The maestro did what all the tourists do. He sat himself down in a corner of the bar and, after ordering, asked the barman, who said, "Of course, a number of fishermen take people out for a price. Just wait till the boats get back, and I'll point out a dependable soul" The maestro seemed reassured: it was just like he'd been told it would be. So he nursed his mulled wine, setting his mug down and rubbing his hands together between sips. He waited a long time. He had many more mugs without losing patience. I've often said that in the bar at port you don't feel the hours pass. The sands of time there are so flowing and fine-grained they never stick in the neck of the glass.
Only three or four sailors make the trip, due to low demand and the very real danger, even if you take all the necessary precautions. But it's not just that. Those who used to go but don't anymore will tell you it's too hard. Before the spectacle of utmost pleasure and utmost pain, you must carry on, never quite knowing what has caused it. "It's cruel," they say, "it's filthy. You can't stomach it for long. It's not about the money: " Those who keep making the trip rarely speak a word. As they grow inured to their singular trade, they say less and less about it. When they're too old to go out to sea, their silence betrays them; you can pick them out as they while away afternoons, even entire evenings, at the bar, mute, back hunched, pensively rubbing their hands before a mug of wine gone cold.
At last, the barman indicated someone with a jerk of his head. The maestro rose and timidly approached the skipper. It was Esmeraldo. I was there, at my usual spot, and watched the scene from afar. It went on for too long. I was struck by the sight of a maestro used to having the world at his feet speaking humbly as a beggar, and at length, to an uneducated fisherman whose hands were chapped by the sea. It wasn't a complicated transaction. All the trawlers asked about the same price. They came to an agreement at last. The maestro hadn't gotten a raw deal. Esmeraldo wasn't the most taciturn of the ones who went. He still spoke willingly when spoken to, and sometimes even laughed! In pointing him out as someone dependable, the barman was merely cleaving to popular opinion. But in light of what happened next, it's clear Esmeraldo wasn't adequately hardened to the task, hadn't cut himself off enough from the world, sealed himself in silence and indifference. To ply this trade, it's best to let yourself go beast-dumb. That's why they no longer speak, why words must be torn from them. For them, silence is essential. They know it protects them, out there and back here. It's clear now that the lengthy conversation between Esmeraldo and the maestro the night before they left was too much. Anyway, they shook on it, and arranged to meet early the next morning at the port. The maestro walked out, tottering slightly from the mulled wine.
Esmeraldo never confessed exactly what happened out there the next day. We pieced it together from his trailing sentences, his sighs and shrugs and muddled denials, and also that conversation of theirs. Not its content, which we would never know, but the simple fact that it had lasted much longer than needed. The only sure thing was that Esmeraldo was at fault. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The boat might have capsized, and no one survived, but this couldn't have transpired had the skipper been aware of his responsibilitieshad he kept watch over his client, protected the man from himself. No need to be a psychic to see that the maestro wouldn't settle for the same excursion as everyone else: a few seconds of rapture and torment, writhing like a worm against the ropes lashing you to the mast before the skipper plugged your ears again with wax like in his own and you returned to port, broken, radiant, initiated. The maestro wanted more. Much more. That was why they'd stayed and talked so long that night at the bar. The maestro had negotiated, insisted, even begged maybe, and Esmeraldo had given in. The next day they'd hugged the shore too closely, and lingered too long in those perilous waters.
So the maestro, too, was to blame in the matter. Why had he come here, anyway? What had he wanted to confirm? We would've had to know where he was at in life to tell. It's said artists are like temperamental machines that work fine for a while and then suddenly stop, for obscure reasons. Too much fame, not enough, too much love, not enough… What keeps them going? What fuel? What fire? No one knows. That flame can gutter out, go astray, get lost. In some people it seems to last their whole lives, and still be burning strong, when one day something else goes missing, or breaks down: a single organ, or a whole body pushed too hard. With others it burns and blazes and suddenly stops, the tank empty, the boiler snuffed out, and there they remain, alive but from then on inert and sterile. Had the maestro broken down? What led us to believe he'd been driven more by worry than curiosity was that he clearly hadn't told anyone where he was going. Otherwise someone would have come looking for him by now.
Someone still might soon, for when a man like that disappears, it doesn't go unnoticed. They must have been looking for him. Someday they'd pick up his trail and follow it here. Then a helicopter streaming rain will drop from the sky to land on the field where our children play. Its arrival will sound the death knell for our way of life, and for what we are, in our way, the last to preserve. At a rare town council meeting, or what passed for one, no one cherished any illusions on the matter. If we just let things continue, we'd soon see a helicopter full of detectives, worried friends and family, and journalists brandishing cameras: our way of life would be blown to smithereens. All of it. For the world beyond the curtain of rain, which had until now been more or less unaware of our existence, neither respects or really tolerates any other world. It is a jealous world. What it names, it kills. Its people claim or hope for the opposite, but the truth is bleak and simple: their cameras despoil all they gaze upon, and destroy all they depict. When the reporters learn where Esmeraldo took the maestro, nothing will stop them from going and filming it from a helicopter. And they'll come back unharmed with their freight of dead images, for the noise of their rotors will drown out the song that turned our illustrious visitor into the village idiot of sorts that he has since become.
In order to keep these things from happening, we decided to wipe out all traces of the maestro's brief trip here, as a child might a chalk line from a blackboard with one swipe of a sponge. His path never brought him to us. Esmeraldo and I have been appointed by the council to see him back to his own kind. We've prepared a sign for him with his name on it, and we will hang it round his neck before abandoning him in the middle of a big city, blowing dumbly into a comb, as he has done unceasingly since his return from the sirens' isle.
Palaiseau, September 1999
La The
ermit me to remain anonymous; my name would mean nothing to you. My profession, however, is not unrelated to the story I am about to tell. I am a doctor. I've seen many a woe in my line of work. Some I've eased, and in other cases forestalled what, without my intervention, wouldn't have been long in coming. Well, you'll say, that's all you can ask of a doctor, and I quite agree: we save those patients of ours whom death vies for distractedly. Should its interest in the game be aroused, all our efforts are in vain, and death reaps another victory… It was fifteen years ago-the summer of 1905, to be exact-while in the exercise my profession, that I made the acquaintance of a young man who introduced himself to me as Bennett Riven. He was a stranger to the small seaside town where I had my practice. I knew as much at the first sight of him in my waiting room, crowded that Saturday as any other. After twenty years of being a doctor in a small town, one knows, or can at least place, everyone. By all counts a strapping lad, he wasn't one of my regulars nor, I would have sworn, among those of my two competitors. I say "strapping" because I've known few people with his physique. On seeing him, I remember thinking that if the whole town had his constitution, I could've tucked the key under the mat and retired. Twenty years old, with a marble worker's shoulders and a peasant's cheeks, the neck of a glassblower and hands big enough to throttle a horse. He had health to spare; I would have bought some if I could. Still, something was the matter, since there he was in my packed waiting room. I took the time to study him, and in his blue eyes, with their corneal patina of faience, easily identified a brightness and fixity of stare that, in such an irritatingly vital giant, could have but one cause: terror.