Down at the jetty I had no problem recognizing the man, and I walked along the pier to where the boat was anchored. He lifted his head when I arrived and didn’t really say hello, more like just acknowledged my presence. Not that he was at all put out, my arrival didn’t seem to bother him in the least. He was sitting on an overturned wooden box on the floor of the boat, preparing trolling lines in the light of a little metal lantern hanging from the side of the tiny cabin. The hull swayed slowly beside the dock, and the shadows inside the boat shifted as the lantern swung back and forth. I’d sat down on the jetty beside a heap of fishing nets left lying there in the dark, and continued to watch the man prepare his trolling lines in front of me in the boat. You’re going out fishing now? I asked him. Tomorrow, he said, and he slipped a fresh piece of bait onto one of his hooks. I took a look at the bait for a moment, a fish head fixed in the darkness to a bit of line. The weather’s going to be good, he went on, but I was hardly listening, I was staring at the bait as he explained that he hadn’t been able to go fishing all week because of the bad weather. The last time he’d been fishing, he said, was, was — he stopped to think. It was the day the cat was murdered. He couldn’t remember, Tuesday or Wednesday, and I looked at his face in the shadows, his massive features and thick crew cut lit from the side by the trembling light. There was no sound around us, just the continual squeak of moorings in the port and sometimes the very short thud of a hull against the wharf, and I continued to look at the man facing me in the shadowy light when I heard the sound of furtive steps coming from the mound of dried seaweed that stretched out on the other side of the port. Hardly had I noticed where the steps were coming from than a black cat appeared in front of me on the jetty and stared at me with luminescent green eyes. The man gave a loud shout that made me start, and hurled the cloth he was holding in its direction, so that it landed with a feeble plop on the jetty.
He then explained it to me in detail how the cat had died accidentally a couple of days ago. Just like tonight, the day before the cat died the man had prepared trolling lines to go out fishing the next day, leaving them overnight in the boat. It was still dark when he came down to the port the next morning, and two black cats had followed him onto the jetty. Just as he was about to board the boat they’d jumped in and pounced on the bait, running off immediately when the man got in and shooed them away. But one of them had gotten a hook snagged in its mouth and was caught by the fishing lines. Struggling furiously, it had become tangled in all the lines on the deck of the boat so that, seeing as it was impossible to get it under control, the man had grabbed a little knife and cut the line to free the cat, which, thrashing around in panic with the hook in its mouth, had finally jumped overboard and drowned in no time as the man looked on. He had then gone out fishing, and it was only later that I myself came down to the jetty, discovering the dead cat in the port and the man’s old gray Mercedes parked on the village square in the dim morning light.
I didn’t go back to the hotel right away that night, instead I walked down to the big sandy beach that stretched out for a mile or so behind the village. Leaving the village behind me I walked down the little path to the beach, avoiding here and there the large puddles of water that had formed in the ruts and were dimly lit by the moon. There was a field in the darkness on the edge of the path, a silent, abandoned field enclosed by a rickety old fence. Walking along the deserted path I soon started to hear the sound of the sea in the distance, the regular murmur of the sea that little by little eased my senses and my mind. Down at the beach I took off my shoes and socks and walked slowly toward the shore, my feet bare and my shoes in my hand. I felt the cold contact of the humid sand under my feet and between my toes, and with each step I dug my feet deeper to immerse myself more and more in the sensation of well-being that I felt with the contact of the wet sand. Finally I sat down at water’s edge and didn’t move, looking out at the sea in front of me. The lighthouse on Sasuelo Island turned regularly in the night and everything was perfectly still. I sat there all alone on the beach in a dark coat, my bare feet in the wet sand. A boat appeared on the horizon, a ferry that slipped slowly across the sea all lit up in the night, moving imperceptibly over the surface of the water until it finally disappeared behind Sasuelo Island.
About the Author and the Translator
JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT is the author of nine novels, and the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Décembre for The Truth about Marie. His writing has been compared to the works of Samuel Beckett, and the films of Jacques Tati and Jim Jarmusch.
A native of Vancouver, JOHN LAMBERT studied philosophy in Paris before moving to Berlin, where he lives with his wife and two children. He has also translated Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Monsieur and Self-Portrait Abroad.