Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  The Doctor showed him to the door of his study, which was open. He went in and flopped down into the armchair.

  “I may not look very serious, but it’s a serious matter that brings me to your island. Those who sent me loathe jokes. They loathe many other things, except work that’s well done. And it so happens that people have tried to sabotage their work, to impede it, and perhaps even to steal it from them. But I’ll explain everything to you. I’ve had the opportunity to observe you. You’re a calm person. You don’t appear to be stupid, even though you have dirty hands like the others. You’re a run-of-the-mill bastard yourself. I’m not judging you. I’m one, too. And of the worst sort. You’re a lamb compared to me, but a lamb with a tarnished coat. Are you feeling ill? Why do you keep that handkerchief under your nose?”

  The Superintendent did not appear to detect the foul stench of decaying carcass which did not disappear but, on the contrary, grew worse as time went by.

  “I get the feeling that you are all going mad. Unless you went mad a long time ago, going round and round in your enclosed world, which would not surprise me. It’s high time I left and never came back here again. Would you have something to drink, if it’s not too much to ask? And then if you happen to have another of those cigars that you’re smoking, I wouldn’t say no. I’ve always thought that smoking those kinds of things helps deep thoughts to surface.”

  The Doctor went to look for the bottle of citron liqueur, two small glasses, and the box of cigars. He filled the glasses while the Superintendent was inspecting the box, sniffing certain cigars, and testing their shape between his thumb and index finger. He eventually chose a Robusto, which he cut gracefully before lighting it, taking his time doing so and rolling the cigar so that the ash was uniform. He inhaled the first puffs, chomped the smoke, watching it emerge from his mouth and settle in grayish layers. He seemed satisfied and raised the glass of liqueur to his lips, knocking it back in a single gulp. He made a face as he put it down again.

  “How disgusting! Did you make this muck? There should be laws against it.”

  Which did not prevent him from helping himself to more without asking.

  “You imagined a strange sort of chess match. You thought that you could win the game, but there was a snag and you panicked. I don’t know who it was who decided to sacrifice a piece, the wretched Teacher in this case, with that crazy story of rape, but nothing will be gained and you will not escape, believe me. You will not win. You even risk losing a great deal. Was it your idea? Was it the Mayor’s? Basically, it doesn’t matter anymore. You’re all shits. You’re talking to a specialist.

  “What I want to say to you is that you can’t turn the clock back. I don’t know how it will all end, badly no doubt, but it will be up to you to pick up the broken pieces. I shall be far away and I’ll forget you very quickly.

  “You’re all bastards, as I’ve told you, but not to the extent that you don’t give a shit about anything, like me. I suspect that there’s still a bit of that absurd Christian core about you that has brought in a tidy sum ever since the business at Golgotha about sin and forgiveness. That’s what will finish you. You’re not sufficiently detached. You don’t have the spiritual means to pursue your filthy ambitions. If you want to enter the Devil’s service, you have to love fire and not be afraid of being roasted in its flames. You’ve remained at a halfway point because you have a corrupt soul, but you don’t have the balls. You’re uncouth amateurs. You’ll suffer the consequences. You’ll die in expiation and remorse, I’m sure of that.”

  The Superintendent poured himself another glass of liqueur. He made a face as he swallowed it. He glanced around the walls and suppressed a chuckle:

  “Have you read all those books that surround you?”

  “Some of them.”

  “What good did they do you?”

  “They helped me understand things.”

  “Pray tell me, what things.”

  “Men. Life. The world.”

  “Nothing else? Pretentious! And on top of it, you come up with this miserable put-up job? Books haven’t done you much good. This story of rape that doesn’t stand up, except for the gathering of overexcited idiots assembled in the square, who would have swallowed it, given that it was served up on a plate? I could have called on the girl and her father before coming to see you. Three slaps would have been enough and they would probably have come up with a new version: one for the girl, who would tell me that she had lied because her father had asked her to do so, and one for her scoundrel of a father, who would admit to me that it was he who had groped her and violated her for months, which the Mayor knew about because he had once surprised him on his boat, or elsewhere, and that he had asked him to accuse the Teacher in exchange for his absolution. I would have left them both in tears, a little whore and an Australopithecus who deserved to be castrated and have both hands amputated.

  “Did you want to blackmail this poor Teacher, prevent him from speaking, from telling me about what you had plotted with the three corpses that had been washed ashore, and what he discovered afterward during his boat trips? It failed. You should have come up with something more convincing. Don’t make that face, he told me everything; but, in any case, I knew more before even setting foot on your shitty island!”

  He paused, inspected his cigar, which had gone out, sniffed at it, and then sniffed all around him. He stared into the Doctor’s eyes.

  “Now you mention it, it’s true that there’s a stench, but I have a feeling that it’s coming from you!”

  XXIV

  THE DOCTOR LISTENED TO THE SUPERINTENDENT, WHO was polishing off the bottle of citron liqueur as well as his cigar. He wondered what threads connected this fanatical creature to life. Was it indifference, love of work well done, cruelty, a loathing for his fellow man, or an unsatisfied fondness for murder, as he had confided to the Mayor, the pleasure of destroying?

  He had said that he came to look for the Doctor because he saw in him someone who was less governed by his emotions than the Mayor, and to whom he would be able to explain his comments. But the Doctor felt that his visit had more to do with a strategy of intimidation. It was important for him to spread fear in small doses, just as one pours salt into an open wound so as to draw tears, in the hope that a little while later the tenderized meat will cook and cut more easily.

  The Superintendent had not challenged the Teacher when he had tried to explain his discoveries to him.

  “I even supplied him with information that he did not have,” he said, tapping the ash of his cigar into an empty pocket that was never meant for this purpose.

  “I work for people who have significant economic interests, and part of their activities concerns the area of maritime transport. My employers deal with all commodities likely to be bought and resold. They’ve done so for decades. Raw materials, fruit and vegetables, cars, cigarettes, consumer goods, et cetera. They are trying to be part of a global economic activity, and to adapt to the market, which as you know is frequently changing.

  “The laws of different nations are excessively strict, and they do not correspond in any way to those of the market, and to its constraints. My clients therefore have to find ways of satisfying their customers by complying as best they can with these laws, which is why they like discretion. Without discretion, nothing is possible. And they are prepared to do anything to maintain this discretion. You understand me, I think?”

  The Superintendent spoke like a bank employee, an accountant, or a politician. Perhaps he was, in fact, all these things? To hear him speak, you could persuade yourself that he believed in what he was saying, and in spite of his totally neutral tone, you sensed nevertheless a threat underlying his every word, just as on certain pathways that meander along the foot of the Brau you suspect that a scorpion may be hiding beneath every stone.

  “And then new claims arise, depending on the turmoil in the world. In recent years, unstable situations, civil wars, the unequal distribution of wealth, and famines
have led to huge migratory movements from the south to the north. My employers, who are not insensitive to human distress, realized that the official international organizations were snowed under. They then tried to do their best to enable tens of thousands of men, women, and children to reach what to them seemed like new promised lands. We often downplay this aspect: the intentions of my employers and of those like them are not merely mercenary. They are also, dare I say it, perhaps first and foremost, humanitarian. I can see that this astonishes you, but I’m not asking you to believe me. I couldn’t care less about your opinion and what you may think. I’m stating the facts, that’s all, so that you should understand properly. People criticize the methods used by those who employ me for getting rid of competition or certain obstacles, methods which are, it is true, occasionally hasty. But all that is nothing compared to the countless deaths attributable to capitalism and ultraliberalism.

  “The world has become a business, as you know. It’s no longer a field of knowledge. Science may have guided mankind for a time, but nowadays it’s only money that matters. Possessing it, keeping it, acquiring it, making it circulate. My employers are certainly motivated by humanitarian intentions, but they are also businessmen. They try to reconcile aspirations that are often far removed from one another. But people never stop putting spokes in their wheels! Take borders, for example. Borders are an ill-considered nuisance when it’s a matter of saving lives, don’t you agree? My employers have therefore devised discreet sea routes, to enable the largest possible number of these wretched people to reach the promised land, without being prevented from doing so by administrative quibbling.”

  He refilled his own glass once more, and suddenly his voice changed. He spoke more slowly, and he now sounded groggy.

  “Everything was going fine, until a little while ago. And then some problems arose. Problems that may appear slight, but which have nevertheless disturbed the fine harmony of what was imagined by my employers, and have eroded the trust people may have had in them, primarily that of their future clients. And that, as you can imagine, they very much resent.

  “Let us suppose, to simplify matters, that certain individuals, who have none of their experience, their know-how, and their dependability, tried to offer the same services as them. Not only did those who sent me suffer a shortfall—negligible, initially, though it could increase—but what’s more, and above all, some incidents occurred: the three corpses that you discovered on the beach testify to this. It’s regrettable. How, after such events, can you retain the vital trust of customers? Right? And how can you continue to work with the greatest discretion, a discretion on which my superiors pathologically set great store? I have come here simply to warn you. To tell you that we know. To say that enough is enough.”

  XXV

  TO BE FRANK, THE DOCTOR UNDERSTOOD ONLY INSTINCTIVELY. He could hear the threats. He guessed, without the Superintendent ever having mentioned their name, who his employers, whose altruistic qualities he had never stopped extolling, actually were. He knew that nobody, on the island or anywhere else, wanted to get in their way and thwart their intentions.

  Like everyone else, he knew their methods and their capabilities only too well. They formed a state within the state, they employed a number of people, and they got rid of a number of others who were in their way without a qualm, and in sufficiently barbarous ways for them to be impressed upon people’s minds and effect a learning curve.

  Their organization was often compared to an octopus, which always upset him because the octopus is the gentlest animal there is; it’s affable, it gets on well with the other creatures of the marine world, and it spends most of its life as a recluse, in some deep cavity, sheltered from everyone’s gaze and causing no harm.

  But what the Doctor did not understand was why the bogus policeman saw the island as the grain of sand in the commercial mechanism dreamed up by those who had sent him? How did the fact that three corpses had washed up on the shore make the islanders competitors who had to be got rid of?

  “Either you’re a moron, or else things are being hidden from you, while you think you know everything. And if things are being hidden from you, it’s because people take you for a moron.”

  The Superintendent put down his glass, almost reluctantly, and picked up the threadbare leather briefcase at his feet. From it he took a bundle of papers which he placed on the Doctor’s desk.

  “I assume that the Mayor has circulated those that I left with him? Here are some more. You will no doubt be impressed by their quality and their precision. The famous eye of God—but God has many eyes these days, always open, which look at us constantly. You only have to knock at the right door to piece together what his eyes have seen. My employers have many connections, it’s not difficult for them. Go on, take your time.”

  He stepped backward, grabbed the bottle, and served himself. He knocked back his glass in a gulp and smiled.

  The photographs were of two types. In half of them you could see what had taken place on the actual morning of the discovery of the bodies, the various characters involved, easily identifiable, and the different things that happened: various people standing around the tarpaulin, in a circle, you might have thought that a prayer was being said around an improvised altar; then the departure of the Old Woman, of her dog, of the Teacher, of the Doctor, of America, and of Swordy; the arrival of Swordy with the cart; Swordy and the Mayor lifting up the tarpaulin and loading the bodies onto the cart.

  The second batch of photographs reeled off a tragic film in four acts, containing ellipses which enhanced the speed and thus increased its dizzying effect even more.

  The first of these showed a boat on which dozens of black men were standing huddled together, so much so that one could not see either the bridge of the boat or its cockpit, nothing that would have enabled it to be recognized. In the second photograph, one could still see lots of men clustered together toward the stern of the boat, but the bow and part of the bridge could now be seen. The surface of the sea, which had appeared uniformly blue in the first photograph, was studded with dark dots on the second image, spread around the bow of the boat. In the third photo, the number of black dots had increased two or three times, and nothing other than two white men could be seen on the bridge—the bridge that was painted in that Tyrian pink so characteristic of the island, since all the boats are painted like that, to the extent that it is a signature, a means of recognition, and of pride, too—two white men who were holding in their hands something that could have been a gun, a truncheon, or part of a harpoon. In the last photograph, the boat had made a maneuver and tacked about, and all one could see was its stern, the rest of it being out of the frame. In the blue water, the black dots were still numerous, and some of them showed arms raised toward the boat that was sailing away. You could see them, these raised arms. Arms raised toward the man who was now gazing at the image, the man who had recognized the boat and had guessed that the two men were fishermen from the island.

  The Superintendent filled his glass again and pushed it toward the Doctor.

  “I think you have more need of it than I do. You’re very pale. What did you say to me not ten minutes ago, about all your books? That they have taught you about the world, about life and mankind? Well, you haven’t read the right ones and, in spite of your age, a large part of your education still remains to be acquired.”

  The Doctor knocked back his drink. The alcohol filled his throat with a fierce fire. He pushed the photographs away as if discarding them would be enough to make what they depicted disappear. His head was spinning. The Superintendent put them away in his briefcase.

  “Strange sort of fishermen, you must admit, who throw away the product of their catch without any compunction. And why did they do all this? Because of a patrol boat which they had probably taken for a coast guard vessel and which in actual fact was merely involved in peddling cigarettes—I am in a position to know this—and which had followed them for a short while just to give them a f
right.”

  The Superintendent drew on his cigar and gazed at the embers, and the smoke which he slowly exhaled.

  “What a waste! So many dead because of an error, for a bit of contraband tobacco!”

  He got to his feet.

  “I must leave you. I must pack my bag. I’ve fulfilled my mission. I’m setting off tomorrow. There’s nothing left for me to do on your rock. I feel as though I’ve been here for a thousand years. Nothing happens here. Time just stands still. You’ll have to sort things out yourselves from now on. You’ve got a lot to do. Up to you to settle your own scores. I don’t think you’ll have any difficulty in finding out who those two idiots were. It no longer concerns me. But don’t oblige me to come back, me or someone like me. There’s a limit to our patience. No one paid any attention to you until recently. Make sure that it becomes like that again.”

  The Superintendent was one of those people whom nobody notices and who go through life without making much of an impact. The unlikelihood of his existence was further reinforced shortly after his departure.

  He was seen boarding the ferry on Tuesday morning. Several witnesses, starting with the Café Owner, swore they had seen him getting on board. The Captain did not say otherwise, even if he was less positive, detained as he was at that moment by a leaking engine.

  What is undisputed, on the other hand, is that the Superintendent did not disembark on the mainland. He had vanished during the crossing, like the smoke from his cigar. Whether he disappeared or threw himself overboard, or whether his employers, so concerned with discretion, as he had repeated time and again, had done away with him, is of no importance. For the inhabitants of the island, his life had lasted only a few days. Before this time, he had not existed. Afterward, he no longer existed.