They wished they could forget that night, all of them, from the parents down to the baby, that night that had left the house streaming with water and their minds full of an inextinguishable terror, the sea slithering everywhere, its tongue lapping up everything in its way, everything it could rip off and tear and take with it to the deep heart of the water, whence nothing would ever return. By the following dawn, wherever they cast their gaze it fell upon a gray, blue, or green expanse, tufts of grass breaking through when the depth must have been only a foot or two—but nothing anywhere else. So much water you thought you were in the middle of the ocean, for indeed it had become an ocean, with a few rare islands emerging in places where, a few hours earlier, there had been a world.
Rocky ground, and the collapsed volcano.
They had all known, since that dawn, that the house was barely standing. The constant wind made it creak day and night. For a day or two they had hoped they’d spot someone on the sea, encounter a poor soul so they could convince themselves that there was still something alive on this earth turned ocean; they could not conceive of the fact that everything might have perished, even if the sea never stopped its constant careless hustling of lifeless bodies, They look like little boats, murmured Noah as he watched them go by, and Madie and Pata didn’t scold him because in fact that was what they looked like, like when you put empty walnut shells on a stream to watch the current catch them, and they dance and shudder and capsize.
So there it was, they had waited and nothing had appeared, other than three or four small boats they had seen in the distance, but which never came any closer, boats fleeing in haste, toward higher ground, said Pata, and no matter how they shouted their lungs out and waved their arms, the boats had gone far away, turning their backs on the volcano, returning to the drowned countryside where only two days earlier cars had been speeding by.
Yes, they knew that they had to leave. Despite Pata’s reassuring words, by the sixth day the waters had not subsided. The sea level rose, and he kept saying: it will go down. The little ones had stared at the ocean, sure that at any moment it would drain away, like a siphon swallowing the contents of a sink. But the sea was doing just as it pleased and it stayed there, maybe slightly lower than on the day after the cataclysm, but there it remained, and there was still too much of it. So of course there was no other option than to leave, to abandon land’s end to the wind and tide, to leave behind forty years of one’s life, or fifteen, or one, for all of them it was wrenching, and as the days went by departure became ever more imperative. But they were rooted there by disbelief, by their sense of panic that had not yet yielded to calm but rather turned their legs to jelly, and the only thing they could do, in the end, was hold hands, all eleven of them, on the shore, and look out at the sea and the volcano that had been the source of so much pain, the sea that never stopped rising and the volcano: there was no guarantee that a third flank was not about to slide into the sea and drive the waves out to conquer the hills.
Leave, they murmured in the void.
Pata had to finish repairing the boat that they moored all the way at the bottom of the steep path, in the inlet where they went fishing when there was no school; it had been damaged by an uprooted tree, gored on one side, and the wave had deposited it at the top of the garden with immeasurable force.
But every morning they had to find food and drink, too, and enough for the twelve days the voyage would last if they wanted to reach terra firma. Madie and Pata had studied the maps and planted their fingers on the same spot at the same time, and they’d said, There, and there, we’d be safe—but the thing was, to begin with, if no rescuers came to find them they would have to sail for twelve days, maybe twelve days of complete solitude, they couldn’t just go off like that as if it were some picnic.
“Yes, a picnic!” exclaimed Sidonie and Emily, clapping their hands.
So whenever the weather allowed, Liam and Matteo, the two eldest, took the big rubber raft that they used to play with in the sea, and with Pata at their side they went to search over by the nearest houses, yesterday’s neighbors, the ones they used to say hello to on their way home from school or work; but there were no more neighbors, and the houses had vanished under the water. The only thing they found, and which brought them some small consolation, was another little hill twenty minutes from the island, a hill that had been spared and where a field of potatoes was growing, and they’d gone back there to pull up a few spuds, This will give us something in reserve, said Pata, spreading his arms, months to live on. The second time, Louie wanted to go with them, but the older boys pushed him away.
“You’re only eleven, you’re no use.”
And they were fifteen and thirteen, almost little men, with their smiles full of delight, for them the tidal wave meant adventure, no more school, and they didn’t care about the rest—they were bound to be rescued someday.
“Beat it, with your gimpy leg,” growled Matteo, pushing Louie aside when he did not move.
And Louie lowered his eyes to look at his leg that earned him the nickname Limpy when his brothers were angry, this damned crooked leg he’d been born with God knows why, and which his parents only discovered when he was old enough to start walking. The nearby bonesetter had told them it would mend itself. He had manipulated the little boy’s leg, recited prayers. It will be fine, he’d concluded with a nod, and nothing had changed. Louie had his game leg and his older brothers knew only too well how to remind him of it when he started clinging to them or pestering them, tattletale, they said, so he went off to see Perrine and Noah, who’d been born just after him and before the babies; the babies were all the ones who were not yet seven, which was the age of reason: Emily was six, Sidonie, five, Lotte, three, and Marion, just one year old.
When they were in a neat little row on the shore looking at the angry sea, holding hands—except for Marion, tight in Madie’s arms—Louie wondered what had happened in the middle.
The middle being the three of them: Louie, Perrine, and Noah.
In the middle, something had gone wrong.
Louie had a twisted leg, Perrine was blind in one eye, and Noah, at the age of eight, was no taller than a five-year-old. Before them, Liam and Matteo were handsome and well-built; after them, the four little sisters had not the slightest flaw. So what had happened to them?
Three rejects. Maybe there was no explanation.
It just landed on them, that was all.
So because there was no answer, Louie squeezed the hands of the dwarf and the one-eyed girl, as the older brothers called them when their parents were out of earshot, and the little ones smiled, never taking their eyes off the ocean, squeezing their fingers even harder, and that was enough, Louie held his leg very straight, blinking in the gusts, while inside, he was singing.
What on earth were they going to do now.
The boat was almost completely repaired, but that wasn’t what worried them: Pata had predicted that the waves would subside, but they were getting more skeptical by the day, and couldn’t help but check the water level in the basement or on the flagstones in the garden. Madie was the only one who’d had her doubts ever since the first morning. And yet she could have succumbed to the ease of believing what Pata said; it would have been comforting, the thought that everything would revert to the way it had always been, that the sea was bound to go back where it belonged, and that underneath, they would find the swing, and the blue pebbles surrounding the flower beds, and the green bench—and further down, the village in the valley. Yes, if she listened to the father of her nine children, she would be convinced through and through that the sea would give them back their land, the grass, the trees. She would even have conceded that the more time went by, the greater their own chances of seeing the gray waters ebb away, because who had ever heard of a flood that stayed forever, the world was in perpetual motion and would force the waters to recede, it couldn’t all just stay like that, motionless, such things didn’t happen.