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 shop¬window 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.