Three Steps In

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Paris, February 1954.

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The light was still burning when the concierge found him. Madame Bouvard told me so three times on the way up the stairs, as if the bulb were the indecent thing in that room. It was a forty-watt bulb under a tin shade, and it was burning at half past seven on a February morning, in a garret whose window had been grey for an hour already.

Anselme Pélissier lay on his side between the workbench and the stove. He was seventy-one years old, a clockmaker, and not much over five feet in his slippers. Somebody had struck him once above the left ear with the brass foot of a lamp. When I arrived the lamp was standing back on the bench where it belonged, wiped. There was a little blood on the boards and a great deal in his white hair. The stove was cold. On the bench a carriage clock lay open, its movement out and the balance wheel set aside on a square of chamois. His loupe lay on top of the chamois, as a man puts his spectacles down when somebody knocks.

"He let them in," said Lhuillier, who had got there before me and had his notebook out. "No force on the door."

"He put his loupe down," I said.

Lhuillier wrote that down too, and then looked at it.

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I have no right hand. I lost it in August 1944, in the fighting by the place Saint-Michel, four streets from that garret, and for ten years it has gone on doing things without me. It reaches for doorknobs. It comes up to shield my eyes when I step out into the sun. On the quai des Orfèvres they know not to hand me things from the right, because I take them with a hand that is not there and they fall. I write with the left now, slowly, and a clerk types it up. Sometimes, when I am tired, I feel the right hand close round a pen, and the left one waits beside it on the paper.

The doctors at the Val-de-Grâce had a word for it. I had a better one, which was habit, and I did not tell them.

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The garret was one room under the roof of a house in the rue de la Parcheminerie, six flights up, with the ceiling sloping down to a single window on the courtyard side. The door opened inward on hinges to the left and folded back flat against the left-hand wall. The wall on the right of the doorway, where a hand coming in from the landing looks for a switch in every building in Paris, was bare plaster with a calendar from a coal merchant pinned to it.

On the first morning, when the photographer had finished, Lhuillier wanted the light off to see what the window showed by itself, and spent a full minute patting that plaster. In the end Madame Bouvard reached past him, went three steps in along the left-hand wall, past the swing of the door, to the end of the workbench, and pressed a brown switch mounted on a wooden block at the height of her hip.

"He had it moved," she said. "So he could put the light out from his stool without getting up. He was not a tall man."

I found the electrician's bill that afternoon in a biscuit tin under the bench, among receipts that went back to 1926. Rigaud, électricien, rue Galande. 14 mars 1951. Déplacement d'un interrupteur, fil sous moulure, fourniture et pose: 1 850 francs. Pélissier had written payé across it in violet ink and the date beneath.

There was a ledger in the tin as well. It recorded what was owed to him. Most of it was in the name of Fernand Lagache, a jeweller in the rue Vieille-du-Temple, who sent him repairs every Thursday and paid for them, by the ledger, perhaps one time in four. The arrears came to two hundred and twelve thousand francs. Lhuillier read the figure out twice and put his pencil behind his ear, which he does when he has decided.

Lower down, on separate lines, in pencil, there were smaller sums against a single initial. R. — 15 000. R. — 20 000. R. — 20 000. The first was dated October 1951, the last six weeks before he died. Nothing was written against any of them as repaid.

"R. could be anyone," said Lhuillier. "Could be Rigaud."

"Rigaud was paid," I said, and showed him the bill.

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There were two people with a reason. Lagache owed the money. The nephew, Raymond Coustel, was the old man's only relation, and so he inherited: the garret's lease, a workbench, some hundreds of watch parts in labelled matchboxes, and a savings book at the Caisse d'Épargne with four hundred thousand francs in it.

Lagache came to the quai on Thursday without being sent for, which counted against him with Lhuillier and in his favour with me. He was a soft, quick man in a camel coat. He talked with his hands, and his hands told me, before his mouth did, that he was frightened of us and not of the room. Yes, he owed the money. Everybody owed Pélissier money; Pélissier liked it that way, he said, because it brought the work back to him. He had last climbed the six flights on Thursday the eleventh, in the afternoon, with a Breguet that had a broken mainspring. Only ever in the afternoon. He could not do those stairs in the dark at his age, and his wife would not have him out after dinner.

On the Tuesday evening, when the doctor put the death between eight and eleven, Lagache said he had been at home. His wife said the same. Lhuillier said that wives say the same.

The nephew I went to see myself, at the insurance office in the rue La Fayette where he was a senior clerk in the claims department. He came down to the hall to meet me rather than have me brought up. He was tall, about forty-five, and thin in the way that clerks are thin, with a stoop that came from the height of desks and not from age. When he shook my hand he put out his right hand first. Then he saw my sleeve, and he changed hands in the air. People mostly do that, and I like them for it. He did it very quickly.

"I had not seen my uncle since 1942," he said. "We quarrelled. It was the winter there was no coal. He said things about my mother I will not repeat, and I said things back, and that was the end of it. I am sorry he is dead. I don't pretend to be more sorry than that."

"You were not at the funeral."

"I did not know when it was until the notary wrote."

"And the Tuesday evening?"

"My wife was at her sister's in Vincennes. I was at home. I read. I went to bed at ten." He said it without hurrying. Then he put his hat on, and took it off again, because we were indoors.

"Madame Bouvard says you shouted on the landing," I said. "In 1942."

"Then Madame Bouvard has a good memory," he said. "I hope she remembers I left and did not come back."

She did remember that. She had told me so in the same words.

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The house in the rue de la Parcheminerie had a fuse board on each landing, a row of porcelain carriers in a wooden box with a door that did not shut. On Saturday at four, while there was still some light in the courtyard, I went up alone. I drew the fuse for the garret and put it in my coat pocket. Then I went into the room and stood in it for some time.

You learn a room with your feet before you learn it with your eyes. The fourth board from the threshold gave under the heel. The boards nearest the bench had been worn into a shallow dip by fifty years of a stool scraping. I went out, shut the door, opened it again, and walked in as though I were coming home. The door went back against the left-hand wall. One, two, three. My right hand, the one I do not have, went down to my hip.

I stood there with nothing in it for a moment. Then I went down and waited for Lagache.

He came at five, cross at being fetched and out of breath by the third floor. I let him go up ahead of me. I told him there were papers on the bench I wanted him to look at, invoices of his among them perhaps, and I did not want to read them by torchlight.

"The bulb's gone, or the fuse," I said at the door. "Be good enough to try the switch while I get my torch out. I have only the one hand."

It was entirely dark in there. The window had gone the colour of a slate roof, and gave no light. Lagache stepped in and turned to the right, as anyone would, and I heard his palm go flat against the plaster beside the frame, at the height of his shoulder. It slid up and down, then along. The calendar rustled under it. He swore at the dead man without much feeling and said, "Where the devil did he keep it?"

I put the torch on. He was standing a foot inside the door, with his hand on the coal merchant's month of February.

"Thank you," I said. "The papers can wait."

---

Coustel came at seven. I had asked him, through the notary, to help me with the inventory: there were family things, a photograph of his mother, a silver watch that might have been his grandfather's, and the law would rather an heir identified them than a policeman. He was in good time. He wore a grey overcoat and carried his gloves in his left hand. Lhuillier waited in the café on the corner with his back to the window.

The stair lights in that house are on a timer. You press the button on the ground floor and have two minutes, which is enough for four flights if you are thirty and three if you are not. The light went out between the fourth and fifth landings. I heard him stop above me and find the rail. We went on up in the dark. There was a little grey from the skylight at the top, enough to show the shape of the door.

I gave him the key, because I needed my hand for the torch. He turned it in the lock with no trouble, but I have seen men turn harder locks than that one with no trouble.

"The light is off," I said. "The fuse, I think. Go in and try the switch, would you, while I get this out of my pocket."

He went in.

I have thought since about what I heard, and I will put it down in the order I heard it. The door went back against the wall and touched it. Then came the boards, one, two, and the third with its give under the heel. There was no sound of a hand on plaster, no patting, no search. Then the click, small and dry, a brown Bakelite click at the height of a man's hip. Then nothing, because there was no fuse. Then the click again, and again, more quickly, the way you work a switch that ought to answer.

I put the torch on.

He was standing at the end of the workbench with his left hand down at his side, flat on the wooden block, his thumb still on the switch. He was not looking at me. He was looking at his hand as if somebody else had put it there.

"Madame Bouvard must have told me where it was," he said.

"You have not spoken to Madame Bouvard."

"Then I saw it. When you opened the door."

"It was dark when I opened the door, and it is behind the door. Monsieur Lagache was here two hours ago. He came up those stairs once a week for twenty years, in daylight. He looked for it by the frame, on the right, where it is in every flat in Paris. I found him with his hand on the calendar." I took the folded bill out of my inside pocket and held it in the torchlight between two fingers, which is all a left hand can manage while it holds a torch. "Your uncle had the switch moved in March 1951. You have been in this room since March 1951. You have come into it in the dark often enough for your hand to know where to go, without you."

He took his thumb off the switch. Then he put it back, and pressed it once more, slowly, as though the first three times might have been a mistake.

"R.," I said. "Fifteen thousand. Twenty. Twenty."

"He liked to be asked," Coustel said. "He liked me to come up the stairs and ask. He wrote it down in front of me. Every time."

He said no more about it then. He did not need to. His right hand was resting at the edge of the bench, a few inches from the brass lamp, and I watched it. It did not move toward the lamp. It moved away from it, very slightly, and lay still on the wood. I think he felt it wanting to go there, and was more afraid of that than of me.

"Monsieur Lhuillier is downstairs," I said. "We will go down to him now."

---

The stair light was off when we came out onto the landing. I kept the torch on the steps in front of him and went down behind him, as one is taught to. Between the fifth and fourth landings the battery began to fail, as it had been failing all week. The beam went brown and then went out, and we were in the dark together on a stair neither of us could see.

I reached for the rail. I reached with the right hand first, as I always do. It closed on the rail and held it, and for a step I was held up by nothing. Then the left hand came across and took its weight.

Below me there was a small sound of a palm on plaster, once, with no searching. Then a click. The light came on, on every landing at once. Raymond Coustel stood on the fourth landing with his finger still on the timer button, and he did not look round.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Mauritiō Merleau-Pontiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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