Houseboat on the Seine. William Wharton
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