Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: The Dead Man's Return

Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

The Dead Man’s Return

THEY often take a long time to come back to us. They have their whims.

A man in a boat some distance away is signalling to Zumlauf, who is in his own boat just in front of the bathing establishment; and it looks as if Zumlauf has understood straight away what was wanted of him, once he’d taken a look at the other man raising his arm to beckon to him.

And then, gesturing with his hand, he was silently telling him to come over, raising his hand up to his face several times.

Zumlauf hasn’t asked any questions.

They’re never in a hurry. The water brings them in and carries them out again. They let themselves be borne along by the water, which must itself obey the winds, and these in their turn sometimes blow from the north, sometimes from the south, with varying persistence and strength: there’s the northeast wind, the northwest wind, all kinds of other local winds, each with its own name and following one another in no particular sequence; and so the poor things are driven from the Savoy side right into the middle of the lake, then they swing round, are swept back towards us and again driven along, level with the shore, where they drift onwards for a long time, dreaming away.

They drift downwards and then back up again. The deep waters suck them down and swallow them. they are drawn slowly downwards, though the never-ending weight of limpid water, and there is a gentle blue light, then a greenish one and gradually you move into the darkness, with just one last glimmer of light far above, and then this too fades away like a door shutting at the end of a long corridor.

They continue to drift on downwards, arms raised, hair streaming out behind them, trying to find the bottom but never reaching it, their clothes cling to their bodies, catching in the weeds, watched by the fish who swim up to them inquisitively, approaching from the side to get a closer look because of their flat heads, and then swimming away with a flick of their tails. They go on downwards, still sinking, until eventually they reach a zone where there are no more weeds, where even the fish don’t come, the regions of total silence, where you cannot even imagine what light is; and there they topple head over heels, with their feet sticking up in the air and their arms hanging downwards.

Zumlauf had settled himself at the oars of his boat, which was as broad as it was long and looked like a large half-marrow and was painted green.

Zumlauf was rowing with long strokes towards the other boatman, who was leaning over the planking waiting for him, holding something black against the side of the boat with one of his oars. Because they always do come back up to the daylight in the end. They come back up to the sun, which moves a tepid hand across their enraptured faces. Their eyes wide open, they endure its dazzling light without surprise or weariness. They brave the sparkling rays glittering on the crest of the waves like brazing wood shavings. They stare boldly back at the golden orb, not turning their gaze away but floating on the surface of the water, and then they continue unconcernedly on their way, moving hither and thither, sometimes lying on their backs, sometimes on their stomachs, day and night. In fair weather and in foul, rising and sinking rhythmically with the waves, docilely going wherever they are bidden, and then in the end coming back to us. And that’s why Zumlauf asks:

‘Who is it?’

‘Don’t know,’ says the other. ‘Someone or other.’

This other man was called Rochat, a watchmaker by trade, but he did some fishing now and again, because he didn’t get much work.

Zumlauf says to him:

‘Hold him carefully.’

Then he takes hold of his boathook. It’s got caught in something slimy and disintegrating; some scraps of clothing come to the surface, but Zumlauf casts his boathook out again and this time it bites into something. The thin layer of water separating us from the dead man seems like a pane of glass being shattered; the dead man comes up to show his face. He no longer had a face.

He only had half a face, the other half was all eaten away – the skull stripped bare, the eye-socket empty, one side of the moustache and beard missing; meanwhile Zumlauf had attached his boathook to the back of the boat and was rowing heavily towards the sore behind Rochat.

Jolting wit the boat’s motion, the dead man was almost wholly visible, his trousers flattened round his legs, which seemed to be missing, in the beautiful evening sun, amidst the laughter and shouts coming from the bathing establishment. A steamer was coming in and at this point on their route the steamers sail very close to the bank, so close that they look enormous, with their two or three decks one above the other, bearing down on you, and the helmsman is on his bridge turning a wheel and the paddles make a noise like a rushing waterfall while the funnel spews out an enormous plume of black smoke like a plait of horsehair being unravelled.

Then they couldn’t see any more. The policeman had covered up the corpse with a tarpaulin. The body scarcely showed under the tarpaulin but the water went on trickling out from underneath, forming two little streams as it ran through the close yellow moss that had grown on the flagstones.

It’s a bed, a last bed, and it’s even got a sheet, but the man sleeping beneath it must be sleeping terribly deeply. A great noise of shouts and laughter can still be heard to your left and Zumlauf is now rowing back to the bathing establishment with long strokes of the oars.

*

THEY were just closing; Larpin was going up and down the cabins shouting: ‘Closing time!’

The bathers were leaving, some of them with patches of sunburn on their legs or on the back of their necks, children with their swimming-trunks rolled up in a ball, holding them by their draw-strings and swinging them around; a tall girl with a brown neck, bare legs and arms, wearing a short, thin summer dress; and Larpin was closing the door of the swimming baths as Zumlauf rowed up.

Meanwhile, Madame Larpin was breaking macaroni into a saucepan on top of a gas-cooker in a small room net to the ticket-office; at the same time, too, Larpin and Zumlauf were settling down at a little pine table on the verandah overlooking the lake where Madame Larpin had just brought them a sealed litre bottle of white wine.

Larpin politely pours out a few drops into his own glass, then he fills up Zumlauf’s and Zumlauf raises it to clink glasses with Larpin. And they say: ‘Cheers! Cheers!’ They are sitting facing each other. They look at each other. They always eat their evening meal together, the two of them and Madame Larpin. They are both smoking pipes and looking at each other. They feel good. the only heat left is in the sand on the beach with its round holes made by people’s footprints: it can be seen hovering above the sand in a kind of shimmer through which things seem to be constantly losing their shape and solidity, so that the upper edge of each object breaks up into tiny fragments which the eye finds it difficult to reassemble. The two men ae sitting in a draught and this makes the hair on Larpin’s bare head flutter gently. Zumlauf still has his cap on. And he has suddenly said from under it:

‘So that’s another one.’

Larpin shrugs:

‘How many does that make this season?’ asks Zumlauf.

‘Four. The German, one; a barmaid from Lausanne, two; the man the other day who was out of work, three, and then today Lambelet.’

Larpin says:

‘Poor old Lambelet!’

‘Why poor?’ Zumlauf says.

He looks at Larpin through the smoke rising from his pipe. Larpin looks thin, bony and dried up, with his sailor vest with its blue and white horizontal stripes, his heavily tanned arms cross-crossed with black veins like ivy knotted round a branch, his bright little eyes half shut; and if you glanced under the table you would see his red belt, his bare feet with toenails like metal nailheads driven in crooked, and a large nickel watchchain hung with medal-lions running across his belly and plunging into his pocket.

‘He wasn’t getting on with his daughter any more.’

That’s Larpin again, but Zumlauf says:

‘He’s all right now.’

‘Yes,’ says Larpin. ‘But what about all that…?’

And, half raising his arm, he makes a circular movement embracing everything around him; the evening descending over the perfect smooth surface of the lake, brimming with pink clouds; in the sky there are more pink clouds, and there are two rows of poplars, the ones up in the air and the ones in the water. Tiny little waves lap against the shore, stretching out their claws into the sand, spreading them out as cats do. they turn white as they open out.

‘All that,’ Larpin says, and all that also means that it’s good to be sitting down with a litre of chilled white wine and a pipe, and also so nice to have nothing to do once you’ve finished doing what you have to do.

‘He doesn’t give a damn now,’ says Zumlauf. ‘personally I think,’ he says, referring to the lake, ‘that you’re just as well off in it as sitting beside it.’

Madame Larpin brings in a dish of macaroni cheese with a piece of leftover ham. She serves the two men.

Larpin says: ‘But he’d worked hard all his life. And he never managed to put anything by.’

Larpin says to his wife: ‘We’re talking about Lambelet, we’ve just fished him out.’

‘Good grief!’ says Madame Larpin, ‘Where?’

‘Just over there.’ Larpin says. ‘Zumlauf did all the dirty work. We kept quiet about it because of all the people around. The ambulance is going to come and fetch him.’

‘Good grief!’ repeats Madame Larpin. ‘What a terrible thing!’

‘The thing is he wasn’t getting on with that daughter of his who took him in. you know, she married some fellow who works on the railway. They live down below the church.’

Zumlauf listens in silence. He knows that Larpin knows more about it han he does. Zumlauf only knows about the lake, and he’s a bachelor.

Meanwhile Larpin goes on talking, cutting slices of ham, forking up a mouthful of macaroni and swallowing it down bit by bit, and it forms a sort of beard which he gradually sucks in towards him, taking a swig of wine every now and then, still with his mouth full.

‘Oh! People had been talking about it for ages. They’re a tight-fisted couple. They gave the old man nothing but bits of leftover soup and he slept in a box-room. And he couldn’t take it any longer.’

‘How long will it be now since he disappeared?’

‘Well, let’s see!’ Zumlauf said. ‘It’s the end of August now: June, July, August, it’ll be about three months.’

‘He took his time coming back.’

‘Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.’ Zumlauf says. ‘They take as long as they fell like, some of them take years and others take so long they never come back at all. he’ll have been wandering about over on the Geneva side, will Lambelet. There’s the current in the middle of the lake that carries them along. At other times the waves fling them against the jetties, they go all limp like a bit of chewed tobacco, they don’t have a single bone unbroken in their body. Lambelet wasn’t too badly damaged, he hadn’t lost too much of his clothing either. Some of them come back so naked it’s almost indecent. He’d still got half his trousers, one of the sleeves of his jacket and his shirt.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it!’ Madame Larpin says. ‘It’s a nasty business. Won’t the law have something to say about it?’

‘What d’you expect them to do?’ replies her husband. ‘Lambelet threw himself into the water of his own free will, nobody’s responsible.’

‘Oh yes, they are!’ madame Larpin says. ‘The people who forced him to kill himself by treating him so badly.’

‘First of all, it’d have to be proved that he was ill-treated, that’s not easy. It would’ve been easier to stop him drowning in the first place. Because he was seen. You know Monsieur Perret. He’s a bank clerk in Lausanne. He saw him. He told me: “I thought he was going for a swim. I was a bit surprised. An old man. And then the water was still cold, but I didn’t think any more of it. he’d just got undressed, he kept his trousers and his shirt on. He had pink socks. I said to myself, What a funny get-up! But it wasn’t any of my business. Still, I couldn’t stop myself looking round when I saw him go beyond the jetty; next I see him getting near the breakwater with his body all doubled up, and he’s clinging on to the rocks with his hands because it was slippery, stretching out one leg. After that I didn’t see nay more. He’d gone down into the water on the other side of the jetty and this hid him from me. you could hear the noise he was making as he slid into the water. He must have slipped, he was holding himself back, making a noise like a swan beating its wings, then you could hear a gurgling sound, and then a shout—so I turned back; you could still see his head above the surface as he struck at the water with his arms as if he was trying to cling onto it, but it gave way under him, and closed over his head. What can you expect? He was in deep water, it’s one of the places where the mountain begins right at the water’s edge. You go about twenty or thirty yards with the water up to your waist and then you’ve got nothing beneath your feet but a bottomless pit. I went to fetch help, but it was some time before they could get there. By then there was no sign of him anywhere.” ‘

‘How deep does it go right at the water’s edge?’

‘Nobody knows…’ Larpin says. ‘A hundred metres, two hundred, and once they’ve gone you can’t do anything but let them go. They start out on their long journey, they get dragged down by their clothing and their feet get tangled up in the weeds. You have to wait till they’ve swelled up before you use them come back up to the surface once day, but then the waves come and since they’ve got all light, they move quickly. They’re like buoys which somebody’s forgotten to anchor. A gust of wind from the north and they’re in Savoy, a blast from the north and they’re in Savoy, a blast from the south-west wind and they come over to us. That’s how it goes, isn’t it, Zumlauf?’

‘That’s it!’ says Zumlauf, who gets interested in the conversation again now that they’re talking about things he knows about. ‘And sometimes they’ll wander along close to the bank for days and not be noticed.’

‘If it hadn’t been for Rochat we wouldn’t have got him today.’

JUST THEN the ambulance siren sounds on the road. Madame Larpin gets up to see from the window what is going to happen.

‘You won’t see anything,’ says Larpin.

The ambulance goes back past the bathing establishment the way it came, and disappears.

The two men are feeling satisfied. They’ve finished eating. There’s a bit of wine left in the bottle. Larpin has filled up the glasses; Zumlauf raises his:

‘Cheers!’

Larpin replied:

‘Cheers!’