Houseboat on the Seine

‘Ah, you are the American who has a boat mon père lifted out of the water.’

Her accent is quite good. She speaks clearly and with verve.

‘Yes, that’s right, little one. What is your name?’

‘I am called Corinne. Mama says I should tell you what Papa is trying to tell you.’

So, from then on, M. Teurnier speaks and she, haltingly but carefully, translates. She’s really rather amazing.

It seems this old shell of a hull I’m standing on had once been an oil barge, hauling oil from Le Havre to different ports along the canals that traverse all of France. The boat was built sixty years ago and had been in service every day since, until recently. This part is easy. Then she points out, at M. Teurnier’s instruction, that the plates of steel forming the boat are riveted, not welded. He points to rivets all over the hull. This, apparently, is good. We look down an open hatch into a deep pitch-black interior. I knew it was a hell. We move to the other end of the boat. It really has had the head cut off, but the beheaded dragon isn’t bleeding. In fact, it’s still shining metal where the surgery was performed. Saint George would be proud.

This part is hard for Corinne to translate. Her father has his arms going like a windmill, trying to explain. It’s so complicated, I can just barely hang on.

It seems that boats like this, standard barges, thirty-nine meters long, are no longer practical on the rivers and canals. They cannot carry enough cargo, and it takes three people to run them safely, especially going through the many locks.

This part I understand reasonably well. Then, with the wind-milling of M. Teurnier and Corinne’s stumbling, halting search for words, I gather that they cut off the part of this boat with the motor and cabin, along with two of the oil-storage sections. The idea was to convert it into a ‘pusher’. It will push four empty barges, without motors, along the river. Then, three people running it can make four times as much money as before. They cannot carry oil, only grain, sand, gravel or coal, but that’s enough.

M. Teurnier points across his no-man’s-land to what I assume is the onetime head of this monster boat. Men are climbing over it, cutting, welding, pounding. I figure this will be the ‘pusher’.

Then M. Teurnier starts marching along the length of this beheaded boat beneath us. It’s still enormous, even with the amputation. He shows me that it’s about seventy feet long. At intervals there are bulging, complex sorts of metal bubbles. Corinne explains they are the pumps that pumped the oil into and out of the barge when it functioned, before it was turned into a metal corpse. M. Teurnier makes swinging, chopping motions to show how he would cut these off. It looks impossible, but little Corinne verifies.

Now he takes me to the other end of the boat. There’s a raised hatch cover and a steep boat-type ladder staircase going down into the dark. He whips out a flashlight he had strapped to his waist and motions me to follow. Down there, it’s almost sane. A bed is fitted against one wall, a sink, some varnished mahogany cabinets, and a built-in bench with storage under it, along another wall. All the fittings are beautiful shined brass. Corinne explains this was the crew cabin. We go upstairs onto the deck mayhem again.

Now, M. Teurnier goes down into that dark hole. He motions for me to follow. It’s a metal ladder with thin, round iron rungs, standing almost vertically against the hatch opening. M. Teurnier obviously tells Corinne to stay on deck or she’ll soil her frock. She wants to come down, but he repeats ‘non’. That frock is still freshly clean, 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 also says, when the boats are together, he will send his brother out to cut windows in the barge, around both sides, for only five hundred francs more. He’ll also cut away the inside walls.’

She looks at me and smiles.

‘But, he says first you must remove all the oil in the bottom of the boat so the work can take place. He knows a man who will bring barrels and has a way to lift them away. This man uses the oil to make roads. This will cost you nothing.’

This entire business is totally unreal. None of it is making sense to me, but at the same time, I’m excited. He holds up his hand again. He’s hurrying. I can see his wife has the midday meal ready and is becoming impatient. He machine-gun-talks the rest of the deal. Corinne tries to keep up, but it’s almost impossible.

‘The oil must be out in three weeks, or a month at most. I have workers, welders, metalworkers, who will be needing work by then. Also, you must move the boat from the atelier here to Port Marly.’

I look up at Corinne and smile. I smile at Mme. Teurnier. She indicates the table with her hands.

‘Please eat with us, monsieur.’

Jack and the Beanstalk

M. Teurnier backs up the invitation with broad motions of his arms. He pulls another chair over to the table. It’s the first time I’ve been invited to share a French meal. I don’t know what’s the right thing to do. Corinne breaks the deadlock.

‘You have no automobile; you cannot go home until Papa drives you, so you must dine with us.’

Over a magnificent but simple meal, we review the details again. I keep staring at the numbers, wondering from whom I can borrow the money, how I’ll ever pay it back.

When we finish, I ask if I can use their phone. I call Rosemary at school, something I virtually never do. She comes dashing in from her kindergarten expecting the worst. Maybe this is the worst. I’ve lost all track.

‘Rosemary, I’m involved in the most complicated, interesting, extravagant arrangement to save our boat and make it more than twice its size and with a metal hull. I’ve just had lunch with M. Teurnier and his family, and I’m using their phone.’

She’s quiet on the other end, giving off vibes of impatience. One can’t leave kindergartners for more than a few minutes. I start to explain the price structure as I understand it. She interrupts.

‘Dear, can you please wait till I come home? I need to go back in my class right now. You do what you think is right. I’ll go along with anything to stop you from tossing and turning the whole night through. Goodbye.’

I look into the hole of the phone. I pause a moment to think. I make up my mind, walk over to M. Teurnier with my hand out. We shake. He puts his other hand on top of mine and winks at me. What does that wink have to do with it? He looks like a combination of Popeye and a worn-out midget version of Yves Montand. He speaks through the little girl. He faces me and she says the words. She’s preparing to go back to school, has her pack on her back.

‘We are les frères Teurnier. My father started this business.’

He holds up his hand with four fingers extended.

‘These are my brothers.’

He names them. He untucks his thumb and holds it out in the French sign for victory, success.

‘This is me, Jacques Teurnier. You will not be sorry to work with us.’

When I come home to the apartment after stopping to bail and pump the boat, I sit down at dinner and explain everything to the family as best I can with my limited understanding.

Again, despite my careful description of the enormity of this task, the ugliness of the barge, there’s enthusiasm. Matt says he and Tom, his best friend, will help with cleaning out the bottom of the barge. I try to make clear the horrendous dimensions of the job, but I take him up on it. I know I could never do it myself.

Just before he left me off at my boat, M. Teurnier told me that soon as he drove back to his boatyard, he’d have some of his men cut the pumps off the decks so we’d have light down in the hold. He also told me he’d manage to gather ten large oil drums to be put on the quay beside the boat. Those will be for dumping the oil into, and he promises to have them hauled away each week. Ten drums of oil a week? What have I gotten us into?! This could take up the rest of my life. All this would be ready by the weekend.

That Saturday, we all – the whole family plus Tom – go out to the boatyard. This involves much searching through unfamiliar territory over dirt roads, but we manage. I find the barge. We make the perilous trip through the boatyard and look at it. Rosemary gives me one of her ‘I-don’t-believe-this!’ looks. That’ll teach her to give me free rein on barmy projects.

We each walk the gangplank onto the barge and peer down into the hold. M. Teurnier, true to his word, has had the pumps cut off, so the deck is clear except for four traplike holes rimmed with jagged steel. But now we can see down into each of the sections. He has also arranged for the oil drums.

We can see there must be close to a foot of thick, black, viscous oil over the entire floor of the hold, in each section. I feel like Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk, showing the beans I’ve received for the family cow.

Matt, Tom and I have had the good sense to dress in bathing suits and old-time bathing caps. We have a few shovels, some trowels and, at Rosemary’s insistence, two dustpans. Those dustpans prove invaluable. We also have three buckets to put the black goop into and carry it up the ladder.

After much experimentation, by the end of which we look like miners coming up from the pits of Newcastle, we work out a rotating chain, one scooping the goop into the bucket, then passing it along to another in mid-ladder. After that, it’s passed up to Kate, our oldest, who’s figured a way to slide the bucket across the deck, then along the gangplank to the edge, where Rosemary helps her dump it into an oil drum. It’s sloppy, splashy work.

That first day, we fill four oil drums, not counting what’s smeared all over our bodies. I’ve brought three bottles of white spirits, and we clean the worst of it off, but it stings. We rub each other hard with old towels. Then we spread newspapers over the inside of our car and drive home quite dispiritedly (except for our stinging skin).

So Much for Science

The next weekend we’re better prepared. That first time, we’d packed lunches, but we couldn’t eat them because anything we touched became covered with oil. We also have everybody in bathing suits and shower caps this time, and pack more old towels. We fill six drums before lunch. We’re quite proud of ourselves; it’s like a war. Rosemary’s made sandwiches cut into bite sizes and wrapped in pieces of paper towel. Lunch is a matter of carefully working the mini-sandwiches out, so the paper towel keeps the taste of oil off them. We have an individual bottle of water for each of us. The necks of the bottles become black, smeared by our oil-covered lips.

We work until dark, filling ten barrels altogether. We can begin to see we’re making progress, but slowly. We have one section empty down to the hull and another started. The job isn’t impossible, it’s only intolerable.

When we reach home, I can feel my back wanting to go out. I’ve alternated, as have the others, between standing barefoot (the only way) on the bottom of the hull, scooping oil into buckets, or standing halfway up the ladder in oil-begrimed boots, passing the heavy buckets up. This might be all right for a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy, but this boy is over forty. Sometimes I can fool myself, but I can’t fool my back.

I’m in bed all that week, and when we go out the next weekend, I’m wearing my old back brace. It’s going to be smeared with oil, too. Poor Rosemary soaks our swimsuits, shower caps and socks in white spirits, then soaks them in soapy water after each session. The boys are beginning to lose enthusiasm, naturally, and we try bucking each other up with songs of labor. ‘Yo Ho Heave Ho’ or ‘Tote That Barge, Lift That Bale’ seem to be the favorites. It helps.

Worst of all, both Matt and Tom begin to break out in gigantic boils all over their backs. It’s almost impossible – even in a hot shower with cleansing powder – to scrub the oil out of our skin. Each Monday, the boys arrive at school looking like terminal cases with a terrible disease, dark rings around their eyes, hair sticky and discolored, boils flaring away. And then, as with the goo Matt and I spread all over the hull of the wooden boat, just when we start looking almost human, it’s back to the barge.

But believe it or not, we do pull out all that oil in four weekends. M. Teurnier is beginning to be impatient. I don’t think he figured on a family act. We’re all sore, filthy, but impressed with ourselves. Next week, M. Teurnier will push or pull our metal boat along the fifty twisting kilometers, through the locks, between where it is now and Port Marly, where the sinking wooden boat awaits. They’ll be starting at six in the morning Wednesday to avoid some of the crowds at the locks.

I really don’t yet believe, or understand, how they can hoist my wooden boat up onto the metal hull. I don’t want to think about it even. But I have. I just haven’t enough French to ask, and I’m worried.

We have two longtime friends in Paris who are scientists. One, of Russian background, named Serge, might well be the most optimistic person I know. My experience with Russians, in general, is that they are pessimistic, but Serge is the raving exception. He, of all things, is in charge of collecting cosmic dust for the French. He has ships floating all over the world gathering this dust. Would you believe it?

But he’s a world-respected scientist. I give him all the information I have, center of gravity, buoyancy, weights, heights, everything I can gather I think might be appropriate. I explain the actual physical project, that is, putting my sinking wooden boat onto the partial hull of an old oil barge.

Serge tilts his head quizzically, does a few quick calculations and gives his somewhat studied opinion.

‘It will not float. The entire combination will tip over, and your boat will be in the water upside down. There is, unfortunately, no other possibility.’

Serge has been in France long enough, so there is nothing halfway about him – it’s all or nothing. I’m about to give in, but I go to my other scientist.

This one is American. He was once in charge of the particle accelerator at Berkeley. He’s now working for a large oil company with offices in the fancy business section of La Défense. He’s a research scientist, a physicist.

I go visit him at his office. He’s most cordial, though generally a somewhat morose man, definitely a pessimist. I present my data to him. I don’t mention my other scientific opinion.

His name is Roger. Roger fills two pages of lined yellow paper with notations meaning nothing to me. I don’t recognize a single word in either French or English. He looks me in the eye with his sad eyes. I should say here, he has a strong resemblance to Dr Oppenheimer. He gives me what passes for a smile from a pessimist, a sort of double twist of the lips, a lifted eyebrow over lowered eyes, and delivers his report.

‘You don’t have a worry in the world. There’s absolutely no way the relatively light weight of the small boat you intend to place on the deck of the metal boat could possibly effect the stability of that barge. Go right to it and good luck.’

So there I am. We’re to start the marriage of the two boats in a few days. I drive out to M. Teurnier’s place with the rest of the money I owe him. I’m deeply in hock to three generous friends, none of them scientists, none of them artists, but all of them lovers of the arts, and here I am counting out 5,500 francs in five-hundred-franc bills. I must be out of my mind.

I explain to M. Teurnier, with Corinne’s help, my scientific discoveries. He laughs. He’s just finishing his lunch and has a huge piece of bread in his mouth. He almost chokes, then swallows. He waves his arms at me, signaling little Corinne to stay on and finish her dessert while he leads the crazy American outside to the boatyard.

We go hopping and hobbling alone to another section of the yard, where I haven’t been. He points. I see a barge, and on the barge is a gigantic yellow crane. On one end of the crane is a barge being lifted practically out of the water, over the side of the first barge! I can’t believe it. We look at each other. He laughs and I start laughing, too. So much for science. He puts his hand on my shoulder; it’s quite a reach for him. I’m convinced. I don’t want to interfere with his meal anymore. I feel somewhat foolish. We make our definite plans for the boat marriage.