Houseboat on the Seine. William Wharton
swing in the air. I assume she is to be our translator for whatever there is to translate. I’m right.
She pushes her face up to me for the typical Breton three kisses. I manage it, but I’m almost pulled off my footing on this slippery deck covered with various unplanned, unannounced booby traps. I almost fall into her. She appears to be about eleven years old and is absolutely bursting with enthusiasm. She looks me right straight in the eyes, hers blue as old M. Teurnier’s must have been fifty years ago. M. Teurnier speaks to her quickly, and she turns to me.
‘Ah, you are the American who has a boat mon père lifted out of the water.’
Her accent is quite good. She speaks clearly and with verve.
‘Yes, that’s right, little one. What is your name?’
‘I am called Corinne. Mama says I should tell you what Papa is trying to tell you.’
So, from then on, M. Teurnier speaks and she, haltingly but carefully, translates. She’s really rather amazing.
It seems this old shell of a hull I’m standing on had once been an oil barge, hauling oil from Le Havre to different ports along the canals that traverse all of France. The boat was built sixty years ago and had been in service every day since, until recently. This part is easy. Then she points out, at M. Teurnier’s instruction, that the plates of steel forming the boat are riveted, not welded. He points to rivets all over the hull. This, apparently, is good. We look down an open hatch into a deep pitch-black interior. I knew it was a hell. We move to the other end of the boat. It really has had the head cut off, but the beheaded dragon isn’t bleeding. In fact, it’s still shining metal where the surgery was performed. Saint George would be proud.
This part is hard for Corinne to translate. Her father has his arms going like a windmill, trying to explain. It’s so complicated, I can just barely hang on.
It seems that boats like this, standard barges, thirty-nine meters long, are no longer practical on the rivers and canals. They cannot carry enough cargo, and it takes three people to run them safely, especially going through the many locks.
This part I understand reasonably well. Then, with the wind-milling of M. Teurnier and Corinne’s stumbling, halting search for words, I gather that they cut off the part of this boat with the motor and cabin, along with two of the oil-storage sections. The idea was to convert it into a ‘pusher’. It will push four empty barges, without motors, along the river. Then, three people running it can make four times as much money as before. They cannot carry oil, only grain, sand, gravel or coal, but that’s enough.
M. Teurnier points across his no-man’s-land to what I assume is the onetime head of this monster boat. Men are climbing over it, cutting, welding, pounding. I figure this will be the ‘pusher’.
Then M. Teurnier starts marching along the length of this beheaded boat beneath us. It’s still enormous, even with the amputation. He shows me that it’s about seventy feet long. At intervals there are bulging, complex sorts of metal bubbles. Corinne explains they are the pumps that pumped the oil into and out of the barge when it functioned, before it was turned into a metal corpse. M. Teurnier makes swinging, chopping motions to show how he would cut these off. It looks impossible, but little Corinne verifies.
Now he takes me to the other end of the boat. There’s a raised hatch cover and a steep boat-type ladder staircase going down into the dark. He whips out a flashlight he had strapped to his waist and motions me to follow. Down there, it’s almost sane. A bed is fitted against one wall, a sink, some varnished mahogany cabinets, and a built-in bench with storage under it, along another wall. All the fittings are beautiful shined brass. Corinne explains this was the crew cabin. We go upstairs onto the deck mayhem again.
Now, M. Teurnier goes down into that dark hole. He motions for me to follow. It’s a metal ladder with thin, round iron rungs, standing almost vertically against the hatch opening. M. Teurnier obviously tells Corinne to stay on deck or she’ll soil her frock. She wants to come down, but he repeats ‘non’. That frock is still freshly clean, despite all. When we are belowdecks, he signals with his flashlight for me to stand with him on two boards balanced across a pair of boxes about six feet apart. The entire bottom of the boat is thick with oil, oil the consistency of mud. He starts waving his flashlight around at the black walls. The space seems small for the size of the boat upstairs. I’m on the edge of panic that I’m going to fall off these wiggling boards into the morass around us. I can’t guess how deep this glistening pool of oil might be.
M. Teurnier realizes I’m not understanding all his jabbering. Corinne is still above us, her beautiful face peering into the murky darkness. It must be how an angel would appear if one were looking up from the depths of hell. M. Teurnier gives a long spiel directed up at his daughter. She translates for me by putting her small hands around her mouth like a megaphone. Sounds rattle around and reverberate against the walls in the hull of the boat.
It seems the boat originally had six individual compartments for the oil. There are four left; we’re in one of them. There are two on a side, two in a row. I’m actually only looking at less than a quarter of the space involved.
He explains through Corinne that the back walls of the last compartments have a wall as strong against water as the hull itself. After all, they held oil. They too are riveted. There’s a bit of confusion then, but Corinne works it out.
M. Teurnier wants me to know that because this hull has always had its metal soaked in oil, it has never rusted. It’s like a new hull. This sounds far-fetched, but I don’t care, none of this means anything to me. It’s his problem; why is he telling me about it? He also makes a big point that the boat was usually full or empty, so the waterline, the part where there is the most damage to a hull, would not be a factor in my case. A factor in what?! I’m beginning to smell the rat. This is not just a tour of an old, chopped-up, oil-filled half-assed barge being provided for my enlightenment and entertainment. This is a sales pitch. We’re doing business.
Monkey Business
To my relief, we climb up out of the hull. M. Teurnier is like a monkey – he goes up and over the edge onto the deck as if he’s in a circus or a zoo. I gingerly mount the slippery, round-runged metal ladder to the deck and am forced to crawl on my hands and knees to push myself upright, so now I have filthy hands and jeans. Corinne is ladylike enough to suppress a giggle.
Well, now that I’ve had the tour, we knuckle down to the real business. M. Teurnier is convinced this derelict of a boat is the answer to my problem. It sounds to me like taking on a demanding, ugly mistress when one already has a demanding, beautiful, suspicious, although somewhat ailing wife.
Little Corinne goes on with the translating. His idea is that first we cut off all these pump bumps on deck. Then we cut out the entire center wall dividing the left from the right half of the interior hull all the way from crew cabin to the amputated back of the boat. He holds up a cautioning finger and warns that we must leave enough for structural support. This is all becoming embarrassingly hilarious. How am I ever going to get out of this insanity?
After that, he claims we’ll cut doorways in the horizontal wall, making the whole thing into one gigantic hull. He wants me to come down into the hull again to see how this scenario would work.
I’m listening. It’s all fascinating, but this entire scheme seems so wild, so expensive, so beyond anything I could ever manage, I’m totally turned off. I’m wondering how I can escape from this lunatic. I turn to little Corinne.
‘Tell your daddy that his ideas sound marvelous, but I don’t have any cutting or welding equipment or any tools to work with metal. Even if I did have these tools, I’ve no idea how to use them. Also, it sounds too expensive. I don’t have much money.’
She smiles, then makes a cute funny face at me. She begins to translate. But the big smile that comes across M. Teurnier’s face doesn’t look like that of a man who’s just had a grand scheme, a business deal, shot down. He stares smiling into my eyes. He motions little Corinne and me to follow him.
We go back across that treacherous plank. I’m trying