Castle of Water: A Novel(20)
Gauguin is quite certain, however, that he needs to get out of Paris. Unable to find his artistic voice amid the ruins of his life, he decides to leave it all behind forever and seek inspiration in a place that might prove gentler on the spirit. After several years of struggling as a painter and bouncing around the artist colonies of France, he packs his bags and jumps a steamer bound for the French colonies in Polynesia. Settling first in Tahiti, and later the Marquesas, he at last finds the inspiration that had previously eluded him, in a place and among a people that set fire to his soul. In his new environs, his faculties flourish, and he produces painting after wondrous painting, helping to birth postimpressionism in the process. On May 8, 1903, a fifty-four-year-old Paul Gauguin finally bids the earthly firmament a final adieu and is buried in the Cimetière Calvaire, on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa. He never did come to realize the profound impact his paintings would have on the art world during his lifetime, nor could he have possibly known that seventy-four years later, when a traveling exhibition of his work happened to alight at the small but respectable Cleveland Museum of Art, a ten-year-old Barry Bleecker, brought there by his mother as a present for his birthday, would stand fixated and bewitched before the sun-ripened curves and alluring eyes of The Spirit of the Dead Watching and decide, with boyish determination, what he wanted to be when he grew up.
A painter. Just like Monsieur Paul Gauguin.
Years pass, times change, it is now 1973 in Paris, and a middle-aged chanson star named Jacques Brel is also not feeling very well at all. After several grueling decades of pouring his heart and soul into every performance, his will and body are both giving out. He knows he is not in good health, and his doctor only confirms what he has suspected for some time—his days on this earth are numbered. Against his doctor’s advice, however, the world-famous singer decides he’d rather spend his life’s dwindling remainder sailing around the world with his wife than wasting away in some hospital ward. He drops a sizable chunk of his fortune on a sixty-foot sailing yacht, tells his wife to pack her bags and bring along a bathing suit, and casts off into the great blue yonder. And as fate would have it, after puttering around the various ports of the globe, destiny blows him right into Atuona Bay, at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. And there, amid the blue honey water and white sugar sands and wide-open smiles of the native Polynesians, he knows he has finally found the place—not where he wants to die, but, rather, where he wants to live. Just like Gauguin before him, he had been searching for a land that was gentler on his spirit, only to discover an island that set fire to his soul. He is happier there than he has ever been in his life, and five years later, when the tumor he’d been trying to outrun finally catches up to him, his body is laid to rest in the very same cemetery on Hiva Oa as the bold postimpressionist who preceded him, their graves literally only yards apart. Jacques may have had some inkling of the great influence he’d had on the musicians of his day, but he would never come to know the full extent of his legacy—particularly that four years after his death, a nine-year-old Sophie Caroline Ducel would be sitting in her grandparents’ cottage deep in the Pyrenees, nestled snugly beneath the Brèche de Roland in the peaks of Gavarnie, singing along with her grand-père to an old phonograph record of “Dans le port d’Amsterdam”—his favorite song—while her dear grand-mère shelled beans for a cassoulet, too shy to sing but not too timid to hum.
Two very different individuals indeed, ending up on the same remote island because of a common dream.
17
Barry and Sophie woke early the next morning, just before sunrise, to a sky that still held at its rim the faint ghosts of stars. Sophie rose first, crawling out from the palm shelter and stifling a yawn. Barry opened his eyes moments later, roused by the sound of her sipping water. He set the flare gun on the ground and swung his feet over the hammock’s side, letting them both land squarely on the dew-damp sand. He plunked in his contacts from the case in his pocket, stood up straight, and looked right at her; they had both slept soundly through the night for the first time since their arrival.
“Bonjour,” she said, handing him the water bag.
“Bonjour,” Barry replied in his best approximation of conversational French.
“?a va?” she asked.
“Oui,” Barry answered, “?a va.” He skinned a pair of leftover bananas and handed one her way with a “Bon appétit”—which, to his surprise, she actually accepted. She said something back to him that was beyond his proficiency, but he took a strategic bite to disguise that fact. Together they chewed their starchy breakfast and watched the crowning of a newborn sun light up the waters, ushering in a whole new day.
After their banana breakfast and separate trips into the palms to alleviate bodily necessities, Barry and Sophie decided that the first step in their plan would be to better organize the camp. The deflated raft was rolled up in the duffel bag and stowed away in the shelter for safekeeping, alongside the various elements of the survival kit—excluding the flare gun, which they both agreed should be kept on hand at all times. Water and bananas, their quotidian staples, would always remain by the entrance for easy access at night. And following the aforementioned trips into the trees, it was also agreed that a latrine ought to be dug, situated a good, hygienically responsible distance away from the camp. Using the plastic oars from the raft as shovels, they cut a shallow but functional toilette from the sandy soil, in a clearing surrounded by palms for at least a hint of privacy. Barry carted in a shirtful of sand to be used for covering up that which was left behind and had the honor shortly thereafter of putting the new facilities to the test. He would have killed for a National Geographic to look at but settled instead for a swarming gnat cloud and the knotty burls of old palm trunks—not quite the glossy images he was accustomed to, but about as geographic as it gets.