Recollections of the Golden Triangle Read online

  Recollections

  of the

  Golden Triangle

  OTHER WORKS BY ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

  Published by Grove Press

  Djinn

  Topology of a Phantom City

  Project for a Revolution in New York

  La Maison de Rendez-vous

  For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

  Last Year at Marienbad

  In the Labyrinth

  Jealousy

  The Voyeur

  The Erasers

  Recollections

  of the

  Golden Triangle

  ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

  J.A. UNDERWOOD

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © English translation J. A. Underwood 1984

  First published in Great Britain 1984 by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, London

  Copyright ©Les Editions de Minuit 1978

  Originally published in French, 1978, under the title Souvenirs du triangle d'or by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  First Grove Press Edition 1986

  ISBN 0-8021-5200-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9054-3

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-45233

  Cover design by John Gall

  Cover illustration by Alfred Gescheidt/Image Bank

  Printed in the United States of America

  Grove Press

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Recollections

  of the

  Golden Triangle

  An impression, already, that things are getting narrower. Don't puzzle too much. Don't turn round. Don't stop. Don't force the pace. For no visible reason, no reason. Speed has become necessary. The imminent discovery of the “temple” by the security forces means that the overall plan has to be modified and above all hurried into execution. But without changing anything—it's too late—of the elements that make it up, and that are now inevitable.

  There is nothing exceptional about the entrance to the building from the street: a black-painted door of medium size, in other words neither smaller nor larger than its neighbours, with restrained mouldings in Directoire style. It appears to be made of wood, like the others. Its only distinguishing detail, though one doesn't notice this at first, is the complete absence of any handle, keyhole, latch, knocker, bell, etc. There is no guessing whether it opens to the right or to the left. Come to that, it might not even be a door. Avoid this course; it leads nowhere.

  The stone surround—pilasters with vertical fluting—is topped by a triangular pediment in the classical style enclosing a second, equilateral triangle standing point downwards and touching the sides of the first with all three vertices. An eye, carved in bas-relief, occupies the centre; but instead of lying horizontally, as in nature and in the manner normally adopted for this type of symbol, the gap between the eyelids here forms a vertical spindle marking the axis of symmetry of the overall design. The hole representing the pupil is pierced so deeply that there is no telling how far in it goes, possibly because of the height at which it is situated in relation to normal eye level.

  People will doubtless have realized already, alas, that the door is operated by means of an electronic signal emitted by a small portable device that must be applied to a specific point on the lower panel, etc. (No ratiocinations, no regrets, no going back.) The stone eye serves no purpose, at least not as things stand.

  This is where the story starts, after an interruption, probably, a fairly major one giving the impression that things are getting even narrower: just the opposite of an opening. The system as a whole remains, for the moment, strictly motionless.

  Motionless again, yes, probably, but with something temporary, brittle, an element of tension, as if over all this calm there reigned, invisible as yet, a threat, a fear, a death sentence already pronounced, still silent, yes, no doubt, but with an almost indiscernible breathing, or whistling as of a wind that, without appearing to be of any force, nevertheless shifts the grains of sand on the beach one by one, carrying them imperceptibly towards the abandoned terrace where, bit by bit, they build up in sinuous little parallel ridges on the gappy grey planks that here blend without a break into the very slight slope of powdery, uneven ground moulded by the treading of innumerable feet the day before, or over the past few days, down to the water, now slack once more, yes, probably, but still breaking at high tide in a tiny wave endlessly repeating itself with a gentle, periodic hiss of such regularity that one might not hear this either, so integral a part is it of this scene caught by the dawn, as one might also fail to be aware of the laboured, soundless flight of a large, pale-coloured pelican moving away to the left, skimming the water about ten metres out, roughly parallel to where the water's edge is marked by a festoon of foam that no sooner vanishes than it is brought back by the inexhaustible and, in any case, from where I am, invisible wavelet, it being too far off, too low down, too much in the background.

  Facing me, which is to say coming towards me in the opposite direction to that in which the big bird disappeared, the noticeably livelier silhouette now tracing its arabesques soon turns out to be that of a naked girl mounted bareback on a colt with a flowing mane in the manner currently in vogue among kids on the west coast; advancing erratically, following a capricious course that means they can be admired from every angle in turn and at closer and closer quarters, her long, blue-black hair and the horse's streaming mane and tail like licks of golden flame whirl and gambol in the warm morning breeze as the girl tries without stirrups or spurs to make her pale-brown mount venture farther into the sea, which is splashed up on all sides by its restive hoofs, falling back amid the tinkling laughter of the amazon whose slender, spume-flecked body gleams with a metallic lustre, suddenly, lit by the rising sun.

  Having almost reached the foreground, the young rider smelling of iodine and salt in turn disappears to the right behind me, my little bride of the moment; and I do not look round to follow her with my gaze. I even fade further into the indistinct background of scattered tables and stacked chairs in the corner of the terrace when I spot, coming in the same direction as if pursuing a fugitive, three hunters armed with rifles, booted and clad in the traditional leather garb with the long, curved feather in the hat. They are walking fast, in line abreast, along the water's edge, the blued-steel guns held in their left hands pointing downwards at an angle, ready to be raised, their right index fingers on the triggers. Having crossed the picture from left to right, but moving much more quickly, they too, with one stride, pass behind me.

  Almost immediately a shot rings out in the silence, apparently very close, followed without any interval by a sharp cry like the rending call of a gull, though none is present; then there is a long-drawn-out whinny and a second, identical detonation, clear and violent, in which I recognize the combat Mauser used by the auxiliary militia, putting a brutal end to the plaintive wail that had been going on and on, a sound almost human, calling to mind that made in the forest by the fine animal with the flesh-coloured plumage known here as the bird-woman. There is nothing after that but jumbled sounds of water that has been set swirling by some falling body, or heavy footsteps, or by the sea beating furiously against an unexpected rock, mingling its eddies and the slaps of abruptly converging waves with the galloping of the crazed horse whose whinnies, briefer now, are alread
y less distinct.

  With calm restored, the surface flat again, the atmosphere once more one of waiting, in the almost imperceptible whistling of the wind, another pelican, flying along laboriously and silently just above the water, crosses the picture in a straight, receding line parallel to the shore, the same distance out as the first, disturbingly duplicating its precise passage. Also following a parallel course and moving in the same direction, but this time a little farther out to sea, a third, similar bird then flies off with the same slowness; seeming to swim through the dense, translucent air, which it beats indolently with its weary wings, immutable, it eventually dissolves like the other two in the murky irresolution of the horizon away to the left. On the terrace of rough planks laid not edge to edge but with a gap between them varying from one finger to two, the greyish sand continues to progress in a steady, methodical, surreptitious manner in wavy, shifting tongues that advance noiselessly and relentlessly towards me.

  Going in the same direction as the pelicans, the young beggar-prostitute now makes her entrance, as she does every day at the same time, with the gracefully lilting, dancer's step that enables me to identify her at first glance the instant she comes into my field of vision. I draw myself up cautiously with the aid of my stick, abandoning all discretion, in order to see her better: clad as usual in a long dress of white silk flowing in tatters, and following the line formed by the very edge of the waves, she is today dragging behind her over the sand with its litter of varied debris a limp thing, difficult to identify, that looks like an old fur coat, or like the skin of a wild animal, freshly flayed. The girl is already in almost full back view when she comes to a halt, the bare foot behind her resting only on its very tip and exposing its tiny, wave-washed sole in an upright position; then, very slowly, she rotates her statue-like bust and her face, pale as pink mother-of-pearl, towards me.

  The lost look in her large eyes with their greeny-grey highlights appearing to gaze through me at some strange sight lying in my direction but beyond, I eventually follow her example and turn my face with its false beard (but still in my opinion unrecognizable) towards the board fence bounding that side of the esplanade of the phantom café, where all I can see is a defaced poster advertising the Michelet Circus, the name of which is still legible in large, lascivious capitals above fragments of the famous lithograph depicting a ravishing equestrienne in a white-gauze tutu and rose-pink tights tilting with a lance at an enraged bull.

  At this point I hear behind me, probably carried by the wind, the clearly enunciated sentence, ‘The great aurochs is dead,’ the highly individual modulations of which put me in mind of the soft, musical voice of the mendicant enchantress. I turn my head back towards her, at least towards where she was a moment ago, for she has disappeared, leaving no further discernible trace in the bumpy surface of the sand than that made just now by the animal skin two paces in from the water's edge: a long, sinuous trail in which I believe I can make out dark patches of blood here and there.

  As if without thinking, I sit down mechanically on a metal folding chair with chipped and rusting slats that is there right beside me, it too abandoned in this out-of-season landscape: an ancient city after the flood of burning ash, a village square the morning after the air-raid, a seaside resort half destroyed by equinoctial storms.

  I cannot, however, contrive to fix my attention in a sufficiently convincing manner on the flakes of dull, pale-green paint that, where they have come away, have left constellations of red-brown triangles all over this disc of sheet metal that forms the top of a table on which my left elbow has just come to rest. I raise my eyes, which I had been holding too determinedly lowered. The two policemen are there, in plain clothes but clearly recognizable with their light-coloured raincoats belted with casual haste and their soft hats with broad brims turned down in front. I have the impression that this scene has occurred at least once before, so familiar do I find the picture it presents.

  To tell the truth I had hardly had time to scan the deserted beach at length in an attempt to make out the already distant figure of the little prostitute in her shredded white veils, still fluttering at the edge of the waves. The two silhouettes were there, quietly menacing, right by my table, blocking the view with massive shoulders made even broader by their trench coats. They too appear to be used to the way the episode unfolds; it is almost with a smile of connivance that the first one holds out a pair of regulation handcuffs while his twin brother places before my eyes a rectangle of paper bearing a black-and-white photograph.

  In spite of the document's curiously impressive size and the abnormal flimsiness of its support, my first thought is that this is a licence certifying that my visitors are indeed policemen. Closer examination, however, enables me to establish that this photo is not at all an identity portrait of the person standing before me: what I have here is quite simply a newspaper cutting in which a few words of text accompany a fairly mediocre snap taken by a reporter in what appears to be a factory, as witness the winches, cables, chains, and pulleys of all sizes distinguishable with some clarity towards the top of the frame. But the most remarkable thing in this setting, although situated neither in the centre of the composition nor in the foreground, is a very young woman, more than half undressed, hanging by the neck, which is slightly twisted to one side, from a rope attached to an enormous iron tackle hook. I don't flinch.

  On the side opposite that towards which the head with its long, tawny-gold hair is tilted the two half-extended arms, chained together at the wrist, hang at face height from a second, identical hook. Despite the shortage of light, very noticeable in the lower part of the print, I find on moving nearer that the victim still has the tips of her bare feet resting on two small round stools placed side by side about fifty centimetres apart and similar at all points to those used by women who operate drilling, grinding, buffing, and other similar machines, these frail (temporary?) supports preventing the captive from being actually strangled by the hemp rope. Shown from the front, she is wearing nothing but a pair of thin white-linen trousers torn several times from the waist down to the level of the crotch, large shreds of material having even been ripped away to reveal more of the stomach and the pubis with its triangle of fine, red-brown fleece; one thigh is exposed almost to the knee, and only the fact that the legs are spread stops what is left of the garment promptly slipping down round the ankles.

  From the position of this exceedingly pretty machinist and the dangerously arousing curves of her proffered body, I see immediately that this is a trap: the native girl that the hunters tie to a stick embedded in the shallows of the backwater to attract the crocodile. I have all the more reason for showing prudence in that the graceful line of the throat and the soft curvature of the arms curiously reproduce the improbable pose of a famous painting, the pride of our National Museum: The Fair Angélique, chained to her rock, eyes wide with a blend of terror and surrender, gazing on the hunter whose lance at the last moment stops a monstrous reptile that was about to eat her alive, at which point she emits a long-drawn-out, throaty moan as if the burning steel were sunk in her own vagina offered there as prey.

  But in place of the giant alligator there is a violin lying on the ground, its melodious tones having perhaps been meant to blend with the cries of the victim. That at least will be one interpretation considered by the investigating authorities when they come across the instrument (riddled, let's not forget, with little holes quite unlike the tunnels made by wood-eating insects) abandoned a few paces from this soft-skinned nude now lying lifeless, in a position we shall have to come back to, amid the steel machines and their gear-wheels, the welding torches, and the blacksmith's tongs.

  For the moment, however, all is silent, discounting the tiny, bell-like sound of the drops of water falling one after another into a pool, as already mentioned, though the precise nature of the liquid involved calls for closer examination, as has been said, or as will be said later, I don't remember. But this apparent calm does not catch me unawares. H
ere and there in the gloom shiny surfaces gleam with metallic highlights, shifting and changing as with increased circumspection I advance towards the bait.

  While reluctant to admit as much, I am fascinated by her white-china complexion, her large, dark-ringed eyes, her sea-green irises staring at me without a quiver of an eyelid, playing to perfection the part of slavish submission and ecstatic entreaty, her lips parted as if to plead for mercy, or for forgiveness, yet not daring to say a word or make the slightest movement for fear of putting an end to the unstable equilibrium of the tall stools perched on their three slender legs, which forces her taut body to arch in what is in any case a most attractive fashion.

  What will intrigue the police even more when they come to ascertain the facts and then seek an expert opinion is the virtual certainty that strangulation cannot have been the real cause of death, as indeed should have been seen at first glance from the dead girl's still pearl-white complexion and from the unobtrusive nature of the marks left on the skin of her long, pliant neck by the rope still encircling it. Nor is a single one of her fragile vertebrae broken. Moreover her whole silken, still warm body appears intact. One might just, if one looked carefully enough, note a great many tiny bright-pink dots, closer together in some areas than in others, that would appear to be needle-marks. As for the rest of the setting, it certainly has its surprising elements; the idea strikes me that I may have intruded upon some ceremony in the midst of its meticulous course. So am I the mysterious criminal at second hand who comes on the scene afterwards to finish off the torture?

  Naturally I allowed no hint of these reflections to appear to the two plain-clothes policemen. I confined myself to asking them, as a trifle of no consequence, whether the traces of blood had been analysed or not. No one having so far made the slightest allusion to these faint reddish streaks staining the tips of the fingernails, the mouth, and the insides of the thighs without, apparently, any corresponding wound, it was difficult for me to say more: to point out to them, for example, that they might belong to a different blood group from that of the beautiful stranger, who in that case perhaps died as a result of drinking blood that was incompatible with her own, or of heart failure while battling tooth and claw against the monster, whose lingam she evidently succeeded in damaging, or anything else of that sort.