The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Read online

  The walls of the cave were lined with wrack. Lying about was a large bag filled with gull feathers, which probably served as a bed. Nearby squatted a coffee table that must have stood in someone’s living-room but now held an assortment of paintbrushes and other do-it-yourself tools, as well as seashells, carapaces, fish bones, together with various pieces of jewellery, knick-knacks, and masks created from these materials. At the very back, the cave ended in a kind of alcove steeped in an eerie glow from a flickering paschal candle which seemed to burn continuously. And right next to it, crouching on an altar consisting of flat stones, there was the beast.

  A real dragon. A monster armed with claws, a big sinister lizard, the one Luc always drew on everything. That satanic snout, that barbed mouth, and that crest running like a gap-toothed comb all the way to the tip of its tail. The reptile didn’t move. It kept still inside its chain mail, and that was to be expected since it wasn’t really alive. The saurian was mounted. Stuffed. The mocking smile that seemed to play on its muzzle was fixed for all time. Only the marbles of its gaze sparkled brightly.

  ‘It’s the iguana,’ Luc whispered in my ear. ‘It’s a magical animal.’

  At first, I thought it had to be a practical joke, but Luc was as solemn as a dozen popes. I leaned forward to take a closer look. I had seen this sort of creepy-crawly before on TV: a marine iguana from the Galápagos Islands.

  Coloured pebbles were placed all around, like so many offerings…

  11

  Clown’s Cove is like a song of praise, a solution to the complex equation of the elements. Here, time is only measured by the great clepsydra, and ordinary customs don’t apply. We go around stark naked if we want to, deck ourselves out with strings of shells, don helmets of kelp, and laze about as much as we like. We cheer the most thrilling waves, climb the rock face, or putter around quietly inside the cave. We often go swimming. We’ll swim around the reefs, beneath eroded cliffs, and at high tide we can dive from the ledges. The Cove is a carapace of clouds, a bunker of blue sky reality simply can’t penetrate. It’s an enclave of freedom, a place to romp about in the sun and play with the sea. But it’s also a reptile’s lair, since there is that iguana dwelling in its heart.

  What a weird piece of junk that iguana is. He certainly wasn’t hatched yesterday. He’s a tough nut, a kind of galvanized old punk, although well preserved for his age. If you dropped him in the middle of his old stomping ground in the Galápagos, you might think he was still basking in the sun between two swims. You almost expect to see him leap up and slip away between your legs. That vitality the animal radiates comes especially from its eyes. Those pupils of pulverized bronze you’d swear you can see quivering; those glowing coals; those tiny, distorting mirrors. They are only glass marbles but seem to blaze with life. No matter where you are in the cave, you feel those eyes fixing on you, following your every move as watchfully as those that stare out at you from the walls of old manor houses. Perched at the centre of an energy field the iguana generates himself, he holds you in his spell. He is a kind of thermostat of the general weirdness around whom everything seems to revolve and, looking at him sitting enthroned on his altar like that, you can easily imagine him to be invested with supernatural powers.

  He comes from Mona Daigneault’s place. It’s a rented iguana with an option to buy, since that’s the deal Luc made with the voluptuous widow. It’s why he does those odd jobs for her; he is paying the amphibian’s rent. Last year, after her taxidermist husband’s fatal coronary, Mona hired Luc to do various manual tasks, and while he cleaned the garage, a disaster area whose many strata yielded a wealth of surprises, Luc happened upon the iguana which was pinned between a moose head and a tortoise shell. How the reptile was snatched from his native reef, and on what latter-day Beagle he crossed the high seas before ending up in the garage the late Conrad Daigneault used to call his taxidermic museum, will perhaps always remain a mystery. But what is absolutely certain, on the other hand, is that the moment Luc spotted it, he felt a shock of recognition. I can understand why: that extraterrestrial look they both have, the same remoteness, the same hankering after the water. Would a dissection reveal identical guts? Unfortunately this cannot be verified since the iguana was gutted a long time ago, but Luc tells me he instantly felt the power of their affinity, the truth of this supernatural twinning. He knew right away he had stumbled upon a kindred spirit, a fellow loner, but what ultimately swayed him and confirmed his intention to adopt the saurian, was its knowledge of dreams.

  He says the iguana is a dream machine, a visionary instrument, a magic tool that allows you to travel around within your dreams. He claims the reptile has the ability to create holes in the thin membrane separating the real world from the one your mind inhabits during sleep. The iguana is a kind of receiver, he explains, and all you need to do is tune it in, a bit like a radio, to get vivid, freaky dreams — wild, multi-coloured night visions that grab you, send you into raptures, feed your soul. Dreams that illuminate other dreams or themselves. And he’s offering me the benefit of this fantastic dream machine. He wants me to use it to get in touch with my mother. He asks me to venture into the shadowland of dreams, to go in search of Mama, and learn from her how she can be restored to life: this is what he proposes.

  I have trouble swallowing it, though. Really, an ancient lizard stuffed with straw and old Chilean newspapers. How can I buy into that? And yet there are those sparks, those eyes shining with a mineral intelligence in the half-light of the cave. The way they glow quietly in the gloom, like a sleeping TV ready to be zapped. There’s that smile lingering on the iguana’s mouth, as if he were savouring some private joke.

  * * *

  Luc says there is a great deal of coherence, a sequential order, in the dreams the iguana transmits — they are like daily instalments of a serial in which you play the lead. He himself is reborn every night into an underwater world. He dreams he is a kind of man-fish, a merman perfectly adapted to that oceanic universe. And he has a tongue-twisting name: something that sounds like ‘Fngl.’ At least, that’s what his fellow sea creatures call him, because Fngl isn’t the only merman on the block. In this sensuous fantasy sea, there are other water beings wheeling about, whom Luc calls ‘gliders’ in contrast to us ‘plodders,’ poor humans that we are, weighed down by the gravity of our land-bound condition. Luc tells me the gliders are pilgrims, adventurers, or simply wanderers. He encounters them at the crossing of two currents or at a bend in a liquid path, and then they sing and hunt together and compete in mind-boggling swimming tournaments, or they will chatter about profound matters in oceanic caverns, where dreams emerge and forms converge, or vanish into the distant deep.

  So this explains the gibberish and other watery conversations that spark up his sleep.

  12

  Now I know what inspires his fluty language and the Egyptoid poems he commits to paper. It’s a glider thing. The same goes for his drawings: what Luc sees and experiences in his dreams, he tries to illustrate, to paint. It’s from these visions that springs his great fresco of the deep, a work he is hoping, perhaps, to pass on to future generations of oddballs, a composition that will no doubt provoke the astonishment, if nothing else, of archaeologists in the year 5000.

  The origin of his obsession with underwater breathing is no longer a mystery; I know where it comes from. But what isn’t clear is where it will lead him, for he finds breathing in the water of his nightly dreams so exhilarating that he has decided to do likewise while awake. He’s analysing the mechanism, the feeling, and trying to duplicate them. He is conducting experiments. Two or three times a day, he actually drowns himself and pukes up litres of ocean, but that doesn’t faze him; he still thinks it can be done. His resolve is like tempered steel — he wants to revive the forgotten traditions of his gill-bearing ancestors. He honestly thinks he’ll succeed, and it’s a waste of time to remind him he is only a mammal, that even whales need air. He claims he has pinpointed the basic problem. That blasted muscular ref
lex locking the windpipe to prevent drowning: this is what one needs to control. As well as developing more strength in the thorax area to make it easier to expel water. With this goal in mind, he subjects himself to an exercise programme. From an old inner tube he has molded a corset he forces himself to wear for at least an hour every day in order to increase the size and strength of his chest muscles. He figures this discipline will produce the desired effect. He truly believes in this freaky iguana stuff at the Cove. He has actually more faith in it, I think, than in the drab reality prevailing outside his hideaway, but the worst is that it seems to be contagious. Perhaps I’ve flipped my lid without noticing, for I, too, am tempted to believe in it even though it makes no sense. It’s just that, in the Cove, reason doesn’t carry the same weight as it does everywhere else. Other powers are at work here. For a start, that of the lizard snoozing in the cave. The iguana sends a thrill through my soul. Every time I come to the Cove, I am swept up in the magic of the place and feel a great rush of joy. It’s as though wonderful things were ready to happen, as though a void was about to be filled. In the past, I would have made fun of all this and labelled Luc a madman, but the events of the last couple of months have opened my mind to other possibilities…

  * * *

  My encyclopedia is silent on the most important issue: not a single word on how to tune in a Galápagos iguana. So I have to rely on Luc. I do my best to imitate him. I place pebbles on the altar, as he does, then crouch down on a kelp mat in an attitude of prayer. Because we’ve gone back to that now; like the Big Guy Up There, the lizard feeds on prayer. There’s no getting around it.

  I open myself up to the iguana. I try to decipher the meaning of his smile, but it seems to change with the light — sometimes I feel I’m dealing with a mischievous gnome, at other times with a wise man weighed down by the years. There are also strange visions, mirages. This morning, I thought I saw my father’s features slipping over the iguana’s crepey face, but I was probably just imagining things. Kneeling on my rug of dried seaweed, I look up at the lizard, focus my thoughts, and wait for something to happen. It would be easier without the hummingbird, that invisible little creature who never fails to show up and buzz around my ears, snickering at my naïveté. Soon I feel like a fool and can’t stand it anymore: I need to go out then and busy myself with something concrete, something less futile, such as taking an inventory of the Cove’s grains of sand. From a technical viewpoint, Luc doesn’t know how to advise me, since communicating with the iguana is instinctive with him. He has never needed to learn how. He plunges into it as if it were a deliciously inviting tropical lagoon, and the rest takes care of itself. So I have to fend for myself and attempt to find on my own the directions, the open sesame, the appropriate prayer. I am searching, I try different tricks. I recycle old litanies:

  Our Iguana who art so ugly,

  Thy will be done in my head as it is in heaven.

  Thy dreams come…

  * * *

  Fngl’s mother is a mermaid a human fisherman caught in his net one day and subjected to an unnatural embrace. Fngl, the result of that involuntary union, was born on the shore like a sea turtle and spent his squalid childhood years among plodders. But as he grew up, the biological legacy of his glider ancestry expressed itself: a metamorphosis took place — he discovered his aquatic skills, understood his true nature. Then, finally, at the age of twelve, he returned to the sea. Ever since that second birth, Fngl has tirelessly criss-crossed the briny deep in search of the naiad who bore him in her womb. Having learned of the existence of an underwater city called Ftan, where the nation of mermaids and mermen are rumoured to dwell, he set off, excitedly thrashing the waves, but the route to the town is a hazardous one, since the wondrous Shimmering City isn’t situated at a fixed point in the ocean. It moves about, drifts along with the currents, travels, changes place continuously. Fngl has yet to catch sight of the tendrilled town’s sargasso train. Every single night the challenge of finding it returns, yet he doesn’t despair. As he clashes with sea monsters but also marvels at bewitching sights and discovers sunken treasures, he continues his quest.

  This is the tale Luc tells me while the fire crackles away. And I listen, amazed, dazzled by his powerful imagination, but fascinated as well by what he doesn’t mention: the obvious similarity between his fable and reality, the close resemblance between him and Fngl. When Luc recounts the young merman’s adventures, he always does so in the first person and sounds as if he were speaking from experience, as though he were describing his own world, his own destiny, as though he straddled two equally concrete lives. I wonder how deeply rooted this split is in his mind. Does he honestly believe that Fngl’s story is his story? That he’s the hybrid fruit of a pig and a mermaid? That his mother has returned to her native seas? Is this how he explains why her body was never recovered? He wouldn’t dare admit it, of course, but I know he’s practically convinced it is so. That’s why he scans the dark waves night after night. He longs to hear a certain song. He is waiting for the mermaid’s call. She is the reason he dances at the water’s edge to ward off the winds. She is the one he thinks about when he gazes out at the swells in his iguana crouch.

  13

  I’ve started sleeping again. It wasn’t easy. At first I just couldn’t because I’d lost the habit. I would back gingerly into sleep with shivery eyelids, afraid I might tumble into Kilometre 54 the way you slip into a wolverines’ lair. Nothing of the kind happened, though. The Kilometre’s apparitions have stopped. The blizzard, the yellow eye, the horn, the frantic flight through the terrifying maze — it’s all gone. Since I have no reason anymore to practise insomnia, I sink luxuriously into sleep like a bear in winter. Actually, I may be sleeping too well, for I am getting only ordinary dreams. None of them seems to have anything to do with Mama. Does this mean the iguana is simply a hollow hide, a puppet filled with untrue news stories? Better not say this to Luc, because he fiercely defends the saurian. Rather than admitting that the stuffed critter is incompetent, he chooses to lay the blame on me. He tells me my faith in it isn’t strong enough.

  * * *

  I sleep like a log and regain my long-lost strength, but in the land of dreams all is dead quiet. To remedy this deficiency, Luc has decided to teach me to dance. It’s a good way to become receptive to the iguana, he feels. The dance is part of glider lore. Fngl learned it from a merman, an old conger-eel breeder, and Luc has adapted it, designed a plodder version for his own use. The dance is believed to have magical properties. Its practice supposedly invests you with the power to control the elements, master the currents, to lull storms or cause them, should the need arise. Luc insists on tutoring me in its basic principles. He says the dance will boost my confidence, kick-start my languid faith, and he urges me to put my heart and soul into it, but it’s not that simple. Appearances notwithstanding, there’s more to the ritual than sticking fishbones into your hair and hopping about excitedly in the waves while uttering a series of yelps and squeals. There’s a complex choreography involved. There are those barks you have to know how to modulate, and especially that looseness you need to aim for, that unforced ease. In order for it to work, Luc says, you must have the right intention — that of not having any. Quite a contortionist’s act for the mind — trying to concentrate while going with the flow.

  * * *

  He accuses me of laziness. He desperately wants me to dance, presses me to give it at least a try. I wriggle my shins just to please him and venture a few steps, try a couple of clucks, then I stop, feeling embarrassed. It’s no good: I watch him dislocating his kneecaps and jumping about like a chicken without a head while yapping into the sea breeze, but to me it simply looks like a weird kind of rock ’n’ roll. He blames me for my lack of stick-to-it-iveness, but has he any idea about the sceptical hummingbird that has a ringside seat and noisily jeers at all my huffing and puffing? Luc keeps saying it’s a cinch — all you have to do is let your mind go blank and relax, as with a circus trick. He say
s dancing is like cycling, you just have to get the hang of it, but who is he to draw such a parallel, since he doesn’t even own a scooter?

  * * *

  They are going to move Mama to Quebec City. They say it has become necessary, and my grandfolks tell me they have given permission to have her admitted to that blasted clinic in the capital. They are going to take her there five days from now, in a flying ambulance. They may as well send her to the moon.

  * * *

  I’ve dreamt about her. I walked into her room, but it wasn’t the Villeneuve hospital room anymore. This was a dark, medieval chamber, and beyond the window a rainy sky bore down on the verdigris gables of Quebec City’s old quarter. My mother’s bed was an antique, monumental affair, with long curtains of frayed voile spilling down from its canopy. She rested peacefully on this catafalque but her hair was a tangle of icicles. Her cheeks were hollow, her features wasted. An unimaginable stretch of time had shrivelled and withered her. Mama seemed to have been sleeping for ages in this dungeon and had turned into a mummified shadow of her former self. I woke up in the stillness that precedes the gulls’ raucous serenades and my very first thought was about the iguana. Could this possibly be the dream I was told to expect?