The Erasers

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  And he goes to the first table and sits down, facing away from the drunk.

  “Still polite as ever,” the latter observes.

  “I could still,” someone says, “be walking obliquely to the canal and be walking in a straight line anyway.”

  The manager serves the three men at the bar another round. The other two have resumed their argument; it is the meaning of the word oblique that is in dispute. Each man is trying to prove he is right by shouting louder than the other.

  “Are you going to let me talk?”

  “That’s all you do is talk!”

  “You don’t understand: I said I can go straight ahead while still taking a direction that’s oblique—oblique in relation to the canal.”

  The other man thinks a moment and remarks calmly:

  “You’re going to fall into the canal.”

  “Then you refuse to answer?”

  “Listen, Antoine, you can say whatever you want, I’m not changing what I said: if you walk obliquely, you don’t go straight ahead! Even if it’s in relation to a canal or anything else.”

  The man in the pharmacist’s gray smock and cap considers the argument he has just given an irrefutable one. His adversary shrugs in disgust:

  “I’ve never met anyone so stupid in my life.”

  He turns toward the sailors; but the latter are speaking among themselves, making exclamations in dialect and laughing loudly. Antoine comes over to the table where Wallas is drinking his hot rum; he calls on Wallas as his witness:

  “You heard that, Monsieur? Here’s a supposedly educated man who doesn’t allow that a line can be both straight and oblique.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you allow that?”

  “No, I don’t,” Wallas quickly answers.

  “What do you mean, you don’t? An oblique line is a line…”

  “Yes, of course. I said I don’t allow that it isn’t allowed.”

  “Oh, all right…fine.”

  Antoine does not seem quite satisfied with this position, which he considers too subtle. All the same he shouts to his companion:

  “You hear that, pillpusher?”

  “I don’t hear anything,” the pharmacist answers.

  “This gentleman agrees with me!”

  “That’s not what he said.”

  Antoine grows more and more exasperated.

  “All right, explain to him what ‘oblique’ means, will you?” he asks Wallas.

  “Oblique,” Wallas repeats evasively. “That can mean several things.”

  “That’s my opinion too,” the pharmacist says approvingly.

  “All right,” Antoine cries, at the end of his patience, “a line that’s oblique in relation to another line, that means something, doesn’t it?”

  Wallas tries to formulate a precise answer:

  “It means,” he says, “that they form an angle, an angle between zero and ninety degrees.”

  The pharmacist chuckles.

  “That’s what I said,” he concludes. “If there’s an angle, it isn’t straight.”

  “I never met anyone so stupid in my life,” Antoine says.

  “Well, I know one even better Listen to this…”

  The drunk has stood up from his table to get into the conversation. Since it is difficult for him to stand, he immediately sits down again beside Wallas. He speaks slowly, so as not to get his words confused:

  “Tell me what animal is a parricide in the morning…”

  “That’s all we needed was this goon here,” Antoine objects. “You don’t even know what an oblique line is, I’ll bet….”

  “You look pretty oblique to me,” the drunk says mildly. “I’m the one around here who asks riddles. I have one here just for my old pal…”

  The two adversaries move away toward the bar, seeking new partisans. Wallas turns his back on the drunk, who goes on nevertheless, his voice jubilant and deliberate:

  “What animal is parricide in the morning, incestuous at noon, and blind at night?”

  At the bar the discussion has become a general one, but the five men are all talking at once and Wallas can hear only snatches of their remarks.

  “Well,” the drunk insists, “can’t you guess? It’s not so hard: parricide in the morning, blind at noon.…No…blind in the morning, incestuous at noon, parricide at night. Well? What animal is it?”

  Fortunately the manager comes over to take away the empty glasses.

  “I’ll be keeping the room tonight,” Wallas informs him.

  “And he’ll pay the next round,” the drunk adds.

  But no one pays any attention to this suggestion.

  “Well, are you deaf?” the drunk asks. “Hey! Buddy! Deaf at noon and blind at night?”

  “Let him alone,” the manager says.

  “And limps in the morning,” the drunk concludes with sudden seriousness.

  “I told you to let him alone.”

  “All right, I wasn’t doing anything. I’m asking a riddle.”

  The manager wipes his rag across the table.

  “Let us alone with your riddles.”

  Wallas leaves. More than any specific task to be accomplished, it is the man with the riddles who is chasing him out of the little café.

  He prefers to walk, despite the cold and the night, despite his fatigue. He tries to organize the various elements he has been able to pick up here and there during the course of the day. Passing in front of the garden fence, he glances up at the house, now empty. On the other side of the street, Madame Bax’s window is lit.

  “Hey! Aren’t you waiting for me? Hey! Buddy!”

  It is the drunk who is pursuing him.

  “Hey! You there. Hey!”

  Wallas walks faster.

  “Wait a minute! Hey!”

  The jubilant voice gradually fades.

  “Hey there, don’t be in such a hurry…. Hey! … Not so fast.…Hey! Hey!…Hey!…”

  2

  Eight short fat fingers pass delicately back and forth over each other, the back of the four right fingers against the inside of the four left fingers.

  The left thumb caresses the right thumbnail, gently at first, then pressing harder and harder. The other fingers exchange positions, the back of the four left fingers vigorously rubbing the inside of the four right fingers. They interlace, lock, twist each other; the movement grows faster, more complicated, gradually loses its regularity, soon becomes so confused that nothing more can be distinguished in the swarm of joints and palms.

  “Come in,” Laurent says.

  He rests his hands flat on the desk, fingers spread wide. It is an officer with a letter.

  “Someone slipped this under the door of the concierge’s lodge. It’s marked ‘Urgent’ and ‘Personal.’ ”

  Laurent takes the yellow envelope the man hands him. The address, written in pencil, is scarcely legible: “Personal. Chief Commissioner. Urgent.”

  “The concierge didn’t see who brought this letter?”

  “He couldn’t; he found it under his door. It may have already been there a quarter of a hour, or even more.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  When the officer has left the room, Laurent feels the envelope. It seems to contain a rather stiff card. He holds it up to the electric light, but sees nothing abnormal about it. He decides to open it with his paper knife.

  It is a picture post card showing a little house in a bad imitation Louis XIII style, at the corner of a long, gloomy suburban street and a wide avenue, probably at the edge of a canal. On the back is written, also in pencil, this one phrase: “Meeting tonight at seven-thirty.” In a woman’s handwriting. There is no signature.

  The police receive messages like this every day—anonymous letters, insults, threats, denunciations—most often very involved, usually sent by illiterates or lunatics. The text of this post card is distinguished by its brevity and its precision. The meeting place is not indicated; it must be the street corner shown on the photograph—
at least so one might suppose. Ii Laurent recognized the place, he might send one or two men there at the hour arranged; but it isn’t worth the bother of doing a lot of research to end up—at best—laying hands on some fishing boat that is smuggling in five pounds of snuff.

  It would be better to be sure that this minor infraction would be effectively punished by the inspector who discovered it. The chief commissioner knows that a good deal of minor smuggling occurs with the complicity of the police who merely take a modest share for themselves. It is only for serious misdemeanors that they are required to be completely uncompromising. it the other end of the scale of crimes, one wonders what their behavior might be…if, for instance, a political organization f the type described by Wallas were to appeal to their…luckily, the question does not come up.

  The commissioner picks up his phone and asks for the capital. He wants to have a clear conscience. Only the central services can inform him—if they have had time to perform the autopsy.

  He gets his line soon enough, but he is transferred from office to office several times without managing to get in touch with the proper branch. The head of the department that signed the letter ordering the release of the body told him to speak to the medico-legal service; here, no one seems to know anything. Transferred from one to the other in succession, he finally reaches the prefect’s office, where someone—he doesn’t know precisely who—agrees to listen to his question: “From that distance was the bullet that killed Daniel Dupont fired ?”

  “Just one minute, please, hold on.”

  It is only after a rather long interval, interspersed with various noises, that the answer reaches him:

  “A 7.65 bullet, fired from a distance of about four yards.”

  An answer which proves absolutely nothing, save that the lesson has been well learned.

  Laurent then receives another visit from Wallas.

  The special agent seems to have nothing to say to him. He has come back here as if he no longer knew where to go. He describes the escape of the businessman Marchat, the meeting with Juard, the visit to the former Madame Dupont. The commissioner, as on each occasion he himself has had dealings with the doctor, finds the latter’s conduct rather suspect. As for the divorced wife, it was obvious to everyone that she knew nothing. Wallas describes the strange shopwindow the station saleswoman has made, and to Laurent’s great surprise, take out of his pocket the same post card the officer has just brought in.

  The commissioner goes to his desk and picks up the card sent by the unknown woman. It is the same card. He read Wallas the phrase written on the back.

  3

  The scene takes place in a Pompeian-style city—and, most particularly, in a rectangular forum one end of which is occupied by a temple (or a theater, or something of the same kind the other sides by various smaller monuments divided by wide paved roadways. Wallas has no idea where this image comes from. He is talking—sometimes in the middle of the square-sometimes on stairs, long flights of stairs—to people he can’t distinguish from one another but who were at the start clearly characterized and individual. He himself has a distinct role, probably a major one, perhaps official. The memory suddenly becomes quite piercing; for a fraction of a second, the entire scene assumes an extraordinary density. But what scene? He has just time to hear himself say:

  “And did that happen a long time ago?”

  Immediately everything has vanished, the people, the stair the temple, the rectangular forum and its monuments. He has never seen anything of the kind.

  It is the agreeable face of a dark young woman which appears in its place—the stationery saleswoman from the Rue Victor-Hugo and the echo of her little throaty laugh. Yet her face is serious.

  Wallas and his mother had finally reached the dead end of a anal; in the sunlight, the low houses reflected their old façades i the green water. It was not an aunt they were looking for: it as a male relative, someone he had never really known. He did not see him that day either. It was his father. How could he have forgotten it?

  ***

  Wallas wanders through the city at random. The night is amp and cold. All day long, the sky has remained yellow, low, overcast—promising snow—but it has not snowed, and it is now the November mists that have gathered. Winter is coming early this year.

  The lights at the street corners cast reddish circles just strong enough to keep the pedestrian from losing his way. It takes a good deal of care, crossing the street, not to stumble against the curbstones.

  In the neighborhoods where the shops are more numerous, le stranger is surprised to find so few shopwindows lighted. Probably there is no need to attract customers in order to sell ice and brown soap. There are few notion stores in this province.

  Wallas steps into a crowded, dusty shop that seems intended for the storage of merchandise rather than its retail sale. At the rear, a man in an apron is nailing shut a crate. He stops pounding to try to understand what kind of eraser Wallas wants. He nods several times during the course of the explanation as if he knew what Wallas meant. Then, without saying a word, he walks toward the other side of the shop; he is obliged to shift a large number of objects on his way in order to reach his go; He opens and closes several drawers, one after the other, thin for a minute, climbs up a ladder, begins searching again, wit out any more success.

  He comes back toward his client: he no longer has the item. He still had some not long ago—a lot left over from before the war; they must have sold the last one—unless it’s been put away somewhere else: “There are so many things here that you can never find anything.”

  Wallas dives back into the night.

  Why not go back to the solitary house as well as anywhere else?

  As the chief commissioner pointed out to him, Doctor Juard behavior is not absolutely clear—though it is hard to see what his secret role could be. When he walked through the parlor library, the little doctor glanced at Wallas out of the corner of his eye while pretending not to see him through his heavy glasses: yet he had walked through the room on purpose to have a look at him. And several times during their conversation half an hour later, Wallas was amazed at the strange way which Juard expressed himself: he seemed to be thinking of something else and occasionally even to be talking about something else. “He has a bad conscience,” Laurent declares.

  Perhaps, too, the businessman Marchat is not so crazy as it seems. After all, to go into hiding was the better part of vale It is strange that the doctor’s account does not make the least allusion to Marchat’s presence in the Rue de Corinthe at the time of the wounded man’s arrival; he has always claimed, to the contrary, that he did not need anyone’s help; yet according to the commissioner, Marchat cannot have invented all the details he reports concerning the professor’s demise. If Juard knew, one way or another, that Marchat was to be murdered tonight in his turn, it would certainly be to his advantage to conceal the businessman’s presence in his clinic last evening He does not know that the latter has already mentioned it to the police.

  Then the pneumatic message discovered at the poste restante window actually did concern this case—Wallas was convinced of it from the beginning. It is the summons sent to the murderer for the second crime—today’s—which (according to this hypothesis) should take place in this same city. The conclusions of the inspector whose report Wallas read in Laurent’s office could be correct about this: the existence of two accomplices in the murder of Daniel Dupont—the addressee (André WS) and the person designated by the letter G in the text of the letter. Tonight, the former would work alone. Lastly, Marchat was right to fear an attack long before the fatal hour—as confirmed by the words “all afternoon” also appearing in the pneumatic message.

  There remains the post card mysteriously slipped under the concierge’s door at the police station. It is extremely doubtful that the conspirators would have decided to inform the police of the time and place of their crime. It is part of their program to indicate the authorship of their crimes and to give t
hem all the publicity possible (the Executive Services and the Ministry of the Interior have already received certain messages from the leaders of the organization), but the post card would constitute evidence capable of wrecking their plans—unless they henceforth felt so powerful that they had nothing further to fear from anyone. One would almost be led to suspect the commissioner himself of duplicity—which, from another point of view, is difficult to imagine.

  It would be more reasonable to admit what Laurent, for his part, appears to be quite certain of: a reminder coming from Marchat. The businessman, before leaving the city, would thus have made a final effort to convince the police to have the dead man’s residence watched.

  The suspicious behavior of the little doctor, the businessman’s fears, various allusions contained in the pneumatic message…The deductions that can be made from such evidence furnish little opportunity for certainty. Wallas knows that. He realizes, in particular, the influence on him of the card left at the police station—though this card cannot logically constitute part of the structure. But after all, he has nothing better to do than show up at the rendezvous. Since at present there is no other lead, he will lose nothing in following this one. He has the key to the house in his pocket—the one to the little glass door—that Madame Smite gave him. Marchat has fled, leaving him a clear field: he himself will play the role of the businessman, to see if by some miracle someone will come to murder him. He congratulates himself on having brought his revolver along.

  “It’s true, you never know,” Laurent has said ironically.

  Wallas reaches the garden gate.

  It is seven o’clock.

  ***

  Everything around him is dark. The street is deserted. Wallas calmly opens the gate.

  Once inside, he carefully pushes it shut, but not all the way, so as to leave some trace of his passage.

  There is no use attracting the attention of anyone walking on the parkway at this hour by unnecessary noise. To avoid making the gravel crunch, Wallas walks on the lawn—easier than on the brick rim. He walks around the house on the right side. In the darkness, he can just make out the path, paler between the two flowerbeds and the neatly pruned top of the spindle trees.