La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  The servant girl now tries to imagine herself pronouncing several words. She realizes that this is easy, but that it does not lead anywhere. She must think of something else. She supposes that, in the street, the deluge is over, as suddenly as it had begun: the sun, as it warms the roadway, draws from the black and shiny asphalt strewn with little shapeless piles—a gray debris whose composition and origin are no longer discernible—a thick white steam which evaporates, accumulates, lingers like smoke, rises in spirals that quickly disappear. Men and women in shiny black pajamas emerge from under the gallery and again put up the big black parasols to protect themselves from the scorching rays, thus making movement easier along the crowded booths among which Kim advances with a determined gait, holding in one hand the paper on which is clearly written the address of the agent to whom she is going, and in the other the little rectangular purse embroidered with gilded beads, which she uses as a handbag and which bulges as if it had been stuffed with sand. . . . No, this remark does not concern the purse, which is actually quite flat, since Kim can hold it between two fingers as she turns unhesitatingly into the narrow staircase, which she climbs with a continuous, rapid, easy, uniform motion. Having reached the landing on the second floor, she knocks at the center door, that is, the one facing the stairs. A Chinese of about forty, in European clothes, immediately opens the door. “Mr. Chang?” she says in English. His face remaining impassive, he answers: “Yes. I am Mr. Chang.” She says: “I’m here for the sale.”

  “I sell nothing,” Mr. Chang says.

  The servant girl is speechless. All the trouble she has just taken, and for nothing? “But,” she says, “. . . why?”

  “Because I have nothing to sell.”

  “Nothing to sell today?” the servant girl asks again.

  “Not today or ever,” Mr. Chang says.

  The servant girl explains: “It’s for Madame Eva.”

  What is happening? The Eurasian girl is perplexed. It must be another Chang. The almost translucent little man in front of her has not spoken a friendly word, nor smiled since the beginning of their dialogue. No gesture, no change in the position of his body, no movement of his face has altered his immobility: he stands in the hallway, his lifeless eyes resting on this importunate visitor (whose height obliges him to keep his head raised) whom he ostensibly forbids to proceed any farther. But she persists:

  “Do you know Madame Eva?”

  “I do not have that honor.”

  “Then it’s a mistake. . . . Excuse me. . . . I was looking for a Mr. Chang.”

  “I am Mr. Chang,” Mr. Chang says.

  “But you don’t sell anything.”

  “No,” Mr. Chang says, “here, we do appraisals.”

  “And do you know if there is anyone else in this house named Chang?”

  “No doubt,” Mr. Chang says. And he closes the door in Kim’s face, leaving her standing for some time on the darkened landing, wondering what she should do now. Once again she consults the square of paper she is still holding in her hand: since she knows the text by heart, she needs no light by which to reread it; the address is quite plain. As she turns around, the servant girl notices, at the bottom of the stairs, at a much greater distance than she expected, the bright rectangle enclosing a bit of the sidewalk, occupied by many little persons clustered on the threshold of the building; they seem to be speaking to each other animatedly, making gestures with their hands and swinging their arms, while looking up toward the top of the stairs in the direction where she herself is standing, as if they had begun a great argument about her. Some even seem to be about to climb the stairs. Although she is certainly not visible from the other end of this dark passageway, Kim, vaguely uneasy, quickly knocks at the third door, the one to the left, from which she no longer sees the street. The door opens at once, as promptly as if someone were standing behind it, ready to intervene. It is the same Chinese with the steel-rimmed glasses, swimming in his narrow suit. He stares at the servant girl with the same neutral expression whose imaginary hostility cannot be strictly localized except in the delicate frame of the glasses. Kim is disturbed and glances around her, in order to make sure that in her haste she has not knocked at the same door as a moment before: not only is it not the same one, but this one is opposite the previous one, and the next flight of stairs, between the two, separates them without risk of confusion. In a voice less and less assured, the girl begins: “Excuse me . . .”

  “Still nothing to sell,” Mr. Chang says, interrupting her harshly. And he closes the door in her face, exactly like the first time.

  Having no further recourse but to leave, Kim is about to go back down the stairs. She takes one step to the side and notices again, at the bottom of the steep stairs, the little men moving about, increasingly numerous and threatening to rush up the stairs. She quickly draws back out of their hypothetical field of vision, to begin climbing the next flight of stairs which is exactly the same as the first but rising in the opposite direction. On the landing of the third floor there are only two doors, the first of which is barred by three slender wooden laths nailed one on top of the other across the frame, to form a cross with six branches: two horizontal and four oblique (along the diagonals of the rectangle). The second door is wide open: this is the source of the vague light which made climbing the last steps easier. In a rather long room, where the light enters through a screened bay window opening onto a balcony covered with drying laundry, about a hundred people—mostly men—are sitting on benches arranged in parallel rows; they are all listening closely to an orator delivering a speech, standing on a little dais at one end of the room. But his speech is a mute one, consisting entirely of complicated, rapid gestures in which both hands play their part, and which is doubtless intended for deaf-mutes.

  But now steps can be heard coming up from the lower part of the staircase, quick yet heavy steps, belonging to several individuals running at different rates of speed. They approach so quickly that the decision cannot await any further reflection. Since the stairs go no higher than this third floor, Kim quite casually enters the lecture hall where, with the assurance and naturalness of someone who had come here on purpose to attend this event, she sits down on the empty end of one of the benches. Yet some heads turn toward her and are perhaps surprised by her presence; her neighbors make signs to each other with their fingers, analogous to those of the speaker: it is not mostly men who are around her, but only men. She wonders what can be the subject of the meeting for which they are gathered; there are so many problems which do not concern women, or which at least cannot be discussed in front of them (which would make her situation all the more awkward). In any case, the question of discovering whether this is a speech in English or Chinese should not come up. (Is this certain?) Two new arrivals appear in the doorway (do they seem out of breath from climbing the stairs too rapidly?) who glance around the room, looking for empty places, that are rare and difficult to determine because of the absence of individual seats. Once they have noticed two located side by side, they hastily occupy them. Is it their steps which were heard echoing up the wooden staircase? And was it deaf-mute gestures which the little men on the sidewalk were making to each other, in the rectangle of light?

  Now it is a British policeman in a short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts and white knee socks who is framed in the doorway. Legs apart, hand resting on his revolver holster, he gives the impression of being stationed here on duty. Is this meeting a political one? Could some Communist propaganda session have concerned the central commissariat of Queens Road more than the others? That is highly unlikely. Or could some criminal have concealed himself among the audience in order to escape his pursuers? Nothing has changed, however, in the behavior of the orator on the dais, nor in that of the audience on their benches. Kim is suddenly convinced, without any particular reason, that this abrupt intervention of the police has some relation to the death of the Old Man; she decides as a result that it is wiser to keep this belated protector of the peace from discove
ring her own presence in the house. First she takes the wise precaution of tearing into tiny fragments, which she gradually and secretly scatters on the floor, the piece of paper bearing the compromising address. Then taking advantage of the fact that the policeman has turned the other way, his back to the room, she stands up quietly and heads toward the other end of the long room, off which opens a double door, each panel of which has a small round glass window in it. Although this exit, judging by its traditional windows as by its swinging doors, seems to be the normal means of access to any meeting hall or auditorium, a notice is attached to it, showing a red ideogram printed on a white back-ground, signifying that this is not an exit. Kim pushes one of the panels gently, it yields with no effort, and she slides through the gap. Before the door, which shuts automatically, is entirely closed behind her, she has time to see through the narrowing opening all the yellow faces which have turned toward her with a single movement. The two edges of the gap immediately come together.

  At the end of a complicated, dark hallway which abruptly changes direction several times, the girl, walking faster and faster, comes out onto a staircase which she hurriedly descends; the narrowness and unaccustomed steepness of the steps accelerates her passage still further: she leaps down the steps two at a time, three at a time, she misses some which completely escape her count, she has the painful sensation of flying. This staircase is not straight, as she had thought at first, but constructed in a very steep spiral. On her way, she notices a calling card fastened to a door by four tacks: “Chang. Agent,” in English of course. She continues her descent.

  Now she is in a tiny office crowded with files. She has lost something. She searches feverishly among the colored cardboard folders, without relying on the misleading labels that have been written on them; or else the labels correspond accurately to the theoretical contents of the folders, but she is looking for a document that has inadvertently been put in the wrong place, or rather been hidden on purpose, in a file concerning matters bearing no connection to what she is looking for. Then she is in a courtyard where various discarded objects have been left: pieces of marble, iron beds, stuffed animals, old crates, mutilated statues, odd collections of pornographic Chinese magazines . . . (this episode, already past, no longer has its place here). Now we see the young Eurasian girl backed into the corner of a luxurious room, near a lacquer chest whose lines are emphasized by bronze ornaments, all escape cut off by a man in a carefully trimmed gray goatee who is towering over her. But now the big black dog comes on the scene; attached to a ring in the lobby of the building on the ground floor, it must have sensed, suddenly, that its mistress was in danger, and it has tugged so violently on its leash that a leather thong has yielded at once, near the collar; after having easily pushed open the glass panel opening onto the staircase, the animal, which has not had the slightest hesitation as to which direction to take, has reached the sixth floor in a few bounds.

  As usual, Manneret had left the door of his apartment open. Before he has had time to turn around, the dog has leaped on him from behind and broken his neck with a single crunch of its jaws. Edouard Manneret, killed on the spot, then lies on the floor of his bedroom (or his study?), stretched out at full length, etc., while the servant girl, who has not made a move, stares at him with the same anguished expression she had had at the beginning of the scene, before the dog’s arrival. If this expression is anguished, it is purely a matter of imagination, since none of its features betrays the slightest emotion. Similarly, when the girl is standing stiffly in front of the unpainted table, etc., with a Chinese of uncertain age seated opposite her; this is obviously the agent, whom she has therefore finally managed to reach and who moreover resembles, feature for feature, the false Mr. Chang, the appraisal man, except of course for the perpetual Eastern smile—which is not a smile—appearing on this countenance. The servant girl takes out of the gilded-bead purse the money Lady Ava has given her. Mr. Chang counts the bills with a rapid finger and says: “That’s right.” After which, he indicates, with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand, a little side door whose existence she had not yet noticed. This door opens onto a tiny anteroom whose sloping ceiling must correspond to a mansard roof, which is quite impossible given the location of the room and the general structure of the building; this anteroom leads into a second office, quite similar to the other but empty of furniture and papers. It is here that the young Japanese girl (named Kito) is being guarded by the dog. Without having to return the way they had come, all three go out directly onto the landing by the door located opposite the one by which the servant girl remembers having originally come in, a door painted the same color brown and fitted with the the same worn and dirty wooden handle. The little anteroom thus passed under the sloping flight of stairs to the third floor. There is only one floor to walk down in order to be back in the covered arcade of Queens Road, deserted at this hour. Some inconsistencies remain in the foregoing; it has nonetheless happened, in every point, in this manner. The rest has already been reported.

  I continue and conclude. Kito—as has been understood—is destined for the third-floor bedrooms of the Blue Villa. She will then be given by Lady Ava to an American, a certain Ralph Johnson, who raises opium poppies on the border of the New Territories. The story of the little Japanese girl having no other connection with the account of this evening, there is no use relating its various vicissitudes in further detail. The important thing is that Johnson, on that day . . . There’s a lot of noise, up there, a lot of noise. It’s getting louder, the rhythm is growing more insistent. The old mad king has an iron-tipped cane with which he accompanies his steps along the floor of the hallway, a long corridor that runs through the apartment from one end to the other. Have I said that this old king was named Boris? He never goes to bed, since he no longer manages to fall asleep. Sometimes he merely stretches out in a rocking chair and rocks for hours, banging the floor with the tip of his cane at each oscillation, to maintain the pendulum movement. I was going to say that on that evening, Johnson, who had happened to be the immediate witness of Georges Marchant’s tragic end, found dead in his car in Kowloon, not far from the dock where the American arrived a few moments later to take: the ferry to Victoria, that Johnson, then, had upon his arrival at the Blue Villa described the suicide of the businessman, whose action he attributed, along with everyone else, to an excess of commercial scruple, in a deal in which his partners had shown much less integrity. It seems, unfortunately, that his account—as lurid as fertile in emotions—has dramatically affected a young blond girl named Laureen, a friend of the mistress of the house and even, some say, her protégée, who came here precisely to marry this unfortunate young man. From that day on, Laureen changed her life and even her character altogether; formerly docile, studious and reserved, she flung herself, with a kind of desperate passion, in pursuit of the worst depravities, the most degrading excesses. This is how she became an inmate of the de luxe brothel whose madam is none other than Lady Ava. And it is the latter who, showing the album of girls available to Sir Ralph, comments by this grim anecdote on the photograph in which her latest acquisition appears in the traditional black corset and openwork stockings, with nothing else below or above.

  Sir Ralph carefully examines the picture being shown him. He regards the proposition as an interesting one, though the price seems very high. After some additional information of an intimate nature, followed by a moment’s reflection, he announces his acceptance, on approval. Lady Ava replies that she was, for her part, certain of his answer and that he would have nothing to complain of. The introductions are to be made during a party that very evening, whose course has constituted the object of several detailed descriptions. It is this same Ralph Johnson, whose too frequent comings and goings between Hong Kong and Canton had finally attracted the attention of the political authorities of the British concession. Hence he was almost always followed by plain-clothes men, third-rate spies dissatisfied with their pay, who recorded without any conviction some
of his movements with the sole purpose of filling up their notes, actually taken to indicate their own activity during the day rather than to give any exhaustive information as to that of the suspect under their surveillance. Most of these contractual employees of the British secret services worked clandestinely for private organizations, which they served with no more zeal or intelligence, but whose wretched investigations nonetheless occupied a great part of their time. The less narrow-minded of them had, moreover, been secretly rehired by the many emissaries from Formosa or Red China, among whom Johnson himself probably had to be included; so that the schedule of his evening—established by such observers—did not even involve a visit to the Blue Villa: he had quite simply returned to the Hotel Victoria for dinner and had not left it again. It is the night porter who has furnished the information, for a large tip.