Castle of Water: A Novel(24)
The entrance is guarded by a primitive-looking canoe suspended from the ceiling, with a strange array of objects hanging down from its sides—ticket stubs, family photos, cigarette packets, even a little rubber octopus—each attached to a fishing hook on a line. The sense of meaning they emit is imposing but indecipherable; the hovering mementos seem like fragments of an unsettling dream. Askoy III is carved into the prow, a name as mysterious as the sculpture itself. It feels out of place, a relic from a natural history museum, perhaps, the sole artifact of a vanished people. Why it is here at the entrance, she does not know. There’s a story to be told, but she has a hunch it is one she will never fully understand.
The paintings inside, however, are beautiful—incredible—their haunting black and white pigments hovering somewhere in the murky border between the abstract and the real. One of her friends had compared them with Pat Steir’s, but no, coloration aside, these are something else entirely. Murals, really, they are immense in both scope and character, taking up entire walls. Up close, they seem to depict blending bands of nocturnal shade; a few steps back, they reveal solitary islands, slumbering in the night. The sprawling canvases are compelling, but not easy to digest. She stares at each one for a long time, struggling to make aesthetic sense of something that, much like a human life or the future before her, she suspects might not make any sense at all. They’re just too big, too beautiful, too hard to take in all at once.
Except one. The final piece in the exhibition is different. Far from being an expansive, semi-abstract seascape, it is instead a portrait. It’s smaller, more intimate, and it is the only one that’s not black and white. It reminds her in its composition of a Rousseau, but in style more like a Gauguin, rich as it is with a slow burn of Polynesian color. It is of a woman, sleeping beneath a palm at the base of a mountain. She cradles tenderly in one arm a slumbering infant and in the other arm a single bunch of green bananas.
Mona begins weeping, she’s not sure why, the tears stinging her eyes and making streaks of her makeup. She smears them away and leans forward to read the title of the painting, thinking it is one she would like to remember. Chateau d’Eau, states the little French plaque beside the frame, a name that she knows all too well. Below that, in bold italics, the English title reads Castle of Water. A mistranslation by some French intern, she can only assume, or some overworked printer’s obvious mistake.
19
For most citizens of the “civilized,” climate-controlled world, there are the usual means of measuring time. Clocks, calendars, cable television seasons—the things that dutifully gauge our progress through life. The sorts of tools one takes for granted until the little LCD screen is cracked, the watchband severed, the Casio casing filled with salt water. How does one measure the days then? For sure there is the rising of the sun, the setting of the moon, the slow churn of the stars—but their repetitiveness tends to make one day indistinguishable from the next. Barry Bleecker and Sophie Ducel learned that the hard way, and they gradually found other ways to keep track of time.
First, there were the disasters recorded. Not even taking into account the personal tragedy that had visited both of their lives, their first year on the island was full of calamity. When the BBC broke the news of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers over the shortwave radio, Barry was stunned—his office at Lehman Brothers had been just across the street from the World Trade Center. When word came that both of the towers had collapsed into cinders, he crumpled to the sand and stared feebly at the sea. Two weeks later, when Radio France informed Sophie that an explosion at a chemical plant in Toulouse had caused more than two thousand casualties, she was shocked—she had cousins who worked there, people she’d grown up with, and there was no way to know if they had escaped the inferno. A November hurricane raked across Cuba, December saw terrorists hiding bombs in their shoes, January brought a volcanic disaster in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and all across the globe armies seemed to be gathering, marching in time to a cadence of doom.
And then there were the pounds lost. Barry did the best he could to supplement their meager diet with the odd fish that slipped through Balthazar’s tentacles, or the occasional whelk that washed up from the sea, and Sophie did the best she could to make it all palatable, experimenting with conch fritters and coconut-sprinkled sashimi. But the vast bulk of their diet comprised half-wild bananas. And although the ancient Polynesians had been generous in their planting, rationing was still called for, as the green bunches were always in varied stages of ripeness; only a handful were generally edible at one time. There was no scale on the island, but after the first month, Barry reckoned he had lost some fifteen pounds; after three months, it seemed closer to thirty; and by month six, his weight had stabilized at somewhere around one hundred and fifty pounds—sixty pounds lighter than the soft-middled banker who had vanished at sea. As for Sophie, her weight loss was less dramatic, as she had been on the thin side to begin with, but it was noticeable nonetheless. In the first few weeks, her breasts shrank and her derriere flattened (“J’ai la fesse triste!” she cried), and several months in, she was confident that at least ten kilos had fallen from her figure. The end of that year saw them both wearing tattered loincloths and nothing else. Their respective garments had long since ceased to fit, any coyness had long since vanished, and trimming down their baggy clothes to breechcloths made far more sense. Even Sophie’s wedding ring, the only memento she had left of her beloved étienne, had taken to slipping off her finger; she in turn had taken to wearing it around her neck on a filament of fishing line.