II

 

 

It took three weeks for Milliquet’s answer to reach its destination, which brings us to the beginning of April; a bit later a dispatch from the consul told us that the young girl had gotten on the boat.

Milliquet had gone to borrow an atlas from the school teacher; he was flipping through it with Rouge.

They’d had to turn a lot of pages before they found America; America itself was divided into three parts.

An America in three parts; they’d hesitated before deciding on the right one.

It was at the bottom of a Gulf, on an island: and to the north was the United States colored red, to the west was Mexico in green, to the south was a purple-colored bend pointing straight back toward us like an arm:

“You see,” Rouge was saying, “that’s the Panama canal… Panama Bonds, don’t you remember? No, you’re too young… And you’re right,” he went back to another subject, “it’s got to be half Negroes in those countries; you don’t know who her mother was?”

“I don’t know a thing, not a thing, not a thing…”

But at least it was easy to see she hadn’t had to make a long journey to get on the boat.

“And then it heads toward us, but I don’t know much about the route it takes…” Rouge was talking about the boat, tracing his finger toward the east. “Because it’s filled with islands… if it goes between Cuba and Haiti, or between Santo Domingo and Puerto-Rico, or between Puerto-Rico and the… wait…” He read the name on the map. “The Virgin Islands… to leave the Sea of Antilles; but then, no matter how it goes, you’re in the Atlantic Ocean…”

He stopped himself once again. Having arrived at the edge of the map he had to flip back in the atlas to the page showing Africa, which looked like a huge turnip; the scale was not the same. Rouge blundered.

“Wait, we have to find the degree. The 20… there, look, just in front of the White Cape.”

And there, finally, the ocean was wide open before us, and Rouge was trying to imagine it, because although we certainly have water, ours is small. A hundred kilometers at the most in one direction, ten or twelve in the other, a small bit of water, just a lake surrounded by mountains; and Rouge was trying to picture that huge illimitable space, those other endless waters, cut flat along the skyline like scissors cutting a blue cloth. In the picture he saw six white decks (he remembered images he had seen in magazines), smokestacks like towers.

“Oh,” Rouge was saying, “it goes fast (because he was also a bit of a navigator). She should be nearly in the Canaries by now.” He said, “These are turbine boats. They don’t have paddlewheels like ours. On the ocean, the waves are much too large.”

That boat was beneath ocean birds, while here we only have sparrows; it was under a scorching sun, here it was still cold, the fields were covered with a white frost in the morning and only the first violets were showing themselves beneath the hedges;—here yet were only a few steamboats on the lake and we had barely seen any sailboats either, because they don’t like to come out too early.

Here, everything is small. We could see Rouge rowing in his boat and that’s all we could see.

The water was gray, water like sand, or the color of soapy water; the sky was the same color as the water and made it hard to see the mountains.

In the café, we have opened the atlas again and the other men who were there drinking came over to join Milliquet and Rouge, leaning in to see between their shoulders:

“Today,” Rouge was saying, “she must be arriving in the Strait of Gibraltar.”

To locate the Strait of Gibraltar, they had to flip through the entire atlas again; they found Italy, then they found Spain; these pages had a reduced scale, so that Spain, for example, was bigger than Africa; but now Milliquet has taken Rouge to the side:

“You know I’m giving her the room upstairs, the south facing one. It’s a good room…”

“You’re right,” said Rouge. “Better to do things conscientiously when you do them…”

Around this time a card arrived from Marseille; this time it wasn’t the consul, it was the traveler herself who had written it.

“It appears,” Milliquet said, “that she knows French… my brother will have taught her…”

It was raining. There were round puddles in front of the stables and between the cobblestones like the bottom of bowls filled with milky coffee. Milliquet took a boy with him who pushed a wheelbarrow. The village station here is small and the 2h40 train was an omnibus; the people who take it are always the same: villagers gone to town on business, traveling salesmen, cattle merchants in long black or purple shirts; there were only three or four and they all got down; Milliquet was standing near the front of the train. The travelers got down; already they were leaving the station; already the stationmaster, putting his whistle to his mouth, was ready to give the signal to go; that’s when we saw the controller step hastily into one of the wagons and then reappear with a suitcase.

The train moved away quickly, while one by one the travelers took to the road.

Under his umbrella, Milliquet moved closer.

He moved closer in his big calfskin shoes with their brass eyelets which he dragged in the gravel; that day his varicose veins were giving him particular trouble; still moving forward, he turned around and gave a sign that the boy should follow him; and so, after this long waiting time (three weeks), across all these oceans and islands, and all the countries he’d glanced at (and also dreamed about, because finally Rouge and the atlas had piqued his imagination) – there was nothing before him on the train platform but a poor little gray thing.

A person without feet, or arms, all wrapped up in a hooded rain coat, and Milliquet couldn’t even see her face. She barely raised her hand when he held out his own, saying:

“Well then! So how are you doing?”

Then he said:

“Did you have a nice trip? It was a bit long, no?”

She barely lifted her head; her suitcase was at her feet, an old leather suitcase all worn around the edges with a broken closure so that only the strap tightened around its bursting middle kept it from opening.

Now he walked next to his niece; he said nothing, she said nothing.

Behind them the boy held the wheelbarrow straight because the path leading to the village is steep. It was a wheelbarrow for grass. They passed under the railroad track; then, on your left, comes a large square house with an elm-tree bordered avenue that we all call the Chateau. It was raining, a delicate rain which seemed less like it was falling from the sky than floating in every which way in the air around you; and Milliquet was walking beneath his umbrella while the girl, the girl was walking beside him and hugging her coat around her;—next, on your right, comes some fields, some orchards, three or four large farms; after the Chateau on your left, there is a line of smaller houses, there’s a pink house, there’s a yellow house, there’s a new house with a store; two or three people appeared on the steps of the store. But we must have thought there wasn’t much to see, so much so that nothing was to be seen all the way to the road leading to the lake.

There, Milliquet stopped and said, “Here we are.”

The front door opened, making way for Mrs. Milliquet’s head beneath a black wool scarf.

Milliquet was carrying the suitcase. “Listen, Miss…” he said. Then he started again, dropping the title, “Listen, I’ll take you directly to your room. You must be tired.”

He went before her along the yellow-painted hallway; together, they went up two stories. They arrived in front of a rough pine door opposite an identical door.

Milliquet opened the door and said, “Here you are. This is your room.”

He placed the suitcase in front of the bed on a carpet with the image of a black and white dog with its tongue hanging out.

“If you need anything, all you have to do is call.”

 

Rouge came just a bit later, to be discreet.

“So?”

“So, she’s here.”

Rouge sat at his normal spot in the café; hesitantly, he spoke again, “And so, how is she?” He raised his head toward Milliquet but Milliquet shrugged his shoulders.

“How should I know?” And then just after, “What would you like to drink?”

He seemed annoyed, which surprised Rouge.

“How do you expect me to tell you,” Milliquet started again. “She didn’t open her mouth.”

“Maybe it’s a language problem.”

“But she understands me very well.”

“Three deciliters of the new,” said Rouge.

Sometimes he took the old wine, sometimes the new; it depended on the weather, or his mood; sometimes he took three deciliters, sometimes a half.

The view on the water that day extended hardly farther than 300 meters until suddenly it was like a curtain falling from its rod in heavy folds.

Milliquet came back with the glass and the carafe, Rouge kept quiet.

Milliquet stared through the window at the cheerless curtains of fog which came across the lake one after the other, like a hand was bringing them and arranging them along a hanging rod;—eventually a question was asked behind his back (it took Rouge a long time to ask it).

“And otherwise?”

Milliquet looked at Rouge over his shoulder.

“I mean, how does she look like?”

“I couldn’t say.”

That was all.

At six o’clock, Milliquet had the serving girl bring her some coffee with milk; she didn’t show herself the entire day.

When it was dark, Milliquet went to look from the terrace whether there was any light on in her room; he saw there was none. And no one heard the slightest sound, even though the planking in her room was simple pine without a carpet and the room where Mr. and Mrs. Milliquet slept was just below. Not the slightest creaking up there; they couldn’t hear her walk or move; so when Milliquet closed up and went to join his wife, she said, “What is that girl doing? You’re sure she didn’t escape?” |