Then, with deliberate precision, in the same even motion, precisely as if the same mechanism were activating three heads, they turned toward us. And they remained that way, petrified once again, motionless now like three statues: the young man with the fair face half-hidden behind his bulky glasses, framed between the little boy on his left and the short man in the shapeless gray suit on his right.
All three kept their eyes fixed on me, the blind man too, I could have sworn it, behind his enormous black lenses. The skinny face of the boy had an extreme, abnormal, ghostly pallor. The ugly features of the short man had frozen into a horrible grimace. The whole group suddenly seemed to me so terrifying that I wanted to scream, as one does to end a nightmare.
But, just as in nightmares, no sound came out of my mouth. Why wasn’t Caroline saying anything? And what about Marie, who was standing between the two of us, why wasn’t she breaking the spell, bold and casual as children will be? Why was she standing there frozen, rendered speechless too, held in thrall by what enchantment?
Anguish was growing in me so dangerously, relentless, that I feared I might faint. To struggle against this unbearable malaise, so unlike my nature, I tried to think of something else. But I could no longer find anything to hold on to, except one of the idiotic tirades Simon was delivering for my benefit an hour or two earlier:
I was not, he claimed, a real woman, but only a highly sophisticated electronic robot built by a certain Dr. Morgan. Dr. Morgan was now subjecting me to various experiments in order to test my performance. He was putting me through a series of tests, while having me watched by agents in his employ, placed everywhere along my way, some of whom, themselves, would be nothing but robots as well. . . .
The gestures of that phony blind man, who had just arrived as though by chance in front of me, did they not, precisely, seem to me mechanical and staccato? Those strange goggles, which seemed to be growing monstrously larger, were probably not covering real eyes, but a sophisticated recording system, perhaps even some device that emitted rays, which were working, unbeknownst to me, on my body and on my consciousness. And the surgeon-cabdriver was none other than Morgan himself.
The space between these people and me had emptied, I know not through what chance circumstance, or what supernatural action. The travelers milling around here in large numbers a moment earlier, had disappeared now. . . . With incomprehensible difficulty, I managed to turn my head away from those three pairs of eyes that hypnotized me. And I sought help in the direction of Marie and Caroline.
They too were staring at me with the same icy, inhuman eyes. They were not on my side, but on that of the others, against me. . . . I felt my legs giving way, and my reason tumbling, into the void, in a vertiginous fall.
When I woke up this morning, my head was empty, heavy, and my mouth felt pasty, as though I had allowed myself, the day before, to drink to excess, or else taken some powerful sleeping drug. Yet that was not the case.
What did I do, exactly, the night before? I could not manage to remember. . . . I was supposed to go and meet Caroline at the station, but something prevented me. . . . I no longer knew what it was.
A picture, however, came back to my memory, but I couldn’t tie it to anything. It was a large room, furnished with odd pieces, in very bad repair, like those sprung chairs and those broken iron bedsteads that used to be relegated to the attics of old houses.
There were, in particular, a very large number of old trunks, of different sizes and shapes. I opened one. It was full of old-fashioned women’s clothing, corsets, petticoats, pretty faded dresses of another day. I could not very well make out the elaborate ornaments or the embroidery, because the room was lit by only two candelabra in which candle stubs burned with a yellow and vacillating flame. . . .
Next, I thought of the ad that Caroline had read me, over the phone, when she called to tell me the arrival time of her train. Since I was looking for a part-time job, in order to supplement the amount of my scholarship, I had decided to go to the address given in that weird job ad, which my friend had found while reading an ecological weekly. But I had overslept so long, today, that the time to get ready had already come, if I wanted to be there at the appointed hour.
I arrived exactly at six-thirty. It was almost dark already. The hangar wasn’t locked. I walked in by pushing the door, which no longer had a lock.
Inside, all was silent. Under the faint light that came through the windows with dirt-encrusted panes, I could barely see the objects that surrounded me, piled everywhere in great disarray, probably cast off.
When my eyes became used to the semidarkness, I finally noticed the man facing me. Standing, motionless, both hands in the pockets of his raincoat, he watched me without speaking a word, without so much as the slightest greeting in my direction.
Resolutely, I stepped forward toward him. . . .
EPILOGUE
Here stops Simon Lecoeur’s story.
I do say “Simon Lecoeur’s story” because no one—neither our people, nor those on the side of the police—thinks that Chapter Eight, supposedly written by a woman, was really written by anyone else: it is too clearly integrated into the whole, from the grammatical point of view as well as according to the logic of the plot locales and the narrative twists.
Simon—all testimony agrees on this point—came as usual to teach his class, at the school on the rue de Passy, on Thursday May eighth early in the afternoon. “He looked worried,” several of his students stated at the time of the inquest. But most of them added that he always looked worried.
He displayed, in fact, a disturbing combination of almost pathological nervousness, incompletely restrained anxiety, and a sweet, smiling lightness that had a great deal to do with the definite charisma that everyone agreed he possessed. In the most casual hallway conversation with a colleague, a student, or even a superior, he offered such easy chatty friendliness, full of casual and unexpected inventiveness, spontaneity, inconsequential humor, that he was liked by everyone, as one loves a child. . . .
Then, suddenly, the innocent smile would vanish from his lips, which would lose in a few seconds their attractive, sensuous lines to become hard and thin; his eyes seemed to sink deeper, his pupils darkened. . . . And he would turn around abruptly, as though he would thus come face to face with an enemy who had approached him behind his back, silently. . . . But there was no one, and Simon would slowly resume his previous demeanor, before his bewildered interlocutor. Bewildered himself, the young man seemed then to have fled thousands of miles, or even light years away. He would then take leave on a few vague, incoherent, barely audible words.
On Friday, May ninth, he did not show up at school. That caused no concern: his Friday class, scheduled at the end of the day, was the last of the week, and many students—especially in the spring—made it a point to consider attendance optional: it sometimes happened that young instructors did the same.
But on Monday the twelfth, he was not seen again either, nor on Tuesday. His room did not have a phone. On Wednesday, an assistant director asked the students whether one of them could stop by the rue d’Amsterdam in order to enquire about the health of “Jan,” who might have been seriously ill and unable to notify anyone. The volunteer messenger said she found a closed door. There was no answer to her repeated rings or her calls. No sound came from within.
Thursday the fifteenth was Ascension Day. On Friday the sixteenth in the morning, school authorities alerted the police. Simon Lecoeur’s door was broken in, in the presence of a police commissioner, that Friday around noon.
In the room as in the bathroom, the inspectors found everything in order, just as our agents (they, obviously, possessed a duplicate key) already had two days earlier. There was no evidence of a struggle, or of any untimely visit, or hurried departure. The ninety-nine typed pages (which we had been careful to replace after Xeroxing) soon became therefore the only element that could be considered a clue.
The interest of the investigators in that text on
ly grew, as one can guess, when, on Sunday the eighteenth, around seven P.M., there was discovered in an abandoned workshop, near the Gare du Nord, the lifeless body of an unknown woman, about twenty years old. She hadn’t been dead for more than an hour, perhaps even less.
The young victim was carrying no document that might help to identify her. But her physical appearance, her clothing, her exact position on the ground (as well as the location itself, besides) were exactly as described in Chapter Six of Simon’s story. As he had indicated, the puddle of blood was not real blood. The coroner noted right away that the body showed no injury, no external trauma, the causes of death remaining therefore undiscovered. It appeared nevertheless almost beyond doubt that it was a case of murder, and not of natural death.
All investigations concerning the identity of the young woman have, so far, yielded no clues: no person answering her description has been reported missing anywhere in the country. Because of the proximity of the railroad station, investigations are now being directed toward Antwerp or Amsterdam.
Another point puzzles the police; the more than curious resemblance (general appearance, measurements, facial features, color of the eyes and the hair, etc.) that exists between the dead girl and Simon Lecoeur himself. The matter is so disturbing that it was believed for a while that they were one and the same person: the charming professor of the Franco-American School would have been a female transvestite. This attractive hypothesis was not however retained, for the school physician had given the so-called Simon a thorough physical some two weeks earlier, and he guaranteed that Simon did belong to the masculine sex.
That practitioner—Dr. Morgan—was treating Simon for eye problems, acute troubles, it seems, although they were probably of nervous origin. The missing man claimed, indeed, to have been experiencing with increased frequency sudden moments of diminished vision (decreased luminosity of the images on the retina), sometimes to the point of total blindness, lasting occasionally for several long minutes. Morgan, given to psychoanalysis, had immediately thought of an everyday Oedipus complex.
The patient had only laughed off the suggestion, saying he had nothing to do at Cologne. That absurd pun, linked to the theme of the disjointed paving stones, continued to plunge the physician into deep perplexity, and renewed his suspicions. It cannot be ruled out, of course, that our sometime blind man was an ordinary faker, but his motives aren’t clear, since he wasn’t asking his employer for any sick leave, nor the slightest change of schedule.
Of all the characters that appear in his story, one in any case—at least—does exist without any doubt: little Marie. Starting from the abandoned workshop, investigators had no trouble finding the café where they don’t serve pizza. A policeman watched the establishment for several days. Little Marie, still in her 1880-style dress, walked in on the evening of the twenty-first (she was coming, as it will be learned later, to pay off an old debt). As she was leaving, the policeman tailed her. He followed her to the Vercingétorix dead end. About halfway down the long alleyway, some of our people stepped in. Having quietly intercepted that overzealous guardian of law and order, they brought him back, once more, to square one.
* * *
LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS
* * *
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This novel cannot, in any way, be considered as a document about life in the British Territory of Hong Kong. Any resemblance to the latter in setting or situations is merely the effect of chance, objective or not.
Should any reader familiar with Oriental ports suppose that the places described below are not congruent with reality, the author, who has spent most of his life there, suggests that he return for another, closer look: things change fast in such climes.
Women’s flesh has always played, no doubt, a great part in my dreams. Even when I am awake, its images constantly beset me. A girl in a summer dress exposing the nape of her bent neck—she is fastening her sandal—her hair, fallen forward, revealing the delicate skin with its blond down, I see her immediately subject to some command, excessive from the start. The narrow hobble skirt, slit to the thighs, of the elegant women of Hong Kong is quickly ripped off by a violent hand, which suddenly lays bare the rounded, firm, smooth, gleaming hip, and the tender slope of the loins. The leather whip, in the window of a Parisian saddle-maker, the exposed breasts of wax mannequins, a theater poster, advertisements for garters or a perfume, moist parted lips, an iron manacle, a dog collar, generate around me their provocative, insistent setting. A simple canopied bed, a piece of string, the glowing tip of a cigar, accompany me for hours, as I travel, for days. In parks, I organize celebrations. For temples, I establish ceremonies, command sacrifices. Arabian or Mogul palaces fill my ears with screams and sighs. On the walls of Byzantine churches, the slabs of marble sawed in symmetrical patterns suggest, as I stare, vaginas parted wide, forced open. Two rings set into the stone, in the depths of an ancient Roman prison, are enough to conjure up the lovely captive chained there, doomed to long tortures, in secrecy, solitude, and at leisure.
Often I linger to stare at some young woman dancing, at a party. I like her to have bare shoulders and, when she turns around, to be able to see her cleavage. The smooth skin glistens softly, under the light from the chandeliers. She performs, with a graceful diligence, one of those complicated steps in which she remains a certain distance from her partner, a tall, dark, almost recessive figure who merely indicates the movements in front of her, while her lowered eyes seem to watch for the slightest sign the man’s hand makes, in order to obey him at once while continuing to observe the complicated laws of the ritual, then, at an almost imperceptible command, smoothly turning around, again offering her shoulders and the nape of her neck.
Now she has stepped back, a little to one side, to fasten the buckle of her sandal, made of slender gold straps which crisscross several times around the bare foot. Sitting on the edge of a sofa, she is leaning over, her hair, fallen forward, revealing more of the delicate skin with its blond down. But two people step forward and soon conceal the scene, a tall figure in a dark tuxedo listening to a fat, red-faced man talking about his travels.
Everyone knows Hong Kong, its harbor, its junks, its sampans, the office buildings of Kowloon, and the narrow hobble skirt, split up the side to the thigh, worn by the Eurasian women, tall, supple girls, each in her clinging black silk sleeveless sheath with its narrow upright collar, cut straight at the neck and armpits. The shiny, thin fabric is worn next to the skin, following the forms ot the belly, the breasts, the hips, and creasing at the waist into a sheaf of tiny folds when the stroller, who has stopped in front of a shopwindow, has turned her head and bust toward the pane of glass where, motionless, her left foot touching the ground only with the toe of a very high-heeled shoe, ready to continue walking in the middle of the interrupted stride, her right hand raised forward, slightly away from the body, and her elbow half bent, she stares for a moment at the wax girl wearing an identical white silk dress, or else at her own reflection in the glass, or else at the braided leather leash the mannequin is holding in her left hand, her bare arm away from the body and her elbow half bent in order to control a big black dog with shiny fur walking in front of her.
The animal has been mounted with great skill. And if it were not for its total immobility, its slightly over-emphasized stiffness, its certainly too-shiny glass eyes that are also too fixed, the excessively pink interior, perhaps, of its gaping mouth, its exaggeratedly white teeth, one would think it was about to complete its interrupted movement: to pick up the paw still stretched out behind the other, prick up its ears evenly, open its jaws wider to show its fangs in a threatening attitude, as if some sight, on the street side, were disturbing it or endangering its mistress.
Her right foot, advancing almost even with the dog’s hindmost paw, is touching the ground with only the toe of a very high-heeled shoe whose gilded leather covers only a narrow triangle at the tip of the toe, while slender thongs crisscross the rest of the foot three times and encircle the
ankle over a very sheer stocking, scarcely visible, though of a dark shade, probably black.
A little higher, the white silk of the skirt is split laterally, revealing the hollow of the knee and suggesting the thigh. Above, by means of an inset zipper that is virtually indiscernible, the dress must open all the way to the armpit in a single stroke, along the naked flesh. The supple body twists from right to left, attempting to free itself from the slender leather thongs which bind ankles and wrists; but to no purpose, of course. The movements this posture permits are, moreover, of very slight scope; torso and limbs obey rules so strict, so constraining, that the dancer now seems quite motionless, merely keeping time with an imperceptible undulation of her hips. And all of a sudden, at a mute command from her partner, she turns around lightly, at once motionless again, or rather, swaying so slowly, so slightly where she stands, that she merely makes the thin fabric ripple over her belly and breasts.
And now the same fat, red-faced man intervenes again, still talking in a loud voice about life in Hong Kong and the elegant shops of Kowloon that sell the most beautiful silks in the world. But he has stopped in the middle of what he was saying, his red eyes raised, as though wondering about the gaze he supposes fixed on himself. Strolling in front of the shop-window, the girl in the black sheath meets the glance reflected in the plate glass; she turns slowly to her right and continues walking with the same even gait past the buildings, holding on its taut leash the big dog with the shiny fur whose half-open mouth drools a little, then closes with a dry snap.
At this moment, down the street, parallel to the sidewalk where the young woman with the dog is walking away with short, quick steps, a rickshaw passes by, pulled rapidly in the same direction by a Chinese in overalls and the traditional funnel-shaped hat. Between the two high wheels, whose wooden spokes are painted bright red, the black canvas hood over the single seat completely conceals the passenger sitting there; unless this seat, which from behind remains invisible because of the hood, is empty, occupied only by an old flattened cushion whose split oilcloth, worn to the buckram in spots, releases its kapok stuffing through a rip at one of the corners; that would explain the astonishing speed at which this apparently puny little man can run on his bare feet, whose blackened soles appear in mechanical alternation between the red shafts, without his ever slowing down to catch his breath, so that he has immediately disappeared at the end of the avenue, where the deep shadow of the giant fig trees begins.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn Page 9