In Bonaire, in the West Indies, children play with what the sea leaves on the shore: crab carcasses, driftwood, bottle caps. That day in July 1991, a shape suddenly caught their attention, wrapped in a ruffled dress: the inert body of a little girl.
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Virginia Tangvald‘s story opens with this macabre scene. The body is that of his sister, Carmen. A few days earlier, the boat of Virginia and Carmen’s father, adventurer Peter Tangvald, crashed into a reef while en route to Venezuela. Only Thomas, Virginia’s brother, survived the accident, before perishing in his turn in a shipwreck off the Brazilian coast in 2014.
Being born and living at sea does not predestined happiness in its pure state, as the label attached to the “generation of Ulysses” would have it, a generation of navigators who appeared after the Second World War, “in search of a deep individual experience, ready to put their lives in danger to find it”, of which Peter Tangvald was one of the icons.
Deconstructing the legend, Virginia Tangvald evokes and wards off the curse surrounding her family. Electrified by the urgency to say, his words break the figure of the hero to reveal his dark sides.
“Horrors happened on this boat”
Nicknamed “the saddest sailor in the world”, Peter Tangvald saw the mothers of his children disappear in troubled circumstances: a pirate attack off the coast of Borneo, a fatal boom strike. Only Lydia, Virginia’s mother, survived, fleeing the dream in which this man, forty years her senior, had trapped her.
“Horrors happened on this boat,” one of Peter’s former companions told her daughter. “He had wanted to be free so much that it was only when he became free that he asked himself “free to do what?” And he had no idea! »
Removing the stigma of her personal history, Virginia Tangvald questions the cost inherent in any quest for freedom, which led to the loss of her family and an inability to feel close to anyone, including herself. Poignant and exciting, the odyssey of Children of the sea testifies to a renaissance accompanied by literature.
“The Children of the Sea”by Virginia Tangvald (JC Lattès, 216 p., 20 €).
