The tiles on the floor were perfectly clean. No mark soiled the white, dull, even, apparently new tiles. The whole room had a neat, almost coquettish look (despite a certain strangeness) in contrast to the appearance of the stairs and the hallway.
The tiling alone could not account for the rather unusual character of the room; its colors were quite ordinary and its presence in a bedroom was easily explained: for instance, as a result of a modification of the entire apartment which had caused the functions of certain rooms to be exchanged. The bed, the night table, the little rectangular rug, the dressing table with its mirror were all popular styles, as was the wallpaper of tiny, many-colored bouquets printed on a cream-colored background. Over the bed, an oil painting (or a vulgar reproduction framed as if it were a masterpiece) showed the corner of a room just like the one in which it hung: a low bed, a night table, a lambskin. Kneeling on the lambskin and facing the bed, a little girl in a nightgown is about to say her prayers, bending her head over her clasped hands. It is evening. The lamp illuminates, from a forty-five-degree angle, the child's neck and right shoulder.
On the night table, the bed lamp had been turned on—forgotten; the daylight, barely obscured by a simple voile curtain, had prevented Mathias from noticing it right away, but the conical lamp shade was unmistakably illuminated from within. Just beneath it shone a small blue rectangular object—which must have been a pack of cigarettes.
Although the rest of the room seemed orderly enough, the bed looked as if it had been the scene of a struggle, or were in the process of being changed. The dark red bedspread had been rumpled and trailed along the tiles on one side of the bed.
A mild warmth emanated from the room, as if something were still burning in the fireplace, even at this time of year—something not visible from the open door of the vestibule where Mathias was standing.
Toward the other end of the landing was an empty garbage pail and, farther on, two brooms leaning against the wall. At the foot of the stairs he decided not to take the narrow hallway which—he assumed—would lead directly back to the quay. He returned to the café which was now quite empty. He quickly reassured himself: no one would have bought anything, neither the sailors, nor the proprietor, nor the girl with the timorous expression who was probably not in the least timorous, nor awkward, nor even obedient. He opened the glass door and was once again out on the uneven cobbles in front of the sparkling water of the harbor.
The weather was even warmer now. His wool-lined duffle coat began to feel heavy. It was really a lovely day for April.
But he had already wasted too much time and did not loiter warming himself in the sunshine. Turning his back on the edge of the quay overhanging the exposed strip of mud strewn with crabs and dismembered pincers, toward which he had just taken a few steps while thinking of something else, Mathias returned to the row of housefronts and to the uncertain exercise of his profession.
A reddish shop-front. . . . A glass door. . . . He turned the handle mechanically and found himself in the next shop, which had a low ceiling and was darker than its neighbors. A customer, leaning on the counter opposite the saleswoman, was checking a long bill which the saleswoman was adding up on a very small rectangle of white paper. He said nothing lest they lose their place in the calculation. The shopkeeper, who was murmuring her figures in an undertone while following them with the point of her pencil, interrupted herself for a moment to smile at the new customer and to ask him, with a gesture of her hand, to be patient. She immediately plunged back into her calculations. She went so rapidly that Mathias wondered how the customer managed to check her figures. Besides, she must have been quite inaccurate, for she started the same series of numbers several times, and could not seem to reach the end of it. Having said “forty-seven” more loudly, she wrote something on the paper.
“Five!” protested the customer.
They checked the suspect column of figures once again, in chorus now and aloud, but at a still more dizzying speed: “Two and one three and three six and four ten. . . .” The shop was filled with various items of merchandise stacked in bins and racks from floor to ceiling along all four walls; shelves had also been installed behind the modest panes forming the shopwindow—which added considerably to the room's darkness. Baskets and cases were heaped all over the floor; the two long counters, arranged in an L filling the rest of the space, were invisible beneath piles of various objects—with the single exception of a two-foot-square surface on which gleamed the rectangle of white paper the two women were leaning over from opposite sides.
The most unrelated articles were piled side by side in great confusion. There were gumdrops, chocolate bars, jars of jam; there were wooden toys and canned goods; a basketful of eggs had been left on the floor; next to it, on a wicker tray, gleamed a spindle-shaped fish, stiff, blue, as long as a dagger, and striped with wavy lines. But there were also pens, books, shoes, espadrilles, even bolts of cloth. And there were still other things of so disparate a nature that Mathias wondered what was written on the shop's signboard outside. In one corner, at eye level, stood a window mannequin: a young woman's body with the limbs cut off—the arms just below the shoulder and the legs eight inches from the trunk—the head slightly to one side and forward to give a “gracious” effect, and one hip projecting slightly beyond the other in a “natural” pose. The mannequin was well-proportioned but smaller than normal, as far as the mutilations permitted her size to be estimated. Her back was turned, her face leaning against a shelf filled with ribbons. She was dressed only in a brassiere and a narrow garter-belt popular in the city.
“Forty-five!” cried out the saleswoman in a triumphant tone. “You're right.” And she attacked the next column of figures.
Above the thin silk strap across the back, the smooth golden skin of the shoulders glistened softly. The tip of a vertebra formed a slight eminence at the fragile nape of the neck.
“There you are!” cried out the saleswoman. “We got there all the same.”
Mathias’ eyes swept over a number of bottles, then a row of jars of several colors, and came to rest on the shopkeeper after having described a half-circle. The customer had straightened up and was looking at him intently from behind her spectacles. Taken unawares, he could not remember what to say in such a situation.
He could manage only gestures: he set down the suitcase on the free surface of the counter and opened the clasp. He quickly took out the black memorandum book to put inside the open cover. He still had not spoken a word when he lifted the paper protecting the first series of watches—the “luxury” models.
“One moment, please,” said the shopkeeper with an engaging smile. Turning to the shelves she leaned over, cleared the floor in front of the drawers that lined the lower section of the wall, opened one of them, and with a triumphant expression produced a cardboard strip of ten wrist watches absolutely identical to the ones he had just revealed. This time the situation was certainly unforeseen: with all the more reason Mathias still found nothing to say. He put his merchandise back in the suitcase and placed the memorandum book on top. Before closing the cover he had time to glance at the bright-colored dolls printed on the lining.
“Give me a quarter-pound of gumdrops,” he said.
“Certainly. Which ones would you like?” She recited a list of flavors and prices, but without paying any attention to her words he indicated the jar containing the most brightly-colored paper wrappers.
She weighed out four ounces and handed him the little cellophane bag which he put in the right pocket of his duffle coat, where the gumdrops joined the slender hemp cord. He paid and went out.
He was staying too long in the shops. It was easy enough to go in—they opened directly off the road, like country houses—and yet in each one he had to wait several minutes because of the customers, only to be disappointed in the end.
Fortunately a series of private houses succeeded this last shop. Deciding not to explore the latter's first floor which he supposed to be the gumdrop
-seller's apartment, he passed down the row.
Along dark hallways lined with closed doors, up narrow stairways leading to failure after failure, he lost himself again among his specters. At one end of a filthy landing he knocked with his ring at a door with no knob which opened by itself. . . . The door swung open and a mistrustful face appeared in the opening—which was just wide enough for him to recognize the black and white tiles on the floor. . . . The large squares were of a uniform gray; the room he entered was not at all remarkable—except for an unmade bed with a red spread trailing on the floor. . . . There was no red bedspread, nor was there an unmade bed; no lambskin, no night table, no bed lamp; there was no blue pack of cigarettes, no flowered wallpaper, no painting on the wall. The room he had been directed to was only a kitchen where he put his suitcase flat on the big oval table in the middle. Then came the oilcloth, the pattern on the oilcloth, the click of the copper-plated clasp, etc. . . .
Emerging from a last shop, one so dark he had been able to see nothing at all—and perhaps hear nothing as well—he realized that he had reached the end of the quay at the point where the long pier began, leading almost perpendicularly from the quay in a cluster of parallel lines to the beacon light where they appeared to converge: two horizontal planes in sunlight alternating with two vertical planes in shadow.
This was where the town ended as well. Mathias had not sold a single watch, and it would be the same story in the three or four alleys behind the quay. He forced himself to take comfort in the fact that his specialty was really the country; the town, no matter how small, doubtless required other qualities than those he possessed. The jetty on top of the pier was deserted. He was about to walk down it when he noticed in front of him an opening in the massive parapet extending right from the end of the quay to an old, half-demolished wall, apparently the remains of the ancient royal city.
Beyond this wall, with little or no transition, stretched a low, rocky coast—large, gently inclined banks of gray stone sloping into the water without showing any sand, even at low tide.
Mathias walked down the several granite steps that led to the flat rocks. On his left he now noticed the exterior side of the pier—vertical, but in sunlight—a single plane, the parapet joining its base without a discernible seam. As long as his progress was more or less unimpeded he continued to advance toward the sea; but he soon had to stop, not daring to jump over a fault in the rock, though not a large one, encumbered as he was with his heavy shoes, his duffle coat, and his precious suitcase.
He therefore sat down on the rock, facing into the sun, and set down his suitcase near him, wedged between the stones to prevent it from slipping. In spite of the breeze that blew more strongly here, he unbuckled his duffle coat and spread it wide on either side. Mechanically he felt for his wallet in the inside left pocket of his jacket. The sun, dazzlingly reflected from the surface of the water, forced him to keep his eyes more than half-closed. He recalled the little girl on the deck of the ship who kept her eyes wide open and her head raised—her hands behind her back. She looked as if she were bound to the iron pillar. He thrust his hand again into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the wallet to see if it still contained the newspaper article clipped the day before from the “Western Lighthouse,” one of the local dailies. After all, there was no reason why the clipping should not be there. Mathias put the wallet back where it had been.
A little wave broke against the rocks at the foot of the slope and moistened the stone at a level where it had previously been quite dry. The tide was coming in. One gull, two gulls, then a third, passed one after another, coasting slowly on the wind—motionless. Again he saw the iron rings in the embankment, alternately revealed and submerged by the water that rose and fell in the sheltered angle of the landing slip. The last bird, suddenly interrupting its horizontal trajectory, fell like a stone, broke the surface of the water, and disappeared. A little wave broke against the rock with a slapping sound. Again he was standing in the narrow vestibule before the door that opened into the room with the black and white tiles.
The girl with the timorous expression was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, her bare feet resting on the lambskin. On the night table the little lamp was turned on. Mathias thrust his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the wallet. He removed the newspaper clipping, put the wallet back, and once again read the text attentively from beginning to end.
The article did not have much of importance to say. It was no longer than a minor news item. In fact a good half of it merely traced the secondary circumstances of the discovery of the body; since the entire conclusion of the article was devoted to commentaries on the direction the police expected their investigations to take, very little space remained for the description of the body itself and none at all for any discussion of the kind of violence to which the victim had been subjected. Adjectives such as “horrible,” “unspeakable,” and “odious” were of no use in these matters. Vague laments over the girl's tragic fate were scarcely more helpful. As for the veiled formulas used to describe the manner of her death, all belonged to the conventional language of the press for this category of news and referred, at best, to generalities. It was evident that the copy writers used the same terms on each similar occasion, without attempting to furnish the slightest piece of real information in a particular case, concerning which they were probably in complete ignorance themselves. The scene would have to be re-invented from beginning to end, starting with two or three elementary details, like the age of the victim or the color of her hair.
A little wave broke against the rock at the foot of the slope, a few yards away from Mathias. His eyes were beginning to hurt. He turned away from the water and walked up the rocks to where a narrow customs road followed the coast southward. The sunlight here had the same blinding intensity. He closed his eyes tight. On the other side, behind the parapet, the flat housefronts extended along the quay as far as the triangular square and its monument encircled with an iron fence. On this side was the succession of shopwindows: the hardware store, the butcher shop, the café “A l'Espérance.” That was where he had drunk his absinthe, at the bar, for three crowns seven.
He is on the first floor, standing in the narrow vestibule before the door opening into the room with the black and white tiles. The girl is sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, her bare feet deep in the fleece of the lambskin. Near her the red bedspread is trailing along the floor.
It is night. Only the little lamp on the night table is turned on. For a long moment the scene remains motionless and silent. Then once again the words: “Are you asleep?” are spoken by the heavy, deep, slightly singsong voice which seems to conceal an unspecified threat. Mathias then notices, framed in the oval mirror above the dressing table, the man standing on the left side of the room. His eyes are fixed on something, but the presence of the mirror between him and the observer prevents any accurate surmise as to the direction of his gaze. Her eyes still lowered, the girl stands up and begins to walk timorously toward the man who has just spoken. She leaves the visible part of the room to appear, several seconds later, in the oval mirror. Having reached a point near her master—less than a step away—within reach of his hand—she stops.
The giant's hand approaches slowly and comes to rest on the fragile nape of her neck. It shapes itself around the neck and presses down, without apparent effort but with so persuasive a force that it obliges the entire delicate body to give way little by little. Bending her knees, the girl puts down first one foot, then the other, until she is kneeling on the tiled floor—white octagons the size of plates, adjacent on four of their sides and thus providing for an equal number of smaller black squares between them.
The man, who has loosened his hold, is still murmuring five or six syllables in the same low voice—but muffled, almost hoarse this time: unintelligible. After a considerable delay—as if the command had taken a long time to reach her across a stretch of sand and stagnant water—she gently begins to move
her arms; her small, compliant hands rise along her thighs, pass behind her hips and finally stop at the small of her back a little below her waist—her wrists crossed as if bound. Then the voice can be heard saying “You are beautiful . . .” with a kind of restrained violence; and again the giant's fingers fall upon his prey who now lies at his feet—so small as to seem almost deformed.
His fingertips trail over the naked skin of her neck, along the nape that is completely exposed by the arrangement of the hair; then his hand slides under her ear to stroke her mouth and face in the same way, finally forcing her to lift her head and expose the large dark eyes between their long doll's lashes.
A stronger wave broke against the rock with a slapping sound; a few drops from the cone of spray landed quite near Mathias, carried by the wind. The salesman glanced anxiously at his suitcase, but the drops had not reached it. He looked at his watch and immediately jumped up. It was five minutes after eleven; the forty-five minutes the garageman had stipulated were already past, the bicycle must be waiting for him. He climbed up the flat rocks, crossed the parapet by means of the little granite stairway, and hastened toward the square along the uneven cobbles of the quay, retracing his steps in the very direction he had taken when he had disembarked an hour before. The gumdrop-seller gave him a nod of recognition from the door of her shop as he passed.
The Voyeur Page 6