The Vexations Page 3

  “Play something,” Vinot says. “Show me what you know so far.”

  Dark, curly hair crawls down Vinot’s face and wraps around his chin and mouth into side whiskers so fecund they remind Eric of the ivy over the mermaid. He’ll play a new piece, he thinks. Vinot will be so impressed he’ll tell Agnès and she’ll tell his father. His father will come back to Honfleur to hear it. Not a little minuet or gavotte, but something big like the ocean, with beautiful things floating inside it. Sweet arpeggios like mermaids, a melody like a mother. Eric builds the song in his head, how grand, how beautiful it will be, how the footsteps in the street outside will stop to listen.

  He holds his hands over the instrument, but the yellowed keys seem somehow unfamiliar. Vinot clears his throat, and Eric plunges his hands down—too loud, the piano has a lighter touch than the one in Paris. And the notes are wrong, too low, but when he moves up the keyboard, the higher notes are dissonant. The more he tries to recapture the music he heard in his head, the worse it becomes.

  “What game are you playing?” Vinot says, and it becomes even more important that Eric somehow rescue the song. He plows ahead until Vinot grabs his wrists and lifts his hands off the instrument. Eric is breathing hard. “I expect you to take your lessons seriously,” Vinot hisses.

  I was absolutely serious, Eric wants to explain. He had such plans, but they all went wrong. From outside the room come snorts of laughter, probably other boys waiting for their own lessons, and he imagines them imitating his playing. How much worse if they knew it was supposed to be a song about the ocean, about the endless things it gobbles up.

  “It was just a joke, sir,” Eric says. “I won’t do it again.”

  After Saturday-morning school lessons the weekly boarders are allowed home. Eric has stolen a piece of chalk from a classroom and stops at the mermaid to outline her form, her curved fin, her curved chest. Once it’s done, she just looks dusty, sullied. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, rubbing at the chalk lines with his hands, then his handkerchief. He arrives home with chalk dust on his cuffs and trousers and tells Agnès he was invited to model his letters on the board for the whole class. She seems almost to believe him, penmanship being one of his few discernible talents.

  Sunday morning at St. Catherine’s they’re joined by a man Agnès introduces as her brother, the children’s great-uncle, in from Le Havre with his wife. Agnès tells them that Monsieur Fortin will serve as their godfather and Eric shrugs, fidgets through Mass. Conrad falls asleep. At the end of the service Eric scurries off the pew and toward the back doors. Agnès catches him by his jacket and leads the three children to the nave, where by prior arrangement with the priest they are rebaptized as Catholics. Eric lets it all happen around him with bemusement. Conrad whimpers when the water hits his forehead, but is otherwise untroubled. For once Louise is the one who misbehaves, squirming out of the priest’s grip until Fortin holds her in place. On the way home Eric tries to take her hand, but she waves him off so that she can use both hands to hold her dress away from her neck where water has run down the collar.

  The weather has grown cold now in December, although there is no ice in the Old Basin, and the ships still come and go easily. Fortin escorts his wife to the ferry dock and comes to Agnès’s house alone for Sunday dinner.

  He quizzes Louise relentlessly. What is the Incarnation? What is the Redemption? What is the Blessed Trinity, and what do we mean by the quality and distinction of the divine Persons? From religion Fortin moves on to plants and animals and the capitals of Europe. Louise fields the questions with increasing despair.

  “She doesn’t know that, nobody knows that,” Eric says when Fortin asks something about Belgium.

  “I know that. Do you want to grow up to be the kind of man who knows nothing about Belgium?”

  “Yes,” Eric says emphatically. “And Louise doesn’t want to know anything about Belgium either.”

  “I’m trying to see what she’s been taught,” Fortin says.

  “She’s reasonably clever,” Agnès offers. “She’ll learn whatever you want her to.”

  At dinner Fortin says grace, adding a special thanks for the opportunity to meet his great-nephews and niece, and guide them in their religious education. The children eat in silence until they are excused to play.

  Eric offers—generously, he thinks—to play paper dolls with Louise. “It’ll be all right,” he says, though he doesn’t know what he’s referring to.

  “Don’t you understand?” Louise says. “We’ll never see her again now. Not ever.”

  That night Eric dreams that both heaven and hell, Catholic and Anglican, are nothing but ocean, infinite and gray. He can swim, and even breathe underwater, but he is alone. He looks all night for his sister, his mother, his father, for Conrad, bobbing at the surface like a fat pale cork. He can’t even find the mermaid, although he swears he hears her singing.

  The next weekend Louise is gone. She’s to live with Uncle Fortin, who has agreed to look after her, Agnès explains. “Three children! I’m not young anymore.”

  Eric has more pilfered chalk, and that night he sneaks into Louise’s bedroom with a candle and draws a picture of her on the wall, but it doesn’t come out. He tries a picture of the mermaid too—also a failure. He gives up, chalks a white splotch onto the floor until the pieces shrink down to nothing, until the tips of his fingers are bleeding from running them across the wood. The splotch is nothing more than a pond, but Eric pretends it’s the ocean. He drags a blanket off Louise’s bed and sleeps there in the sea.

  The next morning there’s chalk all over the blanket and Agnès takes him to church without breakfast. When some of Agnès’s friends ask after Louise, Eric says she’s been kidnapped, and then Agnès doesn’t feed him lunch, either. She packs his bag with a note for the school’s night chaperone and a few coins so Eric can join the late meal with the full-time boarders. Before he leaves, however, she makes him scrub the floor in Louise’s room, and he thinks to check the bed frame. He reaches under the mattress and touches the pocketknife, feels sure Louise has left it for him on purpose. So I can rescue her, Eric thinks. He finishes his scrubbing, takes his satchel from Agnès without protest, and slips the knife out of his pocket and into the bag as soon as she shuts the front door behind him. He walks down the street toward the stairs, and then he walks past them.

  His reflection flickers along the front windows of Osprey’s shop, then the cobbler’s and clockmaker’s and joiner’s. It’s dark, but this time of year it grows dark early, and there are still plenty of people about. Eric attracts no special notice. He circles the Old Basin, to where Osprey’s boat is tied. Eric thought perhaps Osprey might take it out of the water for winter, but tonight it sits close against the wall in the still water. Snow has begun to fall, collecting on the deck, the top of the railing, the spokes of the steering wheel, with little white hillocks on the tie posts on the shore.

  Clove hitch, Eric remembers, seeing the knot and following the rope back up to a cleat on deck. He even remembers his uncle showing him how to undo them, taking the working end under and around. When he heaves the untied rope toward the deck of the boat, it smacks the side and slides down the hull into the water, but Eric is still able to jump easily onto the deck and pull the rope up after him. He coils it near the jam cleat, although the fiber is wet now, and his coil is sloppy. He is so focused on the rope he doesn’t realize at first that he isn’t going anywhere. The boat hasn’t moved.

  Le Havre. Just on the other coast. Alfred laughed when he said it. It mustn’t take long to get there. The ferryboats aren’t terribly big. Eric has not thought about how a man raises a sail, has not observed which way the wind is blowing. He hopes that his Viking heritage will simply awaken in his blood, that this is something all Norman boys, even ones raised in Paris, can do, or at least something they can do when their sisters are in peril.

  With the boat still refusing to move, he searches for an oar, a pole, a fishing gaff, something he can use to pu
sh off from the wall, but he can’t find anything long enough. Frustrated near the point of tears, he shoves himself against the railing on the opposite side, wondering if he can somehow rock the entire boat to freedom. The lights in the building across the street have gone out. The square is emptier. The temperature is dropping and Eric’s bare hands are stiff—he tries to wiggle his fingers, and they move slowly, brokenly. He could hop back over the railing and walk up to the school. Rumor has it that the full-time boarders get hot chocolate Sunday nights. But if he can hop over so easily, that means he should also be able to push the boat while standing on the wall.

  In his new shoes, still not quite broken in, he braces his feet on the slippery, snow-covered stone. This works, well enough that Eric is startled by how quickly the boat rocks away from him. His weight pitches forward, and for a moment, in reaction, he throws himself backward, off the wall. He is so afraid the boat will float off without him, though, that he climbs back up on the wall and leaps for the boat, aiming for the railing, to grab it and pull himself over. But with his hands too frozen to close around the railing the way they should, he slips straight down the side of the boat with a splash.

  The cold is shocking and black and silent. There is no clatter of feet on the stones, no lantern raised over the wall. He thinks his thoughts toward the mermaid, but there is no answer. He thinks, Help. He tries to say it aloud, and water rushes in. The boat is right there on one side, the shore on the other, but there is nothing to grab onto. His body won’t answer. He wonders which afterlife he’ll go to—if Louise is right, or his mother, or the mermaid.

  Then his jacket rises up around him, pinching under his arms, the fabric bunched up at his ears. “Eric? Eric!” He allows himself to hope that the miraculous voice is his father’s. But when he opens his eyes he sees Osprey.

  His uncle leans over him, dripping onto the stones, grabs an end of the rope that Eric left piled on the deck, and reties the boat. Eric watches the long stretch of Osprey’s body and wishes he were grown, wishes he were a man able to simply reach out and bring two things together. He feels angry that his father is grown but can’t seem to do the same. Another man comes with a lantern, and in the light Eric can see there’s a woman with Osprey who isn’t his wife. Osprey takes off his jacket, wraps it around Eric. The woman whispers something and disappears into the dark. Osprey takes Eric into his arms, thanks the man with the lantern.

  “My school bag,” Eric says, when he can breathe. “It’s still on the boat.”

  “Later,” Osprey says.

  Eric sees the street sign for the Rue Haute above Osprey’s shoulder, and realizes he’s being carried back to his grandmother’s house. His skin hurts. “I’m supposed to be at school,” he says. “She sent me back early.” Then, after a pause, “She stole Louise. She sent her away.”

  Osprey comes to a stop and sighs. “I need to get you warm.”

  “I’ll never see her again,” Eric says.

  “Don’t be silly,” Osprey says, but Eric can feel them change direction, feel Osprey walk even more swiftly back the way they came, through the town and then away from it, down a country road that looks to Eric like the end of the earth. Without apartment buildings rising up on either side, without even the little houses and shops of Honfleur, the fields spread in a menacing silence around them.

  At Osprey’s home his wife builds the fire back up, wraps Eric in blankets, rinses his clothes in fresh water and spreads them to dry. Because Osprey’s children are all girls, there are no boys’ clothes in the house, and Eric stays wrapped in the blankets. Osprey’s wife says nothing about why her husband might have been out so late. Eric falls asleep on the floor with Osprey’s arms around him, the fire roaring.

  Eric tries to remember later what he dreamed that night, whether he was late to school the next morning, whether he had his satchel. He remembers Osprey telling him, as they lay curled on the floor together, that they would take the boat out some weekend soon and sail to Le Havre. He would make Eric wear a cork vest for safety, but they’d wave to the ferries as the wind sped them past. He would teach Eric more knots, and Eric and Louise and Conrad could spend their Sundays together. But the boat stays moored, and because Osprey gets along so poorly with Agnès, he seldom comes to the house. There is some trouble with his wife, and then Osprey emigrates, alone, selling the boat in secret to help pay for his passage. Agnès tries to learn where he’s gone, but after an Atlantic crossing the trail goes cold, so that he might be anywhere from the Canadian Arctic to the southern tip of Argentina. Or dead, of course, and somewhere else altogether.

  Fortin, meanwhile, almost never leaves Le Havre, and on the rare occasions when the children see each other Eric can feel Louise’s anger, her loneliness. To share the story of his attempt to rescue her—the boat, the lantern, the bone-dissolving cold of the water—would seem like a plea for sympathy, and he knows Louise has none to spare. He tells himself that the next time they see each other, or the next, she will be easier to speak with, or he will feel braver. He begs the mermaid to soften his sister’s heart. Louise speaks mostly to Agnès, requesting instruction on how to achieve custard’s proper gelatinous quality.

  Whenever Eric reaches the mermaid on the stairs now he curses her, pinches her nipples. He hears her voice less often with each passing month, each passing year, but sometimes, although he feels too old for pretend, a voice nudges him, an echo that must be the mermaid. Tell her, the voice says. How you tried to sail to her. How you ended up half-drowned and frozen.

  She’ll only be angry that I didn’t try again, he answers.

  Then send her something other than words.

  I’ve been writing her songs.

  Not music, the voice urges. Send her the knife.

  He still has it, wrapped in a sock and tucked inside one of the hollow metal legs of his dormitory bedstead. But what good would it do Louise now? It has started to rust, its spring stiff from disuse. A poor steward, then, of both mermaid and knife.

  When he pictures the vast, empty gray ocean of his dream, he knows that although he might try to explain it for the rest of his life, in every note on every page, there is no music like the maw of the sea, no sound to replicate its limitless hunger. There are no songs that bring people back. Not his mother, not his father, not Louise. He has known this, he realizes, since he was very small.

  Louise

  — 3 —

  At the top of your voice,

  don’t you think?

  I HAD TO BE TAKEN OFF THE FERRY LIKE A SACK OF POTATOES tossed over Uncle Fortin’s shoulder, pounding my fists into his back. I managed to kick both my shoes off in my thrashing, one onto land, the other, with a satisfying plunk, into the sea. A sailor fetched the land-bound one, brushed off the dust, and tried to hand it to Fortin.

  “What good does the one do?” he said, then apologized. An orphan I was, he said, overcome by grief. Out of my mind with it. Still, one tries to do one’s Christian duty.

  “I’m not an orphan!” I remember screaming into the black wool of his coat. Or maybe I only wanted to say it, shouted it only into the dark of my own head.

  That is where so many of my words seem to end up, guttering like a lamp nearly out of oil. A lamp—what a ridiculous image! None of my students today would even know what I meant. Fire at their bedsides, a glass globe of oil? Their parents would shiver at the thought. How flammable the last century must have been. How full of little children burned to cinders in their blankets. How like one long Grimms’ tale, the unelectrified past, all witches and woods.

  There were few woods in Le Havre, or in Honfleur. Or in Paris, of course. There are few in Buenos Aires, and no gingerbread houses, although we do have armies of tipa trees lining the streets and brilliant purple jacarandas in the parks. In the plaza where I wait for the bus there is also an enormous ombú tree that would make a perfect witch’s house. Though if there is any witch here, I fear it may be me. Louise of 46 Chacabuco, the gimlet-eyed old lady in room 12. I keep an
eye on the neighborhood children, and I am too old now to worry about the politics of tattling. I tattle freely. Little Mother, Little Mother, same as ever. There are few women who live alone in Monserrat, and none my age, which when the children are ill-mannered enough to ask I give variously between one hundred and two hundred or sometimes the truth, which is seventy-six, and sounds perfectly ancient and witchlike to them. In truth I make a poor witch, with little magic. My one talent, if indeed it is one, is this bending backward and forward of the years.

  In any case, I would never have been allowed to take an entire lamp to bed at Uncle Fortin’s. Light was not to be wasted, and little girls were not to read books behind closed doors, where one could not see what they might be learning. Or perhaps that was just Uncle Fortin’s rule.

  During my first weeks in Le Havre, with him and his wife, Estelle, my dreams were practical. Always in the dream Agnès would send a letter, a ferry ticket, an apology. I would arrive back at her house in time for supper, be installed on the same horsehair mattress, and go to bed within the dream, buried by sleep twice over—only to wake, in reality, on another lumpy mattress, in another narrow room by the sea, so that many mornings I felt like I did not quite know where I was, or who.

  In every place but the harbor, Le Havre was dust in dry weather and mud in wet. Three rings of earthworks were being torn down, walls flattened and ditches filled, the city allowed to outgrow its old fortifications. The demolition had taken twenty years already, and no one seemed to have any particular hope of it ever ending. The largest bulwarks had all faced England. Now everyone’s fear was in the other direction, toward Prussia, but I couldn’t help noticing that I was living in a city which had girded itself thrice over against my mother’s people. I felt like a spy. As if I should be collecting information, though I had no one to report to, and worried about coming to grief among my enemies.