La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Afterward, there is the opium den, already described: a bare white decor consisting of a series of tiny cubical rooms, without furniture, entirely whitewashed including the dirt floor, on which customers in black pajamas are lying everywhere, against the walls or in the middle of the rooms, which communicate by rectangular openings in the thick walls, without doors of any kind and so low that Johnson must bend double in order to pass through. What does he hope to find here? The habitués do not seem to be in a position, judging from their clothes, to furnish him the money he wants, nor from their behavior to discuss obtaining it for him.

  Then we see Johnson at an intersection in the center of town, probably, for under a street lamp sharp black shadows extend from people and things alike. He is talking with another man, a European apparently, wearing a light suit and a raincoat with the collar up, and a felt hat with its brim pulled down over his eyes, who is showing him on the rear part of a bank façade—whose name appears in huge letters above the principal entrance: “Bank of China”—a small fire escape leading to a window of the second floor which is not fitted with an iron grille, unlike all the others on the upper floor as well as on the ground floor. There is no one else in the field of vision, no car driving in the vicinity or parked along the curb; the rickshaw itself is no longer visible. The man in the raincoat must be trying to explain some piece of mischief to the American; but the latter, estimating the likelihood of success of such an enterprise, makes a grimace of doubt, expectation, or even refusal, even clearer in the close-up which follows.

  This face is soon followed by a scene in a little bar. (Are there bars still open at this hour of the night?) Two customers, sitting beside each other on tall stools, are seen from behind, leaning over the counter on which they have set their champagne glasses. They seem to be talking to each other in low voices. To the right, a Chinese waiter in a white jacket, in a slightly higher position between the counter and the racks where the bottles are lined up in closest rows, watches them out of the corner of his eye, one hand stretched out toward a telephone in a niche.

  Then the images follow one another very rapidly: Johnson and Manneret in an interior setting difficult to identify (was it these two who were talking in the bar, where they had arranged to meet?), now making broad gestures, which it is quite impossible to interpret. Then Edouard Manneret in his rocking chair and the American facing him, saying: “If you don’t, you better be careful what happens to you!”, and to the left, in the foreground, Kito telling herself: “Now he’s threatening to kill him!” Then Johnson and Georges Marchat drinking champagne in a garden, near a flowering hibiscus bush. Then Johnson striding away from a big Mercedes parked in front of a closed depot in the Kowloon harbor (the name “Kowloon Docks Company” appears above the iron shutters), and glancing back as he hurriedly leaves the scene. Johnson in conversation with a fat man in front of a buffet covered with silver platters, at an elegant party. Johnson presenting his passport to a police lieutenant, in a steep alley that leads to a staircase not far from a small open military car, behind the wheel of which is sitting another policeman, the lieutenant saying: “A bartender saw you with him, you were making a proposition, and a Japanese prostitute heard you. . . .” Johnson in his hotel room discovering that his papers have been searched again, and deciding to add, for the benefit of the secret service agents on their next visit, a forged document which he begins to write at once, imitating Marchat’s handwriting: “My dear Ralph, I’m writing you this brief note to reassure you about your situation: everything will be all right, you’ll have the money you need in plenty of time; so there’s absolutely no use going to Manneret, or borrowing the money from anyone else.” Signed: “Georges.” And in a postscript underneath: “It’s still not known who owned the heroin laboratory the police have discovered. In my opinion, it must belong to those Belgians from the Congo who want to buy the Hotel Victoria to turn it into some kind of brothel. I hope they arrest every one of those drug merchants who are messing up the Colony.”

  After having put this paper among the letters recently received, inside a green folder in the top left-hand drawer of the desk, Sir Ralph goes into the bathroom to take a shower; then he puts on a dress shirt and his tuxedo, carefully tying his dark-red bow tie. He still has time to have dinner somewhere before going to Lady Bergmann’s party. In the hotel lobby, as he hands his key to the porter, Sir Ralph gives him a wink of complicity; and he leaves by the rear door that opens onto the little square planted with traveler’s palms, for it is on this side that he has the best chance of finding a taxi. A car, as a matter of fact, is parked at the curb; he gets in and is driven to the ferry. Since the heat in the back seat is stifling, he lowers the windows on both sides: although the air from outside is not much cooler, the car’s movement makes it endurable nonetheless, and it thus becomes easier to watch the women strolling in front of the brightly lit shopwindows under the giant fig trees.

  Once Sir Ralph is on the boat, he notices a girl in a tight fitting dress, slit very high up the side, who is holding on a leash a huge black dog with pointed ears; she is strolling along the covered deck, her gait supple and regular, beside the water that is invisible in the darkness but making the sound of ripping cloth against the side of the ferry. Her body moving under the thin silk gives her a provocative look, despite her reserved attitude. When she tries to restrain the dog pulling a little too hard on the taut leather leash, the young woman makes a short, sharp, almost imperceptible cobra hiss between her teeth. Several times, during the twenty-minute crossing, Sir Ralph, passing her on the deck, meets her blue eyes, which calmly return his slave. But he does not speak to her, after all, perhaps because of the dog which growls when strangers approach. At the Victoria landing there are still many taxis; the American selects one, of a recent model, to drive to the little harbor of Aberdeen, where he will be dining in a well-known restaurant, floating in the middle of the roadstead.

  There are not many people, this evening, in the large square room with a pool in the center, in which many huge blue, violet, red or yellow fish can be seen. A slender girl in a close fitting silk dress, probably a Eurasian girl who resembles the passenger on the ferry, dips them out one after the other with a long-handled net which she manipulates with grace and skill, offering them alive, wriggling, their shiny bodies caught in the meshes of the net, to the customer seated at his table, so that he can choose the one he wants to eat. Returning to shore on a lantern-lit sampan rowed by a slender girl in a close fitting dress, etc., with a gait both provocative and reserved, etc., etc., who manipulates the long gondolier’s oar with grace and skill, making undulating movements that slide the thin, shiny silk over her skin . . . (that’s enough, up there! the sound of steps, and the iron-tipped cane which repeatedly pounds the floor . . .), Sir Ralph notices, in the dim light of the harbor lanterns, a row of coolies carrying on their bent shoulders sacks stuffed with some (clandestine?) merchandise to a huge junk—without lights—moored to the quay by a long cat-walk which zigzags from gunwale to gunwale through the flotilla of little boats. A third car then takes him to the Blue Villa, where he arrives at ten after nine, as planned.

  Shortly after he enters the large salon, where some couples are already dancing self-consciously, he is taken aside by the mistress of the house. She has some serious news to tell him: Edouard Manneret has just been murdered by the Communists, on the—obviously false—pretext that he was a double agent in the Formosan service. Actually, the murder was the conclusion of a much more confused, much more complex affair. In any case, Johnson is among the immediate suspects, whom the police have to arrest: perhaps it is only by a kind of diplomatic courtesy toward Peking that they haven’t done so already. Lady Ava asks him, then, what he plans to do. Johnson answers that he will leave Hong Kong that night, on a junk, for either Macao or Canton.

  The evening then passes in a normal fashion, in order not to raise any suspicions, but other guests are certainly on their guard, for something strained is apparent in the a
tmosphere: the least glass that breaks on the floor petrifies everyone, as though they were expecting an event whose imminence is beyond question. Sir Ralph stands in the recess of a bay window, listening through the thick, closed curtains for the sound of a car arriving. Georges Marchat does not leave the buffet, where he has been served, one after the other, six glasses of champagne which he has drunk in succession. In the little music room, Lauren, Marchat’s fiancée, is playing the piano for some silent guests, a modern composition full of breaks and pauses which she punctuates with nervous, abrupt, brief laughs, indicating the wrong notes which only she can identify. Kito, the young Japanese servant girl, has just cut her arm—a little below the elbow, on the inner side—by picking up the fragments of a broken glass too hastily; and she remains where she is without moving, still on her knees on the floor, staring blankly at the thread of bright red blood that slowly runs over her dull skin and falls, drop by drop, at long intervals, on the marble strewn with glittering splinters. A few yards away, behind an armchair on whose back is leaning with an indifferent expression, to conceal her real feelings, though her head is turned toward the preceding scene with a fixed stare which is unmistakable, a lovely Eurasian girl who answers to the American name Kim, contemplating the little kneeling Japanese girl, the pale arm with its slender red line and the drops of blood which form a constellation of scattered points on the floor, concentrating around an axis like the perforations of bullets on a target. And now, slowly, her eyes fixed on the wounded servant girl, Kim’s right hand leaves the back of the chair to rise to her own left clavicle, in the hollow of which the young woman is marked by a faint, bright pink scar—two oblongs close together—which no one would have noticed without her furtive gesture, but whose unusual shape, once attention has been drawn to them, makes one wonder how they were made.

  Some distance from the rest of her guests, Lady Ava waits too, still sitting on her sofa whose velvet has faded with age. Standing beside her is Lucky, Kim’s twin sister who resembles her in every feature, but who is wearing a white silk dress instead of the black one that would be more suitable, in her recent bereavement. (Have they not both lost their father?) She has just handed Lady Ava a brown paper envelope stuffed with documents, which Lady Ava has immediately put out of sight.

  Everywhere in the vicinity, then, occur abrupt or mechanical movements, sidelong glances, gestures suddenly frozen, immobilities which are too long or forced, an abnormal silencing of all sounds, against which stand out, at moments, short sentences which sound unnatural: “When does the performance begin?” “May I have the next dance?” “Won’t you have a glass of champagne?” etc. And for everyone, it is almost a relief when the police in British uniforms finally make their appearance. Moreover the silence was complete for several seconds, as if the precise moment of their entrance had long been known to everyone. The scenario then takes its course in a mechanical fashion, like a well-oiled, precision mechanism, each person henceforth knowing his role to perfection and able to play it without being a second off, without a jolt, without the slightest faux pas that might surprise a fellow actor: the musicians in the orchestra all laying down their instruments or letting them fall back gently, the bow alongside the body, the flute on the desk, the trumpet between the thighs, the sticks across the skin of the drum, and Kito the servant girl who gets to her feet, the Eurasian girl who looks straight ahead again, the fat man with the red face who sets down his empty glass on the silver tray held out by the waiter, the soldier taking his post at the main door, the other soldier who crosses the salon in a straight line between the pairs of motionless dancers, without having to make the slightest detour to avoid anyone on his way, and who will guard the exit at the other end, the lieutenant, finally, who heads unhesitatingly toward the window recess where Johnson is standing, to proceed with his arrest.

  But one thing disturbs me now: wouldn’t the lieutenant actually be walking toward the mistress of the house in that resolute way of his? Isn’t it more logical to arrest her, in the first place? As a matter of fact, Lady Ava hasn’t made any secret, during a conversation with Kim—during a monologue, more exactly (for there is no point playing with words), delivered in the latter’s presence, it will be recalled, while the old lady is preparing to go to bed—she has made no secret, I say, of her deliberate intention of inducing Johnson, by means of Lauren’s exorbitant demands—a classical method, it appears, for this kind of recruiting—of inducing Johnson to become a secret agent for Peking, which would imply a previous commitment on the part of Lady Ava in this matter. One solution of the problem would perhaps lie in the ignorance of the British police, or in its diplomatic fair play policy, which here prefers to deal with the Communist organization known under the names of “Free Hong Kong” or the S. L. S. (“South Liberation Soviet”)—whose role is nonexistent and whose claims are rather contrary to the Chinese interests (to such a degree that many regard it as no more than a front for some drug or white-slave traffic)—rather than put a brutal end to the activities of the real spies.

  In any case, when the police lieutenant presents himself before Lady Ava, and makes the usual salutations, the latter offers the new arrival a drink in her worldly tone of voice, which leads to nothing. Another question: have not the terms “soldiers” and “police” been used somewhat carelessly to indicate the British officers? Were they plain-clothes inspectors, or actual soldiers in combat uniforms with camouflage patterns? Furthermore, various essential points remain to be settled, for example: did the patrol’s arrival take place before or after the theatrical performance? Perhaps it was even in the middle of the performance, at the moment when Lady Ava, having counted, then put away the sachets in the secret safe, and classified in order the papers on the desk, exhausted, pale, staggering, finally goes to her bed and lies down. Then comes the knocking at the main door with its elaborate moldings, once, twice, three times. . . . Who is the unexpected visitor who keeps knocking without receiving an answer? The audience is obviously unaware of what is happening in the rest of the house. But the door opens, and it is a great surprise to see Sir Ralph suddenly come in. He rushes toward the bed. . . . Is he too late? Has the poison already done its work? The spectators are in suspense.

  Sir Ralph bends toward the agonized face, holding the dying woman’s hand. Lady Ava, without seeing him, eyes fixed on the void, in some remote recollection which she cannot recapture, speaks disconnected words, her inflections low and hoarse, among which appear, now and then, fragments of more comprehensible phrases: about the place where she was born, about her marriage, about the countries she has visited, or which she has never known, except by hearsay. She is talking about things she has done, or she would have liked to do, and saying that she has always been a bad actress, and that now that; she is an old woman, she no longer interests anyone. Sir Ralph tries to comfort her, assuring her that she was, on the contrary, splendid on stage tonight, right to the end. But she no longer hears him. She asks if he could stop the noise, over her bedroom. She hears the sound of a cane. She says that someone should go up there to see what is happening. Doubtless someone is sick, or hurt, and calling for help. But she changes her mind immediately: “It’s old King Boris,” she says, “rocking on his ferryboat. . . .” Her diction is so uncertain that Sir Ralph is not sure he has heard her properly. Then she seems a little calmer, but her face has become still more haggard, still grayer. It seems as though all the blood, all the flesh is draining away inside. After a longer silence, with a sudden perfect and unexpected lucidity, she then says: “Things are never where they belong for good.” Then, without moving her head, her eyes widen excessively, and she asks where the dogs are. These are her last words.

  And now Ralph Johnson, known as the American, returns again to the new part of Kowloon, to Manneret’s apartment. He will try his luck again, since there is no one else, in the entire territory of the concession, capable of furnishing him the sum he needs to buy back Lauren. He will use any means to convince the millionaire, if need
be. Without thinking of taking the elevator, he walks up the seven flights. The door of the apartment is ajar, the apartment door is wide open, despite the late hour, the apartment door is closed—what does it matter?—and Manneret himself comes to open it; or else it is a Chinese servant girl or a sleepy young Eurasian girl whom the bell, whom the insistent electric buzzer, whom the thumps of fists against the door have finally roused from her bed. What does all that matter? What does it matter? Edouard Manneret has not yet gone to bed, in any case. He never goes to bed. He sleeps fully dressed in his rocking chair. He hasn’t managed to sleep in a long time, the strongest soporifics having ceased to have the slightest effect on him. He is sound asleep in his bed, but Johnson insists that he be wakened, he waits for him in the living room, he shoves aside the terrified servants and enters the bedroom by force; all this comes to the same thing. Manneret first takes Johnson for his son, he takes him for Georges Marchat or Marchant, he takes him for Mr. Chang, he takes him for Sir Ralph, he takes him for King Boris. It comes down to the same thing, since ultimately he refuses. The American insists. The American threatens. The American begs. Edouard Manneret refuses. Then the American calmly takes his revolver out of the inside right (or left?) pocket of his tuxedo, that revolver which he had removed a while ago (when?) from the wardrobe or the chest in his hotel room, between the starched, white, carefully pressed shirts. . . . Manneret watches him and remains impassive, still smiling as he rocks slowly in his chair with a regular rhythm. Johnson removes the safety catch. Edouard Manneret is still smiling, without moving a muscle in his face. He looks like a wax figure in a museum. And his head rises and sinks, still in the same cadence. Johnson puts a bullet in the barrel and with a calm gesture raises the weapon toward the body which alternately rises and sinks, like the moving targets in carnival shooting galleries. He says: “Then the answer is no?” Manneret does not even answer; he does not seem to believe that all this is really happening. Johnson carefully aims at the heart, his hand following the oscillations of the rocking chair, rising, sinking, rising, sinking, rising, sinking. . . . How easy it is, once in time with the chair. Then he squeezes the trigger. He fires five times in a row: down, up, down, up, down. All the shots have found their target. He puts the still hot revolver back in his inside pocket, while the rocking chair continues its periodic movement, which will gradually die away, and he dashes for the stairs. In the darkness, it seems to him that doors are opened, on each landing, as he passes, but he is not sure of this.