Alain Robbe-Grillet - The Voyeur

In order to reduce the difference as much as possible, Mathias tried getting back to the same point figuring backward from the moment he had looked at his watch (seven minutes after one) in the café at Black Rocks. He had been there about ten minutes, fifteen perhaps. It had taken ten minutes, at the most, for the second sale (to the exhausted-looking couple), and approximately fifteen for the first (including a long conversation with Madame Marek). This part of the road, traveled without any particular haste, might figure on the schedule as ten extra minutes. Unfortunately all these figures seemed a little excessive. Their total, nevertheless, scarcely exceeded three-quarters of an hour. The meeting with the old lady must therefore have occurred at twenty after twelve at the earliest—probably at twelve twenty-five.

The abnormal, excessive, suspicious, inexplicable time amounted to forty minutes—if not fifty. It was more than enough to account for the two successive detours: the trip to the farm and back—including the minor repair to the gearshift in front of the closed door—and the trip to the cliff and back—including…. Mathias would merely have had to hurry a little.

He hurried on. Then, having crossed the main road, he continued down the opposite path—broad enough at the outset but subsequently narrowing to a vague dirt track—twisting to avoid roots and stumps, briar patches, and clumps of stunted gorse. The fields had disappeared. The last wall of fieldstone, half in ruins, indicated the beginning of the road beyond. On either side stretched a series of low ridges covered with reddish vegetation and relieved only occasionally by a gray rock, a thorn bush, or some vaguer, more distant silhouette which was harder to identify—at first sight.

The terrain sloped down. Mathias noticed ahead of him, at eye level, a darker line separating the uniform and motionless gray of the sky from another gray surface—similarly flat and perpendicular—the sea.

The path came out onto the central section of a horseshoe-shaped ridge facing the open sea, enclosing between its two arms a kind of elongated basin which extended to the very edge of the cliff, its dimensions not exceeding twenty by thirty yards. A bright speck attracted the salesman’s notice; he was upon it in a few strides, and leaned over to pick it up; it was only a tiny pebble, cylindrical, smooth, and white, shaped deceptively like a cigarette.

The flattened bottom of the hollow, where the sparse vegetation of the moor gave way to richer grass, came to an end thirty steps away—without transition—in a steep rock face, plunging down about fifteen yards into the eddying water. After an almost perpendicular fall came an irregular series of sharp, protruding ridges, and at the very base, rising out of the foam between the more imposing rock masses, a cluster of conical reefs against which the waves dashed with great violence, countered by the backwash in the opposite direction, producing bursts of spray that sometimes reached higher than the top of the cliff.

Higher still, two sea gulls described interlacing circles in the sky—sometimes executing them so that the loops occurred side by side, sometimes combining their circuits into a perfect figure eight—their maneuvers achieved without a single movement of their wings. The fixed, round eye which the slightly tilted head directed toward the interior of the horseshoe, stared immutably downward like the lidless eyes of fish, as if complete insensibility precluded any need to blink. He was watching the water rising and falling against the wet, polished rock, the runners of whitish moss, the periodic bursts of spray, the intermittent cascades, and farther away the rough stone outcroppings.… Suddenly Mathias noticed, a little to his right, a piece of cloth—knitted cloth—a piece of knitted gray wool hanging from a projecting rock two yards beneath the upper edge—that is, at a height the tide never reached.

Fortunately this spot looked accessible without too much difficulty. Without a moment’s hesitation, the salesman took off his duffle coat, put it on the ground, and advanced along the edge of the precipice, making a detour of several yards to reach—still farther to the right—a point where the descent would be possible. From there, clinging with both hands to the outcroppings, moving his feet cautiously from fissure to projection, pressing his body against the granite flank, he reached, at the cost of more effort than he had supposed, not his goal but a point about two yards below it. Then he had only to stand up as high as he could, stretch out one arm (holding on with the other), and seize the desired object. The cloth came away from the rock without difficulty. There was no doubt about it, it was the gray sweater Violet had been wearing—had not been wearing, rather—but which had been lying on the grass beside her.

Yet Mathias was certain he had thrown it away with the rest, checking everything piece by piece to assure himself that nothing had caught on the rocks halfway down. It would have been better to leave the sweater at the top of the cliff in the hollow where the timid sheep were walking round and round their pickets. Since she had taken it off herself, it would have been more natural for her to fall without it. In any case, it seemed peculiar that she had lost her balance with it on, so that a projecting rock had stripped it from her as she fell without turning it inside out or even tearing it a little. It was lucky no one had discovered it during the search.

But at the same moment Mathias realized the uncertainty of such a conjecture, for the person who might have seen the sweater hanging there would doubtless not have risked trying to get it, regarding such an attempt as unnecessarily dangerous. Under such conditions would it not be a still graver error to remove it now? If someone had noticed it down there on the rock, would it not be better to put it back where he had found it, trying, in fact, to make it hang in exactly the same way?

Then, on consideration, Mathias wondered who such a witness might have been. Maria Leduc, discovering her sister’s sweater, would certainly have decided she had fallen here, and brought a searching party in this direction, where no one had thought of looking yesterday. As for the fishermen who had found the body this morning, they had been down below, looking through the seaweed exposed at low tide, too far away to make out anything in particular. The compromising object had hitherto escaped notice.

Since, on the other hand, it was now impossible to put it back in the grassy hollow where Maria would have found it the day before, there remained only one solution. Mathias steadied himself by spreading his feet farther apart on the narrow ledge, wadded up the sweater into a compact mass, and grasping the rock wall behind him with one hand, threw the sweater out to sea with all his strength.

It landed gently on the water—floating between the rocks. The two gulls screamed, left off their circling, and plunged down together. They did not need to go as far as the water itself to recognize a simple piece of cloth, and immediately rose again, screaming still louder, toward the top of the cliff. Standing near the spot where he had left his duffle coat, at the edge of the vertical rock face, someone was leaning over the precipice, looking at the sea. It was young Julian Marek.

Mathias lowered his head so quickly that he almost fell in. At that moment the gray sweater, already half-saturated, was caught between a little wave and the backwash. Engulfed in the collision, it slowly sank, soon drawn out to sea beyond the rocks. When the surface rose again with the next wave, everything had disappeared.

Now he would have to raise his head toward the boy. The latter had obviously seen the sweater and the salesman’s incomprehensible gesture…. No; he had certainly seen the gesture, but perhaps only a piece of gray cloth, wadded up into a ball. It was important to make him say just what it was he had seen.