Concerto to the Memory of an Angel (6 page)

Disgusted with himself, he stamped his feet in his narrow cell; he struck the metal wall several times with his fist.

“Shame! Shame! If someone says ‘your daughter,' you think of Grace. And if someone says, ‘your daughter has died,' you throw Joan into the grave. You should die of shame.”

To be sure, no one had heard him thinking, but he himself had: he now knew that he was vile and despicable. He would never recover from this bleeding wound.

“I don't have the right to love Joan less than the others. Nor do I have the right to love Grace more. Why haven't I been thinking of Kate or Betty?”

Just as he was ranting to himself, Dexter knocked on the door.

“Are you okay, Greg?”

“I'm okay.”

“Don't you go saying just any old thing. Give me a minute. I've got something that will help you.”

Greg yanked open the door and said, almost violently, “No one can help me.”

Dexter nodded, but handed him a book all the same.

“Here.”

“What's this?”

“My Bible.”

Greg was so disconcerted that he forgot his sorrow for a few seconds. His hands refused to take the Bible, and his eyes, full of hostility, took in the old stained canvas cover, and everything inside him cried out, “What the fuck do you want me to do with this?”

“Keep it, just in case . . . Maybe you'll come upon a text that could help you.”

“I don't read.”

“Open the Bible; it's not reading, it's thinking.”

Dexter shoved the volume into his hands and went off to prepare for his watch.

Greg tossed the book onto his mattress, realized that he wouldn't be able to get to sleep, put on his sneakers and his jacket and decided to jog on deck until he collapsed with fatigue.

 

The next morning Greg woke up convinced that Joan had died.

And this time, it no longer suited him, on the contrary, it hurt him: he dreamt that Joan was dying because she had a bad father, an indifferent parent. Still in bed he began to sob over his daughter's fate, her short life spent with a brutal man, for while he may have hidden from Grace the fact that he preferred her, he had made it quite clear to Joan that he had a hard time putting up with her—he was always scolding her, correcting her, asking her to be quiet or let her sisters speak. Had he ever really hugged her willingly? The child must have felt that he was reluctant to approach her, and if he did so it was more out of a concern for equal treatment than because he felt an impulse to hug her.

Tossing and turning in his bed he felt the weight of Dexter's Bible on his thigh. He began to leaf through the tome unconsciously, wearily gazing at the verses that were printed in such small type, skimming the table of contents, and among the pages he found a card. It was a holy picture, colorful and naïve, printed in relief on meringue-colored card stock, a golden halo framing a woman's face, that of Saint Rita.

He was moved by her smile. It symbolized his wife and daughters in their purity, beauty and candor.

“Please don't let it be Joan,” murmured Greg to the picture, “please don't let it be Joan. That way I'll be able to make it up to her. I'll give her the attention and affection she deserves. Please don't let it be Joan.”

He was surprised to find himself speaking to a cardboard figure; he would have been just as surprised if he'd found himself in the presence of the saint in flesh and blood, for he did not believe in God or in saints. But Dr. Simbadour's telegram had left him in such a state that he was ready to try anything, including prayer. However much he may have wanted Joan to disappear last night, today he wanted her to live so that he could make up for lost time and the rarity of tenderness he'd shown her.

He went back to work, less energetically, because now his ruminations were absorbing part of his strength. The news had stirred up a painful world of thoughts: the door of mental suffering had now opened to him.

He thought about his eldest daughter, Kate, the silent one, who was like her mother physically and like her father in character; at the age of eighteen she was already working in a store in Vancouver . . . Had she died at work? If it was Kate, what dreams had this death come to interrupt?

Greg realized that he didn't really know his daughters. He could list objective facts about them—their age, habits, schedules—but he was completely oblivious as to what troubled their minds. Familiar strangers. Enigmas who depended on his authority. Four daughters: four unknown quantities.

He examined himself in the mirror. He was sturdy, with square shoulders and square ideas. His physique did not lie: his narrow forehead, wider than it was high, left little room for intellect; broad thighs supporting an ample pelvis, although it was not as ample as his torso which grew wider as it rose, powerful, to his shoulders. His body told the story of a man who devoted himself to physical activity. Every evening for years he had been proud to wear himself out, because his exhaustion gave him a sense of duty fulfilled. A very simple life, not even subject to the wearing of time, because to grow tired of one thing one must imagine the next . . .

He looked at his reflection and analyzed himself. He had always gone to sea in order to escape the land. To sea to escape his original family, his drunken father and self-effacing mother. To sea to escape his second family, the one he had founded: the word “founded” seemed pretentious, because Greg had merely gone about possessing his legal wife, that was the whole point of marriage, no? He had sailed the world over: and yet he hadn't seen a thing. The freighter may have docked in any number of ports, Greg had gone no further on land than his ship had, he'd never left the pier, he put in his roots in the port, out of wariness, out of a fear of the unknown, a fear he might be left behind. Basically, in spite of the thousands of kilometers they had sailed, all the cities and nations and foreign landscapes were places he had imagined from on board the ship, or from the tavern on the pier, and they had all remained distant destinations.

As had his daughters. Exotic. Seen in passing. Nothing more.

What did he remember about Betty, the youngest? She was nine years old, a good student, and she lived in the attic room that Greg had reconverted into a bedroom. What else? He had trouble picturing her more precisely. He'd paid no attention to her desires, her aversions, her goals. Why hadn't he found the time to hang out with his daughters? The life he led was a rough one, he was nothing but a sort of beast of burden, an ox plowing the waves.

He looked one last time at the muscular body he'd been so proud of only a day earlier, then rinsed himself off and got dressed.

He continued to avoid any contact with the other men until evening fell, and they respected what they presumed was his sorrow, not insisting at all, for they knew full well that Greg must be going through a crucifying ordeal. What they could not imagine was that his sorrow as a grieving father was compounded by the sorrow of being a bad father.

At midnight, beneath a sky as black as a dragon's mouth, on the planking where Greg was toiling at multiplying the pumps, Dexter asked, “So, we still don't know which one of your daughters . . . ”

Greg almost replied, “It hardly matters, there's not one whom I know any better than the others,” but merely grunted, “No.”

“I have no idea how I'd react if something as horrible as that happened to me,” murmured Dexter.

“Well, neither do I.”

His reply had come out so pertinently that Dexter, who was not at all used to hearing Greg find the right words to express himself, was disconcerted.

Because Greg was experiencing an unexpected pain: he had begun to think. An incessant labor was taking shape inside him, a labor of reflection that exhausted him. He had not changed his skin, no, someone had found their way under his skin, another Greg was living inside the previous one, a psychological and intellectual consciousness was taking up residence in the once tranquil brute.

Back on his bunk he wept for a long time, without deliberating, without trying to determine who had died, and gradually he was overcome by weariness and closed his eyes. He fell asleep without even recovering the energy to get undressed or slide between the sheets, that deep, compact sleep which exhausts the sleeper and leaves him in the morning in a state of supreme irritation.

 

On waking he realized that ever since he had received the fatal telegram he had not thought of his wife for an instant. Mary, moreover, was in his opinion no longer his wife but his family partner, his colleague with whom he was bringing up his daughters: he brought home the money, she put in her hours. That was it. Fair and square. Classic. He suddenly understood that she must be in pain, and that reminded him of the young girl he had met twenty years earlier . . . He realized that Mary, who was fragile and touching, must be overwhelmed with grief at this moment. How many years had it been since he told her he loved her? How many years since he had felt it? The thought was devastating.

The valves of anxiety had opened. Now he was thinking from morning to night, in an emotional whirlwind from night to morning, and it was painful, suffocating, extenuating.

With every passing hour he fretted over his daughters and his wife. Even when he was working there was a streak of sadness in his soul, a taste of bitterness, a melancholy which no manual activity could alleviate.

He spent the last afternoon of the return up on deck, leaning against a railing. Waves from the hull to the horizon, there was nothing to see, so he threw his head back and gazed at the sky. At sea one is drawn to the sky—it is more varied, richer, more changing than the waves, capricious like a woman. All sailors are in love with the clouds.

Greg's mind skipped from the contemplation of the light outside to his inner turmoil; he had never taken the opportunity to be like this, a man, a simple man, minute in the middle of the vast ocean, divided between the infinity of nature and the infinity of his thoughts.

As night his meditation ended in sobs.

Ever since he had received the telegram he had been aware that he was also the widower of the young woman that Mary had once been.

And in the course of these three days, the father who would disembark the next day on the pier in Vancouver had lost all his daughters.

All of them. Not just one. Four.

 

The freighter would soon make landfall. Vancouver was visible on the horizon.

Lively, gracious seagulls swooped with precision, the true masters of a coast they knew better than any sailors, and which they could travel faster than any ship ever could.

On land, autumn was resplendent after a hot summer; the trees blazed in bright hues of yellow and orange; leaves were dying, sublimely, as if through these intense colors they were grateful for the surfeit of sunlight they would surrender all too soon.

The ship finally entered the port of Vancouver. Tall buildings, vigilant and erect, reflected in their windows the clouds and waves that bore the nostalgia of distant places. From one hour to the next the atmosphere changed, alternating between sun and rain in showers that the local inhabitants called “liquid sunshine.”

The
Grandville
pulled alongside the pier with its towering derricks.

Greg was startled. He saw familiar figures along the dock. They were expecting him.

He counted, immediately. And saw his wife and three daughters, immediately.

One of them was missing.

He did not want to know which one, yet. He looked away and immersed himself in the mooring maneuver.

Once the ship was made fast he examined his mourning women, who stood in a row twenty meters below him, tiny yet distinct.

There it is.

Now he knows.

He knows who has died, and who is alive.

His heart bursts. On the one hand, a daughter has just been wrenched from him, and on the other, three of them have been restored to him. One has fallen but the others are reborn. Incapable of reacting, frozen, he feels like laughing, and he needs to cry.

Betty. So it was Betty, the youngest, the one he hardly had time to love.

The gangway is brought; he walks down.

But what is this? The moment he steps on land, Betty springs out of a box where she was hiding, and goes to join her sisters to hold their hands and greet their father.

How is this possible?

Standing frozen on the pavement, Greg counts: his four daughters are there before him, thirty strides away. He no longer understands a thing, he is paralyzed: his four daughters are alive. He clings to the ramp behind him, can no longer swallow his saliva. Was it a mistake, then? From the beginning . . . The telegram was not for him! It was meant for someone else. Yes, they had handed it to him when in fact it was destined for another sailor who had an only daughter. Death has spared his family!

Overjoyed, he runs up to them. He takes Mary in his arms and crushes her against him with a laugh. Surprised, she lets him stifle her. He has never embraced her with such warmth. Then he hugs his daughters several times, touching them, feeling them, checking that they are alive, he does not say a word, he cries out in happiness, his eyes mist over with emotion. Never mind. He's not ashamed anymore, he won't hide his tears—Greg, the modest, reserved, taciturn man; he kisses them, holds them tight, especially Joan, who trembles with astonishment. Every one of them seems like a miracle to him.

Finally he murmurs, “I am so happy to see you all again.”

“Did they tell you?” asks his wife.

What is she talking about? Oh no, not her . . . Not her too . . . He doesn't want to be reminded of this absurd message anymore. He has banished it from his mind. It's none of his business. An error.

“What?”

“Dr. Simbadour assured me he had sent word to the ship.”

Suddenly Greg freezes. What? Was the message in earnest? Was it really meant for him?

Mary looks down and says gravely, “I was in pain. I went to the hospital. A miscarriage. I lost our child.”