And meanwhile, Gène wasn’t moving. He was as motionless as a Buddha, as usual; and had the same beatifically ferocious smile. What was to say he wasn’t being paid to see that the doctor didn’t catch any péquois? A lean man with fine tanned skin. Every time he pulled in his line, there was a fish on it and the most extraordinary thing was that the piade was still intact. He hadn’t needed to break open another hard shell with a hammer to extract another hermit crab.
Could it be that he was turning the boat just when he saw that the doctor was at last about to catch his péquois? It was easy to distinguish, even from a sar, a seabream. It was almost as flat, but not quite, and not quite as round either, because a sar was almost moon-shaped. And it had just one black spot, near the head. As for how good it was to eat … why should it taste better than any other fish? But that was what they’d have him think.
He felt hot. He felt sick. Noises seemed to be pursuing him, to distract him from his fishing. First the sound of footsteps, a procession of footsteps on soft ground. It was the same every night. People stayed on the terrace of the Arche de Noé, in their shirtsleeves, drinking and listening to the jukebox. Then they went off in groups. Some of them kept walking up and down the jetty, and invariably, they would start singing. You could hear them from a long way off. They would come nearer, then move further away, but always with the same sentimental songs. Some of them went off down the Langoustier road, and at times the song would be interrupted by women’s laughter.
Hardly had these sounds faded away before it was the turn of the cicadas, and when there were no cicadas, it was the frogs – they’d explained to him that there were frogs in the big reservoir which provided the island’s drinking water supply.
Why did they think he would never catch a péquois? Even the mayor in his blue overall hadn’t believed in him, he could sense it. All of them, when they talked to him, had the same ironic look in their eyes.
What was the reason …?
He scratched himself. That was another thing they’d made him believe: that he’d be covered with vermin. Well, he wouldn’t believe them, he’d stop scratching. He was thirsty. The bottle of lukewarm wine was out of his reach. If he took the time to drink, he might miss his péquois.
‘François!’
How could his wife be calling him from Notre-Dame Beach?
‘François!’
She was shaking him by the shoulder. He opened his eyes. Sunlight was flooding in through the shutters, and the bedroom was dazzling white from floor to ceiling, except for the iron bedsteads. The window was open. Birds could be heard chirping in the trees.
‘Turn over, François …’
He knew why. When he slept on his left side, he sometimes snored, or breathed noisily. They were not sharing a bed. The double bed in their room wasn’t wide enough for both of them. The doctor was a very stout man; ninety kilos. They had brought up another, narrower bed, as well as the two cots for the children, and all these beds were lined up in the sun-striped room like dominoes.
‘You were talking in your sleep.’
His pillow was soaking wet and smelled of sweat. He had the heavy head of a man who had drunk too much the night before. He closed his eyes, but now he could still see the rays of light, even through his eyelids. From the harbour came the irritating sputtering of two-stroke engines being started.
It was the fishermen, the real ones, the men who sold their catch at Hyères, setting out to pull in their lines on the far side of the island. The doctor had been to watch them the day before, in his slippers, with his nightshirt tucked into his trousers. The air, at that time in the morning, had a curious smell. The sea too. Particularly the sea. And the world was an extraordinary colour: clear, pale in a way, but a luminous kind of pale. Pale blue. Pale green. Even the brightly painted boats had an amazing lightness. Everything was covered with a film of dew.
He had felt something like vertigo at the sight. Was it all too much for him? He didn’t like to think so. He watched the boats leaving, one after another, all heading in the same direction, leaving behind them the same silvery wake, and in the boats the men busy mending nets, except for the helmsman, who was standing, the rudder wedged between his knees, as motionless as a statue, like Gène.
Why on earth had Gardanne sent them on holiday to Porquerolles? They weren’t comfortable here, neither his wife nor himself. His wife’s digestion was already upset from the southern food. And Jeanne had complained of stomach ache from the first day, so he had had to ask for her to be served rice.
His own sunburn was painful, and making him feel unwell. Even here, in bed, with the cool of the morning creeping in through the slats of the shutters, he felt as if he were sickening for flu.
The day before, no, it must have been two days ago, his wife hadn’t wanted to go out straight after lunch, because she was afraid of the intense heat for the children. He wasn’t used to taking a siesta. He had walked across the square, which was deserted, with blinds drawn down in every house.
He had just had one drink on the terrace of the Arche de Noé, because it was cool there. Inside, Polyte, stretched out full length on a banquette, was sleeping with his mouth open, his seaman’s cap down over his eyes. From an invisible kitchen came the sound of someone washing dishes.
He had dragged himself as far as the harbour. The sailing boats were asleep as well. At the far end of the jetty, he had seen a little old man with a white beard, as thin as a boy, in clothes that seemed too big for him, rather like a cartoon character, now leaning over the edge dipping a bamboo stick into the water of the harbour.
‘I’ll get him, I will!’ the old man had cackled.
‘What?’
‘The conger eel, of course! Best conger I’ve seen in my life. He’s down there … Oh, he knows all right I’m going to catch him in the end.’
He pulled the bamboo stick, the length of a fishing-rod, out of the water. On the end was a piece of wire about ten centimetres long, and on the wire a hook with a huge piece of something white.
‘What’s that?’
‘Octopus. Piece of octopus cooked over a fire of mastic twigs. I’ll get him with this, see if I don’t.’
Why, as he spoke to the doctor, did he have that roguish grin? Was he joking? As he gesticulated, holding his fishing line, was he putting on some kind of act?
‘Wait … Look down there … Here … You’ll see his nasty old head. He’s there … Look quickly.’
The doctor could see only the bamboo rod, its reflection cut in half by the water, and the green seaweed clinging to the jetty wall.
‘See him, did you? He’s the tenth, ooh no, maybe the hundredth I’ve caught from that hole. They’ve got a housing shortage like us! When I’ve got this one, there’ll be another one along, because that’s a deep hole.’
And the doctor had stayed there, with the sun blazing down on the back of his neck, watching and listening, stupidly. He’d waited almost an hour.
‘Stay here, because I’m telling you, I’ll catch him.’
It was time to go back to his wife. He turned around, almost regretfully. He had not yet reached the other end of the jetty when he heard a shout and some boys raced past him, to surround the old man.
Yes, it was true, he had got his conger out of the hole, a black, viscous monster, almost as thick as a man’s arm, now writhing on the uneven cobblestones of the jetty. The old man finished it off and was carrying it proudly at arm’s length, its still-twitching tail dragging on the ground, and heaven knew why, it looked somehow obscene.
Since then, whenever he thought about the jetty, he always saw the black head of the conger eel poking cautiously out of its hole, attracted by a repulsive piece of octopus bobbing about at the end of a wire. He imagined this sticky, snake-like creature being pulled forcibly out of its tunnel, then its he
ad splitting open as it was hammered with a stone.
He wouldn’t get back to sleep now; perhaps he would drowse vaguely, dreaming of fish coming and going silently in a greenish world, watching each other from the corners of underwater avenues lined with rocks, and devouring each other. Michel, in his cot, began to sing, as he did every morning. His mother tried to sleep a little longer. In the adjoining room, just a cupboard without windows, so that they had to leave the door open at night, Mariette was using the basin to wash.
He wanted to find out whether they had found Frans Klamm yet. He was also curious to know how the girl in the red dress had spent the night. Had they left the three children alone in the army hut where their mother had died?
He got up and dressed. He felt nostalgic for their previous holidays, which they always spent in the same hotel near Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre. They were welcomed there with joyful cries, as if they were members of the family.
‘Good afternoon, doctor! And madame! Oh, hasn’t the little girl grown! I’ve kept you the same rooms as last year, with a view on the river.’
They still had almost a month to go here, and if not for his self-respect, he’d have decided to leave already, to finish off their holiday in the place where they had been so happy.
He dared not say so to his wife. And yet he knew that she felt exactly the same way. Of course she did. But he kept repeating, in contrary fashion:
‘It’s marvellous here, isn’t it!’
He went outside, while Hélène and Mariette got the children dressed. It had already become a habit, in scarcely four days, to go down to the harbour to watch the Cormoran docking.
The heat was rising. Men like himself, summer visitors, were fishing in the harbour, where all they would catch were gobies, with their revolting fat bellies. Other incomers, women in summer dresses or shorts, were climbing down into the little boats that would take them for a tour round the island, or to Port-Cros.
He saw the mayor, still in his blue overall, with the same hat, pushing a trolley laden with empty orange-boxes towards the Cormoran’s jetty. Groups of local men, bare feet in their carpet slippers, not yet washed or shaved, were taking the air and looking at the white outline of the ferry as it approached from La Tour-Fondue.
‘So, Monsieur le maire, what’s happening?’
The mayor raised his hat to scratch his scalp or mop his brow.
‘We’ll see whether Polyte managed to find him.’
‘What about the children?’
‘Yes, well, we did try to take them away. My sister-in-law would have taken the little ones … And the priest’s housekeeper would have taken Elisabeth.’
‘Is that the older girl? In the red dress?’
‘Yes. But she wouldn’t have it. She clung on to her brother and sister. She kicked up a terrible fuss. In the end we just had to leave them there.’
‘Alone?’
‘Well, she was the one who wanted it. Look! Polyte’s on board, I can see his cap.’
A white peaked cap with a gold badge, like an officer’s or a yachtsman’s. Gène was there too, and he greeted the doctor with his habitual ironic smile.
‘So doctor, what about those péquois?’
He was back from Toulon, bare feet thrust into espadrilles, wearing the same tight-fitting white T-shirt he had worn yesterday, and casually swinging his jacket in his hand. A crowd of visitors spilled off the boat. The bellboys from the hotels took hold of their luggage.
A man came down the gangway last of all, Frans surely, and by the look on his blank face, he had a serious hangover.
‘Go on down … Move …’
Polyte was pushing him along, like a gendarme pushing a prisoner, all the time winking and telling people:
‘He’s not sobered up yet. We made him drink plenty of cups of coffee, but they all came back up. Then we tried ether, but that didn’t work either. What do we do with him, Gustave?’
Gustave was the mayor, and he was giving priority to getting his empty boxes loaded on the Cormoran. As he waited, Frans stayed standing in the sun, unmoving. It was true that he seemed ageless. A thin man, lean and sinewy. His skin had been fair, but was now tanned by the sun, and he had the same cornflower-blue eyes as his daughter, and light-coloured hair, once blond perhaps, streaked with white.
He wore a dirty faded blue battledress and rope-soled espadrilles. He gazed at the bustle around him. He must have seen it all. He showed no impatience, nor did he seem surprised that Polyte had abandoned him and gone over to report to a group of locals.
Exactly like a prisoner. Like the convicts the doctor had once seen lined up in the tug taking them from La Rochelle to Saint-Martin-de-Ré, from where they would be dispatched to Guyana: they had shown the same indifference. No doubt it had often been Frans’s lot to be put in a train carriage or a boat, for some unknown destination, then to be set down at a station, an army barracks or a hospital, with a number attached to him.
He was stronger than the men surrounding him. The doctor could sense that. He felt vexed by it, but was nevertheless sure that Frans dominated all of them. The others came and went, chatted, burst out laughing, and he, standing alone in the sun, isolated by a formidable invisible barrier, neither trembled nor moved a muscle.
‘I thought we’d find him by the station,’ Polyte was explaining. ‘Funny that. Most men, they want to get drunk, they head for the harbour, with all the cafés and the music. Or they try the whorehouses on the ramparts.’
The doctor was eavesdropping, without joining the group.
‘But him, no! I wonder if he even notices women. Say, Frans, do you ever go to see the tarts in Toulon?’
Frans, who must have heard this, did not stir.
‘Anyway, where I found him wasn’t much fun. This little bar, nobody else there, just him in his corner, and the barman who wanted to go to bed … I can tell you, he was far gone!’
‘“Frans,” I says to him, “your wife’s dead!”
‘And I was shaking him and shaking him, and shouting:
‘“Hear me? Your wife’s dead!”
‘Well, he just looked at me and Gène – Gène was with me – just like he’s looking at us now.
‘“You got to come with us,” I says. “Understand?” I says. “We’ve got to bury her, your wife … There’s these papers to sign, and I don’t know what else, but the mayor wants you there.”
‘Well, he just goes on drinking. Has the bottle of plonk in front of him. We help ourselves, Gène and me, he just lets us, he goes on drinking, pays us no attention at all.
‘“He’s always like this?” I asks the boss, “when he comes in here?”
‘“Every time.”
‘“Where does he sleep?”
‘“Don’t ask me. When I turf him out, he goes away. Must go to some other bar.”
‘So I says to Gène:
‘“What d’you think, what’ll we do?”
‘Because, see, it was nearly midnight. And I know his crafty little ways, he could have got away from us.
‘“Damn it all,” I says to Gène. “Don’t you want to sleep in a bed tonight?”
‘Gène’s wife’s not around, is she? No? OK. So we got him by the shoulders. He let us, and we kept telling him:
‘“You got to sober up, pal, because your wife’s dead. Dead, do you understand?”
‘Well, we couldn’t just walk the streets all night. So we took him up the Ramparts. To Flore’s place, know what I mean? And there’s these sailors there, and a few girls, without a stitch on … Even … Eh Gène, we played the pianola, didn’t we, and we stayed there, right?
‘“Got to feed him coffee to sober him up,” that’s what I told the madam, “on account of his wife’s died. And that’s why we’re here, come to that.”
‘Only, him! Y
eah, you, clown face! Don’t look so innocent! Soon as we had our backs turned, he’s swallowed down our drinks! Then when he’d had the coffee, he started throwing it up all over the place, even got some on my trousers, and the old girl was for chucking us out. And it was this tart, dark girl she was and fat – ask Gène what she looks like – that went and fetched some ether from her room …’
‘You finished yet, Gustave? What’ll we do with him?’
‘We’d better take him to the town hall. Come on, Frans, come with me,’ said the mayor. ‘Not drunk now, are you?’
The man shook his head and walked off alongside the mayor in the blue overall, while Polyte and a few other men followed behind, still passing comments.
‘Where’ve they put her?’
‘In the lock-up.’
‘It’ll stink the place out, like it did before. Have to disinfect it, like last time. Remember old Mouchi? Say, doctor, they ever tell you about old Mouchi? This old fellow, so old, no one knew when he came to the island. Sort of Italian, he was, you couldn’t always understand what he was on about. Once a year, in the spring, he used to shave off his hair and his beard with the shears you use for sheep, and then you wouldn’t recognize him, you’d think he was a priest. And then the rest of the year he let it grow, so you couldn’t hardly see his eyes out of all the bristles. Every afternoon, he’d go to sleep on a bench, in the square. He had a room of some sort, just by the barber’s. Nobody’d ever been in there. Anyway, one day, people said Mouchi hadn’t been out of his place for a week. So we go to fetch the mayor, the other one, the one before this one, and he says:
‘“Polyte, you go in to Mouchi’s and take a look.”
‘And when we opened the door, all these fleas jumped out at us, we had to run back out. And there he was, Mouchi, naked as the day he was born, long, long beard and hair, like I said, and stark naked, standing up at the table, leaning over it, and he was dead! Couldn’t go in, because of the vermin. We had to get a sulphate spreader we use for the vines. And we filled it full of formalin, and we puffed it out in front of us to go in. And when somebody touched him, he fell over like a tree trunk, and nobody could bend him after that. I’m right, aren’t I, lads? We stuffed him in a box, and put him in the lock-up, like Frans’s wife. And when we went to fetch the flags for the Fourteenth of July, months later, it was still as full of vermin as his room …’
The Mahé Circle Page 3