The Voyeur (22 page)

Since the boy, on the contrary, maintained an obstinate silence, the salesman's first concern was to put his duffle coat back on. He thrust his hands into the pockets to check their contents. Nothing was missing.

"Smoke?" he asked, holding out the open pack of cigarettes.

Julian shook his head and stepped back. The salesman replaced the blue pack in his pocket, where his hand came in contact with the little cellophane bag.

"Would you like a gumdrop?" He held out the transparent bag filled with multicolored twists of paper.

The frozen face was already beginning to make the same sign of refusal, when the features underwent an almost imperceptible modification. Julian appeared to be changing his mind. He looked at the bag, then at the salesman, then at the bag again. It was at that moment that Mathias realized what was so extraordinary about his eyes: they expressed neither effrontery nor hostility, they were merely a little strabismic. The discovery reassured him.

Besides, Julian—now interested—was walking toward him to take a gumdrop out of the bag. Instead of taking the one on top, he pushed his fingers farther in, to grasp the twist of red paper he had decided on. He looked at it attentively, without unwrapping it. Then he looked at Mathias. . . . There was certainly some flaw in the young man's vision, yet he did not squint. It was something else. . . . Extreme myopia? No, he was holding the gumdrop at a normal distance from his eyes.

"Well, go on and eat it!" the salesman said, laughing at Julian's hesitation. Perhaps he was merely a little simple-minded.

The boy unbuttoned his jacket to reach one of the pockets in his work-clothes. Mathias thought he wanted to keep the tidbit for later.

"Here," he said, "take the whole bag."

"It's not worth it," Julian answered. And he stared again. . . . Could it have been a glass eye that made his stare so embarrassing?

"Is this yours?" the boy asked.

Mathias glanced from his eyes to his hands: the right one still held the wrapped gumdrop, and in the left, between thumb and forefinger, was an identical piece of red paper—shiny, translucent, crumpled—but untwisted and empty.

"It was here in the grass," Julian continued, with a movement of his head to indicate the little hollow beside them. "Is it yours?"

"Maybe I dropped it on the way," said the salesman, feigning indifference. He realized at once that gumdrop wrappers are not "dropped," but thrown away. To disguise his error he added, as agreeably as he could, "You can keep it too, if you like." "It's not worth it," Julian answered.

The same quick smile he had noticed at the farm passed across the boy's thin lips. He wadded the rectangle of red paper into a hard ball and flicked it into the sea. Mathias followed its trajectory, but lost sight of it before it had reached the bottom of the cliff.

"What made you think it was mine?"

"It's just like those."

"What does that prove? I bought them in town. Anyone else could have bought them. Violet must have been eating them while she was tending the sheep . . ."

"Who is Violet?"

"I mean poor little Jacqueline Leduc. You're mixing me up with all your nonsense!"

The boy said nothing for several seconds. Mathias took advantage of the time to let his face become pleasant and peaceful again, a task he had not taken enough trouble with during the last few remarks. Julian took the gumdrop out of its wrapper and put it in his mouth; then he spat it out into his hand, wrapped the paper around it, and threw it into the sea.

"Jackie always bought caramels," he said afterward.

"Well, then it was someone else."

"At first you said it was you."

"Yes, it was. I took one just now, on the way here, and I threw the paper away. You're confusing me with your questions."

The salesman was talking naturally now, even cordially, as if he understood none of the reasons for this interrogation, but was nevertheless yielding to his interlocutor's childish caprices. One of the gulls plunged, then gained altitude with great strokes of its wings, almost grazing the two men as it passed them.

"I found it yesterday," Julian said.

Mathias, not knowing what to answer now, was on the point of walking away from young Marek with all the abruptness of justified impatience. Yet he remained where he was. Although it was impossible to prove anything by this one piece of red paper, it would be better not to alienate so persistent an investigator, one who might be acquainted with other elements of the story. But which ones?

There was already the episode of the gray sweater. Julian might also have discovered a second gumdrop wrapper— the green one—and the third half-smoked cigarette. . . . What else? The question of his presence at the farm at the time of the salesman's supposed visit also remained to be cleared up. Actually, if the boy had happened to be in the courtyard or the shed that morning, why had he not told his father that no one had knocked at the door? What was his motive in backing up Mathias' story? And if he had been somewhere else, why did he behave in such a strange way about it? After his long, stubborn silence, why this preposterous last-minute invention of a repair made to the bicycle gearshift? ... A bolt tightened? . . . Perhaps that was the solution to all these incidents, now that he had come full circuit.

But if Julian Marek had not been at the farm, where had he been? Did his father have good reason for supposing him to have run off to the cliff on the way home from the bakery? Suddenly a wave of terror broke over Mathias: Julian, coming by another path—by "the other" path—to meet Violet, from whom he had demanded explanations—against whom, in fact, he harbored enough resentment to desire her death —Julian, catching sight of the salesman, had taken cover and had watched. . . . Mathias passed his hand over his forehead. Such imaginings did not hold water. His headache had become so violent that he was going out of his mind.

Was it not sheer madness to be ready—suddenly, because of an ordinary gumdrop wrapper—to get rid of young Marek by pushing him over the edge?

Until now Mathias had not taken into account the two little pieces of paper which he had thrown away the day before and which—to his mind, at least—did not constitute actual evidence in the case. He considered it a matter of bad taste that they should be so regarded, since he had not even thought of recovering them; they had seemed so unimportant when he was in a state of composure. Julian himself had just unwrapped one quite casually, demonstrating that nothing could be proved. ... All the same, another interpretation . . .

Another interpretation occurred to him: was this spectacular gesture not meant to show that Julian would keep silent, that the guilty party, once brought to light, would have nothing to fear from
him
? His strange attitude back at the farm could have no other explanation. There too he was proclaiming his power over Mathias: he was destroying evidence with the same facility with which he unearthed further indications of guilt, modifying as he chose the content of the hours that had already elapsed. But there would have to be something more than suspicions—even detailed suspicions— to justify such assurance as this. Julian had "seen." There was no use denying it any longer. Only the images registered by these eyes could have given them such an intolerable fixity.

Yet they were quite ordinary gray eyes—neither ugly nor beautiful, neither large nor small—two perfect, motionless circles set side by side, each one pierced at the center by a black hole.

The salesman had begun talking again to conceal his agitation, rapidly and without a break—unconcerned, moreover, with relevance or even coherence; it did not seem to matter much, since the boy was not listening. Any subject he could think of seemed worth trying: the harbor shops, the length of the crossing, the price of watches, electricity, the sound of the sea, the last two days' weather, the wind and the sun, the toads and the clouds. He also described how he had missed the return boat, which obliged him to remain on the island for several days; he was spending this compulsory leisure time, until his departure, making visits and taking long walks. . . . But when he came to a stop, out of breath, desperately casting about for something else to say in order not to repeat himself too much, he heard Julian's question, asked in the same neutral, even tone of voice: "Why did you go get Jackie's sweater again if you were only going to throw it into the sea?"

Mathias passed his hand over his forehead. Not "go get the sweater," but "go get the sweater again" . . . He began his answer in an almost supplicating tone: "Listen, boy, I didn't know it was hers. I didn't know it was anyone's. I only wanted to see what the gulls would do. You saw them: they thought I was throwing them a fish . . ."

The young man said nothing. He was looking Mathias straight in the eyes, his own fixed and strange—as if unconscious, even blind—or imbecile.

And Mathias still went on talking, though without the slightest conviction, carried away by the flood of his own words across the deserted moor, across the series of dunes where no trace of vegetation remained, across the rubble and the sand, darkened here and there by a sudden shadow of a specter forcing him to retreat. He went on talking. And the ground, from sentence to sentence, gave way a little more beneath his feet.

He had come out here on one of his strolls, following the paths wherever they led, for no other reason than to stretch his legs a little. He had noticed a piece of cloth hanging from the rocks. Having climbed down to have a look, out of sheer curiosity, he had decided it was merely an old rag of no possible use (but Julian was doubtless aware of the gray sweater's excellent condition . . .) and had unthinkingly thrown it to the gulls to see what they would do. How could he have known that this rag, tills dirty piece of wool (on the contrary, extremely clean)— this object, really—belonged to little Jacqueline? He didn't even know this was the place she had fallen . . . fallen . . . fallen. ... He stopped. Julian was looking at him. Julian was going to say: "She didn't fall, either." But the boy did not open his mouth.

The salesman resumed his monologue still more rapidly. It was no easy matter to climb down the rocks, especially wearing such big shoes. Toward the top the ground might easily cave in under his feet. Yet he hadn't suspected it was so dangerous; otherwise he would not even have tried. Since he didn't know this was the place. . . . But no one had said any such thing; the fact that the sweater belonged to Jacqueline did not mean the accident had occurred here. Just now, in the matter of the gumdrop wrapper, Mathias had already given himself away, admitting he knew the exact spot where the girl tended her sheep. Too late, now, to go back. . . . He couldn't suppose, in any case, given the position of the sweater, that it had been torn off in the course of her fall . . . etc.

"That's not it, either," said Julian.

Mathias was seized with panic and hurried on, too apprehensive for explanations. He began to speak at such a rate that objections—or even regret at his own words—became utterly impossible. In order to fill in the blanks, he often repeated the same sentence several times. He even caught himself reciting the multiplication table. Seized with a sudden inspiration, he fumbled in his pocket and brought out the little gold-plated wrist watch: "Here, since it's your birthday I'm going to give you a present: look at this fine watch!"

But Julian, his eyes still fixed on Mathias', retreated farther and farther into the grassy hollow, away from the edge of the cliff toward the curve of the horseshoe. Lest the boy run away even faster, the salesman dared not make the least move in his direction. He stood where he was, holding in his outstretched hand the watch with its band of metal links, as if he were trying to tame birds.

When he reached the foot of the slope bordering the inner limit of the horseshoe, the young man stopped, his eyes still fixed on Mathias'—who was equally motionless, twenty yards away.

"My grandmother will give me a finer one," he said.

Then he thrust his hand into his work-clothes and brought out a handful of miscellaneous fragments, among which the salesman recognized a thick cord spotted with grease; it seemed washed out or discolored, as if by prolonged immersion in sea water. The other things were hard to see at this distance. Julian picked out a cigarette butt—already three-quarters smoked—and put it between his lips. The little cord and the other articles went back into his pocket. He buttoned his jacket again.

Keeping the butt in the right corner of his mouth—without lighting it—and his glassy eyes on the salesman, the boy waited, his face pale; the brim of his cap was tilted slightly toward his left ear. Mathias lowered his eyes first.

"You rented the new bicycle from the tobacco shop," the voice said next. "I know that bike. There's no tool bag under the seat. The tools are in a box behind the luggage rack." Of course. The salesman had noticed it right away the day before: a chromium-plated, rectangular box—one of the permanent accessories; on its rear surface was the red reflector, usually attached to the mudguard. Of course.

Mathias lifted his head again. He was alone on the moor. In front of him, in the grass, in the center of the little hollow, he saw a short cigarette butt—which Julian must have thrown away as he was leaving—or else it was the one he had been looking for himself since morning—or perhaps they were one and the same. He came closer. It was only a little pebble, cylindrical, white, and smooth, which he had already picked up once, when he had come here.

Mathias headed slowly toward the big lighthouse, taking the customs road along the edge of the cliff. He could not help laughing at the thought of the dramatic retreat Julian had just made in order to reveal his discovery: a metal box fastened behind the luggage rack. . . . The salesman had never denied it! Was this detail so imporïant that he ought to have corrected Julian when he spoke of a bag under the seat? If he had no proof better than that. . .

He might just as well have said that the gray sweater was not lying "on the rocks," but "on a projection of the rocks"— or that only one of the mahonias was budding at the Marek farm. He might have said: "The road is not altogether level, nor entirely straight, between the crossroads and the fork leading to the mill"—"The bulletin-board is not precisely in front of the café-tobacco shop door, but slightly to the right, and does not block the entrance"—"The little square is not really triangular: the apex is flattened by the plot of grass around the public building so as to form a trapezoid"—"The enameled iron skimmer sticking out of the mud in the harbor is not the same color blue as the one in the hardware store" —"The pier is not rectilinear, but turns in the center at an angle of one hundred seventy-five degrees."