Project for a Revolution in New York Read online

  And I, meanwhile, in the mounting racket of the metal carcass vibrating under my hurrying steps, continue down the endless and dizzying fire escape. At each new landing, I interrupt my descent a second to lean over the railing and I perceive below me, still a little farther away, the mute, anxious crowd, perhaps already hundreds of yards distant, so remote that the raised faces now constitute only a sea of white specks.

  Then I close the book with the torn cover and return it to its preceding reader after glancing one last time at the illustration, whose exact meaning still escapes me; it seems to me that the spider, on the floor, has again perceptibly advanced toward the bare shoulder. But now Laura suddenly begins telling me a story which, she says, has taken up some of her afternoon. Despite a suddenly animated, even amused tone, she still gives that impression of receiving from elsewhere her ready-made sentences, whose meaning she herself can decipher only in the course of speaking them aloud. According to the story, she heard noises on the doorstep, at the door, and managed to approach their source along the vestibule wall: someone was poking into the lock. She soon realized that it was some maniac, whose goal was not to open the door but to see through the keyhole: by standing on tiptoe and keeping in the dark, standing obliquely against the rectangular pane protected outside by a heavy design of cast-ironwork, she saw the bald head of the man bent down in the posture of a voyeur, though the spaces between the volutes of the cast-iron grille, a little higher, gave him many more opportunities to see something inside, and with much less trouble.

  At first Laura had thought of putting out his eye with a knitting needle, but then something much more amusing occurred to her, thanks in fact to that detective story she had been reading and was holding in her hand at that moment. After having torn off the upper part of the cover, for the presence of the title and the author’s name risks destroying the illusion, she sets the image just opposite the tiny keyhole, at the right distance so that the observer outside can see the subject as a whole, but not the edges of the paper. When everything is ready, she switches on the light, pressing the button within reach of her hand, while holding the book quite still.

  Since the locksmith is nearsighted, he does not notice that the scene is quite close, entirely fixed and flat; he imagines it life-size and located much farther away: at the end of a corridor. The suspended gesture of the man carefully adjusting the needle of the syringe still allows for the possibility of coming to the rescue of his unfortunate victim who is about to have paraffin injected into her veins. He has come in time. Without bothering to make out the details of the scene, he rushes off to get help, abandoning his tools on the doorstep.

  The false Ben-Saïd, in the recess of the house across the street, wonders about the reason for such strange behavior, and what the man can have seen through the keyhole. However, no order permits him to leave his post to look for himself: it might be a trick, and while he was trying to discover something which does not exist, his eye glued to the door, someone would signal from the windows to an accomplice outside. Therefore the sentry merely takes out of an inside pocket a tiny black notebook whose imitation-leather covers are so worn that they show the underlying fabric at the corners; then, after removing his gloves and thrusting them under his left armpit, he writes down, according to his previous observations, the succinct narrative of the occurrence, as well as the exact time, down to the second according to his wrist watch. In the effort he is making to make his task both brief and exact, a nervous tic produces, on two occasions, a wrinkle across his left cheek. Then, without thinking about it, still preoccupied by the sentence whose composition has given him so much difficulty, he puts the notebook back in his pocket and immediately afterward, taking between both thumbs and forefingers the loose flesh of his neck on either side of his chin, he pulls at his skin in hopes of controlling this involuntary twitching which disturbs him, a little as if he were trying to replace a poorly applied plastic mask.

  Laura, who has heard the voyeur’s footsteps hurrying down the steps outside and fading away down the sidewalk to the right, has put out the light and once again approached the glass peephole, in order to examine the street. The man in black having put his gloves back on and his hands back in his pockets, she leaves her observation post and takes a few vague steps toward the staircase. No brief smile passes over her pursed lips nor between the long lashes of her eyelids. Having reached the table, she ceremoniously makes the gesture of setting down on its marble top a bunch of imaginary keys, while glancing up toward the big mirror. Her face withdrawn, her eyes wide and blank, she stares at herself blindly a moment, in the watery depths of the vestibule poorly lit by the half-light from the rectangular opening in the door. After a considerable interval of complete immobility and silence, she says half-aloud the word “ulva” which floats into her mind from somewhere or other.

  Noticing her own reflection at this moment, she tries to reproduce the twitch of the cheek she has just observed once again in the figure wearing the black raincoat. She succeeds and takes advantage of the occasion to experiment with several other rapid and periodic grimaces, affecting various portions of the face. Then she utters two more words, a little more loudly and with exaggerated lip movements: “Axial sex,” followed after a rather long pause, during which her cheek has twitched three times in a row, by the uncompleted sentence: “… the body lying on the steps of the altar, with the seven knives planted in the flesh, around the auburn fleece …” which derives from the popular novel with the torn cover, which is now under her left arm. Finally, still with as much deliberation and seriousness as before, she says: “Don’t forget to set fire to it, Mark-Anthony.”

  She then notices, in the mirror, the half-open door of the library; she quickly turns around toward the actual object and enters the room with careful, silent steps, as if she were hoping to surprise someone there. But no one is there, and it is easy to determine as much at first glance, for there is no furniture either, except for the empty shelves which cover the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Laura takes the book she had put under her arm, at the same time as Ben-Saïd’s black gloves, and flings it toward the upper shelf, in the darkest corner, for its role is now over and done with.

  She mounts the staircase step by step, making herself feel, in her own young legs, all the exhaustion accumulated during a long, nonexistent day of work. At the first landing, she drops her key inadvertently; the complicated noise the key makes as it knocks against one of the iron bars of the railing, then landing on the imitation-stone floor, resembles—does not resemble—the sharp clatter of a pane of glass broken by a murderer breaking the window at the end of the corridor.

  At the end of the corridor, the cracked pane is still in place, indicated in the glass surface only by a fourteen-branched star covering its entire surface, no piece of which has as yet been removed. Several of the rays of the star—five, precisely, or perhaps six—stop before having reached the edges of the pane; it would be tempting to make them continue by pressing lightly against the central point, but the risk of breaking the pane altogether is too great; especially since the fragments which would fall outside, onto the fire escape, would immediately attract the attention of the jailer keeping watch on the opposite sidewalk.

  He is now as motionless as a wax dummy, the kind to be seen in police museums. Laura, crouching against the French window, has already been staring at him for a moment, the line of her gaze passing between two strips of the fire-escape landing. It would certainly be amusing to make him look up by breaking a windowpane or by doing something else, then, slowly rising a few inches, to show on a level with the platform, between the vertical bars of the railing, a grimacing head of a decapitated girl.

  But Laura’s right hand happens to encounter, as it changes its position, one of the pieces of glass which has fallen onto the floor. Resting one knee on the tiles, at a place carefully chosen in order not to cut herself, her chin on the other knee and her lips caressing the taut smooth skin sliding beneath the tip of her
tongue, the girl begins gathering up, between two meticulous fingers, the slender transparent daggers and collecting them one by one in the hollow of her other palm, very slowly, as deliberately and with as many precautions and as much respect as if they were diamonds.

  When she stands up again and looks down the long corridor in front of her, with all the doors which open to the right and left, she no longer manages to remember which leads to her own room, where she must go, however, in order to put in safekeeping the crystal knives she has just made for herself. All the doors are identical and there seem to be more of them than usual. Laura bends over against the first one to try and see, through the keyhole, what is on the other side; but she sees nothing, and she dares not continue because of the short bald man’s knitting needle. She pushes open the door suddenly, violently. The door knocks against a rubber stop and returns, quivering, to a half-open position. The room is empty: neither murderer nor bed nor furniture of any kind. Laura moves on to the next.

  At the fifth door, she finds herself in another room without any furniture, so that it is still not hers, yet which must be since it overlooks in the same way the courtyard surrounded with high fences of a girls’ school, moreover the same one probably. The students are at recess; however there do not seem to be very many today: six in all, playing some kind of blind-man’s buff. These little girls—as usual, with rare exceptions—are all blacks, about twelve to fourteen years old. It is one of the youngest who is wearing the white silk bandage over her eyes and who moves about uncertainly, timidly, her arms extended in front of her, exploring the air like the antennae of a blind insect, and her lips parted. The other five who surround her are each furnished with a long steel T square which doubtless is part of the drawing-kit they must use to produce geometrical figures in their class notebooks. But their function here is actually that of banderilleros in the bull ring. As they advance and retreat to remain two or three steps away from their unarmed playmate, which is to say out of reach of her hands which are nonetheless timorous rather than threatening, they slowly perform around her a kind of wild dance, taking great silent steps, making broad gestures with their arms above their heads, sweeping and ceremonious salutations which, without any apparent or even symbolic meaning, seem nonetheless to belong to the ritual of some religious sacrifice. From time to time, one or the other comes up and roughly touches, with the end of her T square, the defenseless girl vulnerable to their blows, choosing the sensitive points carefully enough to make the victim stagger and even, on occasion, rub the wounded place as though to assuage the pain.

  All this happens without outcry or turbulence of any kind: it is a mute, mild, almost muffled game, and the rubber-soled tennis shoes do not make the slightest sound on the cement of the courtyard, across which the group moves as it circles the victim.

  At the relative height of the fence, in relation to the parallelogram of the courtyard, Laura realizes her mistake: her own room must be on the floor above.

  She therefore returns, walking deliberately, down the corridor to the staircase over which she leans a moment, holding on to the railing, her arms stretched out on either side of her body, bent over almost horizontally, her head to one side, her ear cocked to hear the missing sounds which would rise from below: sounds of a key, sounds of a door, sounds of footsteps, sounds of the pages of a book. Then she resumes her slow progress up the staircase, step by step, her left palm and its five outspread fingers encircling the wooden banister. But, reaching the next landing, she hears once again quite distinctly, although with the imagination of memory, the faint knocks audible in this place from time to time, in reality, coming from still higher up, from the unoccupied rooms of the top floor, as if someone were tapping with his finger tips against a wooden panel, a signal or a gesture of impatience or a long code message transmitted to some other secret inhabitant of the house.

  Laura therefore continues her light, heavy ascent, as though benumbed, but with an increased circumspection, this time setting both feet, one after the other, on each step, the left one first, then the right, avoiding any shock or friction of her sole, and scarcely touching the railing with her thumb and forefinger to avoid making it creak.

  Having reached the top, she walks forward at first, with the same gait of a sleepwalking paralytic, to the French window overlooking the last landing of the fire escape. She notices that the man in the black raincoat—whom she has baptized Ben-Saïd because of a minor character in the book with the torn cover—is now talking to two uniformed policemen wearing flat-topped caps, leather shoulder straps and holstered revolvers. The two men have come to a standstill just at the edge of the roadway, as if some regulation forbade them to leave the darker asphalt altogether. They are standing in exactly the same way, one foot in the gutter and the other resting on the stone curb, thereby resembling—by their identical clothing, corpulence and posture—a single individual doubled by his mirror reflection. The revolver itself completes this illusion, the man on the right having slipped the strap over his left shoulder and the man on the left, over the right shoulder.

  There are also, in fact, the two opposite boots which are placed one close to the other, on a slight elevation, the stone curb. The right foot of the man on the left and the left foot of the man on the right are thus arranged in such a manner, side by side and parallel, that they seem to belong to an intermediary figure who would have his left foot on the right and his right foot on the left. But the third figure of the group is actually Ben-Saïd, who has left his recess in order to come over to the gutter, the frontier of the smoother and paler zone of asphalt of which he himself is the guardian. He is standing exactly opposite the inverted boots and thereby presents, contrary to what would be normal if he were dealing with a single interlocutor, his left shoe in front of the left boot and his right shoe in front of the right boot.

  He has taken his black-gloved hands out of his pockets and makes a sign toward the right end of the street (hence to his left, although the gesture is performed with his right hand), in other words toward the subway station. Since Laura knows that he is then going to raise his head and look toward the window where she is standing, at the top of the fire escape—according to the action already described—she takes a sudden step back, at the same time that she immediately turns around toward the long corridor.

  In order to facilitate her task of inspection, she tries at first to count the doors which open, symmetrically, on each side, opposite each other. She functions calmly and with deliberation. On the right side, there are twelve doors; but then she finds thirteen, counting on the left side. Since the doors are quite regularly arranged in pairs, on each side of the corridor, there must be the same number on each side; hence the number of pairs has increased by one unit between the first count and the second. Laura starts walking and begins checking the empty rooms, one by one, trying to remember the order of each room visited. She walks fast now, although still without making a sound. She opens the door on the right, rapidly inspects the bare walls, closes the door whose ceramic knob is still in her hand, releases the knob, turns around toward the left door which she immediately opens in its turn, again inspects the bare walls, closes the door, walks on twelve steps, opens the right door, inspects the floor and the bare walls, etc.

  At the twenty-sixth room, she stops and mentally calculates that she has already taken, down the corridor, a hundred and forty-four steps since the first door. The corridor which still continues in front of her seems to contain at least as many doors, if not more. Yes, many more, on reflection. Laura remains there without moving, her head straight and her body marking its own bilateral symmetry, exactly in the axis of the corridor. This must last quite a long time. Then, still motionless, she begins to scream: a long continuous cry, starting very low, which gradually swells to a paroxysm cut short, whose echo she then listens to as it echoes from one end to the other of the enormous corridor.

  From one end to the other of the corridor extends a strip of dazzlingly white carpeting which
occupies about a third of the white-tiled floor between the two white walls with their white-lacquered doors. Laura then understands why her footsteps make so little noise. She then continues on her way on the thick carpeting to the next rooms. She puts out her hand toward a new ceramic knob, but interrupts her gesture, her fingers already curled around an imaginary sphere about four inches from the real one.

  There is blood, a trickle of thick fresh bright red blood which runs under the door, coming from inside. It forms a kind of tongue about two inches wide, its tip slightly wider where it advances over the tiles, quite slowly but regularly, toward Laura’s shoes. At this moment, Laura realizes that she is barefoot, contrary to what she would have supposed. And now a second vermilion trickle appears beside the first one, passing in the same way through the interstice which separates the white-lacquered wood from the ceramic tiles. Then, almost immediately, a third and fourth tongue of blood appear from under the door, framing the first two on the right and the left, but faster than they, more fluid, more abundant, while the earliest is already now on the point of touching Laura’s bare foot, resting on the tiles just at the edge of the carpeting which her heel barely touches, an arc tangent to the straight line which constitutes its edge.

  Laura carefully draws back her foot. But its shape and position remain indicated on the floor in a red print clearly drawn, with its plantar arch and the tips of the five toes. Yet the trickle of viscous liquid which was advancing toward the big toe was still a few inches away from it. Then had this foot already been walking in the blood? Laura looks up: the ceramic doorknob is also red, as is the inside of the hand slowly turning its palm upward and falling motionless.