“Explain to me what’s going on.”
Édouard clutches the corner of a cushion and squeezes it in his fist.
“There was an infection: fever, tiredness — the usual. I figured it was the flu. I let it drag on, didn’t want to go to the hospital. It’s expensive down there. Then I saw blood in my urine. I thought I’d caught — you know — one of those diseases.”
Now Madeleine nods her head.
“It wasn’t that. It kept getting worse. My stomach hurt, I lost weight. I was worn out. So I came back. Enough time had gone by for the bacteria to almost completely eat up my kidneys. They put me on dialysis right away. I went back today. That’s what the hike was really about. I have to go there three times a week now. They told me my only way out is a transplant.”
Madeleine puts a finger in her mouth and bites down. A small detonation goes off in the fireplace. She has always wondered why wood goes through this sort of blast as it burns. Exploding knots, perhaps. She thinks of the hard kernel in Édouard’s abdomen. She’d like to blow it up, too. An anatomical big bang. Poof.
As the sun moves past the zenith, a hazy shape comes into view at the far end of the road and very quickly grows larger. Rubbing her eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep, at first Madeleine believes she is seeing a car, possibly Yun already returning from her trip. But the spot is too small, too light. Too red. Soon the slender outline of a bicycle appears and, perched on it, a stooped creature, bending over as though adapting to a frame that is too small, pedals that are too high, handlebars that are too narrow. A few moments later, an extraordinarily tall woman alights and greets Madeleine with a benevolent smile. Her hair is the red of clay cliffs; the blue of her gaze is barely visible through her nearly closed eyelids, which leave just a slit for her eyes fringed with starbursts of deep creases. The face of someone who has spent her life squinting into the sun.
“I’m Joanna,” the woman declares with a thick accent. “You put people up?”
Madeleine contemplates the weary amazon’s body. She must be over six foot three. She wears a man’s shirt that flaps in the wind. Her fingers, partly sheathed in cycling gloves, seem as long as pencils. Her bike is full of nicks half-hidden by stickers from various countries. As she deciphers a Wall Drug logo that masks some Zapatista graffiti, Madeleine searches for the right words to explain to this woman who looks like she’s just circumnavigated the globe that this is not the best time for her to take in visitors.
“The house is a bit upside down these days. My son is ill.”
“If you like, I may be able to help. I’m a nurse. Trained at the best school in the Netherlands.”
“I don’t know. The situation is complicated.”
“I work in refugee camps, in Africa. I’m used to complicated.”
The lighthouse stands on the point like a reminder of humanity. It is often said that lighthouse keepers are solitary, sad, and reclusive. For Madeleine, this perception is too narrow; it obscures the lighthouse’s primary function: to serve as a bridge of light between land dwellers and seafarers. It is, in reality, the building of the multitudes.
After the lighthouse watchman had detoured from his usual route to give Madeleine an awkward pat on the shoulder, she shut herself in her office to avoid visits. Like everyone else, he had heard the news of Édouard’s illness. Madeleine realizes she ought to be touched by the man’s solicitude, but she doesn’t know how to receive all this sympathy, how to come up with a response that isn’t a prolonged howl of despair. The compatibility tests were performed the day before and already she has the impression it’s taking forever for the results to arrive. She would like to sleep until next week, until the moment they announce that Édouard is saved.
Sleep. Édouard does nothing else between his dialysis sessions, waking only to take a small sip of the herbal tea prepared by Joanna, before he sinks back to sleep. The Dutch woman has integrated into the household’s difficult ecology with astonishing ease, asks no questions, offers her help only when she can be useful, and withdraws at just the right moment. Her waking hours coincide exactly with the sun’s daily cycle. Most of her time is spent on her bicycle, and when she is in the house she seems to adapt to the moods and wishes of its inhabitants, cutting flowers when the atmosphere is too gloomy, opening a window when the weather is too hot, humming a Dutch song when the silence weighs too heavily. Joanna’s only annoying habit is a baffling proclivity for being right behind Madeleine when she starts to talk to herself. If Madeleine says, Now where in the world did I put the bread knife? she hears behind her: “It’s under the yellow cloth.” When she whispers, No point in watering the tomatoes — it’s going to rain tonight, a voice chimes in: “Yes, the oncoming clouds look very heavy indeed.” When she complains, It’s taking far too much time — how much longer? Joanna answers simply: “I don’t know.”
Madeleine deals with insomnia by drinking herbal tea all night while perusing medical dictionaries, fussing with Shabby’s fur in the vain hope of removing the knots, and making lists. Lists of things to do, to clean, to throw out, but, especially, lists of close or distant relatives who might act as donors for her son should the test results disqualify her.
When she shows Édouard the list, he balks.
“Your sister Josette? Ma, we’re not going to ask a woman who’s been struggling her whole life with schizophrenia to donate a kidney! And Jan and Tomas? I don’t even know who they are!”
“They’re your father’s brothers.”
“I thought they all died during the war.”
“Not all.”
“So you’re suggesting we cross the ocean to explain to some perfect strangers why they have to give me a kidney? It’s out of the question!”
Resigned, Madeleine puts away her list of donors and pockets her shopping list. The moment she sets foot in the village grocery store she is swamped with stories.
“I have a diabetic uncle who never managed to find a donor, so he went to the Îles-de-la-Madeleine — the Magdalen Islands — to consult a healer. She prescribed edible seaweeds and ever since then it’s as if he’s got four kidneys!”
“My neighbour’s sister-in-law found a donor in just a few weeks — a man who committed suicide by tying a plastic bag around his head. Now she’s the picture of health! But she’s stopped using plastic bags to wrap her orders at the supermarket.”
Madeleine is left drained and exits the store without her groceries; she drives toward the lighthouse and parks her car on the side of the road to avoid going by the museum. Holding her arms open, she slowly makes her way to the old wooden tower painted white and, in the manner of those who hug trees, she embraces with all her might this misunderstood sentinel, this guide for lost souls.
After several days of persistent insomnia, Madeleine throws in the towel. The night is clear, the wind is fair, and the salt air seeks her out even in the depths of the basement, where she is making a half-hearted effort to classify the seeds scattered by the cat a few days before. Moving about on tiptoes, she takes some virgin rolls of film from the cabinet, grabs her camera, pulls on her rubber boots, and goes out. She walks amid the friendly silence, and the night seems to want to speak to her.
The spectacle at the seashore is arresting. The moon illuminates the pebble beach, which the spring tide has littered with debris. Madeleine realizes she has not been on the beach after nightfall since she was young. She and Micha would come to bathe here when the cool air made the water feel warm, like a kiss in the middle of winter. For a brief moment she inhales the rush of nostalgia, then she unpacks her equipment. Her camera starts to snap up all that’s visible and invisible like a large, greedy hand. Using her tripod, Madeleine sets long exposures, barely peeking through the lens. A shot in the dark, the prey felled by chance. The light is incomprehensible; it seems to emanate not from the sky but from the sand, from the salt shimmering on the water’s surface. As if the landscape were shown in negative.