The Mayor continued:
“If the press suddenly gets hold of this and paints an appalling picture of our island, how, in such circumstances, can we complete our Thermal Baths project with the Consortium? Do you think they would still be willing to invest millions and build their complex? Our land, which is famous for its hot water springs, its landscapes, its wine, its oil, and its capers, would it not become one where corpses from Africa get washed up? Our pure waters, would they not become those where dead bodies soak, stew, and rot? Who would then want to swim, take water cures, or eat the fish that are caught there?”
The Mayor paused for a moment, allowing the words he had just spoken to sink into the mind of each one of them and unfurl their gruesome images.
“I am the Mayor,” he went on. “I am responsible for the present and I must also think of the future of our island, and of our children, most of whom are forced to leave because there is too little work here. The Thermal Baths project will create jobs. A hundred or so when fully operational. Not counting all the people required for its construction. I don’t want to wreck this project. It’s our opportunity. Our last opportunity for families to remain here, and their children, and their children’s children. Nothing, alas, will revive these three poor wretches. Letting the public know what has happened risks dreadful consequences and it will not bring them back to life. Don’t take umbrage at my comments, Father. Naturally, I don’t have the authority to tell you how to behave, but I do appeal to everyone’s good sense, to your responsibility, and to your fellow feeling.”
There was a long, dazed silence, filled with awkwardness. Some of them probably thought that the Teacher, who was wriggling about in his chair, would speak out again and question what the Mayor had just said, but he did nothing and merely scratched his woolly blond hair nervously.
The Priest was silent. He was rocking on his chair and had folded his hands over his stomach, which, over the years, had assumed the shape of a thrush’s egg, pointed yet bulging.
The voice of the Old Woman broke the silence like a glass smashing on a tile.
“Where did you put them?”
“In a safe place, I’ve already said.”
“I’m not asking you whether the place is safe, I’m asking you where it is.”
“What difference would it make for you to know?”
“You want our silence? I want the truth. That’s all.”
The Mayor tried to hold the Old Woman’s gaze but he lost himself in her milky eyes. Irritated by his own weakness, he looked away. Then he noticed that the others were all staring at him, without exception, waiting for him to reply.
“In my cold storage room,” he eventually said, in a low voice.
“In your cold storage room? With the fish?” said the Teacher, who seemed shocked and frightened at the same time.
“Where would you expect me to put them? In my bed?” And the Mayor, beside himself, broke the mechanical pencil he was holding in his fingers without even realizing he had done so.
V
IT WAS A CURIOUS PROCESSION WHICH, IN TOTAL silence, left the Mayor’s office that evening shortly after ten o’clock. In single file, the Mayor at the head and the Priest bringing up the rear, it made its way—slipping through the darkness of the narrow streets—toward that area of the port where the fish market, the workshops in which boats are repaired, and the dry docks are situated, as well as the cold storage warehouse.
Set slightly apart from the other buildings and painted red and yellow, the warehouse has two entrances: the one facing the sea enables the Mayor’s three boats to transfer their catch into a tiled room where it is sorted and packaged; and the other, on the quayside, gives access to the company’s offices, to the shed where the fishermen store their equipment, change their clothes, and repair their nets, and to the actual cold room.
The Mayor left it to Swordy to remove the padlock from the chain that kept the gate closed. It went five or six times around the gateposts, and when the fisherman took it off it produced a clanking, swishing, rusty music. It was as though he had just removed a convict’s chains from his ankles. Swordy pushed open the gate and allowed the Mayor to pass.
The little group made its way inside. The Mayor pulled a bunch of keys out of his pocket, chose one without hesitating, and fitted it into the lock of a gateway that was reinforced with plywood panels. He pushed with his shoulder against the door, which had been affected by the damp. The door opened. He pressed a switch and returned to the group, to whom he gave a signal, with a nervous twitch of his hand, that they should enter as quickly as possible. He shut the door behind the Priest with another shove of his shoulder.
Three high ceiling lights dispersed a harsh beam over the ropes and cables, the nets, the plastic and wooden crates, the buoys, the pots of paint and tar, the oilskins and the boots, the cork floats, and all the usual clutter found in fishermen’s storerooms.
Whiffs of salt, dried seaweed, oil, dog hair, and tobacco, and fish, too, mingled with all of this. In a corner, four chairs, placed around a chest upon which a collection of dirty, odd mugs had been left, seemed to be waiting for people to play cards or chat. Promotional calendars for brands of motors were pinned up in one corner. You could make out the days and months of years long past, and the photographs of naked young women that illustrated them had faded over time, giving their enormous breasts a waxy tint.
At the end of the huge room an aluminum door could be seen. It was tall, rounded, and surprisingly new, and it made one think of the airlock in a spacecraft, like those in science fiction films. It was the door to the cold storage room. The Mayor was standing beside it.
“We’re not going to spend the night here!”
They all felt as though they were in a museum and they looked around as though they were discovering a new world: the Doctor was walking about with his hands behind his back like a philosopher out for a stroll. The Priest was adjusting a lopsided crucifix that was wedged between two pornographic pictures he pretended not to notice. America, dazzled by the nylon mesh of a brand-new net, was stroking it lovingly, but abandoned it for some cans of asphalt which were spilling their syrupy contents on the ground in long, thin streaks resembling witch’s hair. Swordy was looking for something in an oilskin that must have belonged to him. The Old Woman, who had positioned herself right in the middle of the warehouse, was swiveling on her feet, slowly inspecting the entire space 360 degrees around her. She could have been mistaken for a bailiff assessing the value of each object before putting it up for auction. As for the Teacher, he was carefully studying a marine chart placed under glass on which the island could be seen, as well as the other isles in the Dog Islands. Faint arrows marked the principal currents. The shallow areas were colored gray and the reefs violet.
The voice of the Mayor shook them out of their daydreams and everyone turned toward him. He had inserted the strange key he had produced a little earlier in the evening into the lock. Once the mechanism was unblocked, he made two attempts to open the door, which eventually gave way with a rubber-like noise, similar to the one made when you unblock a drain with a plunger.
A polar blast suddenly froze their faces as a mist of icy vapors enveloped them, giving them the sense that they were entering another season, far away from their world, from their quiet, warm existence, far from life. They all shivered at the same moment, due to the temperature, which was kept at two degrees in the first part of the room, but also because the vision of perforated crates, in which the previous day’s catch had been put, suddenly revealed a rigid stack of silvery, iridescent creatures with their mouths wide open and their eyes wreathed in gray and green reflections.
Most of the crates contained sea bass, small bonitos, rockfish, mullets, rainbow wrasse, octopuses, and scabbardfish, and all the usual mass from the depths that the nets had dragged up and which the fishermen had then placed on beds of ice.
Hanging from the ceiling by hooks to which their tail fins had been tied, two large swordfis
h and a tuna looked as though they were suffering agonies. The “swords” of the former were dragging, uselessly, on the ground and their big eyes were begging for release. As for the tuna, an enormous one, it resembled a plump landsknecht caparisoned in his armor, fallen in a battle that had left him with no obvious wound. Resigned, he was staring at the ground as if to discover the reasons for his defeat there.
They had to pass close to these large hanging creatures in order to follow the Mayor into the second part of the cold storage room which, behind another aluminum door, housed the freezer. Again, once the door was opened, vapors escaped that were icier still than the previous ones, and they eventually caused the small group to freeze. The Doctor’s smile now looked like a grimace and his mustache, together with the frizzy eyebrows of the Teacher, were quickly covered with what resembled artificial snow. Everybody shivered, with the notable exception of the Old Woman, even though she was dressed in only a thin woolen cardigan.
The freezer room was dark. The vapors that emanated from it succeeded only in edging the darkness with a cloudy, shifting grayness that no one managed to identify. The Mayor left them puzzling over everything for a few seconds, for he was anxious to create a dramatic effect. Then he pulled a lever which produced a dry banging sound, and a surgical light immediately lit up the entire space, obliging the little group to close their eyes for a brief moment as though they had been pushed, in a playful gesture, beneath the blinding spotlights of a television set.
The room was about eight meters square. On three of its walls partitions had been erected to store the fish. The one attached to the farthest wall was empty. Only a crust of ice—thick, uneven, and denticulated—created a miniature ice shelf that was wrapped around its pedestal and from which stalactites drooped in two places, syrup-like, making them look like a large cat’s canine teeth.
Cut up into slices, the head and upper body of a tuna lay in silvery disks on the right-hand partition. The fish’s head, intact and arrogant-looking, still retained, solidly attached to it, a segment of about twenty centimeters of compact, reddish flesh which the cold had made iridescent with pale crystals, but which the saw had not damaged.
On the partition opposite, America’s blue tarpaulin could be seen. The polar cold had accentuated its cracks and absurd corners. Shafts of vapor were escaping from the bundle.
The bodies twisted up inside the plastic shroud took up the entire storage space. Stiffened by the cold, the tarpaulin that covered their legs and their feet created a shape reminiscent of the sarcophagi of Ancient Egypt, but at the top, misshaped by the freezing cold, it had slipped down, allowing the face of one of the men to appear, gazing at the visitors. His eyelids were open, no doubt due to the cold. His eyes possessed neither irises nor pupils: bulging, they had become two white opaque glass balls.
The Priest, who had taken off his thick, Coke-bottle glasses that had been frosted over by the icy vapor, wished to make this lifeless, inhuman expression disappear, and before the Mayor could prevent him he tried to close the dead eyelids, not realizing that his gesture was pointless, since the wretched man’s flesh had now acquired the hardness of marble.
And what the Priest had not thought about, either, was that the skin of his fingers would instantly stick to the large white eyes, the cold acting as the most effective of glues, and so he found that the pads of his right thumb and right index finger adhered to the pale eyeballs.
He let out a little moan of fear and surprise and tried to withdraw his hand, but two of his fingers remained attached to the dead man’s eyes. Panic prevented him hearing the words of the Mayor, who was shouting and ordering him not to do anything and not to move, and asking Swordy to go and fetch a jug of hot water, quickly: with a brisk tug of his arm and a cry of pain, the Priest snatched his fingers away from the corpse.
Something that appeared unreal and fantastical to everyone then occurred: a dead man’s face, black verging on gray, covered in frizzy hairs that were white with frost, whose eyes suddenly began to weep tears of blood which the cold immediately froze into tiny scarlet pearls.
VI
ON THE ISLAND, THE DEAD ARE BURIED STANDING UP. Earth is scarce. It is the most precious commodity. People had realized very quickly that it should belong to the living, that it was there to feed them, and that the dead should take up as little space as possible. That it was of no further use to them.
The town’s cemetery therefore bristled with black stones, uneven in shape, barely a meter high, huddled together like the terrified soldiers of a devastated army, and upon which were carved the name of the deceased, the date of his or her birth, and that of their death.
On the island, people live together, but in death they travel alone; the cemetery does not contain any communal or family graves, merely single tombs in which the dead person stands upright just as he or she stood upright in life.
The deaths of the three young black men had not taken place on the island. The sea had cast them onto the shore as though they were driftwood. No one knew them and their previous lives had never crossed the lives of the island’s inhabitants. Only their deaths had connected them, but that was not sufficient reason for the daily lives of those living there to be affected.
“Exaggerating a little,” said the Mayor, once everyone had left the cold room and Swordy had applied bandages to the bleeding fingers of the Priest, who was screeching like a baby bird, “it is as though these three men have never existed, as though the tide has not brought their remains to us, as though—and this would have been most likely—the sea has carried them away and dissolved them in its depths as in an acid bath, and no one knows what has become of them. If they had identity papers on them, it would be a different problem and a more difficult decision to take. Identity papers would have linked them to the world, to a country, a human administration, a history, a family. But here, there’s nothing. Nothing to enable us to discover their names, their ages, the country from which they have fled. Nothing that can tell us whose sons, brothers, husbands, or fathers they were.”
“Holy shit, you’re hurting me!” the Priest howled all of a sudden, which had the effect of interrupting the Mayor’s comments and to arouse the three bees that were coming back to life on the shoulders of his cassock after the episode in the cold room.
“I’m doing what I can, Father,” said Swordy. “I’m not a nurse.”
“It’s quite clear you’re not the one who is in pain, either!”
The Doctor had refused with a smile to look after the Priest’s fingers, offering the excuse that his own fingers were so awkward and pudgy that he could not apply such small bandages. He had merely insisted that Swordy should disinfect the bare flesh, and so the fisherman had poured the remains of a bottle of brandy on the wounds, which had already caused the Priest to cry out.
“You have understood my thoughts,” the Mayor continued, “and you know very well that I am not a bastard, nor a man with no heart. But I’m not the one who created poverty in the world and it is not for me to mop it up on my own. To bury these three corpses in our cemetery makes no sense. For one thing, these men were not part of our community, but what’s more, we don’t even know what they believed in.
“In all probability they did not share our beliefs, and it would be insulting to put them in a place that has nothing to do with their religion. Furthermore, as I told you in the first place, I want this matter to be solely our concern and for us to keep it to ourselves, until we die, without our having told anyone about it. Which, of course, requires that the corpses of these unfortunate men disappear, and for nothing to provide any further evidence of their presence anywhere.”
The Mayor paused for a moment and scrutinized every face. Most of them bowed their heads, with the exception of the Old Woman, and the Teacher who, appalled, was staring at the Mayor and seemed to be gasping for air as though he were having an asthma attack.
“For a while, I thought it would be simplest to consign them to the sea. But how can we be sure that
the sea will not wash up their bodies on our shore again? So I then said to myself that it would be best for us to bury them here, on our island, which is the last piece of land on which, without their being aware of it, they have come aground, the place where death has deposited them, delivering them from the suffering which has no doubt been their daily fate.”
Swordy had finished bandaging up the Priest, but the Priest was not listening to the Mayor, and continued to grimace as he fiddled with his thick spectacles, as though by closely inspecting his fingers he would enable them to heal more quickly.
“I don’t need to tell you that the island is pitted with chasms. Our ancestors thought these wells were the mouths of the gods. I think there would be nothing sacrilegious or inhuman about our dropping the bodies of these three men into one of them. In a sense, they would be continuing their journey. They would reach the center of the world and achieve eternal peace.”
They all allowed the words of the Mayor to linger in their minds for a long time. As everyone feared, it was the Teacher who broke the silence:
“I’m dreaming! I must be dreaming! I feel as though I’m being rocked to sleep with a story! You speak too well, Mr. Mayor! You want to get rid of the bodies of these poor men as though they were dust that one sweeps under a carpet! Do I have to remind you that certain filthy pigs on this island continue to empty their rubbish down those very same volcanic holes? Is that how you regard these wretched men’s bodies, like rubbish? I should like to hear what Father has to say on this matter!”
When he realized that they were talking about him, the Priest looked up and stopped fiddling with his bandaged fingers, which he had been contemplating with a shattered expression. He was aware that everyone was looking at him and waiting for him to say something. He had probably heard the Mayor’s comments and the brief exchange with the Teacher that followed, but it had been like music played in a distant room. He gave a long sigh, as if about to make a painful effort:
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