Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  “And me?”

  “What about you?”

  “Can I be seen?”

  “Of course you can be seen! Especially you, what’s more! One can’t miss you, you take up so much space. And at our feet, there is the tarpaulin.”

  “The tarpaulin?”

  “The tarpaulin. The blue tarpaulin. America’s tarpaulin. And it’s quite obvious there is something underneath it.”

  “Can you make it out, this something?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean a thing. He’s probably got other photographs on the side, which he didn’t show me. Who knows! This sort of guy doesn’t reveal all his cards at once.”

  The Mayor stopped talking. The Doctor immersed himself in the smoke from his cigar. They remained like this for a long time, without saying anything further to one another, which was scarcely their usual habit.

  XIV

  WHAT TAUTENED THE ROPE STILL MORE THAT DAY TOOK place at the end of the Mass for the blessing of the boats, known colloquially as “the Tuna Mass,” when the Teacher confronted the Mayor.

  It is customary for the Priest to come to the port and for him to bless every boat that is due to depart for the S’tunella. In earlier times, this took the form of a solemn and sumptuous procession, which set off from the church in the early afternoon to the sound of the communal fanfare; each fishing boat with its crew placed itself under the protection of a male or female saint and maintained an altar to his or her glory which lay dormant in an aisle of the church throughout the year, and which was taken out that day, once its gold and silver had been polished, once it had been decorated with flowers, once the colors of the holy plaster figurine had been brightened up with a little pink paint, often the same as that used to preserve the hulls of the boats.

  The fishermen themselves would then carry the altar, of biblical weight, and the procession moved slowly and piously through the narrow streets of the town, making its way to the harbor, where the Priest performed his duty by dispensing holy water before setting off at the same slow pace, accompanied by prayers, toward the church, to the sound of the exhausted brass band with its increasingly false notes, due to weariness and all the glasses of wine everyone was offered at each stop.

  Once the church was reached and the altars replaced in the shade of their alcove until the following year, the Mass would be said. Not all the crowd could fit into the building and many people remained outside, in the square, where on that day not a single one of the lava paving slabs could be seen.

  In the evening, after the Christian ceremony, it was time for the pagan festival. The harbor would be illuminated by paper lanterns which occasionally caught fire and would then fly off into the velvety black air, in glittering shreds, briefly sparkling, among clouds of gold dust that drew them upward and eventually faded when confronted by the splendor of the stars that gazed down upon them, mocking, eternal, and dreamlike.

  Large tables would be erected, simple planks on trestles, and everyone brought their own bread, their wine, their olives, their pickled capers, their marzipan fruits, their pork and goats’ meat, smoked or dried, their honey cakes filled with cream, their pistachio entremets and their citron and orange liqueurs. Between the laughter and the sounds from the orchestra made up of a few surviving members of the brass band reinvigorated by shots of brandy, people would dance. This continued until dawn.

  Nowadays, the fishermen still feel they should attend the Tuna Mass. But there is no longer a procession that precedes it. And no more feasting afterward. Just a meal with the same fishermen. Still held at the harbor. A large table is sufficient. Just men on their own. The wives don’t even come anymore. Still less the children. They drink more than they eat, and it all ends with serious drunkenness, bouts of migraine-filled stupor, and a number of rekindled quarrels. The town council attends the Mass, the Mayor to the fore, who always wonders what on earth he is doing there and champs at the bit. There are also some elderly people present who feel that the hour of reckoning has come and who tell themselves that it may perhaps be wise to sort themselves out. After all, one never knows. It could be useful and it’s free.

  Since the presbytery in its reduced dimensions resembles a doll’s house, the Priest gradually took over the church as it began to be deserted by the congregation. With patience and perseverance, he has made it an annex of his living quarters, a sort of large warehouse in which he has spent years reconstructing the hull of a ship, which had broken up on the reefs that ring the island, the pieces of which he has patiently gathered together, bit by bit, making countless trips during a long summer and filling carts and wheelbarrows borrowed from people here and there.

  The sight of the wrecked ship put together again by inexpert hands is startling because, seeing it like this, huge and damaged, stretching what remains of its broken masts up to the vault, a gigantic, battered mass, dwarfing everything that surrounds it, you wonder whether it is the wreck that has been brought into the church, or whether the church has been built around it in order to preserve this remarkable relic, well and truly a ghost vessel, a ship of the dead, the barque of Osiris and Charon.

  A confessional and a dozen or so pews remain, nevertheless, surrounded by piles of cardboard boxes and unused hives on which one can sit in order to hear Mass.

  The masses are of unparalleled brevity, and only the Mayor still finds them too long. The Priest did not wait for a new council to adjust the liturgy: after a hurriedly recited Our Father, he passes abruptly to his sermon, which generally lasts only a few minutes and in which, accompanied by the loving flight of a few bees, he gives news of his hives, of the weather report, recalls some memories of his years in the seminary on the mainland, and which he ends by reading out the small ads that have been entrusted to him.

  Since his belly no longer allows him to bear the sourness of the wine used at Mass, nor the host which sticks insidiously to his dentures, he decided three years ago to do away with communion, but he does not forget the collection, which he carries out himself, even jotting down in a little notebook what everyone has given, not forgetting to remind certain people of their stinginess at the end of the year. The service ends with a hurried blessing and a prayer to the Virgin, who continues to be the island’s great deity of the water, the depths, and the winds.

  When he had walked into the church, the Mayor had noticed the Teacher, sitting in the back row. He was holding a thick brown envelope under his arm, which the Mayor looked at anxiously. Once the service was over, the Teacher approached him in the square, while the rest of the congregation dispersed and the fishermen returned in groups to the harbor.

  “Would you have a few minutes to spare, Mr. Mayor? I should like to tell you about my discoveries.”

  The Mayor had no other choice but to take the Teacher into his office nearby. A syrupy smell of anisette hung in the room, and the Mayor felt so embarrassed when he caught the Teacher looking at the two sticky glasses left on top of the desk and at the empty bottle protruding from the wastepaper basket that he felt bound to offer an excuse.

  “I had a visitor.”

  “I know,” said the Teacher immediately. “A policeman. More precisely, a superintendent. He arrived this morning.”

  “Who told you?”

  The Mayor was astonished. He did not even have the strength to be annoyed.

  “Everyone knows. News travels fast here. I don’t need to tell you that.”

  The Secretary. It could only be her. That painted-up bonito. She would hear about this on Monday.

  “On the other hand, what people don’t know is why this policeman is here. They claim that it’s to do with the Thermal Baths project. I don’t believe a word of that. As far as I’m concerned, I’m sure that his presence has to do with what occurred on the beach, and with what we did afterward.”

  The Teacher had never spoken to the Mayor with such assurance. Even during the secret meeting that took place on the memorable evening of the discovery of the bodies, in the boardroom, or in the fishi
ng warehouse. It was as though his shyness, that of a boy who has grown up too quickly and is ill at ease in his new body, had vanished. He seemed galvanized. His expression reflected both a calm determination and a degree of impudence. He clung to his envelope and he seemed to be deriving all his strength from it.

  “I have here the conclusions of my experiments. They are damning. During the last few days I have been conducting an examination of the currents which, I have no doubt, you know better than I do. But with perseverance, documents, and maps, I believe I have also become fairly competent in this area.”

  He paused, waiting no doubt for the Mayor to react, but the Mayor was doing his best to breathe calmly and to respect the promise he had just made to himself not to lose his temper. With a nod of his head, he indicated that he was waiting for the Teacher to continue.

  “I released some dummies, each of which were the weight of a man, at different points of the route taken by the smugglers, as they are called, though I find the word too romantic for these unspeakable wretches who trade in other human beings. Not one of the dummies washed up on the island’s beach. Not one, do you hear me, Mr. Mayor? I made the experiment twice over. Not a single one ended up on the beach. What is more, only three of them were found. On the mainland. Someone got in touch to tell me. The others have disappeared, carried further out to sea probably. But today, one dummy turned up. A dummy that I released last Sunday, very far from the usual route. To be more precise, immediately adjoining the Saliva of the Dog. What do you reckon? Who would venture down there, in those dangerous waters, unless it was someone who knew the area? That is to say, someone from these parts, Mr. Mayor?”

  In the Dog Islands, the Saliva is a collection of reefs that barely protrude above the water, like rocky dots that have been spat out there from the mouth of the animal. They do not appear on the maps, which simply indicate the danger that lurks there, for the largest of these stumps is the size of an olive tree. All the fishermen know them and usually avoid them, but at times they go near them—taking care and remaining on their periphery—for their waters are full of fish, and lobsters abound there.

  The Mayor felt himself grow weak, as though an invisible and expert hand had made an incision in one of his veins without his noticing; and when he began to feel dizzy, it meant that so much blood had escaped that it was already too late.

  What could he say to this lunatic? How to respond to him? What to suggest? Whether there was any basis to his assumption or not, the Mayor sensed that his disclosure would harm the peace of the island and ruin the Thermal Baths project, for investors would not countenance the glare of such gruesome publicity. The men who were prepared to put considerable sums into the realization of the complex liked obscurity and discretion above all else. The Mayor dealt only with their lawyers, and he had never been in direct contact with those who possessed the money, but he knew who hid behind the initials and the acronyms of their companies and the pleasant smiles of the lawyers. Those men loathed upsets, unexpected events, journalists, courts. All that interested them was putting an honest and discreet façade to their assets, the source of which remained difficult to trace.

  If the Teacher’s obsession with revealing what he had just told him, whether it was the truth or wild imagination, matched the aggression the Superintendent had displayed to fulfill his mission, then, the Mayor thought, the island would suddenly disappear beneath the symbolic lava of a new volcano, one that would be more effective than the dormant Brau which overlooked them.

  “The sea eludes all calculations, my dear Teacher,” the Mayor replied, his voice calm and reasonable to begin with. “I’ve nothing but praise for your concern about scientific matters, but you see, for the rest of us who were born here, generations of men and women for whom the sea has been a kindly if irascible companion for thousands of years, we know that it is unpredictable, unfathomable, irrational, and mysterious.”

  The Teacher raised no objections. He was waiting for him to continue.

  “You may be right or you may be wrong. I will not give an opinion one way or the other, for I am wise enough to know that in this area we know nothing, we don’t know, and we shall never know. If you release another dummy at the same place, at a different time, in another season, you may find it in Argentina or in Greece. As far as I am concerned, your experiments, on which I imagine you have spent a lot of time and money, prove nothing at all. And then, even if your hypothesis were correct, what would it prove? What is it that you are searching for?”

  The Teacher took his time before replying. Perhaps so as to relish what he was about to say, perhaps also because he knew that, having spoken, he would not be able to go back on his words and was slightly anxious. A thick silence hung over the Mayor’s office, barely troubled by the hum of a large greenbottle fly that was circling about inside the Superintendent’s glass, at the bottom of which there was still a sticky trace of anisette, which it was doing its joyful best to imbibe.

  “I simply affirm, with evidence to support what I say, that the men whose bodies we have disposed of—against my advice, may I remind you—fell into the water in the area of the Saliva of the Dog. They either fell into the water or else they were pushed. You know as well as I do that no one dares to venture around the Saliva of the Dog. All the maps show it as a very dangerous zone. No one, other than the island’s fishermen who are familiar with the area and know how to evade the traps.”

  The Mayor had placed both his hands flat on the desk. He was not moving. He was no longer breathing. He was staring at the Teacher who, for the first time, was holding his gaze and breathing loudly. It was like a duel, without weapons, but which you suddenly felt was going to end in an irreparable way, in the death of one or the other of them.

  “Do you realize what you are insinuating?”

  The voice of the Mayor had become icy, like a sudden blast of air through the room, whereas outside, the sun, which was still very high in the sky, was baking the black walls of the houses and roof tiles.

  “I am not a man to allege things lightly, Mr. Mayor. I may be younger than you. I may not come from these parts, as you constantly like to remind me—and what’s more, in the light of events and the way in which you are trying to cover them up, I am beginning to be proud of the fact—but I am a responsible person, who says nothing without being certain, and who, when it’s a question of such serious matters, weighs up all the factors before discussing them.

  “You asked us not to say anything after that memorable morning. I said nothing. But I can no longer keep quiet. I cannot keep to myself what I know and what I have discovered. I didn’t want to act treacherously. I wanted to warn you beforehand: if, by Monday morning, you have not made the first move, I myself shall take the account, a copy of which I am leaving with you, to the Superintendent. In it I have recorded the events that took place on the beach and the way in which you have chosen to deal with them. Secondly, I have reported my experiments there, and the conclusions I have drawn from them. This policeman must now be prepared to make use of information that will allow him to investigate and establish the truth. I cannot remain on an island on which men live who are probably guilty of the worst crimes, and where other men live who prefer not to know or to forget about them so that they can continue to sleep with complete peace of mind.”

  The Teacher had finished. He placed the envelope on the Mayor’s blotter. The spring fastener was now back in place. The Mayor even reckoned he heard the sound of the click inside his skull. An infernal device. This was what this madman had just placed in front of him. In one way or another, it was going to explode. No one could now prevent that. The Mayor had no intention of letting himself be killed, and if the explosion was now inevitable, as he feared, it was best that it blew to pieces the person who had made it possible.

  “Don’t forget, Mr. Mayor, Monday morning.”

  The Teacher left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  The Mayor needed calm. And very curiously he, who was no
rmally so on edge, did feel calm. To such a degree that he even wondered whether he had just died. He put his hand to his heart. It was still beating. He left the palm of his hand on the shirt for a few seconds, so that he could feel the beats that were regular and those that were too close together. He had the impression that there, a few centimeters beneath his flesh, there was a small caged animal.

  He glanced at his watch. He had an hour before he was due to attend the meal given by the fishermen at the harbor. As the fishermen’s boss and as mayor, he could not escape from it. One hour in which to work out how to put the bomb back in the hands of the lunatic who had conceived it. That particular bomb, or else another one. For after all, what mattered was to prevent the Teacher causing harm. The Mayor felt that if this fanatic were to alert the authorities, nothing would ever be the same on the island, to say nothing of the Thermal Baths project, which would become a dead issue and a vanished dream. There was no time to go into niceties about the means. All that mattered was that it should be effective. It was necessary to neutralize him.

  The Mayor’s eyes fell on the glasses that had contained the anisette. At the bottom of one of them, the strange large fly was now lying on its back, its two wings stuck in the drops of alcohol. It was exposing its purplish, plump belly as it feebly wiggled one of its legs. It was dying. The flickering leg was moving less and less. The Mayor could not stop looking at it. Very soon it stopped moving at all, motionless forever in a translucent coffin that was much too big for it.

  XV

  THE MAJORITY OF MEN ARE NOT AWARE OF THEIR DARKER side, which nevertheless everyone possesses. It is often circumstances that reveal it, wars, famines, disasters, revolutions, genocides. So when they contemplate it for the first time, in the secrecy of their conscience, they are appalled and they shudder.

  The Mayor was confronted by all of this. He discovered nothing that he had not had a premonition about already. What was the point of lying to oneself? He was no longer a child. He had to face the facts: occasionally it is necessary to pass through darkness in order to observe once more the clarity of the dawning day. But he was not a monster, and neither did he hold all the cards. Did anyone actually hold them?