Repetition

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Without being sure where I am going, I venture down, overcoming my apprehensions, following this uncomfortable staircase, where soon I cannot see even my own feet. Lacking a railing, I guide myself by running my left hand along the cold, rough outer wall of the spiral, which is to say, on the side where the steps are a little wider. My progress is impeded by a fear of falling, for I have to explore each successive step with the toe of my shoe to make sure it is not missing. At one moment, the darkness is so complete that I have the sensation of being totally blind. I nonetheless continue going down, but the dangerous exercise lasts much longer than I thought it would. Luckily a pale glow rising from below now replaces that which had come from above, in the hallway. This new dimly lit zone turns out, unfortunately, to be very limited, and soon I must enter a new turn of the screw without seeing where I am putting my feet. It is hard for me to count the number of turns I have made in this fashion, but I finally realize that this strange stone well which penetrates the brick villa from top to bottom leads only to some cellar or crypt a story underground—in other words, two stories lower than the room I started from.

  When I finally reach the bottom of this spiral, which seemed interminable, lit only by tiny night-lights much too far apart, I am facing the entrance to a gallery that is no longer lit at all. But on the last step, corresponding to the last dim light, is set a portable torch lamp, the military model used by the American occupation troops; and it works perfectly. The range of its narrow beam of light allows me to see a long, straight subterranean corridor, about a meter and a half wide at most, its vaulted stone ceiling giving every evidence of being quite old. The ground slants steeply and soon vanishes under a sheet of stagnant water extending for some fifteen or twenty meters. Yet a plank walkway on the right side is built high enough for me to cross this pond or puddle without wetting my feet.…

  And here, between the last bit of duckboard and the wall, three-quarters submerged in the blackish water, lies the body of a man on his back, his limbs outstretched—undoubtedly dead. Sweeping the corpse with the luminous circle of my torch, I examine him for a moment, scarcely surprised by his macabre presence. Then the ground rises again, and walking faster in order to get away sooner rather than later from this compromising figure, I reach a new spiral stairway, this one lacking any lighting at all and its steps made of perforated cast iron. I climb up, making as little noise as possible. It opens into a rusty metal turret which I immediately realize houses the machinery of the ancient drawbridge. As a precaution, I put out my torch and set it down on the lozenge-paved iron roadway before emerging onto the quay, only slightly differentiated from the darkness by a few antiquated lampposts, apparently operating by gas, yet providing enough light to allow a quick crossing of the irregular paving stones.

  It is distinctly warmer tonight; I have no trouble doing without my fur-lined jacket or any kind of coat. As was to be expected after my long trip though an underground tunnel partly invaded by water, I am now on the far bank of the dead-end canal, facing the comfortable villa, with its many traps, the doll shop, the nest of double agents, the traffic in human flesh, the prison, the clinic, etc. All the windows of the façade are brightly lit, as if there was a big party going on, though I had seen no sign of such a thing when I left the premises. The central window above the entrance door—the one where I glimpsed Gigi for the first time—is wide open. The others, sporting white mousseline inside the panes, their double curtains open, reveal the fleeting shadows of passing guests, of servants bearing big trays, of couples dancing.…

  Rather than take the bridge to return to the Hôtel des Alliés, at the other end of the opposite quay, I decide to continue on this side of the stagnant canal and then to cross at the dead end, where the phantom sailboat is rotting.… Almost immediately, I hear a man’s footsteps on the uneven pavement behind me, heavy yet rapid, characteristic of the low boots worn by the military police. I have no need to turn around to know what this means, and indeed the brief command rings out to proceed no farther—“Halt!” — apparently pronounced by a native German speaker. Turning around without excessive haste, I see advancing toward me the usual pair of American MPs, wearing these two big white letters painted on the front of their helmets and holding their machine guns casually trained in my direction. In several strides matching their size, they come to a stop two yards away from me. The one speaking German asks for my papers and if I possess the necessary pass to circulate after curfew. Without answering, I put my right hand in my inside left jacket pocket, with the naturalness of a man sure of finding the object in question. To my astonishment, my fingers encounter a hard flat object I had not noticed when I got dressed in this borrowed suit, and which turns out to be a Berlin Ausweis, a stiff rectangle with rounded corners.

  Without even glancing at it, I advance a step in order to hand it to the soldier, who inspects it in the intense brilliance of his torch lamp, identical to the one I have just made use of myself; then he shines the blinding light in my face, to compare my features with those on the photograph laminated on the metallic card. I could always tell him that this Ausweis, which is not mine, as I shall immediately agree, must have been handed to me by mistake instead of the right one, without my noticing it at a recent checkpoint where there were a lot of people; and I would claim to have discovered the substitution only at this very moment. However, the officer returns my precious document with a friendly, almost embarrassed smile and a brief apology for his mistake: “Verzeihung, Herr von Brücke!” Upon which, after a rapid, rather shapeless and quite un-German military salute, he turns on his heels, as does his comrade, to return toward the Landwehrkanal, where they will continue their interrupted patrol.

  This time my astonishment is so great that I do not resist the desire to examine this providential identity card in my turn. As soon as the two MPs are out of sight, I hurry on to the next lamppost. In the bluish halo it projects in the immediate vicinity of its cast-iron base, wreathed by stylized ivy, the photograph might in fact represent me quite acceptably. The name of the true owner is: Walther von Brücke, residing at 2 Feldmesserstrasse, in Berlin-Kreuzberg.… Sensing some new trap set by the lovely Io and her acolytes, I return to my hotel in great confusion. I no longer remember who opened the door. I was suddenly feeling so queasy that I took off my clothes right away, washed quite sum marily, went to bed in a kind of oneiric cloud, and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

  Doubtless it was not long afterward that, awakened by a natural need, I went into the bathroom similar to the one I had vainly sought during my nocturnal adventures, of which I then reviewed several brief passages, convinced at first that I had just had a nightmare, a supposition all the more plausible in that I recognized the habitual themes of my recurrent dreams ever since childhood: the undiscoverable toilets during a confusing and complicated search, the descending spiral staircase with missing steps, the underground tunnel invaded by the sea, the river, the sewers … and finally the identity check during which I am mistaken for someone else.…12 But upon returning to my couch and its disordered feather bed, I glimpsed in passing certain material proofs of the quite tangible reality of these reminiscences: the heavy wool suit hanging on the back of my chair, the white shirt (embroidered, like the handkerchief, with a gothic W), the bright red socks with black diamonds in the worst possible taste, the heavy walking shoes. … In an inside pocket of the jacket, I also noted the presence of the German Ausweis.… I was so tired that I immediately fell back to sleep, without waiting for the consolation of a maternal kiss.…

  * * *

  Note 12 – Our amateur psychoanalyst here “forgets,” of course, the three essential themes organizing the series of episodes he has just related in detail: incest, twinship, and blindness.

  * * *

  I had no sooner completed a rapid breakfast, reduced to the minimum by lack of appetite, than Pierre Garin, without knocking, entered my room in his customary offhand manner, determined never to seem surprised by anything at all and a
lways to know more about everything than his interlocutors. After the usual gesture, which resembled an abortive Fascist salute, he immediately began his monologue, as if we had parted only a few hours earlier, and without any special problems: “Maria told me you were awake. So I came up for a minute, though there’s nothing urgent. Only one piece of news: we were fooled. Oberst Dany von Brücke isn’t dead—just a flesh wound in the arm! The gradual collapse of the body under the killer’s bullets—that was all a farce. I should have suspected as much: the best way to escape pursuit, even a possible repetition.… But the others are smarter than we supposed.…”

  “Smarter than we are, you mean?”

  “In a sense, yes … although the comparison …”

  To put a good face on things and not seem too anxious about the message he wanted to give me, I was clearing up the disorder which had accumulated on my improvised desk—I’ve already pointed out the desk’s exiguity, I believe. While listening to him with a seemingly inattentive ear, I piled the remains of my breakfast on the tray, which had not yet been taken away, pushed various small personal objects to the other end of the desk, and above all, put away the scattered sheets of the interrupted manuscript, but without appearing to attach much importance to that either. Pierre Garin, I’m afraid, was not fooled. I knew now that he was not playing the same part as I in our dubious business. It was, in fact, abnormal—to say the least—that this bird of ill omen (“Sterne” often served him as a nom de plume!) failed to make the slightest allusion to his brutal dismissal of my services, nor to the subsequent means used to track me down, nor to the fact that he didn’t ask me a single question about what I might have been doing for the two (or three?) preceding days. In an indifferent tone of voice, as if to say something relating to the investigation, I asked: “Von Brücke had a son, they say.… Does he play a part in your stupendous story?”

  “Ah! So Gigi mentioned Walther? No, he has nothing to do with it. He died on the Eastern front, during the last days.… Watch out for Gigi and what she tells. She makes up nonsense for the fun of misleading people.… That little girl, lovely as she is, has a lie in every bone of her body!”

  As a matter of fact, from now on it would be Pierre Garin himself whom I had to watch out for. But what he obviously didn’t know was that I had happened to discover, during my nocturnal wanderings through the huge house where I had been, in a matter of speaking, interned, three pornographic drawings signed by this Walther von Brücke, in which Gigi herself was unmistakably represented, despite the indecorous postures, and obviously at more or less the age she is now. I didn’t want to mention this in my report, for it hardly struck me as an essential element, except to cast a certain light on this W’s sado-erotic impulses. My colleague Sterne’s recent observations have changed my mind: here is proof that Walther von Brücke did not die in the war, as Gigi knows on her own account, for all she has to say to the contrary, and it is highly unlikely that Pierre Garin is not aware of the situation; what is his reason for repeating the lie, in this regard, concerning the child?

  Yet one narrative difficulty remains, which doubtless counted for something in the deliberate elimination of the whole sequence: the fact that I remain incapable of locating it, if not in space (the room cannot be localized elsewhere than within the labyrinth of second-floor hallways), at least in time. Would it be before or after the doctor’s visit? Had I consumed my frugal repast washed down with a suspicious liquor? Was I still in pajamas? Had I already put on my escape outfit? Or else—who knows?—other garments of which I have no memory whatsoever.

  As for Gigi, she is completely naked in the three drawings, each of which bears a number indicating the order in which they are to be considered and a title. They are executed on gray drawing paper, format forty by sixty centimeters, in black pencil of a relatively hard lead, blurred with a stump to indicate certain shadows. and heightened with a watercolor wash covering very limited surfaces. The workmanship is very fine in the modeling of the flesh and the facial expression. With regard to many details of the body or of the bonds which fetter it, as well as to the perfectly recognizable features of the model, the precision is almost excessive, whereas other parts are left in a sort of blur, as if due to the uneven lighting or on account of the varying amount of attention the perverse artist has paid to each element of his subject.

  In the first image, entitled Penitence, the young victim is shown from the front, kneeling on two little round prickly cushions, her thighs held very wide apart by means of leather loops surrounding the leg at the hollow of the calf, and attached by cords to hooks in the floor. Her back is leaning against a stone column to which her left hand is chained at the wrist, just above her head, its golden locks ruffled in an affecting disorder. With her right hand (the only limb remaining free) Gigi strokes the inside of her vulva, separating its lips with her thumb and ring finger, while her index and middle fingers penetrate deep beneath the fleece of the pubis, abundant mucous secretions agglutinating the short curls there into lovelocks near the opening. The whole pelvic basin twists to one side, causing the right hip to project forward. Some blood of a lovely red-currant shade has flowed under the knees, pierced with several wounds reopened by her slightest movements. The girl’s sensual features express a sort of ecstasy, which might well be a consequence of suffering but actually evokes something more like the voluptuous delight of martyrdom.

  The second drawing is called The Stake, but this does not refer to the traditional pile of fagots on which witches were burned alive. The little victim, once again on her knees but directly on the tiles this time, her thighs virtually spread-eagled by their taut chains, is seen here in a three-quarter view from behind, her bust leaning forward and her arms pulled toward the column, where her hands, tied together at the wrists, are attached to an iron ring at shoulder height. Beneath her buttocks, facing the spectator (the painter, a smitten lover, a lascivious and refined torturer, an art critic …), gaping wide and emphasized by the powerfully arched loins, glows a brazier mounted on a sort of tripod in the form of a candlestick, resembling a perfume brazier, which slowly consumes the soft pubic mound, the inner thighs, and the whole perineum. Her head is lying on one side, tipped back, turning toward us a lovely face agonized by the intolerable progress of the fire that is devouring her, while from her fine parted lips escape long moans of pain, varying in strength and extremely exciting.

  On the back of the sheet several hurriedly scrawled diagonal pencil lines might be the artist’s dédicace to his model, more or less obscene and impassioned words of love, or merely of tenderness with slightly cruel inflections.… But the nervous script, in cursive gothic letters, makes the inscription largely incomprehensible to a foreigner. I decipher a word here and there, without being altogether sure of reading it correctly—for instance, meine, which is merely an acute succession of ten vertical downstrokes, all identical, connected by the faintest oblique upstrokes. The German word, at least if taken out of context, might just as well signify “I have in mind” as “my own,” “the one belonging to me.” This brief text (it contains only three or four sentences) is signed with the simple abbreviated given name “Wal,” with a clearly legible date: “April ’49.” At the bottom of the drawing itself is written, on the contrary, the whole name “Walther von Brücke.”

  In the third image, which bears the symbolic title Redemption, Gigi has been crucified on a rough-hewn wooden gibbet in the shape of the letter T, its base an upside-down V. Her hands, nailed through their palms at the ends of the upper bar, hold her arms almost horizontal, while her legs are parted along the two diverging lines of the lower chevron, at the bottom of which her feet are nailed on slightly jutting supports. Her head, crowned with wild roses, is tilted slightly forward, leaning to one side to reveal an eye moistened by tears and a moaning mouth. The Roman centurion in charge of the proper execution of the sentence is applying himself to tormenting the child’s sex, thrusting the tip of his lance into it, and even more deeply into the tender fl
esh surrounding it. From these many wounds in the belly, the vulva, the groin, and the upper thighs pours a flood of vermilion blood which Joseph of Arimathea has collected in a nearly full champagne glass.

  This same glass is now prominently located on what seems to be a makeup stand in the bedroom of the willing model who has thus posed for the representation of her own torture, beside the portfolio into which I have carefully returned, before closing it, the three sheets of drawing paper. The contents of the glass have been entirely consumed, but the crystal itself remains soiled by traces of the bright red liquid which has dried on the sides and especially in the bottom of its concavity. The special shape of this glass (distinctly shallower than the ones in which sparkling wines are usually served, when champagne flutes are not used) immediately allows me to recognize it as belonging to the same service of Bohemian glass as the object the girl broke on the threshold of my bedroom.13 This bedroom, by which I mean hers, is in extraordinary disorder, and I am not speaking only of the various utensils lying together on the long table along with the creams, greasepaint, and unguents surrounding the tilted mirror. The whole room is strewn with miscellaneous objects, ranging from a top hat to a steamer trunk, from a man’s bicycle to a big bundle of ropes, from an old-fashioned Victrola to a dressmaker’s dummy, from a painter’s easel to a blind man’s white cane … and all this junk is more or less lying about at random, piled up, upside down, knocked over, as if after a battle or the passage of a hurricane. Articles of clothing, intimate garments, unmatched boots or shoes are scattered on the furniture as on the floor, testifying to the careless or violent way in which Gigi treats her possessions. A bloodstained pair of white panties lies on the floor between an imitation-tortoiseshell wide-toothed comb and a large pair of barber’s scissors. What looks like a quite recent bloodstain, still bright red, appears to be from an accidental wound rather than from the girl’s period. Probably without libidinous motives, but by a sort of instinct of conservation, as if it were a question of doing away with the traces of a crime in which I might be implicated, I stuffed the little piece of stained silk into my deepest pocket.