Project for a Revolution in New York

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  The heavier footsteps of their pursuers have stopped too, close by no doubt, though no one appears anywhere. Standing in the middle of the street, the young people stare at the two intersections, one after the other, the one they came from and the one toward which they were running just now, being about halfway between them, which is to say, opposite the place where Ben-Saïd and W are hiding in the photographic image, as frozen as if they themselves were represented in it.

  Then a man appears, at one of the corners, emerging from behind a shed which forms the end of the block; he takes three slow steps and comes to a standstill under the streetlamp, very easy to see. Another man appears in the same way immediately opposite, at the corner of the fence, to take up an identical position under the other streetlamp. And then at the two corners of the other intersection, two other men take up their positions. All four are wearing the same costume: a kind of grayish sweatshirt; they are bareheaded, with close-cropped blond hair; they are wearing black masks over the upper parts of their faces.

  At each successive appearance, the young man has turned toward the new threat which has just arisen, guided by the sound of rubber soles, henceforth isolated in the great silence. Still very calmly, each of the four men takes out from under his sweater, where it was concealed by the loose material at the side of the chest, a heavy revolver which he immediately provides with a silencer, screwing on the device carefully, without hurrying. The weapon is made even more impressive by this thick cylinder which extends the barrel by at least two inches, when the marksman aims it toward the center of the scene.

  The girl utters a scream of anguish, a single, hoarse, long drawn-out scream which echoes as in the closed space of a theater. In an impersonal voice, one of the four men (it would be difficult to tell which, for they are all exactly alike, and similarly arranged) tells the boy to walk ten feet toward the wall. His words are very distinct, each one pronounced quite separately from the rest, and the acoustics of the place are so good that he has no need to raise his voice, despite the distance. The boy obeys, under the threat of the four revolvers, after hesitating scarcely a second.

  Then a kind of muffled explosion is heard, then another. The young man collapses and rolls across the pavement. Then there are two more explosions, and he stops moving altogether. At each shot, the impact of the bullet is distinctly perceptible on his body. The girl in the white organdy dress remains motionless and mute, as though paralyzed by fear in a slightly melodramatic posture: one hand half-extended toward her boy friend, the other raised to her lips, which open a little wider at each detonation. And she remains in that attitude, then, like a wax figure, her outspread fingers (one of them encircled by a slender gold ring) about six inches from her parted lips, her pretty blond head slightly turned away, her body leaning back, while the four murderers, with the same deliberation as before, unscrew the silencers from their revolvers and replace the weapons and the metal tubes under one arm.

  Then they approach the girl, temporarily spared, and seize her without meeting any resistance. Nonetheless, for safety’s sake, they gag her and tie her hands behind her back before they take her away, walking fast, supported, almost carried by two of her ravishers who hold her tightly by the arms on each side. At the intersection, they stop a moment: one of the two others leans down to pick up from the ground the long white veil their captive had lost, just now, in her flight, and delicately puts it back on her head. In a few quick strides, the group has vanished down the cross street.

  All that is left on the asphalt, ten feet away from the dead man, is a little white circle which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a wreath of orange blossoms made out of plastic. When, at dawn, the police assigned to collecting corpses will find this body, they will also discover in the young man’s hand a calling card or at least a piece of white cardboard in the shape of a calling card, with these words written on it in capital letters: “Young brides, in white raiment, will be torn, still virgin, from the arms of their earthly spouse, to become the prey of the knife and the flames …” and underneath: “Apocalypse, 8-90. Free Warning.”

  It is Ben-Saïd himself who tells us the story at “Old Joe’s,” where we are sitting around a table, as we do every evening, in front of our Bloody Marys. He put, he says, this random signature in the dead man’s hand in order to take care of any eventuality. But now he wonders if it was such a good idea, for (he carefully checks the notebook accounting for his movements) it was not the hour indicated, nor even the exact place. He in any case is never late, he repeats bitterly; if he got there, this once, too close to the beginning of the scene, of which he might have missed a fragment, it was obviously because he had been given the wrong time, and perhaps on purpose, if someone is trying to put him in the wrong. Seven minutes’ difference is a lot! And it was stipulated: “inside the vacant lot,” which he had, for this very reason, already taken the trouble to describe. Or else it was an altogether different scene, and the men assigned to do the shooting belonged to an altogether different group. The whole thing, moreover, had seemed to him too neatly set up … “A mess!” he sighs. “The mess gets worse and worse, and I’m getting sick of it all.”

  But at this moment Frank arrived, walking through the door in that casual way, and sat down at our table as if he had heard nothing of the conversation. “Mission accomplished?” he asked. “Mission accomplished!” Ben-Saïd answered. And he has not made the slightest allusion to the minor discrepancies of time and place, nor to his dissatisfaction.

  I went home immediately afterward, for Frank had—it seems to me—nothing to say to me. I took the subway, where everything seemed calm enough. The express car, which I got into at the stop where you change from the local, was empty, except for a very young girl in black leather slacks and jacket who, keeping her back toward me, kept staring through the pane of the little connecting door at the far end of the car. She reminded me of Laura, for some reason. I had the feeling, once again, that she wasn’t happy. Opposite my house, the man was still at his post, in the recess of the wall. Without stopping to make conversation, for I was in a hurry to get to bed, I greeted him with a familiar “Hello!” He answered in the same way, as though in echo.

  When I put my key into the lock, I had the momentary sensation that the mechanism had been tampered with: something unaccustomed was stuck inside, almost imperceptibly. Still, the key turned normally, and the door opened. I went in, closed the door behind me without making any noise, and put the key down on the table next to the unopened letter dropped in my box by mistake, which I should have returned to the postman I don’t know how long ago. I once again made out the name and address, but it meant no more to me than the other times. On the back, there was still no mention of the sender. Again I had the impulse to open the envelope, then I decided that I wasn’t so interested, after all.

  I went up to the third floor and there I found Laura in her nightgown, her bed lamp in her hand, turned out, of course, the wire stretched across the floor, over the threshold of one of the empty rooms whose door was wide open, the room with white tiles.

  I asked her what she had been doing there. She answered that she had been testing a plug. When I insisted on further explanations, and tried to find out why, furthermore, she had not gone to bed at this late hour, she led me to the center of the room and pointed at the two neat round holes which are set in the middle of one of the ceramic tiles. She had noticed, she said, that these holes were lined with brass.

  “This must have been,” I immediately answered, “a dining room, which explains the tiles. The plug was used for a bell, or a lamp in the center of the table, during the meals. Moreover, there is no indication of a chandelier in the ceiling, nor of any other kind of lighting in the room.” But I had immediately sensed the danger: I already knew what she was getting at.

  “The holes of a plug,” she said, “are not threaded inside. Moreover, to make sure, I’ve just tested them: the diameter is too great, and the holes are too far apart.”

 
; “Then it was probably to screw something down.”

  “Yes, that’s what I decided,” she murmured, as though to herself.

  I added, with the indifferent expression of someone who attaches no importance to such nonsense, especially after a long day of exhausting work:

  “There are lots of odd installations in this house.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ve noticed many other incomprehensible details.”

  “Incomprehensible is not the word,” she answered, after a moment’s thought.

  To change the subject, I said that she would catch cold, walking around barefoot on the tiles. That was when she told me about the man in the black raincoat who was watching the house.

  I told her that she was talking nonsense, and I started to push her out of this room, where she had no business to be … Before I touched her, she had leaped out of my reach, taking refuge then in the corner farthest from the door. Here she crouched, huddled into as small a space as possible, as if she hoped to vanish into the walls, her arms encircling her knees, as has already been reported. I have also described how I slowly approached her, on the diagonal axis of the empty room, ready to make a quick swerve to the right or left if she attempted to escape me. But she made no movement, merely beginning to whimper like a dog on a leash.

  I grabbed her by one wrist and pulled her to her feet. Then she began to struggle, but it was too late: she was imprisoned in my arms and her vain efforts to free herself had no effect except to make her weakness more apparent, while rubbing her body agreeably against mine, so that I continued this particular phase a few minutes longer, for pleasure’s sake. Naturally I immediately desired her, and I dragged her toward her room, at the other end of the corridor, twisting one arm behind her, in order to give her a sharp pain if she should try to stop walking. But I stopped twice on the way in order to make her press up against me again and to make her suffer a little more, in that position, feeling against my rough clothes the tender friction of her belly and breasts through the delicate rumpled silk of her nightgown.

  The door of her room had remained opened; the bed was already unmade. I pushed my captive inside and kicked the door shut behind us. Still holding her in the same way, I forced the girl to kneel on the white goatskin rug; without releasing her, I sat down facing her on the edge of the bed. Then I immobilized her wrists behind her back in one of my hands, and with the other, the right one, I slapped her several times, quite slowly, on the pretext of punishing her for not yet having gone to sleep.

  Then I brought her head close to my face, taking a handful of her loose hair in my right fist, just above the nape of her neck, and I caressed her mouth with my lips. Since she did not seem to me to be sufficiently obliging, I slapped her again, without further explanation. After the third punishment, she kissed me without reticence, with all the care and sweetness I could require. Then I made her stretch out on her back across the bed, her fragile wrists still imprisoned together behind her back, in my left hand, and at the same time I pulled her nightgown up above her breasts; and I half lay down on that defenseless flesh.

  For a long time I stroked her skin with the finger tips on my free hand, in all the places where the flesh is most delicate, but more to make her feel her helplessness than to interest my captive in my own intentions. Soon, under the threat of other, more barbarous tortures, I forced her to open her thighs, parting them with one of my knees, my wrist stuffing the delicate material down her throat as a gag to choke her a little with each application of pressure, as a means of additional persuasion. But from that moment, she abandoned any impulse of resistance, and obeyed my orders without question.

  It was that night that I fell asleep beside her, all my clothes on, forgetting that there was a box of matches in the pocket of my coat, flung to the foot of the bed, which she could have reached by making a simple gesture without running any risk of disturbing my sleep. Yet it is the unconscious anxiety about those matches which immediately appears in my dream. I am walking down a deserted street, a street lost—I know it is lost—somewhere in a ruined suburb, in the bluish half-darkness of the early evening. There is no noise, not the faintest hum of traffic in the environs, and it is in a total silence that I hear myself saying: “Something gentle and desperate,” which doubtless refers to this calm landscape, the tumble-down walls, the twilight.

  The second sound which lacerates this tranquillity is that of the matches which I strike one after the other, trying to see the subject of the huge posters along a very high fence, which forms a smooth, impassable surface on my right. Without my knowing exactly why, it is very important that I make out the texts and images of these advertisements. But the faint, brief light from the tiny fugitive flames, which I must protect with one hand, does not manage to reveal anything in the shadows but certain details so enlarged by their immediate proximity that it is impossible to attribute any meaning to them, much less relate them to a whole.

  Fortunately, streetlamps of an unusual power and height are now suddenly turned on, in every direction at once; and I need merely step back in order to look at the posters, which have nothing exceptional about them, moreover: they are the ones to be seen everywhere, in the subway and other places. Among them is the face, enlarged to the dimensions of a drive-in movie screen, of a young woman with parted lips and blindfolded eyes; the only remarkable (but not exceptional) detail of this particular one: a giant graffito, painted with a single stroke of an airbrush, representing a male organ about ten feet high, raised vertically to the parted lips. The poster thus disfigured, although recently put up, also includes five words added to its own laconic text—”tomorrow …”—which is completed by this manuscript judgment: “the ax and the stake!”

  There is also, right next to it, an electric iron the size of a locomotive, all its chromium gleaming, as complicated as a whole factory, and for a caption the familiar slogan: “Warm as paradise, exact as hell,” which is a phonetic allusion to the manufacturer’s brand name. A little farther on spreads the image of a very smoky bar, of enormous proportions, where customers—all men—are sitting at tables in front of glasses filled with the same red liquid, from which it seems they are hesitant to drink; their severe, drawn faces, as though in anticipation of an imminent event, express moreover none of the sentiments one might expect to see in praise of the warmth of an apéritif.

  I recall the advertisement, also, of a large clothing store which is offering special prices to young people getting married: the photograph represents an elegant young man in a black suit, accompanied by a blond girl wearing the traditional gown of white organdy with the transparent veil and the wreath of orange blossoms. They are just over life-size, and run forward, holding hands. The pretty bride has her other hand outstretched, as if she were trying to catch something; her lips part as though to speak. But no sound emerges from her mouth, and her gesture remains frozen in mid-air, her hand not closing over anything.

  The next poster is also a very good reproduction of a color photograph. The subject itself is this time so widespread that its natural size has sufficed: it is the façade of my own house. I recognize it immediately by the three imitation-stone steps, the top one with a chip in the corner, and by the design of the cast-iron grille which protects the little rectangular window-pane. Two figures stand to the left of the steps, on the sidewalk glistening with rain. One is Ben-Saïd, the go-between who on Frank’s orders is keeping an eye on any of Laura’s comings and goings: it is easy to recognize him with his shiny black raincoat and his felt hat pulled down low over his eyes. He must have been caught unawares by the camera, without having dared to run away or protest, for fear of waking suspicions if he seemed to be afraid of any publicity revealing his appearance in this part of town. But what interests me more is the boy in faded jeans and a scuffed leather jacket standing next to him in the picture, for I have never noticed the presence of this person in my neighborhood. The letter W embroidered on his breast pocket should correspond to the owner�
�s initial; but it is not certain, judging from the general look of the boy, that his possession of a piece of clothing implies his legal ownership of it.

  As I come closer I discover that, if the two human figures are in fact life-size, the door on the contrary—on account of the perspective—is slightly smaller than the one through which I enter and leave my house every day. Yet (and I cannot say this really surprises me) my key has no difficulty entering the little black hole which corresponds to the orifice of my keyhole, it turns in it quite normally and opens the lock. The door opens, and I merely need bend down slightly in order to get through the wall.

  One question comes up now: how was the ascent of the three steps effected: I cannot have climbed them, since they are a photographic illusion. And yet I don’t have any memory of having had to step over a threshold of any such height … On the other side, moreover, there is neither table nor brass candlestick nor big mirror, but a rectangular empty lot, where a sparse vegetation has pushed into the very visible cracks which crisscross the entire surface of a regular pavement. The place must have been used to dump unwanted objects; now, curiously, such things are not heaped up here in disorder, but spread over the entire surface like the pieces in a chess game.

  It is doubtless for this reason that I say the word “play”; yet the game in question might have, rather, the character of a theatrical performance, and then the play in question would actually be the entire representation. The fact of the matter is that the most striking of these objects is a magnificent brass bed in the center of the rectangle, its mattress slit as though by repeated knife thrusts, spilling out its synthetic horsehair stuffing scorched by the sun and sodden with the rain. A naked mannequin, made of some flesh-colored elastic substance, is lying on its back on the bed, limbs spread out in a St. Andrew’s cross, a magnificent red wig framing its milky doll’s face with huge staring green eyes. The genitals are also embellished with a hairy tuft imitating nature, but this pubic hair seems improvised with no more than a handful of reddish horsehair, ripped out of the mattress and summarily pasted onto the pubic triangle.