“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.