Repetition

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  But at that very moment, a violent sound of broken glass explodes to my left, coming from the ground-glass partition separating us from the next room.

  * * *

  HR, still lost in his contemplation of the enigmatic mural which substitutes for a window in the children’s room where he has slept, particularly fascinated by that life-size adolescent girl who knocks at the windowpane (also in trompe l’oeil) to ask for help, so present—not only by her outstretched hand, but especially by her angelic face, rosy with emotion; her wide green eyes, wider still with the excitement of the adventure; her mouth, with its fleshy lips just parted and on the point of uttering a long cry of distress—and so near that she seems to have already entered the room, then gives a start in hearing behind him the crystalline sound of breaking glass.

  He quickly turns toward the opposite wall. In the left corner of the room, Gigi stands in the open doorway, still dressed in her schoolgirl outfit with its white lace collar, looking down at her feet, where the sparkling debris resembles the remains of a champagne glass broken into hundreds of scattered fragments. The largest of these—and the most recognizable—is connected to the stem and part of the foot, no longer supporting anything more than a crystal sliver sharp as a little dagger. The girl, who is carrying a folded cloak or cape over one arm, assumes a distressed expression, her lips parted in confusion, her eyelids lowered toward the sudden chaos on the floor. She says: “I was bringing you a glass of bubbly. … It fell out of my hands, I don’t know how it happened. …” Then raising her eyes, she immediately recovers her tone of assurance: “But what have you been doing here for an hour, still in your pajamas and standing in front of that silly picture? I’ve had time to drink a glass with some friends who are downstairs with my mother, and to finish my preparations for the night’s work. … Now I have to leave or I’ll be late.…”

  “The place where you work, is that a sort of dive?”

  “See if you can find a better one in Berlin, among the universal ruins left by the disaster! As our proverb says: whores and crooks always arrive sooner than priests! It’s useless to hide your face.… And dangerous!”

  “The customers are … only Allied soldiers?”

  “That depends on the day. There are all kinds of people besides the Allies: third-rate spies, pimps, psychoanalysts, avant-garde architects, war criminals, shady businessmen with their lawyers. Io claims you can find everyone you need to start the world over.”

  “And what’s the name of this cour des miracles?”

  “You can find as many like it as you want in the whole sector north of Schönberg, from Kreuzberg to the Zoo. The one where I work is called Die Sphinx, which means la sphinge, since the word is exclusively feminine in German.”

  “You speak German?”

  “German, English, Italian …”

  “Which is your favorite?”

  A blond lock of hair falling over her mouth, Gigi is content, for an answer, to stick out the pink tip of her tongue and to catch the stray lock between her fleshy lips. Her eyes glisten strangely under the effect of skillful makeup, or else of some drug? What sort of wine had she been drinking just now? Before leaving, she utters a few more rapid sentences: “The old lady who’s coming up with your dinner will clean up the pieces. If you don’t know already, the toilets are down the hall: to the right and then left. You can’t leave the house: you’re still too weak. Besides, the door down to the lower floor is locked.”

  Funny kind of clinic, HR thinks, wondering if he really wants to leave this disturbing house where he seems to be a prisoner. What has happened to his clothes? He opens the door of the big mirrored armoire. In the closet half, there is a man’s suit on a hanger, but it’s clearly not his. Not giving it another thought, he returns to the war mural and to his own image as a soldier, or at least to the image of a man who resembles him despite the bloody bandage masking his eyes, and to that Central European version of Gigi leading him by the hand. It is only then that he notices a detail of the trompe l’oeil that had escaped him: the pane which the helpful little girl is touching shows a star-shaped crack, centered at the very place where her little fist has just knocked. The sinuous lines that spread from it, in the supposed thickness of the glass, glisten in long ribbons of light like the impalpable metal-plated chaff released by the attacking airplanes so that it will be impossible to locate them by radar.

  Fourth Day

  In Room 3 in the Hôtel des Alliés, HR was rudely awakened by the untimely roar of an American four-engine plane, probably the freight version of the B17 just taking off from the nearby Tempelhof airport. Flights today are of course less numerous than during the airlift, but they remain quite present. Between the double curtains—still in their daytime position, pushed toward the sides—the entire window overlooking the stagnant canal vibrates so alarmingly as the plane passes overhead, at a lower altitude than usual, that every pane seems doomed to explode, the sound of shattered glass falling in fragments onto the floor mingling with the noise of the plane as it gains altitude and disappears. It is broad daylight. The traveler sits on the edge of the bed, happy to have escaped this further incident. His mind is so confused that he is not quite sure where he is.

  Standing up with a sort of persistent malaise throughout his entire body, as well as in his cerebral functioning, he sees that his door (facing the window) is wide open. In the doorway stand two motionless persons: the attractive Maria, carrying a heavily laden tray, and, behind her but towering over her, one of the Mahler brothers, probably Franz, judging by the unpleasant voice announcing in a tone of aggressive reproach: “It’s the breakfast you ordered for this time, Monsieur Wall.” The man, whose stature seems even more inordinate than in the lobby downstairs, immediately vanishes into the shadowy depths of the hallway, where he is obliged to stoop, while the slender waitress, parading her prettiest smile, sets the tray down on a small table near the window which the traveler had not noticed when he took possession of the premises (yesterday? the day before?) and which must also serve as a desk, for before arranging the plates, cup, bread basket, etc., the young woman had moved aside a pile of white sheets (business size, though without heading), as well as a fountain pen apparently awaiting its writer.

  HR, in any case, is now certain of one thing: he has recognized his hotel room, and it is here that he has spent the end of a disturbing night. However, though he is conscious of coming in very late, he does not recall having asked to be awakened at any particular time, and he has now omitted having this information repeated more specifically by the disagreeable innkeeper, which might thereby compensate for the lack of a watch in working order. It seems that the notion of time, exact or even approximate, has lost all importance in his eyes, perhaps because his special mission is now suspended, or else merely since he has been lost in contemplation of the war picture decorating the children’s room, in the house belonging to the maternal and disturbing Io. Starting, as a matter of fact, from the sort of mental drift produced by that window-opening, walled up with a trompe l’oeil mural, heavy with its missing signification, the preceding night’s chain of events leaves a disagreeable impression of incoherence, at once causal and chronological, a succession of episodes which seem to have no other connection than contiguity (which makes it impossible to assign them a definitive place), some of which are tinged with a comforting sensual sweetness, while others rather suggest nightmares, if not an acute hallucinatory fever.

  Maria having finished serving the morning meal, HR, who keeps hearing the sentence uttered by the nastier Mahler, instead of demanding an elucidation of the ambiguous “for this time,” asks the waitress as she is on the point of leaving, in an elementary but explicit German, about the origin of this name “Wall” that people call him by. Maria gives him a surprised glance and finally says, “Ein freundliches Diminutiv, Herr Walther!” an expression which plunges the traveler into a new perplexity. So it would not be the patronymic Wallon which has thus been thus shortened “in a friendly way,
” but the given name Walther, which has never been his and which figures on no document, authentic or false.

  Once the young soubrette has left, making a nice little bow before closing the door behind her, HR, at loose ends, nibbles some of the various rolls and biscuits and even samples the tasteless cheese. He is distracted. After pushing aside these inopportune and unwanted foodstuffs, he replaces the blank sheets of paper in the center of the table, in front of his chair. And, principally concerned with putting a little order—if such a thing is still possible—in the discontinuous, shifting, evasive series of nocturnal vicissitudes before they dissolve into a fog of fictive reminiscences, of specious forgetting, or of aleatory erasure, even of a total dislocation, the traveler without further delay resumes writing his report, the control of which, he fears, is increasingly likely to escape him:

  After Gigi’s departure for her dubious “job,” I went over to the doorway to pick up that crystal dagger formed out of the broken champagne glass. I considered it closely for a long moment, from several angles. At once fragile and cruel, it might eventually serve as a defensive weapon, or rather as a threat, if I wanted—for instance, to force some guard (of either sex) to hand over the keys of my prison. For safekeeping I put the dangerous object on a shelf in the armoire, where it stood on its intact base beside the delicate dance slipper covered with sparkling blue sequins, a remote reflection of the deep water at the foot of the cliffs in the Baltic Sea.

  Then, after a lapse of time difficult to specify, the chaperone in black arrived, carrying on a little tray something that resembled an American army K ration: a cold chicken leg, a raw tomato cut into quarters (shiny, quite regular, of a fine chemical red), and a translucent plastic goblet containing a brownish drink which might be a CocaCola gone flat. The old lady did not utter a word as she came into the room to set her offering down on my mattress. As she left, still without a word, she noticed the scattered pieces of glass on the floor, which she merely, after darting me an accusatory glance, pushed with her foot toward a corner of the room.

  In the absence of any other chair, I ate the tomatoes and the chicken sitting on one of the children’s beds, the one with the pillow embroidered with a big gothic M. Though still afraid of being the victim of some drug or poison, I risked taking a sip of the suspicious liquid, which was not nearly so bad than as Coca-Cola. At the second mouthful, I even enjoyed the taste, which was probably alcoholic, and finished by drinking the entire glass. I had never thought of asking my visitor for the time, for her scarcely amenable aspect did not encourage conversation. A rigid jailer, tall and bony in her black dress, she seemed to have emerged from a classical tragedy staged according to our postwar fashions. I don’t remember if, stretched out on my mattress again, I drifted off to sleep or not.

  A little later Io loomed above me, holding in both hands a white cup and saucer which she was being very careful not to spill—in other words, the repetition of a previous sequence already reported. But this time her black hair spread in shiny waves over her shoulders, and her milky flesh appeared at many points through the gauze and lace of a transparent nightgown suitable for a honeymoon, under which I could discern no other garment and which fell straight from her shoulders to her bare feet. Her arms were bare too, round and firm, their satin skin almost immaterial. The smooth armpits must have been shaved. The pubic bush formed an equilateral triangle, small but distinct, and very dark under the shifting folds of the gown.

  “I’ve brought you a cup of lime-blossom tea,” she murmured timidly, as if she were afraid of waking me, though my eyes were wide open, looking up at her as she loomed above me. “It’s indispensable at night if you want to sleep without having bad dreams.” I immediately thought, of course, of the evening kiss of the vampire mama required by the little boy as a viaticum in order to be able to fall asleep. If my improvised couch had had sheets, she would doubtless have tucked me in before kissing me one last time.

  Yet the next image shows her in the same costume and still leaning over me, but kneeling astride me now, her thighs far apart, my cock erect inside her sex, which she moves gently from side to side in slow oscillations, the swaying gestures suddenly becoming more violent, the way the sea caresses the cliffs. … Of course, I was not indifferent to the care she was taking with her lovemaking; nonetheless I felt that I was in an inexplicable state of confusion: while feeling intense physical pleasure, I really did not feel I was concerned by what was happening. Whereas in such circumstances I usually take the initiative without paying too much attention to my partner, tonight I was abandoning myself to a precisely contrary situation. I had the impression of being ravished, yet I didn’t find this disagreeable—quite the opposite, only perhaps a little absurd. Lying on my back, my arms inert, I could have come very intensely while remaining, so to speak, absent from myself. I was like a half-sleeping baby whom his mother undresses, lathers, carefully bathes, rinses, rubs dry, powders with talcum which she applies with a downy pink puff, while murmuring sweetly and with a certain authority a reassuring melody whose meaning I don’t even try to follow.… Upon reflection all this continues to seem absolutely contrary to what I regard as my nature, especially since this maternal lover is much younger than I: she is thirty-two and I am forty-six! What kind of drug—or love potion—was in that fake Coca-Cola of mine?

  At another moment (was this before the preceding one? or, on the contrary, just after it?) it is a doctor who is leaning over my docile body. I had been laid flat on my back (from my head to my dangling knees) for an auscultation on one of the two children’s beds. The physician was sitting beside me on a kitchen chair (where had it come from?), and it seemed to me I had already seen this man before. His few words even suggested, moreover, that this was not the first visit he had paid me. He had Lenin’s goatee and baldness, and slitty eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He was taking measurements with various instruments, concerning the heart in particular, and noting his observations on a pad. I realized that it was just as likely that I had never seen him before: perhaps he merely resembled the photograph of a famous spy or war criminal published several times in recent French newspapers. As he left, he said in a tone of unquestionable competence that an analysis would be necessary, but without specifying an analysis of what.

  And now it’s Io’s face that returns. Although this final flash seems to be separate, it must belong to the same lascivious scene: the young woman’s body is still swathed in vaporous materials, and she is still straddling me in the same manner. But her loins are arched, her upper body is vertical, even arched backward momentarily. Her raised arms thrash as if she were swimming desperately to escape the flood of mousseline and lace submerging her. Her mouth opens to gasp the air, which is growing rare in this liquid element. Her hair spreads around her face like the rays of a black sun. A long raucous cry dies gradually in her throat.…

  And now I am alone once more, but I have left the children’s room. I am wandering in the hallways looking for the toilet, which I must have already visited at least twice. It seems that the long, nearly dark hallways, with their sudden bifurcations, right-angle turns, and dead ends, have become infinitely more numerous, more complex, more bewildering. I begin to suspect that this situation is not compatible with the external dimensions of the house on the canal. Have I been transported somewhere else without knowing it? I am no longer wearing pajamas: I have hurriedly pulled on some underwear which was in the big armoire, then a white shirt, a sweater, and finally a man’s suit that was on a hanger in there. It is a heavy wool suit, comfortable and just my size, as if made to my measurements. None of these things belongs to me, but everything seems put here for my use. I’ve also taken a white handkerchief on which the letter W was embroidered in one corner, and argyle socks which also seemed meant for me.

  After many detours, doublings back, and repetitions, I think I finally recognize what I seem to have a very exact memory of: a good-size room transformed into a bathroom, with a sink, toilets, and a huge enameled ca
st-iron tub on four lion’s feet. The door, which I recall despite the vague light from the hallway being particularly dim right here, opens easily enough; but once pushed wide open it seems to lead into a tiny dark closet of some sort. I grope for the light switch, which in principle should be on the inside wall, to the left. Yet my hand encounters nothing at all like an electric switch or porcelain button next to the jamb. As I advance, in some confusion, over the threshold and my eyes gradually get used to the darkness, I realize that this is no bathroom at all, small or large, nor even any other kind of room: I am at the top of a narrow spiral staircase with stone steps, more like a secret passage than an ordinary service staircase. A faint glow from below provides some light—at a distance I cannot estimate—on the last visible steps of a steep, very dark, and rather alarming descent.