The Erasers

2

“Daniel was a melancholy man…melancholy and solitary…But he wasn’t the kind of man to commit suicide-anything but. We lived together almost two years in that house in the

Rue des Arpenteurs (the young woman stretches out her arm and points east-unless she is merely indicating the big photograph on the other side of the partition, in the shopwindow) and not once during those two years did he ever reveal the slightest sign of discouragement or doubt. It wasn’t just a front: that serenity was the true expression of his nature.”

“You were saying, just now, that he was melancholy.”

“Yes. That probably isn’t the right word. He wasn’t melancholy…He certainly wasn’t gay: gaiety didn’t mean anything once you got through the garden gate. But melancholy didn’t either. I don’t know how to tell you… Boring? That isn’t right either. I enjoyed listening to him, when he was explaining something to me… No, what made it impossible to live with Daniel was that you felt he was alone, definitively alone. He was alone, and it didn’t bother him. He wasn’t made for marriage, or for any other kind of attachment. He had no friends. At the School of Law, his courses were popular, but he didn’t even know his students’ faces… Why did he marry me?…I was very young, and I felt a kind of admiration for this older man; everyone I knew admired him. I had been brought up by an uncle, and Daniel came to his house for dinner now and then. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, it can’t be interesting for you.”

“Yes, yes it is,” Wallas protests. “On the contrary, we need to know if Dupont’s suicide is plausible, if he might have had reasons to kill himself-or if he was capable of doing it without any reason.”

“Oh, not that! There was always a reason-for his least action. When it didn’t appear at the moment, you found out later that there had been one all the same, a precise, long deliberated reason that left no aspect of the question in doubt. Daniel did nothing without having decided to do it in advance, and his decisions were always rational; unchangeable too, of course…A lack of imagination, if you like, but to an extraordinary degree…I had nothing but virtues to reproach him for, really: never doing anything without thinking first, never changing his mind, never being wrong.”

“But you said his marriage was a mistake?”

“Well yes, of course, in his relations with human beings he risked making mistakes. You could even say that he did nothing but make mistakes. Yet in the long run he was right anyway: his only mistake was in supposing the rest of the world was as reasonable as he was.”

“Do you think he might have been somewhat bitter about this incomprehension?”

“You don’t understand the kind of man he was. Absolutely unshakable. He was sure of being right, and that was enough for him. If other people enjoyed themselves over chimeras, too bad for them.”

“He might have changed as he grew older; you hadn’t seen him since…”

“Oh yes, we’ve seen each other several times: he was still the same. He talked to me about his work, about how he spent his time, the few people he still saw. He was happy, in his way; a thousand miles from any thought of suicide, anyway; satisfied with his monk’s life between his old deaf housekeeper and his books…His books…his work…that was all he lived for! You know the house, gloomy and silent, muffled with rugs, full of old-fashioned ornaments no one is allowed to touch. Once inside you felt uncomfortable, as if you were choking in the gloom that took away any desire to joke, to laugh, to sing…I was twenty… Daniel seemed comfortable there and didn’t understand that someone else might feel differently. Besides, he rarely left his study where no one was allowed to move anything. Even at the beginning of our marriage, he only left the house to do his errands, three times a week; the minute he came back he went upstairs and shut himself in; and he often spent some of the night there. I only saw him during meals, when he came down to the dining room, punctually at noon and at seven.

“When you told me he was dead, just now, it gave me a funny feeling. I don’t know how to describe it to you…What difference could there be between Daniel living and Daniel dead? He wasn’t ever alive…Not that he lacked personality, or character…But he was never alive.”

“No, I haven’t seen him yet. I plan on going there when I leave here.”

“What’s his name?”

“Doctor Juard.”

“Oh He’s the one who performed the operation?”

“Yes.”

“That’s funny.”

“He’s not a good surgeon?”

“Oh yes…I think he is.”

“You know him?”

“Just by name…I thought he was a gynecologist.”

“And that happened a long time ago?”

“Everyone began talking about it just before the beginning of…”

Wallas suddenly has the disagreeable sensation that he is wasting his time. At the moment it occurred to him that the stationery seller in the Rue Victor-Hugo was perhaps the former Madame Dupont, this coincidence seemed miraculous to him; he hurried back toward the shop, where from the woman’s first words he discovered that he had guessed right. He felt tremendously pleased, as if an unhoped-for piece of luck bad just helped his investigation along considerably. Yet the fact of having met this woman by chance, on his way, changed nothing about the importance of the information he was entitled to expect from her: if Wallas had seriously supposed she could furnish anything important he would immediately have looked up the address of the divorced wife whose existence Commissioner Laurent had indicated to him this morning. At the time, he had decided it was more important to proceed to other interrogations first-that of Doctor Juard, for instance, whom he has not yet been able to contact.

Wallas now realizes how unreasonable his recent hope was. He is left somewhat dazed by it-not only from realizing this hope was vain, but disturbed, above all, by not having realized it sooner. Sitting in the back room of the shop, facing this attractive young woman, he wonders what he came here for-perhaps something he doesn’t know himself.

At the same time, he is suddenly afraid of no longer finding the doctor at the clinic. And as he stands up, apologizing for being unable to stay and chat any longer, he is once again surprised by the little throaty laugh that seems to suggest some complicity. Yet the banal phrase he has just spoken offered no possibility of a double meaning…In his uncertainty, Wallas tries to reconstitute it; but he doesn’t manage to: “I’m going to have to…I’m going to…”

The buzzer at the door brings his attempts to an end, like a bell trying to remind him of the time. But instead of freeing him, this intervention delays his departure still longer; the saleswoman has disappeared into her shop, leaving him alone after a few cheerful words:

“Just a minute, please. I have to wait on a customer.”

“I’m sorry, Madame, to have to…Just a minute, please, I have to go I’m going to have to go I’m going to…I’m going to have to…”

There was nothing to laugh about that way.

Wallas sits down again, not knowing what to do while waiting for the woman to come back. Through the half open door he has heard her receiving her visitor with a brief professional phrase-hard to make out, moreover, for the room Wallas is in is separated from the shop by a winding series of hallways and anterooms. Afterward, he has heard no further words. The customer, no doubt, has a lower voice, and the young woman herself is not speaking-or else has lowered her voice. But why would she lower her voice?

His ears involuntarily straining, Wallas tries to imagine the scene. A series of possibilities quickly flashes before his eyes, mostly silent, or whispered so low that the words are completely lost-which further emphasizes their mimed, caricatural, even grotesque quality. Besides, almost all these suppositions are characterized by so flagrant an improbability that their own creator is obliged to recognize them as relating more to delirium than to reasonable conjecture. He worries over this for a moment: does not his job, in fact, consist of precisely…“It’s difficult work… Difficult and disappointing…Well, since you’ve come recommended, I’m going to hire you-on probation…”

All that is obviously not very serious; if it were something important-relating to his case-he would not let his mind wander this way. He has no reason to be interested in what is being said out there.

Yet he listens despite himself-he tries to listen, rather, for he can hear nothing but extremely vague noises whose provenance is as little characterized as their nature Nothing, in any case, that resembles a little throaty laugh…warm and provocative…

It is evening. Daniel Dupont returns from his errands. His eyes on the floor, he climbs the stairs with that determined gait of his in which only a slight fatigue can be detected. Having reached the second floor, he walks without a second’s hesitation toward the study door…He starts as he hears, just behind him, the little throaty laugh that greets his arrival. In the dimness of the landing, where he neglected to turn on the light, he has not noticed the attractive young woman who is waiting for him in front of the open bedroom door…with her little throaty laugh that seems to emanate from her whole body…provocative and suggestive His wife.

Wallas dismisses this image in its turn. The bedroom door shuts the overly carnal wife inside. The ghost of Daniel Dupont continues on its way toward the study, eyes the floor, hand already extended toward the doorknob it is about to turn…

From the shop side, the situation is still just as vague. Wallas, who is growing impatient, mechanically pushes up his cuff to look at his wrist watch. He remembers at the same moment that it has stopped: it still shows seven-thirty. There is no use setting it as long as it won’t work.

On the chest opposite him, on either side of a porcelain figurine of stylized gallantry, is a pair of portraits. The one on the left shows the stern face of a middle-aged man; he is seen in three-quarters, almost in profile, and seems to be observing the statuette out of the corner of his eye-unless he is looking at the second photograph, older than the first, as the yellowing of the paper and the old-fashioned clothes of the people shown in it indicate. A little boy in a communion suit is looking up toward a tall woman wearing the ruffled dress and plumed hat fashionable in the last century. It is probably his mother, an extremely young mother whom the child looks up at with rather perplexed admiration-as far as can be judged from this faded snapshot, where the features have lost a good deal of their actuality. This lady must also be the mother of the stationer) seller; the severe gentleman may be Dupont. Wallas does not even know what the dead man looks like.

Seen at close range, the photograph reveals an almost imperceptible smile, without its being possible to tell whether it comes from the mouth or from the eyes… From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it. Daniel Dupont returns from his errands. He climbs the stairs with a heavy tread in which his haste can nevertheless be detected. When he reaches the top, he turns left toward the bedroom, whose door he pushes open without bothering to knock… But the figure of a young man has appeared from the study just behind him Two revolver shots ring out. Dupont collapses without a sound on the hall carpet.

The young woman appears in the doorway: “I haven’t kept you waiting too long, have I?” she asks in her throaty voice.

“No, not at all,” Wallas answers; “but I’ll have to be running along now.”

She stops him with a gesture:

“Wait just a minute! You know what he bought? Guess!”

“Who?”

The customer, of course. And he has bought an eraser, oi course. What does she think is so surprising about that?

“You know, the customer who just left!”

“I don’t know,” Wallas says.

“The postcard!” the young woman exclaims. “He bought the post card showing the house, the one you bought from me yourself this morning!”

This time the throaty laugh continues indefinitely

When she came into the shop, there was a short, sickly looking man there, wearing a long greenish coat and a dirty hat. He did not say what he wanted right away, merely murmuring “Good morning” vaguely between his teeth. He glanced around the room, and after a pause slightly too long to seem natural he decided on the rack of post cards, which he calmly went over to examine. He said something like:

“…choose a card…”

“Take your time,” the saleswoman replied.

But the man’s manner had something so unusual about it that she was going to call Wallas in, on some excuse, to show that she was not alone, when the man stopped in front of one of the cards; he took it out of the stand and examined it carefully. Then, without saying another word, he put a coin down on the counter (the price of the card was indicated on the rack) and left the shop, taking his find with him. It was the little house in the Rue des Arpenteurs, the “scene of the crime!” Wasn’t that a funny customer?

When Wallas is finally able to leave, there is no longer any chance of finding the strange collector of photographs. The Rue Victor-Hugo is empty in both directions. It is impossible to know which way the stranger turned.

Wallas therefore heads for the Juard Clinic-or at least where he imagines it to be, for he has forgotten to ask directions from the young woman, and he prefers-without any real reason, moreover-not to go back to her shop again.

He has just turned into the next street, when he sees in front of him, at the next intersection, the little man in the green coat staring at his post card, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Wallas walks toward him without having exactly decided what he is going to do; having no doubt noticed him, the other man begins walking again and immediately disappears around the corner to the right. A few seconds later, Wallas, walking faster, reaches the intersection. To the right extends a long, straight street without shops or any kind of doorway in which a man could be concealed; it is completely empty, aside from a tall pedestrian far in the distance, who is quickly disappearing down the street.

Wallas continues to the first crossing and looks in all directions. Still no one. The little man has vanished.