The Voyeur (17 page)

Furthermore, he had arrived without mishap at the level section of the road just before the fork; he was forced to stop in order to avoid a little girl who was heedlessly crossing just in front of him. In order to gain momentum he unthinkingly gave the pedals a turn . . . then several more. The bicycle was working perfectly. The peculiar noise had entirely disappeared.

At the other end of the town he heard the little steamer's whistle: once, twice, three times.

He entered the square, the town hall on his left. The whistle blew again, shrill and prolonged.

On the movie bulletin-board, the advertisement had been changed. He leaned the bicycle against it and dashed into the café-tobacco shop. No one was there: no customer in the room, no proprietor behind the counter. He called. No one answered.

Outside there was no one either, no one in sight, Mathias remembered that the man had returned his security. The sum amounted to . . .

The ship's whistle blew a long blast—in a slightly lower tone.

The salesman jumped onto the bicycle. He would leave it at the end of the quay—would hand it to someone—with the amount he owed for its rental. But even pedaling as hard as he could along the uneven cobbles, he managed to remember that the garageman had still not told him the terms. At first it had only been a question of the two-hundred-crowns security, which obviously bore no relation to the value of the bicycle nor to the cost of a half-day's rental.

Mathias decided not to try riding along the pier, for it was encumbered with a great many baskets and hampers. There was not a single stroller on this part of the quay to take the money, so he abandoned the bicycle against the parapet and immediately ran toward the steamer. In a few seconds he had reached the landing slip, where a little crowd of about ten people was standing. The gangplank had been pulled up. The steamer was slowly pulling away from the embankment.

The tide was high now. The water covered a good part of the inclined plane—half of it, perhaps—or two-thirds. The seaweed on the bottom could no longer be seen, nor the tufts of greenish moss which made the lower stones so slippery.

Mathias looked at the narrow strip of water almost imperceptibly widening between the ship's side and the oblique edge of the landing slip. He could not jump across it, not so much because of the distance—which was still very slight—but because of the dangers of landing on the gunwale or in the midst of the passengers and their baggage on the stem deck. The downward slope along which he would have to run to gain momentum increased the difficulty still further, as did the heavy shoes and the duffle coat he was wearing, not to mention the suitcase he was carrying.

He looked at the half-turned backs of the people staying behind, their faces in profile, their stares motionless and parallel—meeting identical stares from the ship. Standing against an iron pillar that supported the deck above, a child of seven or eight was gravely staring at him with large, calm eyes. He wondered why she was looking at him that way, but then something—a silhouette—came between him and the image—a sailor on board whom the salesman thought he recognized. He ran forward three steps toward the end of the pier and shouted: "Hey there!"

The sailor did not hear him over the noise of the engines. On the pier Mathias' immediate neighbors turned toward him—then others farther away, by degrees.

The passengers, noticing the general movement of heads on the pier, also looked in his direction—as if in astonishment. The sailor raised his eyes and caught sight of Mathias, who waved his arms in his direction and cried again: "Hey there!"

"Hey!" answered the sailor waving his arms in farewell. The little girl next to him had not moved, but the maneuver executed by the ship changed the direction of her gaze: now she would be looking at the top of the pier, above the landing slip, where another group of people was standing on the narrow passageway that led to the beacon light. These too were now facing Mathias. All of them had the same strained, frozen expression as before.

Without addressing anyone in particular, Mathias said: "I didn't miss it by much."

The little steamer executed its usual maneuver, which consisted of turning so that it presented its stem to the open sea. The islanders left the end of the pier one after the other to return to their houses. The salesman wondered where he would sleep that night, and the next, and the one after that too—for the boat would not return until Friday. He also wondered if there were any policemen on the island. Then he decided it wouldn't change matters, whether there were or not.

In any case, it would have been better if he had left, since that had been his plan.

"You should have shouted! They would have come back."

Mathias turned toward the person who had spoken these words. It was an old man in city clothes whose smile might have been kindly as well as ironic.

"Bah!" answered Mathias. "It doesn't matter."

Besides, he
had
shouted—not right away, it was true— and not very insistently. The sailor had not seemed to understand that he had just missed the boat. He did not know why he had shouted himself.

"They would have come back," the old man repeated. "At high tide they can tum easily."

Perhaps he wasn't joking. "I didn't have to go," said the salesman.

Besides, he had to take back the bicycle and pay for its rental. He looked at the water lapping against the foot of the embankment—slack tide probably. In the sheltered angle of the landing slip, the backwash produced scarcely any swell at all.

Then came a series of little waves from the steamer's propeller. But the harbor was empty. Only a fishing-smack was dancing out in the middle somewhere, its mast waving to and fro. Since he risked getting spattered on the landing slip, Mathias walked up the slope and found himself again on top of the pier, walking alone among the baskets, nets, and traps.

He put his right hand—the free one—in the pocket of his duffle coat. It came into contact with the slender cord rolled into a figure eight—a fine piece for his collection. He had often heard the story before: once he had had a whole boxful—perhaps twenty-five or thirty years ago.

He did not remember what had become of them. The slender cord picked up that morning had also disappeared from his duffle coat pocket. His right hand encountered only a pack of cigarettes and a little bag of gumdrops.

Thinking this was a good time to have a smoke, he took out the pack and discovered that several cigarettes were already missing—three, to be exact. He put the pack back in his pocket. The bag of gumdrops had also been opened.

He was walking slowly along the pier, on the side with no railing. The water level was several yards higher. At the end of the pier, against the quay, the sea had entirely covered the strip of mud. Beyond stretched the row of houses and shops: the hardware store at the comer of the square, the butcher shop, the café "A l'Espérance," the shop that sold everything—women's lingerie, wrist watches, fish, preserves, etc. . . .

Groping at the bottom of his pocket, Mathias opened the cellophane bag and took out a gumdrop. This one was wrapped in blue paper. Still using only one hand, he unwrapped the paper, put the gumdrop in his mouth, rolled the little rectangle of paper into a ball, and threw it into the water where it floated on the surface.

Leaning over a little farther, he saw at his feet the vertical embankment that plunged into the black water. The strip of shadow cast by the pier would have grown very thin at this time of day. But there was no longer any sunshine; the sky was uniformly overcast.

Mathias advanced to the middle of the cluster of gray parallel lines between the water level and the outer edge of the parapet: the inner rim of the parapet, the angle formed by the jetty and the base of the parapet, the side of the pier that had no railing—rigid horizontal lines, interrupted by several openings, extending straight toward the quay.

III

The new advertisement represented a landscape.

At least Mathias thought he could make out a moor dotted with clumps of bushes in its interlacing lines, but something else must have been superimposed: here and there certain outlines or patches of color appeared which did not seem to be part of the original design. On the other hand they could not be said to constitute another drawing entirely; they appeared to have no relation to one another, and it was impossible to guess their intention. They succeeded, in any case, in so blurring the configurations of the moor that it was doubtful whether the poster represented a landscape at all.

On the upper section appeared the names of the leading actors—foreign names Mathias thought he had already seen many times, but which he associated with no particular faces. Underneath was spread in huge letters what must have been the name of the film: "Monsieur X on the Double Circuit." Not conforming to the trends of recent productions, this title—which was scarcely enticing, having little or no relation to anything human—provided remarkably little information about what type of film it described. Perhaps it was a detective story, or a thriller.

Attempting once again to decipher the network of curves and angles, Mathias now recognized nothing at all—it was impossible to decide whether there were two different images superimposed, or just one, or three, or even more.

He stepped back to get a better look at the bulletin-board as a whole, but the more he examined it the more vague, shifting, and incomprehensible it seemed. There were performances on Saturday night and Sunday, not before; he would be unable to see the film, since he intended to leave Friday afternoon.

"Good-looking sign, isn't it?" said a voice he knew.

Mathias raised his eyes. Above the bulletin-board the garageman's head had appeared in the doorway.

"That one, yes! . . ." the salesman began, cautiously.

"Wonder where they get colors like those," the other continued.

Did this mean that he had discovered what the lines were supposed to represent?

"Here's your bicycle," said Mathias. "It's just played me a nasty trick!"

"I'm not surprised," the garageman returned, still smiling. "All these new makes are the same—they're shiny enough, but no good when you need them."

The salesman recounted his misfortune: he had just missed the boat by a few seconds because of this chain, which at the last minute had made him lose five precious minutes.

The garageman found the incident so commonplace he did not even listen to him. He asked instead: "You came from the pier?"

"Just now . . ."

"Then you were going to take the bicycle with you?" the man exclaimed as jovially as before.

Mathias explained that he had stopped by the tobacco shop beforehand to leave the bicycle and pay for its use;

but he had found no one there. As he returned to the square—not knowing what to do next—he had heard the boat's last whistle, the one that meant the gangway was about to be closed, so he had headed toward the pier—not hurrying, since it was too late—just to watch the little steamer pull out—to have something to do, really . . .

"Yes," the man said, "I saw you. I was there too, at the end of the pier."

"Now I'm going to need a room until Friday. Where can I find one?"

The garageman seemed to be thinking it over.

"The boat left at least five minutes late today," he said, after a rather long silence.

Of course there was no hotel on the island, not even a rooming house. From time to time people rented an empty room, but it was difficult living in someone else's house, and there were really no conveniences. The best solution, as far as finding out what was available at the moment, was to ask at the café "A l'Espérance," on the quay. Then the salesman asked how much he owed for the bicycle and paid the twenty crowns he was charged. In consideration of the bicycle's newness, on the one hand, and its irregular operation on the other, it was difficult to say whether this was cheap or expensive.

"Wait a minute," the tobacconist continued, "there's the Widow Leduc just nearby—she used to have a good room to rent out; but she's off her head today, ever since her kid disappeared. You'd better leave her alone."

"Disappeared?" the salesman asked. "Madame Leduc is an old friend; I saw her only this morning. I hope nothing has happened . . ."

"It's that little Jacqueline again: they've been looking for her since noon, but no one can find her."

"She can't be far, after all! The island isn't so big as that!"

The meadows and the moor, the potato fields, the edge of the fields, the hollows in the cliff, the sand, the rocks, the sea . . .

"Don't fool yourself," said the man, winking at him. "Someone knows where she is."

Mathias did not dare leave. He had waited too long again. And now he was obliged to struggle a second time with silences that threatened to riddle the conversation at every turn: "Then that was it," he said, "that business with the sheep they were talking about at Black Rocks?"

"Yes, that's it—she was tending the sheep, but the wolf got the shepherdess!" etc. . . . etc. . . .

And also: "At thirteen! It's really a shame"—"She's got a devil inside her"—"A wild animal!"—"Children are a lot of trouble"—"She deserves to be. . . ."

There was no reason for it to stop. Mathias said something, the man answered, Mathias answered that. The man said something, Mathias answered. Mathias said something, Mathias answered. Little Jacqueline was walking along the path on top of the cliff, showing off her delicate, scandalous silhouette. In the hollows, sheltered from the wind, in the long meadow grass, under the hedges, against the trunk of a pine, she stopped and slowly ran her fingertips over her hair, her neck, her shoulders . . .

She always came home to sleep—the last house as you left town on the road to the big lighthouse. Tonight, when Mathias would climb upstairs to his room, having said goodnight to the mother and the two older sisters, holding his lighted candle in front of him in his right hand and in his left his little suitcase in which he had carefully stored the cord, raising his head—he would see, a few steps higher, showing him the way up the dark staircase, so slender in her little black peasant girl's dress, Violet as a child. . . . Violet! Violet! Violet!