Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  “What do you expect me to say to you? Do you think that because I am a priest I know more than you? I have my concerns like everybody does and I am no cleverer than anyone else. If you were asking me a question about bees, I could give you an answer,” he said as he brushed away two that were climbing up his sleeve. “I have learned a great deal from bees and the miracle of honey still continues to amaze me. If God exists, He is in the honey! This is what I have discovered during my sixty-nine years, and my fifty years of ministry. The thought that through the repeated labors of thousands of insects, which could be crushed between two fingers, the pollen of flowers is changed into this golden nectar that sweetens life, and which encapsulates all the scents of the earth, the smells of plants and those of the winds—that is what confirms in me the idea that God exists, even if today many people attempt to convince us otherwise or try to impose something else, through fighting, assassination, bombs, and blood. As for everything else, and these poor Negroes in particular, what do you expect me to say to you?”

  “Why do you call them ‘Negroes’?” said the Teacher indignantly.

  The Priest looked up, searching for him through the dirty lenses of his spectacles. He found him eventually, and shrugged.

  “So what do you want me to call them?”

  “Blacks, Africans, men!”

  “Will that be enough to bring them back to life?”

  “It would be more dignified, at least. The word ‘Negro’ is an insult, you know that very well!”

  “Not from my lips, Mr. Teacher. Not from my lips. I am much older than you. I come from another time, after all. It was the word used when I was a child. A time when they spoke to me at school about Redskins, Yellow People, Whites, and Negroes. That is how I learned about the world. It didn’t stop us respecting them. Every man of each of these colors is a child of God. Hatred and contempt do not reside in the words, but in the use we make of them. But if you wish me to call these men ‘Blacks,’ I will say ‘Blacks.’ I will do that if it pleases you and makes you happy. It won’t make them any less dead.”

  The Teacher waved his hand in irritation. A bee landed on the knuckle of his thumb and, curling up, was about to sting him. He waved it away with his other hand. It fluttered unsteadily as far as the collar of the Priest’s cassock. The Teacher resumed, somewhat wearily and sulkily, like a frustrated child:

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I’m about to, don’t worry: what the Mayor has said is not stupid, and God is my witness that I am not always in agreement with him, particularly, as everyone knows, over this costly plan for a spa that will bring us more luxury, corruption, false values, and debauchery than exist already. But it would be worse still if our land were brought to the malicious notice of the outside world, and if we were suddenly to become an object of a curiosity that could only do us harm, Mr. Teacher.

  “My view is that we have all been chosen by God to preserve the memory of these unfortunate people, the memory of their death and the memory of their lives, even though we are only aware of the outcome. We have been chosen by God to know this and to retain it within ourselves, like a secret cross which we must carry on their behalf, but also on behalf of the other members of our community.

  “We must bear the burden and pain of this secret, which will weigh heavily on our lives, but enable those of others not to be troubled in the future. And so what I propose, Mr. Mayor, is a commonsense solution. I myself do not see the difference between burying a man in our cemetery or in a chasm. There is nothing undignified about that.”

  The Teacher could no longer keep still, and was turning toward everyone for support, for backing, but he remained isolated.

  “If it is decided that I should bury the bodies of these unfortunate people,” the Priest continued, “even though it’s true that we don’t know what their religion was or even whether they had one, I will do it. I will do it as I would for any human being, because it’s my priestly duty. And tell yourself, to remove your scruples or your fear, Mr. Teacher, that when one of our fishermen dies at sea, he never takes his place in our cemetery, and that does not prevent us praying for him and for the repose of his soul, and the vast place in which he lies forever; this sea that bathes us, feeds us, and troubles us contains no less rubbish or junk than the chasms of the Brau that seem to frighten you so much. That is my opinion, with the help of God.”

  The Priest stopped speaking, but his final words were followed by a sudden groan, because, as he always did at the end of his sermon, he had tapped his fingers together, forgetting the fresh wounds, so inadequately treated, that studded them.

  VII

  THE TEACHER PROBABLY SLEPT BADLY THE FOLLOWING night, because when the Mayor put his proposal to the vote in the fishing warehouse, it was adopted almost unanimously, the one exception being his.

  The Mayor then proposed that, together with Swordy, the Priest, and the Doctor, he would supervise what, for want of another name, he could only call the burial, even though it was clear that the word stuck in his throat. He also included the Teacher because he realized, even before the latter had intervened, that he would ask to be there. The Old Woman, who had hitherto been silent, remained so, and America must have been very glad to have been forgotten. This whole business had already taken up too much time. He had other things to do than deal with the funerals of savages.

  After a final word from the Mayor, each of them set off into the night.

  That being said, nobody slept easily that night, for the wind continued to blow its dank breath beneath the thresholds of house doors and through the poorly insulated window joints, setting their nerves, which were already as entangled as vipers, on edge. Of course, it was not just the wind that played on their minds: the image of the corpses of the three drowned men was stitched to the inside of their eyelids. No one could be rid of it.

  The Doctor woke up suddenly at 2:13 in the morning, as could be ascertained from his radio alarm clock and its luminescent numbers, having felt what he believed to be a large cold hand on his back stroking his spine, and he saw in front of him a huge face with lips of a blue that was almost black trying to kiss him on the forehead.

  He switched on the television. This was not something he did very often nowadays. A politician was speaking. He was in his sixties, bronzed and with gleaming teeth. The Doctor turned off the sound. The politician resembled all his smooth-talking colleagues with their heavily made-up complexions, their dyed or implanted hair, and their pretty, supple, well-fed, turkey-like necks that emerged from the collars of their eternally pale-blue shirts.

  The Doctor lost himself for a moment in the man’s face, which, basically, was no one’s face, but it allowed him to forget those of the dead “Negroes,” as the Priest called them. It astonished him that politicians could talk like this in the middle of the night—who for, and why, after all? He did not have the courage to turn up the sound to discover anything further because he knew that none of them had anything to say, anything profound or profoundly essential to the state of the world, such as those matters that can be discovered in books, for example. But it was the job of these men to talk all the time, to talk and never to listen to whoever was speaking to them, to never stop talking themselves, to live in the word, even the most meaningless of them, and one that becomes an ill-considered, cajoling noise, the modern-day siren song.

  He heated up the coffee that was left in the saucepan on the cooker and drank it very black and without sugar, listening to the sound of the wind. He lit a cigar and picked up his old copy of Dante’s Inferno, which was never very far from him and had accompanied him over so many years. He opened it at random and, in a low voice, read ten or more lines, making the rugged words written almost a thousand years ago in a sequence that had not altered since then resonate, whereas so many things—monuments, empires, palaces, men, states, monarchs, beliefs—had vanished.

  The Doctor smoked and read the verses aloud, just for himself, and also for the night which
enveloped him like a warm shawl. He drank the coffee and a little brandy as well. In small glassfuls. With great pleasure. The words and the smoke hovered in the air of his kitchen, and his thoughts did, too, and for a brief and marvelous moment all three miraculously managed to come together and lure him into their immateriality, causing him to forget his overweight body, his age, the place where he happened to be, and even who he was.

  He remembered that as a child he would run around the narrow streets of the island, for he could run in those days, and he was able to forget about his body. He had the feeling that he was on his own, driven on by the excitement of what he was doing. His mind became a little devil feeding off the laughter and the thrills. He had no nostalgia for times past. He had no nostalgia: he hated looking backward, because he did not recognize himself.

  Alas, all pleasures come to an end: the coffee at the bottom of the cold cup suddenly developed a disgusting taste; the cigar, reduced to a few centimeters of tobacco wet with saliva, began to smell of piss and manure. The brandy started to coat his esophagus with a bitter taste. Only Dante stood upright, now and as he always did, taunting him with his words from a distant century. Inhuman, the words speak of the human. Like the Doctor’s childlike soul, they float steadfastly and unconsciously above the bodies that run breathlessly, lifelessly, along the narrow, poorly paved streets of existence.

  The Doctor went back to bed, feeling slightly sad but also comforted, without really knowing why.

  VIII

  TWO DAYS LATER, THE THREE DROWNED MEN HAD regained the warmth of the earth. The Mayor, the Doctor, the Priest, the Teacher, and Swordy carried the frozen corpses, still wrapped inside the blue tarpaulin, from the cold room to the Mayor’s small-tracked vehicle that he uses for his vines, which are high up and far away.

  It was still nighttime. The sun would rise in only two hours. And so, walking at a slow pace, following the small vehicle—the only one on the island that is not pulled by animals, for there are neither roads nor cars here—they all set off for Nös di Boss, which is a large red rock overlooking a mass of fallen stones strewn there like bulky seeds by the idle hand of a Titan.

  The last of the vines come to a halt a hundred meters lower down, and their stocks are so shriveled and twisted that you can almost hear them complaining about having to dig their roots so deep, to find the small amount of water necessary for their survival. But it is also one of the vines on the island that provides the best grapes, in sparing and outstanding quantities. It belongs to Boueux, a cousin of the Mayor’s who ineptly looks after road maintenance, a sluggish worker and an obese redhead, who is wedded to his two angora cats and has only one eye, the other having been lost in a brawl at the harbor during his turbulent younger days.

  They took the small, dilapidated vehicle driven by Swordy to the very top of the dust track. The Mayor made the journey alongside his employee, and the Priest stood on the running board, next to the corpses, whose waters were breaking as though they were about to give birth. The Doctor, with his smile and his dyed mustache, struggled after them, on foot. As for the Teacher, he did not appear to be in the least affected by the effort, sustained as he was by his youthfulness, his physical shape, and his sweet naïvety.

  The pale light of dawn was rising when they left the vehicle at the farthest point of the track suitable for cars, where it rose in hairpin bends up the side of the volcano. In the distance, down below, was the blue expanse of the impervious sea.

  The church bell, which could not be seen, was chiming seven o’clock. Neither could the little town be seen behind the jutting-out cliff. A large bloodred sun in the east was hesitating to leave the ocean. They carried the bodies on a stretcher, taking over from one another every fifty meters, in breathless silence. Only the Teacher, no doubt on account of his daily jogs, showed considerable energy. The others were too old and smoked too much, or they were too weak, too fat, and not sufficiently motivated to make an effort.

  In spite of the chilly air, they arrived at the first of the three holes dripping with sweat. The Doctor’s smile now looked like a grimace and the dye from his mustache was dripping down on his lips in dark streaks. The others brushed the dust from their clothes and recovered their breath, every now and then glancing nervously into the hole. The blue tarpaulin was running with moisture and water was oozing into the plastic folds, falling to the ground in a rush of tears that were immediately consumed by the earth. They did not dare look at the bodies any longer; only a jumbled mass could be seen, the three corpses having been stacked together, which made the situation less human and all the more monstrous, but a monstrosity that was paradoxically reassuring, since it resembled a large sculpture.

  The Mayor and the Teacher set off on their own to inspect the two other dark mouths of the crater, about a hundred meters away from the first one. The others sat down casually on the ground. None of them talked. Some smoked. The Priest took out his missal and his stole from the pockets of his cassock. A few bees also flew out and they began to circle their master’s skull, providing him with an affectionate and noisy halo.

  The two scouts returned: the Mayor declared that the hole situated highest up was certainly the one that offered the steepest entrance, so much so that neither he nor the Teacher had heard the pebbles they had thrown in bounce off the sides. There was a murmur of disappointment among the little group, because they had all hoped not to have to carry the load any higher, but they reconciled themselves to the task, and the procession began again, the Priest and his bees at the front this time, as if the sacred had invited itself on the walk from this point on, in order to take control.

  When they finally arrived at the edge of the chasm, the mouth of which was only two meters wide, each of them wanted to look down into it, and they all observed that nothing could be seen, that no sound came from it and that only a damp smell arose, like a whiff of musty tobacco from the bowl of a pipe. The light had dimmed during the day, which seemed never to have dawned, and the sun had dissolved in the sea covered with a heavy charcoal sheet. It was also colder. And the sweat on their foreheads and beneath their armpits caused them all to shiver. They needed to get the business over quickly, otherwise they would well and truly catch their death there.

  Swordy and the Teacher placed the load at the very edge of the hole. They gathered in a semicircle. The Priest blessed the tarpaulin which Swordy gazed at sadly, a lovely, brand-new tarpaulin and one that might have been put to good use for years, as America had said, insisting that he be reimbursed, whereupon the Mayor had told him to shut his trap, that he would pay him for his bloody tarpaulin, out of his own money if necessary, and America, like a right ass, had said nothing and remained bitter, and at that moment Swordy, who did not like waste, probably thought that the three corpses did not need this fine tarpaulin to make their final journey and that by getting rid of things that were useful to the living in this way and were of no use to the dead they were just adding a second sin to the first.

  The Priest said the prayer, skipping one word in every three. They made the sign of the cross. The bees also seemed to pause for reflection by flying around in silence. Then the Priest blessed the blue plastic once more, from which water now flowed as if from the spout of a fountain. It remained only for everything to be shoved into the hole. Swordy got down to the task, encouraged by the Mayor. The Doctor, who had recovered his breath, wedged his first cigar of the day between his teeth and lent a symbolic hand. The Teacher helped them, too. They had to push hard, because the bundle clung to the roughness of the ground. The three dead men who had come from elsewhere did not want to leave the world. Nearly all of those present prepared to get ready, under orders from the Mayor, who organized the shove: “One, two, three!”

  Then at last the blue tarpaulin toppled into the hole, accompanied by a silky sigh and by some bees that swarmed after it, abandoning the Priest and the others to their solitude. They flattened themselves against the edge of the somber rim, side by side, out of breath, and peered i
nto the darkness. They listened. They heard nothing. You could have thought that the three corpses were falling into infinity, without ever crashing into a ledge, a ridge, or even the bottom of the chasm. You could also believe that they had never existed. That you had been dreaming up fantastical and macabre images in the uncomfortable hollow of a bad night, after having drunk too much wine, or eaten too much meat and gravy. You might have believed a lot of things that would have allowed you to live more happily afterward.

  IX

  THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED WERE A CONTINUAL COMEDY in which, it must be admitted, everyone played his or her part without the slightest false note. That is to say they all continued to carry out the scenes and actions of everyday life as they always had done: every morning, the Old Woman walked her dog at the same time and at the same place, crossing the black pebble beach, as she had done for years, without showing the slightest emotion when she passed by the place where the bodies had been washed up. The dog behaved like a dog, running ahead, tearing back again, chasing the seagulls or the waves, yapping for no reason and obeying when his mistress called him to heel. America tended his vines and did some building work for various people.

  It would also soon be the time for the S’tunella, the great offshore tuna-fishing event on the island, and all the fishermen, Swordy included, were busy preparing the large nets, scrubbing the hulls and decks of the boats, and refueling them for the operation during which three-quarters of the year’s profits were at stake.

  As for the Priest, he prepared his hives for the winter and continued to say mass in his church for three religious zealots and a dozen bees that appeared to be intoxicated by the fumes of incense, because their buzzing became excessive, before spending his afternoon in the harbor café, in his customary place at the very back of the room, where he read his breviary, his beekeeping manuals, and the sporting press, being particularly keen on the results of the women’s high jump competitions, a subject on which he was inexhaustible. He often tried to convince people that the graceful ascent of young athletes was a modern version of the assumption of the Virgin, and that God had created the high jump so that sinners could come closer to Him.