The Voyeur (3 page)

Fortunately Mathias did not care much about such matters. He had no intention of looking for the house at the moor's edge, or for the bird on its perch. He had only made his inquiries so carefully, the day before, about the forgotten topography of the island in order to establish the most convenient route, to facilitate broaching the subject of watches in the houses he was supposed to be returning to with such understandable pleasure. The extra effort of cordiality—above all of imagination—required by such an enterprise would be more than compensated for by the profit of five thousand crowns he expected to clear.

He really needed the money. For almost three months, sales had been noticeably below normal; if matters did not soon improve, he would have to get rid of his stock at cut prices—probably at a loss—and find another job again. Among the measures contemplated to settle his difficulties, the imminent canvassing of the island played an important role. Eighteen thousand crowns in cash at such a time meant much more than his thirty-per-cent commission: he would not immediately replace all the watches sold, and the sum would permit him to hold out until better days. If this privileged territory had not been originally included in his schedule, it was doubtless because he had wanted to keep it in reserve for bad times. Present circumstances compelled him to make the trip—of which the inconveniences appeared ever more numerous, as he had feared.

The boat left at seven in the morning, which had forced Mathias to get up earlier than usual. When he traveled by bus or the local railroad he almost never started before eight o'clock. Besides, although his house was quite near the train station it was a good distance from the harbor— and none of the bus lines brought him much nearer. He might as well walk the whole way.

At this hour of the morning the Saint-Jacques district was deserted. As he was walking down an alley which he hoped would be a short cut, Mathias thought he heard a moan—faint, yet seeming to come from so near by that he turned his head. There was no one in sight; the street was as empty behind him as in front. He was about to continue on his way when he heard the sound again, a distinct moan almost in his ear. At that moment he noticed a ground-floor window within reach of his right hand; a light was shining inside although by now the daylight was barely obscured by the simple voile curtain that hung behind the panes. The room looked rather large, however, and its only window was of modest size: a yard wide, perhaps, and scarcely any higher; with its four identical, almost square panes it would have been more suitable for a farmhouse than these urban premises. The folds of the curtain made it impossible to see how the room was furnished. All that could be distinguished was what the electric light illuminated at the back of the room: the conical lamp shade—a bed lamp—and the vaguer form of an unmade bed. Standing near the bed, bending slightly over it, a masculine silhouette lifted one arm toward the ceiling.

The whole scene remained motionless. In spite of the incomplete nature of his gesture, the man moved no more than a statue. Under the lamp, on the night table, was a small blue rectangular object—which must have been a pack of cigarettes.

Mathias had no time to wait for what was going to happen next—supposing that anything was going to happen next. He was not even certain the moans came from this house; he had guessed they came from a source still closer, less muffled than they would have been by a closed window. In thinking it over he wondered if he had heard only moans, inarticulate sounds; had there been identifiable words? In any case it was impossible for him to remember what they were. Judging from the quality of her voice—which was pleasant, and not at all sad—the victim must have been a very young woman, or a child. 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. Her huge eyes inordinately wide (whereas all the passengers were squinting because the sun had begun to break through), she continued to look straight ahead of her, with the same calmness with which she had just now looked into his own eyes.

Confronted with such insistence, he had thought at first that the wad of cord belonged to her. She might be making a collection herself. But then he had decided this was an absurd notion: that was no pastime for little girls. Yet boys always have their pockets full of knives, string, chains, and those porous clematis stems they smoke for cigarettes.

Nevertheless, he couldn't recall that his tastes as a collector had been widely encouraged. The good pieces that came into the house were usually confiscated for some domestic purpose. When he complained, they seemed not to understand his disappointment, "since he didn't use them for anything, anyway." The shoebox was in the biggest cupboard of the back room, on a lower shelf; the cupboard was kept locked and he was allowed to have his box only after he had done all his homework and learned his lessons. Sometimes he had to wait several days before he could put a new acquisition in it; meanwhile he carried it in his right pocket, where it kept company with the little brass chain which was a permanent resident there. In these conditions even the best quality cords lost something of their sheen and their cleanness; the most exposed loops blackened, the torsion of the fibers slackened, little threads stuck out everywhere. Continual friction against the metal links must have hastened the fraying process. Sometimes after too long a wait the latest find became good for nothing except tying up packages.

A sudden anxiety crossed his mind: the majority of the pieces kept in the box had been put there without having been in his pocket, or at most after only a few hours of this ordeal. So what confidence could he have in their qualities? Obviously less than in the others. To compensate he would have to subject them to a more rigorous examination. Mathias wanted to take out of his duffle coat the piece of cord rolled into a figure eight in order to estimate its value again. But he couldn't reach his right pocket with his left hand, and his right hand was holding the little suitcase. There was still time to set down the suitcase before becoming involved in the confusion of disembarkation, and even to open it in order to put the cord safely away. The contact with the coins in his pocket would be bad for it. Since Mathias had no need of company to enjoy this pastime of his, he didn't have to carry the best specimens with him for his schoolmates to admire—he didn't even know whether they would have liked them at all. Actually, the string other boys filled their pockets with seemed to have no relation to the string he collected; in any case, theirs demanded fewer precautions and evidently gave them less trouble. Unfortunately, the suitcase with the watches in it was not the shoebox; he tried not to clutter it up with questionable objects that might produce a bad impression on the clientele when the time came for him to display his wares. Appearances were more important than anything else, and he must omit nothing, leave nothing to chance, if he wanted to sell eighty-nine wrist watches to slightly less than two thousand people—including children and paupers.

Mathias tried to divide two thousand by eighty-nine in his head. He lost his place and decided to use a round number as his divisor—one hundred, to account for the cottages and shanties too isolated for him to visit. That would come to about one sale for every twenty inhabitants—so by supposing each family to average five people, that would mean one sale for every four houses visited. Of course he knew from experience that things turned out differently in practice: in one family, where they might feel well-disposed toward him, he sometimes succeeded in selling two or three watches at a time. Nevertheless, the overall rhythm of one watch for every four houses would be difficult to attain—difficult, not impossible.

Today especially, success would be a matter of imagination. He would have to have played, long ago, over there on the cliff, with many little friends whom he had never known. Together they would have explored, at low tide, the unfamiliar regions inhabited by forms of life of only an equivocal probability. He had taught the others how to make the sabellas and sea-anemones open. Along the beaches they had found unidentifiable sea-wrack. For hours at a time they had watched the water rising and falling in the sheltered angle of the landing slip, had watched the seaweed alternately revealed and submerged. He had even showed them his string, had invented all kinds of complicated and uncertain games. People don't remember such things; he would manufacture childhoods for them leading straight to the purchase of a wrist watch. With the young it would be more convenient to have known a mother, a grandfather, or someone else.

A brother and an uncle, for instance. Mathias had reached the pier long before sailing time. He had talked to one of the sailors of the line who like himself, he discovered, had been born on the island; the man's whole family was still living there, his sister in particular, who had three daughters. Two were already engaged, but the third girl was causing her mother many worries. She couldn't be made to behave, and even at her age had an upsetting number of admirers. "She really is a devil," the sailor repeated, with a smile that betrayed how fond he was of his niece in spite of everything. Their house was the last one on the road to the big lighthouse as you left town. His sister was a widow, in easy circumstances. The three girls were named Maria, Jeanne, and Jacqueline. Mathias, who expected to put them to good use soon, added all these facts to the inquiries he had made the day before. In work like his, there was no such thing as a superfluous detail. He decided to have known the brother for a long time; if need be, he would have sold him a "six-jewel" model he had been using for years without it ever needing the slightest adjustment.

When the man made a gesture, Mathias noticed that he was not wearing a watch. His wrists stuck out beyond the sleeves of his jumper when he reached up to fasten the tarpaulin at the back of the post-office van. Nor was there a light strip around the skin of the left wrist, as there would have been if he had been wearing a watch until recently— if it was being repaired, for example. The watch, actually, had never needed repairs. The fact of the matter was that the sailor did not wear it during the week for fear of damaging it while he was working.

The two arms fell back. The man shouted something that was not understood on board over the noise of the engines; at the same moment he stepped to one side of the van and waved to the driver. The van's motor had not stopped, and the vehicle pulled away at once, making a quick, unhesitating turn around the little company office.

The employee in the chevroned helmet who had taken the tickets at the gangplank returned to the company office, closing the door behind him. The sailor who had just cast off the moorings from the pier and tossed them onto the deck took a tobacco pouch out of his pocket and began to roll himself a cigarette. At his right the ship's boy held out his arms, letting them fall slack at a certain distance from his body. The two of them remained alone at the end of the quay, along with the man whose watch worked so perfectly; the latter, noticing Mathias, waved his hand as if to wish him
bon
voyage.
The stone rim began its oblique receding movement.

It was exactly seven o'clock. Mathias, whose time had to be very strictly calculated, noticed this with satisfaction. If the fog didn't grow too thick, they would be on time.

In any case, once ashore he mustn't waste a minute; it was the brevity of his stay, made necessary by the rest of his itinerary, which constituted the chief difficulty. It was true that the steamship line was not making his work any easier for him: there were only two boats a week, one making a round trip on Tuesday, the other on Friday. There was no question of staying on the island four days; that would be almost a week, and the whole advantage of his undertaking would be lost, or just about. He would have to confine himself to this one, all-too-short day, between the boat's arrival at ten and its departure at four-fifteen that afternoon. He therefore had six hours and fifteen minutes at his disposal —that would make three hundred sixty plus fifteen, three hundred and seventy-five minutes. Problem: if he wanted to sell his eighty-nine watches, how much time could he allow for each one?

Three hundred seventy-five divided by eighty-nine. . . . By using ninety and three hundred sixty the result was easy: four times nine, thirty-six—four minutes for each watch. Using the actual figures would even give him a little extra time: first of all the fifteen minutes omitted from the calculation, and then the time that the sale of the ninetieth watch (already sold) would have taken—another four minutes—fifteen and four, nineteen—a nineteen-minute margin in order not to risk missing the boat back. Mathias tried to imagine this ideal sale which would last only four minutes: arrival, sales-talk, display of the merchandise, choice of the article, payment of the amount written on the price-tag, departure. Even not taking into account any hesitation on the customer's part, any fuller explanation on his, any discussion about the price, how could he hope to sell everything he had in so little time?

The last house on the road to the big lighthouse as you leave town is an ordinary house: a one-story building with a small, square window on either side of a low door. As he passes Mathias knocks on the pane of the first window and without pausing continues to the door. The second he reaches it, he sees the door open in front of him; there is no need whatever to hesitate before entering the hallway, and then, after a quarter-turn to the right, the kitchen itself, where he immediately sets his suitcase down flat on the big table. With a quick gesture he opens the clasp; the cover springs back and right on top can be seen the most expensive items; he seizes the first cardboard strip in his right hand while with his left he lifts the protecting sheet of paper and points to the three splendid ladies' watches at four hundred twenty-five crowns. The lady of the house is standing near him, flanked by her two elder daughters (a little shorter than their mother), all three motionless and attentive. As one person, with a gesture of rapid, identical, and perfectly synchronized acquiescence, all three nod their heads. Already Mathias is removing—almost tearing—from the cardboard strip the three watches, one after the other, in order to hold them out to the three women who one after the other extend their hands—the mother first, then the daughter on the right, then the daughter on the left. The amount, calculated in advance, is there on the table: one thousand-crown note, two hundred-crown notes, and three twenty-five-crown pieces—twelve hundred seventy-five crowns—four hundred twenty-five multiplied by three. The amount is correct. The suitcase closes with a dry click.