Read Online Concerto to the Memory of an Angel by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt - Free Book Online

in spite of the thousands of kilometers they had sailed, all the cities and nations and foreign landscapes were places he had imagined from on board the ship, or from the tavern on the pier, and they had all remained distant destinations.
    As had his daughters. Exotic. Seen in passing. Nothing more.
    What did he remember about Betty, the youngest? She was nine years old, a good student, and she lived in the attic room that Greg had reconverted into a bedroom. What else? He had trouble picturing her more precisely. He’d paid no attention to her desires, her aversions, her goals. Why hadn’t he found the time to hang out with his daughters? The life he led was a rough one, he was nothing but a sort of beast of burden, an ox plowing the waves.
    He looked one last time at the muscular body he’d been so proud of only a day earlier, then rinsed himself off and got dressed.
    He continued to avoid any contact with the other men until evening fell, and they respected what they presumed was his sorrow, not insisting at all, for they knew full well that Greg must be going through a crucifying ordeal. What they could not imagine was that his sorrow as a grieving father was compounded by the sorrow of being a bad father.
    At midnight, beneath a sky as black as a dragon’s mouth, on the planking where Greg was toiling at multiplying the pumps, Dexter asked, “So, we still don’t know which one of your daughters . . . ”
    Greg almost replied, “It hardly matters, there’s not one whom I know any better than the others,” but merely grunted, “No.”
    â€œI have no idea how I’d react if something as horrible as that happened to me,” murmured Dexter.
    â€œWell, neither do I.”
    His reply had come out so pertinently that Dexter, who was not at all used to hearing Greg find the right words to express himself, was disconcerted.
    Because Greg was experiencing an unexpected pain: he had begun to think. An incessant labor was taking shape inside him, a labor of reflection that exhausted him. He had not changed his skin, no, someone had found their way under his skin, another Greg was living inside the previous one, a psychological and intellectual consciousness was taking up residence in the once tranquil brute.
    Back on his bunk he wept for a long time, without deliberating, without trying to determine who had died, and gradually he was overcome by weariness and closed his eyes. He fell asleep without even recovering the energy to get undressed or slide between the sheets, that deep, compact sleep which exhausts the sleeper and leaves him in the morning in a state of supreme irritation.
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    On waking he realized that ever since he had received the fatal telegram he had not thought of his wife for an instant. Mary, moreover, was in his opinion no longer his wife but his family partner, his colleague with whom he was bringing up his daughters: he brought home the money, she put in her hours. That was it. Fair and square. Classic. He suddenly understood that she must be in pain, and that reminded him of the young girl he had met twenty years earlier . . . He realized that Mary, who was fragile and touching, must be overwhelmed with grief at this moment. How many years had it been since he told her he loved her? How many years since he had felt it? The thought was devastating.
    The valves of anxiety had opened. Now he was thinking from morning to night, in an emotional whirlwind from night to morning, and it was painful, suffocating, extenuating.
    With every passing hour he fretted over his daughters and his wife. Even when he was working there was a streak of sadness in his soul, a taste of bitterness, a melancholy which no manual activity could alleviate.
    He spent the last afternoon of the return up on deck, leaning against a railing. Waves from the hull to the horizon, there was nothing to see, so he threw his head back and gazed at the sky. At sea one is drawn to the sky—it