The Islanders

He opened one eye. In the seat opposite, a woman in her forties was smiling to herself as she looked through a set of photos she had probably just collected. They showed a baby with vermilion-red eyes being held under the arms like a hideous chrysalis. Next to her, a rough-looking skinhead was flicking through a copy of
Sécuri-mag
, ‘the number one magazine for security professionals’. He gave the impression he took his job seriously.

Olivier glanced at his watch. In three-quarters of an hour he would be in Paris. Outside was empty space which the snow, despite falling heavily, could not fill. As the train entered a tunnel, he noticed a heart traced on the steamed-up window. He wondered which of them had drawn it: the lady with the photos or the skinhead. The skinhead, without a doubt. Olivier pulled his coat up round his ears. Even on the TGV it was cold, the icy air seeping in through the tiniest crack like a toxic gas. He lowered his eyelids and tried to return to his dream. All that was left of it was odd snippets, fragments that melted like snowflakes the moment he tried to grasp them. The roof of the clinic …

The roof of the rehab clinic in Tain was strewn with hip flasks filled with bad rum, whisky and brandy. Theoretically, people were supposed to leave cured. Theoretically. For most patients, it was simply a warm place to spend the winter. They hardly ever got to see a doctor, but there was a ping-pong table in the common room. They knocked the ball listlessly back and forth between doses of medication.

This was the first time in two years he had thought about his detox treatment. It had not been too painful. Just boring, like
military service. When he was let out two weeks later and met Odile, she asked him how he had got through it.

‘I told myself that if I was on a desert island, I’d have had no choice but to give up.’

‘And how do you feel now?’

‘Like I’m on a desert island.’

He had married Odile.

Distracted by memories, he could not go back to his dream. A girl tottered down the aisle. Nice bum, nice shaved head, as if she knew she was pretty enough to get away with making herself ugly.

Olivier weighed up whether to take a taxi or the metro from Gare de Lyon to Gare Saint-Lazare. A taxi would be more comfortable but he had not been on the metro for a long time. He had not done many things for a long time … After getting out of rehab he had decided to write a novel, the way retired people take up golf. On the first page of a new pad, he had noted down:

He never got beyond the titles. It had done him good, all the same. The most he had composed over the last two years was a few postcards, and that had been hard enough. He was scared of words. Even in speech, he used them as sparingly as possible. They belonged to another life, that of a small-time journalist reporting what passed for news – stolen ducks, sinks, mopeds – for the local rag. But since he and Odile had been running the perfume shop, he only needed to call upon about forty words of vocabulary: ‘Good morning, Madame’, ‘Goodbye, Madame’ and so on.

A voice with a distinct garlic whiff of Provençal announced the train’s arrival in the capital. One by one the passengers awoke from their trance, lowing like cows at milking time. Those who had been dying of boredom fifteen minutes earlier were now marvelling at the phenomenal speed of the TGV. The woman with the photos shot him a brilliant smile and the thick-set skinhead seemed to thicken further. Everyone was preparing to return to normal life and talking about the extreme temperatures that would greet them on the platform at Gare de Lyon.

‘They’re saying it’s minus fifteen!’

‘Minus seventeen, I heard!’

Olivier had always found his mother to be a pain in the neck. But dying a few days before Christmas, in Versailles, at minus seventeen degrees? That was something else.

The view from the window changed from fields to suburban houses, to four-storey buildings, to tower blocks. A few minutes later, Olivier was in Paris.

His hands thrust into the pockets of his parka right up to his elbow, Roland had been pacing up and down the concourse at Gare Saint-Lazare for half an hour. His left ear was still burning from the blow he had received. He was struggling to calm down. He could still see the stunned looks on the faces of the children who had witnessed the bust-up outside Galeries Lafayette: ‘The Father Christmases too!’ Roland and the other guy had been at one another’s throats like two hookers fighting for turf. Their respective photographers had eventually managed to pull them apart. The other guy had blood all over his white beard, which was hanging round his neck like a napkin. Roland’s beard was lost entirely. Monsieur Lopez, his photographer, had called him every name under the sun while he got changed in the toilets at Havre–Caumartin. That was where poor sods like him put on
the traditional red outfit and cotton-wool beard on top of their own questionable clothing. Despite the torn hood, he managed to squeeze a hundred francs out of Lopez. He had really screwed up losing this job on day one. That hundred francs was all he had to his name.

He had instinctively fled to Gare Saint-Lazare because he had nowhere to go, and people with nowhere to go always end up at stations. If there was one thing he knew about, it was stations. He had spent three months playing deaf and dumb on commuter trains. One day he had come across a bag filled with a hundred or so Mickey Mouse key rings and the same number of pin badges, along with a card certifying that the bearer was deaf and dumb and authorised to sell on the SNCF rail network. He had kept his mouth shut for three months, until he had a run-in with a sour-tempered ticket inspector.

A succession of other roles followed, with Roland always playing against type … It was almost ten past midnight. It was so cold that the air seemed to have solidified. The travellers had doubled in volume, bundled up in layers of jumpers, scarves and coats. Puffs of steam emerged from their mouths, making them look like little factories. Roland had only been on earth for twenty-two years but it already felt too long. He would have liked to be adopted, if only for Christmas, by any one of those standing on the platform, stamping their feet to keep warm while checking the time on their watches.

Roland exchanged a few words and a cigarette with another homeless man as mangy as the dog by his side. The station was almost empty. Roland was as lonely as the ball inside a jingle bell. He jumped on the last train. It was going to Versailles.

Of all the foreign languages whirling in the air beneath the pyramid at the Louvre, Italian predominated. It was as if the Medicis had come back to house-sit for the holidays. Shivering,
bundled up in scarves, they were talking even more loudly than usual to keep warm, and their sunny accents were a strange contrast to the arctic conditions prevailing in Paris.

Rodolphe had been forced to queue among them for a good half-hour before entering the museum. He felt like a lettuce heart left to wilt in the drawer at the bottom of the fridge. He resembled one of those blocks of lard sculpted into the shape of an animal and placed in the windows of the best charcuteries. A pig, for example, a lovely little pink pig with black glasses and a funny face as if squinting at the sun.

In Rodolphe’s case, it was not the sun but an eternal eclipse that clamped that strained smile on his fat face. In common with all blind people, he seemed to face the sky expectantly, chin raised as if preparing for take-off, tethered to the ground only by the tip of his telescopic stick.

Every time he entered the room where
The Raft of the Medusa
hung, he felt as if he was arriving at a ball, with footsteps on the wooden floor and whispers swirling around him, the only music the rustling of fabric and bodies brushing past one another. With a flick of the wrist he folded up his white stick and strode confidently to the bench in the middle of the room. There was no need to invoke his disability to get a seat since no one was sitting there. Rodolphe plonked down his one hundred and twenty kilos of weight, peeled off his overcoat, jacket and cardigan like a giant onion, then laid his chubby little hands flat against his enormous thighs and waited, giving a grunt of pleasure.

As his body slowly warmed and loosened up, he clung to life like a ball of soft dough. One by one he felt his pores opening, millions of little hungry mouths greedily sucking up every little sound, smell and vibration around him. The crowds were his plankton and he wallowed among them as a basking seal.

A very small woman of a certain age perched on the bench alongside him. She smelt of biscuits and eau de Cologne.

‘Excuse me, Madame. Do you speak French?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, good. Would you mind telling me about the painting there, in front of us?’

‘
The Raft of the Medusa
?’

‘That’s the one!’

‘But … What do you want me to tell you?’

‘I’m visually impaired and …’

‘Oh! I’m sorry, I hadn’t noticed. You don’t often come across bli—, visually impaired people in galleries.’

‘I appreciate why you might be surprised, Madame, but I’m waiting for my sister to come and pick me up. I can still enjoy something of the art through other people’s eyes. As long as I’m not bothering you?’

‘No, not at all! So … it’s a picture of a raft … with people on it, far out at sea.’

‘Ah.’

‘Just a minute, I’ve got a guide … Géricault, Géricault … Ah, here we are.
The Raft of the Medusa
, 1819, acquired in 1824—’

‘No, I’m not interested in that. I want to know what
you
can see.’

‘What I can see?’

‘Yes. How many people are on this raft? Is it day or night? Colours, everything!’

‘Right, right. Hang on, I’m counting them … The thing is, some of them are dead and some alive.’

‘Count the bodies, just the bodies!’

‘I’d say about fifteen but I can’t be sure, they’re all piled up …’

‘Is it disgusting?’

‘No! Well, actually yes, a bit. It’s tragic, isn’t it?’

‘It’s tragic … and is it day or night?’

‘Neither. It could be dawn or dusk …’

‘Which do you think?’

‘Dusk.’

‘Ah, the gloaming! It’s a terrible time of day, isn’t it? You know it’s nearly over but you don’t know when it’s going to end, only that it will. It’s terrible not knowing, isn’t it? Excuse me.’

Rodolphe took from his pocket a huge handkerchief almost the size of a sail and blew his nose loudly. The little old lady shrank slightly further away.

‘I beg your pardon. So what are they doing, these people on the raft?’

‘Well, er … some of them are dead and half covered in water, and others are waving their shirts in the air for help.’

‘Who from?’

‘That, I don’t know. They’re doing it to keep their hopes up.’

‘To keep their hopes up? What are you talking about? You told me they were stranded way out at sea … You shouldn’t take advantage of my disability to lead me up the garden path!’

‘I’m not, I swear!’

‘OK, if they’re calling for help, it means there’s a boat somewhere. Use your eyes, damn it!’

‘Ah, yes, yes! I can see a boat actually, but it’s very small, just a dot on the horizon.’

‘So they’re going to be saved?’

‘Yes, they’ll be saved.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that’s the boat that abandoned them. There were two ships in this story. One of them – the
Medusa
– sank. The survivors were piled onto a raft attached to the other ship, but during the night the rope holding them together snapped or – more likely – was cut. No one ever knew for certain. So it’s not dusk, it’s dawn. These poor sods have just realised they’ve been cut adrift. Oh no! They’re going to start eating each other, and some of them will get a taste for it. They’ll drink their own piss.
Some is better than others, apparently. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Oh yes, there’s good piss and bad piss. Hope has the flavour of piss and rotting flesh. Had you never noticed?’

‘No, I … I should be going …’

‘Wait. You mustn’t give up hope, even if it reeks of urine and decaying corpses. The proof is that there were three survivors.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Yes, three, including the shipwright Corréard. He’s the one you can see to the right of the sail, pointing to the horizon.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I met his great-grandson. And do you know how this brave shipwright died?’

‘No.’

‘Drowned in a puddle a few years later, bladdered after a barn dance in Normandy.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘To remind you there’s always someone looking out for you up there.’

He listened gleefully to the old lady’s footsteps hurrying towards the exit. As often as he could, Rodolphe arranged to be dropped at the Louvre where he would make a beeline for Géricault’s painting and tell his anecdote to the first French-speaking person to sit next to him. His story made the greatest impression on the elderly, like the woman who had just scurried off. By the time they reached old age, people always had a few regrets, and had seen others carried off for the most minor of sins; they felt preyed upon, and they were.

‘Survivors, ha! Silly bitch. Life leaves no survivors.’

People tended to forget this and act as if they were immortal, and Rodolphe took it upon himself to remind them. He did this not only for the pleasure of spoiling their day – though the sour smell of fear did bring him some satisfaction – but because he felt
himself invested with a public service mission: ‘No use playing tough: you’re being watched and we’ll all pay our debts in the end.’

He really had met the descendant of the
Medusa
’s shipwright in a bar five years earlier. He was one of those drunks who over the course of an evening give away a family secret, or rather spill it into their glass. To Rodolphe, the story was a revelation. It was his duty to pass it on. Was destiny not as blind as him, after all?