I am then amazed to discover that the room we were in overlooks Central Park, which seems to me quite impossible, given the position of the building JR entered a few minutes earlier. It would have required, in other words, that the complicated route she took to the apartment door from the entrance lobby, by various elevators and escalators, made her pass under at least one street. But now these topographical reflections divert me to a scene which is taking place at the very bottom, between the bushes, not far from a streetlamp casting a dim light over the figures, distorting their shadows.
There are three men, or else two men and a woman, it is difficult to tell exactly, seen from so high up and in such a dim light. It is equally impossible to say with any certainty if the white car parked nearby, at the curb, is involved with the wild gesticulations, the rapid, repeated, apparently incoherent comings and goings of the three individuals. What is certain, on the other hand, is that they are carrying out some hasty and secret operation: tearing up flowers, or else carrying and concealing under the vegetation objects of rather small size, or perhaps even changing clothes with each other, or rather putting on clothes brought intentionally, after having thrown into the bushes, bordering the flower bed, the ones they had previously been wearing and which they now wanted to get rid of … It is even conceivable that they are completing their transformations by taking off the masks they had been wearing for the criminal act they have just committed, also removing like gloves the white hands with false fingerprints which camouflaged their black skin.
One of the men, who is not managing to get rid of his mask, too well pasted onto his real face, hurrying to finish, for the morals squad looking for under-age homosexuals is always a danger in these neighborhoods, loses patience, strips off at random the various lumps or protrusions on which he can get a grip, and begins tearing at his ears, his throat, his temples, his eyelids, without even realizing that he is actually lacerating in his haste big sections of his own flesh. And in a little while, when he appears in “Old Joe’s” to report to Frank on his mission and to recoup his strength with a double shot of bourbon, the band will suddenly stop playing, the trumpet-player suddenly mute, without thinking in his astonishment of putting down his meaningless instrument, will merely take it away from his mouth, holding it motionless in the air about three inches from his lips which still keep the tense position of a soloist in the middle of a fortissimo, while all the heads in the room turn with a single movement toward the street door, in order to see in their turn what the musicians have seen first from the bandstand: the bloody face which has just appeared in the rectangular frame formed by the open door against the black background of the night.
As for me, I believe I have now looked long enough at the window where the rows of masks of the dead presidents surround the placard which permits any plan, any fantasy, and I risk another sidelong glance toward the end of the street, where I think I once again see the figures of Frank and Ben-Saïd walking away. But this glance may be too brief to permit me to register anything but the series of houses whose irregular façades succeed each other down the empty street, which I then project for a long time through the shop-window quickly returned to like a refuge, inside which glows the luxuriant auburn hair which offers its abundance just opposite my gaze.
Finally I make up my mind to look more openly in the other direction: contrary to my calculations, the two men have actually vanished. Not having had time, without running, to reach the intersection, they can only have gone into a building next door to “Old Joe’s.” So all I have to do now is to head toward the subway station and then return home.
But in the express car, quite empty as it often is at this late hour, which is carrying me in a tremendous racket of grating machinery, vibrating metal, and irregular jolts, I think again of JR who is still, mean-while, with little Laura in the Park Avenue apartment. The child has finally made up her mind to show her new governess where the disturbing sounds come from that filled the room next door: a tape inside a transparent plastic cassette, set on a Chinese stand. The scene of violence has calmed down now; all that can be heard is an irregular, still-oppressed breathing which gradually fades into the silence of the great building.
JR asks the little girl why she puts such strange recordings into this machine. But Laura continues listening without a word to the breathing box, her eyes fixed on the slender brown tape which smoothly unrolls behind its transparent plate, from which the young woman cannot even manage to tear her eyes, in the imperceptibly anxious expectation of what will happen next.
Then the child makes up her mind to answer, but without taking her eyes off the cassette in which one of the reels gradually loses its thickness while the other’s diameter increases. The tone of her voice is that of a discreet, neutral commentary, which seems to be the result of her attentive observation of the mechanism: “He turned it on before he went out,” she says.
“But you could have turned it off!”
“No, you can’t turn it off: the box is locked.”
“Did your father forget to turn it off before he went out?”
“He’s not my father, and he didn’t forget: he started it on purpose.”
“Why?”
“He said it’s to keep me company.”
“When I came in, you couldn’t hear a thing.”
“Because you came in during a silence.”
“Are there silences on the tape?”
“Yes … Sometimes very long ones …” And she adds in a low voice, keeping her face bent over the little machine: “Those are the times I’m really frightened …”
“But … Couldn’t you tell him …”
“No, it’s no use … He does it on purpose.”
And suddenly the action resumes, without warning, with a man’s footsteps, once again, hurrying footsteps climbing up steps, metallic echoes coming closer from landing to landing, faster and faster, nearer and nearer, until they give the impression that someone is right here in the room, and at this moment a loud noise of broken glass makes us both give a start and turn our heads in the same movement toward the bay window … But it is only the tape which continues its slow and continuous unwinding … Pieces of glass have fallen tinkling to the tiles; then come the fainter noises of the pieces of glass carefully being removed, then a latch grating, a window opening, the footsteps advancing down the tiled corridor, a very long corridor, a door brutally opened, a young woman’s scream quickly smothered in the sound of cloth being torn, and a hoarse voice murmuring: “Keep still, you little fool, or I’ll hurt you…”
Then Laura gently raises the light lid of the transparent box, presses a precise finger on a tiny red button, and everything stops.
“That’s enough for now,” she says, “it’s always the same: the footsteps, the screams, the broken glass, and they keep saying the same thing.”
“Where does it come from?”
“What—the cassette?”
“No, the tape.”
“From the man who sells them—where do you think it would come from?”
“But … Who recorded it?”
“The musicians, of course, the performers!”
“And they sell it in the stores?”
“Of course! I bought this one this morning, in the Times Square subway station … It’s the story of a lieutenant fireman who climbs up a skyscraper to save a little girl who’s about to throw herself off.”
“Oh, I see … She wants to kill herself?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t have enough fun at home.”
“And why did she say that her father started the tape and locked the cassette?”
“First of all she didn’t say he was her father. And besides, she never stops lying anyway.”
“Does she like lying?”
“Not all that much. But for one little truth, there are millions and millions of lies, so she can’t help it, really … And she might have said, just as well, that it was the
lieutenant fireman who made her listen to this on purpose to scare her; or that it was you, or me, or Abraham Lincoln, or Edouard Manneret.”
JR glances at her watch. It is almost midnight. She’s tired of waiting. She asks: “And what time is your stepfather coming back?”
“My stepfather? Oh yes, my uncle, you mean … He’s not coming back today. If you want to leave, you can. There’s a time clock in the vestibule—if you punch it, you’ll be paid automatically: I punched it for you when you rang, at the same time I turned on the cassette.”
Young Laura immediately accompanies her visitor to the apartment door, which she slams behind her, shouting “See you soon!” words followed by the sharp click of the lock, which extends a deep vibration through the entire wooden panel.
Then an angelic smile curves the little girl’s lips, as she listens to the echo which rises, fades, and quickly dies away … Then she returns, dancing in a slow waltz, steps to the Chinese room, reopens the plexiglass cassette, turns back the reels without bothering to bring them all the way to the starting position, presses the red button and stretches out on the floor to listen to the other side in peace:
“… did auburn hair which offers its splendor just opposite me. It immediately occurs to me that this is a trap: the too knowingly sensual and accessory smile of this young woman from nowhere, on the strength of a simple advertisement, and who has told me nothing about herself so far except her first name: Joan, her dress too short and cut too low, its fine emerald-green silk shifting too readily over a tender, firm flesh, gentle, nervous, and as though too provisionally concealed by those green algae with their shifting reflections, vague, impalpable areas changing slowly, according to secret currents, drowned in the liquid mass a deep-sea fish whose motionless body, half-hidden in the ulvae, faintly undulates itself occasionally, ready to buckle in sudden violent twists, ready to open in a soft and greedy mouth with complicated, precise, many-formed folds, ceaselessly reshaped by new excrescences or invaginations, but which despite their shifting sinuosities preserve a constant bilateral symmetry.”
“Oh, come on…” Laura says aloud, to express her lack of enthusiasm for this last detail, emphasizing her condemnation by a critical pout of her pursed lips. Then she suddenly stands up, in an unlikely leap, and seizes an enormous dictionary which seems to be, on most occasions, within arm’s reach. She looks up the word “ulva” and reads: “a genus of green seaweeds, the sea-lettuces, with a thin, flat thallus like a lettuce leaf, generally growing in brackish waters.” The little girl stares at the carved cornice which runs under the ceiling, at the top of the scarlet-wallpapered room, thinking that a deep-sea fish cannot take refuge in that salad. Then she whispers, though quite distinctly: “ulva oluptuous,” and a few seconds later, “sub-merged cathedral.”
She walks over to the bay window, in order to see if the thieves hidden in the bushes lining the avenue have found any victims. But nothing more is to be seen in the narrow zone illuminated by the street-lamp; perhaps they have caught their prey and are now dismembering it, under cover of the foliage. Their victim is probably the pretty governess, who was caught as she came out of the building.
Laura lets the tulle curtain fall back, glances at the cassette and notices that the reel is far from being finished; and the voice, which has meanwhile continued telling its story, seems to have been scarcely disturbed by something more interesting: uproar of a revolution, sirens, conflagration, revolver shots…. Then the little girl herself imitates a burst of machine-gun fire, staggers and collapses in a heap on the high-pile carpet, where she remains lying on her back at full length, legs and arms spread out in a cross.
This tape is certainly not worth much, on either side. The narrator continues his reasons to suspect a pretty girl named Joan, the latest of the governesses recruited by means of an advertisement in the newspaper. He has the impression of having got hold, this time, of what he is looking for, but he must not make any mistake: even if the auburn-haired young woman is really a prostitute—amateur or professional—it still remains to be proved that she belongs to the organization; and to be sure of that, he must be careful not to force matters. The conversation with Laura, during her first visit—duly recorded by the microphones hidden in the walls—actually warranted only the vaguest suppositions. The second meeting, with the uncle himself, as just reported, has therefore already supplied more tangible results. The third time, JR is asked to come in the middle of the afternoon.
She arrives as arranged, at the Park Avenue address, and rings as usual at the door of the sham apartment. The door turns slowly on its hinges, without anyone, today, appearing in the vestibule. And it is the time clock which announces cavernously: “Come in … Close the door … Thank you … Your arrival has been recorded.”
Since the vestibule remains empty, JR walks into the pneumatic boudoir, where she finds no one either. But she hears a man’s voice—which she thinks she recognizes—in the next room, the Chinese one. She knocks lightly on the door, receives no answer, decides to walk into the sanctuary all the same, wearing her best smile—the smile of a timid slave secretly in love with her master (since the word “docile” has not yet been clarified) … But the smile freezes on her lovely lips: little Laura is here, lying full length on the floor, and it is the tape recorder that is talking.
JR reaches the lacquered table in a few nervous steps; she lifts up the lid of the transparent box and stops the machine with an irritated gesture. The child has not stirred.
JR asks: “Isn’t your uncle here?”
Without making a move, Laura answers: “No, as you see.”
JR insists: “He’s not at home:”
“If he was at home, you wouldn’t have to come and take care of me.”
“Fine … I’d like to know what need there is to take care of a girl your age as if she was a baby.”
“If you hadn’t come, I would have set fire to the apartment. I had already prepared the can of gasoline and the pile of sheets.”
The young woman shrugs her shoulders and says: “Don’t you go to school?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Oh, to learn something.”
“What?”
“What a job!” JR thinks, as she walks back and forth in the room. She approaches the large bay window, raises the curtain, returns to the prone body which now rolls across the red carpet as if it were suffering from epileptic convulsions. She feels like giving it a good kick.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, “variable equations, or the capital of Maryland …”
“Annapolis!” the little girl shrieks. “That’s too easy. Ask another question.”
“Who killed Lincoln?”
“John Wilkes Booth.”
“How many seconds are there in a day?”
“Eighty-six thousand four hundred and twenty.”
“What’s an ulva?”
“A genus of green seaweeds.”
“What do little girls dream about?”
“Knives … and blood!”
“Where are the women we love?”
“In the grave.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen and a half.”
“What do you see from the windows of this apartment?”
“Central Park.”
(That’s what it had looked like to me.)
“Is this part of it lit?”
“Yes, dimly … There’s a streetlamp.”
“And what can be seen near the streetlamp?”
“Three people.”
“Of which sex?”
“Two men, a woman … She’s wearing pants and a cap, but you can see her breasts under her sweater.”
“What is this lady’s name?”
“Her name—or at least what they call her—is Joan Robeson, or sometimes Robertson too.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s one of the fake nurses who works for Doctor Morgan, t
he psychoanalyst whose office is in the Forty-second Street subway station. The other nurses are blond, and …”
“But what is she doing here, now, in the bushes bordering the park, with those two men? And who are those two men?”
“That’s easy: one is Ben-Saïd, the other is the narrator. The three of them are loading cartons of marijuana cigarettes disguised as ordinary Philip Morrises into a white Buick. It was a go-between who dropped them in the bushes a few minutes ago; he had just heard, by a walkie-talkie radio, that his car was going to be searched by the police when it reached the garage. Who could have warned him? A cop, of course, who was working with them. Joan and the other two have been assigned to make the pickup. What makes it hard to understand their gestures is that they are not content to lean down, to grope for the packages scattered in the foliage, hiding them one after the other under their clothes and carrying them that way to the car parked at the curb; for the same time they are eating roast-beef sandwiches which they have to keep stuffing into their pockets in order not to interrupt their work, pulling them out again the next minute.
Ben-Saïd hasn’t opened his mouth since the job began, except to bite into his sandwich, and the narrator wonders if something’s wrong, for he’s usually quite talkative. Joan, who has concealed her hair, for the occasion, under a huge cap, smiles or winks at him playfully, each time she comes near him; without much effect, moreover, for he seems to pay no attention to her. Irritated by their behavior, the narrator—let’s say “I,” it will be simpler—looks around for a long time to make sure nothing is left behind the clump of japonica; and this is the moment the girl chooses to come over and search in the same place, as if she hadn’t seen that someone was already there.
“Oh, there you are!” she says.
“Yes, you can see I am … What’s the matter with Ben-Saïd?”
Project for a Revolution in New York Page 5