photograph, life size, of an open vagina.
Now he is looking at me, then at the table and the empty chair behind it. Finally he brings himself to pronounce the sentence: “I’ve come for a narco-analysis.” Without omitting or changing a single word, I could give him the right answer, but it does not seem to me to be my part to do so; therefore I speak no more than the beginning, in order to reassure him even so: “Yes … It’s quite late.” Then I improvise: “The doctor’s assistant has gone out. But I think she’ll be right back.”
“Oh good. Thank you,” the gray-faced man says, turning toward the ground-glass window opening onto the mall, exactly as if he could see through it and had chosen this sight as a diversion, to help pass the time.
Suddenly I am filled with suspicion as I notice the way in which the newcomer is dressed: shiny black raincoat and soft felt hat with the brim turned down … Unless his back merely reminds me of the disturbing figure I have just seen pressed up against the display of the pornographic bookstore … But now the man, as though to give more consistency to the disturbing connection I cannot help making, straightening up in his raincoat, thrusts his gloved hands deep into its broad pockets.
Without leaving me time to wait for the man to show his face again, so that I might recognize what he looks like even when his features are drawn by fatigue, the young woman in the nurse’s uniform returns and very quickly gets rid of me. According to her directions, I leave through the rear door with the glass knob and climb a steep narrow spiral staircase made of cast iron.
Then there is a long corridor entirely covered (except for the floor) with that dilapidated white ceramic tile already described during the passage through the subway station, in which, as a matter of fact, I must still be walking. At the end of the hallway, a tiny sliding door with an electric-eye device opens automatically to let me through, and finally I enter the room where, if I have understood correctly, we are to be given our orders for tomorrow. Here there are some fifty persons. I immediately wonder how many police informers there can already be among them. Since I have come in at the rear of the room, I see the people in it only from the back, which does not make any such estimate easy—in fact, ridiculous.
I imagined I was ahead of time; it appears on the contrary that the meeting has already been going on for some time. And it is not concerned with the usual specific details, concerning imminent action. Instead, today, the meeting is given over to a kind of ideological discussion presented in the usual form, whose didactic effectiveness on the militants of every persuasion has been readily acknowledged: a prefabricated dialogue between or among three persons assigned alternately questions and answers, changing parts by a circular permutation at each shift of the text—i.e., about every minute.
The sentences are short and simple—subject, verb, complement—with constant repetitions and antitheses, but the vocabulary includes quite a large number of technical terms belonging to various fields, philosophy, grammar, or geology, which keep turning up. The tone of the speakers remains constantly neutral and even, even in the liveliest moments; the voices are polite, almost smiling despite the coolness and exactitude of their elocution. They all three know their parts down to the last comma, and the whole scenario is articulated like a piece of machinery, without a single hesitation, without a slip of memory or the tongue, in an absolute perfection.
The three actors are wearing dark suits of severe cut, with impeccable shirts and striped ties. They are sitting side by side on a little platform, behind a rickety wooden table, like the kind that used to be seen in poor men’s kitchens. This piece of furniture is therefore more or less in harmony with the walls and ceiling of the room which are here, too, covered with the same dilapidated ceramic tiles, which slow infiltrations of moisture have loosened in irregular patches, revealing grayish surfaces of crude concrete, confined to the edges of the tile by crenellations or ladder-shaped areas. The theme of the day’s lecture seems to be “the color red,” considered as a radical solution to the irreducible antagonism between black and white. Right now each of the three voices is devoted to one of the main liberating actions related to red: rape, arson, murder.
The preliminary section, which was ending when I arrived, must have been devoted to the theoretical justifications of crime in general and to the notion of metaphorical acts. The performers are now dealing with the identification and analysis of the three functions in particular. The reasoning which identifies rape with the color red, in cases where the victim has already lost her virginity, is of a purely subjective nature, though it appeals to recent studies of retinal impressions, as well as to investigations concerning the religious rituals of Central Africa, at the beginning of the century, and the lot of young captives belonging to races regarded as hostile, during public ceremonies suggesting the theatrical performances of antiquity, with their machinery, their brilliant costumes, their painted masks, their paroxysmal gestures, and that same mixture of coolness, precision, and delirium in the staging of a mythology as murderous as it is cathartic.
The crowd of spectators, facing the semicircle formed by the curved row of oil palms, dances from one foot to the other, stamping the red-earth floor, always in the same heavy rhythm which nonetheless gradually accelerates. Each time a foot touches the ground, the upper part of the body bends forward while the air emerging from the lungs produces a wheezing sound which seems to accompany some woodcutter’s laborious efforts with his ax or some farmer’s with his hoe. Without my being able to account for it, I keep remembering the sophisticated young woman disguised as a nurse who receives the so-called patients of Doctor Morgan in the brightly lighted little room precisely when she brushes past me with her dyed-blond hair and her doubtless artificial breasts that swell the white uniform and her violent perfume.
She prolongs the contact insistently, provocatively, inexplicably. As if an invisible obstacle stands in the middle of the room which she must pass on my side by undulating her hips in a kind of vertical slither, in order to get through the narrow space. And meanwhile, the stamping of bare feet on the clay floor continues in an accelerating cadence, accompanied by an increasingly raucous collective gasping, which finally drowns out the noise of the tom-toms beaten by musicians crouched in front of the dancing area, their row closing off the half-circle of palm trees.
But the three actors, on the dais, have now come to the second panel of their triptych, in other words, to the murder; and the demonstration can this time, on the contrary, remain on a perfectly objective level while being based on the blood spilled, provided nonetheless it is limited to methods provoking a sufficiently abundant external bleeding. The same is then the case for the third panel, which relates to the traditional color of flames, approached most nearly by using gasoline to start the fires.
The spectators, seated in parallel rows on their kitchen chairs, are as motionless in their religious attention as rag dolls. And since I have remained at the very back of the room, standing against the wall since there was no empty seat, and since as a result I see only their backs, I can suppose that they have no faces at all, that they are merely stuffed figures surmounted by clipped and curled wigs. The speakers, on their side, moreover, perform their parts in an altogether abstract fashion, always speaking quite frontally without their eyes coming to rest on anything, as if there were no one facing them, as if the room were empty.
And it is in chorus now, all three reciting the same text together, in the same neutral and jerky voices in which no syllable stands out, that they present the conclusion of the account: the perfect crime, which combines the three elements studied here, would be the defoliation, performed by force, of a virgin, preferably a girl with milky skin and very blond hair, the victim then being immolated by disembowelment or throat-cutting, her naked and bloodstained body having to be burned at a stake doused with gasoline, the fire gradually consuming the whole house.
The scream of terror, of pain, of death, still fills my ears as I contemplate the heap of crumpled bedclothes spread like so many rags on the floor, an improvised altar whose folds are gradually dyed a brilliant red, in a stain with distinct edges which, starting from the center,
