Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  The ferry carried away the Teacher’s coffin, and his wife and his little daughters. The ferry did not sound its siren. On either side of the coffin, the Teacher’s wife and his twin girls were staring at the harbor, the town, the volcano, the island. They were staring at all of this with their eyes of stone. The houses were still closed up. The residents absent. Invisible. Only the Priest had accompanied them to the port. And he had remained there, watching the ferry disappear, the silent ferry with the Widow and the little girls, and the coffin, at the stern, and inside the coffin the body of a man who, for his part, had tried his best to merit the name of man.

  It took a few days for people to start acting normally again. To try to pick up the ordinary course of events once more. Everyone behaved as they knew how. Unimportant comments were exchanged. No one ever spoke again about the Teacher, even though people thought about him constantly, even though what the Priest had said to the Mayor and the Doctor proved to be appallingly accurate.

  Similarly, between the Mayor and the Doctor the matter of the boat and its tragic human cargo that the satellite had photographed was never mentioned again. Without consulting one another, they had decided not to say anything and not to know anything more about it. Not to attempt to recognize the boat in the photographs, or the two men. Only the Priest was informed, but this had been in the secrecy of the confessional, and he, not believing in very much any longer, possibly not even in God, respected his vow of silence and did not repeat to anyone what the Mayor had confided in him in this way.

  For it was he, the Mayor, who, beneath his air of ruling with a rod of iron, regularly felt the need to flush out his soul to the Priest, not so much to obtain from him some sort of forgiveness, but because the simple mind of a man can never retain all the evil that is deposited in it and which it exudes, and because this regular bloodletting soothed him for a while, and enabled him to put up with himself and put up with the world.

  For one had to go on living. Living while knowing all the while that within this community there also lived slave drivers, men who traded in human bodies, dealers in dreams, robbers of hope, murderers. People who, because they thought themselves hounded, had not hesitated to toss dozens of their fellow men into the waters of the Saliva of the Dog, where they all drowned. These men were here, close at hand, these men who murdered other men.

  XXIX

  TEN DAYS AFTER THE FERRY HAD CARRIED AWAY THE remains of the Teacher, his Widow, and his twin girls, Biceps set off very slowly toward the bench at the far end of the jetty. The S’tunella bench.

  Biceps was the senior fisherman. He lied a little when he said he was more than a hundred years old, but he can’t have been far off that age. People called him Biceps because in his youth he had apparently possessed remarkable muscles, which he exhibited whenever anyone asked. No one was around to remember this, and these days Biceps was little more than a slim collection of frail bones, a bit of dry skin, and a great many wrinkles. A walking stick made from one of his vine stocks served as his actual leg. He could hardly see anymore, and he moved as slowly as a snail, but his mind still functioned fairly well.

  He sat on the bench and waited. A few moments later, he was joined by Pearl, Siesta, and Dry Arse, three other elderly fishermen whose surnames there is little point in revealing, and who walked slightly better than he did, all three of them having barely reached the age of ninety. The conference could begin.

  It lasted just over an hour. An hour during which the four elderly men sat looking at the sea as they attempted to read it, to assess it, to discover whether the great shoals of tuna that come up from the south were to be found at its greatest depth, within reach of the island, within reach of the boats and the nets. The same guesswork occurred every year.

  At last they could be seen getting to their feet and returning to the port, Biceps at their head, sliding rather than walking over the paving stones, rather like those robots that are given to children at Christmas and which operate on batteries for a while, then wear out. The three others didn’t dare overtake him, out of respect. Almost ten minutes later, they finally reached the port where the fishermen were waiting for them in silence, bareheaded, their caps in their hands.

  Biceps gathered his breath, and then spoke the ritual form of words, in a strong voice that one would not have expected from such a worn-out body:

  “The moment for the S’tunella has arrived. To your boats, fishermen, and you, mothers, wives, and children, pray for them!”

  Normally, cries of delight and music accompany the bidding. People are happy. Bottles are opened. Some music is played. There are toasts.

  Nothing of the sort took place this year. The bidding was greeted with silence, so that Biceps thought that no one had heard it. He therefore repeated it. But there was silence once more. The fishermen put their caps back on and dispersed. They went over to their boats to make sure all their equipment was safe, then they set off home to have a final meal surrounded by their families. Each of them went to bed early. The following day, they would leave before dawn.

  Many people had heard tell of the S’tunella without necessarily remembering the name. Many had probably also seen photographs, among them the best known, in which you can see fishing boats arranged in a circle, and in the midst of this circle thousands of furious tuna, which are harpooned and gaffed before being hoisted on board, while the sea takes on the color of their blood and suddenly turns a thick red that stains the naked thighs, the torsos, and the faces of the fishermen.

  The S’tunella has more to do with hunting than fishing. Its origins are lost in the mists of time and of legend. It is the fledgling concept of land-bound people accustomed to hunting game, and which unforeseen events, wars, or famines have driven toward the sea, upon which and in which they have attempted to perpetuate the wiles of hunting.

  In this very distinctive form of catching fish, which exists nowhere else in the world, the boats are set out in a pattern similar to that which beaters adopt when they participate in biggame hunts, and which may well have been the custom when they once hunted foxes, aurochs, and bison. On each of the boats, the men yell down a sort of wooden tube, the kaffin, the far end of which is plunged into the waves, and they beat upon the hulls of their boats with the shafts of their harpoons. The aim is to frighten the shoals of tuna, through the echoing sounds made by this din, and to drive them toward an area that would have been decided on beforehand, and upon which all the boats converge, letting their large, well-filled nets drift behind them.

  This can take several days. This is when they say they beat the sea. The most experienced fishermen, what is more, can sense the reactions of this sea that has endured such a din. They say that it bristles, that it lies back and takes it, that it shudders, that it hides, that it rages, that it uses cunning or that it squeezes, according to whatever these men expect of the sea at the time, and above all what they imagine to be the movements of this fish that looks like a large cannonball, and which is known as the red tuna. The tuna, this emblem, this monarch. The greatest of fish, the one that comes to mind when one tries to draw a fish. In a perfect movement, like a child’s drawing, pure, undeviating, faultless, an obvious outline that denotes genius.

  The tuna’s skin shows no scales. It’s a fuselage. When you cut into it, you would think it was a tree. Its eye is human and it judges you. Its compact flesh is reminiscent of the muscles of a warrior. Its wounds are worthy ones. Its death is a long time in coming. When you observe these fish slipping between the currents, in their hundreds, in the translucent depths, the sun does its best to delve into the belly of the sea as far as possible, and it shines on their backs with a pewter-like gray. Unlike the shoals of garfish, scabbardfish, or barracuda which frolic with the light as though it was a musical instrument—a sort of aquatic organ whose distant melody one sometimes perceives—the tuna absorbs the rays of the sun and never reflects them. It cleaves the depths, as the plowshare does the earth. It striates the sea in the silence of its perfect
outline, launched by invisible cannons, far removed from everything.

  The S’tunella represents simultaneously the veneration that men feel for the tuna and its awe-inspiring death. In the arena formed by the boats when, after several days and several nights, they meet again having driven the enormous shoals before them, the final act is played out.

  The large trapped fish collide with one another and hurl themselves up out of the waves, forcing their massive weight skyward, giving them the illusion that they can fly. The men on the boats fire harpoons which thrust into their compact flesh, or sometimes glide over their hard, shiny bodies, without wounding them. You would think you were witnessing a primitive scene such as those painted by the first men on the walls of caves.

  What reinforces still more the parallel with an archaic activity is the custom that requires the fishermen, just as the final circle is formed, to be dressed simply in baggy white cotton shorts, the runello, which is more like a loincloth, and is made of one long strip of material that is wound several times around the waist and tucked in between the legs. As the tuna are harpooned and hoisted onto the boats, and as their blood spurts out, the bodies of the fishermen and the encircling sea turn red until all the white and all the blue vanishes.

  Accompanying this incredible ferment of the sea created by the large fish (which curiously do not seem to realize that their salvation could be procured by diving down to the deep)—a ferment that precedes the killing and which one might think was induced by a gigantic fire created in the very depths of the sea—is the violent drunkenness caused by the blood and by death.

  The fishermen kill, in a frenzy that lasts for several hours, consumed by their actions which they repeat mechanically, intoxicated by the cries they yell out to give themselves courage, and by the din caused by the beating of fins that invades their minds and shatters all thoughts, all conscience and all feeling.

  And the creatures die, one after another, large, heavy bodies on which only the tails still move and whose undamaged eyes confront the eyes of the fishermen whom they can no longer see, corpses weighing a hundredweight, hoisted up with much liberating puffing and panting, and piled up on board the boats like logs, still warm from the sap of thousands of trees from a destroyed forest.

  When nothing moves any longer, apart from the hulls of the ships, when the indifferent swell returns to its gentle lapping and everything is still again, a tremendous noise surges up, emanating from the exhausted fishermen, plastered with blood and sweat. Then the fish are counted and the boat on which lie the most fish becomes the flagship which will lead the flotilla back to the island, and will be the first to enter the port, to the applause of all those who remained ashore.

  But beforehand, and to conclude the ceremony, the captain of this boat is proclaimed “Re dul S’tunella.” He is not entitled to any crown, but he is given a baptism, which consists of plunging into the battlefield, into the bloody sea, of diving into the filthy red water, and swimming in it for a long time and emerging once more to much cheering, transformed into a barbaric creature, with blood-clotted hair, whose face can be told apart from the rest of the body only by his two staring and exhausted opaline eyes and by the whiteness of his teeth.

  Tradition requires that the Re dul S’tunella should stand at the prow of his boat, and return to port in that position, without washing himself, stained with the noble blood of his victory, and that the other fishermen should also retain the marks of combat on their thighs and their arms that are the proof of their bravery.

  The minds of those who have once seen the fishermen returning in this way are engraved with images that seem to have emanated from the epics of antiquity. They thus give man the sweet and unique sense of primitive strength, of the power of life, of the gravity of death, and of the minute place that he occupies in the heart of the great theater of the world, which occasionally deigns to open its curtain to him.

  But in this sad year, there was no Re dul S’tunella.

  There was no king because there was no victory.

  There was not even a battle.

  XXX

  THE BOATS RETURNED TO PORT TEN DAYS AFTER THEY HAD left, their holds as empty as when they had set out. The sailors’ bodies were not stained with any blood, but the expressions on their faces indicated both astonishment and gravity. The great nutritive fish had constantly avoided them. During the voyage they had not once heard their murmur, or spotted their muted glow.

  They disembarked from their vessels without saying a word. They forced a path through the incredulous crowd on whom a great silence had descended. They returned, ashamed, to hide away in their homes. The Brau rumbled slightly, as if to show its opprobrium.

  In the memory of men, they had never experienced such a thing.

  People immediately began gossiping about a curse. When people don’t understand certain facts, it is easy to resort to magic and the supernatural. It was whispered that the Teacher’s little girls bore the expressions of witches, that they had laid a curse on the island, that the cries of the Widow on the night following the death of her husband had placed spells of vengeance and also of evil on every house. It was said that on leaving the island on the ferry, with the body of the dead man in the white poplar coffin, the Widow and the children had lured to themselves all the fish in the sea, had put a charm on them, and had led them in their ethereal nets toward other islands, other fishermen, other vessels.

  They talked nonsense.

  But the truth was that the boats had indeed returned without a catch. And however much the Mayor explained the disastrous campaign, mistreated his men, scolded them and called them incompetent, however much he pored over nautical charts, spoke to Biceps and the other elderly men for hours, consulted ancient registers, and gathered all the fishermen together, nothing came of any of this. Mankind is either extremely naïve or very conceited to imagine that any mystery can be understood, and that any problem can be resolved.

  The Doctor no longer went anywhere without a handkerchief over his nose. The stench had increased still more. It was no longer merely a smell, it was becoming a taste. He felt as though he were still breathing it and chewing it. The others could not detect anything of this smell of decaying carcass and rotting meat. The Old Woman shrugged whenever she passed him, and the Mayor placed his index finger on the side of his head whenever the Doctor tried to talk to him about it. He seldom went out.

  In his sleep, the three young men who had drowned came to visit him, they lay down beside him, or they remained standing at the back of the room. The water dripped from the bottom of their trouser legs and formed a puddle on the wooden floor. The pool grew larger. The water rose along the sides of the walls. It swept through the room up to the ceiling. He died in it without dying. He was floating. He was carried off by the young black men, into deep currents. He was joined by the Teacher, whose blond hair looked like sponges. He smiled at him a little sadly, as he had done the day after the secret meeting at the town hall that had followed the discovery of the corpses. He had encountered him in the street. It was morning. The Teacher had just returned from running. He stopped, somewhat out of breath, and said:

  “You didn’t help me much yesterday evening.”

  The Doctor had shrugged.

  “Yet you’re intelligent. I was depending on you. And I’m sure that you’re a good man.”

  “I’m a cowardly man above all,” he had said.

  “A cowardly man?” the Teacher had responded, dreamily.

  “It’s almost a pleonasm, isn’t it?” the Doctor had concluded.

  In his darkness, the journey continued toward the high seas. He drifted among other drowned people and among thousands of tuna that bore quizzical expressions. They all ended up in large black nets, in the midst of a circle of boats. They were harpooned. He felt the tip of the arrow entering his side, going right through him, glancing off a vertebra, smashing a bone, and puncturing viscera. Yet he was not in pain. And then he was hoisted up.

  Whereupon
he woke up, contemplating the last words written by Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French poet, a volume of whose work never left his bedside. While his leg was being amputated and he lay dying in a hospital room not far from the port of Marseilles, Rimbaud had written a brief letter to the captain of the ship on which he still hoped to embark, to return to Abyssinia. It ended with this sentence:

  “Let me know at what time I shall be carried on board.”

  Everyone asks themselves this question sooner or later, but everyone behaves nevertheless as though they were carrying on.

  The Doctor and the Mayor were putting the finishing touches to the Thermal file, but their hearts were no longer in it. Without admitting it, they knew that the project would never see the light of day. Without giving in to the belief that a curse would befall the island, they both had a premonition that it and its shores would be cluttered by too many corpses. The presence of these dead people put a strain on the living, and took from them not so much the will to live, as their love and hope in life. All this was like a stain on a piece of clothing, on clothing that one had enjoyed wearing.

  They spent long periods of time together, but something had been damaged, both between them and within their world. The Brau made its voice heard increasingly frequently. There were scarcely any days when you did not feel its irritated shudder beneath your feet and inside the houses and hear its elderly predator’s roar.

  The sky sulked above them. The sun no longer appeared. The heat was no less suffocating. It wrung them out like washing. It seemed to them as though they were entering an endless season of boiling temperatures and darkness. It was not yet the isle of the dead, exactly, but it was already the isle of the dying.