The youngest dockworker, a boy named Patrice who had thought “Grosse Fesse” was just a joke, asked the old man why he had done it.
But the nickname “Grosse Fesse” came later, long after grief had calcified into habit. The men on the docks didn't know about Céleste. They saw a fat, quiet man who never laughed and assumed stupidity or sourness. They slapped him on the backside as a joke— “Alors, Grosse Fesse, you block the sun?” —and Étienne would grunt and move the next crate.
Étienne, wrapped in wool, shivering but calm, looked at the boy with eyes like the winter sea.
Of all the nicknames a man could earn in the small, rainswept fishing village of Saint-Malo-sur-Mer, “Grosse Fesse” was perhaps the least kind and the most inevitable. grosse fesse
He would sit on the floor, his heavy back against the cold stone wall, and place the duck on his thigh. Then he would talk.
On his left buttock—on the great, heavy, much-mocked mound of flesh—a tattoo. Faded, blurred at the edges, but unmistakable. A single word in looping script, the ink long since settled into his skin like a bruise that never healed.
His real name was Étienne Morel. He was forty-two, broad as a cider barrel, with a face weathered by salt and silence. The nickname—meaning “Big Buttock”—came from the other dockworkers, who watched him haul crates of mackerel up the slick gangplanks. Étienne carried his weight low and heavy, like an anchor. They meant it as a jab. He accepted it as a fact. The youngest dockworker, a boy named Patrice who
Inside the lighthouse, which had been decommissioned in 1973, Étienne kept a single room tidy. A cot. A kerosene lamp. A wooden chest bound with iron straps. And on the wall, a photograph of a woman with a missing front tooth and eyes like the winter sea.
One winter, the cold was merciless. The harbor froze for the first time in forty years. Étienne, now seventy-one, slipped on the gangplank and fell into the black water. The other men pulled him out, coughing and blue. They stripped his clothes in the dockmaster's shack to wrap him in blankets.
The dockworkers, for the first time in living memory, did not use his nickname. They stood in silence, caps in hands, as the priest spoke of a man who had loved greatly and lost greatly and never once complained. They saw a fat, quiet man who never
She asked what kind.
He took the duck home and placed it on his own mantelpiece, where his wife could see it. When she asked what it was, he said, “A lesson.”
What they didn't see was what he did every Thursday night.
And in the harbor below, the waves beat against the stone, indifferent and eternal, as they always had. As they always would.
“ Ma petite ,” he would say to the duck, as if it were a little girl with pigtails. “Today a storm came in from the north. The old men said they'd never seen the sea so angry. I thought of you. I thought: she would have been afraid of the thunder. I would have held you.”