I imagine her at a podium, standing as well, and facing her audience. Is there a table in front of her, as in a classroom? And how is Djinn dressed? Is she still wearing her raincoat and her felt hat? Or else, has she taken them off for this meeting? What about her dark glasses, has she kept them on?
For the first time, I am dying to remove mine. But nobody has yet give me permission; and this is not after all the right moment, with all these people nearby who can see me. Not counting Djinn herself . . . I must therefore be satisfied with what is offered me: the delicious voice with its hint of an American accent.
“. . . clandestine international organization . . . partitioning the tasks . . . great humanitarian enterprise . . .”
What great humanitarian enterprise? What is she talking about? Suddenly, I become aware of my frivolity: I’m not even listening to what she says! Charmed by her exotic intonations, quite busy imagining the face and the mouth from which they come (is she smiling? Or else is she putting on that phony gang-leader look?), I have forgotten the main thing: to pay attention to the information contained in her words; I am savoring them instead of registering their meaning. And all the time, I claimed to be so anxious to learn more about my future work!
But now, Djinn has stopped speaking. What has she just said, exactly? I try in vain to remember. I have the vague idea that they were only words of greeting, of welcome into the organization, and that the most important part remains yet to come. But why is she silent? And what are the other members of the audience doing in the meantime? Nobody moves around me, nor evidences any surprise.
I don’t know if it’s emotional, but a bothersome itching is annoying my right eye. Vigorous blinking does not succeed in getting rid of it. I try to find a way to scratch discreetly. My left hand has remained held in the kid’s, and he is not letting go, and the right one is encumbered with the cane. Yet, unable to stand it any longer, I attempt with that right hand to rub at least the area around my eye.
Inconvenienced by the curved handle of the cane, I make a clumsy gesture, and the thick frame of the glasses slides upward, to my eyebrows. As a matter of fact, the goggles have barely moved, but the space created between my skin and the rubber rim is still enough to allow me to glimpse what is directly on my right. . . .
It leaves me stupefied. I had hardly guessed anything like this. . . . I slowly move my head, in order to sweep a wider angle through my narrowed field of vision. What I see, on all sides, only confirms my initial stupefaction: I have the feeling that I am in front of my own image, multiplied twenty or thirty-fold.
The entire room is, in fact, full of blind men, phony blind men as well, most likely: young men my own age, dressed in various ways (but, all in all, pretty much like me), with the same heavy black goggles over their eyes, the same white cane in the right hand, a kid just like mine holding them by the left hand.
They are all turned in the same direction, toward the stage. Each pair—a blind man and his guide—is separated from the others by an empty space, always about the same, as if one had taken care to arrange, on carefully marked squares, a series of identical statuettes.
And, suddenly, a stupid feeling of jealousy tightens my heart: It isn’t me then that Djinn was speaking to! I did know she was addressing a large assembly. But it is quite something else to see, with my own eyes, that Djinn has already recruited two or three dozen guys, who are little different from me and treated in exactly the same way. I am nothing more, to her, than the least remarkable among them.
But just at that moment, Djinn resumes speaking. Most strangely, she picks up her speech right in the middle of a sentence, without; repeating the words that came before so as to preserve the coherence of her remarks. And she says nothing to justify this interruption; her tone is exactly the same as if there had not been any.
“. . . will allow you not to awaken suspicions . . .”
Having abandoned all prudence (and all obedience to the orders that I suddenly can’t bear any longer), I manage to turn my head sufficiently, by twisting my neck and raising my chin, so as to place the center of the stage in my visual field. . . .
I don’t understand right away what’s going on. . . . But soon I must surrender to the evidence: there is a lecturer’s table all right, but no one behind it! Djinn is not there at all, nor anywhere else in the room.
It is just a loudspeaker that is broadcasting her address, recorded I know not where nor when. The machine is placed on the table, perfectly visible, almost indecent. It had probably stopped, following some technical trouble: a technician is just now checking the wires, which he must have just plugged back in. . . .
All the charm of that fresh and sensuous voice has disappeared suddenly. No doubt the rest of the recording is of the same excellent quality; the words continue their lilting song from beyond the Atlantic; the tape recorder faithfully reproduces its sonorities, the melody, down to the slightest inflection. . . .
But, now that the illusion of her physical presence has vanished, I have lost all feeling of contact with that music, so sweet to my ears a moment before. My discovery of the ruse has broken the magical spell of the speech, which has then become dull and cold: the magnetic tape now reels it off with the anonymous neutrality of an airport announcement. So much so that, now, I no longer have any trouble at all listening to its words nor discovering meaning in them.
The faceless voice is in the process of explaining to us our roles and our future functions. But she does not divulge them entirely, she gives us only their broad outlines. She elaborates more on the goals to be pursued than on the methods: it is because of a concern for efficiency that she prefers, she says again, to divulge to us, for the moment, only that which is strictly necessary.
I have not followed well, as I said, the beginning of her expose. But it seems to me however that I have grasped the essentials: what I am now hearing allows me in any case to assume that I did, for I can find in it no major obscurities (except those intentionally worked in there by the speaker).
We have then, she informs us, been enlisted, the others and I, in an international movement of struggle against machinism. The classified ad that led me (after a brief exchange of letters, with a post-office box) to meet Djinn in the abandoned workshop, had already led me to assume it as much. But I had not fully fathomed the consequences of the slogan being used: “For a life more free and rid of the imperialism of machines.”
In fact, the organization’s ideology is rather simple, simplistic even or so it seems: “The time has come to free ourselves from machines, for they, and nothing else, oppress us. Men believe that machines work for them. While men, on the contrary, hence-forth work for machines. More and more, machines command us, and we obey them.
“Machinism, above all, is responsible for the division of work into tiny fragments devoid of all meaning. The automated tool demands the performance by each worker of a single gesture, he must repeat from morning to night, all his life long. Fragmentation is evident then in manual work. But it is also becoming the rule in any other branch of human activity.
“This, in all cases, the long-term product of our work (manufactured goods, service, or intellectual study) escapes us entirely. The worker never knows either the form of the whole, or its ultimate use, except in a theoretical and purely abstract way. No responsibility accrues to him, no pride can he reap from it. He is nothing but an infinitesimally small link in the immense chain of production, bringing only a modification of detail to a spare part, to an isolated cog, that have no significance in themselves.
“No one, in any domain, any longer produces anything complete. And man’s conscience and awareness have been shattered. But mark my word: it is our alienation by the machine that has brought forth capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy, and not the contrary. It is the atomization of the entire universe that has begotten the atomic bomb.
“Yet, at the beginning of this century, the ruling class, the only one to be spared, still kept decision-making power. Henceforth, t
he machine that thinks—that is to say, the computer—has taken these away as well. We are no longer anything more than slaves, working toward our own destruction, in the service—and for the greater glory—of the Almighty God of the Mechanical.”
On the subject of the means for raising the consciousness of the masses, Djinn is more discreet and less explicit. She speaks of “peaceful terrorism” and “dramatic” actions staged by us in the midst of the crowd, in the subway, in city squares, in offices and in factories. . . .
And yet, something disturbs me about these fine words: it is the fate meant for us, we, the agents of the program’s execution: our role is in total contradiction to the goals that it proposes. Up to now at least, this program has hardly been applied to us. We, on the contrary, have been manipulated, without any regard for our free will. And now still, it has been admitted that only partial knowledge of the whole is permitted us. They want to raise our consciousness, but they start out by preventing us from seeing. Finally, to top it all off, it’s a machine that talks to us, persuading us, directing us. . . .
Once again, I am filled with mistrust. I sense some unknown, obscure danger floating over this trumped-up meeting. This roomful of phony blind men is a trap, in which I have allowed myself to be caught. Through the narrow slit, which I have carefully maintained under the right edge of my cumbersome glasses, I glance at my closest neighbor, a tall blond guy who wears a white leather windbreaker, rather chic, open over a bright blue pullover. . . .
He has also (as I suspected a moment ago), man-aged to slip by a fraction of an inch the tight-fitting contraption that blinded him, so as to glimpse the surroundings on his left; in such a way that our side-long glances have crossed, I am certain of it. A slight tightening of his mouth gives me, besides, a sign of connivance. I return it, in the form of the same grimace, which can pass for a smile in his direction.
The kid who accompanies him, and who holds his left hand, has noticed nothing of our carryings-on, it seems to me. Little Jean hasn’t either, certainly, for he, he is clearly located outside this limited exchange. Meanwhile, the harangue goes on, calling out to us in no uncertain terms:
“The machine is watching you: fear it no longer! The machine gives you orders: obey it no longer! The machine demands all your time: surrender it no longer! The machine thinks itself superior to men: prefer it over them no longer!”
At this point, I see that the character in the white zippered jacket, who has like me kept his blind man’s cane in his right hand, slips it discreetly behind his back, toward his left, so as to bring its sharp tip closer to me. With that iron tip, he noiselessly draws complicated signs on the ground.
Indeed, this colleague of mine, as rebellious as I, is trying to communicate something to me. But I can’t seem to understand what he wants to tell me. He repeats several times for me the same series of short, straight lines and intertwining curves. I persist vainly in my attempts to decipher them; my very limited view of the floor, distorted furthermore by the excessive angle, doesn’t help, that’s for sure.
“We have discovered,” the recorded voice goes on, “a simple solution to save our brothers. Make them aware of it. Put it in their head without telling them, almost without their knowing it. And turn them themselves into new propagandists . . .”
At this point, I sense a sudden agitation behind me. Hurried footsteps, very near, break the silence. I feel a violent shock, at the base of my skull, and a very sharp pain. . . .
CHAPTER SIX
Simon Lecoeur awoke, feeling hung over, as though he had drunk too much, in the midst of piled-up crates and junked machinery. He regained consciousness little by little, with the vague feeling that he was coming out of a long nightmare. Soon, he recognized the scene around him. It was the abandoned workshop where he had met Djinn. And, almost immediately, there returned to his mind the starting point of his mission.
“I must,” he thought, “go to the Gare du Nord. In fact, I must hurry, for it is most important that I be on time for the arrival of the train from Amsterdam. If I do not creditably carry out this first assignment, I very much fear that I won’t be trusted later on, and that I won’t be allowed to go any further. . . .”
But Simon Lecoeur felt, in some confused way, that all this business of railroad station, a train, a traveler he was supposed not to miss, was out of date, done with: this future already belonged to the past. Something was scrambling space and time. And Simon did not seem able to define in it all his own situation. What had happened to him? And when? And where?
On the one hand, he was finding himself lying on the floor, unable to grasp the reason for it, in the dust and assorted debris that littered the workshop, among the discarded materials and machinery. On the other hand, it was broad daylight. The sun, already high, of a fine spring morning, brightly illumined from outside the dusty panes of the skylight; while, on the contrary, night had been falling when Djinn materialized, in these same forlorn premises, with her raincoat and her fedora. . . .
Simon suddenly remembered a recent scene, seeing it again with extreme precision: a boy of about ten, probably dead, considering his total immobility, his excessive rigidity and his waxen complexion, who was lying on an iron bedstead with a bare mattress, a large crucifix placed on his chest, under the flickering light of the three candles in a brass candelabrum. . . .
Another image followed this one, just as sharp and swift: that same boy, still clad in the fashion of the last century, was leading a blind man, holding his left hand. The invalid tightly held, in his other hand, the curved handle of a white cane, which he used to reconnoiter the ground in front of his steps. Heavy black goggles half hid his face. He wore a fine white leather windbreaker with a zipper, wide open over a bright blue sweater. . . .
A sudden thought crossed Simon Lecoeur’s mind. He felt his chest with his hand. His fingers did not find the ebony crucifix (although he himself was lying supine in the exact position of the kid at the wake), but he acknowledged the presence of the lambskin windbreaker and the cashmere pullover. He recalled having chosen them, in fact, for tonight’s appointment, although this blue and white outfit, at once elegant and casual, did not seem to him perfectly suited to job hunting. . . .
“But of course,” he said to himself, “this cannot be tonight’s meeting. Tonight hasn’t come yet, and the appointment has already taken place. Therefore, it must have been last night. . . . As for those two scenes in which the same kid figures, the second one had to take place before the first, since, in the first, the child is lying on his deathbed. . . . But where do these images come from?
Simon did not know whether he should grant them the status of recollections, as though they were events of his real life; or else whether they were not, instead, images such as are shaped in dreams and file through our head at the moment of awakening and usually in reverse chronological order.
In any case, there was a gap in his timetable. Indeed, it seemed hard to conceive that Simon might have slept more than twelve hours in that uncomfortable place . . . unless sleeping pills, or harder drugs, were the cause. . . .
A new image, come from he knew not where, arose unexpectedly in his disordered memory: a long straight alleyway, badly paved, feebly lit by old-fashioned streetlights, between ramshackle fencing, blind walls, and half-ruined cottages. . . . And again, the same kid, springing forth from one of the houses, taking five or six running steps, and sprawling headlong into a puddle of reddish water. . . .
Simon Lecoeur stood up painfully. Every joint hurt, he was uncomfortable, his head heavy. “I must have a cup of coffee,” he thought, “and take an aspirin.” He recalled having seen, on his way down the broad avenue nearby, a number of coffee shops and restaurants. Simon made a few swipes, with the flat of his hands, at the white fabric of his trousers, now rumpled, shapeless and stained with black dust; but he did not manage, evidently, to restore its normal look.
Turning around to leave, he saw that someone else was lying on the floor, a few yar
ds from him, in an identical position. The body was not wholly visible: a large size crate was hiding from view the upper torso and the head. Simon approached cautiously. He was startled to discover the face: it was Djinn’s without the least possible doubt.
The girl was lying across the passageway, still wearing her buttoned-up raincoat, her sunglasses, and her slouch felt hat, which had strangely remained in place when she had dropped, mortally wounded in the back by some knife blade or bullet of a gun. She showed no visible wound, but a puddle of blood, already coagulated, had formed under her chest and had spread onto the darkish concrete floor all around her left shoulder.
Minutes ran out slowly before Simon decided to make a move. He was standing there, motionless, uncomprehending, and inspired with no idea of what he should do. At length, he bent down, overcoming his revulsion, and wanting to touch the hand of the cadaver. . . .
Not only was the hand stiffened and cold, but it seemed to him much too hard, too rigid, to pass as one made of flesh and human joints. In order to dissipate his last doubts, and although an inexplicable revulsion still held him back, he forced himself to feel as well the limbs, the chest, the skin of the cheeks and the lips. . . .
The obvious artificiality of the whole thing quite convinced Simon of his mistake, which duplicated, after all, given the interval of a few hours, the one he had made upon his arrival: he was once more in the presence of a papier-mâché mannequin. Yet, the dark red puddle was not plastic: Simon verified, with his fingertips, its slightly damp and viscous quality. One could not swear, nonetheless, that it was real blood.
All this seemed absurd to Simon Lecoeur; yet, he feared, in some obscure way, that there might be a precise meaning to these simulations, although that meaning eluded him. . . . The murdered mannequin was lying at the exact place where Djinn had stood at the time of the brief interview of the previous day; although Simon remembered very well having seen it, at that time, on the ground floor. . . . Unless he was now confusing the two consecutive scenes, the one with Djinn and the one with the mannequin.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn Page 5