Czytaj książkę: «Houseboat on the Seine»

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A Brief Enchantment

First, I build up that side with the water sloshing in. Then I clean out and scrape or scrap all the charred interior. This involves, among other things, replacing forty-five small mullioned windowpanes. There are also two huge plate-glass view windows that are so smoke- and soot-covered, nothing can be seen through them – two more days of scrubbing there. The walls of what served as a living room and bedroom are beyond mere painting; they will take more serious treatment.

I find a bolt of gold brocade cloth at the Marché Aligré, a street market near our apartment-cum-studio in Paris. For some reason, this brocade is only about the price of burlap, so I buy it all, three bolts full. I begin to know I’m going crazy because I look forward to sticking this cloth over all the black walls and ceilings. I’m being carried away. Perhaps the entire boat is enchanted.

I use paste to cover the walls and ceiling so I can attach the gold brocade – it does cover a multitude of sins. I buy inexpensive light fixtures with amber lightbulbs, and, after some considerable electrical work, much beyond my skill level, manage to fix them so they actually light, even turn on and off with primitive switches.

I call in the rest of the family on weekends to scrub out the bathroom, the kitchen, the usual comfort necessities. These are all a uniform smoke-brownish hue. Before the school year ends, late in June, we have the boat finished. According to my wife, it looks like a drunken pirate’s private whorehouse – she’s very conservative in these kinds of things.

The layout of the houseboat is quite simple. After one comes up the gangplank, one goes through a low oaken door, about five-feet six-inches high. I’m five-foot-ten. After bumping my head the tenth time, I consider wearing a hard hat permanently, or maybe an old-time bowler.

The door opens onto a tiny vestibule. Turning right, one goes through two swinging mahogany doors with beautiful brass fittings, very boatlike. These doors lead down two steps into the main room. On the left, looking out over the river, now, after much scraping, is one of two large plate windows. It’s about seven feet wide and four feet high.

The living room is approximately twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. At the far end, on the river side, is an entry to a small kitchen. In the center of that end wall is another pair of mahogany doors like those opening from the vestibule. These doors lead to a narrow hall with a bathroom, complete with toilet, sink and shower, opening on the right, the shore side.

Directly ahead are three steps up to the bedroom. Here we find the second of the large plate windows, also looking out on the river.

All along the shore side are small windows, four in all, opening onto the quay. These are house-type windows with shutters. There is also a window of the same design opening onto the kitchen on the river side.

It must have been a lovely place for the French explorer and his lady friend. I’m not sure how it’s going to work with a family of five, though.

We rent the boat out for the summer to a young woman (another witch) who works for the Foire de Trône, a sort of yearly carnival in Le Bois de Vincennes. My contract for our boat location stipulates someone must be on the boat at all times. The river-navigation people are already very suspicious of this crippled craft.

We leave for our usual summer vacation to the old water mill we’d bought in Burgundy when we first came to France. We paid the huge sum of two thousand dollars for this place. It was another romantic coup de foudre. Actually, the mill is only a three-hundred-year-old stone tent, but that’s another story.

Disenchantment!

We hadn’t been at the mill three weeks when we receive a telegram, our first French telegram. It’s from an elderly English couple who live two boats downriver from us. I don’t know why they wrote it in French. It says:

Votre bateau a coulé.

That’s said coo-lay, as in Kool-Aid.

I run across the street to a French neighbor hoping to find out what the word ‘coulé’ means. As if I didn’t know! I just don’t want to believe it.

I immediately take the train up to Paris, then the bus out to where the boat is. It is, indeed, coulé. Only a small corner of the roof is sticking above water. There is a medium-sized crowd along the bank. They surround the boat, babbling in French. Each seems to have a different idea as to why the boat has sunk. All of them, in French fashion, are convinced there must be a reason, C’est logique, n’est-ce pas?

After much running around, trying to find someone to lift the boat out of the water and getting nowhere, someone tells me about specialists in this kind of work, bringing up sunken boats. They are called les frères Teurnier. I phone them from the café on the corner. This town of Le Port Marly has seven restaurants, but only one café. It’s directly across the street from the boule courts, which are on the chemin de halage, or path, next to our boat. There are also two restaurants de routiers, sort of truck stops that double as cafés.

The next day, a broken down old ‘deux chevaux’ pulls up on the chemin de halage beside the boat. I’d camped, somewhat chillily, on la berge overnight. The man who climbs out of this car is in his sixties and about five feet tall. He’s wearing French workmen’s blues, filthy, stiff with oil and sweat, and a mariner’s cap, also filthy.

He shakes my hand, jabbers away, smiles, then pulls down a plank from the top of his car. He slides down the steep riverbank and throws the plank out across the water, between the land and the projecting bit of boat roof. I’m convinced he’s going to sink the whole business, but he walks like an acrobat, muttering to himself, out on that board. After looking down all sides of the boat, seeing I can’t imagine what, except dirty, black water, he comes back to me and, in a complex mixture of Breton, French, my broken French and his violent pantomime, I come to know he thinks he can raise the boat for two thousand francs (at that time about four hundred dollars).

This represents the amount we still owe on the boat and were hoping to pay off in September. I actually have it in my pocket in one-hundred-franc bills, twenty of them, plus some change. At the moment, it represents virtually our total capital.

In French and in pantomime again, he tells me he will wrap the boat with a large cloth, then pump the water out so the boat can come to the surface and we can see what’s wrong. It sounds crazy. However, he insists that before he can put the pumps in the boat to pump out the water, I must go down inside and remove anything floating in there. If I don’t, they’ll jam his pumps.

With this advice, he leaves, promising he’ll be back in three days to commence the rescue operation.

Losing My Suntan

I look at the boat. It’s noon, the bells of the village church are ringing. I figure I might as well start right off. Luckily, the crowds have diminished. In the bright sunlight, I strip down to my Jockey shorts and slide into the water. Happily, as a last-minute decision, I’ve also brought along from the mill a waterproof flashlight, a Christmas present for Matt, our fifteen-year-old son.

Usually we leave the key right in the boat door. When I’m feeling around in the blackness of water, holding my breath, I find the key. Our renter must have left it there, too. I’m half afraid to go in, expecting she might still be inside, floating, bloated, in our living room.

I turn the key and the door opens sluggishly. I come up inside and there is an air pocket. M. Teurnier had said there probably would be. I take a deep, ghoulish breath and look around. It’s dark and things are floating around as he expected, but no bodies, yet. I flash the light around the dark interior. My God, the place is filled with junk: floating doors, cabinet doors, real doors; pillows, mattresses, papers, furniture, bits of furniture; all floating in the dark. Also, there are other things floating, things I hadn’t expected, though I should have. I strap the flashlight to my head with a torn piece of wet sheet and get started.

I spend the rest of that day pulling out the floaters and spreading them on the bank. Chairs, tables, anything held together with glue, are no longer in one piece. I fish away, in and out, down and up, until dark settles over all and fatigue drags me to the ground.

Just before the bakery closes, I buy a baguette for dinner. I sit on the berge and watch the sun go down behind me. The temptation is strong just to walk away and allow someone else to deal with this mess, write it all off.

The evening is warm. I curl up and fall asleep. But I wake in the middle of the night with severe stomach cramps. My baguette goes out the way it went in and, simultaneously, the way it should come out. I accompany these gratuitous acts of my body with much grunting, groaning and feeble whining.

When the morning finally comes, I put on some clothes and walk across to the Café Brazza, the same one Alfred Sisley painted several times when the river was in full flood. I’ll never look at those paintings the same way, beautiful as they are. I use the café phone to contact a farmhouse with the only phone near our mill. They’ll pass on a message to my family that I’m all right, but I’ll be staying up here awhile, trying to raise the boat. It sounds so simple. I give the message on the edge of tears, tears of self-pity.

Back on the berge, I start my diving again. I’m now having the heaves out both ends. I didn’t know this was possible. There’s nothing in there anyway, and the river wouldn’t mind if there were. I’m as polluted as it is.

I don’t eat lunch. It seems like suicide, and, as I said, I’m very short on money. Who’d pay for the funeral? Then I notice that my skin is peeling off in great slabs. I’m baby pink underneath. My beginning summer tan is turning a gray-black and slipping away. It falls off my head and face and droops like a veil over my beard. I feel miserable, shaking inside and trembling outside. But I am pulling the last floating things from the boat. After that, I’ll have a day or two of rest. I’m having blackout spells. Time mysteriously passes, and I find myself on the ground. For some reason, it doesn’t seem serious to me, that’s how far gone I am.

The Royal Mounted Police Arrive

The next part of this tale I didn’t experience directly. I was told about it ten years later under unusual circumstances.

A Canadian-American family had rented a boat downriver, the same boat Pauline and Bob had rented. They were walking their five children along the chemin de halage. This is a dirt road beside the river, which, in the old days, was used for horses and mules to pull the barges up to the locks in Bougival. The barges were much smaller in those times.

This family, out for a walk, looks over the edge of the berge and sees me, virtually naked, curled in the fetal position and moaning. The children insist their parents check to see what’s the matter.

They’re shocked when I look up at them, or at least seem to, and speak English, American English. I don’t remember a thing, not what I said, none of it. The entire family, all seven of them, drag me down to their boat, actually carrying me part of the way. They put my heaving hulk into a bunk bed and try forcing food into me. Carol, the wife, pats cold cream over the bare red patches of my body.

They’re sure I’d just managed to survive from the sinking boat they’ve seen in the water behind me. I remember none of this, either.

I stay with these kindly people on their boat that night and the next day. But, on the third day, I’m conscious enough to explain the situation, how M. Teurnier will be coming to raise my boat and will be needing me.

I force my way onto my feet groggily and stagger back to the chemin de halage, thence to the berge with the sunken barge. M. Teurnier and another man are already there. They have a truck pulling a small boat on a trailer. They stare at me. My basic French isn’t enough. Don, the Canadian husband and father of the family, has come with me. He’s afraid I’ll collapse. He speaks French well – at least it sounds good to me. This part I can vaguely remember.

It turns out the river here is filled with sulfuric acid dumped at the Renault automobile plant upriver. M. Teurnier had assumed I knew this and so would be using a wet suit when I went into the river. He and the other man both look surprised that I’m alive. I know I must look like Lazarus risen from the grave with my gray skin flapping in pieces like a rotted grave shroud around me.

They go to work immediately, Don helping where he can, while I stumble weakly around trying to be of some assistance. They nail a large canvas tarpaulin all around the roof of the boat, letting it float down with weights along the sides. Then they set up a humongous pump and begin pumping. Water spurts out of a six-inch-diameter exit pipe. It shoots up into the air and splashes down into the river with a tumultuous, continuous crashing noise. A crowd has gathered again to watch the excitement. In the mêlée, I can’t find Don. Later, I discover this was the day they were scheduled to depart, and despite the complaints of their children, he couldn’t stay. I’ve lost my translator and trusty worker, and don’t see him again for twenty years.

The pump spouts water continually, but the boat, despite all this feverish activity, rises only a few inches, then settles back on the bottom, not unlike a beached, dying whale I once saw in California. They turn off the pump. I understand M. Teurnier saying to his brother that it must be a huge hole. They set up a second pump with an exit spout twice the size of the first. They turn this one on, and, with the two going, the boat makes a tremendous effort. The pumps make a horrendous racket, but the boat rises only slightly, then with what appears an overwhelming fatigue, settles back to the bottom. I’m weak and feeling much the same as the feelings I project into the boat.

Les Scaphandriers

Next, M. Teurnier begins to dress in a genuine diver’s outfit, a heavy canvas suit with oxygen tanks to feed a brass helmet over his head and face. He walks into the water, wearing weights around his neck, checks his hoses, pauses as his brother screws the helmet onto the top of the suit and clamps it. M. Teurnier signals with one finger to start the oxygen flowing and walks down and in, I presume through the same door I’ve been slogging in and out of during the few days I could work.

He comes back to the surface every fifteen minutes or so and tells us with hand signals and head shaking that he’s found nothing, no hole. He gives the signal to start the smaller of the two pumps. Water is rushing out again. This time, after only about five minutes, he comes staggering up the slippery bank clasping something in his left hand. His brother turns off the pump and opens the helmet.

M. Teurnier pushes his hand in front of my face, stares at me with his violet-blue eyes.

‘On vous a bien eu.’

I don’t know what this means any more than coulé. A young woman on the bank shouts to me in British English. I listen hard after all the noise.

‘Monsieur, he says you have been had!’

I also keep hearing another word that sounds like scaf on drier or maybe that’s several words run together. I look up at her.

‘Monsieur, don’t you realize how lucky you are? They are scaphandriers and the work is very dangerous.’

I look down at M. Teurnier. He seems to be embarrassed. I feel the rotted wood in his gloved hand. It’s like sponge. Maybe this is lucky, but it doesn’t seem like that to me. M. Teurnier undresses from his diving costume, stands briefly, shivering in his briefs, and dresses in his work clothes again. We walk across the street for a beer. I invite the young woman to join us. She’s somewhat leery, and I don’t blame her. I beg her to translate, she agrees and I order her a beer.

She’s all excited, it’s as bad as Rosemary with this damned boat when she first saw it. She babbles on in English.

‘These men are called les pieds-lourds because of the heavy leaded shoes they wear. This équipe that’s working on your boat is famous. Originally, it was a father and his sons. The father started as a scaphandrier in 1912; they specialize in renflouage, that is, bringing up sunken boats such as yours. You should be very proud.’

I don’t want to hear any more. This woman must be mad. I stare at her.

‘How do you know all this? It seems like very specialized knowledge, especially for a young Englishwoman like you.’

She smiles at me.

‘I am a student at l’École des mines. Also, I have always had a special interest in underwater work. A friend of mine told me about your boat sinking, and I came here to watch.’

Over the beer, M. Teurnier explains through the young woman that there is at least one completely rotten plank going from one side of the boat to the other. This is what blew out and caused the boat to sink.

‘But is it possible to bring it up again?’

His answer translates into the idea of shoving some large sheets of plywood under the suspect section, pumping to see if the boat will come up, then inspecting the damage.

The Surfacing Whale

So, that’s what we do. M. Teurnier dresses again in his diving costume, forces pieces of plywood under the leaking sections, then gives the signal for the pumps to start.

This time the boat starts rising and keeps on rising. Again it’s like a huge whale surfacing, only alive and well, more or less well. There are shouts of encouragement and applause from the village people along the bank. M. Teurnier stays down, manipulating the plywood until the hole or holes in the hull are covered. Within half an hour, the boat, filthy, waterlogged, has surfaced. M. Teurnier opens the only door to the cabin fully, and the last of the water flows out. I walk over the slippery gangplank and go inside. The entire interior is covered with dark brown mud, the consistency of thick crème fraîche, or nonemulsified peanut butter.

Again, like a latter-day astronaut, he’s undressed by his brother and jumps into his regular French blues. We go back to the café. The young woman who has been translating and instructing me as to the mysteries of les scaphandriers says she has a class and must leave. I try paying for her help with nonexistent money, but, thankfully, she’ll take nothing, which is about what I have to offer. She wishes me good luck and bon courage. Good luck, courage and more is what I need, all right.

We eat lunch at the nearest routier. Les frères Teurnier discuss what can be done. After a full bottle of wine and steaks with frites, we drive in the truck to a building-supply house. M. Teurnier buys five sacks of premixed, quick-drying, anhydrous concrete. We drive back to the scene of the crime, remove the rotted parts of the guilty board and pour the concrete over the entire area, mixing it with river water. We keep building small dams to hold the concrete in place over the damaged sections. We watch to see if the water will seep through or around it. M. Teurnier keeps looking out one of the mud-smeared windows. Everyone, except me, lights up cigarettes. Then he points out the window. One of the plywood pieces is floating away. He pulls it in with a grappling hood, then manages to hook the other as it too loosens. He’s smiling. Finally, I understand what’s happening. Now there’s no longer the pressure of water onto the boat holding the boards against the hull, so it means the leak is effectively stopped – more or less, that is.

We smile all around, a bottle of wine is brought out from the back of the truck and they somehow manage to open it with a bent nail. I don’t know what to do next. M. Teurnier takes his slug at the bottle and passes it on.

He pulls me along with him to the boat just next to mine, downriver. He rings a bell hanging on the door, till somebody comes. It’s a very dignified-looking Frenchman. M. Teurnier rattles away in his Breton French. The man looks at me and speaks in French-accented, but clear, English.

‘I always knew that boat would sink someday, wooden bottom and no one taking care of it. You must remember, monsieur, you have bought a boat with a house on it, not a house with a boat under it. There is a big difference.’

So I’m not ready for more lectures. M. Teurnier explains the problem, I can see from his pantomime. He does it even when he’s speaking French to another Frenchman. He looks at me. The man, whose name is M. Le Clerc, looks at me. He shrugs and then concentrates.

‘I do not belive any chantier, I mean slip, around here would take a noncommercial ship with a wooden coque for repairs. You could have a sabot, a metal shoe, made and slipped under your boat, but that would be very expensive. I do not really know, monsieur. Perhaps it is best to accept the loss and have the boat destroyed. It will be nothing but souci, trouble, otherwise.’