Nikolski (22 page)

Even the massive genealogical archives of the Mormons are of no help in untangling the branches of her family tree. Nothing on Leslie Lynn Doucette, or Herménégilde Doucette, or the family’s buccaneering vocation. Grandfather Lyzandre apparently knew something the genealogists did not.

She still has to download tonight’s email. With a finger-flick she wakes up Louis-Olivier Gamache, fifty-seventh avatar of the species, and logs on to the Internet. A minute later, Eudora announces: 96 new messages.

None of these messages is addressed to her. In the last ten years she has not received a single email in her name. Not one
Dear Joyce,
or
Dear Miss Doucette,
or
Hi, Jo!
Piracy demands absolute anonymity, and Joyce has always hidden behind one or another of the false identities fished out of the garbage.

In a single glance, she spots and annihilates the spam—email publicity spawned by super-robots equipped with a business dictionary, a grammar corrector and a copy of
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
capable of firing off ten thousand new messages per minute:
Want to earn more money? Stop Hair Loss Now! Lose 30
Pounds in 30
Days, Guaranteed! Increased Sexual Potency! Hot Casino Action—Try for Free! Brand New—-Just Launched—Be the First!

That leaves the business correspondence, written in a vast variety of languages: the ornate slang of the Cayman Islands, the telegraphic Spanish of Mexico, the elliptical Japanese of Osaka. Not to mention the picturesque Anglo-Russian of a certain Dimitri, a seventeen-year-old Muscovite hacker sustained by little more than Brezhnev Cola.

She glumly observes the stream of credit card numbers, IP addresses and fragments of source code.

For the second time tonight, Joyce experiences a deep-seated weariness. The little universe of piracy is exhausting. Information spills out on every side, circulates at lightning speed and almost instantly fades into obsolescence. The moment you slow down you are left behind, so that life soon turns into an endless series of expiration dates.

Joyce looks at her watch. In three hours she must report for work at the fish store.

She yawns and looks outside. The sky is gradually growing blue over Montreal. For a brief instant, she has the impression of looking not through a window but at another cathode screen.

She presses her nose against the glass and peers at the old building across the street. Curtains are drawn back. One family after another is waking up.

In the tiny window of a bathroom, a man is shaving and cautiously pushes his nose up out of the way with his forefinger. A couple of windows farther along, a woman is making breakfast while a long-haired young girl hastily does her math homework on the edge of the table.

Joyce feels she is living on the outskirts of a precious world that is slipping away. On the other side of this window, events take their course and there is no stopping them, no way of affecting their inherent logic. Each second, each moment, unfolds for the first and last time. The process cannot be interrupted, cannot be reversed, cannot be copied or backed up.

The windowpane has misted over from Joyce’s breath. The outside world gradually recedes, and reality seems more and more a relative thing. She wipes the window with her sleeve. On the other side of the street, the long-haired girl has finished her math homework and is putting her notebooks away in a brightly coloured backpack.

Joyce starts to shiver, even though it’s warm in the apartment. She turns to the computer hoping to find something to latch on to, a certainty, but the spell has been broken. On the screen, the words are no longer meant for her. The objects around her seem foreign. It is as if she has awoken from a long dream and finds herself sitting at someone else’s desk.

Looking around, she discovers only one object that is familiar to her: the photograph of Susie Legault, employee No. 3445, abandoned in a wastebasket.

Little by little, the odour of melted vinyl fades away.

NOAH AND SIMÓN
, with sandals on their feet and towels around their necks, burst out of the house running. Just as they are leaving the garden, they collide with the mailman. After a moment of disarray, the old man straightens his cap and glasses, before handing an envelope to Noah.

It’s a letter for Sarah, addressed to General Delivery in Relay and returned with the notice:
No Such Post Office.

Noah shrugs and dashes off again. Simón, who is still a good ten metres ahead, shouts for him to
Come on!
and
Hurry up!
At the corner of the street, they jump on the old sky-blue bus that goes down to Juangriego.

As it leaves La Asunción, the bus route crosses the flight corridor of the Santiago Mariño airport. A roar fills the air, and Simón thrusts his head out the window just in time to see the white belly of a Boeing brush over the hillside in slow motion. The airplane gains altitude, veers off toward the mainland and dissolves into the
sun, while the crowded blue bus continues on its way down to the seashore in a thundering racket of steel.

The simple pleasures of a bus ride.

Waves of dust and pollen blow in through the windows. The driver steers his vehicle lackadaisically, fiddling with the radio buttons all the while. Amid the crackling, the tuner pulls in a few measures
of cumbia
and fragments of detergent commercials. Three times in every kilometre, the bus must take on or drop off a passenger. At each stop, the brakes groan as if about to commit their souls to God in the next few metres. And when they move off again, it’s the transmission’s turn to utter its death rattle. Between these two threats, the bus rolls along without much trouble, aided—it should be said—by the slope.

After an endless series of hairpin curves, the road comes out at sea level and shoots straight toward the water. Each time, Noah hopes the bus will not stop, but keep on sailing over the water toward the horizon.

After the exit to Juangriego, the houses are more dispersed. The roadside is filled with watercraft, fishing gear, rickety shacks and then, finally, there you are at the María Libre beach. Screech of brakes, groan of transmission—Noah and Simón find themselves alone before the ocean’s immensity.

Simón dashes across the road and through the stand of coconut trees, swoops over the beach sloughing his clothes off behind him and plunges naked, headlong, into the surf.

Noah grins and unrolls the bamboo mat in the exact middle of the beach, where he can easily supervise the boy. He is fascinated by the tremendous amount of energy that radiates from this little
Homo sapiens.
Every minute, he leaps out of the water holding a new treasure: gold coin, emerald, ivory figurine. Noah greets the artifacts with cheerful shouts and jams them into an old plastic bag, their improvised strongbox, which is soon overflowing with dripping stones, shards of polished glass, and shells that here and there are shaken up by hermit crabs trying to break free.

Noah had never set foot on a beach before coming to Margarita Island, and this belated discovery has overwhelmed him. Gazing at the sea, he once again experiences the dizziness one feels on the great plains of Saskatchewan. The monotone roar of the waves is reminiscent of the wind in the barley fields, and triggers a state of mind conducive to the fabrication of crazy stories that he will tell Simón that night.

The setting would be perfect if not for the presence of the
Granma,
an old yacht abandoned by the side of the road years ago, whose condition is in constant decline. The portholes have been smashed, the hull is falling apart under layers of rust. Half peeled away on the lower stern, the ship’s name
(La Granma)
and its home port
(Tuxpan-Mexico)
can be made out. Perched on a makeshift cradle, it resembles a grim wading bird lurking among the coconut trees.

Noah eyes the
Granma
warily and with a peculiar uneasiness. The old yacht reminds him of boat people, and he cannot help but imagine the family of Cuban refugees who once found themselves drifting off Miami Beach in this dilapidated old tub. He wonders what his life might have looked like had he grown up on a boat rather than in a trailer.

Late in the afternoon, on the far side of the bay, the sun goes down suddenly and without warning.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Noah observes the sky. Off the coast of Trinidad the horizon has turned suspiciously opaque. High above the territorial waters, a great mass of rain is gathering. For now, though, only the precursory cirrus clouds are visible, those fine particles of ice floating ten thousand metres above sea level.

Noah removes his shirt and dives in to retrieve Simón, who threatens to grow gills and never leave the ocean again. With teasing carelessness, he hoists the little rebel on his shoulder, carries him back to dry land and, over the boy’s protests, gives him a vigorous rub-down with his towel. The same scene is repeated every time they go to the beach. Simón seems to be a prototype for a new human subspecies, half-terrestrial, half-aquatic. But might this not be just the normal demeanour of an island-dweller?

They get dressed, try in vain to shake the sand out of their clothes and, while scarfing down the chorizo
sandwiches that María made for them, run to catch the old sky-blue bus going back up to La Asunción.

As they approach the road, Noah turns to take a last look at the stand of coconut trees. The
Granma,
alone and ominous on its stilts, seems to be watching them.

ROUTE 627, SASKATCHEWAN
.

On both sides of the road, a cornfield goes on forever, as vast as the Pacific Ocean. Nothing interrupts the horizontal perfection of the immense plain. Nothing except, to the southwest, a tiny silhouette.

At first it resembles an elephant propped up on crutches and saddled with a pagoda. The silhouette gradually grows larger, more distinct, until finally it’s the
Granma
that comes into view, crossing the prairie on iron stilts, straight out of Salvador Dalí’s surrealist menagerie. It advances diagonally, indifferent to the layout of the fields, cutting a wide swath through the corn. With each huge stride, long metallic groans ring out, and large flakes of rust drop away from the hull.

It crosses Route 627 and disappears heading north-northwest.

Noah sits up in his bed, eyes wide open.

He wipes the sweat from his forehead.

The clock says five in the morning, and the room temperature is close to 30 degrees Celsius. There’s no point in trying to go back to sleep now.

He turns on the bedside lamp, grumbling as he rubs his eyes. He looks for a book on the night table, but all he finds is the dog-eared copy of
Moby-Dick
that Arizna lent him. He has made several attempts at reading this daunting book, all in vain; Herman Melville bores him. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be the best way to go back to sleep? The book opens of its own accord at chapter 44. Noah skims a few paragraphs, but the oppressive presence of the
Granma
still weighs heavily on his chest.

He gets up noiselessly and goes out into the corridor.

In the adjoining room, Simón is fast asleep, arms and legs spread out like a little starfish. Standing in the doorway, Noah muses over the child’s slumber, flawless and untroubled by phantoms.

He shuts the door and goes down to wait for sunrise on the patio.

After four years of exile on Margarita Island, Noah has made friends with only one person: Bernardo Báez, superintendent, secretary, treasurer and director of the colonial archives of La Asunción—archives that amount to no more than a few dozen boxes crammed inside a forgotten cubbyhole of city hall.

When he was a teenager, Bernardo had a Great Dream. He would become an expert in marine
archaeology and go live on the Mediterranean coast. Every night, immersed in the turquoise waters of his obsession, he discovered Phoenician shipwrecks, Alexandrine sphinxes, submerged amphorae. In 1993 he went to study history in Caracas, the first leg of a centrifugal voyage that, in theory, was to take him farther and farther from his native island.