The Voyeur (12 page)

"I came in here as soon as I reached the village. If Maria was here shortly before, she must have passed me without my seeing her—while I was visiting customers: in the cottage along the road, the only one between the village and the crossroads. Before stopping there, I had gone to see my old friends the Mareks—where I waited for a long time in the courtyard: no one was there and I didn't want to leave without saying hello, hearing the family news, gossiping a little about the neighbors. I was born here on the island, you know. Robert Marek was a childhood playmate of mine. He had gone into town this morning. His mother—still an active woman—was marketing here at Black Rocks. Maybe you ran into her while she was here. Luckily I met her on her way back, at the crossroads—at the fork, I mean—but there is a crossroads there, since the road to their farm crosses the main road and continues as a path over the moor. If Maria went that way, she must have been there while I was waiting at the farmhouse. Didn't you say that the path just after the crossroads led to the cliff top—to that place on the cliff top where she took the sheep to graze?"

He had better stop. These specifications as to time and itinerary—both furnished and requested—were futile, suspect even—worse still: confusing. Besides, the fat woman had never said Maria took the road passing through the crossroads, but only that the Leduc sheep were grazing "after the crossroads"—an ambiguous expression, since it was impossible to know if she meant "after" in relation to her own village or to the town where Madame Leduc lived.

The proprietress did not answer his question. She was no longer looking at the salesman. Mathias thought he had not made himself heard above the noise of the coffee mill. He did not try again, however, and pretended to drink the liquid remaining in his glass. Afterward, he doubted whether he had spoken aloud at all.

He was glad of it: if it was useless to go over the details of his alibis with listeners as inattentive as this, it could only be dangerous to falsify those parts of his story relating to the sister, who would certainly remember which road she had taken. Doubtless she had reached the cliff top by another road—a short cut the proprietress must know about. It was stupid, under such conditions, to refer to the "fact" that the girl had taken a path at the crossroads.

Then the salesman remembered that the fat woman had not said "after the crossroads," but something like "under the crossroads"—which meant nothing in particular—or even nothing at all. As a last resource, there still remained. . . .

He had to make a conscious mental effort to understand that here too any attempt at deception would be useless: the place where the sheep were picketed had been determined beyond all possibility of dispute. They were always pastured in the one spot, perhaps, and Maria went there often. In any case, she had had time today, certainly, to examine the place as much as she liked. Furthermore: the sheep, left where they had been picketed, would be the most irrefutable indication of all. And besides, Mathias knew the hollow on the cliff top as well as anyone else. He would obviously not succeed in changing its position by pretending to interpret incorrectly the declarations of an indirect witness.

Anyway these various pieces of information concerning location and route were of no importance whatever. The thing to remember was that Maria could not have seen him crossing the moor, or else he would have seen her himself, especially since they were going in opposite directions. All these explanations were intended solely to account for the fact that they had not met each other when he stopped in the middle of the main road, near the toad's dried corpse —a place where such a meeting would be of no importance. To try to prove in addition that they had not seen each other because he was waiting at the Marek farm during that time would lead to nothing.

It would be much more likely, everyone would think, that Maria Leduc had passed the salesman well before he reached the crossroads, while he was showing his merchandise in another house—the mill, for instance. The few minutes Mathias had spent at the Marek farm, added to the trip to the cliff top and back on the little path, did not leave the girl time enough to look for her youngest sister in all the nooks and crannies of the cliff.

True enough, Mathias had not gone to the farm—but a conversation with the old woman at the crossroads sounded as if it would have lasted an even shorter time. The mill would be a solution less open to dispute. Unfortunately it too had to be rejected as altogether spurious for at least two reasons, one being that the salesman had no more made this side-trip to the mill than he had made the other to the farm.

As for the other reason, it must be confessed that Maria's investigations represented only the time it would take to sell a watch—near a crossroads—to repair a new bicycle, to tell the difference between a frog's skin and a toad's, to rediscover in the all-too-changeable shapes of clouds the fixed eye of a sea gull, to follow the movements of an ant's antennae in the dust.

Mathias prepared to recapitulate his movements since he had left the café-tobacco shop-garage on the rented bicycle. That had been at eleven-ten or eleven-fifteen. To establish the subsequent chronology of his stops presented no particular difficulty; but this would not be true in determining their respective lengths, which he had neglected to note. And the length of time on the road between each stop scarcely influenced his calculations, the distance from town to lighthouse not exceeding three miles—that is, scarcely more than fifteen minutes in all.

To begin with, the distance to the first stop being virtually negligible, he could state that the latter had occurred at exactly eleven-fifteen.

It was the last house as he left town. Madame Leduc had opened the door almost at once. The preliminaries had gone very fast: the brother working for the steamship line, the wrist watches at prices defying all competition, the hallway splitting the house down the middle, the door to the right, the big kitchen, the oval table in the middle of the room, the oilcloth with the many-colored little flowers, the pressure of his fingers on the suitcase clasp, the cover opening back, the black memorandum book, the prospectuses, the rectangular frame on top of the sideboard, the shiny metal support, the photograph, the sloping path, the hollow on the cliff sheltered from the wind, secret, calm, isolated as if by thick walls ... as if by thick walls . . . the oval table in the middle of the room, the oilcloth with the many-colored little flowers, the pressure of his fingers on the suitcase clasp, the cover opening back as if on a spring, the black memorandum book, the prospectuses, the shiny metal frame, the photograph showing . . . the photograph showing the photograph, the photograph, the photograph, the photograph . . .

The noise of the coffee mill suddenly stopped. The woman rose from her stool. Mathias pretended to drink the liquid remaining in his glass. To his left, one of the workmen said something to his companion. The salesman cocked his ears; but again, no one was speaking any longer.

There had been the word "soup" at the end of a rather short sentence; perhaps the words "come home" as well.

It must have been something like ". . . come home in time for soup," beginning with words like "Be sure to . . ." or "I always . . ." It was just a figure of speech, probably; it had been several generations since the fishermen took soup at the noon meal. The woman seized the empty glasses before the two men, plunged them into the sink, washed them quickly, rinsed them under the tap, and set them upside down on the drainboard. The man next to Mathias thrust his right hand into his trouser pocket and brought out a handful of coins.

"We're going to be late for soup again," he said, counting out the money on the tin slab that covered the bar.

For the first time since he had left town, the salesman looked at his watch—it was after one—one-seven, exactly. He had already been on the island over three hours—three hours and one minute. And he had sold only two wrist watches, both at one hundred fifty crowns.

"I'll have to hurry," said the second workman, "on account of the kids going to school."

The proprietress picked up the money with a quick movement of her hand, smiled, and said "Thank you, gentlemen!" She put the coffee mill in a cupboard. She had not emptied the tray after having ground the beans.

"Yes, children are a lot of trouble," Mathias repeated.

The two lighthouse employees had left. He thought, too late, that he should have tried to sell them watches. But he still had to obtain information on two points: where was Maria Leduc going after she left Black Rocks? Why had she mentioned him? He tried to find some expression that would give an air of indifference to the question.

"And sometimes satisfaction, too," the fat woman said.

The salesman nodded. "Of course they are!" And, after a pause, "One man's trouble . . ." he began.

He went no further. That was not at all the right formula.

"Maria went home," the woman continued, "by the path along the cliff."

"That's no short cut," Mathias declared, hoping to find out if it was.

"It's a short cut if you're walking; but with her bicycle, she'll take longer that way than by the road. She wanted to see if Jacqueline would be playing down on the rocks, near Devil's Hole."

"Maybe she wasn't that far away. She might not have heard Maria on account of the wind. They'll find her peacefully tending her sheep in the usual place, like a good girl."

A good girl. Peaceful, in the quiet hollow.

"Then too," said the woman, "they may find her still prowling around here—over at the lighthouse. And maybe not alone either. At thirteen, it's hard to believe."

"Bah! She can't do anything very bad. . . . She wasn't going to play too close to the edge, was she—where the rocks are dangerous? Sometimes it caves in in places. You have to watch where you put your feet."

"Don't worry about that. She's a lively one!"

Lively. She was. Lively. Alive. Burned alive.

"Anyone can lose his footing," the salesman said. -

He took his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a ten-crown note from it. He took advantage of this movement to put back in place a newspaper clipping that stuck out a little beyond the other papers. Then he held out the note to the proprietress. When she gave him his change, he noticed that she put the coins on the counter, one by one, with her left hand.

Then she picked up his glass which rapidly underwent the series of ablutionary operations: sink, circular rubbing, tap, drainboard. Now the three identical glasses were again lined up on the drainboard—as they had been on top of the bar—but at a noticeably lower level this time, and nearer one another besides, empty (that is, transparent and colorless instead of opaque because of the brown liquid which had filled them so perfectly), and upside down. Nevertheless, the shape of these glasses—a cylinder bulging at the middle—made their silhouettes virtually the same whether they were standing rightside up or on their rims.

Mathias' situation was unchanged. Neither his own reasoning nor the proprietress' words had enlightened him on the essential point: why had Maria Leduc just mentioned his presence on the island apropos of her sister's disappearance? That was the one thing to find out, and he would scarcely further his knowledge on the point by disputing the existence of more or less favorable short cuts in the inextricable tangle of paths that ran along the cliff top in all directions.

Why would the girl have mentioned him, unless she had seen him riding over the moor—"under the crossroads"— where there was no reason for him to be? The fact that he had not seen her was all too easy to explain. Their two paths, separated from each other by the considerable unevenness of the ground, had only a few privileged points from which two observers could see each other at the same time. At a given moment he and the girl had occupied these favorable positions, but she alone had turned in his direction, so that the reciprocity of their points of view had not functioned. At that particular moment Mathias had his eyes somewhere else—on the ground, for instance, or raised toward the sky, or looking in any direction except the right one.

The girl, on the contrary, had immediately identified the person she had glimpsed by the shiny bicycle and the little brown suitcase her mother had just described to her. There was no possibility of a mistake. Now she was hoping he might know where her sister was hiding, for he seemed to be coming back from where she was supposed to be. And if there was a chance that the mother had related the salesman's remarks about his itinerary incorrectly, Maria might even have been positive that he was coming back from the cliff top. And in fact he remembered that while he had been trying to leave the overly talkative Madame Leduc without being actually rude, she had spoken of an eventual meeting between him and her youngest daughter. The idea was a preposterous one, of course. What would he be doing on that awkward path without any houses along it and leading nowhere?—except to the sea, to steep rocks, to a hollow sheltered from the wind, and five sheep grazing on their pickets under the superfluous vigilance of a thirteen-year-old child.

He had recognized Violet immediately, she was wearing the same peasant-girl disguise she had on in the photograph. Her thin black cotton dress was more suitable for midsummer, but it was so warm at the bottom of the hollow that it seemed like August. Violet was there on the sunny grass, half-sitting, half-kneeling, her legs bent under her, the rest of her body vertical and slightly twisted toward the right in a rather strained attitude. Her right ankle and foot protruded from under the top of her thigh; the other leg remained completely invisible below the knee. Her arms were lifted, her elbows bent, and her hands were at the nape of her neck—as if arranging her hair behind her head. A gray sweater was lying next to her on the ground. The sleeveless dress exposed the hollows of her armpits.

Turned toward him, she had not moved as he approached, her eyes wide as they met his. But on reflection Mathias wondered whether she was looking at him or at something behind him—something of enormous size. Her pupils remained fixed; not a feature of her face moved. Without lowering her eyelids or shifting her uncomfortable position, she twisted the upper part of her body to the left.