The End of the Ocean

Chapter 27 SIGNE

The approach to Bordeaux reveals a gently sloping landscape, apparently innocent, welcoming, but I still have to wait twelve hours before I can put into port, the tide takes everything with it, the waves move back and forth, the ocean rises and ebbs. I’ve seen surfers rush forward on this brown, brackish water before, but today there aren’t any here.

The moon controls us; every six hours and twelve minutes it pulls the ocean up or down. Out here, tables are everything, one lives according to the tide table. I have it on my phone, update it all the time, a dot shows me where I am in relation to low and high tide at any given moment. The moon is rising now, large and yellow as I sail carefully in along the strait, letting myself be steered by its pull, drawn towards land while the sun sets into the ocean behind me, as if it is the one I am abandoning.

The landscape around me is living two lives, twice every single day the coastline is drained of water; only a broad strip of sand, mud, shore crabs and oysters remain, where abandoned dinghies await side by side, stranded on the seabed, moored to buoys that have no purpose, no longer afloat.

And then, twelve hours later, the water is back, the boats bob on the surface, have come to life, and woe to the one that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that was taken by the tides.

I step onto the quay in Bordeaux, solid ground beneath my feet after such a long time, a feeling which never ceases to surprise me, because my body is used to the rocking, has long since adapted, only knows of a world in constant movement, and now I’m standing here feeling how the movement continues and it’s as if the ground beneath me, the wharf ’s concrete structure, comes towards me. How rudely and unyieldingly it meets my feet, meets my body, jars against my inner turbulence with its stability.

I make the boat fast using an extra spring line, put out all the fenders I have, but don’t think it’s enough. There are huge heaps of old tires on the quay, abandoned by other boats that have used them in the canal. I carry a few over to Blue, ease them down between the hull and the wharf, toss a couple extra on deck, thinking they may come in handy later.

A bistro by the wharf draws me in, no vegetarian dishes on the menu; I can’t bear the thought of fish—no mussels, nothing from the ocean right now—order boeuf bourguignon, can’t remember the last time I ate red meat, but I’m so thin, my body is all angles and hard edges. I’m hungry, I gulp down chunks of meat, carrots, mushrooms and onions in red wine sauce, a hot meal, a rich meal.

A glass of beer to drink, it goes straight to my head. I almost regret it—the world rocks even more and, strictly speaking, beer is not the right choice. The waiter makes this clear, wrinkling his nose when he puts it on the table—you should have ordered red wine here, of course, that’s what Magnus would have said, a full-bodied Bordeaux to go with the solid meat dish. But no wine for me; on the rare occasion when I do drink, it’s beer.

A man comes over, around my age, maybe a little younger, his skin tanned, a blue and white striped sweater, Top-Siders. A little pathetic, dressing like a sailor to signal his maritime connection to everyone.

“Can I sit down?” he asks in English, with a French accent.

“No.”

“Please?” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Have you sailed here from far away?”

It’s been a very long time, many years, since I last experienced this and it always made me angry, that a woman, the second sex, can’t sit alone at a restaurant, have a meal, without being disturbed, without a man storming over with a peculiar and vague agenda of protecting her from her own company, maybe also from other men, and hoping that this heroic deed will lead to further enjoyment in another, more intimate setting, preferably in a bed.

“I’m not looking for company,” I say.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, you did.”

“Are you the one who came in with the Arietta?”

Is he really not going to give up?

I stare at him, evil eye, I think suddenly, and catch myself grinning, and the combination of a hard stare and a confusing smile is fortunately enough, because now he starts to walk away.

“Let me know, then,” he says. “If you change your mind. I’ll be over there.” He points at a bar stool.

I return to my beer, would like to drink it in peace, but am unable to think about anything but the man now. He’s sitting at the bar doing everything he can to avoid looking in my direction. He’s attractive, to the extent that men my age are attractive; perhaps he’s been at sea for a long time, sailing the kilos off him, slender, almost no paunch whatsoever, strong hands, thickly muscled and full of all the tiny cuts and injuries you get from sailing for weeks in a row, cuts that heal slowly when they are constantly exposed to salt water.

I could have gone with him to his boat. There’s nothing stopping me. Maybe it’s every bit as tidy and maritime as he is, dark blue with copper trim, weathered only in the right places. Or maybe it’s big, a forty-five-foot Hallberg-Rassy, a stylish cliché, white as chalk, except for a single, dark-blue, snobbish stripe, and with a bed twice as wide as my own, good mattresses, clean sheets, another body against my own, another’s warmth…

But no. Such an ordeal—the undressing, the bashfulness, the discomfort, embarrassment—maybe he has hair growth in the wrong places, I do at any rate, maybe he smells rank, alien, maybe he’ll think I’m too haggard, too wrinkled, at the end of the day, with all my scratches, scrapes and dents. And what about him, what about his scratches? No doubt he doesn’t give them a second thought, he’s a man, the positive and neutral being. The word for man in both French and English also signifies human beings in general, while I’m the negative, woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.

I empty my glass, stand up, pay at the bar, stop for a moment. Shall I say something to the man at the bar, shall I give him a piece of my mind? No, I can’t be bothered, am too old for anger, too many have tried to rescue me.

Magnus also wanted to rescue me—he rescued me with a snowman, he rescued me at a party. It was maybe for that reason alone that we were together, because he continued to live off the good deed he had done when he was thirteen, when he had behaved like an adult. Maybe he had tried to live off that moment, tried to find it again and perhaps also tried to find his way back to the same helplessness in me.

Or was it me, was I the one who based our relationship on this, who was searching for the same thing again? I know that memories are unreliable, just as unstable as fiction. But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to base a life on. He was an interruption only, an interruption in everything else that is really me. I have to trust it, because what can I trust if I start second-guessing my own history?

I unlock the boat and walk into the saloon, where the containers dominate the space completely. I want to sit down, but there’s no room, so I walk out into the cockpit again; it’s damp there, condensation on the benches, a cool evening, I miss the saloon.

I return below, pick up one of the ice containers. I can put them on deck; the mast has to come down tomorrow, to be disassembled for the trip up the canal. I can put them beside it. There aren’t any waves here, no storms to wash them overboard.

The feeling of plastic against my palms—I don’t dare open them, imagine if it has all melted, imagine if there’s no ice left… and have I started coming undone, imagine if I can’t do it, don’t have the strength, am too old, too slow, have lost the rage required to see this through?

No, no I haven’t, and it’s just as well if the ice has melted, then I can pour it out across his courtyard; it was supposed to melt anyway, sooner or later, the way all ice eventually melts and I can say that, I can shout that to him.

All ice melts.