Last day
It's his last day.
This morning, Michel Le Bihan once again climbed to the top of the tower. At half past five, it is still very dark. With a magnetic friction noise, the enormous Fresnel lens cuts through the night with great jets of white light.
One long burst, two short ones, a black pause, and it starts again. Thirty meters below, the scalpel of the waves tears the red rocks into splashes of foam.
Michel goes out on the passageway. He doesn't even want to smoke. He is leaning on the railing and gazes at the horizon which repaints the sky in pale vermilion. In a few minutes, the sun will appear behind the reefs.
It's his last day.
Michel is not even sad, no, that's not it. Rather an impression of light emptiness. The guys from the mainland who came to install the automation last month didn't really convince him. In fact, the lighthouse will have to fend for itself, with its heart elsewhere… The lens will soon give way to a big flash that will smear the air in all directions, like an idiot painter. The brush of the artist who caressed the waves will be seen in the museum.
It's his last day.
The day gets up, on the tip of the fort, on the hill where the chapel, whose plaster is peeling off, is dying, with its steeple leaning in the direction of the wind. It's not even raining. Michel rubs his big hands against each other, which smell of salt like the face of a guy you don't give it to. However, he leaves.
– Brav eo an amzer hiziv
The sun finally appears, very round, very smiling. That's right, the weather is nice today!
Fabrice Roy © Musefabe 2007
In his art history lectures, Fabrice Roy combines the past with the present, in a poetic and playful evocation of the French 19th century...
