despite all. When we are belowdecks, he signals with his flashlight for me to stand with him on two boards balanced across a pair of boxes about six feet apart. The entire bottom of the boat is thick with oil, oil the consistency of mud. He starts waving his flashlight around at the black walls. The space seems small for the size of the boat upstairs. I’m on the edge of panic that I’m going to fall off these wiggling boards into the morass around us. I can’t guess how deep this glistening pool of oil might be.
M. Teurnier realizes I’m not understanding all his jabbering. Corinne is still above us, her beautiful face peering into the murky darkness. It must be how an angel would appear if one were looking up from the depths of hell. M. Teurnier gives a long spiel directed up at his daughter. She translates for me by putting her small hands around her mouth like a megaphone. Sounds rattle around and reverberate against the walls in the hull of the boat.
It seems the boat originally had six individual compartments for the oil. There are four left; we’re in one of them. There are two on a side, two in a row. I’m actually only looking at less than a quarter of the space involved.
He explains through Corinne that the back walls of the last compartments have a wall as strong against water as the hull itself. After all, they held oil. They too are riveted. There’s a bit of confusion then, but Corinne works it out.
M. Teurnier wants me to know that because this hull has always had its metal soaked in oil, it has never rusted. It’s like a new hull. This sounds far-fetched, but I don’t care, none of this means anything to me. It’s his problem; why is he telling me about it? He also makes a big point that the boat was usually full or empty, so the waterline, the part where there is the most damage to a hull, would not be a factor in my case. A factor in what?! I’m beginning to smell the rat. This is not just a tour of an old, chopped-up, oil-filled half-assed barge being provided for my enlightenment and entertainment. This is a sales pitch. We’re doing business.
Monkey Business
To my relief, we climb up out of the hull. M. Teurnier is like a monkey – he goes up and over the edge onto the deck as if he’s in a circus or a zoo. I gingerly mount the slippery, round-runged metal ladder to the deck and am forced to crawl on my hands and knees to push myself upright, so now I have filthy hands and jeans. Corinne is ladylike enough to suppress a giggle.
Well, now that I’ve had the tour, we knuckle down to the real business. M. Teurnier is convinced this derelict of a boat is the answer to my problem. It sounds to me like taking on a demanding, ugly mistress when one already has a demanding, beautiful, suspicious, although somewhat ailing wife.
Little Corinne goes on with the translating. His idea is that first we cut off all these pump bumps on deck. Then we cut out the entire center wall dividing the left from the right half of the interior hull all the way from crew cabin to the amputated back of the boat. He holds up a cautioning finger and warns that we must leave enough for structural support. This is all becoming embarrassingly hilarious. How am I ever going to get out of this insanity?
After that, he claims we’ll cut doorways in the horizontal wall, making the whole thing into one gigantic hull. He wants me to come down into the hull again to see how this scenario would work.
I’m listening. It’s all fascinating, but this entire scheme seems so wild, so expensive, so beyond anything I could ever manage, I’m totally turned off. I’m wondering how I can escape from this lunatic. I turn to little Corinne.
‘Tell your daddy that his ideas sound marvelous, but I don’t have any cutting or welding equipment or any tools to work with metal. Even if I did have these tools, I’ve no idea how to use them. Also, it sounds too expensive. I don’t have much money.’
She smiles, then makes a cute funny face at me. She begins to translate. But the big smile that comes across M. Teurnier’s face doesn’t look like that of a man who’s just had a grand scheme, a business deal, shot down. He stares smiling into my eyes. He motions little Corinne and me to follow him.
We go back across that treacherous plank. I’m trying not to look down. Then we walk across the minefield of cut and rusting metal to his house on blocks in the middle of it all. He invites me inside. His wife is cooking. She turns as we come in, smiles and says ‘Hello’ in English.
M. Teurnier is casting his eyes about looking for something, then he speaks to Corinne. She takes out her leather school bag, pulls from it a thin notebook with pale blue lines up and down, back and forth. Then she gives him a ballpoint pen, but he reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a greasy grease pencil, about half an inch thick and flat. He reaches into another pocket, extracts a fisherman’s folding knife and sharpens the pencil, pulling the blade toward his chest. He’s talking all the time, more or less muttering to himself. Corinne doesn’t bother to translate. She shrugs.
Mme. Teurnier motions me to sit at the oilcloth-covered table in the center of the room. Corinne is leaning against the other side of it, then she sits down. M. Teurnier is sitting beside me. He’s starting to make a list. After each item on the list, he sucks the tip of his pencil, then writes a number. Corinne comes around and starts translating from the list. I can almost hear the enthusiastic timbre of M. Teurnier’s voice in her clear thin one.
‘See. I’ll sell you that entire barge at the price of scrap metal. That’s what I’d need to do anyway. It’s dead now, the name of the barge, Ste.-Margarite, went to the pusher.’
He looks into my eyes to see if I’m understanding. I’m not really. He points at the numbers beside the first item on the list. I read. He’s written 270,000 francs. That’s what it looks like to me with the seven crossed French style. That’s about what I thought would be involved. Then, as I’m about to give up totally, he puts in a comma after the second zero from the end. This is now 2,700 francs, at that time less than eight hundred dollars. That’s ridiculously low. I take the pencil from his hand, and beside his number write 2,700 NF, even crossing the seven. The French at that time (still) tended to quote big numbers in old francs. He looks at me and smiles. I smile. This is beginning to look vaguely possible, very vaguely.
Then again he talks to his cute little girl. It’s obvious she’s becoming bored with the whole business. But still I hear his vital voice through her. She’s going down the list, changing all the numbers into new francs. She’s impressive all right.
‘To cut the pumps off the deck, three hundred. To cut out the walls of the compartments, six hundred. To move the barge down to where your sinking wooden boat is, now, in Port Marly, five hundred.’
M. Teurnier pauses, looks at the ceiling, sucks his pencil again. I wait. He writes the number down. Corinne translates.
‘To put the two boats together, your boat on top of this one, one thousand new francs.’
I’m bewildered. He licks the point of his pencil and starts adding the numbers. He comes up with 5,100 new francs. He looks up at me, then knocks off the hundred francs.
He talks quickly to Corinne, who’s now sitting her doll in a tiny high chair at the table. From there she tells me what he’s saying. She’s getting more fluent with each exchange. I’m really surprised that she still plays with dolls. French children seem to play longer than American children. I will say again, she’ll make a great translator someday, dolls and all.
‘My father says the boat, with all the work, will only cost you five thousand new francs. If you need to have your old boat pulled away and destroyed, it would cost you twenty-five hundred francs. This way you can have a big two-story boat with much space for just twice that price.
‘Father
