He was drawing on very smooth paper with a hard-lead pencil. Although scarcely pressing down at all, in order not to leave an impression on the next pages in the notebook, he obtained a clear, black line; he had taken such care to reproduce his model faithfully that there was no need to erase. His head bent over his work, his forearms resting on the oak table, he began to feel tired from sitting so long in one position, his legs dangling over the edge of the hard, uncomfortable chair. But he did not want to move.
Behind him the whole house was empty and black. Except when the morning sun brightened them, the front rooms, facing the road, were even darker than the others. Yet this room, where he had settled down to work, was lighted by only one small, square window deeply recessed in the wall; the carpet was very dark, the high, heavy, dark-stained furniture crowded close together. There were at least three heavy wardrobe-cupboards, two of them side by side opposite the door opening onto the hallway. On a lower shelf of the third one, in the right-hand corner, was the shoebox in which he kept his string collection.
The water level rose and fell in the sheltered angle at the bottom of the landing slip. The ball of blue paper, quickly saturated, had half unfolded and was floating between two waves a few inches below the surface. It was easier to tell now that it was the paper from a pack of cigarettes. It rose and fell, following the movement of the water, but always at the same point—neither closer to nor farther away from the embankment, moving neither to the right nor the left. Its position was easy for Mathias to establish, for it was on a line with the mark shaped like a figure eight.
The moment he became aware of this fact, he noticed, about a yard away from the first mark and at the same height, another design shaped like a figure eight—two circles incised side by side, and between them the same reddish excrescence that seemed to be the remains of a piece of iron. There must have been two rings fixed into the embankment. The one nearer the landing slip immediately disappeared, submerged by a wave. Then the other one was engulfed in its turn.
The water, falling back from the vertical embankment, collided with the backwash from the inclined plane of the landing slip; a little cone of liquid leaped toward the sky with a slapping sound, and a few drops fell back around it; then everything was as it had been before. Mathias looked for the floating cigarette pack—it was impossible to tell exactly where it would surface again. He is sitting at the table wedged into the window recess, facing the window.
The window is almost square—a yard wide and hardly any higher—four identical panes—with neither curtain nor shade. It is raining. The sea is invisible, though quite near. Although it is broad daylight, there is just enough light from outside to make the waxed table top gleam—very faintly. The rest of the room is very dark, for in spite of its rather large size it has only this one aperture, which furthermore happens to be located in a recess in the wall. A good half of the square, dark-stained oak table is wedged into the recess. On the table the white pages of the notebook, placed parallel to the edge, constitute the only bright thing in the room—not counting, above them, four slightly larger rectangles: the four panes of the window opening onto the fog that conceals the entire landscape.
He is sitting on a bulky chair that is on top of two dictionaries. He is drawing. He is drawing a big gray and white sea gull. The bird's head is facing toward the right, in profile. The wavy line dividing the two parts of its curved, pointed bill can be distinguished, as well as the pattern of the feathers on its tail and along the edge of its wing, and even the overlapping scales down the length of its leg. Yet it seems as if something is missing.
There was something missing from the drawing, although it was difficult to tell exactly what. Mathias decided that something was either not correctly drawn—or else missing altogether. Instead of the pencil, his right hand was holding the wad of cord he had just picked up from the deck. He looked at the group of passengers in front of him, as if he were hoping to find among them the object's owner coming toward him, smiling, to ask for its return. But no one paid any attention to him or to his discovery; they all continued to turn their backs. Slightly to one side, the little girl seemed to be forsaken. She was standing against one of the iron pillars that supported the deck above. Her hands were clasped behind the small of her back, her legs braced and slightly spread, her head leaning against the column; even in a position as rigid as this the child maintained something of her graceful attitude. Her face shone with the confident, yet conscious gentleness imagination attributes to obedient children. She had been in the same position ever since Mathias first noticed her presence; she was still looking in the same direction, toward where the sea had been and where now the vertical embankment of the pier rose above them—quite close by.
Mathias had just stuffed the cord into the pocket of his duffle coat. He caught sight of his empty right hand, its nails too long and too pointed. To give those five fingers something to do, he gripped them around the handle of the little suitcase he had been holding in his other hand. It was an ordinary enough suitcase, but its solid manufacture inspired confidence: it was made of a very hard, reddish-brown fiber, the corners reinforced with some material of a darker, almost chocolate color. The handle, fastened with two metal clasps, was made of a softer, imitation-leather material. The lock, the two hinges, and the three big rivets at each of the eight corners looked like copper, as did the clasps of the handle, but even slight wear had already revealed the real composition of the four rivets on the bottom: copper-plated babbit metal, which was obviously what the other twenty rivets were made of—and doubtless the rest of the fittings as well.
The inside was lined with printed cretonne, of which the pattern only superficially resembled those customarily used for materials of this type, even in women's or girls’ luggage; instead of bouquets or sprays of flowers, the decorative motif consisted of tiny dolls, like those used on nursery curtains. But unless examined closely, it was not apparent that they were dolls: they looked more like bright-colored spots on the pale canvas—they might just as well have been bouquets of flowers. The suitcase contained an ordinary memorandum book, a few prospectuses, and eighty-nine wrist watches mounted in rows of ten on nine rectangular strips of cardboard, one of which had an empty mounting.
Mathias had already made his first sale that same morning, before boarding the ship. Even though it had been a watch from the cheapest row—one hundred fifteen crowns—on which he realized the most slender profit, he decided to consider this early start as a good omen. On this island, where he had been born, after all, and where he was personally acquainted with many families—where, at least, in spite of his bad memory for faces, he could make a harmless pretense of renewing old friendships, thanks to the inquiries he had made the day before—he had a good chance of selling most of his merchandise in a few hours. In spite of the fact that he had to leave on the four o'clock boat, it was even possible—or not materially impossible—to sell every watch he had brought in the course of this one short day. Furthermore, he was not even limited to the contents of his suitcase: in the past he had occasionally taken orders for articles which were paid for on delivery.
But counting only the ninety watches which were in his luggage, the profit would be considerable: ten at a hundred fifteen crowns, eleven hundred fifty, ten at one hundred thirty, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred fifty, ten at one hundred fifty, four with a special wristband at five crowns extra apiece. . . . To simplify matters Mathias decided on an average price of two hundred crowns; the week before he had calculated the exact amount that a similar batch was worth, and two hundred crowns was a good approximation. So he should total about eighteen thousand crowns. His gross profit varied between twenty-six and thirty-eight per cent; figuring on an average of thirty per cent—three times eight, twenty-four, three times one, three, three and two, five—it came to more than five thousand crowns, that is, the gross profit was actually worth a whole week's work—even during a good week—in his usual territory. As for personal expenses, t
here would be only the sixty crowns for the round-trip boat fare, which was practically negligible.
It had taken hopes of such exceptionally favorable transactions as these to convince Mathias to make this trip, which was not included in his theoretical itinerary; otherwise two three-hour crossings represented too many complications and too great a loss of time for so small an island—barely two thousand inhabitants—to which nothing else, neither childhood friendships nor early memories of any kind, attracted him. The houses on the island were so much alike that he was not even sure he could recognize the one in which he had spent almost his entire childhood and which, unless there was some mistake, was also the house where he had been born.
They assured him that nothing had changed for thirty years, but often a shed added on to a gable or a little stonework redressed is enough to make a whole building unrecognizable. And even supposing that everything, down to the smallest detail, had remained just as he had left it, he would still have to reckon with the errors and inaccuracies of his own memory, which experience had taught him to mistrust. More than any real changes on the island, or even hazy recollections—which were nevertheless numerous enough to prevent him from retaining any precise image of the place—he would have to be wary of exact but false memories which would here and there have substituted themselves for the original earth and stones.
After all, all the houses on the island looked alike: a low door between two small, square windows—and the same arrangement at the back. From one door to the other a tiled hallway split the house down the middle, separating the four rooms into two symmetrical groups: on one side the kitchen and a bedroom, on the other a second bedroom and a room used either as a parlor or as a kind of lumber room. The kitchen and bedroom on the street side faced east and received the morning sun. The remaining two rooms looked out toward the cliff over three hundred yards of open ground rolling toward an indentation in the coast. The winter rains and the west wind battered against the windows; it was only in milder weather that the shutters could be left open. He had been sitting all afternoon at the heavy table wedged into the window recess, drawing a sea gull that had perched on one of the fence posts at the end of the garden.
Neither the arrangement of the grounds nor their orientation gave him enough clues. As for the cliff, it was the same all the way around the island—and the same, moreover, on the mainland opposite. Its indentations and rises could be as easily confused as pebbles on a beach, as gray gulls.
Fortunately Mathias did not care much about such matters. He had no intention of looking for the house at the moor's edge, or for the bird on its perch. He had only made his inquiries so carefully, the day before, about the forgotten topography of the island in order to establish the most convenient route, to facilitate broaching the subject of watches in the houses he was supposed to be returning to with such understandable pleasure. The extra effort of cordiality—above all of imagination—required by such an enterprise would be more than compensated for by the profit of five thousand crowns he expected to clear.
He really needed the money. For almost three months, sales had been noticeably below normal; if matters did not soon improve, he would have to get rid of his stock at cut prices—probably at a loss—and find another job again. Among the measures contemplated to settle his difficulties, the imminent canvassing of the island played an important role. Eighteen thousand crowns in cash at such a time meant much more than his thirty-per-cent commission: he would not immediately replace all the watches sold, and the sum would permit him to hold out until better days. If this privileged territory had not been originally included in his schedule, it was doubtless because he had wanted to keep it in reserve for bad times. Present circumstances compelled him to make the trip—of which the inconveniences appeared ever more numerous, as he had feared.
The boat left at seven in the morning, which had forced Mathias to get up earlier than usual. When he traveled by bus or the local railroad he almost never started before eight o'clock. Besides, although his house was quite near the train station it was a good distance from the harbor—and none of the bus lines brought him much nearer. He might as well walk the whole way.
At this hour of the morning the Saint-Jacques district was deserted. As he was walking down an alley which he hoped would be a short cut, Mathias thought he heard a moan—faint, yet seeming to come from so near by that he turned his head. There was no one in sight; the street was as empty behind him as in front. He was about to continue on his way when he heard the sound again, a distinct moan almost in his ear. At that moment he noticed a ground-floor window within reach of his right hand; a light was shining inside although by now the daylight was barely obscured by the simple voile curtain that hung behind the panes. The room looked rather large, however, and its only window was of modest size: a yard wide, perhaps, and scarcely any higher; with its four identical, almost square panes it would have been more suitable for a farmhouse than these urban premises. The folds of the curtain made it impossible to see how the room was furnished. All that could be distinguished was what the electric light illuminated at the back of the room: the conical lamp shade—a bed lamp—and the vaguer form of an unmade bed. Standing near the bed, bending slightly over it, a masculine silhouette lifted one arm toward the ceiling.
The whole scene remained motionless. In spite of the incomplete nature of his gesture, the man moved no more than a statue. Under the lamp, on the night table, was a small blue rectangular object—which must have been a pack of cigarettes.
Mathias had no time to wait for what was going to happen next—supposing that anything was going to happen next. He was not even certain the moans came from this house; he had guessed they came from a source still closer, less muffled than they would have been by a closed window. In thinking it over he wondered if he had heard only moans, inarticulate sounds; had there been identifiable words? In any case it was impossible for him to remember what they were. Judging from the quality of her voice—which was pleasant, and not at all sad—the victim must have been a very young woman, or a child. She was standing against one of the iron pillars that supported the deck above; her hands were clasped behind the small of her back, her legs braced and slightly spread, her head leaning against the column. Her huge eyes inordinately wide (whereas all the passengers were squinting because the sun had begun to break through), she continued to look straight ahead of her, with the same calmness with which she had just now looked into his own eyes.
Confronted with such insistence, he had thought at first that the wad of cord belonged to her. She might be making a collection herself. But then he had decided this was an absurd notion: that was no pastime for little girls. Yet boys always have their pockets full of knives, string, chains, and those porous clematis stems they smoke for cigarettes.
Nevertheless, he couldn't recall that his tastes as a collector had been widely encouraged. The good pieces that came into the house were usually confiscated for some domestic purpose. When he complained, they seemed not to understand his disappointment, “since he didn't use them for anything, anyway.” The shoebox was in the biggest cupboard of the back room, on a lower shelf; the cupboard was kept locked and he was allowed to have his box only after he had done all his homework and learned his lessons. Sometimes he had to wait several days before he could put a new acquisition in it; meanwhile he carried it in his right pocket, where it kept company with the little brass chain which was a permanent resident there. In these conditions even the best quality cords lost something of their sheen and their cleanness; the most exposed loops blackened, the torsion of the fibers slackened, little threads stuck out everywhere. Continual friction against the metal links must have hastened the fraying process. Sometimes after too long a wait the latest find became good for nothing except tying up packages.
A sudden anxiety crossed his mind: the majority of the pieces kept in the box had been put there without having been in his pocket, or at most after only a few hours of this ordeal. So what confidenc
e could he have in their qualities? Obviously less than in the others. To compensate he would have to subject them to a more rigorous examination. Mathias wanted to take out of his duffle coat the piece of cord rolled into a figure eight in order to estimate its value again. But he couldn't reach his right pocket with his left hand, and his right hand was holding the little suitcase. There was still time to set down the suitcase before becoming involved in the confusion of disembarkation, and even to open it in order to put the cord safely away. The contact with the coins in his pocket would be bad for it. Since Mathias had no need of company to enjoy this pastime of his, he didn't have to carry the best specimens with him for his schoolmates to admire—he didn't even know whether they would have liked them at all. Actually, the string other boys filled their pockets with seemed to have no relation to the string he collected; in any case, theirs demanded fewer precautions and evidently gave them less trouble. Unfortunately, the suitcase with the watches in it was not the shoebox; he tried not to clutter it up with questionable objects that might produce a bad impression on the clientele when the time came for him to display his wares. Appearances were more important than anything else, and he must omit nothing, leave nothing to chance, if he wanted to sell eighty-nine wrist watches to slightly less than two thousand people—including children and paupers.
Mathias tried to divide two thousand by eighty-nine in his head. He lost his place and decided to use a round number as his divisor—one hundred, to account for the cottages and shanties too isolated for him to visit. That would come to about one sale for every twenty inhabitants—so by supposing each family to average five people, that would mean one sale for every four houses visited. Of course he knew from experience that things turned out differently in practice: in one family, where they might feel well-disposed toward him, he sometimes succeeded in selling two or three watches at a time. Nevertheless, the overall rhythm of one watch for every four houses would be difficult to attain—difficult, not impossible.
The Voyeur Page 2