Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Reticence

I stood at the window holding my son, softly stroking his head to soothe him. He’d put one of his hands on my shoulder and we looked outside as his tears subsided little by little. The weather was bleak, and the road was still glistening slightly from the rain. The lone donkey was seemingly at loose ends in the weed-covered lot across the way, scratching itself nonchalantly against the fence. Look at the donkey down there, I said softly to my son, placing a fingertip on the window and pointing at the animal. My son turned to me and smiled an unexpected and complicitous little smile, still flushed with tears. You see the donkey? I said, but in fact it was my finger he was looking at more than anything else, which he finally clenched softly in his small hand. And that’s how we stayed, my son and I, very tenderly for a moment at the window. Then I slowly closed the curtains and put my son back in his cot, because I’d decided to take a nap.

I lay down and remained with my eyes open in the half-light without sleeping. My son had fallen asleep as soon as I’d set him down and now breathed quietly in his cot, I could see his little body curled up on the mattress through the fine stitching of his bed. I couldn’t hear anything from outside, and each time I closed my eyes my thoughts came obsessively back to the cat’s body in the port, its whiskers like translucent gauze and its ears rising vertically above the waterline, turned sideways and floating heavily on the surface of the gray water, and soon another image — one I’d already seen — appeared to me gradually, the image of Biaggi watching me, and then I saw Biaggi’s body floating face up in the port, unmoving, and his arms spread wide, dressed in a sailor’s jacket and canvas pants that were slightly pulled up over his calves, his shoes and socks soaked with water. The tie around his neck was ripped and his head was twisted to one side, a bluish cheek slightly immersed in the water. The tie wasn’t fastened with a normal knot, but floated loosely around his shoulders like a scarf, and red marks appeared at the base of his neck, faint but unmistakable traces of strangulation, in all likelihood he’d been strangled with this tie. Biaggi had been strangled on one of the previous nights on the jetty with this tie by someone who’d met him there during the night, someone who’d approached him from behind under the moonlight that was identical every night, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, and who’d slipped his tie around Biaggi’s neck, his own tie which he hadn’t taken off and which was still tied around his collar, and which he’d pulled tight while Biaggi’s hands gripped his wrists to make him let go, but he hadn’t let go, he’d continued to pull in the long luminous beam of the lighthouse on Sasuelo Island that intermittently lit up his face as he tugged harder and harder on his tie, to the point of strangling himself as well to a certain extent, but he hadn’t let up and continued to pull with all his might until, almost simultaneously, the tie had broken leaving no more than a ripped clump of fabric around my collar, and Biaggi had relaxed his grip, falling onto the pier with the rest of my tie around his neck — a kick of the foot was all it took to topple his body into the bay.

The village stretched out behind me in the mist, and I walked off slowly in the other direction, heading down to the beach with my son in his stroller, who let himself be pushed along indifferently while swinging his legs idly back and forth. At the beach I took him out of his stroller and he started crawling around on the shore on all fours in his little blue anorak. I sat down on the sand beside his stroller and smoked a cigarette while looking pensively out to sea. The distant contours of Sasuelo Island could be distinguished off the coast, little more than a rugged stretch of rocky earth. The tiny silhouette of the lighthouse rose up on the left at the summit of the island, and at its very top, somewhat darker, was the little room with the lantern. Large rain clouds blackened the sky and the sound of the waves was close at hand as they crashed against the shore and threw up all sorts of algae onto the beach, plaited like unruly tufts of hair.

As we walked back down the beach on our way to the hotel I left my son’s stroller at the side of the water for a moment and advanced cautiously onto a mound of dried seaweed on the shoreline to watch a bird flying off the coast, a cormorant perhaps, slowly wheeling around in circles over the water, and I pointed it out to my son. The bird, I said happily, look at the bird, but he was looking at my finger, a little surprised at having been disturbed for so little, and, coming back over to him without taking my eyes off the bird, I crouched down at the foot of his stroller and started to imitate the cry of the cormorant, kneeling on the sand with one hand on my chest. Cui-cui, I said, and my son at once turned his head toward me in amazement. He looked at me in boundless gratitude, his two little eyes dazzling under the oval opening of his balaclava, and it was as if he’d all at once discovered my true nature after having been mistaken about me for the last eight months. For my part I hadn’t had any delusions about my nature for thirty-three years, because I’d just turned thirty-three, yes, the end of adolescence.

Night had started to fall when I got back to the village, and I took a detour down to the port before going back to the hotel. There was no one on the jetty and the wind was blowing hard, ruffling a little piece of red cloth on a boathook that was leaning against the low stone wall. Fishing nets and lobster traps lay on the ground in the dim light and a couple of boats pitched softly alongside the jetty. It was then that I saw that the cat’s body and the letter were gone. The water of the port was perfectly empty in front of me, stretching out silently in the night, and I stared at the dark, untroubled water thinking that to a certain extent we were back at square one, there was no longer a corpse in the port and the letters I’d taken from the Biaggis’ mailbox a couple of days earlier were there once again. We’re right back at the beginning, give or take one letter, I thought, one letter that had fallen into the water the night before and which the Biaggis would never receive no doubt, because by now the current must have carried it out into the distance.

Night had fallen over the jetty, and I stood there alone beside my son’s stroller. Everything seemed strangely simple now, and I continued to watch the black water of the port as it undulated in front of me while thinking that it was even entirely possible that if I hadn’t found the Biaggis at home the night before, they must simply have gone out for a reason unknown to me, and that in the same way if I hadn’t seen their car at their property this morning, it was because they’d decided to spend the day out of the village and that, having left early, they’d had lunch en route and probably wouldn’t be back home until the evening. And it seemed to me then that, paradoxically, as we’d come back to the initial situation in this way and everything was as it had been on the first day, I could now envisage going to see the Biaggis, perhaps not right away, no, I had to bring my son back to the hotel and the Biaggis might not be back yet, but a little later on that evening, just to say hello.

When I got back to the hotel that evening I saw that the television was on in the lounge and a young woman I’d never seen before was sitting there on a couch, flipping idly through an old TV guide that must have been long out of date. She turned and gave me a quick look, and I said hello before picking up my key at reception. Back in my room I undressed my son on my bed and poured him a bath in the washbasin, it was a pretty big washbasin and he was a pretty small guy and he just fit, sitting half immersed in the water like a Roman consul, completely naked with his chubby little nipples, the soap in one hand and my toothbrush glass in the other, with a little yellow plastic duck bobbing against his chest. He played there good-naturedly, every bit the druggist, filling the glass and then emptying it again slowly into the water to see the effect it produced. Generally he was very fond of baths, offering as they did the chance to carry out new pharmaceutical experiments each time, and, even if he didn’t have enough room to straighten up and belly-flop into the water, he nevertheless managed to splash with his feet and spill water all over the floor. I picked him up all dripping wet and wrapped him in a large white towel to dry his hair while rubbing his back and little bum, and, lying him on the bed, I wrapped him in a fresh diaper while he beat his legs chaotically just to make things more difficult. You stop it now, I said. He stopped, giving me a charming little smile. He was still lying on his back smiling at me — what a hypocrite — and I sat him up to slip on the clean little pajama I’d gotten out for him. I then combed his hair, parting it on the side (now we’re all squeaky clean) and we played like that for a bit on the bed before dinner.