bernard quiriny
TRANS. BY edward gauvin
black tides
I met Pierre Gould at the port in Antwerp, where I work on the docks. My job consists of mooring giant ships with steel hawsers. It’s fairly manual labor, but I like being near the massive craft whose tanks hold millions of barrels of crude. Dockers always work in pairs: the first, from a launch, retrieves the hawsers with a boathook, tying them to heaving lines tossed out from the dock, while on land, the second secures the ship. Both jobs keep you on your toes. It’s a striking sensation, being out on the launch, caught between the berthing dolphins on one side and the oil tanker on the other, like a fly buzzing around a mammoth ; with the tides, the swell, and the churning propellers, there’s a risk of being sucked under the hull. Being on the dock is another matter altogether: you have to monitor the tension in the hawsers, because if the steel snaps, it could slice right through you like a knife through a stick of butter. But I’m not here to tell you about mooring tankers, I’m here to tell you how I met Pierre Gould.
He was ambling along the docks like a tourist, seemingly unaware of the danger in his surroundings; he wasn’t even wearing the mandatory helmet. With his checkered suit and owlish glasses, he reminded me of an assistant curator or a law professor absent-mindedly astray in this hazardous environment. No one on the docks was paying him any mind; the sailors were pretending not to see him, and the longshoremen too busy to tell him to buzz off. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, so I went over to ask him to leave. He was gazing at the Pedro Páramo, a fifteen-hundred foot Mexican tanker from the Persian Gulf.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He looked me up and down.
“What a beast, eh?” he said, grinning. His admiration seemed sincere. I inferred from this that he wasn’t up on his ships. The Pedro Páramo was far from large; there were much bigger ships all over the port. But I agreed, so as not to offend him.
“Yeah, she’s a heck of a ship.” I was about to tell him that he wasn’t allowed out here on the docks when he added, “She doesn’t seem to be in very good shape.”
Surprised, I gave the Pedro Páramo’s hull a closer look. Usually I pay no heed to the condition of the ships I’m mooring; you could slip me a wreck of a torpedo boat or a sixteenth-century galleon and I wouldn’t notice. But indeed, a closer look revealed the Pedro Páramo was far from the bloom of youth. It had probably been on the seas for a good twenty years, at least; the hull was eaten away by rust, several portholes were broken, and its name was flaking off the side.
“You’re right. It’s not exactly looking brand new,” I told Gould.
“Do you know how many barrels of oil its tanks hold?”
I didn’t, but as a professional, I felt obliged to proffer a guess. “About a million and a half, I’d say.”
“One point six, to be exact, divided into twenty-one tanks. Its lightship weight is almost 29,000 metric tons, or thirty times heavier than the Eiffel Tower. From keel to truck, it measures more than one hundred fifty feet. Its fuel autonomy is approximately forty days—enough time to sail three-quarters of the way around the world.”
I stood there, stunned. “How’d you know all that?”
He adopted the air of a detective unveiling the results of an investigation. “I’ve had my eye on the Pedro Páramo for some time now. If you ask me, she’ll be ripe soon.”
“Ripe?”
“Ripe. Like a great big plum. If she sails another few thousand miles or so, she’s sure to burst wide open.”
“What are you saying?”
His eyes lit up with a flicker of joy, and his face broke into a magnificent smile. “That she’ll sink, spilling oil into the sea, producing a beautiful, very beautiful, exemplary black tide.”
With these words, he plucked a small tin from his suit jacket, opened it, and held it towards me. “Marzipan?”
The tin was full of them. So I took one between my fingers while he popped two in his mouth and shut the tin back up. We chewed in silence, watching the Pedro Páramo with interest, and I reflected that his attitude was indeed quite strange.
“Do my words shock you?” he asked.
“No, no,” I replied. “I just think they’re… strange.”
“I understand. I understand completely. That said, I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a maniac, or a pervert. Not for all the world—this I swear—would I wish this scrapheap to split open and spill its contents into the water. How horrible that would be! Horrible and immoral, profoundly immoral. I’m all for morality and virtue and all that—that much goes without saying. Believe you me, I’d be the first to maintain that black tides are dreadful, scandalous catastrophes.”
Once more he withdrew his tin from his jacket and took out a third marzipan sweet. “And yet, you see…”
His face suddenly became very serious; his eyes narrowed, his voice grew solemn. “Black tides aren’t so different from other abominations man is guilty of. From my point of view, we might place them in the exact same category as murders.”
He had emphasized the word “murder,” and noticed when I flinched “Oh, don’t worry,” said he, laughing, “I’m no more in favor of homicide than I am black tides. They’re both equally reprehensible, even if their consequences are different—consequences I won’t take the trouble to compare, for we’d find ourselves in the blackest depths of human activities, an unpleasant place to visit, even in the spirit of science. But let’s be frank: once we’ve agreed that murder and marine pollution are two horrible, shameful, deeply shocking things—once we’ve established that—is there anything more to be said?”
He fixed me with an intense stare, as if awaiting a reply.
“Um… I guess not?” I said, shrugging.
“Yes!” he exclaimed. “Yes, sir, there is something more to be said. We have in fact said only half of what must be said. For know this: murder and marine pollution are both two-sided coins, and once we have condemned them as firmly as possible, using the entire lexicon of disapprobation and scandal, we have subjected but one side of these coins to examination. To see the other, we must adopt a bent of mind most of our fellow citizens find inaccessible.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”
He slipped his hand inside his jacket; I thought he was going to offer me another sweet, but he pulled out a cheaply printed booklet.
“Have you ever heard of these lectures?”
There was nothing on the cover, or the back. “What is this?”
“Read it. You can borrow it, and give it back later. My card’s inside.”
Opening the booklet, I found a handsome calling card on Bristol stock inside. Pierre Gould, it read, and beneath that, the letters SABT followed by a telephone number.
“What’s that stand for? Looks like a shipping company.”
“It’s not a maritime corporation,” Gould replied. “You’ll figure out what it’s about once you’ve read the lectures. And now, please permit me to bid you adieu—I still have several ships to see today.”
He buttoned his jacket, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and walked off.
“But how do I find you?” I called out. “I have to give you your book back!”
“I can often be found loitering on the docks,” he said, without turning back. “And if you truly find the lectures interesting, you may reach me at the number on the card.”
I remained at the foot of the Pedro Páramo, booklet in hand, watching him grow smaller until he vanished among the containers cluttering the docks. That was when I realized I’d forgotten to tell him the port was off-limits to visitors.
***
I forgot all about Gould and his marzipan sweets until three days later, when I was emptying out my pants pockets—there was the booklet, all crumpled up. I thought I’d better smooth it out under a pile of dictionaries before giving it back. It was only fifty some pages—a lecture, just as Gould had said. It began like this: “Gentlemen: I have had the honor to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams Lecture on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts—a task which might be easy enough three or four centuries ago, when the art was little understood, and few great models had been exhibited; but in this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been executed by professional men, it must be evident that in the style of criticism applied to them the public will look for something of a corresponding improvement.” I caught on quick to the author’s agenda: proving that murder, in addition to its immorality, comprises an aesthetic dimension beyond the question of good and evil, which merits special consideration. “People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife a purse, and a dark lane.” You also had to pay attention to “design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment.”
All this seemed wholly entertaining, and I couldn’t hold back a few chuckles during the more comical segments. The intelligence and skill with which the speaker persuaded his audience that it was possible to consider carnage with a bladed weapon as a work of art, all the while remaining at peace with one’s conscience, commanded admiration. Refraining from a lack of morality, he suggested the reader apply the following method: “When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense — not done, not even (according to modern purism) being done, but only going to be done — and a rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it, Τετελεσται, It is finished, or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) Ειργασται, Done it is, it is a fait accompli; suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs, to trip up the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose — "abiit, evasit, excessit, erupit," etc. — why, then, I say, what's the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts.” Even if I wasn’t entirely convinced, it was remarkably well-phrased; although he affected as much seriousness as he could muster, our dear speaker had such a sense of humor that it was hard for me to believe in his sincerity, and subscribe to his theories. At any rate, I had a good laugh and went to bed wondering if, as Gould had claimed, you could really do with black tides what this very witty author had done with murder: make art criticism.
***
I caught up with Gould a month later; he was standing in front of the Theodore Powys, an English tanker the same size as the Pedro Páramo, scheduled to cast off that very night for Marseille. Despite the wintry weather, Gould was wearing khaki shorts and white socks pulled up to his knees, with a small canvas backpack that made him look like a fusty old boy scout.
“Is she ripe?” I asked, walking toward him.
“Excuse me?” he said, surprised, before recognizing me. “Oh, it’s you!”
He came to meet me and shook my hand warmly—his own was ice cold.
“I don’t think this one will give rise to a masterpiece for a long time yet,” he said, gazing at the Theodore Powys. “She’s got a double hull and the owner, who lives in London, is the most serious sort of industrialist. No, truth to tell, my hopes currently lie with that tanker flying a Panamanian flag over there.”
He pointed to a tanker moored several hundred yards away, too far for me to see its name.
“Here,” I said, handing him the booklet. “Your book.”
“Ah, thank you.” He pulled his tin from his shorts, offered me a marzipan sweet, and took two or three himself.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked, chewing.
“A lot. It was… surprising.”
“Isn’t it, though? They out to teach it in schools.”
I considered this proposition, trying to imagine the kind of world where children were taught to appreciate the virtues of an artful crime instead of great music, the paintings of the Old Masters, or a poem.
“I suppose you now understand the raison d’être of the little society to which I belong,” Gould went on.
“Yes, I think so. You’re critics of oil slicks.”
“That’s it!” Gould exclaimed, delighted. “Exactly! And what do you think of that?”
“Well… how should I put it? Believe me, that lecture certainly wasn’t boring, but still, there are one or two things that—”
“I’m listening.”
“For starters, the idea of likening a polluter to a criminal seems quite clear. But can’t you say the same for other human activities?”
“Whoa there! Slow down, my friend!” Gould retorted. “That’s going a bit far! I’d like to agree with you, but you must admit a black tide is infinitely more conducive to an aesthetic approach than, say, a plane crash, for example. It’s no accident there’s such a thing as a Society for the Appreciation of Black Tides, and no Society for the Appreciation of Aviation Accidents.”
“Maybe,” I replied, so as not to upset him. “Anyway, my second reservation: the aesthetic pleasure you get from seeing blotches of oil on a beach remains—I’ll be honest—obscure to me.”
“That’s because you’ve never seen them up close.” He said this with such aplomb that I remained speechless.
“Allow me to convince you,” he insisted. “I can tell you remain skeptical, and that troubles me. You seem like a person of worth; you don’t deserve to be excluded from one of the most refined pleasures ever imagined for eye and mind.”
Hearing him talk, you might have thought that knowing how to assess the aesthetic merits of an oil spill was a privilege as rare as fully understanding German philosophers.
“The best thing would be for you to attend one of our meetings,” he explained. “The next one’s in eight days. Promise you’ll come?”
He got a pen from his backpack and scribbled an address on a scrap of paper, which he folded in four and handed to me, casting furtive glances all around.
“Don’t be late,” he added.
***
The Society for the Appreciation of Black Tides met every two months, each time in a different place: hotels, basements, back rooms flung across the four corners of Belgium. That night, they were meeting in a movie theatre near Antwerp, which motivated me to take Gould up on his offer—I don’t think I would’ve gone if I’d had to drive all the way to Brussels, Bastogne, or Charleroi. Gould welcomed me with a hug and introduced me to his fellow members. There were about thirty of them, Flemish and Walloons of all ages, from all walks of life; I spotted an old man in a wheelchair, an Agatha Christie lookalike, and a scarred young man who, despite the darkness, was wearing sunglasses. After offering me a sweet, Gould went over the evening’s program: first up was a lecture by an Italian professor, after which we’d see the photos one of the members, Philippe, had brought back from Asia. I nodded and sat down in a middle row.
When everyone was seated, the lecturer, whose name was Malazzi, got up and took his place behind a podium by the screen. In a marvelous Italian accent, he launched into his speech. It was a very detailed exposé of the different stages in the formation of a black tide, from the initial wreck to the beaching of fuel oil onshore. Malazzi explained why the concentration and the sheen of oil slicks at sea varied depending on volatility, solubility, and density, and showed how winds and currents then pushed them in different directions. “If we’re lucky,” he declared, “the fuel oil spreads directly onto the beach.” A knowing laugh rippled through the crowd. Malazzi went on, describing petroleum on rocks and plants; he knew his subject and showed off his expertise, ranging from chemistry to geology, biology to meteorology. After explaining how fuel oil asphyxiates life-forms that make their home in rocky crevices, he concluded by saying that globs finally became friable and broke loose “before being swept away on the tides toward new adventures.” In the end, after covering several miles of coast, the fuel would oxidize from contact with the air and scatter in the seas. Sometimes environmentalists and the self-righteous used shovels to collect and shamelessly destroy “these sticky stains of perfect blackness we tasteful connoisseurs find so delightful.”
These remarks were met with thunderous applause. After answering a few questions, Malazzi was replaced at the podium by Philippe, a young man, bearded like an apostle, who had just come back from a trip to India. He’d rushed there to view the gargantuan oil spill from a collision between two tankers in the Gulf of Oman. With a great attention to detail, Philippe recounted the circumstances of the collision and described the fire that had ensued on the larger of the two ships. The spectacle, he declared, was apocalyptic: the tanker being towed out to sea left behind a layer of crude in flames, and the smoke made the sky dark as an eclipse. After three days of this debacle, the hulk had begun to list and unburdened itself of all its oil. Philippe had been lucky enough to climb aboard a helicopter and fly over the zone, taking photos from above. Then he’d headed for the coast between Bhatkal and Kundapur, and from there witnessed the arrival of a flood of fuel oil that had covered everything in its path, as if God had upended a bucket of hot tar onto the earth just for kicks.
The lights went down, and the first image was projected onscreen. It showed smoke, shot from a helicopter: a gigantic black mushroom, quite alarming. After that we saw the oil tanker in different stages of sinking, then the massive flood that escaped its tanks and spread over the ocean. The club members waxed ecstatic like art lovers before a stormy sky by El Greco. Philippe narrated his photos, recounting his feelings on beholding such scenes of desolation. Next came the photos taken from the coast, when the sheet of bunker fuel hit shore. If the aerial shots were still bearable for being relatively abstract, these were so repulsive as to turn one’s stomach: petroleum patties stuck to the rocks like sooty buboes, birds bogged down to their beaks, natives pathetically trying to gather the spill with rakes, and even a lost little boy, his feet in fuel oil, gazing disgustedly at a gluey patty in his hand, not knowing whether to hurl it far away or hang on to it so as not to add to the general desolation. It was appalling. Gould came and sat down beside me, murmuring a gentle reprimand: “Remember, morality has no place here! The disaster has already happened; it’s not our fault, nor is it within our power to repair. So check your guilt at the door.” I tried as best I could to suppress my nausea; all around me, the club members were purring with pleasure. It was very strange: the sight of oil-covered animals, soiled beaches, and lichens sopping with petroleum aroused in them the same kind of reaction that pornographic pictures did in the average person. These lovers of black tides weren’t just perverts: they were in fact connoisseurs of a special kind of obscenity, akin to refined erotomaniacs whose tastes run only to sophisticated depravities.
To my great inner turmoil, I realized I was hooked. After each image I awaited the next, hoping it would be more sickening still; after every close-up I wanted another, even closer; with every puddle of petroleum, I wished the next to be bigger, fouler, oilier, with impotent men staring at it, knowing neither how to destroy nor contain it. I tried to reason with myself; I tried to tear my mind from that fascination, tried instead to feel sincere and wholesome condemnation, but it was no use. Like the author of the satire Pierre Gould (now feverishly rubbing his hands together) had lent me, I felt “the satisfaction… to discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand on, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.” The carousel of petroleous images went on for a few more minutes, and then the showing came to an end. At once repulsed and transported, I couldn’t help from joining the degenerate art lovers in their applause.
***
Two weeks later, a phone call woke me in the middle of the night. It was Gould, all worked up.
“We’ve got one!” he said, “They just reported it on the radio! In Spain! It’s massive! You have to see it!”
He recapped the story for me: last night, a South African tanker had run aground on the shoals off Cape Finisterre. Its tank had been torn open, and hundreds of gallons of refined petroleum products were spreading into the ocean. With any help from the currents, the first patties would reach the Spanish coast the next day; the SABT had immediately organized a disaster-watching trip.
“We’ll swing by around six. Pack light; there won’t be much room in the van.”
“Six AM? That’s four hours from now!”
“Call in sick to work. You’ll never get another chance to see a masterpiece like this!” Gould hung up.
At the appointed hour, Gould and eight other oil slick admirers showed up at my door. I offered them coffee, but they claimed we had no time to lose. So I grabbed my backpack and climbed aboard the SABT van. We were off.
It was a boisterous trip; the festive mood reminded me of snow days from my childhood. Up front, Philippe rode shotgun, giving directions to Pierre at the wheel. Someone stuck a phone in my hand, to call my foreman. “I’m in bed with the flu,” I told him, while all around me, club members tried to stifle their laughter, bursting into hysterics as soon as I’d hung up. Soon we reached Lille. We changed drivers every two hours. To ward off the monotony of the highway, Philippe suggested we sing a song, and everyone started howling like a pep squad before segueing to an impression contest that Vincent, priceless as the president of Shell, won by a landslide. When we reached Paris, Herbert was driving, and he advised us to settle down and get some rest. We slept till Orléans, where we took a lunch break, switched drivers again, and gassed up. Every half hour we’d turn on the radio to get the latest news on the spill, hoping the oil wouldn’t reach the coast before we did.
Around six PM, we crossed the Spanish border. When he saw the signs for San Sebastián and Bilbao, Pierre burst out joyfully: “I can smell the fuel already!” We stopped in Durango for dinner, polished off Pierre’s marzipan candy, and got back in the van for the final leg. We were exhausted but, almost unconsciously overcome with excitement, all of us—myself included—impatient to reach our goal. “I hope we get there before nightfall,” Vincent murmured. The closer we got to the coast, the more solemn my companions became. Once past Buelna, all was quiet save for terse directions from the shotgun seat and muffled chatter from the radio we’d left on in case of breaking news. The appreciators were feverishly readying themselves for one of the most beautiful experiences of their lives.
At last, after a journey of more than a thousand miles, we reached our destination: Cape Finisterre. The night was clear. We had good hopes of seeing the oil hit shore. We didn’t know where it would alight, and for a good twenty minutes, we drove the coastal roads looking for police cars, heavy equipment, or gatherings of ecologists that might indicate we were near the landfall. I was worn out, and thought it might be nice to look for a hotel, but I knew my companions would not rest before finding the oil whose very presence they could sense. At two AM, we spotted a crowd and light coming from the beach below. Gould, who’d taken back the wheel around Muxía, slammed on the brakes, parked the van on the shoulder, and started running toward the sea, elated, letting out hurrahs. There were many people on the dunes. In broken English, Vincent and I asked two onlookers if the oil had been sighted. They nodded and gestured wildly to convey the scope of the disaster while a breathless Gould called out for us to hurry up and join him.
We reached the beach at last. The spectacle was breathtaking. Everywhere around us bustled people in rubber jumpsuits, like astronauts; bulldozers were growling; trucks towed trailers into which petroleum patties were being tossed by the shovelful. Before us, waves were sweeping in the first blotches of fuel oil; despite the darkness of the hour, we made out the gummy black mud slowly covering the blond sand. The connoisseurs and I contemplated the scene, deeply moved, and I must admit I found it all magnificent. Better still, I realized I’d taken up the poetic art of the Society for the Appreciation of Black Tides in all its radicality: I watched these people rushing to and fro to clean up the corruption, I knew this disaster would ruin the landscape for twenty years to come, but I no longer felt any sorrow or remorse. What could I do to contain the crude? These two arms and all my goodwill were pathetic when faced with the tons of fuel oil the next few weeks would pour upon the coast, with the millions of sticky patties they’d be picking up for months. I had to surrender to reason: for want of being able to save Cape Finisterre, I could at least contemplate the beauty of the spectacle. I recalled Gould’s pamphlet: “A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can’t mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purpose, let us treat it aesthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way.”
I no longer remember who among us was the first to laugh. Nevertheless, that laugh infected us and even drew a few tears of happiness. I was the first to kick off my shoes, roll up my pants, and start running toward the waves. My companions did the same, and we ran around in the oil like children in fresh snow. I recall the delectable sensation of my feet dipping in the black glue and the obscene slap of my footsteps on the sand. Dumbfounded, people watched us frolic in the foul wallow the ocean had become, shouting, chortling, hurling clotted tarballs heavenward in mad hopes of soiling the immaculate moon itself.
Bernard Quiriny is a Belgian critic, law professor, and author of three novels, four story collections, and a study of Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier. Among his awards are the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Histoires assassines (Rivages, 2015), the Prix du Style, the Prix Marcel Thiry, and Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel for Contes carnivoires (Seuil, 2008). He lives and works in France. His work appears in English in Subtropics, World Literature Today, The Coffin Factory, Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2012.
Edward Gauvin has received prizes, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. He has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and Tin House. The translator of more than 250 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. In 2011, he received a NEA grant to work on Bernard Quiriny.