On the Côte d’Azur

by John Coville

The beach in Nice is covered with stones. When the waves break against the shore, the smooth pebbles clack against each other, then again when the sea recedes, like the rattled breathing of the sick. The sound fills the mind of an aged grandfather, who is near his end.

He was conceived in Nice. He has no real evidence of this belief, other than a grainy black-and-white film of his parents’ second honeymoon taken by his father in the year before his birth. It is the only moving image of his parents he has ever seen.

In the faded film, his mother is in a hotel room, unpacking. The balcony doors are open, revealing the busy traffic along the Promenade des Anglais, the sun-bleached beach, the blue Mediterranean beyond, and the rocky shore where the clacking stones lie.

The sound echoes in his mind as he lingers between there and here.

He opens his eyes a little. He sees his wife and children and grandchildren, gathered around his bed. They look sad and a bit bored, waiting for his death. He closes his eyes again.

He floats.

He is on a train in the south of France, a middle-aged man, searching for an elusive thread to his parents, eternally young in a few seconds of grainy footage. The double-decked train is crowded with beachgoers, sunned and salted, on their way to hotels or villas in Nice, Monaco, or Cannes. Every seat is full.

A man with a black eyepatch sits on the stairs playing a plaintive harmonica. Near the door, a group of tanned Italian girls chat expansively, hands flying, arms waving, laughing. Across from him, a family of four is squeezed into a seat for two. The father has one arm around his wife, she has one arm around one son, and he has one arm draped over his brother. They sit stern-faced and resolute, linked like a chain.

The train jostles the passengers as it winds its way along the Côte d’Azur, past mountains and through dark tunnels, carrying them all to their destinations. Perhaps his parents rode a train like this, bumping against other passengers like the stones along the shore.

He opens his eyes again, though his lids resist, the small muscles in his face weakening. With blurred vision, he scans the room. Nothing has changed, except that night has fallen. His family is still here, fading now in the deepening darkness. Had he been asleep? How much time has passed? He is not sure, only certain of the coarse crackle of his own breath.

He has another clue to his conception. His first toy as a child was a brown teddy bear that he named “Nice” because he had been conceived in Nice. He tries to smile, but the ability is lost.

Through barely open eyes, he peeks around the room once more. In trembling, bony hands, his wife holds her rosary beads. She has many colors, but today she has chosen the red beads. That’s not good. Her vigil is nearly complete. The only movement in the room is her fingers caressing the beads, one by one, as her lips move in prayer. Everyone else is very still.

He closes his eyes and returns to the stones of Nice. Galets they are called, he remembers now, made smooth and round by the wind, the sun, the ceaseless flow of water.

He drifts.

Did his parents hear the stones through the open window as they made him? Did their breathing match the sea’s rhythmic rush against the shore? Did they share a knowing laugh when he christened his stuffed toy? Yes, yes, it is clear now. His beginning is as solid as the blue and gray galets, as certain as the approaching coast.

His breath slows as he is there, a boy clutching his teddy bear, standing on the shore before the vast obsidian sea.