Oh, how he envies them when he spots the noble herds travelling past in the open sea! If they approach the shore to hunt krill or frolic near the water’s edge, he swims towards them and slides down into the iridescence to watch their huge but nimble bodies glide by and crease the aluminous surface with their backs. He never tires of listening to their song, their clicking sounds. He likes overhearing their chatter. He’d love to know what these perpetual wanderers talk about, and it puzzles me too: what do they go on about in their magnificent Morse?

  * * *

  The ocean has sharpened his senses. From the frothing of the waves, the smell of the wind, the behaviour of terns and countless other signs, Luc can forecast the weather. It’s a gift from the wide open spaces and violet horizons, the result of all those nights spent out of doors in a ripped old sleeping bag. Because h
e loves the sea so much he even sleeps with it. Why should that surprise me? Doesn’t an odd duck belong near the water?

  He dreams his boyhood away at the bottom of a dune in front of his place. Only the rain can dislodge him, but even then he’d rather take shelter under the upturned boat than inside the house. He says you sleep better on the beach, dreams are more vivid, and even when you’re awake, there are always things to see. He speaks of wild animals, porcupines, moose, and every now and then a wolf in need of salt, slipping out of the forest and trotting right up to the shore to lap up a bit of vintage Atlantic. He paints a picture of those submarine fields of light he sometimes sees moving against the current in the open sea and describes that funny guy, that crazy golfer who’ll come down to the beach on pitch-black nights to practise his swing with phosphorescent balls. He tells me about the comets, the phases of the moon, northern lights, novae, meteors, and makes it all sound like a brilliant fireworks display. Luc knows a thing or two about the stars. He has made a study of the night, that dark cavern with gem-studded walls. He is a great configurer of heavenly bodies. Choosing to remain ignorant about ordinary constellations, he has invented his own, each one inspired by the sea: the Anemone, the Dolphin, the Seahorse, the Ray, the Barracuda…

  Night and day, he is in harmony with the ocean’s moods. He is serene when it is poised between tides, tumultuous when there’s a swell coming on; he bristles when gales rage, and I predict that in January, as soon as the ice appears, he will shrink back into the deepest recesses of his shell. Actually, he hates winter and finds it unfair to have to be subjected to its tyranny every year. His birth in such a high latitude is an error, he thinks, which he vows to correct some day. He has equatorial ambitions. He would like to live in the Galápagos and bask under a gentle sky. He fantasizes about mangroves, warm waters with crystalline depths, fish flashing riotous colours. On those shores, in the blazing tropical sun, his bones are going to turn white some day. He swears they will.

  8

  Luc has asked if he could come to the hospital with me. He would like to see my mother. I wasn’t really surprised; for quite a while I’d felt him circling the topic like a shark on the prowl. Poor Luc. He conjures up the most fantastic images of motherhood but doesn’t know a thing about it. He only has the vaguest of notions of what a mother is. He’s dying to find out, that’s why he’s so interested in mine. The mother of a friend is already better than an anonymous ghost, and he quizzes me constantly, wanting to know all about those famous maternal virtues people praise so highly on TV and everywhere else.

  As for the hospital, I’ve said yes. I didn’t see any reason to refuse — provided, of course, we go there without Grandmother’s knowledge, because she wouldn’t understand and would be climbing the walls. We’ll take the bus early tomorrow morning and she’ll never know. Luc was over the moon. Couldn’t have been more excited if I’d handed him a ticket to the Galápagos.

  * * *

  We presented ourselves at the hospital at eight o’clock. Luc caused some dismay among the staff on Mama’s floor with that snooty-octopus look of his, but they did let us proceed to her room. Once we got there, Luc had a sudden attack of nerves. He didn’t want to go in anymore. It was as if the threshold marked a magical boundary he didn’t dare cross. Since that’s how it was, I left him standing in the hallway and went in by myself to take care of my dear crystal mother as usual. Luc lingered outside. His carp-like stare loomed in the doorway. He seemed hypnotized by the northern loveliness of the sleeping beauty. My mother did look dazzling. The slanting morning sun bathed her in a golden glow and turned the room into a mausoleum out of some science-fiction movie. Even though held hostage by the fifty-fourth kilometre, even though nearly dead, she was still beautiful, and I felt as proud of that as if I’d had something to do with it.

  Luc finally tiptoed in, totally awed. He watched me gently warming Mama’s waxen hand. Then he decided to imitate me, lifting her other hand and transferring as many calories to it as possible. We kept this up for quite a while, like a pair of hot-water bottles, one on each side of her, warming my mother by heating up her extremities. It was one of those freaky moments you feel you have already lived through once before. Time had broken down, and Luc took advantage of it to sink into a worshipping trance, while I caught myself seeing a kind of unlikely brother in him.

  When we needed to leave, it was simply impossible to drag him away from the bed. He hung on to it for dear life, enraptured by the sheer nearness of my mother. I reminded him that Grandmother’s regular visiting time was fast approaching and she might show up any minute, but he wasn’t listening. Bewitched, he gazed hungrily at Mama and wouldn’t let go of her hand. I sensed he would have liked to be left alone with her and I almost went out, but then I changed my mind since that wasn’t my plan after all. I wasn’t going to grant him such a privilege; he might have taken advantage of it to nibble her like a crab and kiss her greedily, just to see if it produced the same effect as in fairy tales. There is a limit to my generosity where my mother is concerned and, to make him understand, I marked out the private property of her beloved brow with jealous kisses. This shook Luc up, and he agreed at last to follow me outside, but not without casting one final enamoured-toad glance at my slumbering mother.

  A feeling of uneasiness stayed with us all the way to the bus and ensconced itself between us on the seat. We were silent on the journey home. I felt guilty and terribly selfish. I blamed myself for having so abruptly cut short the cardiological experience, no doubt a crucial one for Luc, of being at long last in contact with a real mother. He watched the islands drift past beyond the bus window. He still didn’t say anything while I did my best to take an interest in the speeded-up film of spruce trees that was being shown on my side. I jumped when I felt his hand on my shoulder. He was looking at me even more gravely than usual, and suddenly, as if he had read my mind, he put into words what I really thought:

  ‘We’ll have to wake her up.’

  The expression in his eyes was candid, free from any ulterior motive. He was offering me his help. And a huge wave of emotion surged through me. Wake her up, yes, before it was too late. Wake her up before the hydrochloric bitterness had eaten too deeply into the pipes and the plumbing gave way. Wake her up before the lava of hope congealed, while it was still warm, because without her the world would slowly grind to a halt, because otherwise you couldn’t really call it living anymore. Wake her up? Absolutely! But how?

  Luc’s eyes were yo-yos. He was deep in thought. His brain had gone on the offensive, neurons were firing away, the cerebral artillery was fully deployed. For a moment, I honestly believed that a seed of genius was germinating in the sweltering hothouse of his skull and a new idea was about to be born, an original solution, but as we left Highway 138 to turn into the village road, he simply stated that he would pray for Mama’s recovery. Big deal! A whole lot of good that would do. But he seemed as pleased as punch to have come up with it all by himself.

  Later, in the evening, it occurred to me that it was perhaps as good an idea as any. Possibly, I’d been wrong to condemn the Guy who Runs the Show so quickly. What do we really know about the pressures gods are under? Deciding to give the Über Space Surfer one last chance, I knelt down by my bed and offered him my apologies, begging him humbly to do something for Mama. I laid on the faith bit with a trowel because I wanted it to work, but after ten minutes I realized I was dialling into the void. There was no answer. It didn’t even ring. The number was not in service. At least I knew where I stood: there is no puppeteer, no invisible strings. The Guy who Runs the Show is simply another Santa Claus you sooner or later just have to stop believing in.

  It’s tough to know you are alone. To make sure something more immense than my loneliness existed, I went over to the window and tried to measure the sea. Off to the west, Luc probably lay in his sleeping bag, busy smelling the stars, or praying perhaps. I hoped he would have more luck…

  * * *

  Usually
Luc is waiting for me on the steps, but this morning he wasn’t there. Luc late for a hunting expedition — that was a first, and I headed out to meet him. When I got to his place, I heard sounds, the tearful mumblings that serve as swearwords when he is angry. It came from beneath the upturned boat, and that’s where I found him, prostrate and swollen. The Pig has thrashed him once again. I gathered the swine had sullied his mother, called her a slut, accused her of sleeping with every sailor in the port. I understood that he’d kept on trampling her like this until Luc couldn’t take it anymore and reacted, giving the swine a perfect excuse for a thorough beating.

  ‘It’s all a pack of lies,’ Luc said, jabbing the rowboat’s ribs with his fists.

  And through his sobs he defended his mother. She wasn’t a tramp. Not at all. She was a virtuous woman. She had abandoned him, that was true, but he was convinced she must have had a very good reason, she must have had no choice. He just knew she was thinking of him wherever she might be. Some day she would come for him, he said, and the two of them would go away together, they’d go and live in the tropical sun. But, for now, there was only this breeze raking his hair, these glistening slugs coating his cheeks, that tentacular soreness burning all over. I tried to comfort him but didn’t succeed. He wanted to be alone. He went off to the Gigots and I walked home, feeling sad. I wish I knew how to ease his sorrow. I wonder where that runaway mother is. Couldn’t we try to find her?