第2章

It was as if no one had heard.

The whistle blew again-a shrill, prolonged noise followed by three short blasts of ear-splitting violence: a violence without purpose that remained without effect. There was no more reaction-no further exclamation-than there had been at first; not one feature of one face had even trembled.

A motionless and parallel series of strained, almost anxious stares crossed-tried to cross-struggled against the narrowing space that still separated them from their goal. Every head was raised, one next to the other, in an identical attitude. A last puff of heavy, noiseless steam formed a great plume in the air above them, and vanished as soon as it had appeared.

Slightly to one side, behind the area in which the steam had just appeared, one passenger stood apart from the expectant group. The whistle had had no more effect on his withdrawal than on the passionate attention of his neighbors. Standing like them, his body and limbs rigid, he kept his eyes on the deck.

He had often heard the story before. When he was still a child-perhaps twenty-five or thirty years ago-he had had a big cardboard box, an old shoebox, in which he collected pieces of string. Not any string, not scraps of inferior quality, worn, frayed bits that had been spoiled by overuse, not pieces too short to be good for anything.

This one would have been just right. It was a thin hemp cord in perfect condition, carefully rolled into a figure eight, with a few extra turns wound around the middle. It must be pretty long-a yard at least, perhaps two. Someone had probably dropped it by mistake after having rolled it up for future use-or else for a collection.

Mathias bent down to retrieve it. As he straightened up again he noticed, a few feet to the right, a little girl of seven or eight gravely staring at him, her eyes enormous and calm. He smiled hesitantly, but she did not bother to smile back, and it was only after several seconds that he saw her eyes shift toward the wad of string he was holding at the level of his chest. He was not disappointed by a closer look: it was a real find-not too shiny, firmly and regularly twisted, and evidently very strong.

For a moment he thought he recognized it, as if it were something he had lost long ago. A similar cord once must have occupied an important place in his thoughts. Would it be with the others in the shoebox? His memory immediately edged away toward the indefinite light of a rainy landscape, in which a piece of string played no perceptible part.

He had only to put it in his pocket. But no sooner had he begun the gesture than he stopped, his arm half-bent, undecided, gazing at his hand. He saw that his nails were too long, which he already knew. He also noticed that in growing their shape had become exaggeratedly pointed; naturally he did not file them to look like that.

The child was still staring in his direction, but it was difficult to be sure she was looking at him and not at something behind him, or even at nothing at all; her eyes seemed almost too wide to be able to focus on a single object, unless it was one of enormous size. She must have been looking at the sea.

Mathias let his arm fall to his side. Suddenly the engines stopped. The vibration ceased at once, as well as the continuous rumbling sound that had accompanied the ship since its departure. All the passengers remained silent, motionless, pressed close together at the entrance to the already crowded corridor through which they would eventually leave the ship. Most of them, ready for the disembarkation for some time, held their luggage in their hands, and all were facing left, their eyes fixed on the top of the pier where about twenty people were standing in a compact group, equally silent and rigid, looking for a familiar face in the crowd on the little steamer. In each group the expressions were identical: strained, almost anxious, strangely petrified and uniform.

The ship moved ahead under its own momentum, and the only sound that could be heard was the rustling of water as it slid past the hull. A gray gull, flying from astern at a speed only slightly greater than that of the ship, passed slowly on the port side in front of the pier, gliding at the level of the bridge without the slightest movement of its wings, its head cocked, one eye fixed on the water below-one round, indifferent, inexpressive eye.

There was the sound of an electric bell. The engines started up again. The ship began to make a turn that brought it gradually closer to the pier. The coast rapidly extended along the other side: the squat lighthouse striped black and white, the half-ruined fort, the sluice gates of the tidal basin, the row of houses on the quay.

"She's on time today," said a voice. "Almost," someone corrected-perhaps it was the same voice.

Mathias looked at his watch. The crossing had lasted exactly three hours. The electric bell rang again; then once more, a few seconds later. A gray gull resembling the first one passed by in the same direction, following the same horizontal trajectory in the same deliberate way-wings motionless, head cocked, beak pointing downward, one eye fixed.

The ship didn't seem to be moving in any direction at all. But the noise of violently churning water could be heard astern. The pier, now quite close, towered several yards above the deck. The tide must have been out. The landing slip from which the ship would be boarded revealed the smoother surface of its lower section, darkened by the water and half-covered with greenish moss. On closer inspection, the stone rim drew almost imperceptibly closer.

The stone rim-an oblique, sharp edge formed by two intersecting perpendicular planes: the vertical embankment perpendicular to the quay and the ramp leading to the top of the pier-was continued along its upper side at the top of the pier by a horizontal line extending straight toward the quay.

The pier, which seemed longer than it actually was as an effect of perspective, extended from both sides of this base line in a cluster of parallels describing, with a precision accentuated even more sharply by the morning light, a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical: the crest of the massive parapet that protected the tidal basin from the open sea, the inner wall of the parapet, the jetty along the top of the pier, and the vertical embankment that plunged straight into the water of the harbor. The two vertical surfaces were in shadow, the other two brilliantly lit by the sun-the whole breadth of the parapet and all of the jetty save for one dark narrow strip: the shadow cast by the parapet. Theoretically, the reversed image of the entire group could be seen reflected in the harbor water, and, on the surface, still within the same play of parallels, the shadow cast by the vertical embankment extending straight toward the quay.

At the end of the jetty the structure grew more elaborate; the pier divided into two parts: on the parapet side, a narrow passageway leading to a beacon light, and on the left the landing slip sloping down into the water. It was this latter inclined rectangle, seen obliquely, that attracted notice; slashed diagonally by the shadow of the embankment it skirted, it showed up as one dark triangle and one bright. All other surfaces were blurred. The water in the harbor was not calm enough for the reflection of the pier to be distinguished. Similarly the shadow of the pier appeared only as a vague strip constantly broken by surface undulations. The shadow of the parapet on the jetty tended to blend into the vertical surface which cast it. Jetty and parapet alike were still encumbered with drying fish, empty crates, large wicker baskets-crayfish and lobster traps, oyster hampers, crab snares. The crowd gathered for the ship's arrival circulated with some difficulty among the various piles of objects.

The ship itself floated so low on the ebb tide that it became impossible to see anything from its deck save the vertical embankment extending straight toward the quay and interrupted at its other end, just in front of the beacon, by the oblique landing slip-its lower section smoother, darkened by the water, and half-covered with greenish moss-still the same distance from the deck, as if all movement were at an end.

Nevertheless, on closer inspection the stone rim drew almost imperceptibly nearer.

The morning sun, slightly overcast as usual, indicated shadows faintly, yet sufficiently to divide the slope into two symmetrical parts, one darker, one brighter, slanting a sharp point of light toward the bottom where the water rose along the slope, lapping between the strands of seaweed.

The movement bringing the little steamer nearer the triangle of stone that thus emerged from the darkness was itself an oblique one, and so deliberate as to be constantly approaching absolute immobility.

Measured and even, despite slight variations of amplitude and rhythm perceptible to the eye but scarcely exceeding six inches and two or three seconds, the sea rose and fell in the sheltered angle formed by the landing slip. On the lower section of this inclined plane the water alternately revealed and submerged great clumps of green seaweed. From time to time, at what were doubtless regular intervals-though probably of a more complex frequency-a powerful wash of water broke this rocking rhythm and the two masses of liquid, rushing against each other, collided with a slapping sound and spattered some drops of foam a little higher up against the embankment.

The ship's side-now parallel to the embankment-continued to advance; the channel between must have narrowed little by little as that movement extended the length of the pier. Mathias tried to find a point of reference. In the angle of the landing slip the water rose and fell against the brown stone embankment. This far out from shore none of the wreckage covering most harbor floors was visible from the surface. The seaweed that grew at the bottom of the landing slip, rising and falling again and again with the wash of water, was as fresh and glossy as the kind found only at great depths; it was never exposed to the air for very long at a time. As each little wave rolled in, it lifted the free ends of the clumps of seaweed, drew them down immediately afterward, and finally abandoned them once again, limp and outstretched on the streaming stones, trailing masses of tangled ribbon down the slope. From time to time a more powerful wash of water flooded the landing slip a little higher, leaving, as it flowed back, a shiny puddle in a hollow of the pavement that reflected the sky for a few seconds before it quickly disappeared between the stones.

Mathias decided on a mark shaped like a figure eight, cut clearly enough in the steep, recessed embankment to make a good point of reference. The mark was exactly opposite him, that is, ten or fifteen feet to the left of the point where the landing slip emerged from the pier. A sudden rise in the water level caused it to disappear. When, after forcing himself to keep his eyes in the same place for several seconds, he saw it again, he was not quite sure he was looking at the same mark-other irregularities in the stone looked just as much like-or unlike-the two little coupled circles whose shape he still remembered.

Something fell, thrown from the top of the pier, landing on the surface of the water-a piece of paper the color of a pack of cigarettes. The water rose in the sheltered angle of the landing slip, colliding with the backwash from its sloping surface. The periodic shock of this collision occurred just where the ball of blue paper was floating, and it was engulfed with a slapping sound; some drops of foam were spattered against the embankment, just as a more powerful wash of water again submerged the strands of seaweed and reached as far as the hollow in the pavement.

The water fell back at once; the limp seaweed remained outstretched on the wet rocks, trailing long strands down the slope. In the bright triangle, the little puddle reflected the sky.

Before it had time to disappear between the stones, this reflection was suddenly darkened, as if by the shadow of some great bird. Mathias raised his eyes. Flying from astern, the gray gull imperturbably described again, with the same deliberation, its horizontal trajectory-wings motionless and outspread in a double arc between the slightly drooping tips, head cocked to the right, one round eye fixed on the water-or the ship-or nothing at all.

According to their respective positions, it could not have been this gull's shadow that had just passed over the little puddle.

In the bright triangle the hollow of the pavement was dry. At the lower edge of the landing slip a rising wash of water had turned the seaweed so that it spread upward. Ten or fifteen feet to the left Mathias noticed the mark in the shape of a figure eight.

It was an eight on its side: two coupled circles of the same size, a little less than six inches in diameter. At the point of tangency appeared a reddish excrescence that looked like the rust-corroded pivot of an old iron ring. The circles on either side might have been worn gradually into the stone by a ring fastened vertically into the embankment by the pivot and swinging freely to the right or left in the wash of the ebb tide. Such a ring had doubtless been used for mooring boats at the pier ahead of the landing slip.

But the ring had been set so low in the embankment that it must have been underwater most of the time-sometimes several yards beneath the surface. Furthermore, its modest size scarcely seemed adequate to the thickness of the ropes ordinarily used for mooring even the smallest fishing boats. The only rope that could have passed through such a ring would have to be a thin, strong cord. Mathias turned his eyes ninety degrees toward the crowd of passengers, then lowered them to the deck. He had often heard the story before. It was on a rainy day; he had been left alone in the house; instead of doing the next days arithmetic homework he had spent all afternoon sitting at the back window, drawing a sea gull that had perched on one of the fence posts at the end of the garden.

It had been a rainy day-to all appearances a rainy day like the rest. He was sitting at the table wedged into the window recess, facing the window, two big books under the chair so he could work comfortably. The room must have been very dark; the table top reflected only enough light from outside to make the waxed oak gleam-very faintly. The notebook's white paper constituted the only bright thing in the room, along with the child's face, and perhaps his hands as well. He was sitting on a chair on top of two dictionaries-had been there for hours, probably. He had almost finished his drawing.

The room was very dark. Outside it was raining. The big gull remained motionless on its perch. He had not seen it land there. He did not know how long it had been where it was. Usually they did not come so near the house, not even in the worst weather, although between the garden and the sea there was no more than three hundred yards of open ground rolling toward an indentation in the coast, bounded on the left by the beginning of the cliff. The garden here was nothing but a piece of moorland planted with potatoes every year and fenced off with barbed-wire fastened to wooden posts to keep out the sheep. The unwieldy size of these posts indicated that originally they had not been intended for such use. The fence post at the end of the central path was even thicker than the rest, in spite of the slenderness of the lattice-gate it supported; it was a cylindrical post, a pine log roughly trimmed, and its almost flat top, a yard and a half above the ground, formed an ideal perch for the gull. The bird's head was turned toward the fence, in profile, one eye looking at the sea, the other at the house.

Between the fence and the house the garden, at this time of year, consisted of little more than a few late weeds piercing the carpet of dead vegetation that had been rotting in the rain for several days.

The weather was very calm, without a breath of wind. The continuous light rain may have blurred the horizon, but did not obstruct the view for shorter distances. On the contrary, it was as if in this new-washed air the objects near at hand profited from an additional luster-especially when they were light-colored to begin with, like the gull. He had copied not only the contours of its body, the folded gray wing, the single foot (which completely concealed the other one), and the white head with its round eye, but also the wavy line dividing the two parts of its curved, pointed bill, the pattern of the feathers on its tail and along the edges of its wing, and even the overlapping scales down the length of its leg.

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, there 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 confidence 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.

Today especially, success would be a matter of imagination. He would have to have played, long ago, over there on the cliff, with many little friends whom he had never known. Together they would have explored, at low tide, the unfamiliar regions inhabited by forms of life of only an equivocal probability. He had taught the others how to make the sabellas and sea-anemones open. Along the beaches they had found unidentifiable sea-wrack. For hours at a time they had watched the water rising and falling in the sheltered angle of the landing slip, had watched the seaweed alternately revealed and submerged. He had even showed them his string, had invented all kinds of complicated and uncertain games. People don't remember such things; he would manufacture childhoods for them leading straight to the purchase of a wrist watch. With the young it would be more convenient to have known a mother, a grandfather, or someone else.

A brother and an uncle, for instance. Mathias had reached the pier long before sailing time. He had talked to one of the sailors of the line who like himself, he discovered, had been born on the island; the man's whole family was still living there, his sister in particular, who had three daughters. Two were already engaged, but the third girl was causing her mother many worries. She couldn't be made to behave, and even at her age had an upsetting number of admirers. "She really is a devil," the sailor repeated, with a smile that betrayed how fond he was of his niece in spite of everything. Their house was the last one on the road to the big lighthouse as you left town. His sister was a widow, in easy circumstances. The three girls were named Maria, Jeanne, and Jacqueline. Mathias, who expected to put them to good use soon, added all these facts to the inquiries he had made the day before. In work like his, there was no such thing as a superfluous detail. He decided to have known the brother for a long time; if need be, he would have sold him a "six-jewel" model he had been using for years without it ever needing the slightest adjustment.

When the man made a gesture, Mathias noticed that he was not wearing a watch. His wrists stuck out beyond the sleeves of his jumper when he reached up to fasten the tarpaulin at the back of the post-office van. Nor was there a light strip around the skin of the left wrist, as there would have been if he had been wearing a watch until recently-if it was being repaired, for example. The watch, actually, had never needed repairs. The fact of the matter was that the sailor did not wear it during the week for fear of damaging it while he was working.

The two arms fell back. The man shouted something that was not understood on board over the noise of the engines; at the same moment he stepped to one side of the van and waved to the driver. The van's motor had not stopped, and the vehicle pulled away at once, making a quick, unhesitating turn around the little company office.

The employee in the chevroned helmet who had taken the tickets at the gangplank returned to the company office, closing the door behind him. The sailor who had just cast off the moorings from the pier and tossed them onto the deck took a tobacco pouch out of his pocket and began to roll himself a cigarette. At his right the ship's boy held out his arms, letting them fall slack at a certain distance from his body. The two of them remained alone at the end of the quay, along with the man whose watch worked so perfectly; the latter, noticing Mathias, waved his hand as if to wish him bon voyage. The stone rim began its oblique receding movement.

It was exactly seven o'clock. Mathias, whose time had to be very strictly calculated, noticed this with satisfaction. If the fog didn't grow too thick, they would be on time.

In any case, once ashore he mustn't waste a minute; it was the brevity of his stay, made necessary by the rest of his itinerary, which constituted the chief difficulty. It was true that the steamship line was not making his work any easier for him: there were only two boats a week, one making a round trip on Tuesday, the other on Friday. There was no question of staying on the island four days; that would be almost a week, and the whole advantage of his undertaking would be lost, or just about. He would have to confine himself to this one, all-too-short day, between the boat's arrival at ten and its departure at four-fifteen that afternoon. He therefore had six hours and fifteen minutes at his disposal-that would make three hundred sixty plus fifteen, three hundred and seventy-five minutes. Problem: if he wanted to sell his eighty-nine watches, how much time could he allow for each one?

Three hundred seventy-five divided by eighty-nine…. By using ninety and three hundred sixty the result was easy: four times nine, thirty-six-four minutes for each watch. Using the actual figures would even give him a little extra time: first of all the fifteen minutes omitted from the calculation, and then the time that the sale of the ninetieth watch (already sold) would have taken-another four minutes-fifteen and four, nineteen-a nineteen-minute margin in order not to risk missing the boat back. Mathias tried to imagine this ideal sale which would last only four minutes: arrival, sales-talk, display of the merchandise, choice of the article, payment of the amount written on the price-tag, departure. Even not taking into account any hesitation on the customer's part, any fuller explanation on his, any discussion about the price, how could he hope to sell everything he had in so little time?

The last house on the road to the big lighthouse as you leave town is an ordinary house: a one-story building with a small, square window on either side of a low door. As he passes Mathias knocks on the pane of the first window and without pausing continues to the door. The second he reaches it, he sees the door open in front of him; there is no need whatever to hesitate before entering the hallway, and then, after a quarter-turn to the right, the kitchen itself, where he immediately sets his suitcase down flat on the big table. With a quick gesture he opens the clasp; the cover springs back and right on top can be seen the most expensive items; he seizes the first cardboard strip in his right hand while with his left he lifts the protecting sheet of paper and points to the three splendid ladies' watches at four hundred twenty-five crowns. The lady of the house is standing near him, flanked by her two elder daughters (a little shorter than their mother), all three motionless and attentive. As one person, with a gesture of rapid, identical, and perfectly synchronized acquiescence, all three nod their heads. Already Mathias is removing-almost tearing-from the cardboard strip the three watches, one after the other, in order to hold them out to the three women who one after the other extend their hands-the mother first, then the daughter on the right, then the daughter on the left. The amount, calculated in advance, is there on the table: one thousand-crown note, two hundred-crown notes, and three twenty-five-crown pieces-twelve hundred seventy-five crowns-four hundred twenty-five multiplied by three. The amount is correct. The suitcase closes with a dry click.

As he was leaving he wanted to say a few words of farewell, but none came out of his mouth. He noticed this at the same moment he realized that the whole scene had been a stupidly wordless one. Once on the road, behind the closed door, his suitcase unopened in his hand, he understood that it all still remained to be done. Turning around, he knocked with his ring against the door panel, which echoed as if he had struck an empty box.

The varnished paint, recently renewed, imitated the veins and irregularities of wood to a fault. Judging from the sound of his knock, there could be no doubt that under this deceptive layer the door was really a wooden one. On a level with his face there were two round knots painted side by side: they looked like two big eyes-or more precisely like a pair of glasses. They were represented with an attention to detail not generally accorded to this type of decoration; yet although executed with the greatest possible realism, they comprised a perfection of design virtually beyond probability; it must have been artificial because it appeared so studied, as if the accidents themselves had occurred in obedience to law. But it would have been difficult to prove by any particular detail the flagrant impossibility of any such pattern in nature. Even the suspect symmetry of the whole door could be explained by some new development in carpentry. If the paint were scratched away at this very point, two real knots might have been discovered in the wood, knots cut exactly in this shape-or in any case presenting a very similar formation.

The fibers formed two dark circles, thicker at the top and the bottom and provided, at their highest points, with a little excrescence pointing upward. More than like a pair of glasses, they looked like two rings painted in trompe-l'oeil, with the shadows they cast on the wood panel and the two nails on which they hung. Their position was certainly surprising, and their modest size seemed out of all proportion to the thickness of the ropes usually used: nothing much heavier than thin cords could have been attached to them.

Because of the green seaweed that grew on the lower section of the landing slip, Mathias was obliged to watch where he put his feet in order not to slip, lose his balance, and do some kind of damage to his precious burden.

After a few steps he was out of danger. Having reached the top of the inclined plane, he continued to make his way along the jetty at the top of the pier extending straight toward the quay. But the crowd of passengers moved very slowly among the nets and traps, and Mathias could not walk as rapidly as he wanted to. To jostle past his neighbors served no purpose, in view of the narrowness and complexity of the passage. He would have to advance at their pace. Nevertheless he felt a slight impatience rising within him. They were taking too long to answer the door. Lifting his hand on a level with his face this time, he knocked again-between the two eyes painted on the wood. The door, which must have been extremely thick, sent back a dull sound which would be barely audible inside. He was about to knock again, this time with his ring, when he heard a noise in the vestibule.

Now he must get something a little less ghostly under way. It was essential that the customers say something; therefore he would have to say something first. The exaggerated acceleration of his gestures also constituted a major danger: working fast must not keep him from remaining natural.

The door opened on the mother's mistrustful countenance. Distracted from her work by this unexpected visit and finding herself face to face with a stranger-the island was so small she knew everyone on it-she was already preparing to close the door again. Mathias was someone who had knocked at the wrong door-or else a traveling salesman, which was no better.

Of course she said nothing. He made what seemed to him a considerable effort: "Good morning, madame," he said. "How are you?" The door slammed in his face.

The door had not slammed, but it was still closed. Mathias felt as if he were going to be dizzy.

He noticed that he was walking too near the edge, on the side where the pier had no railing. He stopped to let a group of people pass him; a narrowing of the path, caused by the accumulation of empty boxes and baskets, dangerously choked the line of passengers ahead of him. Down the vertical embankment his gaze plunged to the water that rose and fell against the stone. The pier's shadow colored it a dark green-almost black. As soon as the path was clear, he stepped away from the edge-to the left-and continued on his way.

A voice behind him repeated that the boat was on time this morning. But this was not quite accurate: it had actually docked a good five minutes late. Mathias turned his wrist to glance at his watch. This whole landing was interminable.

When he finally managed to reach the kitchen, a period of time out of all proportion to the amount at his disposal must have passed, yet he had not promoted his interests in the slightest. The lady of the house had only admitted him, apparently, against her better judgment. He set his suitcase down flat on the big oval table in the middle of the room.

"You can judge for yourself," he forced himself to say; but hearing the sound of his own voice and the silence that followed, he sensed how falsely it rang. The words lacked conviction-density-to a disturbing degree; it was worse than saying nothing at all. The table was covered by an oilcloth with a pattern of little flowers, a pattern that might have been like the one on the lining of his suitcase. As soon as he had opened the suitcase he quickly put the memorandum book inside the open cover, in the hope of concealing the dolls from his customer.

Instead of the memorandum book spread conspicuously over the sheet of paper that protected the first row of watches, appeared the wad of cord rolled into a figure eight. Mathias was in front of the door to the house, contemplating the two circles with their symmetrical deformations painted side by side in the center of the panel. Finally he heard a noise in the vestibule and the door opened on the mother's mistrustful countenance.

"Good morning, madame."

For a moment he thought she was going to answer, but he was mistaken; she continued to look at him without speaking. Her strained, almost anxious expression indicated something more than surprise, something more than ill-humor or suspicion; and if she was frightened, it was difficult to imagine why. Her features were frozen in the very expression they had assumed when she first saw him-as though unexpectedly recorded on a photographic plate. This immobility, far from making it easier to read her countenance, merely rendered each attempt at interpretation more uncertain: although the face, judging from appearances, expressed some intention-a very banal intention that seemed identifiable at first glance-it ceaselessly avoided every reference by which Mathias attempted to capture its meaning. He was not even altogether certain whether she was looking at him-the man who provoked her mistrust, her astonishment, her fear…-or at something behind him-beyond the road, the potato field bordering it, the barbed-wire fence, and the open ground on the other side-something that came from the sea.

She didn't appear to see him. He made what seemed to him a considerable effort: "Good morning, madame," he said. "I have news for you…"

The pupils of her eyes had not moved a fraction of an inch; yet he had the impression-he imagined the impression, he gathered it, a net full of fish, or of too much seaweed, or of a little mud-he imagined that her gaze fell on him.

The customer was looking at him. "I have some news for you, some news of your brother, your brother the sailor." The woman opened her mouth several times, moving her lips as if she were speaking-with difficulty. But no sound came from them.

Then, very low, a few seconds later, came the words: "I have no brother"-words too brief to correspond to the movements the lips had made a moment before. Immediately afterward-as an echo-came the expected sounds, somewhat more distinct although distorted, inhuman, like the voice of an old phonograph record: "Which brother? All my brothers are sailors."

The eyes had moved no more than the lips. They still looked away, toward the open ground, the cliff, the distant sea beyond the field and the barbed-wire fence.

Mathias, on the verge of abandoning his attempt, started to explain again: he meant the brother who worked for the steamship company. The voice became more regular as it answered: "Oh, of course, that's Joseph." And she asked if there was a message.

From then on, fortunately, the conversation gathered momentum and accelerated. Intonations and expressions began to come into focus; gestures and words were once again functioning almost normally: "… wrist watches… the finest being manufactured today, and the cheapest as well; all sold with a guarantee and a manufacturer's certificate, registered and trade-marked, waterproof, rustproof, shock-proof, antimagnetic…" He would have to keep track of the time all this was taking, but at the moment the question of knowing whether the brother wore a watch-and for how long he had-threatened to lead to another collapse. Mathias needed all his attention to get past it.

He managed to reach the kitchen and its oval table, and set his suitcase on it while continuing the conversation. Then there was the oilcloth and the little flowers of its pattern. Things were going almost too quickly. There was the pressure of his fingers on the clasp of the suitcase, the cover opening wide, the memorandum book lying on the pile of cardboard strips, the dolls printed on the lining, the memorandum book inside the open cover, the piece of cord rolled into a figure eight on top of the pile of cardboard strips, the vertical side of the pier extending straight toward the quay. Mathias stepped back from the water, toward the parapet.

Among the passengers lined up in front of him he looked for the little girl who had been staring into space; he did not see her any more-unless he was looking at her without recognizing her. He turned around as he was walking, thinking he might catch sight of her behind him. He was surprised to discover that he was the last passenger on the pier. Behind him the pier was empty again, a cluster of parallel lines describing a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical, in light and in shadow. At the very end was the beacon light that indicated the entrance to the harbor.

Before reaching the end of the pier, the horizontal plane formed by the jetty underwent a change, lost in an abrupt inset about two-thirds of its width, and continued, thus narrowed, as far as the turret of the beacon light between the massive parapet (on the open sea side) and the embankment without a railing that was set back for two or three yards of its length, plunging straight down into the black water. From where Mathias was standing the landing slip was no longer visible because of the steepness of its slope, so that the jetty appeared to be cut off at that point without any reason.

When he turned around and continued his interrupted walk toward the quay, there was no one on the pier ahead of him either. It was suddenly deserted. On the quay, in front of the row of houses, only three or four little groups of people could be seen, and a few isolated figures moving in one direction or the other, going about their affairs. The men were all wearing more or less worn and patched blue canvas trousers and wide fishermen's jumpers. The women wore aprons and were bare-headed. All had on sabots. These people could not be the passengers who had disembarked to join their families. The passengers had disappeared-had already gone into their houses, or perhaps into the nearby alley leading to the center of town.

But the center of town was not situated behind the houses along the quay. It was a square, opening at its narrowest side on the quay itself and roughly triangular in shape. Besides the quay, which thus constituted the base of the triangle pointing into the town, four roadways opened into it: one into each of the long sides (the least important) of the triangle, and the two others at its point-on the right the road to the fort, which it skirted before following the coast toward the northwest, and on the left the road to the big lighthouse.

In the center of the square Mathias noticed a statue he did not recognize-at least he had no recollection of it. Rising from a granite pedestal cut to imitate living rock, a woman in regional dress (which was no longer worn) was scanning the horizon toward the open sea. Although there was no list of names cut into the sides of the pedestal, the statue must have been a monument to the dead.

As he was passing next to the high iron fence around it-a circle of rectilinear, vertical, and equidistant rails-he saw at his feet, on the big rectangular paving-stones laid around the monument, the shadow of the stone peasant woman. It was deformed in projection, unrecognizable but distinct: very dark in contrast to the rest of the dusty surface and so sharp in outline that Mathias had the sensation of stumbling against a solid body. He made an instinctive movement to avoid the obstacle.

He had not had time yet to begin the necessary swerve when he was already smiling at his mistake. He put his foot in the middle of the body. Around him the fence rails ruled off the ground with the oblique regularity of the heavily lined white paper made for schoolchildren to learn to slant their handwriting regularly. Mathias turned right to get out of the network of shadows more quickly. He stepped down to the uneven cobbles. The sun, as the distinctness of the shadows bore witness, had burned off the morning mist. At this season it was unusual that a day promised to be so fine.

The café-tobacco shop, which also served as a garage, according to the information he had obtained the day before, was on the right side of the triangle, at the corner of the alley that led to the quay.

In front of the door a bulletin-board, supported from behind by two wooden uprights, offered the weekly program of the local movie house. The showings doubtless took place in the garage itself, on Sundays. In the garishly colored advertisement, a colossal man dressed in Renaissance clothes was clutching a young girl wearing a kind of long pale nightgown; the man was holding her wrists behind her back with one hand, and was strangling her with the other. The upper part of her body and her head were bent backward in her effort to escape her executioner, and her long blond hair hung down to the ground. The setting in the background represented a tremendous pillared bed with red covers.

The bulletin-board was placed in such a way-partly concealing the entrance-that Mathias was obliged to walk around it in order to get into the café. There were no customers in the room, and no one was behind the counter. Instead of calling, he came out again after a moment's wait.

No one could be seen in the vicinity. The square itself gave an impression of solitude. Except for the tobacco shop, there was not a single store: the grocery, the butcher shop, the bakery, and the main café all faced the harbor. Furthermore, more than half its left side consisted of an unbroken wall almost six feet high, its masonry crumbling and its tile sheathing missing in several places. At the point of the triangle, in the fork of the two roads, stood a small, official-looking building, set off by a plot of ground; above the pediment was a long pole with a flag attached to it; it might have been a school or the town hall-or both. Everywhere (except around the statue), the utter absence of sidewalks was surprising: the roadway of old paving-stones, full of humps and hollows, reached to the house walls. Mathias had forgotten this detail, like everything else. In his round-about inspection, his eyes fell again on the wooden bulletin-board. He had already seen this advertisement a few weeks ago, posted all over the city. Probably its unusual angle made him notice for the first time the broken doll lying on the ground at the hero's feet.

He raised his eyes toward the windows above the café, in the hope of catching someone's attention. The building, almost austere in its simplicity, had only one upper story, like all its neighbors, whereas most of those facing the harbor had two. He noticed along the alley joining the square the backs of the houses he had already passed in front-their structure was just as elementary, in spite of their greater size. The last, at the corner formed by the square and the quay, stood out in a patch of shadow against the sparkling water of the harbor. The free end of the pier could be seen protruding beyond the gable-end; it too was in shadow, striped with a single horizontal line of light running its length between the parapet and the inner embankment and connected by a short, oblique projection to the ship moored against the landing slip. Farther away than it seemed, and especially by contrast with the pier that was actually larger at low tide, the ship had become ridiculously tiny.

Mathias had to screen his eyes with his hand to protect them from the sun.

Emerging from the angle between the houses, a woman in a black dress with a wide skirt and narrow apron crossed the square in his direction. In order not to have to step up onto the sidewalk around the monument, her path described a curve of which the eventual perfection disappeared in the irregularities of the terrain. When she was no more than two or three steps away Mathias greeted her and asked if she knew where he could find the owner of the garage. He wanted-he added-to rent a bicycle for the day. The woman pointed to the movie advertisement, that is, to the tobacco shop located behind it: then, learning that there was no one inside, she seemed to be distressed by the news, as if in that case the situation was without remedy. To spare his feelings, no doubt, she declared-in very vague terms-that the garageman would not have rented him a bicycle anyway; or else her words must have meant…

At this moment a man's head appeared in the doorway above the bulletin-board.

"There," said the woman, "there's someone now." And she disappeared into the alley leading to the harbor. Mathias walked over to the tobacconist.

"Good-looking girl, isn't she?" the man said, with a wink toward the alley.

Although he had seen nothing particularly attractive about the woman in question, who had not seemed to him even very young, Mathias returned the wink-as a professional obligation. In fact it had not even crossed his mind that she might be considered from this point of view; he remembered only that she was wearing a thin black ribbon around her neck, in accordance with the old island custom. He began explaining his business at once. He had been sent by Père Henry, the proprietor of the Café Transatlantique (one of the city's large establishments); he wanted to rent a bicycle for the day-a good bicycle. He would return it at four this afternoon, before the boat left, since he had no intention of staying until Friday.

"Are you a traveling salesman?" asked the man.

"Wrist watches," answered Mathias, lightly tapping his suitcase.

"Ha! Ha! You sell watches," repeated the other. "Good for you!" But immediately afterward, with a grimace: "You won't sell one, they're all too backward around here. You're wasting your time."

"I'll try my luck," answered Mathias good-naturedly.

"All right. Fine. That's up to you. In any case, you wanted a bicycle?"

"Yes, the best one you have."

The garageman thought for a moment and declared that in his opinion there wasn't any need for a bicycle to cover six blocks of houses. He indicated the square with an ironic shrug.

"I'll be working more in the country," explained Mathias. "A kind of specialty."

"Oh, in the country? All right then!" agreed the garageman.

As he spoke these last words he opened his eyes wide: selling watches to the people living on the cliff seemed even more chimerical to him. The conversation nevertheless remained quite friendly-although a little too long for Mathias' taste. His interlocutor had an odd way of answering, always beginning in agreement, even repeating his own words in a tone of conviction, only to introduce some doubt a second later, and then deny everything by a contrary, more or less categorical, proposition.

"Well then," he concluded, "you'll travel around the island. You have good weather for it. Some people think the cliffs are picturesque."

"As for the island, you see, I know it already: I was born here!" replied Mathias.

And as if to prove what he had said, he gave his surname. This time the garageman started off on still more complicated considerations in which he managed to imply that Mathias must have been born on the island to conceive the preposterous notion of returning to it for a sales trip, and at the same time that the expectation of selling a single wrist watch betrayed a complete ignorance of the place, and finally that names like his didn't mean a thing-you could find them wherever you liked. He himself was not born on the island-of course not-and he didn't expect to stay there and "gather moss," either.

As for the bicycle, the man had an excellent one which wasn't "here, at the moment." He would go fetch it, "as a favor" Mathias would have it in half an hour without fail. Mathias thanked him; he would adapt himself to this turn of events, would make a quick visit to some of the houses in town before canvassing the outlying villages, and would return for the bicycle in exactly three-quarters of an hour.

On the off chance, he offered to display his wares: "excellent merchandise, completely guaranteed and at unbeatable prices." The other having agreed, they went into the café, where Mathias opened his suitcase on the first table from the door. Scarcely had he lifted the paper protecting the top strip of cardboard than his client changed his mind: he had no need of a watch, he was wearing one now (he lifted his sleeve-it was true) and was even keeping another in reserve. Besides, he would have to hurry if he was to get hold of the bicycle by the time he had promised. In his haste he almost pushed the salesman out of the café. It was as if he had acted as though he had only to verify the contents of the suitcase. What had he expected to find?

Above the wooden bulletin-board Mathias caught sight of the granite statue which divided the visible part of the pier into two sections. He stepped down onto the uneven cobbles, and in order to avoid the bulletin-board made a step in the direction of the town hall-of what looked like a town hall-in miniature. If the building had been newer, its size would have made it look like a model.

Then his gaze turned left, sweeping over the whole length of the square: the little plot of ground in front of the town hall, the road to the big lighthouse, the wall with the crumbling sheathing, the alley and the backs of the first houses facing the harbor, the gable-end of the corner house which cast its shadow on the paving-stones, the central section of the pier in shadow above a quadrilateral of sparkling water, the monument to the dead, the little steamer moored against the landing slip defined by a band of light, the free end of the pier with its beacon light, the open sea as far as the horizon.

The cube-shaped pedestal of the monument had no inscription on its southern face either. Mathias had forgotten to buy cigarettes. He would buy them in a moment, on his way back. In the tobacco shop, among all the apéritif advertisements, hung the placard distributed throughout the province by the syndicate of retail jewelers: "Buy your watch at your Jeweler's." There was no jeweler on the island. The tobacconist was prejudiced against the place and its inhabitants. His exclamation about the woman with the black ribbon must have been made ironically-the incomplete beginning of a favorite manner of speaking:

"Good-looking girl, isn't she?"

"That one, yes! Good enough to eat!"

"Well, you're not hard to please! They're all hideous around here, and drunk all the time."

The fellow's pessimistic predictions ("You won't sell one, they're all too backward around here!") were nevertheless a bad omen. Without conceding them any objective importance-without believing they corresponded to any real knowledge, on the part of the speaker, of the market, or even to any particular power of divination-Mathias would have preferred not having heard them. Then too, he still felt a certain annoyance at the recent decision to begin his rounds in town, when according to the original itinerary he would have completed his rounds there-if the country left him time enough before the boat's departure. His confidence-carefully constructed but entirely too fragile-was already shaken. He tried to find in this vacillation-in this propitiatory change of plan-some token of success, but in reality he felt the whole enterprise collapsing beneath him.

He was going to start out now by devoting three-quarters of an hour to these sad houses, where he was positive he would meet with one failure after another. When he would finally leave on the bicycle, it would be after eleven. From eleven to four-fifteen left only five and a quarter hours-three hundred fifteen minutes. Furthermore, it wasn't four minutes per sale that he would have to allow, but ten at least. By putting every one of his three hundred fifteen minutes to good advantage he would still only manage to get rid of thirty-one and a half watches. And unfortunately even this result was inaccurate: first of all he would have to subtract the considerable amount of time spent in getting from place to place and then, above all, the time wasted on people who didn't buy anything-obviously the most numerous. According to his most favorable calculations (those by which he sold all eighty-nine watches), out of the two thousand inhabitants there were in any case nineteen hundred eleven who would refuse to buy; figuring even only a minute per person, that came to nineteen hundred eleven minutes, which-dividing by sixty-was more than thirty hours for refusals alone. It was five times more time than he had! One-fifth of a minute-twelve seconds-twelve seconds for a negative answer. He might as well give up right away, since he didn't even have time to free himself from so many refusals.

Along the quay in front of him stretched the housefronts which led him back toward the pier. The vague light brought no detail into relief, nothing solid to hold on to. The crumbling whitewashed walls, stained with damp, were of no age and of no period. The clump of buildings did not suggest much of the island's former importance-an entirely military importance, it was true, but one which in past centuries had permitted the development of a flourishing little port. After the naval services' abandonment of a base impossible to defend against modern weapons, a fire had completed the ruin of the decaying town. The dwellings built in place of those destroyed were much less luxurious and no longer on the same scale as the immense pier, which now protected no more than twenty small sailboats and a few trawlers of low tonnage, and bore no relation to the imposing mass of the fort which marked the town limit on the other side. It was now nothing more than an extremely modest fishing port, with neither natural resources nor commercial possibilities. Shellfish and the fish taken by trawler were shipped to the mainland, but the profits from this trade grew less and less satisfactory. The spider-crabs that were a specialty of the island sold particularly badly.

At low tide the remains of these crabs strewed the naked mud in front of the quay. Among the flat stones with their manes of rotting seaweed, on the barely slanting blackish surface, in which sparkled here and there a tin can that still had not rusted, a bit of crockery painted with little flowers, a blue enamel skimmer almost intact, their arched, spiny shells could be distinguished next to the longer, smoother shells of ordinary crabs. There was also a considerable quantity of bony legs, or parts of legs-one, two, or three joints ending in a claw that was too long, slightly curved, and sharp-edged-and large, pointed pincers, most of them broken, some of startling size, worthy of real sea monsters. Under the morning sun the whole surface gave off an odor that was already strong, though not quite repellent: a mixture of iodine, fuel oil, and slightly stale shrimp.

Mathias, who had stepped out of his path to get nearer the edge, turned back toward the houses. He crossed the width of the quay toward the shop forming the corner of the square-a kind of dry goods-hardware emporium-and entered the dark orifice that opened between it and the butcher shop.

The door, which he had found ajar, closed softly as soon as he released it. Coming in out of the bright sunshine, he could see nothing at all for a moment. Then he realized he was looking at the hardware shopwindow from behind. He noticed on the left a round, long-handled enameled iron skimmer like the one sticking out of the mud, the same shade of blue, scarcely any newer. Looking more closely, he discovered that a sizable chip of the enamel had flaked off, leaving a fan-shaped black mark fringed with concentric lines that faded out toward the edge. To the right, a dozen identical little knives-mounted on a cardboard strip, like watches-formed a circle, all pointing toward a tiny design in the center which must have been the manufacturer's trade-mark. Their blades were about four inches long, quite thick but tapering to a sharp cutting edge much slenderer than those of ordinary knives; they were more like triangular stilettos, with a single honed edge. Mathias could not remember ever having seen knives like them; the fishermen doubtless used them for a particular kind of dismemberment-a very ordinary kind, though, since there was no indication as to their use. The cardboard strip was decorated with a red frame, the trade-mark "Indispensable" inscribed at the top in capital letters, and the label at the center of the wheel of which the knives constituted the spokes. The design represented a tree with a smooth, rectilinear trunk terminating in two branches forming a Y and bearing little tufts of foliage that barely protruded beyond the two branches at the sides, but filled in the fork of the Y.

Again Mathias found himself out in the road that had no sidewalk. Of course he had not sold a single wrist watch. In the hardware shopwindow could be seen various objects that were ordinarily sold in dry-goods stores as well, ranging from big balls of thread for mending fishnets to black silk braids and pincushions.

Once past the butcher shop, Mathias disappeared into the next doorway.

He made his way down the same dark narrow corridor the arrangement of which he now recognized. Without, however, achieving any greater success. At the first door he knocked on, there was no answer. At the second, a very old woman, pleasant enough although stone deaf, obliged him to abandon all attempts at salesmanship: since she understood nothing of what he wanted, he retreated with many smiles and an expression indicating he was entirely satisfied with his visit; somewhat startled, the old woman decided to smile back and even to thank him warmly. With many reciprocal little bows, they parted after an affectionate handshake; in another moment she would have kissed him. He climbed the uncomfortable staircase to the first floor; there a woman shut the door in his face without giving him time to speak a word; a baby was screaming somewhere. On the second floor he found only some dirty, frightened children-perhaps they were sick, since they were home from school on a Tuesday.

On the quay again, he turned back to try to interest the butcher, who was waiting on two customers; no one paid enough attention to what he was saying to justify even opening the suitcase. He did not insist, repelled by the cold smell of the meat.

The next shop was the café "A l'Espérance." He walked in. The first thing to do in a café is to buy a drink. He went to the bar, set his suitcase on the floor between his feet, and asked for an absinthe.

The girl working behind the bar had a timorous face and the ill-assured manner of a dog that had been whipped. When she ventured to raise her eyelids her large eyes could be seen-dark and lovely-but only for an instant; she lowered them immediately, leaving only her long doll's lashes to be admired. Their delicate outlines emphasized her vulnerable expression.

Three men-three sailors-whom Mathias had passed as they were arguing in front of the door walked in and sat down at a table, They ordered red wine. The barmaid walked around the bar, awkwardly carrying the bottle and three glasses stacked one inside the other. Without a word she set down the glasses in front of the customers. To fill them exactly she leaned forward from the waist, her head to one side. Under her apron she was wearing a black dress cut low over the delicate skin of her back. Her hair was arranged so that the nape of her neck was completely exposed.

One of the sailors had turned toward the bar. Mathias, without having had time to realize what made him turn away, suddenly wheeled back to his glass of absinthe and drank a swallow of it. In front of him was someone new, standing against the door frame of the inner room, near the cash drawer. Mathias made a vague gesture of greeting.

The man did not seem to notice it. He kept his eyes fastened on the girl who was still pouring the wine.

She was not used to the job. She poured too slowly, constantly watching the level of the liquid in the glass, determined not to waste a drop. When the third one was filled to the brim she raised the bottle and, holding it in both hands, returned to her place with lowered eyes. At the other end of the bar the man watched her severely as she approached him, walking with short steps. She must have become aware of her master's presence-in a flicker of her lashes-for she stopped short, hypnotized by the floorboards at the tips of her shoes.

The others were already quite motionless. Once the girl's change of position-too uncertain to last under such conditions-had been reabsorbed in its turn, the entire scene crystallized.

No one said anything.

The barmaid looked at the floor in front of her feet. The proprietor looked at the barmaid. Mathias watched the proprietor looking at her. The three sailors looked at their glasses. Nothing revealed the pulsation of the blood through the veins-not a quiver.

It would be pointless to try to estimate the time this lasted.

Four syllables rang out. But instead of breaking the silence, they were completely assimilated by it: "Are you asleep?"

The voice was heavy, deep, slightly singsong. Although spoken without anger, almost softly, the words concealed beneath their pretended gentleness an unspecified threat. Or it might have been in this very appearance of intimidation, on the other hand, that the pretense was to be found.

After a considerable delay-as if the command had taken a long time to reach her across a stretch of sand and stagnant water-the girl continued to advance timorously without lifting her head toward the man who had just spoken. (Had anyone seen his lips move?) Having reached a point near him-less than a step away-within reach of his hand-she leaned over to put the bottle back in place-presenting the nape of her neck from which, where it was exposed by her dress, protruded the tip of a vertebra. Then, straightening up, she busied herself drying the newly-washed glasses. Outside, behind the glass door, beyond the paving-stones and the mud, the water of the harbor sparkled in dancing flashes: undulating lozenges of flame forming transverse gothic arches, lines which suddenly contracted to produce a jagged flash of light-which as suddenly flattened, extending horizontally until it formed a line that broke once more into a brilliant zigzag-a jig-saw puzzle, a seamless series of incessant dislocations.

At the sailors' table, air whistled between clenched teeth-preceding the imminent return of speech.

Passionately, though in an undertone, syllables picked out by one: "… would deserve…" began the youngest, who was continuing some long-drawn-out argument begun elsewhere. "She deserves…" A silence…. A little whistle…. Squinting from the effort of choosing his words, he was looking into a dark corner where the pin-ball machine stood. "I don't know what she deserves."

"Oh, yes!" said one of the two others-the one next to him-in a more sonorous tone, exaggeratedly drawling the initial interjection.

The third sailor, sitting opposite, drank off the wine left in the bottom of his glass and said calmly, already bored by the subject: "A good smack…. And you too."

They stopped talking. The proprietor had disappeared from the doorway to the inner room. Mathias noticed the girl's large dark eyes-in a flicker of her lashes. He drank a swallow of absinthe. The glasses were all dried now; to give herself something to do the girl put her hands behind her back on the pretext of retying her apron strings.

"The whip!" continued the young man's voice. He whistled between his teeth, two short blasts, and repeated the word in a more uncertain tone-as if in a dream.

Mathias looked down at the glass of cloudy yellow alcohol in front of him. He saw his right hand lying on the edge of the counter, the nails he had neglected to cut, and their abnormal length and pointedness.

He thrust his hand into the pocket of his duffle coat, where it came in contact with the wad of cord. He remembered the suitcase at his feet, the purpose of his trip, the urgency of his work. But the proprietor was not there any longer and the girl would not be in a position to spend one hundred fifty or two hundred crowns. Two of the drinkers evidently belonged to the non-watch-buying category; as for the youngest, he was repeating some story of an unfaithful wife or fickle sweetheart from which it would be difficult to distract him.

Mathias finished his absinthe and signaled that he was ready to pay for it by jingling the coins in his pocket.

"That will be three crowns seven," said the girl.

Surprisingly enough, she spoke quite naturally, without a trace of embarrassment. The absinthe was not expensive. He spread out on the counter the three silver coins and the seven bronze ones, then added a brand-new half-crown.

"For you."

"Thank you, sir." She picked up all the coins and dropped them pell-mell into the cash drawer.

"Your mistress isn't here?" asked Mathias.

"She's upstairs, sir," the girl answered.

The proprietor's silhouette appeared again in the doorway to the inner room, exactly where it had been before-not in the center, but leaning against the right side-as if he had not moved since his first appearance. His expression had not changed either: inscrutable, harsh, waxen, it could be variously interpreted as hostility, concern, or merely absent-mindedness; on the other hand, such a countenance was just as likely to harbor the most sinister intentions. The girl had bent down to stack the clean glasses under the counter. On the other side of the glass door reflections from the water flickered in the sunlight.

"Nice day!" said Mathias.

He stooped and picked up his suitcase with his left hand. He was anxious to get outside again. If no one answered him he would leave without making further efforts.

Just then came the girl's quiet voice: "This gentleman wanted to see Madame Robin." In the sun's glare the water of the harbor danced with dazzling flashes of light. Mathias put his right hand over his eyes.

"What about?" asked the proprietor.

Mathias turned to face him. He was a tall, heavily built man-almost a giant. The impression of strength he produced was emphasized by an immobility that he seemed to find difficult to overcome.

"This is Monsieur Robin," the girl explained.

Mathias nodded his head with a good-natured smile. This time the proprietor returned his greeting, though with an almost imperceptible gesture. He must have been about Mathias' age.

"I once knew someone named Robin," Mathias said, "about thirty years ago, when I was still just a boy…" And he began to conjure up, in a rather vague way, schoolday memories suitable to any islander's childhood. "Robin," he added, "a big, strong fellow…. I think he was named Jean-Jean Robin…"

"My cousin," the man said, nodding his head. "He wasn't so big as all that. Anyway, he's dead."

"No!"

"He died in thirty-six."

"That's incredible!" Mathias exclaimed, suddenly overcome with sadness. His friendship for this imaginary Robin was sensibly enhanced by the fact that he ran no risk of encountering him in the course of his inventions. He mentioned his own surname in passing and attempted to draw out his interlocutor, who would then take him into his confidence. "And how did the poor chap die?"

"Is that why you wanted to see my wife?" inquired the genuine Robin, whose perplexity might have been authentic.

Mathias reassured him. The purpose of his visit was quite different: he was selling wrist watches and he happened to have with him three attractive ladies' styles which would certainly interest a woman of taste like Madame Robin.

Monsieur Robin made a little gesture with his arm-his first actual movement since his appearance-to show he was not taken in by the compliment. The salesman gave a knowing laugh which unfortunately aroused no response. At the sailors' table the red-faced man sitting at the deceived lover's left repeated his drawled "oh, yes"-for no apparent reason, since no one had spoken to him. Mathias hastened to explain that he also had a number of men's models of exceptional quality, considering their price-defying all competition. He should have opened his suitcase unhesitatingly and enumerated the advantages of his merchandise while passing it around; but the counter was too high to facilitate such an operation, which required freedom of movement, and the use of one of the tables would oblige him to turn his back to the proprietor, his only likely customer. Nevertheless, he decided on this unsatisfactory solution and began his sales-talk-standing too far to one side, however, to be in a position to convince any of his hearers. After having washed, dried, and put away his empty glass, the barmaid took a rag and wiped off the counter's zinc top at the spot where he had just been drinking. Next to him the three sailors had begun a new argument as incoherent as the last, with the same economy of words and the same deliberation, displaying neither progression nor conclusion. This time it was something about a shipment of spider-crabs ("hookers," they called them) to be transported to the mainland; there was a disagreement about how they were to be marketed-a difference of opinion, it appeared, with their fishmonger. Or else they were in agreement but not altogether satisfied with the decision they had reached. To put an end to the discussion, the oldest-who was facing the other two-declared that it was his round next. The girl again picked up the bottle of red wine and walked around the bar, taking short steps.

Mathias, who had approached the proprietor in order to give him a better look at one of the series of watches (at two hundred fifty crowns), saw the man's eyes shift from the cardboard strip to the table where his employee was pouring the wine. She held her head to one side, neck and shoulders bent, in order to observe more closely the rising level of the liquid in the glass. Her black dress was cut low in back. Her hair was arranged so that the nape of her neck was exposed.

Since no one was paying attention to him any more, Mathias was about to put the cardboard strip back in the suitcase. The red-faced sailor looked up and made a sudden grimace of complicity in his direction. At the same time he nudged the man next to him: "What about you, Louis, don't you want a watch? Don't you? (A wink.) What about a present for Jacqueline?"

As if in answer the young man whistled between his teeth, two short blasts. The girl suddenly straightened up, twisting at the waist. For an instant Mathias saw her pupils and the dark reflections in the iris of her eyes. She turned on her heels like a marionette, then took the bottle back behind the bar, resuming her slow, delicate doll's gait which he had at first attributed to clumsiness-mistakenly, in all probability.

Mathias also turned around, offering the proprietor a series of ladies' watches: the "fantasies."

"And here's something for Madame Robin; I'm sure she'd like one of these! The first one here is two hundred seventy-five crowns. This one, with the antique case, is three hundred forty-nine. A watch like this is worth at least five hundred crowns at any jeweler's you can name. And I'll include the band as a special gift bonus! Now this one is a real gem!"

His enthusiasm went for nothing. Hardly aroused, his assumed good humor faded of its own accord. The atmosphere was too unfavorable. There was no use persisting under these conditions. No one was listening to him.

Yet on the other hand, no one had explicitly refused him. Perhaps they counted on letting him continue until nightfall, glancing inattentively at his watches and answering with a word or two now and then to keep him from leaving. It would be better to go right away: after all, a ceremony of refusal was not indispensable.

"If you want to," the proprietor said at last, "you can go upstairs. She won't buy anything, but it will give her something to do."

Thinking the husband would accompany him, Mathias was already casting about for an excuse to leave when he realized that the man had no such intention: the proprietor was, in fact, giving him directions for finding his wife, who was occupied, he said, either in the kitchen or with the housework, which made the notion that she needed something to do a rather strange one. In any case, Mathias decided to make a final attempt, hoping to revive his means of persuasion once out of this impassive giant's hearing. Until now he had had the constant sense of talking in a void-a hostile void that devoured his words as soon as he had uttered them.

He closed his suitcase and headed toward the back of the room. Instead of leaving by the door behind the bar, he had been directed to another exit, a doorway in the corner where the pin-ball machine stood.

When the door closed behind him, he was standing in a rather dirty vestibule dimly lighted by a little glass door opening on an interior court, itself deep and dark. The walls around him, once painted a uniform yellow-ochre, were filthy, scaling, scored, even split in places. The wood of the floors and stairs, although evidently as worn by frequent washing as by the passage of feet, was black with encrusted grime. Various objects were piled in the corners: cases of empty bottles, large boxes of corrugated cardboard, a washing-machine, fragments of cast-off furniture. It was apparent they had been stored with a certain system, and had not accumulated merely in successive rejections. Furthermore, nothing was actually dirty; everything seemed quite ordinary: it was obvious that the floorboards simply had not been waxed (which, after all, was not surprising) and that the walls needed repainting. As for the dead silence, that was much less depressing-and more justified-than the virtually mute tension that filled the café from one moment to the next.

A narrow hallway turned off to the right, doubtless leading to the room behind the bar and, farther on, to the quay itself. There were also two stairways, one as narrow as the other-it was difficult to account for both, since they did not appear to lead to different wings of the building.

Mathias was to take the one directly in front of him as he came out of the café; to a certain degree either stairway might have fit this description, although neither of them satisfied it altogether. He hesitated a few seconds and ended by choosing the one farthest from him because the other was distinctly recessed in the wall. He walked up one flight. Here he was confronted by two doors-as he had been told-one with no knob.

The second was not closed, but merely resting against the jamb. He knocked without pressing too heavily, lest the door open completely, for he could feel that it would turn on its hinges at the slightest pressure.

He waited. There was not enough light on the landing for him to tell whether the door was painted to imitate the texture of wood, or else spectacles, eyes, rings, or a whorl of thread rolled into a figure eight.

He knocked again, this time with his ring. As he feared, the door opened by itself. Then he realized that it led only to another vestibule. After waiting again he stepped forward, no longer certain where to knock. There were now three doors in front of him.

The one in the middle was wide open. What it presented to view was not the kitchen described by the proprietor, but a spacious bedroom that surprised Mathias by its resemblance to something he could not later identify. The entire center of the room had been cleared so that the black and white tile flooring was immediately noticeable: 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. Mathias then recalled that it was an old island custom to lay tiles rather than floor-boards in the finest rooms of the house-but more often in the dining room or the living room than in a bedroom. Yet this room left no doubt about its function: a large, low bed filled one of its corners, its long side against the wall facing the door. Against the wall at the right, perpendicular to the head of the bed, a night table supported a bed lamp. Next came a closed door, then the dressing table over which hung an oval mirror. A bedside rug made of lambskin completed the furnishings of this corner. To see farther along the wall at the right he would have had to put his head all the way into the room. Similarly, the whole left side of the room remained concealed by the door to the vestibule where Mathias was standing.

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.

As soon as he had turned the corner around the hardware store, he saw a shiny chromium-plated bicycle leaning against the movie bulletin-board behind the monument. The innumerable pieces of polished metal reflected the sunlight in every direction. As he approached Mathias could see what a fine model it was, furnished with every desirable accessory as well as with several others he did not recognize and therefore judged to be superfluous.