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  Deep inside, I was saying to myself: What do you want to know, Lazenec? What do you think I know, and why do you care? And for just a moment, it was as if I glimpsed the dark, naked shape of the demon in him, as if the shape had started dancing right under my nose, with all those well-turned phrases like a musical score. And I also said to myself: Now I’m like a weed he’d want to rip out, a weed he’s afraid is going to grow and keep growing back. We were in a standoff of silence and sentences with hidden meanings, as if we were pawns on a chessboard. A kind of local Yalta, right there in the grayish setting of the mayoralty, everything seemingly rearranged with a few handshakes, with him wondering what stake he could chain me to, as with a donkey, or goat, or beaten dog, without realizing that I was already out there, chained like the dog in the fable.

  Chained to what? asked the judge. You weren’t chained to anything, unless maybe it was your pride?

  No, it wasn’t pride. You don’t know the feeling that still lurks deep inside us, a thing that’s strange and unfathomable, absurd, you might say, of course absurd, but the worst is that we’ve made up a pretty word for that absurd thing hiding deep within that keeps us from just letting go, and that pretty word is “hope.” I said this to the judge in just that way, in that tone of voice, so he would pick up the little quotation marks I put like a golden fringe around the word “hope.”

  Hope for what? he asked.

  This time I looked him straight in the eye, as if claiming my right before any head of state. The hope of getting my money back, I said.

  At that, the judge slumped in his chair, struck by what I’d said, like a spectator in an old movie theater wondering how soon the movie would end, or even if it ever would.

  You don’t know what it’s like to have money on the brain, I said. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you might do with it or what you may lack in your daily life, I mean if I could turn that money into some sort of material asset even for a moment, I would plop right down on it like an old pillow. But that’s not it, it doesn’t involve money as money, no, it has to do with a piece of flesh torn out, you understand, a piece of living flesh that burns on and on, as if Lazenec the cowboy had put me to sleep on an operating table and removed an organ, I don’t know which one, maybe the heart, in any case something very important, that he took out of me and I haven’t woken up since then, and it’s only when I’ll have found that organ again that I can get up and resume a normal and useful life. That’s how, even when you feel that all is lost, even when you’ve quit looking to the future, you still face the steps of despair, and you go down them very slowly one by one, but never all at once. I swear, there’s something in your brain that keeps you from racing down them.

  So yeah, I waited for my money for nineteen hundred and fifty days, right up until yesterday, and I don’t mean the return on my money, not those shiny percentages I’m sure I calculated over and over during the first five hundred days, no, it didn’t take me that long to understand I would never get them, I’m talking about my initial stake, the five hundred and twelve thousand francs. I was still at that point, with the idea that you can always go back, like the Ferris wheel that magically started to go backward just when I thought it never would, that one day instead of this whole business being in my brain, there would be a blank page wiped clean by a magic eraser, so that when I would be out on my own Merry Fisher casting for bass, I could smile, thinking back on all this. But that’s not how it works. I know that, now. And Lazenec probably knew it, too. So the only thing I could think to say, facing Lazenec with our glasses of cider that weren’t sparkling anymore, the only thing I could say to end the conversation was: Monsieur Lazenec, don’t you think you’ve gone too far this time?

  It’s almost strange, but just that simple sentence, that simple fake question, seemed to relieve him, as if in that phrasing, which was even more enigmatic than his, I was saying, You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. And he sort of smiled, if you could call it a smile.

  Do you mean a rictus? asked the judge.

  I had to say no, that I knew the word “rictus,” and if I’d needed to use it, of course I would have, but that it wasn’t a rictus. A smile, I said.

  Then I turned my back on Lazenec and went outside to join Erwan, who was finishing his cigarette and pacing in front of the glass doors with his head covered with the kind of hood that so cuts him off from the world. But I know he’d followed the whole scene. He didn’t need be a lip-reader to judge the balance of power between Lazenec and me and to feel it, because when it comes to those things you have to be really naïve to think they can be wrapped in language made up of sentences, when any five-year-old can look at the slump of shoulders or the bow of a neck and tell which person has power over the other and could crush him single-handedly. But Erwan didn’t say anything, just started walking with that loose teenage stride where you don’t know what to do with your body, hands in his pockets as if to say he was calm and unmoved, maybe, or maybe just the opposite, to hide his violence and nervous tension, fists clenched for sure, waiting for some evening bigger than the others, considering that all this was filling Erwan much more than me, as I’ve learned since.

  What was filling him more than you?

  The class struggle, I said. And for the first time since I’d stepped into the office and faced the judge, I smiled.

  It wasn’t for lack of telling Erwan lies, trying to lie to him for his own good, for the good of all of us, for social peace, you understand. On that rainy road, I said that everything would soon be all right, that I’d talked at length with Lazenec and lots of things would change soon, whereas I felt in my gut that I could just as well have begun with the only definite sentence worth saying, which was something like, “All right, your father is a moron, your father’s been cheated up and down the line, and now he’s crawling on his belly, and you’re his son and you’re seeing his fall.” Just imagining saying this to my son, I felt all the weight that had been pressing down on me for so many years lift, as if I were descending a long series of steps toward a void, and deep in that void there might be an underground exit, a light that would appear in the bottom of a cave in which I would put down one by one all the weapons I’d kept as armor on my skin for so long. But I didn’t say anything, of course. We just walked along in the damp silence.

  It wasn’t very far from the mayoralty to my place, less than a mile on the wet sidewalks to the château pathway, the former château, that is, but my house was still there, our house, like a border outpost in a country at war. You should come see someday, I told the judge. Photos aren’t enough, you have to see what it looks like, that lonely house standing in the middle of a field of dirt, like it’s lost in the mud. It’s bad enough that it’s so easy to get lost in these parts because of the heaviness of the clouds or, I don’t know, the trees that look like a sort of mangrove swamp and seem to tumble into the sea. I’ll take you out someday, there are places deep in the peninsula here that look like South America. I’ve never been to South America but I’ve seen things on television, I’ve seen muddy rivers with trees and their exhausted reflection in the gray water, and sometimes it’s like that here, and then you feel that you could lose your soul, or at least that it could slip away between the tree branches, in the shades of green and the little stone walls along the bank, that it could lose itself in the flat expanses of stony dunes that seem to go on and on. You have to understand this, I told the judge. Once you’re past the channel narrows, what takes your breath away isn’t the open ocean or the strength of the wind but the stagnant water, the muddy smell you find in rivers, that’s what the bottom of a harbor is like. In a way, the harbor is the ocean minus the ocean.

  We reached our house’s porch, looking at our solitude buried under all that excavated earth, and I remember saying to Erwan: Now I’d like grass to grow back, just that, grass that grows and hides stuff. But before seeding the grass, before erasing the scars in the earth, i
t would have to be cleaned up, I said.

  Erwan was staring out to sea, aiming his gaze between the cliffs on either side of the harbor. Without blinking or turning his head a hundredth of a degree toward me, he just answered, “Yeah, there’s lots of things that should be cleaned up.”

  We were like two actors who didn’t dare face each other and instead looked at the audience, if the audience was the whole harbor, with the water, the sky, and the mud all watching and holding their breath. I looked out at the ocean as well, the fall of the rocks that you could barely make out with the rain dampening the sky, and I didn’t turn my head a hundredth of a degree toward him either, since we were sharing our thoughts well enough in silence, when language itself is a useless luxury because there was nothing more to say, nothing more to understand, at least if understanding would mean making a sentence that uses “so” and “then” to articulate and clarify, but no, understanding inside, I told the judge, it’s more like deeply feeling here, right here. I put my finger not on my heart or my chest but on my stomach below the solar plexus, yeah here, understanding that causes a pain people have known since antiquity, I swear, without being quite sure if it burns, or stings, or destroys.

  The two of us stood dazed by the wind and the rain.

  The two of us, still standing there facing the sea. Except that the sea was suddenly like an impasse. And among the few words he managed to pull from the silence, Erwan asked: What are you going to do now?

  What do you expect me to do? I said. That kind of guy is like the rain, there’s nothing else to do except wait for it to stop.

  But do you think a seventeen-year-old kid can handle that without flinching? I asked the judge. No, of course not, so he kept on looking at the horizon, or rather the absence of horizon, and you know what he said, my own son, you know what he said, which he must have ruminated over for hours in fear and pain in his bedroom? Still without looking at me, he asked: Are you going to wind up like Le Goff?

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was like an invisible shadow next to him, a lifeless and silent shadow that only wanted to soothe and comfort him, yes, even today I’d like to wrap him in my comforting, the same comforting that so clashed with—what?—his anger maybe or maybe his fear, and I’m the first to admit that I should have comforted him more often, stilled the wind that howled along the baseboards. Because now I understand that Erwan was like an electric battery that I’d been continuously charging all those years.

  I’ve gone to see him a lot recently. I’ve had time to observe him through the glass in the visiting room. I’ve noticed new wrinkles under his eyes and I thought, That’s not fatigue, he’s just gotten older than his age, and it’s basically because of me. No. Not because of me. Because of Lazenec. Lazenec, who testified against Erwan on the stand in the courtroom. The same Lazenec who played up being a victim, which he was so good at, telling the court: “Violence never solves anything, Your Honor. I may have my faults, but I’ve never used violence to settle things.”

  And then I saw Erwan standing in the dock, about to speak. I’ll always remember that, I told the judge, when I entered the courtroom and looked around to see him in the defendant’s box, handcuffed, leaning against the metal bar that was like the prow of a ship, a little shiny in the overhead fluorescent lights and already damp from earlier verdicts. There were a lot of people on the wooden benches, as if they’d come to the movies, and there was Erwan, standing alone in the light, not daring to look at me. Now that I think of it, I can’t say he really looked at me even once these last weeks, during the many hours of court hearings and all those times in the visiting room.

  From her dais, the trial judge opened the hearing by saying, Erwan Kermeur, do you acknowledge the facts you are charged with? And he in turn very clearly and calmly said, Yes, I acknowledge them.

  Erwan then told the whole story, down to the smallest details: How he took my car keys from the buffet in the hallway and went out. How he drove without a license to the marina and parked there, by the chain-link fence around the work sites. How he walked around the warehouses to the basin that sheltered the sailboats and power boats. Though “sheltered” is overstating it; manhandled would be more like it: That night the wind was blowing so hard that the boats were being manhandled and shaken relentlessly. It might have been midnight, and there wasn’t anyone there, only bad genies rising from the waves, popping up on every burst of white spray to whisper some evil plan into your ear. Imagine a November night with the wind blowing Force 8, nothing protecting anything, and the wind hissing faster than birds of prey screaming through the air. There was no one around, said Erwan, absolutely no one, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it, of course.

  He opened the little gate to Dock A marked “Reserved for Yachts,” tried not to slip while walking down the iron gangway, and stepped onto the wooden dock amid the racket of colliding crosstrees and loose halyards banging against masts. You know that sound, don’t you? The metallic clanging you can hear all the way up here when the wind blows from the north, like an orchestra that can’t get in tune. So he stepped onto the dock and walked along the lights lining the pathways, his footsteps covered by the craziness of the wind whirling among the boats, and stopped in front of a Merry Fisher that probably hadn’t been out for the past two months. He stood there looking at it, he told the trial judge, getting soaked by waves that the breakwater farther out was trying to control.

  He stood there like that for a long time, just watching the boat moving, jerking against mooring lines tied to cleats forward, aft, and amidships, solidly anchored against times like this, when every extra inch you snug a line tighter helps you sleep at night when you’re thinking about your boat. If it were my boat, I would have doubled the bow and stern lines and also the spring lines, to make absolutely sure it wouldn’t move, and I’d still pray that nothing would come loose. But it wasn’t my boat. It was Lazenec’s. And Lazenec probably didn’t pray hard enough stop a young idiot…Okay, I’ve called my son an idiot for once, and right in front of you. It’s the first time, but I’m sure you can understand how good it feels to say something bad about your son. It’s usually the other way around—it’s supposed to be healthy for children to speak ill of their parents—but it actually works both ways, because of how crazily attached we are to them, so to sometimes let yourself believe your child is a person like anyone else, and to think you can have some effect on their reasoning and maybe even their judgment the way you might on some stranger’s, really does one good.

  So my son the idiot thought long and hard, weighing each move he was about to make. Then he bent down to the cleat bolted to the dock, took the salt-soaked mooring line, and began to untie it, calmly slipping the end through the loop to undo the knot, releasing the spring line that kept the boat from backing away from the dock. The sea told me to do it, he said, with all those waves pounding on our coast, all those mooring lines holding that awful Merry Fisher in the hard chop, it was like a wild horse tied up in its stall, desperate to get out, I swear, Your Honor, it was being so jerked around that it was whinnying on the water, I just had to do it.

  And as I listened to him say this, with each image entering my mind so precisely, I was telling myself this can’t be, he couldn’t have done it. But of course he had. He did. He moved along the hull down the dock to the other mooring lines holding the boat, bent over to them one by one, and loosened each knot, releasing the lines holding the boat one after another, untying them, untying them in the storm.

  And now the Merry Fisher was free.

  I can imagine how the boat must’ve banged crazily against the wooden dock, unsure whether to go forward, rise in the air, or go backward, as if the boat itself were deciding anything, as if it were able to exercise some bit of self-determination. In reality, when the sea is at all rough, no boat, whether it belongs to Lazenec or some other idiot, can decide which way it will be tossed, not its nice clean hull or the four hundred horses resting i
n the raised twin outboard motors, nor what rock, breakwater, or hull it will hit first, now that it was like a child’s bathtub toy shaken by all the gods of vengeance and justice combined, and would soon lie smashed on the shore, filling with water.

  For a few minutes, sitting there in the courtroom, I enjoyed the sight of Lazenec listening to this, the wreck of his awful boat, even though he bought a new one the following day, the exact same Merry Fisher model, with the money from a shady insurer he had treated to white wine and abalone. But I swear that had no importance right then compared to that other pleasure, Erwan’s, who went on telling what happened, like an indifferent machine mechanically cranking out his actions in order.

  Because there was more to come.

  Because it wasn’t enough for him to see Lazenec’s boat dancing on the water, no. Standing there on the dock, staring at all those boats like so many slaps in the face that awoke such pain in him, I don’t know what came over him, but he started untying them all, one after another, all the Merry Fishers, the Antareses, and the other motorboats, working his way down the dock right to the end, thirty boats untied in the storm one after another, yes, he did that, and when he described it to the trial judge, he was almost smiling. He could still see them like little ducks, is what he said, little ducks in a bathtub starting to bang into each other, bumper cars discovering the mutual joy of colliding, all eager to join their big brother who had already washed up on the beach.

  Front-page news, next day.

  Every TV station in France came to shoot the same clip: thirty boats driven onto the beach by the current, piled up like in a junkyard, scattered by the power of the waves that had swept them up. Crowds on the railing, admiring the result. And every witness saying: We’ve never seen the like. Never seen the like.