The Voyeur (2 page)

But the ring had been set so low in the embankment that it must have been underwater most of the time—sometimes several yards beneath the surface. Furthermore, its modest size scarcely seemed adequate to the thickness of the ropes ordinarily used for mooring even the smallest fishing boats. The only rope that could have passed through such a ring would have to be a thin, strong cord. Mathias turned his eyes ninety degrees toward the crowd of passengers, then lowered them to the deck. He had often heard the story before. It was on a rainy day; he had been left alone in the house; instead of doing the next day's arithmetic homework he had spent all afternoon sitting at the back window, drawing a sea gull that had perched on one of the fence posts at the end of the garden.

It had been a rainy day—to all appearances a rainy day like the rest. He was sitting at the table wedged into the window recess, facing the window, two big books under the chair so he could work comfortably. The room must have been very dark; the table top reflected only enough light from outside to make the waxed oak gleam—very faintly. The notebook's white paper constituted the only bright thing in the room, along with the child's face, and perhaps his hands as well. He was sitting on a chair on top of two dictionaries—had been there for hours, probably. He had almost finished his drawing.

The room was very dark. Outside it was raining. The big gull remained motionless on its perch. He had not seen it land there. He did not know how long it had been where it was. Usually they did not come so near the house, not even in the worst weather, although between the garden and the sea there was no more than three hundred yards of open ground rolling toward an indentation in the coast, bounded on the left by the beginning of the cliff. The garden here was nothing but a piece of moorland planted with potatoes every year and fenced off with barbed-wire fastened to wooden posts to keep out the sheep. The unwieldy size of these posts indicated that originally they had not been intended for such use. The fence post at the end of the central path was even thicker than the rest, in spite of the slenderness of the lattice-gate it supported; it was a cylindrical post, a pine log roughly trimmed, and its almost flat top, a yard and a half above the ground, formed an ideal perch for the gull. The bird's head was turned toward the fence, in profile, one eye looking at the sea, the other at the house.

Between the fence and the house the garden, at this time of year, consisted of little more than a few late weeds piercing the carpet of dead vegetation that had been rotting in the rain for several days.

The weather was very calm, without a breath of wind. The continuous light rain may have blurred the horizon, but did not obstruct the view for shorter distances. On the contrary, it was as if in this new-washed air the objects near at hand profited from an additional luster—especially when they were light-colored to begin with, like the gull. He had copied not only the contours of its body, the folded gray wing, the single foot (which completely concealed the other one), and the white head with its round eye, but also the wavy line dividing the two parts of its curved, pointed bill, the pattern of the feathers on its tail and along the edges of its wing, and even the overlapping scales down the length of its leg.

He was drawing on very smooth paper with a hard-lead pencil. Although scarcely pressing down at all, in order not to leave an impression on the next pages in the notebook, he obtained a clear, black line; he had taken such care to reproduce his model faithfully that there was no need to erase. His head bent over his work, his forearms resting on the oak table, he began to feel tired from sitting so long in one position, his legs dangling over the edge of the hard, uncomfortable chair. But he did not want to move.

Behind him the whole house was empty and black. Except when the morning sun brightened them, the front rooms, facing the road, were even darker than the others. Yet this room, where he had settled down to work, was lighted by only one small, square window deeply recessed in the wall; the carpet was very dark, the high, heavy, dark-stained furniture crowded close together. There were at least three heavy wardrobe-cupboards, two of them side by side opposite the door opening onto the hallway. On a lower shelf of the third one, in the right-hand corner, was the shoebox in which he kept his string collection.

The water level rose and fell in the sheltered angle at the bottom of the landing slip. The ball of blue paper, quickly saturated, had half unfolded and was floating between two waves a few inches below the surface. It was easier to tell now that it was the paper from a pack of cigarettes. It rose and fell, following the movement of the water, but always at the same point—neither closer to nor farther away from the embankment, moving neither to the right nor the left. Its position was easy for Mathias to establish, for it was on a line with the mark shaped like a figure eight.

The moment he became aware of this fact, he noticed, about a yard away from the first mark and at the same height, another design shaped like a figure eight—two circles incised side by side, and between them the same reddish excrescence that seemed to be the remains of a piece of iron. There must have been two rings fixed into the embankment. The one nearer the landing slip immediately disappeared, submerged by a wave. Then the other one was engulfed in its turn.

The water, falling back from the vertical embankment, collided with the backwash from the inclined plane of the landing slip; a little cone of liquid leaped toward the sky with a slapping sound, and a few drops fell back around it; then everything was as it had been before. Mathias looked for the floating cigarette pack—it was impossible to tell exactly where it would surface again. He is sitting at the table wedged into the window recess, facing the window.

The window is almost square—a yard wide and hardly any higher—four identical panes—with neither curtain nor shade. It is raining. The sea is invisible, though quite near.

Although it is broad daylight, there is just enough light from outside to make the waxed table top gleam—very faintly. The rest of the room is very dark, for in spite of its rather large size it has only this one aperture, which furthermore happens to be located in a recess in the wall. A good half of the square, dark-stained oak table is wedged into the recess. On the table the white pages of the notebook, placed parallel to the edge, constitute the only bright thing in the room—not counting, above them, four slightly larger rectangles: the four panes of the window opening onto the fog that conceals the entire landscape.

He is sitting on a bulky chair that is on top of two dictionaries. He is drawing. He is drawing a big gray and white sea gull. The bird's head is facing toward the right, in profile. The wavy line dividing the two parts of its curved, pointed bill can be distinguished, as well as the pattern of the feathers on its tail and along the edge of its wing, and even the overlapping scales down the length of its leg. Yet it seems as if something is missing.

There was something missing from the drawing, although it was difficult to tell exactly what. Mathias decided that something was either not correctly drawn—or else missing altogether. Instead of the pencil, his right hand was holding the wad of cord he had just picked up from the deck. He looked at the group of passengers in front of him, as if he were hoping to find among them the object's owner coming toward him, smiling, to ask for its return. But no one paid any attention to him or to his discovery; they all continued to turn their backs. Slightly to one side, the little girl seemed to be forsaken. She was standing against one of the iron pillars that supported the deck above. Her hands were clasped behind the small of her back, her legs braced and slightly spread, her head leaning against the column; even in a position as rigid as this the child maintained something of her graceful attitude. Her face shone with the confident, yet conscious gentleness imagination attributes to obedient children. She had been in the same position ever since Mathias first noticed her presence; she was still looking in the same direction, toward where the sea had been and where now the vertical embankment of the pier rose above them—quite close by.

Mathias had just stuffed the cord into the pocket of his duffle coat. He caught sight of his empty right hand, its nails too long and too pointed. To give those five fingers something to do, he gripped them around the handle of the little suitcase he had been holding in his other hand. It was an ordinary enough suitcase, but its solid manufacture inspired confidence: it was made of a very hard, reddish-brown fiber, the corners reinforced with some material of a darker, almost chocolate color. The handle, fastened with two metal clasps, was made of a softer, imitation-leather material. The lock, the two hinges, and the three big rivets at each of the eight corners looked like copper, as did the clasps of the handle, but even slight wear had already revealed the real composition of the four rivets on the bottom: copper-plated babbit metal, which was obviously what the other twenty rivets were made of—and doubtless the rest of the fittings as well.

The inside was lined with printed cretonne, of which the pattern only superficially resembled those customarily used for materials of this type, even in women's or girls' luggage; instead of bouquets or sprays of flowers, the decorative motif consisted of tiny dolls, like those used on nursery curtains. But unless examined closely, it was not apparent that they were dolls: they looked more like bright-colored spots on the pale canvas—they might just as well have been bouquets of flowers. The suitcase contained an ordinary memorandum book, a few prospectuses, and eighty-nine wrist watches mounted in rows of ten on nine rectangular strips of cardboard, one of which had an empty mounting.

Mathias had already made his first sale that same morning, before boarding the ship. Even though it had been a watch from the cheapest row—one hundred fifteen crowns— on which he realized the most slender profit, he decided to consider this early start as a good omen. On this island, where he had been born, after all, and where he was personally acquainted with many families—where, at least, in spite of his bad memory for faces, he could make a harmless pretense of renewing old friendships, thanks to the inquiries he had made the day before—he had a good chance of selling most of his merchandise in a few hours. In spite of the fact that he had to leave on the four o'clock boat, it was even possible—or not materially impossible—to sell every watch he had brought in the course of this one short day. Furthermore, he was not even limited to the contents of his suitcase: in the past he had occasionally taken orders for articles which were paid for on delivery.

But counting only the ninety watches which were in his luggage, the profit would be considerable: ten at a hundred fifteen crowns, eleven hundred fifty, ten at one hundred thirty, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred fifty, ten at one hundred fifty, four with a special wristband at five crowns extra apiece. ... To simplify matters Mathias decided on an average price of two hundred crowns; the week before he had calculated the exact amount that a similar batch was worth, and two hundred crowns was a good approximation. So he should total about eighteen thousand crowns. His gross profit varied between twenty-six and thirty-eight per cent; figuring on an average of thirty per cent—three times eight, twenty-four, three times one, three, three and two, five—it came to more than five thousand crowns, that is, the gross profit was actually worth a whole week's work—even during a good week—in his usual territory. As for personal expenses, there would be only the sixty crowns for the round-trip boat fare, which was practically negligible.

It had taken hopes of such exceptionally favorable transactions as these to convince Mathias to make this trip, which was not included in his theoretical itinerary; otherwise two three-hour crossings represented too many complications and too great a loss of time for so small an island—barely two thousand inhabitants—to which nothing else, neither childhood friendships nor early memories of any kind, attracted him. The houses on the island were so much alike that he was not even sure he could recognize the one in which he had spent almost his entire childhood and which, unless there was some mistake, was also the house where he had been born.

They assured him that nothing had changed for thirty years, but often a shed added on to a gable or a little stonework redressed is enough to make a whole building unrecognizable. And even supposing that everything, down to the smallest detail, had remained just as he had left it, he would still have to reckon with the errors and inaccuracies of his own memory, which experience had taught him to mistrust. More than any real changes on the island, or even hazy recollections—which were nevertheless numerous enough to prevent him from retaining any precise image of the place —he would have to be wary of exact but false memories which would here and there have substituted themselves for the original earth and stones.

After all, all the houses on the island looked alike: a low door between two small, square windows—and the same arrangement at the back. From one door to the other a tiled hallway split the house down the middle, separating the four rooms into two symmetrical groups: on one side the kitchen and a bedroom, on the other a second bedroom and a room used either as a parlor or as a kind of lumber room. The kitchen and bedroom on the street side faced east and received the morning sun. The remaining two rooms looked out toward the cliff over three hundred yards of open ground rolling toward an indentation in the coast. The winter rains and the west wind battered against the windows; it was only in milder weather that the shutters could be left open. He had been sitting all afternoon at the heavy table wedged into the window recess, drawing a sea gull that had perched on one of the fence posts at the end of the garden.

Neither the arrangement of the grounds nor their orientation gave him enough clues. As for the cliff, it was the same all the way around the island—and the same, moreover, on the mainland opposite. Its indentations and rises could be as easily confused as pebbles on a beach, as gray gulls.