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 roundabout inspection, his eyes fell again on the wooden bulletinboard. 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.