But the center of town was not situated behind the houses along the quay. It was a square, opening at its narrowest side on the quay itself and roughly triangular in shape. Besides the quay, which thus constituted the base of the triangle pointing into the town, four roadways opened into it: one into each of the long sides (the least important) of the triangle, and the two others at its point—on the right the road to the fort, which it skirted before following the coast toward the northwest, and on the left the road to the big lighthouse.
In the center of the square Mathias noticed a statue he did not recognize—at least he had no recollection of it. Rising from a granite pedestal cut to imitate living rock, a woman in regional dress (which was no longer worn) was scanning the horizon toward the open sea. Although there was no list of names cut into the sides of the pedestal, the statue must have been a monument to the dead.
As he was passing next to the high iron fence around it—a circle of rectilinear, vertical, and equidistant rails—he saw at his feet, on the big rectangular paving-stones laid around the monument, the shadow of the stone peasant woman. It was deformed in projection, unrecognizable but distinct: very dark in contrast to the rest of the dusty surface and so sharp in outline that Mathias had the sensation of stumbling against a solid body. He made an instinctive movement to avoid the obstacle.
He had not had time yet to begin the necessary swerve when he was already smiling at his mistake. He put his foot in the middle of the body. Around him the fence rails ruled off the ground with the oblique regularity of the heavily lined white paper made for schoolchildren to learn to slant their handwriting regularly. Mathias turned right to get out of the network of shadows more quickly. He stepped down to the uneven cobbles. The sun, as the distinctness of the shadows bore witness, had burned off the morning mist. At this season it was unusual that a day promised to be so fine.
The café-tobacco shop, which also served as a garage, according to the information he had obtained the day before, was on the right side of the triangle, at the corner of the alley that led to the quay.
In front of the door a bulletin-board, supported from behind by two wooden uprights, offered the weekly program of the local movie house. The showings doubtless took place in the garage itself, on Sundays. In the garishly colored advertisement, a colossal man dressed in Renaissance clothes was clutching a young girl wearing a kind of long pale nightgown; the man was holding her wrists behind her back with one hand, and was strangling her with the other. The upper part of her body and her head were bent backward in her effort to escape her executioner, and her long blond hair hung down to the ground. The setting in the background represented a tremendous pillared bed with red covers.
The bulletin-board was placed in such a way—partly concealing the entrance—that Mathias was obliged to walk around it in order to get into the café. There were no customers in the room, and no one was behind the counter. Instead of calling, he came out again after a moment's wait.
No one could be seen in the vicinity. The square itself gave an impression of solitude. Except for the tobacco shop, there was not a single store: the grocery, the butcher shop, the bakery, and the main café all faced the harbor. Furthermore, more than half its left side consisted of an unbroken wall almost six feet high, its masonry crumbling and its tile sheathing missing in several places. At the point of the triangle, in the fork of the two roads, stood a small, official-looking building, set off by a plot of ground; above the pediment was a long pole with a flag attached to it; it might have been a school or the town hall—or both. Everywhere (except around the statue), the utter absence of sidewalks was surprising: the roadway of old paving-stones, full of humps and hollows, reached to the house walls. Mathias had forgotten this detail, like everything else. In his round-about inspection, his eyes fell again on the wooden bulletin-board. He had already seen this advertisement a few weeks ago, posted all over the city. Probably its unusual angle made him notice for the first time the broken doll lying on the ground at the hero's feet.
He raised his eyes toward the windows above the café, in the hope of catching someone's attention. The building, almost austere in its simplicity, had only one upper story, like all its neighbors, whereas most of those facing the harbor had two. He noticed along the alley joining the square the backs of the houses he had already passed in front—their structure was just as elementary, in spite of their greater size. The last, at the corner formed by the square and the quay, stood out in a patch of shadow against the sparkling water of the harbor. The free end of the pier could be seen protruding beyond the gable-end; it too was in shadow, striped with a single horizontal line of light running its length between the parapet and the inner embankment and connected by a short, oblique projection to the ship moored against the landing slip. Farther away than it seemed, and especially by contrast with the pier that was actually larger at low tide, the ship had become ridiculously tiny.
Mathias had to screen his eyes with his hand to protect them from the sun.
Emerging from the angle between the houses, a woman in a black dress with a wide skirt and narrow apron crossed the square in his direction. In order not to have to step up onto the sidewalk around the monument, her path described a curve of which the eventual perfection disappeared in the irregularities of the terrain. When she was no more than two or three steps away Mathias greeted her and asked if she knew where he could find the owner of the garage. He wanted—he added—to rent a bicycle for the day. The woman pointed to the movie advertisement, that is, to the tobacco shop located behind it: then, learning that there was no one inside, she seemed to be distressed by the news, as if in that case the situation was without remedy. To spare his feelings, no doubt, she declared—in very vague terms—that the garageman would not have rented him a bicycle anyway; or else her words must have meant . . .
At this moment a man's head appeared in the doorway above the bulletin-board.
“There,” said the woman, “there's someone now.” And she disappeared into the alley leading to the harbor. Mathias walked over to the tobacconist.
“Good-looking girl, isn't she?” the man said, with a wink toward the alley.
Although he had seen nothing particularly attractive about the woman in question, who had not seemed to him even very young, Mathias returned the wink—as a professional obligation. In fact it had not even crossed his mind that she might be considered from this point of view; he remembered only that she was wearing a thin black ribbon around her neck, in accordance with the old island custom. He began explaining his business at once. He had been sent by Père Henry, the proprietor of the Café Transatlantique (one of the city's large establishments); he wanted to rent a bicycle for the day—a good bicycle. He would return it at four this afternoon, before the boat left, since he had no intention of staying until Friday.
“Are you a traveling salesman?” asked the man.
“Wrist watches,” answered Mathias, lightly tapping his suitcase.
“Ha! Ha! You sell watches,” repeated the other. “Good for you!” But immediately afterward, with a grimace: “You won't sell one, they're all too backward around here. You're wasting your time.”
“I'll try my luck,” answered Mathias good-naturedly.
“All right. Fine. That's up to you. In any case, you wanted a bicycle?”
“Yes, the best one you have.”
The garageman thought for a moment and declared that in his opinion there wasn't any need for a bicycle to cover six blocks of houses. He indicated the square with an ironic shrug.
“I'll be working more in the country,” explained Mathias. “A kind of specialty.”
“Oh, in the country? All right then!” agreed the garageman.
As he spoke these last words he opened his eyes wide: selling watches to the people living on the cliff seemed even more chimerical to him. The conversation nevertheless remained quite friendly—although a little too long for Mathias’ taste. His interlocutor had an odd way of answering,
always beginning in agreement, even repeating his own words in a tone of conviction, only to introduce some doubt a second later, and then deny everything by a contrary, more or less categorical, proposition.
“Well then,” he concluded, “you'll travel around the island. You have good weather for it. Some people think the cliffs are picturesque.”
“As for the island, you see, I know it already: I was born here!” replied Mathias.
And as if to prove what he had said, he gave his surname. This time the garageman started off on still more complicated considerations in which he managed to imply that Mathias must have been born on the island to conceive the preposterous notion of returning to it for a sales trip, and at the same time that the expectation of selling a single wrist watch betrayed a complete ignorance of the place, and finally that names like his didn't mean a thing—you could find them wherever you liked. He himself was not born on the island—of course not—and he didn't expect to stay there and “gather moss,” either.
As for the bicycle, the man had an excellent one which wasn't “here, at the moment.” He would go fetch it, “as a favor” Mathias would have it in half an hour without fail. Mathias thanked him; he would adapt himself to this turn of events, would make a quick visit to some of the houses in town before canvassing the outlying villages, and would return for the bicycle in exactly three-quarters of an hour.
On the off chance, he offered to display his wares: “excellent merchandise, completely guaranteed and at unbeatable prices.” The other having agreed, they went into the café, where Mathias opened his suitcase on the first table from the door. Scarcely had he lifted the paper protecting the top strip of cardboard than his client changed his mind: he had no need of a watch, he was wearing one now (he lifted his sleeve—it was true) and was even keeping another in reserve. Besides, he would have to hurry if he was to get hold of the bicycle by the time he had promised. In his haste he almost pushed the salesman out of the café. It was as if he had acted as though he had only to verify the contents of the suitcase. What had he expected to find?
Above the wooden bulletin-board Mathias caught sight of the granite statue which divided the visible part of the pier into two sections. He stepped down onto the uneven cobbles, and in order to avoid the bulletin-board made a step in the direction of the town hall—of what looked like a town hall—in miniature. If the building had been newer, its size would have made it look like a model.
Then his gaze turned left, sweeping over the whole length of the square: the little plot of ground in front of the town hall, the road to the big lighthouse, the wall with the crumbling sheathing, the alley and the backs of the first houses facing the harbor, the gable-end of the corner house which cast its shadow on the paving-stones, the central section of the pier in shadow above a quadrilateral of sparkling water, the monument to the dead, the little steamer moored against the landing slip defined by a band of light, the free end of the pier with its beacon light, the open sea as far as the horizon.
The cube-shaped pedestal of the monument had no inscription on its southern face either. Mathias had forgotten to buy cigarettes. He would buy them in a moment, on his way back. In the tobacco shop, among all the apéritif advertisements, hung the placard distributed throughout the province by the syndicate of retail jewelers: “Buy your watch at your Jeweler's.” There was no jeweler on the island. The tobacconist was prejudiced against the place and its inhabitants. His exclamation about the woman with the black ribbon must have been made ironically—the incomplete beginning of a favorite manner of speaking:
“Good-looking girl, isn't she?”
“That one, yes! Good enough to eat!”
“Well, you're not hard to please! They're all hideous around here, and drunk all the time.”
The fellow's pessimistic predictions ("You won't sell one, they're all too backward around here!") were nevertheless a bad omen. Without conceding them any objective importance—without believing they corresponded to any real knowledge, on the part of the speaker, of the market, or even to any particular power of divination—Mathias would have preferred not having heard them. Then too, he still felt a certain annoyance at the recent decision to begin his rounds in town, when according to the original itinerary he would have completed his rounds there—if the country left him time enough before the boat's departure. His confidence—carefully constructed but entirely too fragile—was already shaken. He tried to find in this vacillation—in this propitiatory change of plan—some token of success, but in reality he felt the whole enterprise collapsing beneath him.
He was going to start out now by devoting three-quarters of an hour to these sad houses, where he was positive he would meet with one failure after another. When he would finally leave on the bicycle, it would be after eleven. From eleven to four-fifteen left only five and a quarter hours—three hundred fifteen minutes. Furthermore, it wasn't four minutes per sale that he would have to allow, but ten at least. By putting every one of his three hundred fifteen minutes to good advantage he would still only manage to get rid of thirty-one and a half watches. And unfortunately even this result was inaccurate: first of all he would have to subtract the considerable amount of time spent in getting from place to place and then, above all, the time wasted on people who didn't buy anything—obviously the most numerous. According to his most favorable calculations (those by which he sold all eighty-nine watches), out of the two thousand inhabitants there were in any case nineteen hundred eleven who would refuse to buy; figuring even only a minute per person, that came to nineteen hundred eleven minutes, which—dividing by sixty—was more than thirty hours for refusals alone. It was five times more time than he had! One-fifth of a minute—twelve seconds —twelve seconds for a negative answer. He might as well give up right away, since he didn't even have time to free himself from so many refusals.
Along the quay in front of him stretched the housefronts which led him back toward the pier. The vague light brought no detail into relief, nothing solid to hold on to. The crumbling whitewashed walls, stained with damp, were of no age and of no period. The clump of buildings did not suggest much of the island's former importance—an entirely military importance, it was true, but one which in past centuries had permitted the development of a flourishing little port. After the naval services’ abandonment of a base impossible to defend against modern weapons, a fire had completed the ruin of the decaying town. The dwellings built in place of those destroyed were much less luxurious and no longer on the same scale as the immense pier, which now protected no more than twenty small sailboats and a few trawlers of low tonnage, and bore no relation to the imposing mass of the fort which marked the town limit on the other side. It was now nothing more than an extremely modest fishing port, with neither natural resources nor commercial possibilities. Shellfish and the fish taken by trawler were shipped to the mainland, but the profits from this trade grew less and less satisfactory. The spider-crabs that were a specialty of the island sold particularly badly.
At low tide the remains of these crabs strewed the naked mud in front of the quay. Among the flat stones with their manes of rotting seaweed, on the barely slanting blackish surface, in which sparkled here and there a tin can that still had not rusted, a bit of crockery painted with little flowers, a blue enamel skimmer almost intact, their arched, spiny shells could be distinguished next to the longer, smoother shells of ordinary crabs. There was also a considerable quantity of bony legs, or parts of legs—one, two, or three joints ending in a claw that was too long, slightly curved, and sharp-edged—and large, pointed pincers, most of them broken, some of startling size, worthy of real sea monsters. Under the morning sun the whole surface gave off an odor that was already strong, though not quite repellent: a mixture of iodine, fuel oil, and slightly stale shrimp.
Mathias, who had stepped out of his path to get nearer the edge, turned back toward the houses. He crossed the width of the quay toward the shop forming the corner of the square—a kind of dry goods-hardware empo
rium—and entered the dark orifice that opened between it and the butcher shop.
The door, which he had found ajar, closed softly as soon as he released it. Coming in out of the bright sunshine, he could see nothing at all for a moment. Then he realized he was looking at the hardware shopwindow from behind. He noticed on the left a round, long-handled enameled iron skimmer like the one sticking out of the mud, the same shade of blue, scarcely any newer. Looking more closely, he discovered that a sizable chip of the enamel had flaked off, leaving a fan-shaped black mark fringed with concentric lines that faded out toward the edge. To the right, a dozen identical little knives—mounted on a cardboard strip, like watches—formed a circle, all pointing toward a tiny design in the center which must have been the manufacturer's trade-mark. Their blades were about four inches long, quite thick but tapering to a sharp cutting edge much slenderer than those of ordinary knives; they were more like triangular stilettos, with a single honed edge. Mathias could not remember ever having seen knives like them; the fishermen doubtless used them for a particular kind of dismemberment—a very ordinary kind, though, since there was no indication as to their use. The cardboard strip was decorated with a red frame, the trade-mark “Indispensable” inscribed at the top in capital letters, and the label at the center of the wheel of which the knives constituted the spokes. The design represented a tree with a smooth, rectilinear trunk terminating in two branches forming a Y and bearing little tufts of foliage that barely protruded beyond the two branches at the sides, but filled in the fork of the Y.
The Voyeur Page 4
