Heureux qui comme Ulysse

Happy He Who Like Ulysses…

Jean Schlumberger

“Why would I have confided in you?” said Cyrille. “Because, during four weeks of crossing, we watched each other smoke our pipes. I remembered Renaud well enough, a schoolmate. But you are not the only one to bear that name.”

“You,” the other resumed, “I should have recognized you from your unsociability alone. I said to myself: That tan is a sailor’s. You intrigued me. Yesterday, by chance, I talk with a man on board. He knows the ports of China well, names your vessel, names you. Two or three details about you, and I set about piecing together my memories… But let us go up to the bridge; the coast is already visible.”

Settled on a bench, Renaud continued:

“You are no older than I, yet you claim to have a boy of fifteen?”

“Well, I married young!”

The other resumed:

“In so many years, you have managed to produce only one child?”

Cyrille removed his damp cap; he wiped it without haste, which led Renaud to say complacently:

“I have three!”

Then, pulling a portrait from his wallet:

“Here, if you want to see them?”

Cyrille tried not to appear indifferent. The other added:

“Show me what your boy looks like.”

“The look they all have at his age.”

“You want to be coaxed. You must have a photograph somewhere.”

The sailor appeared ill at ease.

“God knows where I will have put it!”

He added, to justify himself:

“Besides, portraits are never true likenesses.”

But the excuse fell flat.

“You must be a terrible father!” said Renaud.

Cyrille’s cheeks flushed. He retorted in a tone he wanted calm:

“You are mistaken: I love children. In port, I let them roam about my brig, even the little ones. They come to play right in my cabin.”

Renaud replied:

“I flatter myself that I am paternal, but I would not go so far as to amuse myself with other people’s children. It was yours alone I meant to speak of.”

Cyrille fell silent, hesitated:

“The others or mine…”

“What then?”

“No, nothing.”

“Since you have begun…”

Cyrille packed his pipe, then seeing Renaud persist, he said impatiently:

“If I care about other children more than about my own son, what does it matter to you?”

Renaud murmured with stupefaction:

“You care less…”

But Cyrille cut short:

“Let us drop all that.”

Renaud, mortified, wanted to be silent, yet his curiosity won out:

“Your feelings do not concern me, and I did not question you. It is you yourself who speaks of your son in terms…”

“What terms?”

“Good Lord, just now.”

“You called me a bad father.”

Renaud tried to make amends:

“It was only a jest.”

“Do not take back, one by one, everything intelligent that may escape you! You are afraid you hit the mark. Admit that you are afraid!”

“But what can your boy have done to you?”

“What have yours done to you for you to love them? Do antipathy or love have reasons? My poor friend, it is born or it is not, without our meddling.”

Feeling his agitation betray him, he armed himself with insolence, examined each feature of his companion — the nose, the ears, the Adam’s apple:

“You are so very attached to perpetuating yourself?”

He shrugged, then continued, brutally:

“If only you knew yourself to have interesting features, tastes! But you are of the most neutral type. What a fine pleasure to find in your children your faults and your diseases, or the shape of some relative you detest with all your heart!”

Renaud assumed a meek air:

“The voice of blood seems mute in you. Boast of it less loudly. The fire of your pleading gives rise to suspicions…”

He was afraid, for a second, of having imprudently struck; but Cyrille burst into ingenuous laughter:

“Well no, old man, so much the worse for your theories, but Remy is mine — insofar as one can vouch for such things.”

[The novella continues, exploring the complex relationship between Cyrille, a sailor returning from years at sea, and his adolescent son Remy, whom he barely knows. Through the conversations between Cyrille and his old schoolmate Renaud, and through Cyrille’s gradual, painful attempt to reconnect with his son, Schlumberger examines the tensions between freedom and duty, between the wandering life and the claims of family, evoking the ancient longing of Ulysses for home while questioning whether return is truly possible.]