The Silent Men, Albert Camus
The Silent Men
It was the dead of winter and yet a radiant sun was rising over the already active city. At the end of the jetty, sea and sky fused in a single dazzling light. But Yvars did not see them. He was cycling slowly along the boulevards above the harbor. On the fixed pedal of his cycle his crippled leg rested stiffly while the other labored to cope with the slippery pavement still wet with the night’s moisture.
Without raising his head, a slight figure astride the saddle, he avoided the rails of the former car-line, suddenly turned the handlebars to let autos pass him, and occasionally elbowed back into place the musette bag in which Fernande had put his lunch. At such moments he would think bitterly of the bag’s contents. Between the two slices of coarse bread, instead of the Spanish omelet he liked or the beefsteak fried in oil, there was nothing but cheese.
The ride to the shop had never seemed to him so long. To be sure, he was aging. At forty, though he had remained as slim as a vine shoot, a man’s muscles don’t warm up so quickly. At times, reading sports commentaries in which a thirty-year-old athlete was referred to as a veteran, he would shrug his shoulders. “If he’s a veteran,” he would say to Fernande, “then I’m practically in a wheelchair.” Yet he knew that the reporter wasn’t altogether wrong.
At thirty a man is already beginning to lose his wind without noticing it. At forty he’s not yet in a wheelchair, but he’s definitely heading in that direction. Wasn’t that just why he now avoided looking toward the sea during the ride to the other end of town where the cooper’s shop was? When he was twenty he never got tired of watching it, for it used to hold in store a happy weekend on the beach. Despite or because of his lameness, he had always liked swimming.
Then the years had passed, there had been Fernande, the birth of the boy, and, to make ends meet, the overtime, at the shop on Saturdays and on various odd jobs for others on Sundays. Little by little he had lost the habit of those violent days that used to satiate him. The deep, clear water, the hot sun, the girls, the physical life—there was no other form of happiness in this country. And that happiness disappeared with youth. Yvars continued to love the sea, but only at the end of the day when the water in the bay became a little darker.
The moment was pleasant on the terrace beside his house where he would sit down after work, grateful for his clean shirt that Fernande ironed so well and for the glass of anisette all frosted over. Evening would fall, the sky would become all soft and mellow, the neighbors talking with Yvars would suddenly lower their voices. At those times he didn’t know whether he was happy or felt like crying. At least he felt in harmony at such moments, he had nothing to do but wait quietly, without quite knowing for what.
In the morning when he went back to work, on the other hand, he didn’t like to look at the sea. Though it was always there to greet him, he refused to see it until evening. This morning he was pedaling along with head down, feeling even heavier than usual; his heart too was heavy.
When he had come back from the meeting, the night before, and had announced that they were going back to work, Fernande had gaily said: “Then the boss is giving you all a raise?” The boss was not giving any raise; the strike had failed. They hadn’t managed things right, it had to be admitted. An impetuous walkout, and the union had been right to back it up only halfheartedly.
After all, some fifteen workers hardly counted; the union had to consider the other cooper’s shops that hadn’t gone along. You couldn’t really blame the union. Cooperage, threatened by the building of tankers and tank trucks, was not thriving. Fewer and fewer barrels and large casks were being made; work consisted chiefly in repairing the huge tuns already in existence.
Employers saw their business compromised, to be sure, but even so they wanted to maintain a margin of profit and the easiest way still seemed to them to block wages despite the rise in living costs. What can coopers do when cooperage disappears?
You don’t change trades when you’ve gone to the trouble of learning one; this one was hard and called for a long apprenticeship. The good cooper, the one who fits his curved staves and tightens them in the fire with an iron hoop, almost hermetically, without calking with raffia or oakum, was rare.
Yvars knew this and was proud of it. Changing trades is nothing, but to give up what you know, your master craftsmanship, is not easy. A fine craft without employment and you’re stuck, you have to resign yourself. But resignation isn’t easy either. It was hard to have one’s mouth shut, not to be able to discuss really, and to take the same road every morning with an accumulating fatigue, in order to receive at the end of every week merely what they are willing to give you, which is less and less adequate.
So they had got angry. Two or three of them had hesitated, but the anger had spread to them too after the first discussions with the boss. He had told them flatly, in fact, that they could take it or leave it. A man doesn’t talk that way. “What’s he expect of us?” Esposito had said. “That we’ll stoop over and wait to be kicked in the ass?” The boss wasn’t a bad sort, however.
He had inherited from his father, had grown up in the shop, and had known almost all the workers for years. Occasionally he invited them to have a snack in the shop; they would cook sardines or sausage meat over fires of shavings and, thanks partly to the wine, he was really very nice. At New Year’s he always gave five bottles of vintage wine to each of the men, and often, when one of them was ill or celebrated an event like marriage or first communion, he would make a gift of money.
At the birth of his daughter, there had been sugar-coated almonds for everyone. Two or three times he had invited Yvars to hunt on his coastal property. He liked his workmen, no doubt, and often recalled the fact that his father had begun as an apprentice. But he had never gone to their homes; he wasn’t aware. He thought only of himself because he knew nothing but himself, and now you could take it or leave it. In other words, he had become obstinate likewise. But, in his position, he could allow himself to be.
He had forced the union’s hand, and the shop had closed its doors. “Don’t go to the trouble of picketing,” the boss had said; “when the shop’s not working, I save money.” That wasn’t true, but it didn’t help matters since he was telling them to their faces that he gave them work out of charity. Esposito was wild with fury and had told him he wasn’t a man. The boss was hot-blooded and they had to be separated.
But, at the same time, it had made an impression on the workers. Twenty days on strike, the wives sad at home, two or three of them discouraged, and, in the end, the union had advised them to give in on the promise of arbitration and recovery of the lost days through overtime. They had decided to go back to work. Swaggering, of course, and saying that it wasn’t all settled, that it would have to be reconsidered. But this morning, with a fatigue that resembled defeat, cheese instead of meat, the illusion was no longer possible.
No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises. Yvars pressed on his single pedal and with each turn of the wheel it seemed to him he was aging a little. He couldn’t think of the shop, of the fellow workers and the boss he would soon be seeing again without feeling his heart become a trifle heavier. Fernande had been worried: “What will you men say to him?” “Nothing.” Yvars had straddled his bicycle, and had shaken his head.
He had clenched his teeth; his small, dark, and wrinkled face with its delicate features had become hard. “We’re going back to work. That’s enough.” Now he was cycling along, his teeth still clenched, with a sad, dry anger that darkened even the sky itself.
He left the boulevard, and the sea, to attack the moist streets of the old Spanish quarter. They led to an area occupied solely by sheds, junkyards, and garages, where the shop was—a sort of low shed that was faced with stone up to a halfway point and then glassed in up to the corrugated metal roof.
This shop opened onto the former cooperage, a courtyard surrounded by a covered shed that had been abandoned when the business had enlarged and now served only as a storehouse for worn-out machines and old casks. Beyond the courtyard, separated from it by a sort of path covered with old tiles, the boss’s garden began, at the end of which his house stood. Big and ugly, it was nevertheless prepossessing because of the Virginia creeper and the straggling honeysuckle surrounding the outside steps.
Yvars saw at once that the
