Adrien Bosc - Constellation

The marriage was floundering, the two children and Simone were homesick for France, she dreamed of returning there one day and visited more and more often, a month in August 1946 with Bridget and Eileen, three weeks at Christmas in 1947. She never warmed to the bleak life of a suburban mother. A cohort of neurotic women, cheated on, zealously religious, imprisoned in a rosy picture of success. Friendships that were not really friendships, meaningless conversations, phony conviviality, boredom of the kind that latches on to you and won’t let go, crass habits, and all joie de vivre put on the shelf. In January 1949, husband and wife were separated. In October, she goes to Paris to settle her father’s estate, her two daughters stay in Dobbs Ferry, the nanny, Eileen Sheridan, looks after them. Simone prepares their return to France, rents an apartment in the 6th Arrondissement, and sets off to fetch her daughters on October 27 by the Air France flight.

Patrick Hennessy learns of Simone’s death on October 28, all doubt is gone, there are no survivors. He rushes to his daughters’ sides, uncertain how to console them, he has never known, so he holds them in his arms and does what he can to dry their tears. Eight and ten years old. They fall asleep from exhaustion, poleaxed. On October 29, he decides to take the first flight for Paris, to wait there for the body of his ex-wife, to identify her at the morgue, to attend to all the formalities. The girls will be in the care of their nanny, they will join him in a week. In December, he starts legal proceedings, a battle that will last almost five years. He sues Air France for 25 million francs ($71,000) in compensation, rather than accept the 2,200,000 francs ($6,300) set by international law. Divorced, he says he is fighting on his children’s behalf. His lawyer, Marcel Héraud, blames the pilot and the fact that the navigational instruments weren’t thoroughly checked. The court finds in Air France’s favor on two occasions, and, on February 3, 1954, Patrick Hennessy drops his suit. The case becomes a textbook example, cited as Hennessy v. Air France .

Going to the island finally became inevitable. Following the procession, backward, toward the crest of the mountain, looking for the remains of the aircraft, most likely buried under thick layers of ferns.

On the morning of October 28, a boat belonging to the Atlânticoline company sets out for Ponta Delgada from Vila do Porto. Sixty-four years earlier, as the sun rose over the archipelago, small boats were still scanning the ocean for parts of the downed airplane, and search planes were flying low over the area.

On the bridge, the sense of taking part in a mimetic pilgrimage, no doubt grotesque, driven by a maniacal concern with synchrony, to the point of making my itinerary coincide with the dates of the expedition. So it’s at noon, approaching Ponta Delgada, that I join the first crew alerted by the search plane. No one is waiting for me, unless it’s the bus traveling the shoreline of São Miguel Island that, turning at the foot of the mountain, heads for the village of Povoação. I have reserved a room in a bed-and-breakfast, facing the ocean. The next day, at noon, I will proceed to Algarvia and, with Lévis-Mirepoix’s expedition, begin the ascent of Mount Redondo, while a fine rain falls, a sort of liquid mist, an atomizer’s halo. After hours of hiking through the forest, following paths blazed with paint marks, the mountain’s crest appears, and it is only after following the ridgeline to the end of a narrow, exposed trail that the famous shadow of the Redondo nipple appears, where the last remains of the Constellation, overgrown with time and native grasses, lie. The only marker is a stone erected by the inhabitants of the village in honor of the forty-eight victims of Air France’s F-BAZN, a commemorative edifice known by the name alminhas , “little souls.” A granite cross, the base tiled in ceramic squares, with a blue-painted text describing the site:

LOCAL ONDE CAIU NO DIA

27 DE OUTUBRO DE 1949

UM AVIÀO DE AIR FRANCE

TENDO MORRIDO TODA

A SUA TRIPULAÇÀO

E OS PASSAGEIROS.

DAI–LHES SENHOR

O ETERNO DESCANSO …

PLACE WHERE FELL

ON OCTOBER 27, 1949,

AN AIR FRANCE AIRPLANE

CAUSING THE DEATH OF ALL

ITS CREW MEMBERS

AND ITS PASSENGERS.

GIVE THEM, LORD,

ETERNAL REST …

Two sets of initials appear at the top of the marker, “PN” and “AM,” Pater Noster and Ave Maria . I searched through the dense foliage for a few rusty bits of the mechanical skeleton, a riveted sacred shroud, relics of my pilgrimage. The last pieces of the aircraft lie several feet below the surface, under the carpet of mosses, eaten away by their decades-old destruction. The bulk of the carcass, junked in the weeks following the crash, found a second life God only knows where on São Miguel.

The archipelago is constellated with almas or alminhas , “souls” or “little souls,” cubes of stone with blue and white tiles, topped by a cross. According to local legend, the souls circle the stones on November 2, hoping that Saint Michael will catch them with his rope and fish them out of Purgatory. The crosses, of which there are a great many on the heights of São Miguel, watch over the rescue of those shipwrecked at sea. On the summit of Mount Redondo, a soul watches over the salvation of forty-eight people shipwrecked in the sky.

My last day in the archipelago, I went to look at whales, beyond the folded hills on which the island’s peasant farmers graze their bleating ewes. At Lajes do Pico, the Captain Ahabs with their shallow nets, the emigrants washed onto the dock from the ocean crossroads, and the farmers who had swapped their pitchforks for makeshift harpoons have all been replaced by excursion boats that ply Pico’s waters on a fixed schedule, for tour operators who guarantee a glimpse of whales or your money back. Offshore, far from the coastline, the whale’s silvery blue skin, striped with lines of lighter blue, emerges from the water, ferrying ultrasonic songs up from the deep. I’d like to tell you about Antonio Tabucchi and The Woman of Porto Pim , a collection of tales set in the Azores. In the prologue, the Italian novelist warns you that the whales and shipwrecked sailors in his stories are symbols of the infinite and the absolute. On the bridge, my heart knotted by solitude and absence, I imagine the crash, the airplane and its passengers like transposed images of chance and coincidence. Every story is a pretext. These last two years, I have believed more than is reasonable in signs, in lucky stars, I have lost myself in them, only the story of these lives fatefully enclosed in the fuselage of a Constellation could answer my questions. I had needed to travel to the Azores to hear the intimate resonance of these men and women, who once lived and loved. I had had to reach Ponta Delgada, walk along the trails of Mount Redondo, watch late and early the sky and the shoreline, to see the illusion of distance at the heart of the novel. To understand that by getting away from the morass of my emotions I would in the end come up against a familiar landscape, find answers, put one foot in front of another again. One has always to set off, one’s heart in a jumble, in search of whales. And in Pico, I might add, no beacons shone.