The Erasers

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  He turns the muzzle toward himself again; he presses it against the material of his vest, in the place where the first hole must already be. Fearing he might weaken, he puts all his strength into contracting his finger But this time nothing happens, absolutely nothing. However hard he tightens his finger on the trigger, the weapon remains inert.

  He lays it on the desk and puts his hand through several exercises to prove to himself that it is functioning normally. It is the revolver that is jammed.

  Although hard of hearing, old Anna, who was clearing off the table in the dining room, has obviously heard the explosion What is she doing? Has she gone out to call for help? Or is she coming upstairs? She never makes any noise with her felt slippers. Something must be done before she reaches him. He must get out of this absurd situation.

  The professor tries to get up; he succeeds easily. He can even walk. He goes to the mantelpiece to look at himself in the mirror; he moves a pile of books aside. Now he sees the hole, a little too high; the material of his vest, torn, is faintly stained with blood; almost nothing. He need only button his jacket and it won’t show any more. A glance at his face: no, he doesn’t look so bad. He turns back to his desk, tears up the letter he has written to his friend Juard before dinner, and throws it in the wastebasket…

  Daniel Dupont is sitting in his study. He is cleaning his revolver.

  He manipulates it with care.

  After having checked the proper functioning of the mechanism, he puts the clip back in place. Then he puts his rag away in a drawer. He is a meticulous man, who likes every task to be executed properly.

  He stands up and takes a few steps on the water-green carpet that muffles every sound. There is scarcely any room to walk in the little study. On every side books surround him: law, social legislation, political economy… Down below, to the left, at the end of the long shelves, stands the row of books he himself has added to the series. Not much. There were two or three ideas nevertheless. Who has understood them? Too bad for them; that’s no reason to kill oneself in despair! The professor smiles faintly, rather contemptuously, thinking again of the preposterous notions that had suddenly passed through his mind just now, while he was holding the revolver… People would have thought it was an accident.

  He stops in front of his desk and glances one last time at this letter he has just written, to a Belgian colleague interested in his theories. It is a clear, dry letter; it gives all the explanations necessary. Perhaps, when he has eaten dinner, he will add a warmer word at the end.

  Before going downstairs he must put the revolver back in the light table drawer. He wraps it up carefully in the piece of rag he has just put away absent-mindedly. Then he turns out the large lamp on his desk. It is seven o’clock…

  When he came back upstairs to finish his letter, he found he murderer waiting for him. It would have been better if he had kept the revolver in his pocket… But who said that he had examined it just that day? He would have removed the old hell that jammed the mechanism. The laboratory only indicted that the weapon was “well cared for” and that the missing bullet had been “recently” fired, that is, after the last cleaning—which could, after all, date from several weeks ago, even several months. Laurent translated this as follows: Dupont leaned it yesterday, in order to use it that very evening.

  Wallas is now thinking that he should have been able to convince the commissioner. The latter’s arguments often seemed worthless, and it was certainly possible to prove it to him. Instead of which, Wallas has let himself get involved in utile arguments over secondary points—or even discussions having no relation to the crime whatever—and when he wanted D make the broad outlines of the case clear, he did so with phrases so clumsy that this whole story of the secret society and the timed murders assumed an unreal, gratuitous, “badly put together” quality in his mouth.

  As he talked, he grew more and more aware of the unbelievable character of his account. Moreover, maybe this was not matter of the words he was using: others chosen with more care might have suffered the same fate; it was enough for him t pronounce them for them to cease to inspire confidence. Walls consequently reached the point of no longer trying to reason against the ready-made formulas that naturally occurred t him; they were the ones that were easiest.

  To top it off, opposite him was the commissioner’s cynical face, whose all too obvious incredulity completely annihilate the plausibility of Wallas’ constructions.

  Laurent has begun asking himself precise questions. Who are the victims? What, exactly, was their role in the state Hasn’t their sudden and collective disappearance already caused an appreciable void? How does it happen that no one speaks of it in society, in the newspapers, in the street?

  In reality, this is easily explained. It is a matter of a rather numerous group of men scattered throughout the country. Fc the most part, they occupy no official positions; they are not supposed to belong to the government; their influence is nevertheless direct and considerable. Economists, financiers, head of industrial corporations, men in charge of union council! jurists, engineers, technicians of all kinds, they prefer remaining in the background and leading quite obscure lives; their names are meaningless to the public, their faces completely unknown. Yet the conspirators make no mistake about them they know how to reach, through them, the very core of the nation’s politico-economic system. Up to now, everything possible has been done in high places to conceal the gravity of the situation; no publicity has been given to the nine murders already committed, several have even been treated as accidents the newspapers are keeping quiet; public life continues i usual, to all appearances. Since leaks are likely in a service i enormous and as ramified as that of the police, Roy-Dauzet has decided that the latter should not be directly assigned to the terrorists. The minister has more confidence in the various information services he controls and whose personnel, at least, is personally committed to him.

  Wallas has answered the chief commissioner’s questions as well as he could, without betraying any essential secrets. But he realizes the weaknesses of his position. These background characters who clandestinely run the country, these crimes no ne mentions, these secret services marginal to the actual police, and lastly, these terrorists, more mysterious than all the rest—here is enough here to disturb a self-confident official who is hearing about them for the first time… And probably the tory could be invented entirely and would still leave every-ne the possibility of believing it—or not—and these successive revelations, in one direction or another, would only modify its nature in exactly the same way.

  Laurent, pink and plump, sitting comfortably in his official armchair among his salaried informers and his files, contracted the special agent so categorically that the latter has suddenly felt his very existence threatened: himself a member of one of these vague organizations, Wallas himself could just as well be, like the conspiracy, a pure invention of an overly imaginative minister; it is to this status, in any case, that his iterlocutor seems to relegate him. For the commissioner now declared his opinion without bothering about appearances or discretion: they were dealing, once again, with one of Roy-Dauzet’s whims; the fact that people like Fabius had any confidence in it was not enough to make it hold water. Moreover, their disciples went still further in their extravagance, like that Marchat—who, unfortunately, might even go so far as to die at seven-thirty tonight by suggestion…

  The businessman’s intervention has obviously been of no help at all.

  Wallas has left, taking with him the dead man’s revolver. Laurent did not want it: he had nothing to do with it; since Wallas was in charge of the investigation, he should hold on t the “items of evidence.” At the commissioner’s request, tit laboratory had returned the weapon in the state in which it ha been found, that is, with the empty shell that kept it from functioning.

  Wallas walks on. The arrangement of the streets constantly surprises him in this city. He has followed the same route 2 this morning ever since he left the prefec
ture, and yet he ha the impression of walking much longer than he had to the fir< time, to cover the distance from the police station to Doctor Juard’s clinic. But since all the streets in the neighborhood look alike, he could not swear that he has always taken precisely the same ones. He is afraid of having veered too far to the left an hence passed the street he was looking for.

  He decides to go into a shop to ask the way to the Rue de Corinthe. It is a small bookstore that also sells stationery, pencils, and paints for children. The saleswoman stands up to wait on him:

  “Monsieur?”

  “I’d like a very soft gum eraser, for drawing.”

  “Yes of course, Monsieur.”

  The ruins of Thebes.

  On a hill above the city, a Sunday painter has set up his ease in the shade of cypress trees, between the scattered shafts c columns. He paints carefully, his eyes shifting back to his subject every few seconds; with a fine brush he points up man details that are scarcely noticeable to the naked eye, but which assume a surprising intensity once they are reproduced in the picture. He must have very sharp eyes. One could count the stones that form the edge of the quay, the bricks of the gabled end, and even the slates in the roof. At the corner of the fence the leaves of the spindle trees gleam in the sun, which emphasizes their outlines. Behind, a bush rises above the hedge, a bare bush whose every twig is lined with a bright streak where the light hits it, and a dark one on the shadow side. The snapshot has been taken in winter, on an exceptionally clear day. What reason could the young woman have for photographing this house?

  “It’s a pretty house, isn’t it?”

  “Well yes, if you like it.”

  She cannot have been the tenant who preceded Dupont; the latter took up residence there some twenty-five years ago, and inherited it from an uncle. Has she been the servant there? Wallas sees again the gay, slightly provocative face of the saleswoman; thirty to thirty-five years old at the most, prepossessing maturity with full, rounded form; warm complexion, shining eyes, dark hair, an uncommon physical type in this country—actually reminiscent of the women of southern Europe or the Balkans.

  “Well yes, if you like it.”

  With a throaty little laugh, as if he had just indulged in some flattering compliment. His wife? That would be strange. Didn’t Laurent say she was running a shop now? Around fifteen years younger than her husband…dark, with black eyes… that’s who it is!

  Wallas leaves the bookstore. A few yards farther on, he reaches a crossroad. Opposite him stands the red placard: “For drawing, for school, for the office…”

  It is here that he got off the streetcar, before lunch. Again he follows the arrow toward the Victor-Hugo stationery shop.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  Down below, directly beneath his eyes, a cable runs along the surface of the water.

  Leaning over the parapet, he sees it rising from under the arch, straight and taut, apparently no thicker than his thumb; but distance is deceptive when there is no object of comparison. The coiled strands follow each other smoothly, giving the impression of great speed. A hundred spirals a second, perhaps?…Actually, that would still be no great rate of speed, that of a man walking briskly—that of the tug pulling a train of barges along a canal.

  Beneath the metal cable is the water, greenish, opaque, chopping slightly in the wake of the already distant tug.

  The first barge has not yet appeared under the bridge; the cable still runs along the water, without anything to suggest that it must soon be interrupted. Yet the tug is now reaching the next footbridge and, in order to pass under it, begins lowering its smokestack.

  2

  “Daniel was a melancholy man…melancholy and solitary.…But he wasn’t the kind of man to commit suicide—anything but. We lived together almost two years in that house in the

  Rue des Arpenteurs (the young woman stretches out her arm and points east—unless she is merely indicating the big photograph on the other side of the partition, in the shopwindow) and not once during those two years did he ever reveal the slightest sign of discouragement or doubt. It wasn’t just a front: that serenity was the true expression of his nature.”

  “You were saying, just now, that he was melancholy.”

  “Yes. That probably isn’t the right word. He wasn’t melancholy.…He certainly wasn’t gay: gaiety didn’t mean anything once you got through the garden gate. But melancholy didn’t either. I don’t know how to tell you… Boring? That isn’t right either. I enjoyed listening to him, when he was explaining something to me… No, what made it impossible to live with Daniel was that you felt he was alone, definitively alone. He was alone, and it didn’t bother him. He wasn’t made for marriage, or for any other kind of attachment. He had no friends. At the School of Law, his courses were popular, but he didn’t even know his students’ faces… Why did he marry me?…I was very young, and I felt a kind of admiration for this older man; everyone I knew admired him. I had been brought up by an uncle, and Daniel came to his house for dinner now and then. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, it can’t be interesting for you.”

  “Yes, yes it is,” Wallas protests. “On the contrary, we need to know if Dupont’s suicide is plausible, if he might have had reasons to kill himself—or if he was capable of doing it without any reason.”

  “Oh, not that! There was always a reason—for his least action. When it didn’t appear at the moment, you found out later that there had been one all the same, a precise, long deliberated reason that left no aspect of the question in doubt. Daniel did nothing without having decided to do it in advance, and his decisions were always rational; unchangeable too, of course…A lack of imagination, if you like, but to an extraordinary degree.…I had nothing but virtues to reproach him for, really: never doing anything without thinking first, never changing his mind, never being wrong.”

  “But you said his marriage was a mistake?”

  “Well yes, of course, in his relations with human beings he risked making mistakes. You could even say that he did nothing but make mistakes. Yet in the long run he was right anyway: his only mistake was in supposing the rest of the world was as reasonable as he was.”

  “Do you think he might have been somewhat bitter about this incomprehension?”

  “You don’t understand the kind of man he was. Absolutely unshakable. He was sure of being right, and that was enough for him. If other people enjoyed themselves over chimeras, too bad for them.”

  “He might have changed as he grew older; you hadn’t seen him since…”

  “Oh yes, we’ve seen each other several times: he was still the same. He talked to me about his work, about how he spent his time, the few people he still saw. He was happy, in his way; a thousand miles from any thought of suicide, anyway; satisfied with his monk’s life between his old deaf housekeeper and his books…His books…his work…that was all he lived for! You know the house, gloomy and silent, muffled with rugs, full of old-fashioned ornaments no one is allowed to touch. Once inside you felt uncomfortable, as if you were choking in the gloom that took away any desire to joke, to laugh, to sing …I was twenty… Daniel seemed comfortable there and didn’t understand that someone else might feel differently. Besides, he rarely left his study where no one was allowed to move anything. Even at the beginning of our marriage, he only left the house to do his errands, three times a week; the minute he came back he went upstairs and shut himself in; and he often spent some of the night there. I only saw him during meals, when he came down to the dining room, punctually at noon and at seven.

  “When you told me he was dead, just now, it gave me a funny feeling. I don’t know how to describe it to you…What difference could there be between Daniel living and Daniel dead? He wasn’t ever alive…Not that he lacked personality, or character…But he was never alive.”

  ***

  “No, I haven’t seen him yet. I plan on going there when I leave here.”

  “What’s his name?”

 
“Doctor Juard.”

  “Oh He’s the one who performed the operation?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “He’s not a good surgeon?”

  “Oh yes…I think he is.”

  “You know him?”

  “Just by name…I thought he was a gynecologist.”

  “And that happened a long time ago?”

  “Everyone began talking about it just before the beginning of…”

  Wallas suddenly has the disagreeable sensation that he is wasting his time. At the moment it occurred to him that the stationery seller in the Rue Victor-Hugo was perhaps the former Madame Dupont, this coincidence seemed miraculous to him; he hurried back toward the shop, where from the woman’s first words he discovered that he had guessed right. He felt tremendously pleased, as if an unhoped-for piece of luck bad just helped his investigation along considerably. Yet the fact of having met this woman by chance, on his way, changed nothing about the importance of the information he was entitled to expect from her: if Wallas had seriously supposed she could furnish anything important he would immediately have looked up the address of the divorced wife whose existence Commissioner Laurent had indicated to him this morning. At the time, he had decided it was more important to proceed to other interrogations first—that of Doctor Juard, for instance, whom he has not yet been able to contact.

  Wallas now realizes how unreasonable his recent hope was. He is left somewhat dazed by it—not only from realizing this hope was vain, but disturbed, above all, by not having realized it sooner. Sitting in the back room of the shop, facing this attractive young woman, he wonders what he came here for—perhaps something he doesn’t know himself.

  At the same time, he is suddenly afraid of no longer finding the doctor at the clinic. And as he stands up, apologizing for being unable to stay and chat any longer, he is once again surprised by the little throaty laugh that seems to suggest some complicity. Yet the banal phrase he has just spoken offered no possibility of a double meaning.…In his uncertainty, Wallas tries to reconstitute it; but he doesn’t manage to: “I’m going to have to…I’m going to…”