The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet Read Free Book Online

going out of his way or slowing down, Wallas walks on. In front of him a woman crosses the street. An old man drags toward a back door an empty garbage can that had been standing on the edge of the sidewalk. Behind a window are stacked three rows of rectangular platters containing all kinds of marinated anchovies, smoked sprats, rolled and loose herring, salted, seasoned, raw or cooked, smoked, fried, pickled, sliced, and chopped. A little farther, a gentleman in a black overcoat and hat comes out of a house and passes him; middle-aged, comfortable, frequent stomach trouble; he takes only a few steps and immediately turns into an extremely clean-looking café , certainly more appealing than the one where Wallas spent the night. Wallas remembers how hungry he is, but he has made up his mind to eat his breakfast in some large modern restaurant, on one of those squares or boulevards that must, as everywhere else, constitute the heart of the city.
    The next cross streets intersect the one he is on at a decidedly obtuse angle, and consequently would lead him too far back — almost in the direction he is coming from.
    Wallas likes walking. In the cold, early winter air he likes walking straight ahead through this unknown city. He looks around, he listens, he smells the air; this perpetually renewed contact affords him a subtle imp ression of continuity; he walks on and gradually unrolls the uninterrupted ribbon of his own passage, not a series of irrational, unrelated images, but a smooth band where each element immediately takes its place in the web, even the most fortuitous, even those that might at first seem absurd or threatening or anachronistic or deceptive; they all fall into place in good order, one beside the other, and the ribbon extends without flaw or excess, in time with the regular speed of his footsteps. For it is Wallas who is advancing; it is to his own body that this movement belongs, not to the backcloth some stagehand might be unrolling; he can follow in his own limbs the play of the joints, the successive contractions of the muscles, and it is he himself who controls the rhythm and length of his strides: a half second for each step, a step and a half for each yard, eighty yards a minute. It is of his own free will that he is walking toward an inevitable and perfect future. In the past, he has too frequently let himself be caught in the circles of doubt and impotence, now he is walking; he has recovered his continuity here.
     
    On the wall of a school courtyard there are three yellow posters side by side, three copies of a political speech printed in tiny letters with an enormous headline at the top: “ Citizens Awake! Citizens Awake! Citizens Awake! ” Wallas recognizes this poster, distributed throughout the city and already old, some kind of trade-union propaganda against the trusts, or liberal propaganda against the tariff rates, the sort of literature no one ever reads, except, occasionally, an old gentleman who stops, puts on his glasses and carefully reads the whole text through, shifts his eyes back and forth along the lines from the beginning all the way to the end, steps back a little to consider the whole poster with a shrug, puts his glasses back in their case and the case in his pocket, then goes on his way in some perplexity, wondering if he has not missed the point. Among the usual words some suspect term occasionally stands out like a signal, and the sentence it illuminates so equivocally seems for a moment to conceal many things, or nothing at all. Thirty yards farther on can be seen the back of the plaque warning drivers of the school crossing.
    The street next crosses another canal, wider than the last, along which a tug is slowly approaching, pulling two coal barges. A man in a dark blue pea jacket and a visored cap has just closed off the bridge at the opposite end and turns toward the free end where Wallas has just started across.
    “ Hurry up, Monsieur, it ’ ll be openingI ” the