“When I think,” the man said, “that here we are, the two of us, calmly peeling potatoes together….” He laughed and left his sentence unfinished. Indicating the crabs with his chin, he asked, “Don’t you like hookers?”
Mathias answered in the affirmative, asked himself the same question, and decided that he had just lied. The odor, however, was not disagreeable. The sailor picked up one of the creatures and tore off its limbs one by one; with the largest blade of his knife he pierced the belly at two points and then stripped off the carapace with a precise, vigorous gesture; the body in one hand and the shell in the other, he stopped a moment to inspect the flesh.
“And they claim they’re empty!”
This exclamation was followed by several insults intended for the fish merchants, and the man finished with a few recriminations about the low prices spider-crabs were bringing now. At the same time he had taken the hammer and begun to break open the legs with sharp taps, using the table between his own plate and the salesman’s as an anvil.
As he was struggling with a particularly difficult joint, a little liquid squirted out, spattering against the girl’s cheek. She said nothing but wiped it off with the back of her forefinger. She was wearing a gold circlet which might have been a wedding-ring.
The sailor continued his monologue, speaking in turn of the increasing difficulties of life for the islanders, of the development of the village at Black Rocks in recent years, of the electricity which a large part of the countryside was now installing, of his objections to the extension of the current to this house, of the “good life” he led here in his corner of the cliff, “with the little girl,” among his traps and nets. The conversation presented no problems for Mathias, the other man never requiring an answer, even when he happened to speak in interrogation; on such occasions it was enough to wait until a few silent seconds had passed and then the monologue continued as if there had been no interruption.
From all appearances, the sailor preferred keeping to generalities rather than dwelling on his own experiences. Not once did he refer to the friendship which had bound Mathias and himself together for that vague period the salesman vainly attempted to determine in time. Sometimes the fisherman spoke to him as to his own brother, immediately afterward treating him as a guest or a casual visitor. The diminutive “Matt,” which he employed in his bursts of intimacy, provided no illumination, for he could remember no one who had ever called him by this name.
There was no greater specification of place or circumstance than of date or duration. In Mathias’ opinion, their friendship could scarcely have originated on the island—for all kinds of reasons—unless it was connected with his earliest youth. But the man was not speaking of his youth. On the contrary, he expatiated at length on the new system of lenses which had been installed in the lighthouse last autumn, attaining an unprecedented optic power capable of piercing the heaviest fog. He undertook to explain their operation, but his description of the apparatus, despite a certain technical jargon, was from the start so obscure that the salesman did not even try to follow its course. It seemed to him that his host was using the words without understanding their meaning, satisfied to set one here or there, almost at chance, into the surface of his discourse, which was itself quite vague and meaningless. He emphasized most of his sentences with rapid, expansive, complicated gestures which seemed only remotely connected with what he was saying. The various joints of one of the big claws thus described above the table a trajectory of circles, spirals, loops, and figure eights; since the shell had been broken, tiny fragments fell off and landed all around them. The crab and his own garrulity making him thirsty, the man frequently interrupted himself to refill his glass.
In the girl’s glass, on the contrary, the level remained the same. She said nothing and ate scarcely at all. After each piece she swallowed, she carefully licked her fingers clean—perhaps in honor of their guest. She rounded her mouth, pushed out her lips, and passed her fingers between them several times, from back to front. To see better what she was doing, she half turned toward the window.
“It lights up the cliff like broad daylight,” declared the fisherman in conclusion.
It was obviously untrue: the beam of the lighthouse did not reach the coast below them. An astonishing error on the part of a man who was supposed to be a sailor; yet he seemed to think that this was its function, doubtless in order to show navigators the detail of the rocks to be avoided. He probably never used his fishing-smack at night.
The “little girl” was sitting perfectly still, profile toward him, her middle finger in her mouth. Leaning forward, her head was bent; the outline of the nape of her neck, rounded and taut, gleamed in the light behind her.
But she was not half-turned toward the light to make sure she was cleaning her hand thoroughly. Her eyes, as far as Mathias could judge from where he was sitting, were looking sideways at the corner of the window, as if trying to make out something through the dirty pane.
“It’s the whip she deserves, that trollop!”
At first the salesman did not know what his host was talking about, for he has not been paying attention to what had gone before. When he realized he was referring to the youngest Leduc girl, Mathias wondered how the sailor had managed to shift the conversation to such a subject. Nevertheless, he took advantage of a pause to agree with the master of the house: after everything he had heard since morning it really seemed that the girl deserved a good whipping, perhaps an even worse punishment.
At this moment he discovered that the sailor was looking in his direction. He glanced to his left; the man was staring at him with so profound an expression of astonishment that Mathias himself was surprised. After all, he had said nothing remarkable. Was it only because his interlocutor did not expect an answer? Mathias tried to remember if he had said anything else since he had come into the cottage. He was unable to be sure: perhaps he had said that the room was warm—perhaps some banality about the lighthouse…. He swallowed a mouthful of wine and sighed as he put down his glass: “Children are a lot of trouble.”
But he was relieved to see that the fisherman was no longer concerned with him; his face had grown serious again, preoccupied as it had been before. He stopped talking, his hands empty, inert, his forearms leaning on the edge of the table. His gaze—over the remains of the crab, the empty bottle, the full bottle, the shoulder under the black cotton—was unquestionably toward the little window.
“Rain tomorrow,” he said.
He was still not moving. After about twenty seconds he corrected himself: “Tomorrow—or the day after for sure.”
In any case, the salesman would be far away.
Without changing position, the fisherman said: “If it’s that Jacqueline you’re watching for…”
Mathias supposed he was speaking to his young companion, but nothing gave him the slightest clue. She had begun to toy with her food again, and behaved as if she had not heard. The man continued: “You can hope I’ll give her a fine reception.”
He emphasized the word “fine” to show that it should be taken in the opposite sense. Furthermore, like most islanders, he used “hope” instead of “imagine”—which in the present case seemed more likely to mean “fear.”
“She won’t come now,” the salesman said.
He wished he had not spoken, and merely increased his confusion by adding far too hurriedly: “I mean, she must have gone to lunch by now.”
He glanced anxiously around him: luckily no one seemed to have noticed his interruption or his embarrassment. The girl had lowered her eyes over a piece of shell into which she was trying to insert the tip of her tongue. Over the outline of her shoulder which the thin cloth divided into two parts—one flesh, the other black—the man was looking toward the window.