Repetition

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Her last sentence was not spoken in the same casual tone that the girl had been parading from the beginning of their conversation. These last words seemed to be whistled through clenched teeth, while a disturbing glow appeared in her green eyes. And it’s only now I notice what the child is wearing today: a white orderly coat, buttoned very tight at the waist and short enough to permit a fine view of her impeccably suntanned legs, from the upper thighs to the loose socks. Since she doesn’t fail to notice the direction of my glances, Gigi soon recovers her smiling composure, half-affectionate, half-provocative, in order to explain the strange way she’s dressed with preposterous arguments: “Nurse’s wear is compulsory here, to circulate freely through the clinical services.… Do you like it? (She twirls around with a little twist of her hips.) Mind you, this number’s also very hot with nothing on underneath, in certain clubs for military R and R. Just like the little beggar girl, the Christian slave, the Oriental odalisque, or the young ballerina in her tutu. Besides, even in this hospital, in the psycho wards, there’s a section of affective parthenotherapy: mental health through traffic with prepubescent girls.…”

  She’s lying, obviously, with her habitual effrontery. I change the subject: “And Pierre Garin in all this—what’s he up to?”

  “Left without any forwarding address. He did in too many folks at once. The Mahlers must have put him out of harm’s way. You can count on them: loyalty, devotion, exactitude … service and packing included.”

  “Walther’s afraid of them now?”

  “Walther brags a lot, but he’s actually afraid of everything. He’s afraid of Pierre Garin, he’s afraid of the two Mahlers—Franz-Josef, as they’re called—he’s afraid of Commissioner Lorentz, he’s afraid of Sir Ralph, he’s afraid of Io, he’s afraid of his shadow. … I think he’s even afraid of me.”

  “Just what are the connections between you two?”

  “Very simple: he’s my half-brother, as you know.… But he claims to be my natural father.… And he’s my pimp into the bargain.… And I hate him! I hate him! I hate him! …”

  The sudden vehemence of her remarks is paradoxically accompanied by a few dance steps to the rhythm of the last three words, which she repeats with seductive and silly grimaces as she comes close enough to bestow a tiny kiss on my forehead: “Good night, Monsieur von B; don’t forget your new name: Marco Faou-Bé—that’s the German way of saying it. Be good now and just relax. They’re going to take out all those deepwater divers’ tubes—you don’t need them any more.”

  She’s already halfway to the door when she turns around with a swift pirouette that makes her supple blond locks flutter around her head, and she adds: “Oh! I was forgetting the main thing. I came to tell you you’re going to have a visitor, Commissioner Hendrik Lorentz wants to ask you a few more questions. Be nice to him. He’s fussy, but he’s polite, and he can be useful to you later. Me, I’m only here as a scout, to tell him if you were in a condition to talk to him. Make an effort to remember accurately the things he asks. If you’re tempted to invent some detail, or even a whole sequence, avoid contradictions that are too obvious. And above all, no mistakes in grammar: Hendrichou corrects my French solecisms as much as he does the German ones! … All right, I can’t stay another moment: I have friends to visit in another service.”

  This flood of words leaves me rather bewildered. But as soon as she’s out the door, even before it has closed behind her, another nurse (who may have been waiting in the corridor) replaces her, much more plausible from every point of view: traditional hospital coat descending almost below the calf, collar buttoned up to the neck, coif covering her hair, gestures sharp and precise and reduced to essentials, chilly professional smile.… Having checked the level of a colorless liquid, a manometer needle, the proper position of the sling supporting my left arm, she removes most of my umbilical cords and gives me an intravenous injection. It all takes no more than three minutes.

  Bursting in the second after this efficient hospital worker’s departure, Lorentz excuses himself for having to disturb me once again, sits down at my bedside on a white-lacquered chair, and asks me straight off when I last saw Pierre Garin. I reflect a long while (my brain, like everything else, remains rather numb) before answering him at last, not without several hesitations and scruples: “It was when I woke up in room number three, in the Hôtel des Alliés.”

  “What day? What time was it?”

  “Yesterday, probably. It’s hard for me to be absolutely sure. … I had come in quite exhausted from the long night spent with Joëlle Kast. The various potions and drugs she had made me drink, in addition to her constantly renewed amorous assaults, left me, by early morning, in a strange state, with a need for sleep bordering on lethargy. I don’t know how long I might have slept, especially since I was abruptly wakened out of my slumbers several times: by a big plane flying too low; by another client who had come in the wrong door; by Pierre Garin, though he had nothing special to tell me; by sweet Maria bringing me an untimely breakfast; by the more affable of the Mahler brothers, who was worried about my excessive fatigue.… As a matter of fact, in Pierre Garin’s case, this must have happened the day before yesterday.… He’s apparently vanished?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t know. Gigi probably.”

  “That would surprise me! In any case he’s turned up today, floating in the canal. They fished out his body against a piling of the old drawbridge, at the entrance to the deadend arm of the canal your window looks out on. Death occurred several hours ago, and it can’t have been an accidental drowning. His back has deep club wounds, delivered before his fall over the bridge parapet.”

  “And you think Mademoiselle Kast knows about it?”

  “I do more than think: she’s the one who told us about the presence of a body floating under the surface, just in front of her house.… I’m sorry for your personal calm, but now you’re under new suspicions—you’re the last one to see him alive.”

  “I didn’t leave my room, where I fell back to sleep like a log immediately after he left.”

  “At least that’s what you claim.”

  “Yes! Categorically!”

  “A strange conviction for someone whose memory is so confused he doesn’t even remember the exact day.…”

  “And as for your earlier suspicions regarding me, haven’t the Mahler brothers testified in support of my story? We now have proof that Walther von Brücke is a soulless assassin. Everything points to him, psychically speaking, as his father’s murderer, and perhaps the unfortunate Pierre Garin’s as well, last night.”

  “My dear Monsieur von B., you’re going a little too fast! Franz-Josef made no comment concerning the Oberführer’s execution. So nothing has come up to invalidate the charges lodged against you in this matter. Besides, we can hardly forget that you were the author of an attempted sexual crime against the person of Violetta, one of the cute young whores working at the Sphinx and lodging in Madame Kast’s vast establishment.”

  “What attempt was that ? Where? When? I’ve never even met this woman!”

  “Yes you have: twice at least, and specifically at Joëlle Kast’s. The first time in the main-floor salon where, by your request, the mistress of the house introduced you to several attractive living dolls in an advanced state of undress. And a second time the following night (that is, the night of the seventeenth to eighteenth) when you attacked the girl (no doubt chosen the night before) at a turn of the upstairs gallery giving access to the private rooms or those at the disposal of gentlemen who happen to require them on the spot. It must have been about one-thirty in the morning. You seemed drunk or drugged, she said, and looked like a crazy man. You demanded a key, a well-known sexual symbol, while you brandished yet another in a threatening hand: that crystal blade which therefore figures among the objects produced in evidence for your case. After viciously attacking the body of your victim, you fled, taking with you as a souvenir one of her slippers, moreover stained with blo
od. When you passed through the little garden gate, Colonel Ralph Johnson, who happened to pass you, observed your distraught manner. Fifteen minutes later, you were at Viktoria Park. Violetta as well as the American officer have supplied a description—of your face and of your heavy fur lined cloak—which leaves not the slightest doubt as to the aggressor’s identity.”

  “You know very well, Commissioner, that Walther von Brücke resembles me very closely, and that he could with no difficulty at all have borrowed my jacket while I was involved with the enchantress Io.”

  “Don’t make too much of that absolute resemblance which characterizes real twins. It will turn against you the parricide’s motives which you impute to the man whose brother you would be, reinforced in your case by certain incestuous relations with a stepmother who lavishes her favors upon you.… And furthermore, why should the prudent Walther have so hideously slashed the precious jewel of an amiable person who was prostituting herself with such talent in the heart of his own establishment?”

  “Aren’t corporal punishments common cash in the profession?”

  “I know your habits, my dear sir, and our police, indeed, are extremely interested in the exactions committed upon prostitutes’ bodies, especially when they are those of minors. But what you say would not have taken place so furtively in a corridor, when several torture chambers, Ottoman-style and gothic, are available for this type of ceremony, and consequently completely furnished, in the villa’s underground premises. Moreover, although the sexual cruelties endured there by the young inmates are frequently long and intense, it is always with their explicit consent, in exchange for considerable remunerations listed in the regulations codex. Let’s say straight off that the pretext of an obligatory punishment for some fault, whether or not preceded by a parody-interrogation and the condemnation of the so-called guilty parties, is merely an agreeable alibi which many gentlemen require as a certain spice giving a particular savor to their favorite pleasure. Lastly, the erotic torments then visited upon the captive obliged, if need be, to endure several days chained in her dungeon, according to the desires of the rich amateur who himself usually performs the series of humiliations and cruelties listed in detail in the sentence (cigar burns in intimate locations, stinging lashes on tender flesh with various whips or rods, steel needles slowly forced into sensitive points, fiery tampons of ether or alcohol in genital orifices, etc.) must never leave lasting scars or the slightest infirmity.

  “In the provident Io’s establishment, for instance, the good Doctor Juan is there to guarantee the harmlessness of exceptional fantasies involving the greatest risks. As a matter of fact, our special brigade intervenes only on very rare occasions, serious madams knowing that any overly manifest abuse would involve the immediate closing of their establishment. Once, during the blockade, we had to interrupt the commerce of three Yugoslavs who tortured naïve girls and helpless young women until they blindly signed a contract permitting the dishonest tormentors to make them suffer even more cruelly, but quite legally, selling at high prices their lovely bodies exposed on terrifying machines which gradually distended them, twisting them backwards and doubtless dislocating their joints, their delicious terror at the prospect of a dreadful fate, their wild supplications, their charming promises, their voluptuous kisses, their futile tears, and soon their barbarous penetration by phalluses bristling with needles, their screams of pain under the grip of red-hot pincers, their blood jutting up in vermilion spouts, the gradual tearing away of their delicate feminine charms, finally the long spasms and convulsive shudders which spread in successive waves over their entire martyred bodies, followed, always too soon, alas, by their last sighs. The best pieces of their anatomy were subsequently devoured, under the label “Brochettes de Biche Sauvage” in specialized restaurants of the Tiergarten.

  “Be reassured, my friend, such fraudulent transactions did not last long, for we pursue our métier with vigilance, although with understanding, eros being by nature the privileged domain of frustration, of criminal hallucination, and of excess. It must be admitted that once the disturbing victim is offered to his mercy on some cross or scaffold in a convenient and uncomfortable posture by means of carefully fastened cords, chains, leather bonds, and bracelets carefully adjusted to facilitate the many tortures planned, as well as the ultimate violations, the aesthete, intoxicated by the excitation of the sacrifice, may have some difficulty confining his amorous passion within the limits allowed, and still more if the seductive captive convincingly performs the comedy of abandonment, of martyrdom, and of ecstasy. Ultimately, if the condemnable excesses remain infrequent in spite of everything, it is because true connoisseurs especially appreciate those complaisant little victims who apply themselves to writhing with some grace in their bonds and moaning in a pathetic fashion under the tormentor’s instruments, with quivering loins, breasts palpitating with swifter exhalations, then head and neck suddenly thrown back in a delectable appeal for immolation, while the swollen lips part wider in a harmonious gasp and the wide eyes spin in a ravishing swoon.… Our Violetta, whom you half disemboweled, was one of our most celebrated performers. Men came great distances to see her body distended in a dream of shapely contours, a trickle of blood flow over her pearly flesh, her angelic countenance flinch and collapse. She worked with such ardor that with a little skill a man could make her come at some length between two paroxysms of a suffering which could scarcely be faked.”

  Can this reasonable-looking man be completely mad? Or is he merely setting a trap for me? In agonizing doubt, and in the attempt to find out more, I cautiously venture into his terrain, evidently jeopardized by the adjectives of a repertoire all too familiar, even to nonspecialists.

  “I am being accused, then, of maliciously spoiling one of your prettiest toys?”

  “If you like … But to tell the truth, we have many others. And we need not worry about their replacement, given the abundance of candidates. Your dear Gigi, for instance, despite her extreme youth and an evident lack of experience, which moreover has a charm of its own, already shows in this rather special realm an astonishing and precocious vocation. Unfortunately she has a difficult character—difficult, moody, unpredictable. She would have to submit to a certain amount of discipline in one of our schools for slaves of the bed; but she rejects any such thing with a laugh. The technical and affective training of apprentice hetairas is nonetheless an essential task for our vice squads, if we want to rehabilitate their profession.”

  Our commissioner of erotic excesses speaks in a calm and measured tone of voice, convinced though often a bit dreamy, which increasingly seems to distract him from his investigation and to defog him in the mists of his own psyche. Might eros also be the privileged site of eternal reexamination and ineffable repetition, ever ready to rise again? Is it my task to reprimand this functionary implicated in his work in an all-too-personal fashion?

  “If you really think I am a murderer conjoined with a madman incapable of controlling his sadistic impulses, why don’t you go ahead and arrest me without further delay?”

  Lorentz leans back in his chair to gaze at me with astonishment, as if he suddenly were discovering my presence, seeming to emerge from his distraction to come back down to earth, though without abandoning his amiably conversational tone: “My dear Marco, I shouldn’t advise any such thing. Our prisons are old, and dramatically lacking in comfort, especially in winter. Be patient at least until spring.… And then, I wouldn’t want to displease our lovely Io too much—she performs so many services for us.”

  “Do you also take part in her … industry?”

  “Doceo puellas grammaticam,” the commissioner answers with a smile of complicity. “The rule of the double accusative of our studious youth! To begin by teaching them grammar and the use of a pertinent vocabulary seems to me the best method for the training of adolescent girls, particularly if they seek to perform in circles having some cultural concerns.”

  “With the aid of carnal cruelties, in order to pu
nish defective terminologies and faulty constructions?”

  “Of course! The rod played an essential part in Greco-Roman education. But just think: double accusative, double pain, ha-ha! Barbarisms in discourse always go hand in hand with errors in behavior in the culture of pleasure. To the precise rosy stripes of a supple lash it is therefore necessary, in order to prepare the schoolgirls selected for the plastic constraints of the métier they have chosen, to add the piquancy of a deliberately sensual posture against some column supplied with constraining rings and propitious chains, or on the narrow shelf of a scaffold.… Sensuous for the master, of course, but sensual for the schoolgirl!”

  As is frequently the case in a properly understood police institution, Lorentz seems to live in perfect harmony with the more or less reprehensible activities of a sector he jealously supervises. I must further acknowledge that he speaks a much richer French than I had first thought in the café of the Hôtel des Alliés, since he ventures into elaborate linguistic tricks and games, including a Latin quotation. … A new problem occurs to me, this time concerning the service I myself belong or at least once belonged to: “Tell me, Commissioner: Was Pierre Garin, who is apparently closely linked to Madame and Mademoiselle Kast, also a member of this libertine organization?”

  “It appears that Pierre Garin was everywhere, certainly here in our West Berlin, that turntable of all the vices, immoral traffic, and corrupt markets. Isn’t it precisely this which has doomed our friend? He betrayed too many people at once. In this regard, I can tell you a curious story, still unexplained.… We’ve already possessed, for two days now, a first corpse of Pierre Garin, whereas he was paying you a visit in perfect health during the afternoon. Moreover we realized soon enough that the disfigured body, discovered in a pool of stagnant water at the lowest point of the long subterranean tunnel which, passing under the stagnant arm of the canal, allows one to emerge from the villa Kast on the opposite bank, was not really that of your unfortunate colleague, although there has been found in his inside jacket pocket a French passport made out to one Gary P. Sterne, born in Wichita, Kansas, which is the most current of his many pseudonymous identities. The only hypothesis still plausible, and certainly the most rational, would be that he was trying to disappear. Doubtless regarding himself in danger, he imagined that the best means of escaping the assassins who pursued him for some motive or other was to pass himself off as already dead. Thirty to forty hours later, someone stabbed him from behind before letting his body fall into the canal, still in the immediate environs of your hotel.”