Project for a Revolution in New York

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Without proceeding to a more thorough search of the house, Morgan, who is convinced he is dealing with Laura herself, does not even take the trouble to check the artificial character of her epidermis. He is eager to pursue upon this new patient, before eliminating her according to his orders, the experiments he has begun some months ago concerning the poison of various tropical animals: yellow scorpion, black widow spider, tarantula, centipede, and horned viper. His intention—as is well known—is to perfect a vesicant product which, applied to certain specific regions of the external genitals of a woman, would be capable of setting off a series of increasingly powerful and prolonged sexual spasms, rapidly becoming extraordinarily painful, ending after several hours with the death of the subjects in the combined convulsions of the most intense pleasure and the most hideous suffering. Such a preparation would of course be in great demand during the great celebrations marking the triumph of the revolution, which must include, according to the program drawn up, in order to avoid a general massacre of the whites, a fair number of human sacrifices which would be particularly spectacular: collective rapes available to all passers-by on trestles set up at intersections and offering the city’s loveliest creatures tied to special racks in various postures, theatrical performances in which certain chosen victims would be tortured in unheard-of ways, circus games revived from antiquity, public competitions for torture devices, tested before a jury of specialists, the most successful then being preserved—in the future society—as a legal means of execution, as was the case of the French guillotine, but in a much more refined class.

  Unfortunately, Doctor Morgan has just lost at the same time one of his precious inmates (a fine white-ringed black widow from Mexico) and several of the most interesting pages of the memorandum he has been devoting to his researches. And now he is rushing like a madman through the endless corridors of the subway. And it is in pursuit of him that I myself am occupied. Yet I have long since lost all trace of him, and I continue walking, at a rapid, confident, regular gait, in the labyrinth of stairs and corridors, like someone who knows where he is going. Cut.

  The trumpet player at “Old Joe’s” then begins raising toward his lips the mouthpiece of his shiny brass instrument, suspended about six inches in mid-air beneath his brown lips still tense with the effort of a soloist in the middle of a fortissimo. In the huge smoky hall, all heads turn back toward him. Laura’s hand, already curved around an imaginary sphere, takes hold of the white ceramic doorknob. On the tape, the scene resumes its course. Cut.

  But I have been wondering for some time if Laura is not staying in this house on specific orders from Frank himself, who has assigned her the mission of keeping an eye on the narrator even in the most intimate hiding places of his own residence, even in his inadmissible gestures, his old habits, his secret thoughts. She is, in this espionage work, in constant liaison with the false Ben-Saïd, who is keeping watch on the sidewalk across the street. They signal each other through the windows. And from time to time, he slips her a book in code through the broken pane on the sixth floor, a book whose stains, tears, and missing pages represent the most important messages of their correspondence; which explains the state of my library, as well as the sudden appearance of new detective stories, as frequent and unforeseeable as their sudden disappearance. Cut.

  The trumpet player at “Old Joe’s” must be the same character, among others, as the man with the steel-gray face who has followed Brown to the fake psychotherapeutic clinic. Having heard, on the other side of the ground glass, the passwords exchanged by N with the nurse, he could easily have repeated them and thus managed to get himself into the heart of the story. Unfortunately, it is not known what became of him afterward. Cut.

  I have also lost all trace of young Mark-Anthony, the boy wearing a stolen jacket with a letter embroidered over the breast pocket which might be the initial of the name “William.” The leg of his trousers was torn on the occasion of the theft of the white car from a newlywed couple, a car which he must have later abandoned in an empty lot. Cut.

  In pursuit of the criminal surgeon in the labyrinth of the subway shops under the Spanish district of Brooklyn, I once again pass in front of the big store dealing in religious items, which offers its customers imaginative clothes for communicants. In the window, the passer-by can admire twelve identical little girls, between thirteen and fourteen, pretty and shapely, more or less dressed in the successive items of the most expensive costume suggested for the great day, the first child in the row wearing only openwork black stockings with the chain and gold cross around her right thigh instead of a garter, the second having also pulled on the tight panties of bright red lace, all the way to the last entirely decked out in all her still immaculate veils. A few accessories of mortification hang among them, such as chains, cords, and whips. Inside, in order to give the children a taste for forgiveness and for sin, there are waxwork scenes, life-size, like the kind to be seen in police museums, but which here represent young saints at the most decorative moment of their martyrdom. Cut.

  A problem arises. Who are the blond nurses, mentioned at varying intervals in the body of the text? What are they doing in the service of the psychoanalyst who employs them? What is their precise role in the narrative? Why have I written, in their regard, “false nurses”? And why are their white uniforms spattered with tiny red stains? Cut.

  Retake. When Laura closes the library door behind her and turns around toward the big mirror, she notices on the black marble table top the skeleton key Ben-Saïd has forgotten. A remote smile passes like a shadow across her motionless face. With the slow movements of a sleepwalker, but without hesitations or breaks in continuity, she picks up the key, opens the door of her prison, neglecting to close it behind her, and walks down the straight street toward the subway station. Then it was certainly Laura whom I glimpsed from behind, pressed against the little rectangular window of the connecting door at the very end of the empty car I got into at the stop where I changed from the local to the express. A little later, as has been seen, she was captured by our agents who surrounded her on all sides: Ben-Saïd whose role consisted precisely in noting her flight and immediately warning the others, young W who is one of the three hoodlums encountered here and there in the narrative, Doctor Morgan himself, and M, The Subway Vampire. Cut.

  Still later, Laura, who has been, during her entire interrogation, raped at great length and several times over by the two men, in various bizarre and uncomfortable postures which she has been forced to assume, which she has found very exciting after the nervous tension of her escape and the ambiguous pleasure caused by her own capture, is now imprisoned in the iron cage of the little underground room lined with white tiles. She has said disingenuous things to the surgeon on several occasions for the pleasure of lying, especially during the actual rapes. She recalls in particular the last confidences made at teatime by her brief companion Sarah Goldstücker, who seemed so eager to tell someone (whose mind she doubtless thought was shaky, which encouraged her to further outpourings, as she might have spoken to a deaf person or to a cat) the story of her dramatic youth: her eventful childhood, her difficulties during adolescence, the role of the sexually obsessed family doctor (whose name is not Müller, but Juard), etc. Cut.

  Have I already indicated that even before the revolution, the entire city of New York, and in particular Manhattan Island, had been in ruins for a long time? I am speaking of course of the surface constructions, those in what is called the open air. One of the last houses still standing, the narrator’s, located in the West Village, is now in the hands of a team of dynamiters. Having invoked the plan to construct soon, in its place, something higher and more modern, these four men with severe faces, dressed in dark gray sweatshirts, are skillfully and diligently planting all through the building their Bickford fuses and explosive charges, with a view to an explosion which cannot be long in coming now. Cut.

  You have asked me what her ravishers did with the young bride. I can answer you in a
few words. She figured for several days among the white slaves who are obliged to submit to services of all kinds—generally humiliating ones—at the will of members of the organization, in the conquered sections of the under-ground city. Then she was executed, on the pretext of some minor fault she committed during a ritual ceremony. They initially amused themselves by burning her with their cigars at the most sensitive and secret points of her body. They also forced her (at the same time and subsequently) to perform certain services of an intimate nature which the doomed girl was obliged to carry out to the best of her ability, despite her lack of experience. Finally they attached her arms and legs to the floor and wall of a cellar provided with huge rings set into the stone. When the body was stretched out in the shape of an X, arms and legs drawn wide apart by the chains fastened to her ankles and wrists, they stuck long needles into her flesh, especially through the breasts, in the buttocks, the thighs and the belly, in every direction and all the way through, from waist to knees, and they let her die that way. Cut.

  I still had left to describe, in the same order of ideas, the fourth act of the torture of Joan, the pretty milky-skinned whore. But time is short. Soon it will be day. And now there has just appeared a “cat” somewhere in the sentence, apropos of Sarah the half-caste: a deaf man and a cat. The deaf man, I’m convinced, is the trumpet player at “Old Joe’s.” But the cat has not yet played any part here, to my knowledge; so that can only be a mistake … Apropos of the blond nurses and their incomprehensible presence in the organization, I should have found out, above all, what had become of the nicest one, that tall girl with the big dark glasses and the strong perfume, who kept brushing up against me … But it is too late. In the gray light of dawn, the hammering tread of the patrol is already echoing outside, at the very end of the long straight street where they advance, right down the middle of the pavement, with their calm, regular gait … And Claudia … Who was Claudia? Why was she executed? … Yes, that’s it, I was saying: with their calm, regular gait. The two militiamen are wearing navy-blue tunics and leather shoulder straps, with holsters over their hips; they are the same height, rather tall; they have faces that look alike—frozen, attentive, absent—under the flat-topped caps with very high front brims and the city emblem under it and a wide shiny visor which almost hides their eyes … And also: who is tapping in the blind room on the last floor, up at the very top of the big house? You’re not going to try and make me believe it’s old King Boris? … It sounds like pointed nails tapping against a door, or against a cast-iron radiator, as if someone were trying to send a message to other prisoners, especially women prisoners … And in that regard, just how did the second meeting go between JR and the mad old uncle who was not yet known as Goldstücker at the time? In any case I’ve already described—it will be remembered—how that exceptional girl had been recruited by means of a want ad, not one of the ones regularly published in The New York Times by so-called sophisticated couples who belong to the establishment, something like this: “Modern couple looking for weekend partners to play hearts. Photographs returned,” which moreover we always answer systematically, sending the undressed picture of a handsome black man grinning with all his teeth and holding in his arms a delicate white-skinned creature, which has always obtained excellent results, but on the contrary by means of a text written this time by us, in order to encourage a more timid, not yet specialized clientele. A certain Jean Robertson, whom we subsequently renamed Joan, had answered the ad immediately, on the assumption she was dealing with some naïve businessman, someone easy to lure into a complicated affair, soon inextricably mixed up with stories of defective heroin and more or less consenting minors, which is to say rather less than more. From our first experiments, the call girl’s remarkable gifts, in the various realms which interested the organization, had then saved her life (and this all the more easily in that she had claimed to be one of our own people, exhibiting a family passbook which was probably forged), until the day at least when N. G. Brown had discovered that the girl had just sold out to the local police. It remains possible of course that Brown lied in the report he turned over to Frank, and that he invented this betrayal out of whole cloth, having chosen the surest method of ridding himself for good of an inconvenient witness who might have given away his personal secrets: the presence in his house of the little captive removed from Doctor Morgan’s menagerie, or even his own double game as an informer. Still, the fact is that the suspect had been sentenced to death without further trial … But, now that I think of it, one thing is certain: if the pink-and-blond complexion of the young nurses is not an artifice, they too must belong to the constantly renewed harem of war captives reduced to slavery. The little red stains, particularly numerous on the breast and from the hips to mid-thigh, would then be explained by the Pravaz needles which Doctor Morgan injects deep into their bodies through the white uniform (under which the reprieved victims generally wear nothing at all) in order to punish them for their daily delinquencies, the long hollow needles then having to remain planted in their flesh until the end of their night duty, even—or especially—if they make certain postures, certain attitudes, certain positions, or certain gestures extremely painful, which must in no case alter the professional smile enforced upon these creatures. (It has been shown, in particular, that the psychoanalyst prostitutes them to his paying customers whose sexual behavior he then studies by the direct experimental method.) The blood which trickles drop by drop through each slender steel channel … The cadenced sound of boots comes closer, and the regular rubbing of the holster against the leather belts, and the two black figures reflected in a gleaming double on the asphalt drenched by the recent shower … Faster, please, faster! And now, for the last act, Joan’s splendid bloodstained body is lying on its back, head down, on the altar steps of an abandoned church in the depths of Harlem which has been used for a long time for expiatory ceremonies, but the blind organist keeps coming to play every day, so that the victims’ screams can be drowned out by the uproar of the liturgical cadences. Moreover it is not impossible that the musician is also deaf, and that he is the one who plays the trumpet every night at “Old Joe’s.” The church in question has preserved all its old splendors: elaborate ornaments on every confessional and over each side chapel, huge black draperies which seem to smother the worshiper in the smoke of incense burners, gigantic carved motifs imitating the baroque where, among the arabesques, the billows, the scallops, the volutes, the scrolls, the garlands, appear the god of wrath, the god of the lightning, the god of tempests, each brandishing his attributes, the herald angels sounding their long trumpets, the mutilated corpses rising from their graves. Only the paving in the nave and the six steps of the high altar are of plain white marble. Here, surrounding the victim lying head down, legs wide apart, her feet attached to two giant candelabra which illuminate the scene with their countless tapers, the twelve still-virginal communicants in all their finery are kneeling, six on each side, on the marble steps, each one holding a lit black candle between hands fettered by a rosary instead of a chain. For an hour they have heard nothing but the religious music whose rolling waves break from the top of the vaults, occasionally resembling cries of mystic fervor; and they see nothing of the spectacle which is taking place ten feet away from them, because of the black bandages over their eyes, so that they still believe they are attending the high mass of their initiation, which remains true, in a sense. But in front of the twelve columns of the nave are already standing the twelve crosses to which the little girls are ultimately doomed: three crosses in the shape of an X, three in the shape of a T, three in the shape of a Y, three in the shape of an inverted Y. And beneath their blind gaze, the victim of the sacrifice lies in a pool of blood, the breasts torn off as well as all the flesh in the pubic area and the upper part of the thighs. Her delicate hands, carefully washed and very white, seem to caress these lacerations, in the hollow of the dark red wound which replaces the genitals; but these hands with their tapering fingers are like al
ien hands which are no longer attached to the body, for the arms too have been torn off and the blood which has gushed from the armpits has collected all around the head with its ecstatic smile resting on the slabs, the mouth and the eyes wide open, coagulating in the auburn hair spread out in cunning disarray, extending the curling locks in a flaming sun, like a scarlet octopus. But this time, I no longer have a minute to lose. I must return to that delicate girl who is still languishing in her cage, for M, The Vampire, and Doctor Morgan are now returning to the little white room in order to continue the interrogation, after having gone out for a sandwich to the drugstore in the nearby station. They remain standing, the two of them, in the room. They seem uncertain, exhausted. M pulls off his mask for a moment, with a mechanical gesture, trying to rub away, with the back of his hand, the wrinkles of his own face underneath; and Morgan, who then looks up from the papers accumulated on the table, recognizes with amazement the narrator’s features. Without hesitating, realizing I have been discovered … Cut.

  And suddenly the action resumes, without warning, and it is the same scene which proceeds all over again, very fast, always just as it was before. I have wrapped the girl in a blanket, as though to save her from the flames, climbing down the zigzag fire escape attached to a dizzyingly high building, where already the fire is roaring from roof to cellar. In the iron cage, padlocked once again, I have left in her place the slender skeleton of the other girl—the one the German television company did not want—whose bones are so neatly nibbled, so clean, so white, so varnished, that they seem to be made out of some plastic substance. And now I am closing the door behind me, after having set my precious burden down on the vestibule floor, while the police patrol stops to speak to the sentry on duty, in the recess of the house across the street, and now I am closing the door behind me, a heavy wooden door with a tiny narrow rectangular window in the top part, its pane protected by a … Cut. It is at this moment that I heard again the faint taps of a light hand, at the very top of the huge staircase of the enormous empty building, on a shaft of the central heating system. Laura has immediately raised her head, ears cocked, eyes fixed, lips pursed, as has already been said.