Recollections of the Golden Triangle

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Having discovered the ladies’ lavatory, more or less by chance, she tries to shut herself in one of the cubicles, but the lock does not work and she has to devise an uncomfortable stratagem in order somehow or other to block the heavy door with the judas in it . . . or rather with no judas . . . She becomes aware at this point that she must have forgotten, while dressing, to put on any panties, her routine no doubt disturbed by the particular care she was today devoting to her preparations: make-up, perfume, hair-do, etc. When she emerges she is terrified to see that the corridors, lobbies, and staircases are now quite deserted. She starts to run, alone and frail among the mirrors, marble statues, and columns, in order to regain her seat as quickly as possible.

  Her father has taken a whole box for this intimate celebration of his beloved daughter Carolina's seventeenth birthday. She re-enters the box, rosy-cheeked, but no smile of welcome crosses the stern face: probably he wishes to punish her for being late. With the same gesture as he uses to make his dogs lie down he motions her towards the red-velvet seats, and she is surprised by the way in which they are arranged, which has changed in her absence: the two armless chairs in the front row on which they sat side by side for the preceding acts have been turned round, in other words they now have their short backs to the arm-rest at the front of the box.

  In his habitually overbearing manner her father announces that this will give her a better view of the performance, with one knee on each seat. But the chairs have been placed unnecessarily far apart, and Caroline is about to protest when all at once the lights go out. She obeys in silence rather than start an argument, which she would find distressing and which might attract the attention of the neighbouring boxes, and is consequently obliged to spread her knees quite wide beneath the very full, flounced skirt of her long dress, having first lifted this up at the front in order at all events to avoid creasing the material. And she rests her two folded forearms on the stuffing with its covering of rough velvet lining the top of the balustrade. She has a better view of the stage as a whole, obviously, but she considers the position offensive and fit only for a little girl.

  Her father has placed himself right behind her, standing between the two chairs; in fact this is probably the reason why he did not put them closer together: the present arrangement allows him to move right up against her and to see comfortably over her head. Her attention held by the new set—the wild rocks, the red-brown heath, and the sea below, smashing against the foot of the cliff—then by the shepherd's modulated lament, later blending with the song of hope and despair sung by Tristan as he lies dying of his wound, caught up immediately in the immemorial wait just beginning, Carolina does not immediately feel too clearly what is happening behind her back. In point of fact her father's right hand has slid beneath the ample skirt right up to the bare hip, subsequently descending towards the pit of the stomach. She attempts to repel this untimely contact as it becomes more explicit, she shifts slightly, makes one of the chairs squeak, half-turns the upper part of her body to murmur: Leave me alone . . .

  But at this people start making urgent cries of hush all around her; since her father, far from removing his hand, has on the contrary pressed himself shamelessly against her buttocks in order to caress her in greater comfort, and since she cannot even close her thighs, she decides to submit without saying anything . . . The wound . . . the ship . . . the waiting . . . The insidious fingers are no longer satisfied with stroking the pale-brown algae's silken tresses and the cleft—already moist, it would seem—between the polished walls of the marble cliffs. They pass back and forth in wave after wave, tirelessly, over the bivalvular lips, now slightly parted. The rising tide enters every little nook and cranny, parts the lacy fronds of a sea anemone, the water plunging and withdrawing in a continuous to-and-fro movement. The wound . . . the wound . . . One tiny, fragile rock resists and stiffens, buffeted by eddies and spume; yet it threatens, if this goes on, to shatter beneath too violent an impact. The ship . . . the ship . . . Carolina hasn't the strength left to hold back any longer from the pleasure that now fills her and at times swamps her. Before letting herself go completely she makes one final effort to open her eyes once more on the world of the living: the opulence of her surroundings, the presence in the half-darkness of a large and glittering audience, fear of the scandal, the impossibility of altering this pose in which she has been placed, all merge with the emotion rising from the orchestra in long, rolling waves that break one after another . . . Isolde's death aria plunges her into an ecstacy that goes on and on . . .

  Abruptly, all the lights have come on again. Carolina, whose head was rolling on her arms as they grasped the rail, raises it as if she has just woken with a start. Is the last act over already, then? Or has she, by some over-obtrusive departure from accepted conduct, just interrupted the performance herself? Did they perhaps hear her moan with the flow beneath the singer's fortissimo passages? Two peremptory hands stand her up without a word. A large pool is spreading over the carpeted floor of the box between the chairs that have their backs to the balustrade. What liquid is this? What has been happening to her? She dare not look at her father. Having ventured a surreptitious glance, however, she cannot understand why tears are running down his cheeks, which it does not even occur to him to wipe away.

  And why have the members of the audience risen to their feet without applauding? She lets herself be swept towards the exit, walking as if in her sleep in the middle of the jostling throng. There is an even more unusual commotion at the foot of the great staircase. Shouts and commands can be heard. Five or six helmeted policemen with rifles slung are trying to keep the inquisitive back from an area they have cleared. Someone says to her father in passing: There's been a murder.

  Back home, she doesn't know why, in her all-white room, she immediately falls asleep with exhaustion. She is walking along a long, bare corridor, devoid of doors or any other openings but which turns abruptly at right angles for no visible reason, either to right or left, a great many times and in a wholly irregular fashion. At the same time, with each change of direction the passage becomes a little narrower. Nevertheless, there's no turning back. Don't ask questions, don't stop, don't look behind. For no visible reason, no reason.

  She recognizes the place now: the convent of the kind sisters. She is fifteen. Her name is Christine. It is the much dreaded day of her first communion. She is in the chapel, kneeling on a red-and-black prie-dieu, flanked by six other girls apparently much younger than herself. All seven are dressed in white veils—tulle, transparent embroidery, and lace—and crowned with spotless flowers such as one sees on Christian martyrs in picture-books. In a row facing the communicants as they wait for the host with hands together and mouths half open are twelve lighted candles, tall and slim and mounted on twelve silver candlesticks. Right at the back stands the altar, dominated by a cross of unpolished ebony measuring nearly three metres, with no figure, destined for the torture of the virgin; this is flanked by two more modest crosses of Baroque inspiration on which have been carved, in contorted poses, the nude figures of Violet and Lauretta, the two little whores crucified by way of a prelude on the same festive occasion.

  Christine no longer knows quite what circumstances led to her completing the ceremony of religious initiation so late. A different and more distressing delay is very much more on her mind: since the end of the last lunar cycle, each passing day has convinced her a little more that that nocturnal visitation from the archangel in her cell, on her wrought-iron bed, cannot have been a dream. Taking her eyes off the cross that stands threateningly over her to lower them towards the region of her body that has just been pierced once again by that disturbing pain, very fierce yet gone in a flash, a lightning pain like a sword-thrust or the deep prick of a needle, Christine discovers to her horror that her white dress is now stained, in the region of the lower belly, by a small vermilion spot that is spreading with alarming rapidity, seeping into and, not encountering the least resistance, soaking through the various laye
rs of light, porous material with which she is clad. Soon the whole central portion of her virginal costume is a single, blood-drenched disc, reminiscent of the Aunt Sally sideshow glimpsed at a fair where the bride's veil went red when a shot found the middle.

  But this is not the smacking of bullets into sheet-metal targets, nor the dull reports of automatic rifles; this sound is that of the drum rolls announcing the execution. Looming up suddenly before the altar, standing there motionless, the priest stares at the condemned girl with eyes slightly narrowed behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, which glitter with innumerable unbearably bright points of light. Christine would like to cry out, but no sound comes from her mouth. A cruel smile now contracts the priest's thin lips. And here, sure enough, are the iron-helmeted Roman soldiers who a moment ago were on guard at the foot of the great staircase, appearing suddenly behind her and seizing her with brutal, obscene gestures; there are three of them, and their big hands clamp down on her neck, her throat, her hips, pulling great fistfuls of the flimsy material in all directions, ripping and tearing away everything that falls beneath their fingers, holding up the bloody rags with hideous laughs and incomprehensible exclamations in a barbarous-sounding language. Before long all she has left to cover her nakedness is her mass of black hair, which has spread in thick, glossy curls over her shoulders and one breast. Mockingly the soldiers replace on her head the wreath that earlier fell to the floor: the white, sacrificial roses. And it takes them no more than a minute to nail the girl to the ebony cross, her arms stretched out sideways, a crude iron horseshoe nail driven into the hollow of each palm, the feet together and punched through in the same way with blows of the hammer, supported by a projecting bit of wood that forms a lip a metre from the ground.

  Facing her now, the six little blond communicants have not moved. Moreover Christine, looking down from her cross, can now see that their hands, ostensibly joined in prayer, are in fact chained together to the arm-rests of their prie-dieus with iron rosaries, of which strong links constitute the beads. Undoubtedly terrified and not knowing what their turn will bring, they carefully hold their poses; and none of them flinches when the priest approaches their docile line and looks them in the eyes one by one as if trying to discover some guilty secret in the depths of pupils enlarged by the drug contained in the incense fumes.

  He has picked up the first candle in passing, leaving the spike of the candlestick exposed, and he leans towards the faces at the risk of setting fire to the veils that form haloes around them, bringing the burning wick as close as possible, so that its slender, dancing redness is reflected in the mirror of each iris. Having inspected the little girls’ twelve blue eyes in this fashion, the priest in his golden chasuble turns back to face the altar, holds the candle out at arm's length towards the tortured victim, whose strength is beginning to ebb, and in order to revive her extinguishes the flame by sinking it, between the tops of her thighs, several centimetres into the medial slit that lies open beneath the black triangle of fleece, now stained with vermilion. The young woman writhes feebly on her cross.

  But the priest resumes the same business with the second candle, first using its light to scan the guilty reactions of the little girls still kneeling in the same position like statues of saints, then dousing the burning wick and its molten wax in the vagina of the crucified girl, who moves her body a little more with each fresh burn, writhing with hips and waist, opening her mouth inordinately wide, and making her swirling hair fling to right and left, since only her flower-wreathed head has been left any scope for movement. As the seventh flame penetrates her, the spasm is so violent that she thinks she is dying . . .

  Christine wakes up, shaken by an extended orgasm, on her iron bed. She has just had another visit from the archangel. All around, the room is bathed in reddish light. The girl nows sees quite clearly that she is not lying in her usual little bed with the wrought-iron spirals but in a heavy coffin of carved mahogany, the lid of which, decorated with a tall, massive cross, stands not far away against one of the marble columns of the mortuary chapel. Her father, wrapped in a black cloak for his solitary vigil, has fallen asleep in his chair beside her. Naked and adorned, Christine is lying on a bed of roses, flanked by twelve candles; only five of these, however, are still alight: the others have probably been blown out by draughts. One of them, near her feet, having toppled from its silver candlestick, has in falling set fire to the artificial flowers of silky gauze amongst which the girl has been laid out, arms slightly away from her sides and legs apart, like a doll in the flesh.

  The flames spread rapidly, by degrees, up the groove between the thighs to the pubis, which catches fire in turn . . . Christine wants to shout, struggle . . . But the erlking, who holds her firmly prisoner in invisible bonds, prevents her from even batting an eyelid and thus spoiling, if only for an instant, the still beauty of her face and her whole body. It is by moving her lips in an imperceptible fashion that, before losing consciousness altogether, she manages to murmur simply, as if in tender reproach: Father, can't you see I'm burning?

  Dr. Morgan abruptly raises his lowered head, the inclination of which was becoming more and more pronounced and which just now collapsed under its own weight; he had fallen asleep with exhaustion, sitting on his white-painted chair in the laboratory cell. He immediately ascertains to his surprise that Angelica von Salomon has disappeared: the skeletal iron bed beside him is empty. He experiences a sharp sense of irritation. They must have come and fetched the prisoner for a fresh interrogation; but Morgan considers they could have notified him at least a few hours in advance rather than interrupt his experimental research during the course of a textual progression by taking advantage of a momentary sleep on his part, perfectly excusable in view of the surfeit of work currently keeping him busy day and night.

  What a shambles! he exclaims out loud, thinking of the prison administration. The inspectors are all half mad, if not murderers. Chief Commissioner Duchamp thinks of nothing but gratifying his sexual whims. As for the guards and intelligence or enforcement officers, on the pretext that they often find themselves obliged to play a double game they now operate in so off-hand a manner that all control over them has become impossible; indeed one increasingly has the impression that they are deliberately working for the terrorist organizations themselves, for the call-girl racket, and for the drug traffickers, their official duties being no more than a convenient cover-up. Finally, certain highly-placed suspects take advantage of their social contacts to escape any kind of serious investigation conducted with appropriate and effective modern methods.

  It seems obvious, for example, that the very young Lady G. ought to have been arrested there and then after the crime that cost her husband, Lord David, his life. In fact it would have been better to begin questioning her seriously prior to the deed; this might then have been, if not avoided, which hardly made sense, at least exploited more intelligently. But Morgan had the utmost difficulty even in managing to secure the imprisonment of two minor figures in the secret sections of headquarters: little Violet d'Eu and her friend Laura B., known as Lauretta, aged fourteen and sixteen respectively, members of Lady Caroline's private household who were employed ostensibly as chambermaids but whose actual duties must have been of a very much more personal nature, judging by the disturbing evidence collected by Temple, a false under-age beggar-girl disguised as an itinerant flower-seller, and disclosed to the chief commissioner just before the booby-trap went off in the main foyer of the Opera House.

  Moreover Morgan is soon going to find himself further confirmed in his suspicions regarding the highly ramified undercurrents of this affair since, no more than a few hours later, he hears from the mouth of the chief commissioner himself that G. Court has been completely destroyed by a violent fire, which will make it impossible now to pursue investigations that were being held in abeyance (on whose orders?) among the considerable mass of files, records, or documents of various sorts collected and placed under seal by the investigating authorities but
left, for the time being, where they were. The fire apparently started, by a curious coincidence, in a room built onto the vast house: the private chapel where the alleged Lord David lay in his sumptuous coffin, this having been closed prematurely because of the appalling state in which the bomb had left the body, which was unrecognizable, blown into scattered fragments so that it was even hard to say whether there was a complete human being there or not, and of what age and which sex. The tall ceremonial candlesticks flanking him were to blame for the accident: a defective candle, deformed by the heat of its own combustion, had apparently overbalanced, collapsed on the artificial flowers of the funeral wreaths, and, in the absence of any surveillance, immediately set light to the red roses made of some synthetic material, celluloid-based and particularly inflammable—sometimes, depending on the circumstances, explosive.

  The timber present in plenty from top to bottom of the building (the furniture, the old-style parquet flooring, the ceilings with no thermal insulation, the panelling, and even the carcasing of the walls) subsequently enabled the fire to spread with incredible speed through every part of the edifice, which for all its stately appearance was constructed entirely in lightweight materials, as was common practice at the time. The firemen, after a long struggle, managed only to inundate with great streams of water a few charred remains forming a paltry heap, as if all that had burned here had been a very small shed. But the most surprising thing is still the total disintegration of the coffin and its contents, so that none of the meticulous searches conducted without delay in the warm ashes, now packed into a crumbly or muddy paste, came up with the least vestige of it, the vaguest trace, in spite of its solid bronze mounts and the thick lead lining to which the funeral directors’ representative drew attention. Everything seems to have volatilized in the furnace.