The Voyeur (4 page)

As he was leaving he wanted to say a few words of farewell, but none came out of his mouth. He noticed this at the same moment he realized that the whole scene had been a stupidly wordless one. Once on the road, behind the closed door, his suitcase unopened in his hand, he understood that it all still remained to be done. Turning around, he knocked with his ring against the door panel, which echoed as if he had struck an empty box.

The varnished paint, recently renewed, imitated the veins and irregularities of wood to a fault. Judging from the sound of his knock, there could be no doubt that under this deceptive layer the door was really a wooden one. On a level with his face there were two round knots painted side by side: they looked like two big eyes—or more precisely like a pair of glasses. They were represented with an attention to detail not generally accorded to this type of decoration; yet although executed with the greatest possible realism, they comprised a perfection of design virtually beyond probability; it must have been artificial because it appeared so studied, as if the accidents themselves had occurred in obedience to law. But it would have been difficult to prove by any particular detail the flagrant impossibility of any such pattern in nature. Even the suspect symmetry of the whole door could be explained by some new development in carpentry. If the paint were scratched away at this very point, two real knots might have been discovered in the wood, knots cut exactly in this shape—or in any case presenting a very similar formation.

The fibers formed two dark circles, thicker at the top and the bottom and provided, at their highest points, with a little excrescence pointing upward. More than like a pair of glasses, they looked like two rings painted in
trompe-l'oeil,
with the shadows they cast on the wood panel and the two nails on which they hung. Their position was certainly surprising, and their modest size seemed out of all proportion to the thickness of the ropes usually used: nothing much heavier than thin cords could have been attached to them.

Because of the green seaweed that grew on the lower section of the landing slip, Mathias was obliged to watch where he put his feet in order not to slip, lose his balance, and do some kind of damage to his precious burden.

After a few steps he was out of danger. Having reached the top of the inclined plane, he continued to make his way along the jetty at the top of the pier extending straight toward the quay. But the crowd of passengers moved very slowly among the nets and traps, and Mathias could not walk as rapidly as he wanted to. To jostle past his neighbors served no purpose, in view of the narrowness and complexity of the passage. He would have to advance at their pace. Nevertheless he felt a slight impatience rising within him. They were taking too long to answer the door. Lifting his hand on a level with his face this time, he knocked again— between the two eyes painted on the wood. The door, which must have been extremely thick, sent back a dull sound which would be barely audible inside. He was about to knock again, this time with his ring, when he heard a noise in the vestibule.

Now he must get something a little less ghostly under way. It was essential that the customers say something; therefore he would have to say something first. The exaggerated acceleration of his gestures also constituted a major danger: working fast must not keep him from remaining natural.

The door opened on the mother's mistrustful countenance. Distracted from her work by this unexpected visit and finding herself face to face with a stranger—the island was so small she knew everyone on it—she was already preparing to close the door again. Mathias was someone who had knocked at the wrong door—or else a traveling salesman, which was no better.

Of course she said nothing. He made what seemed to him a considerable effort: "Good morning, madame," he said. "How are you?" The door slammed in his face.

The door had not slammed, but it was still closed. Mathias felt as if he were going to be dizzy.

He noticed that he was walking too near the edge, on the side where the pier had no railing. He stopped to let a group of people pass him; a narrowing of the path, caused by the accumulation of empty boxes and baskets, dangerously choked the line of passengers ahead of him. Down the vertical embankment his gaze plunged to the water that rose and fell against the stone. The pier's shadow colored it a dark green—almost black. As soon as the path was clear, he stepped away from the edge—to the left—and continued on his way.

A voice behind him repeated that the boat was on time this morning. But this was not quite accurate: it had actually docked a good five minutes late. Mathias turned his wrist to glance at his watch. This whole landing was interminable.

When he finally managed to reach the kitchen, a period of time out of all proportion to the amount at his disposal must have passed, yet he had not promoted his interests in the slightest. The lady of the house had only admitted him, apparently, against her better judgment. He set his suitcase down flat on the big oval table in the middle of the room.

"You can judge for yourself," he forced himself to say; but hearing the sound of his own voice and the silence that followed, he sensed how falsely it rang. The words lacked conviction—density—to a disturbing degree; it was worse than saying nothing at all. The table was covered by an oilcloth with a pattern of little flowers, a pattern that might have been like the one on the lining of his suitcase. As soon as he had opened the suitcase he quickly put the memorandum book inside the open cover, in the hope of concealing the dolls from his customer.

Instead of the memorandum book spread conspicuously over the sheet of paper that protected the first row of watches, appeared the wad of cord rolled into a figure eight. Mathias was in front of the door to the house, contemplating the two circles with their symmetrical deformations painted side by side in the center of the panel. Finally he heard a noise in the vestibule and the door opened on the mother's mistrustful countenance.

"Good morning, madame."

For a moment he thought she was going to answer, but he was mistaken; she continued to look at him without speaking. Her strained, almost anxious expression indicated something more than surprise, something more than ill-humor or suspicion; and if she was frightened, it was difficult to imagine why. Her features were frozen in the very expression they had assumed when she first saw him—as though unexpectedly recorded on a photographic plate. This immobility, far from making it easier to read her countenance, merely rendered each attempt at interpretation more uncertain: although the face, judging from appearances, expressed some intention—a very banal intention that seemed identifiable at first glance—it ceaselessly avoided every reference by which Mathias attempted to capture its meaning. He was not even altogether certain whether she was looking at him —the man who provoked her mistrust, her astonishment, her fear . . . —or at something behind him—beyond the road, the potato field bordering it, the barbed-wire fence, and the open ground on the other side—something that came from the sea.

She didn't appear to see him. He made what seemed to him a considerable effort: "Good morning, madame," he said. "I have news for you .. ."

The pupils of her eyes had not moved a fraction of an inch; yet he had the impression—he imagined the impression, he gathered it, a net full of fish, or of too much seaweed, or of a little mud—he imagined that her gaze fell on him.

The customer was looking at him. "I have some news for you, some news of your brother, your brother the sailor." The woman opened her mouth several times, moving her lips as if she were speaking—with difficulty. But no sound came from them.

Then, very low, a few seconds later, came the words: "I have no brother"—words too brief to correspond to the movements the lips had made a moment before. Immediately afterward—as an echo—came the expected sounds, somewhat more distinct although distorted, inhuman, like the voice of an old phonograph record: "Which brother? All my brothers are sailors."

The eyes had moved n0 more than the lips. They still looked away, toward the open ground, the cliff, the distant sea beyond the field and the barbed-wire fence.

Mathias, on the verge of abandoning his attempt, started to explain again: he meant the brother who worked for the steamship company. The voice became more regular as it answered: "Oh, of course, that's Joseph." And she asked if there was a message.

From then on, fortunately, the conversation gathered momentum and accelerated. Intonations and expressions began to come into focus; gestures and words were once again functioning almost normally: ". . . wrist watches . . . the finest being manufactured today, and the cheapest as well; all sold with a guarantee and a manufacturer's certificate, registered and trade-marked, waterproof, rustproof, shock-proof, antimagnetic . . ." He would have to keep track of the time all this was taking, but at the moment the question of knowing whether the brother wore a watch—and for how long he had—threatened to lead to another collapse. Mathias needed all his attention to get past it.

He managed to reach the kitchen and its oval table, and set his suitcase on it while continuing the conversation. Then there was the oilcloth and the little flowers of its pattern. Things were going almost too quickly. There was the pressure of his fingers on the clasp of the suitcase, the cover opening wide, the memorandum book lying on the pile of cardboard strips, the dolls printed on the lining, the memorandum book inside the open cover, the piece of cord rolled into a figure eight on top of the pile of cardboard strips, the vertical side of the pier extending straight toward the quay. Mathias stepped back from the water, toward the parapet.

Among the passengers lined up in front of him he looked for the little girl who had been staring into space; he did not see her any more—unless he was looking at her without recognizing her. He turned around as he was walking, thinking he might catch sight of her behind him. He was surprised to discover that he was the last passenger on the pier. Behind him the pier was empty again, a cluster of parallel lines describing a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical, in light and in shadow. At the very end was the beacon light that indicated the entrance to the harbor.

Before reaching the end of the pier, the horizontal plane formed by the jetty underwent a change, lost in an abrupt inset about two-thirds of its width, and continued, thus narrowed, as far as the turret of the beacon light between the massive parapet (on the open sea side) and the embankment without a railing that was set back for two or three yards of its length, plunging straight down into the black water. From where Mathias was standing the landing slip was no longer visible because of the steepness of its slope, so that the jetty appeared to be cut off at that point without any reason.

When he turned around and continued his interrupted walk toward the quay, there was no one on the pier ahead of him either. It was suddenly deserted. On the quay, in front of the row of houses, only three or four little groups of people could be seen, and a few isolated figures moving in one direction or the other, going about their affairs. The men were all wearing more or less worn and patched blue canvas trousers and wide fishermen's jumpers. The women wore aprons and were bare-headed. All had on sabots. These people could not be the passengers who had disembarked to join their families. The passengers had disappeared—had already gone into their houses, or perhaps into the nearby alley leading to the center of town.

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 0n 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.