The Toilers of the Sea (19 page)

“He is my tocayo.”

“He will come whatever the weather?”

“Yes: whatever the weather. He's not afraid. I am Blasco; he is Blasquito.”

“So he will not fail to come to Guernsey?”

“I come one month; he comes the next month.”

“I see.”

“Counting from next Saturday, a week today, Blasquito will arrive within five days.”

“But if the sea were very rough?”

“Egurraldia gaïztoa?”
¹³¹

“Yes.”

“Blasquito would not come so quickly, but he would still come.”

“Where will he be coming from?”

“Bilbao.”

“Where will he be heading for?”

“Portland.”

“Good.”

“Or Torbay.”

“Better still.”

“Your man need not worry.”

“Blasquito won't betray him?”

“Only cowards are traitors. We are brave men. The sea is the church of winter. Treason is the church of hell.”

“No one can hear what we are saying?”

“No one can hear us or see us. Fear keeps people away from here.”

“I know.”

“Who would dare to come and listen to us here?”

“True enough.”

“Besides, even if anyone were listening they wouldn't understand. We are speaking a language of our own that nobody here understands. You understand it, and that makes you one of us.”

“I came here to arrange things with you.”

“Right.”

“Now I must go.”

“All right.”

“Tell me: suppose the passenger wanted Blasquito to land him somewhere other than Portland or Torbay, what then?”

“If he's got the money there will be no difficulty.”

“Will Blasquito do whatever the man wants?”

“Blasquito will do whatever the money wants.”

“Will it take long to get to Torbay?”

“That depends on the wind.”

“Eight hours?”

“Thereabouts.”

“Will Blasquito obey his passenger?”

“If the sea obeys Blasquito.”

“He will be well paid.”

“Gold is gold. The sea is the sea.”

“That is true.”

“A man with gold can do what he wants. God, with the wind, does what he wants.”

“The man who wants to go with Blasquito will be here on Friday.”

“Right.”

“At what time of day will Blasquito arrive?”

“At night. We arrive at night. We leave at night. We have a wife who is called the Sea and a sister who is called Night. The wife is sometimes unfaithful; the sister never.”

“Then it's all settled. Good-bye, lads.”

“Good-bye. A drop of brandy?”

“No, thank you.”

“It's better for you than medicine.”

“I have your word, then?”

“My name is Pundonor.”
¹³²

“Good-bye.”

“You are a gentleman and I am a caballero.”

Clearly only devils could speak in this way. The boys did not stay to hear any more, and this time took to their heels in earnest. The French boy, finally convinced, ran faster than the others.

On the following Tuesday Sieur Clubin was back in Saint-Malo with the Durande.

The
Tamaulipas
was still in the roads.

Between two puffs on his pipe Sieur Clubin asked the landlord of the Auberge Jean:

“Well, when is the
Tamaulipas
sailing?”

“On Thursday; the day after tomorrow,” replied the innkeeper.

That evening Clubin had his meal at the coastguards' table, and, contrary to his usual habit, went out after supper. As a result he was absent from the Durande's office and lost some of the vessel's freight. This was remarked on as being unlike a man so punctual in business.

He seems to have had a few minutes' conversation with his friend the money changer.

He returned two hours after Noguette
¹³³
had rung the curfew. This Brazilian bell rings at ten o'clock; so it was midnight.

VI

LA JACRESSARDE

Forty years ago there was an alley in Saint-Malo called the Ruelle Coutanchez. It no longer exists, having been caught up in improvements to the town.

It consisted of a double row of houses leaning toward each other and leaving just enough room between them for a gutter that was called the street. People walked with their legs apart on either side of the water, knocking their head or their elbow on the houses to right and left. These ancient medieval houses in Normandy have an almost human aspect. A dilapidated old hovel and a witch are not unlike each other. Their slanting upper stories, their overhangs, their circumflexshaped canopies, and their scrub of ironwork are like lips, chins, noses, and eyebrows. The garret window is the eye, half blind. The wall is the cheek, wrinkled and covered with sores. Their foreheads are close together, as if they were plotting some mischief. This architecture summons up the idea of such old words, reflections of ancient villainy, as cutthroat and cutpurse.

One of the houses in the Ruelle Coutanchez—the largest and the best-known or most ill-famed—was called La Jacressarde. It was a lodging for the kind of people who have no permanent lodging. In all towns, and particularly in seaports, there is always to be found, below the general population, a residue. Lawless characters—so lawless that even the law sometimes cannot get its hands on them—pickers and stealers, tricksters living by their wits, chemists of villainy continually brewing up life in their crucibles; rags of every kind and every way of wearing them; withered fruits of roguery, bankrupt existences, consciences that have declared themselves insolvent; the incompetents of breaking and entering (for the big men of burglary are above all this); journeymen and journeywomen of evil, rascals both male and female; scruples in tatters and out at elbow; scoundrels who have sunk into poverty, evildoers who have had little reward from their work, losers in the social duel, devourers who now go hungry, the low earners of crime, beggars and villains: such are the people who form this residue. Human intelligence is to be found here, but it is bestial. This is the rubbish heap of souls, piled up in a corner and swept from time to time by the broom that is called a police raid. La Jacressarde was a corner of this kind in Saint-Malo.

In such dens you do not find the big men of crime, bandits and robbers, the major products of ignorance and poverty. If murder is represented here it is the work of some brutal drunkard; the robbers here are mere petty thieves. This is the spittle of society rather than its vomit. Small-time crooks, yes; brigands, no. Yet you can never be sure. On this lowest level of low life there may sometimes be extremes of wickedness. When the police raided the Épi-scié cabaret—which was for Paris what La Jacressarde was for Saint-Malo—they picked up Lacenaire.
¹³⁴

Lodgings of this kind accept anybody. A fall in the social scale is a leveling experience. Sometimes honesty reduced to rags finds a home there. Virtue and integrity, we know, can suffer misadventure. We should not, out of hand, value a Louvre highly or despise a prison.

Both public respect and universal reprobation must be bestowed only after careful examination. There can be surprises. An angel in a house of ill fame, a pearl on a dung heap: there may sometimes be such somber and dazzling discoveries.

La Jacressarde was a courtyard rather than a house, and a well rather than a courtyard. It had no windows looking onto the street. Its façade was a high wall pierced only by a low doorway leading into the courtyard. You lifted the latch, pushed the door, and found yourself in a courtyard.

In the middle of the courtyard was a round hole, its margin level with the ground. It was a well. The courtyard was small; the well was large. Around the well was broken paving.

On three sides of the courtyard, which was square, were buildings. On the street side there was nothing; but facing the doorway and to right and left was the house.

If, rather at your peril, you entered the courtyard after nightfall, you would hear the sound of mingled breathing, and if there was enough moonlight or starlight to give form to the obscure shapes that confronted you, this is what you would see:

The courtyard. The well. Around the courtyard, facing the doorway, a kind of shed in the form of a horseshoe (if a horseshoe can be square), a worm-eaten gallery open to the air, roofed with wooden beams borne on stone pillars set at irregular intervals; in the center, the well; around the well, on a litter of straw, a ring of boots and shoes, worn and down-at-heel; toes sticking through holes, numbers of bare heels; men's feet, women's feet, children's feet. All these feet were asleep.

Beyond the feet, in the semidarkness of the shed, your eye might distinguish bodies, forms, sleeping heads, figures lying inert, rags of both sexes, the promiscuity of the dunghill, a strange and sinister deposit of humanity. This sleeping chamber was open to anyone and everyone. The occupants paid two sous a week. Their feet touched the well. On stormy nights rain fell on these feet; on winter nights it snowed on these bodies.

Who were these creatures? Unknowns. They came in the evening and left in the morning.

The order of society is complicated by such human debris. Some of them slipped in for a single night and made off without paying. Most of them had had nothing to eat all day.

Every vice, every form of abjection, every infection, every kind of distress; the same sleep of despondency on the same bed of mud. The dreams of all these souls were very similar to one another. It was a ghastly concourse, mingling in the same miasma all their lassitudes, their weaknesses, their bouts of drunkenness, their marches and countermarches in a day without a crust of bread or a kindly thought; livid pallors with eyes tight closed; regrets, lusts; hair mingled with streetsweepings; faces with the look of death on them, perhaps of kisses from the mouths of darkness. All this human putridity fermented in this vat. They had been thrown into this lodging by fatality, by their wanderings, by a ship that had arrived the day before, by their release from prison, by chance, by the night. Each day destiny emptied its pack here. Hither came any who would, here slept any who could, here spoke any who dared; for this was a place of whispers. Those who came here were quick to mingle in the mass; they tried to forget themselves in sleep since they could not lose themselves in the dark. They took as much of death as they could. They closed their eyes in a kind of death agony that recurred every evening. Where did they come from? From society, of which they were the dregs; from the waves, on which they were the foam.

There was not enough straw to go around. Many a naked body lay on the hard paving. They lay down in the evening exhausted; they got up in the morning stiff and sore. The well, thirty feet deep, without a parapet, without a cover, gaped open day and night. Rain fell into it, filth oozed into it, all the trickles of water in the courtyard drained into it. Beside it was the bucket for drawing water. Anyone who was thirsty drank from it. Anyone who was tired of life drowned himself in it, slipping from his sleep amid the refuse to that other sleep. In 1819 the body of a boy of fourteen was taken out of the well.

To live safely in this house you had to “belong.” Outsiders were not regarded with favor. Did these people know each other? No. They scented each other.

The mistress of the house was a young woman with a wooden leg, not bad-looking, who wore a bonnet trimmed with ribbons, who washed herself occasionally with water from the well.

At dawn the courtyard emptied; the occupants scattered in all directions.

There were a cock and some hens in the courtyard that scratched about in the refuse all day long. Across the courtyard ran a horizontal beam borne on posts, the likeness of a gallows that did not seem entirely out of place there. Sometimes, on the day after a rainy evening, a bedraggled silk dress belonging to the woman with the wooden leg would be hung out on the beam to dry.

Above the shed and, like it, running around the courtyard, was an upper story, and above this a loft. A staircase of rotting wood ran up through an aperture in the roof of the shed to the upper floor—a rickety ladder up which the woman with the wooden leg stumped noisily. Casual lodgers, paying by the week or by the night, slept in the courtyard. More permanent residents lived in the house.

Windows without glass, doorways without doors, fireplaces without fires: the house was like that. You passed from one room to another either through a long square hole where there had been a door or through a triangular gap between the joists in the dividing walls. The floors were littered with fallen plaster. It was hard to see how the house held together. It was shaken by every wind. Climbing the worn and slippery steps of the staircase was a hazardous business. The whole structure was open to the air. Winter entered the house as water enters a sponge. The multitude of spiders provided some reassurance against the immediate collapse of the building. There was no furniture of any kind. Two or three straw mattresses in the corners of the rooms, gaping open and revealing more ashes than straw. Here and there a jug and an earthenware pot, serving a variety of uses. A repellent sweetish smell.

From the windows there was a view of the courtyard—a view like the view of a scavenger's cart. The things—to say nothing of the people—that lay rotting, rusting, moldering there were indescribable. All the various kinds of debris fraternized; they fell off the walls, they fell off the occupants. The rags and tatters seeded the rubble.

In addition to the floating population of the courtyard La Jacressarde had three permanent lodgers—a coal man, a ragpicker, and a maker of gold. The coal man and the ragpicker occupied two of the straw mattresses on the first floor; the gold maker, a chemist, lodged in the loft. No one knew where the woman slept. The gold maker was also something of a poet. In the roof space, under the tiles, he had a room with a narrow window and a large stone fireplace in which the wind roared. Since the window had no frame he had nailed over it a strip of scrap metal salvaged from a ship, which admitted little light but plenty of cold air. The coal man paid for his lodging with a sack of coal from time to time; the ragpicker paid with a setier of grain for the chickens once a week; the gold maker did not pay anything. In the meantime he was burning up the house. He had torn off what little woodwork there was and kept taking laths from the wall or the roof to heat his crucible. On the wall above the rag-and-bone man's bed were two columns of figures written in chalk, a column of threes and a column of fives, according to whether a setier of grain cost three liards or five centimes.
¹³⁵
For his crucible the “chemist” used a broken old shell-case, promoted by him to the role of cauldron, in which he mixed his ingredients. He was obsessed with the idea of transmutation. Sometimes he talked about it to the vagrants in the courtyard, who laughed at him. Then he would say: “People like that are full of prejudices.” He was determined not to die until he had thrown the philosopher's stone through the windows of science. His furnace consumed a great deal of wood. The banisters of the staircase had disappeared into its maw, and the whole of the house was going that way, little by little. The landlady used to say to him: “You will leave us nothing but the shell.” Then he would disarm her by writing poetry to her.

Such was La Jacressarde.

The domestic staff consisted of a goitrous boy, or perhaps a dwarf, who might have been twelve or might have been sixty, who went about with a broom in his hand.

The lodgers entered by the doorway leading into the courtyard; the general public entered through the shop.

What was the shop?

In the high wall facing onto the street, to the right of the entrance to the courtyard, was a square opening that was both a door and a window, with shutters and a window frame—the only shutters in the whole of the house with hinges and bolts. Behind this window, opening off the street, was a small room formed by cutting off a corner of the shed around the courtyard. Scrawled in charcoal on the street door was the inscription CURIOSITY SHOP—a term that was then in use. On three shelves in the shop window could be seen a few china jars without handles, a torn Chinese parasol in figured gold-beater's skin that could be neither opened nor shut, some shapeless fragments of iron and earthenware, battered hats and bonnets, three or four ormer shells, a few packets of bone and copper buttons, a snuffbox with a portrait of Marie-Antoinette, an odd volume of Bois-Bertrand's
Algebra.
This was the shop; these were the “curiosities” sold here. A door in the back of the shop led into the courtyard in which was the well. In the shop were a table and a stool. The shopkeeper was the woman with the wooden leg.