The road did not continue beyond the farm, of which the courtyard was its terminal enlargement.
In broad outline, there was little to describe again: the sheds, the garden fence, the gray house with its clumps of mahonia, the arrangement of the windows and the wide expanse of bare stone above the door. . . . The whole picture corresponded almost perfectly to reality.
The salesman was walking forward on the beaten earth floor which muffled the sound of his steps. The four windows were closed, but all the shutters were open—of course. The only surprising thing about this house was the distance between the two openings on the first floor. It looked as if something were missing there—a niche, for instance, cut into the wall to hold a statuette of the Virgin, or a wedding bouquet under a glass bell, or some kind of mascot.
He was about to knock on the door panel when he noticed that one of the mahonia bushes was about to die, if not dead already; although the other bush was already showing its buds, the one on the right bore only a few brownish leaves at the ends of the stems, half-shriveled and spotted with black.
The door was not bolted. Mathias pushed it open and heard voices quite close by as he made his way down the hallway—it sounded like a vehement argument. He stopped.
As soon as he had released it, the door slowly returned to its original position without making the slightest sound. The kitchen door was ajar.
“Well? . . . Can't you say anything?”
“Oh, leave the boy alone. He told you he came straight here and waited for you out in the courtyard!”
That was the old country woman's voice. She sounded out of patience. Mathias took a step forward, carefully setting down his heavy shoe on the tiles. Through the opening, which was three or four inches wide, could be seen only one end of the table, covered with an oilcloth patterned with small, many-colored flowers, on which were lying a pair of glasses, a paper-knife, and two identical stacks of clean white plates, side by side; behind them, sitting bolt upright on a chair beneath a calendar tacked to the wall, was a young man holding himself perfectly motionless, his hands on his knees, head high, eyes fixed. He might have been fifteen or sixteen. Although his lips were not moving, it was easy to tell from his shiny, rigid face the importance of his role in this scene. Other people were talking and moving about in the rest of the room. Then came a man's voice: “He told me. . . . He told me! He was lying, as usual. Look at that mule's face. You think you know what's going on inside that head? The boy's not all there. . . . Still, he could answer a question when he's asked!”
“But he's told you again and again . . .”
“He sits there on that chair as if he had lost his tongue!”
“Because he's already told you what he had to say! You always start the same thing over and over.”
“Oh, of course, I'm the one who's crazy!”
Heavy steps resounded on the cement, a man's steps (doubtless those of Robert Marek—who else could have been talking that way?). But nothing crossed Mathias’ field of vision, the vertical strip remained unchanged: the cement squares of the floor, the table leg, the edge of the oilcloth with the pattern of little flowers, the steel-rimmed glasses, the long paper-knife with a black handle, the pile of four soup plates and the second pile just behind it, the upper part of the young man's body, a part of the back of his chair to the left, his frozen face, pinched mouth, fixed eyes, the illustrated calendar on the wall.
“If I knew he was the one who did it . . .” the father's voice growled.
The old woman began to cry. Amidst her wails and pleas for divine compassion, several words recurred again and again, a leitmotif: “. . . a murderer . . . murderer . . . he thinks his son is a murderer . . .”
“That's enough of that, Mother,” the man shouted. The wailing stopped.
After a moment of silence, punctuated by the sound of his steps, he continued more deliberately. “You told us yourself that this—what did you call him?—this watch salesman had stopped here while I was away and found no one in the house. If Julian had been sitting on the doorstep, the way he claims he was, the man would certainly have seen him.”
“He might have gone away for a minute . . . did you, darling?”
Mathias felt a sudden impulse to laugh, so unsuited to this impassive countenance was the word “darling,” used by all the islanders in speaking to children. His efforts to contain himself prevented him from hearing an exchange in which he nevertheless made out a new voice—that of a younger woman. Yet the boy had not moved a muscle; perhaps these words did not really concern him after all, perhaps the others were interrogating someone else. This second feminine voice might be the boy's mother. . . . But no, she was away on a trip. Besides, the father had brutally silenced the importunate interruption; he continued his accusation: “First of all, Julian says he didn't leave the door. So he lied in any case. . . . The brat can't even keep his job in the bakery! Liar, thief, murderer! . . .”
“Robert! Are you crazy?”
“Yes, that's right—I'm the one who's crazy. . . .All right, you, are you going to answer—yes or no? You were out there, weren't you—out on the cliff, when that fellow came here; you had just time enough to get back before I did—without taking the road, since your grandmother didn't see you. . . . Well, say something, stubborn! You met the little Leduc girl, didn't you—you tried something with her? Oh, I know she wasn't a saint. . . . All you had to do was leave her alone. . . . And then? You were fighting? or what? Maybe you made her fall without meaning to? You were at the edge of the rock, and in the struggle. . . . Or was it for revenge, because they threw you off the pier the other night? Well? . . . You're going to say something or I'll break your head for you!”
“Robert, you're losing your temper again, you're . . .”
The salesman instinctively stepped back into the shadow: a sudden thrill of warmth ran through him. He realized that a change had just occurred (but when?) in the relation between the plates and the calendar, in the face directly opposite—now staring at his own. Immediately recovering his composure, Mathias walked deliberately toward the door, while the father's voice repeated louder and louder: “Then let him answer, let him answer!”
“Someone's there,” the young man said.
Mathias exaggerated the noise his shoes made on the tiles and knocked with his ring on the half-open door. In the kitchen all sound had immediately ceased.
Then Robert Marek's voice said: “Come in!” and at the same moment the door was violently opened from inside. The salesman stepped forward. Everyone came toward him. They all seemed to know him: the old woman with the yellow face, the man in the leather jacket, even the young woman washing the dishes in a corner; half-turned toward the door, she had stopped in the midst of her work, a pot in her hand, and greeted him with a nod. Only the boy on the chair had not moved. He merely moved his eyes a little, in order to keep them fixed on Mathias.
Mathias, after having shaken all the hands held out to him, without succeeding despite his happy “hello's” in relaxing the tension in the air, ended up by walking over to the calendar tacked to the wall: “And there's Julian, my word! How he's grown! Let's see . . . how many years is it?”
“Can't you stand up when you're being spoken to?” shouted the father. “A real mule-face! That's why we were shouting a little, a minute ago: he's got himself fired from the bakery—yesterday morning—where he was working as an apprentice. I've half a mind to send him off as a cabin-boy if this goes on. . . . Always making trouble. . . . Last week he got into a fight with a drunken fisherman, fell in the harbor, and almost drowned. . . .That's what we were shouting about a minute ago. We were shaking some of the fleas out of him . . .”
Julian had stood up and was staring at his father. Then he turned and looked at the salesman. A vague smile hovered at the corners of his tightly-closed lips. He said nothing. Mathias did not dare hold out his hand to him. The wall was painted a flat ochre color of which the top layer was coming off here and there in polygonal scales. T
he picture on the calendar represented a little girl, her eyes blindfolded, playing blind-man's buff. He turned toward the grandmother: “And where are the children? I'd like to see them too . . .”
“They've gone back to school,” Robert Marek said.
Julian's eyes did not leave the salesman's face, compelling him to speak, to speak rapidly, as rapidly as possible, in constant fear his mind would be wandering over dangerous ground, or into some place impossible to get out of . . . he had missed the boat last night; he came back to the farm because he thought he had forgotten something . . . (no). So he had to wait here until Friday; he would take advantage of his time to get some rest. Nevertheless, he had come back to the farm to sell one or two more watches . . .(no). He had missed the boat by about three minutes because of the bicycle he had rented, which at the last minute . . . (no); the chain had been giving him trouble since morning: when Madame Marek had seen him at the crossroads, at the fork, at the turn, he was already trying to get it back into place. Today, with plenty of time to spare, he was making the trip on foot; he was back at the farm to hear about the whole family . . .
“Did you bring your wrist watches with you?” the old country woman asked. Mathias was about to answer in the affirmative when he remembered he had left his suitcase with his landlady. He thrust his hand into his duffle coat pocket and brought out the only item he had with him: the little gold-plated lady's model returned this morning by . . .
“This is the only one I have left,” he said, hoping to get out of the difficulty. Had not Madame Marek expressed the desire to furnish a certain member of her household with a watch—someone who was always late with her work?
The man in the leather jacket was not listening any more. At first, the old woman herself did not seem to understand; then her face brightened: “Ah, you mean Josephine!” she exclaimed, pointing at the girl. “No, she's not going to get any watch for a present—she'd forget to wind it. And she wouldn't know where she'd put it. And before three days were up she'd have lost it for good!”
The notion made both of them laugh. Mathias put the article back in his pocket. Deciding the situation was improving a little, he risked a glance in the young man's direction; but the latter had not moved, nor left off staring at Mathias. The father, who had been silent for several moments, suddenly asked the salesman point-blank: “I was sorry to get home too late yesterday to be able to see you. Do you happen to remember when it was you were here?”
“I'd say around noon,” Mathias answered evasively.
Robert Marek looked at his son. “That's strange! And where were you at the time?”
A strained silence fell on the room again. Finally the boy decided to open his mouth. “I was in the shed on the other side of the courtyard,” he said, without taking his eyes off the salesman.
“Yes,” Mathias broke in hastily, “that's quite possible. I didn't see him because of the haystacks.”
“There! You see!” cried the grandmother. “Just what I said all along!”
“What does that prove?” the man replied. “It's too easy to say that now!”
But the boy continued: “You got off the bicycle and you knocked at the door. Then you went to look at the gate to the garden. And before leaving you took a key out of a little bag fastened to the seat and used it to tighten something on your gearshift.”
“Yes, that's right!” Mathias confirmed after each phrase, trying to smile as if these imaginary acts had been as obvious as they were unimportant.
All of which, in fact, merely reinforced his own alibi. Since Julian Marek was bearing witness to the fact that Mathias had been at the farm, had even waited some time for the absent owners, how could he have been on the cliff at the very moment—that is, in the opposite direction where the girl was tending her sheep? The salesman was obviously above suspicion from now on . . .
At least Mathias wanted to believe he was, with all his might. Yet this unexpected guarantor disturbed rather than reassured him: he invented too glibly. If the boy had really been in the courtyard or the shed at the end of the morning, he knew perfectly well that no salesman had come to the door. On the other hand, if he hadn't been there and merely wanted to make his father think he had, why would he make up details as precise as the little bag, the key, and the gearshift? The chances he would hit on the exact elements were so slight that their inventor ran the risk of an immediate and categorical denial. The only explanation—madness aside —would be that Julian had known beforehand that Mathias would not contradict him, in any case, because of his own irregular situation—because of his reciprocal fear of a denial.
Now, if Julian knew about the salesman's questionable status, it was obviously because he had been at the farm at the time of Mathias’ supposed visit; he knew no one had knocked at the door. Which was why he had stared at the stranger so insolently at the very moment he was accumulating his fictitious details . . .
The question then remained the same as before: what was the boy's reason for supporting Mathias’ position? Why, having told his father from the start that he had remained in the doorway, could he not defend himself against the declarations made by a passer-by to his grandmother? Was he afraid that the latter had a better chance of being believed than he himself?
No. From the moment Julian began lying—so recklessly—it seemed more likely that things had happened differently: the boy was not at the farm that morning. (On the other hand, he certainly was not in the hollow of the cliff—where he was accused of being; he was somewhere else, that was all.) And he believed the salesman had visited the farm. But since his father demanded actual proof, he had needed to invent some precise detail—hit upon by chance. In order to ask Mathias’ help—for he would think the whole matter was of no importance to Mathias—Julian had looked him straight in the eyes, hoping to communicate his distress and obtain the salesman's complicity. What Mathias had attributed to insolence was really supplication. Or else the young man was trying to hypnotize him . . .
All the way back down the little road, between the gnarled trunks of the pines, the salesman examined the many aspects of the problem over and over again. He reminded himself that his headache might have prevented him from arriving at a solution, for he would certainly have established one indisputably if all his forces had been at his disposal. In his haste to escape that inhospitable kitchen and the young man's overinsistent stares, he had left without asking for the aspirin tablets he had counted on. Words, efforts of attention, all these calculations had now increased his discomfort to considerable proportions. He would be better off having avoided that damned farm altogether.
On the other hand, wasn't it worth having provoked such testimony? Julian Marek's public declaration, no matter how confused his motives, nevertheless was the desired proof that he had been waiting for some time in a place far from the scene of the accident. . . . A place “far” from the scene? Waiting for “some time"? How much time? As for the distance, the whole island measured only four miles from end to end! With a good bicycle . . .
After having struggled so hard to establish this alibi—supposing it could free him from all suspicion–Mathias now realized its inadequacy. He had stayed much too long on the cliff to be able to account for his time in this manner. There was still a hole in his schedule.
Mathias again began to recapitulate his movements since leaving the café-tobacco shop-garage. It had been then eleven-ten or eleven-fifteen. The distance to the Leduc house being virtually negligible, his arrival there could be set at eleven-fifteen exactly. This first stop certainly accounted for less than fifteen minutes, although the woman's chatter had made it seem exasperatingly long. The subsequent stops had been both rare and brief—two or three minutes altogether. The mile or so on the main road, between town and the turn, at full speed and without a single side-trip, had taken scarcely more than five minutes. Five and three, eight; and fifteen, twenty-three. . . . Less than twenty-five minutes had therefore elapsed between his start at the square and the place w
here the salesman had encountered Madame Marek. That made it eleven-forty at the most, more likely eleven-thirty-five. Yet this meeting with the old country woman had actually occurred an hour later.
In order to reduce the difference as much as possible, Mathias tried getting back to the same point figuring backward from the moment he had looked at his watch (seven minutes after one) in the café at Black Rocks. He had been there about ten minutes, fifteen perhaps. It had taken ten minutes, at the most, for the second sale (to the exhausted-looking couple), and approximately fifteen for the first (including a long conversation with Madame Marek). This part of the road, traveled without any particular haste, might figure on the schedule as ten extra minutes. Unfortunately all these figures seemed a little excessive. Their total, nevertheless, scarcely exceeded three-quarters of an hour. The meeting with the old lady must therefore have occurred at twenty after twelve at the earliest—probably at twelve twenty-five.
The abnormal, excessive, suspicious, inexplicable time amounted to forty minutes—if not fifty. It was more than enough to account for the two successive detours: the trip to the farm and back—including the minor repair to the gearshift in front of the closed door—and the trip to the cliff and back—including. . . . Mathias would merely have had to hurry a little.
He hurried on. Then, having crossed the main road, he continued down the opposite path—broad enough at the outset but subsequently narrowing to a vague dirt track-twisting to avoid roots and stumps, briar patches, and clumps of stunted gorse. The fields had disappeared. The last wall of fieldstone, half in ruins, indicated the beginning of the road beyond. On either side stretched a series of low ridges covered with reddish vegetation and relieved only occasionally by a gray rock, a thorn bush, or some vaguer, more distant silhouette which was harder to identify—at first sight.
The terrain sloped down. Mathias noticed ahead of him, at eye level, a darker line separating the uniform and motionless gray of the sky from another gray surface—similarly flat and perpendicular—the sea.
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