‘Well, yes.’
‘It’s unbelievable!’
What I didn’t add was that in that very mausoleum, away from prying looks, I had smoked my first fags and sniffed ether with my mates. Thank you, Corentine Malgorn, born 1850, for providing the youth of the day with shelter from the rain and refuge from their parents’ gaze since 1924!
I ventured into the structure I knew so well.
Despite the fact that the memorial porcelain portrait had borne witness to all my youthful shenanigans, I’d never made the connection with anybody in my family. Corentine was not portrayed in the traditional white headdress and black outfit featured on all the other old gravestones, but instead was dressed as a chic, bourgeois woman.
‘Looks like she clearly had means, then, if she could afford to have something like this built. But why did she have herself buried all alone and not with the other Malgorns in the cemetery?’
‘Because they’d quarrelled, I think; ask your father, it’s his grandmother, after all.’
I found him where I’ve always known he would be, next to his dinghy, quietly working away on his lobster pots. Though he’s still a handsome man, with his bushy, satyr-like white eyebrows and leathery face, seeing him there I felt an immense wave of pity. He had fallen into a state of utter neglect, much like the fields on our island that have been overrun by brambles after feeding almost an entire community for centuries. His hands had grown clumsy, crippled by arthritis and nails that were too long, and his clothes were threadbare simply for want of any shop where he might buy anything new; of the internet, he knew nothing.
In a moment of weakness I wondered if it might perhaps be time to make our peace.
‘What do you want for lunch, Dad?’
‘Nothing. When are you leaving?’
‘I’m taking the boat shortly.’
Silence.
Alright then.
I went on the attack.
‘I wanted to ask you: why is your grandmother Corentine buried all on her own and not with the Malgorns?’
‘Because she cursed them for a hundred years.’
‘Why?’
‘I have no idea, it’s all water under the bridge now!’
‘But why did she curse the Malgorns for a hundred years?’
‘Since when are you interested?’
‘Since today!’
‘The Malgorns have always had tickets on themselves, that’s probably why.’
‘And what about your father? Why have you never spoken about him . . .’
‘He was an old cripple.’
‘Yes, I know that, but where was he born?’
‘In Paris.’
‘That’s what Granny Soize told me: that Corentine Malgorn had gone off to work in Paris, where she got herself pregnant to a de Rigny.’
He sniggered.
‘She really gave those Malgorns something to talk about when she came back. Did you never wonder why we were the only ones with central heating?’
‘No, because it never worked.’
‘That Corentine, she brought a car across with her so she could drive her son around. A car . . . In the ’20s . . . Can you believe it? There was only one road and she had a car! You can make her out in the background in Epstein’s film Finis Terrae.’
‘But who was he, this de Rigny?’
‘What would I know . . . The guy who knocked her up with a kid.’
‘But did you never ask him?’
‘Who?’
‘Your father.’
‘My father . . . huh, and what mouth would he have answered with?’
‘True!’
‘Your problem is that you never stop to think before you speak! His birth certificate is at home in the drawer with the other important documents. Take it if you want to. Voilà . . . voilà . . .’
Voilà ... voilà ... He returned to fiddling quietly with his lobster pots, completely blocking me out, lost in contemplation of an oil slick on the sea. The rainbows forming on the water’s surface must have reminded him of a similar slick somewhere off the coast of Valparaíso, Pointe-Noire or Pondicherry. I watched him in silence as he skittered mentally through the labyrinthine passageways of one of the ships on which he’d served, and then I headed back to his place . . . to our place . . . I don’t really know what to call it: the place that has remained frozen in time since the day I left.
I ascertained from the muddled mess on his desk that he had not opened a single letter for a long time; bank statements, bills, letters from the mariners’ pension fund and fishing-related advertising materials, all mixed together in great piles. Apart from that, there was nothing other than the detritus from an old sailor’s life: photos of old crew members, postcards from distant ports, and business cards from bars and brothels at the ends of the earth.
He had once and for all renounced any participation in life’s social structures – and I have to say, I envied him.
I had no difficulty laying my hands on the document in question, which was, paradoxically, tidied away in a drawer right next to both of our family record books. And then I got out of this place that had always freaked me the hell out.
I spent my remaining time with Granny Soize. We chatted a bit more about Corentine Malgorn. She didn’t know much, except that she had opened a crêpe shop called The Greedy Seagull in Montparnasse in 1871, where Bretons would come to eat – refer to the postcard ‘Little Brittany in the 19th Century’, which is constantly reprinted: it shows my great-grandmother posing, young and proud, at the front of her establishment. When she returned to the island with the money she’d saved, she had built the most beautiful house in the village; the one in which I grew up and which my father was letting go to rack and ruin. My grandmother had changed the furniture in the ’50s, a time when people swapped beautiful items for Formica, because it was magical the way it could be cleaned with the wipe of a sponge. Nothing remained of Corentine but a round porcelain portrait at the back of a lichen-covered mausoleum and an old clock covered in a bird-of-paradise design which had stopped working a long time ago.
Paris
12 June 1870
As well as taking courses at the Sorbonne, Auguste and his friends were busy reshaping the world in the fashionable cafés of the day. Much like their studies, this required serious expertise, the chief difficulty being knowing which café was in vogue at precisely the moment they planned to meet there. And one had to keep up, because a single man of letters or a sole politician could make or break the atmosphere of a place, dragging all his admirers along in his wake.
Currently, if one were a follower of Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx, Blanqui – or if one merely wished to bring down the Empire while discussing the suffering of the people – the Café de Madrid on Boulevard Montmartre was the place to be. One arrived after the casual passers-by had departed, never before 5 o’clock of an evening. One would hang one’s hat on a peg and then order half a pint or an absinthe, scanning the crowd to make sure there wasn’t an informer from the Department of General Security eavesdropping and trying to gather information. And then one would engage in conversation, refining one’s arguments as one parried with others, and one’s evening, indeed one’s entire night, would be consumed by discussions. And one had to know how to use one’s elbows, because generally speaking there were twice as many patrons crammed in as there were seats – and that’s not counting the women, of course, who much like children, as everyone knows, only ever nibble on their food while perched on a man’s lap.