A Boat

Another week went by. One of those weeks you don’t know where to put afterwards, in which you walk a lot and decide nothing.

They saw it from the road and Axel thought it was a roof.

It was a big curved thing, wood-coloured, sticking up over the wall of a yard at the entrance to the village. Like the back of an enormous animal asleep among the houses.

“What’s that?” said Eva.

They went closer. The wall had an iron gate half open, and through the gap you could see the whole yard.

And in the yard there was a boat.

A real boat, wooden, with the planks laid one over another, the bow lifted, resting on builders’ trestles. Eight or nine metres of boat. In a mountain village, two hundred kilometres from the nearest sea. And under the hull, lying on a mechanic’s creeper, there was a man sanding.

“Afternoon,” said Axel.

The man pushed the creeper out from under the boat with two shoves of his heel, stood up and took off his mask. Sixty-something, wiry, with sawdust even in his eyebrows.

“Afternoon.”

“Sorry to bother you. It’s that…” Axel pointed, not quite knowing what to say. “Well. There’s a boat.”

“There is indeed.”

And he stood there, making nothing more of it, waiting to see if they wanted something.

His name was Nardo and he’d been at it for eight years, and he didn’t tell it as a feat. He told it the way you tell somebody you’re painting the hallway.

“I started in seventeen. Well, I started before that, buying the wood, which took me a fair while.”

“And how do you learn to build a boat?”

“Like everything. With a book and by getting it wrong.” He wiped his hands on his trousers. “Look, the first thing I made was the keel, and I made it badly. I made it badly because I believed it. I thought: this is a long piece of wood, what’s complicated about this? And it turns out a whole boat is raised from that piece of wood, and if that piece has half a centimetre of curve, everything you put on top of it goes crooked and you don’t notice until you’re two years in. So I cut it up and started again.” He raised his eyebrows. “Two years.”

He showed them the ribs inside, which were oak and which he had made one by one. He showed them where the engine was going to go. He showed them a bucket full of copper nails he’d had to order from France because nobody makes them here.

He talked about wood the way Bruno used to talk about hair.

“This is from here, off the hillside. I bought it from a bloke who felled twenty years ago and had it drying in a shed. Twenty years drying.” He rapped it twice with his knuckles and it sounded solid. “This doesn’t move any more. This is for ever.”

Hortensia was walking round it with her hands behind her back, looking upwards.

“And how do you get it out of here, son?”

And there Axel braced himself. Because that was the question. That was the question that turned all of it into a sad story about a man who had gone mad in a village.

Nardo scratched the back of his neck.

“Well, through the wall.”

“What do you mean, through the wall?”

“I knock the wall down.” He pointed at it with his chin, perfectly calm. “It’s mine. I take down twenty metres, the crane comes in, gets it out, I put it on a lorry and off north. And then I build the wall up again, which is two days’ work and I’ve built it before.”

“Seriously?”

“Of course, woman. What other way is there?”

He said it with the same face you use to explain to somebody how to open a tin.

Axel laughed.

“So you really are going to launch it.”

“Well. I should think so.”

“When?”

“When it’s done.” He picked the sander up again. “It’s got two years left. Maybe three, depending on the engine.”

They stayed all afternoon. Nobody proposed it: Nardo said “if you’re bored, there’s sandpaper over there” and ten minutes later all three of them were sanding the port side, each in their own square, with masks on. You sanded and you didn’t talk, because the sander made a hellish racket.

Something odd happened to Axel. He liked it. He liked it enormously, spending two hours doing one very small and very silly thing with his hands, without looking at his phone once.

He remembered his father. His father in the workshop, with the same sawdust in his eyebrows, getting a chair out of a plank, and himself at twelve sitting on a crate asking him questions until he wore him out. And one afternoon of some August or other when his father put a chisel in his hand and said “don’t push, let it cut on its own”, which was the only lesson he had ever given him and which was good for almost everything.

Without noticing, he ran a hand round his neck, under his T-shirt, and felt the cord. The thing hanging off it he had sanded himself too, in that same workshop, and it had taken him a whole afternoon.

He realised he hadn’t watched him work in a very long time.

They had dinner there, in the yard, under the boat. Nardo brought out a folding table, some pork steaks and a wine from the co-operative that wasn’t bad at all.

That was when Hortensia said it, because Hortensia said things.

“Listen, Nardo. And why a boat?”

Axel stopped chewing. Here it came. Here came the line.

Nardo really thought about it. He spent a while looking at his wine.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“No.” He took a drink. “One day at the beach I saw a wooden one moored and I thought ‘how lovely’. And then I thought ‘well, that can be done’. And that’s it.”

“And that’s it?”

“And that’s it.” He looked at the hull above their heads. “The thing is everybody asks me why, all right. Everybody. And at first I used to make one up, because I could see people were left hanging if you told them there wasn’t one. I used to say my grandfather was a fisherman. And my grandfather was a postman.” He laughed with his mouth closed. “If you fancy it, that’s enough, isn’t it?”

He put a piece of bread in his mouth. That was all. He said nothing else all evening that had anything to do with the boat: he talked about the price of wood, about a dog he once had, and about a time he dropped a hammer on his foot.

They slept in the yard, under the hull, without putting up the tent because there was no need. Axel lay awake looking at the belly of the boat, which in the dark looked even bigger.

Eight years.

It had never occurred to him that a reason was needed. He lay a while thinking about all the things he hadn’t done for want of a good reason. Small things. Learning to play something. Going back to Norway. Phoning his father on some random Tuesday when it wasn’t anybody’s birthday.

From there his mind went to the reservoir, which was a few days back now.

Because when they saw the bell tower coming out of the water, Hortensia had stood on the bank much longer than they had, and had said something that at the time went right over him.

“There are houses down there.”

“Mmh.”

“I mean houses with their walls standing. People think they knocked the village down before they let the water in, and they didn’t. The doors were opened, the furniture was taken out and the doors were shut.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because it happened to my grandmother with hers. In another reservoir, further east. They gave her some money and a house in a new village, all straight lines and identical streets, and she died in it saying it wasn’t her house.”

She had said nothing more about it.

Axel turned over. Eva was awake, eyes open, looking at the same thing he was.

“Would you get on it?” she said.

“On that one?”

“When he launches it.”

Axel thought about it.

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

And she said it in a very calm and very clear voice, the way you say things you decided a while ago, and she turned over before he could answer anything. Axel gave the hull a little longer. That had been something lovely and he didn’t know what, so he left it there and went to sleep.

In the morning, when they left, Nardo was already under the hull with his mask on. He raised a hand without coming out from the creeper.

He never asked them where they were going.