La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  This time, I am seized by fear for good. I open my eyes. I remove my dark glasses. . . . I remain dazed, at first, by the bright light to which I am no longer accustomed. Then, the surroundings come into focus, become clearer, take on a consistency, as would a Polaroid photograph, where the picture would appear little by little on the glazed white paper. . . . But it is like the setting in a dream, repetitive and full of anguish, with convolutions from which I could not manage to free myself. . . .

  The long, deserted street, stretching in front of me, reminds me indeed of something, the origin of which however I could not determine: I only have the feeling of a place where I would already have come, recently, once at least, several times perhaps. . . .

  It is a straight alley, fairly narrow, empty, solitary, you can’t see the end of it. It looks like it has been abandoned by everyone, quarantined, forgotten by time. Each side is lined with low structures, uncertain, more or less dilapidated: crumbling houses with yawning apertures, ruined workshops, blind walls and ramshackle fences. . . .

  On the crude old-fashioned pavement—which has probably not been repaired for a hundred years— a kid about twelve, clad in a gray smock, billowing and cinched at the waist, such as little boys used to wear last century, lies prone, stretched to his full length, seemingly deprived of consciousness. . . .

  All of this then would have taken place already, previously, once at least. This situation, however exceptional, that I confront here, would only be the reproduction of a previous adventure, exactly identical, one whose events I myself would have lived, and in which I play the same part. . . . But when? And where?

  Progressively, the memory dims. . . . The more I attempt to close in on it, the more it escapes me. . . . A last glimmer, still. . . . Then nothing more. It will all have been but a brief illusion. I am well acquainted, anyway, with these sharp and fleeting impressions, which I, as well as many others, experience frequently, and which are sometimes called: memory of the future.

  It might instead be, in fact, an instantaneous memory: we believe that what is happening to us has already happened before, as though the present time were splitting in two, breaking in its own midst into two parts: an immediate reality, plus a ghost of that reality. . . . But the ghost soon wavers. . . . One would like to grasp it. . . . It passes again and again behind our eyes, diaphanous butterfly or dancing will-o’-the-wisp that toys with us. . . . Ten seconds later, it has all fled forever.

  As to the fate of the injured boy, there is, in any case, one reassuring fact: the viscous liquid that stained my fingers, when I felt the ground close to the gray linen smock, is not blood, although its color could make you think of it, as well as the way it feels.

  It is nothing but an ordinary puddle of reddish mud, colored by rusty dust, that has probably remained in the hollow of the pavement since the last rain. The child, luckily for his clothes, which are threadbare, but very clean, has fallen just on the edge. He was trying perhaps to guide me away from that obstacle towards which I was rushing, when he himself lost his balance. I hope the consequence of his fall will not be too serious.

  But I ought to do something about it, it is an emergency. Even if nothing is broken, the fact that he has fainted could make me fear some serious injury. And yet, I do not see, as I turn over the frail body with maternal care, any injury to either the forehead or the jaw.

  The whole face is intact. The eyes are closed. It looks as though the kid is asleep. His pulse and his breathing seem normal, though very weak. In any case, I have to take action: nobody will come to my help in this deserted place.

  If the surrounding houses were lived in, I’d go there to seek assistance. I’d carry the child there, kind women would offer him a bed, and we would call the paramedics, or some neighborhood physician who would be willing to come over.

  But are there any tenants in these crumbling buildings open to the weather? That would surprise me greatly. There ought to be living there, at this point, no one except some vagabonds who would laugh at me were I to ask them for a bed or a telephone. Perhaps even, were I to disturb them in the midst of some suspicious pursuit, they would manage an even worse reception for me.

  Just then, I spot, directly on my right, a small two-story building, where the windows have remained in place in their frames and still retain all their panes. The door is ajar. . . . It is there, then, that I shall attempt my first visit. As soon as I have placed the injured boy under some shelter, I will already feel better.

  But it seems to me, inexplicably, that I already know the rest: pushing the half open door with my foot, I shall penetrate into that unknown house, with the unconscious child that I shall be holding carefully in my arms. Inside, all will be obscure and deserted. I shall perceive, however, a dim bluish light, which will be coming from the second floor. I shall slowly climb a wooden staircase, steep and narrow, with steps that will creak in the silence. . . .

  I know it. I remember it. . . . I remember that entire house, with hallucinating precision, and all those events that would therefore already have taken place, through whose succession I would already have lived, and in which I would have taken an active part. . . . But when was that?

  At the very top of the stairs, there was a half-open door. A young woman, tall and slender, with pale blond hair, was standing in the doorway, as though she had been waiting for someone’s arrival. She was wearing a white dress, of some light fabric, gauzy, translucent, whose folds, floating at the whim of an unlikely breeze, caught the reflections of that blue light that fell I knew not from where.

  An undefinable smile, very gentle, youthful and faraway, played upon her pale lips. Her large green eyes, widened still in the semidarkness, shone with a strange brilliance “like those of a girl who would have come from another world,” thought Simon Lecoeur, as soon as he saw her.

  And he remained there, motionless on the threshold of the room, holding in his arms (“like an armful of roses offered in tribute,” he thought) the unconscious little boy. Struck with enchantment himself, he gazed upon the otherworldly apparition, fearful at each instant that she might disappear in a wisp of smoke, especially when a stronger gust of air (to which yet no other object in the room seemed exposed), blew her veils around her like “ash-colored flames.”

  After a time, probably very lengthy (but impossible to measure with any certainty), during which Simon did not manage to compose, in his mind, any phrase that might have been appropriate to this extraordinary situation, he finally, for lack of anything better, spoke these ridiculously simple words:

  “A child has been hurt.”

  “Yes, I know,” said the young woman, but after such a delay that Simon’s words seemed to have traveled, before reaching her, immense distances. Then, after another silence, she added: “Hello. My name is Djinn.”

  Her voice was soft and faraway, alluring yet elusive, like her eyes.

  “You are an elf?” asked Simon.

  “A spirit, an elf, a girl, as you like.”

  “My name is Simon Lecoeur,” said Simon.

  “Yes, I know,” said the strange girl.

  She had a slight foreign accent, British perhaps, unless these were the melodious tones of sirens and fairies. Her smile had become imperceptibly more pronounced with these words: it seemed she was speaking from elsewhere, from very far away in time, that she was standing in a sort of future world, in the midst of which everything would already have been accomplished.

  She opened the door wide, so that Simon could walk in without difficulty. And she gestured to him gracefully with a movement of her bare arm (which had just emerged out of a very ample and flaring sleeve) toward an old-fashioned brass bed. Its head, resting against the back wall under an ebony crucifix, was framed by two gilt bronze candelabra that sparkled, bearing numerous tapers. Djinn started to light these, one after the other.

  “It looks like a deathbed,” said Simon.

  “Won’t all beds be deathbeds, sooner or later?” answered the young woman in a ba
rely audible whisper. Her voice took on a little more substance to declare, with sudden maternal care: “As soon as you have laid him upon these white sheets, Jean will fall into a dreamless sleep.”

  “So you even know that his name is Jean?”

  “What else would he be called? What strange name would you want him to bear? All little boys are called Jean. All little girls are called Marie. You would know that, if you were from here.”

  Simon wondered what she meant by the words from here. Did she mean this strange house? Or this whole abandoned street? Simon very gently laid the still-inanimate child on the funeral bed. Djinn folded his hands across his chest, as is done for those whose soul is departing.

  The child let her without offering the slightest resistance, nor showing any other reaction. His eyes had remained wide open, but his pupils were fixed. The flame of the candles lit them with dancing lights, which imparted to them a feverish, supernatural, disconcerting life.

  Djinn, now, stood motionless again, next to the bed she surveyed serenely. To see her there, in her filmy white dress, almost immaterial, she looked like an archangel watching over the repose of a restless heart.

  Simon had to shake himself back to reality, in the oppressive silence that had fallen upon the room, to ask the young woman some new questions:

  “Can you tell me, then, what ails him?”

  “He is afflicted,” she answered, “with acute dysfunction of the memory, which provokes partial losses of consciousness, and which might end up killing him completely. He should rest, or else his over-wrought brain will tire too soon, and his nervous cells will die of exhaustion, before his body reaches adulthood.”

  “What kind of dysfunction, exactly?”

  “He remembers, with extraordinary precision, events that have not yet taken place: what will happen to him tomorrow, or even what he will do next year. And you are, here, nothing but a character out of his afflicted memory. When he wakes up, you will immediately disappear from this room, where, as a matter of fact, you have not yet set foot. . . .”

  “So, I will come here at a later date?”

  “Yes. Beyond any doubt.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know the exact date. You will walk into this house, for the first time, about the middle of next week. . . .”

  “And what about you, Djinn? What would become of you if he woke up?”

  “I, too, will disappear from here upon his awakening. We would both disappear at the same time.”

  “But where would we go? Would we stay together?”

  “Oh, no. That would be contrary to the rules of chronology. Try to understand: you will go where you ought to be at that time, in your present reality. . . .”

  “What do you mean by present!”

  “It is your future self that is here by error. Your present day self is several miles away from here, I think, where you are attending some ecological meeting, that opposes electronic machinism, or something of the sort.”

  “What about you?”

  “I, unfortunately, am already dead, and have been for almost three years, so I will not go anywhere. It is only Jean’s malfunctioning brain that has brought us together in this house, by chance: I belong to his past, while you, Simon, you belong to his future existence. You understand, now?”

  But Simon could not manage to grasp—except as a total abstraction—what all this could mean in the here and now. In order to test whether he was—yes or no—nothing but someone else’s dream, it occurred to him to pinch his ear hard. He felt a normal pain, quite real. But what did that prove?

  He had to struggle against the vertigo to which these confusions of time and space subjected his reason. This diaphanous and dreamlike woman was perhaps quite insane. . . . He raised his eyes toward her. Djinn was watching him with a smile.

  “You pinch your ear,” she said, “in order to know whether you are not in the midst of a dream. But you are not dreaming: you are being dreamed, that is quite different. As for me, although I am dead, I can still feel pain and pleasure in my body: these are my past joys and sufferings, recalled by that overly receptive child, and imbued by him with new life, barely dulled by time.”

  Simon was the prey of contradictory emotions. On the one hand, this strange girl fascinated him, and, without admitting it to himself, he feared to see her disappear; even if she came from the realm of shadows, he wanted to stay close to her. But at the same time, he was angry to hear all that nonsense: he had the feeling that he was being told, to mock him, tales without rhyme or reason.

  He tried to reason calmly. This scene (which he was, at that very moment, living) could have belonged to his future existence—or to that of the child—only if the characters present in the room were, indeed, to be gathered there a little later—the following week, for instance. However, that became an impossibility, under normal conditions, if the girl had died three years before.

  Owing to the same anachronisms, the scene now taking place here could not have happened in Djinn’s past existence, since he had never met her before, while she was alive. . . .

  A doubt, suddenly, shook that overly reassuring conviction. . . . In a flash, a recollection crossed Simon’s mind, of a past meeting with a blond girl, with pale green eyes and a slight American accent. . . . Soon this impression vanished, suddenly, just as it had come. But it left the young man perturbed.

  Had he confused her, for a fleeting moment, with some image of the actress Jane Frank that would have strongly impressed him, in a movie? That explanation was not convincing. A fear seized him, more strongly than ever, that the child would regain consciousness, and that Djinn would vanish before his eyes, forever.

  At that moment, Simon became aware of a significant peculiarity in the decor, to which, very strangely, he had not yet paid any attention: the curtains of the room were drawn. Made of some heavy, dark-red fabric, probably quite old (worn threadbare along the folds), they completely masked the window-panes that must have opened onto the street. Why were they kept drawn that way, in broad daylight?

  But Simon reflected then on that idea of broad “daylight.” What time could it be? Stirred by a sudden anxiety, he ran to the windows, which emitted no light at all, neither through the fabric or along the sides. He hastily raised a fold of the curtain.

  Outside, it was pitch black. For how long had it been? The alley was steeped in total darkness, under a starless and moonless sky. Not the slightest light-electric or otherwise—in the windows of the houses, themselves almost invisible. A single old-fashioned streetlight, fairly distant, way off to the right, gave off a faint bluish light in a radius barely a few feet wide.

  Simon let the curtain fall back. Would night have fallen that fast? Or else was time flowing “here” according to other laws? Simon looked at his wrist-watch. He wasn’t even surprised to see that it had stopped. The hands showed exactly twelve o’clock. That was noon as well as midnight.

  On the wall, between the two windows, hung a photographic portrait under glass, framed in black wood, with a sprig of boxwood protruding from the back. Simon looked at it more closely. But the light that came from the candelabra was not enough for him to make out the features of the person, a man in some military uniform, it seemed.

  A sudden desire to see the face better seized Simon, for whom the image was suddenly taking on an inexplicable significance. He returned quickly to the bed, grabbed one of the candlesticks, and returned to the portrait, which he lighted as best he could with the flickering light of the candles. . . .

  He could almost have bet on it: it was his own photograph. No mistake was possible. The face was perfectly recognizable, although older perhaps by two or three years, or barely more than that, which brought to it an expression of seriousness and maturity.

  This left Simon petrified. Holding at arm’s length the heavy bronze candelabrum, he could not take his eyes off his double, who smiled imperceptibly at him, a smile both fraternal and mocking.

  He wore, in that unknown p
hoto, the uniform of the navy and the braid of a chief petty officer. But the costume was not exactly like that worn in the French forces, not at that time, in any case. Simon, furthermore, had never been either a sailor or a soldier. The print was of a sepia tint a little washed out. The paper seemed yellowed by time, marked by small gray and brownish stains.

  In the lower margin, two short, handwritten lines slanted across the blank space. Simon immediately recognized his own handwriting, slanted backwards like that of left-handed people. He read in a low voice: “For Marie and Jean, their loving Papa.”

  Simon Lecoeur turned around. Without his hearing her, Djinn had moved closer to him; and she was gazing upon him with an almost tender, playful pout:

  “You see,” she said, “that’s a photo of you taken a few years from now.”

  “Then it also belongs to Jean’s abnormal memory, and to the future?”

  “Of course, as does everything else here.”

  “Except you?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Because Jean mixes up times and tenses. That’s what confuses things and makes them hard to understand.”

  “You were saying just now that I would come here a few days hence. Why? What will 1 come here for?”

  “You will bring back an injured little boy in your arms, obviously, a little boy who must, besides, be your son.”

  “Jean is my son?”

  “He ‘will be’ your son, as proved by the dedication on this photograph. And you will also have a little daughter, who will be called Marie.”

  “Can’t you see that’s impossible! I cannot, next week, have an eight-year-old child who is not born today, and whom you would have known, yourself, more than two years ago!”

  “You really reason like a Frenchman, positivist and Cartesian. . . . In any case, I said that you would come here in a few days, ‘for the first time,’ but you will come back many times after that. You will probably even live in this house with your wife and your children. Why, otherwise, would your photo hang on this wall?”