J.M.G. Le Clézio

Terra Amata

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. M. G. Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice and was educated at the University College of Nice and at Bristol and London universities. His knowledge of English enabled him to work closely with his translator on his debut novel, The Interrogation, which won the Prix Renaudot in 1963. Since then he has written over forty highly acclaimed books and has been translated into thirty-six languages. The Interrogation is published by Penguin and three of his early novels are now Penguin Modern Classics: The Flood, Terra Amata and Fever. Le Clézio divides his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), New Mexico and Mauritius. In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

PROLOGUE

You’ve opened the book at this page. You’ve turned over two or three pages, glancing idly at the title, the name of the author, the publisher, and perhaps you’ve looked for the phrase in quotation marks that’s nearly always to be found at the beginning of novels because it looks well and the author covers himself to a certain extent by referring to someone more important than he is. In this case the phrase might have been: ‘I am one of you, a grain, one of you … Shining … Vibrating … Burning …’ I was in the Bibliothèque Nationale one day and a woman of about fifty with a rabbit’s-fur hat on came up to the table where I was sitting, held her hand out shyly, and said, ‘I’ m Maria Michal-owicz … Perhaps … These poems …’ They were very good poems, and if I’d quoted anything at all I’d have been glad to quote a line from one of them.

But to continue: you’ve opened the book. You bought it in a bookshop, or someone gave it to you as a present, perhaps a birthday present. Why this book rather than another? There are so many novels in the bookshops, so many love-stories, detective-stories, adventures, thrillers. There are so many intriguing titles, so many books that are all the rage, with pictures and conversation and psychology on every page. Sometimes they have such lovely titles—A Scent of Pines, Dum-dum Symphony, Say it with Prunes! The Praying Mantis—such lovely titles, and the names of strange, mysterious cities: Manila, Hongkong, Arequipa, Tokyo, Reykjavik, Vladivostock, and so on. And such beautiful dust-jackets: a pretty girl without any clothes on holding a revolver, or stretching out her arms to embrace you. There are so many interesting books, so much crime and violence and exoticism and eroticism. So why this book? But of course there’s always art, literature, the books you can leave lying about on your bedside table and not be ashamed of; there’s always culture. All that’s too complicated to talk about, and too dangerous as well, perhaps … Anyway, there you are with this book open in front of you, about twelve inches from your face. You’ve already flicked through the pages, glancing at a line here and there to see what it’s all about, or in the hope of finding a spicy bit. Then you probably decided to read it; that’s what people generally do with books. You made yourself as comfortable as possible and opened it. If you bought it at a railway station along with two or three newspapers, you probably gave a thought while you were choosing it to the people who’d be sitting opposite you in the compartment. It’s a shield you hold in front of you to ward off the gossip and curiosity of your neighbours. The jolting of the train makes the lines jump up and down, so it’s difficult to read. The monotonous sound of the wheels on the rails gradually penetrates and anaesthetizes you. You won’t get far. Soon you’ll shut your eyes and try to go to sleep. Or you’ll lay the book aside for your magazine, and re-read the story in pictures of the latest plane crash, or about a war in some country somewhere with an unpronounceable name. But perhaps you’re not on a train. Perhaps you’re in the passenger-lounge of an airport and have got to wait there all night for a connection. You bought the book at a kiosk and then went and sat down on the cushions of an excessively deep armchair. You’ve lit a cigarette and begun to read, while the maddening voice of the automatic girl echoes all over the airport: ‘Flight SAS 612 for Frankfurt, immediate boarding gate number 19. Vol SAS 612 pour Franc-fort, départ immédiat porte numéro 19’. Everything sparkles in the bald light falling relentlessly from the flat ceilings and reflected back from plastic, glass and metal surfaces. The hours are long and empty; unreal. Here the book is no longer just a shield. It’s also a weapon, a revolver with which you could shoot at all these spotless windows, all these bustling, distant silhouettes.

But perhaps you aren’t travelling. In that case you’re just sitting at home in your chair with a glass of something in your hand and your slippers on. You read without haste, just skipping one or two lines occasionally, rarely a whole page. You picked up two or three books at once, selecting this one at the last minute because it happened to be on top. Unless you’re on your bed. Lots of people like to read lying down. The only thing is if you stay too long in one position, leaning on your right elbow, say, you soon get cramp. But you can read in any position, even kneeling down or standing on one foot. There’s no compulsory attitude for cultivating the mind.

Or you can read on the beach. You put on dark glasses because of the sun and stretch out face downwards on the sand or the pebbles. When it gets too hot you go into the sea for a dip. In that way you can start reading again without realizing you’ve read that part before, which is never a bad thing when it comes to literature. The book is there, like an object in the midst of life, no more readable and no more lasting than everything else around you. A woman in a bikini walks by; you look at her. Then you turn back to the written word, and it’s as if the woman in the bikini had really walked right through the story. You have the word ‘table’, or ‘mirror’, but it might just as well have been ‘cloud’ or ‘tanker’. It’s precisely that which is interesting in a book — that which is noted in an infinite variety of ways in the one possible way. But what does it matter when and where you read these lines? What does it matter why you’re reading, even? It is this reason or that, and it might have been anything. Chance with its million cog-wheels never ceases its wearying grind. What does it matter that there was one to write and another to read? In the last resort, in the very last resort, they are one and the same, and they’ve always known it.

ON THE EARTH BY CHANCE

I’ll begin by saying what kind of a landscape it was. It was a stretch of earth and dry rubble, with a few mountains, a few hills, and, on the other side, the great plateau of the sea. An undistinguished sort of country, but so to speak eternal, where thousands of men and women had been born and then had died, where lizards had slept in their holes, and insects had hummed, and thick-leaved plants and dusty shrubs had sent down their roots, one after the other, calmly, without changing anything. It was a countryside without a name, old like the skin of an old woman, dilated by the day, chilled by the night, washed by the rains, worn by the wind, split by the frost, nibbled at by the sea, furrowed by the streams, dug, sown, ploughed, eaten, trodden down century after century; now and then an earthquake had swept over it thrusting up new peaks, opening new gulfs. But it was as if nothing had happened. The fossil shells remained imprisoned, useless, in their dusty matrices.

I’d also like to talk straight away about the sun. Above the hard crust of the earth you can see it seething away like some strange motionless whirlpool. Now, round and livid, it’s in position for about 2.30 in the afternoon, and there’s nothing else but it. Concealed, swollen and distended, behind pale layers of air, it is a burning, staring eye. It understands nothing. It judges nothing. No, it is simply fixed and hard, ceasingly sending out its concentric rings to the earth, while the red mercury column climbs towards 30. Heat comes from and out of it, spreading over the four corners of the sky, and this energy fills everything to the brim like a sandstorm: hard, hard, ramming each of its grains into every available hollow, wearing away, scraping, galling. Today the sun is so heavy and its gaze so painful that it’s as if it too had been given a name, a name for ever, written down in books, graven on steles of stone, slashed into the leaves of the bald aloes which eternally dry up the eternal scar.

SUN

Now you can talk to him, call him by his name, mumble the incomprehensible litanies. You can meet his gaze too, until your eyes begin to burn and veil themselves with tears. You can take a pair of those thick-lensed glasses and let the pewter-coloured globe glide down their dull screen. The white star floats in the evening sky. It hangs alone in the middle of the heavens like an electric light bulb. Or like a single nickel coin shining on a black table.

Now is the moment to look straight at him from the floating plateau of the earth, and call upon him. So as not to forget him, give him the name of some man or beast. Kax — he shall be called Kax. Kax looks down on the earth. Kax warms the trunks of the trees. Kax reduces the little lumps of mud to powder.

A lens held over the earth, which makes everything visible. Held over the infinitesimal spark of light hidden in the mass of dust and ashes, the little white spark from which comes life and from which, perhaps in a few seconds, will spring the first paper-burning flame.

The light pours down, the brightness whirls and vibrates unwearyingly. For Kax is not kind. He is a pitiless monster that seeks to destroy the world. He throws his invisible darts, he gnaws and scrapes imperceptibly at everything within reach, and every evening when he disappears below the horizon you hear a great sigh of peace over all the earth.

Down below on the earth is the army of insects. There are insects of every colour, some black as jet, some blue, some grey, some yellow, some red and gold, some red and green, some purple, some iridescent. They perch on every green leaf, preening their legs and wings. Some are motionless, like drops of blood. Others walk and walk without stopping, clutching on to the fine hairs of the grasses with their little crooked legs. Others hover with throbbing abdomen. Yet others swim in puddles. You could never finish counting them. You could never finish killing them one by one.

Every so often a butterfly darts about madly through the warm air. Behind the great blocks of mossy stone the worms stuff their pale bellies. Or a centipede swiftly unwinds and with its thousand feet digs itself a hole to hide in. This is the world of the dung-beetles, scorpions and termites. Bulging eye, quivering feeler, hard cold black body that creeps between the grains of earth.

And each one has its name. Like so many little men they each have their magic identity. There’s one mosquito that’s called Sepia, and another Darius, and another Ananda. There’s the blowfly Truming. The cockroach Bryant. The caterpillar Alex. The flea Maria. The grasshopper Smythe, and the grasshopper Eole. There’s the bed-bug Marcelle. The tick Galapago. The mason-wasp Giordano. The black spider Sanka. The butterfly Dorian, the moth Kazan. There’s Anya the ladybird, Knock the praying mantis, Furious the fish and Go the cockchafer.

They are all there. Each one with its name, its tiny solemn life, its eggs, its larvae, the things it eats, its excrement. Each with its lurking danger of death, making the heart tremble deep within the hermetic carapace. Each with its hole, its familiar paths, its places for hunting or love, its flowers, its pebble mountains. You must be there with them at the right moment, and call them softly, mysteriously, by their names.

But there are also the plants, and the other animals. Azor the dog, Pussy the cat, Coco the parrot. And every blade of grass, its special name written in every fibre, that yields beneath the weight of the wind. Manuel, Kalar, Gélo, Silicoe, Amadeus, Prixt, Tony, Gaur, Terence, Gilbert the olive-tree, Anatole the cactus. Jeremy the cork-oak, Waterman the bamboo. Each blade of grass sticking up out of the ground like a hair and leading its own silent life. Each of these trees, each of these flowers, each of these stones or ponds, must be given a name so as not to be forgotten. This round stone shall be called Sib-Song, this sharp one Moroboc. That crow just flying by is Pliny. That horse with a galled back is Goiran. That bit of broken bottle is Roland. It reflects light from the sky Han, caught between the branches of the cherry-tree Otho and Gregory, the dusty boulder. The seagull Antar hovers over Maa the sea, between the wave Solange and the wave Simone.

And when you’d given everything, each animal and each plant, a name, you’d never be alone again. All over this huge landscape beaten down on endlessly by the sun, these names are linked with one another by fine, almost invisible threads. They contain every story, every adventure. Countless. Ceaseless. Millions of little dramas, billions of little tragi-comedies, thrillers, corridas, tournaments, wars, processions, in which every twig and pebble has its part. Yes, it’s here one ought to sit down, on a rock in the middle of the earth, or lie down on the hard grass, and write the whole history of the world. You could start on the first page of a big black exercise-book, and write in capital letters:

HISTORY OF THE WORLD

It would contain all the miniature epics, all the combats and massacres and exoduses. Chapter CXXII, for example, would tell of the destruction of Tsin, city of the ants, and of the long march to the mound where they were to build their new town.

Chapter DXCIV would have the adventure of Nathan the crab. It would set down how Nathan, washed ashore in a storm with three broken legs, crawled under the cruel sun to the pool of Banatovoro, there to reign as absolute lord until he was four years old, when he was crushed to death by a falling rock.

Chapter CMXCIX would give a biography of Fueco, the salamander without a tail.

Chapter MDCCII would treat of the fight to the death between the two tarantulas, Brux and Géochs, for Waïon the female.

And Chapter MMMCCCXLVI would relate how a thunderbolt fell one summer night on the oak-tree Zaba, and split it in two, and how the fire spread all over the mountain, burning thousands of trees and animals to death in a few hours.

Here, as everywhere else, lots of things happened. On this portion of earth once inhabited, then deserted, the sun struck down with all its strength. The rocks wore gently away, imperceptibly dropping their sweat of sand and gravel. The plants grew peacefully, their little identical leaves all stretching out towards the light. And in the earth the hairy roots sought without moving for the crystals, drank the water, and dissolved the salts. It was like a pot of flowers, but very large, a sort of Japanese garden in which everything stays where it is. Here the aloes. There the blue-painted stream and the pond made from a piece of mirror. Yonder the twisted rock, elaborate as a piece of coral. Near the rock the grove of Aaron’s rod, and close by a few clumps of grass, a dwarf cactus, and a plant that smells of mint. A bed of geraniums. By the looking-glass lake, a temple the size of a match-box, and a toll-gate. Some pink flamingoes perch on their long thin legs. And just by the bank, facing the unknown, a man in a conical hat carries a streamer on which is written:

There’s no escaping this country. No escaping these names, these labels everything bears in being itself. It is also a prison, but light and without walls, where all that happens has a secret meaning that enchains you. Try as you may to run away, to hide in dark caves or dim bushes, it’s useless. You can’t escape. You can’t ever get away. You’re continually overcome by blows dealt you from all directions at once by beauty — great, cruel, delightful beauty. Towns, the houses of men, beaches, cars, the sunken lanes that wind among the hills, and the swirls of noisy torrents — you can hide in none of them. Beauty always finds you and comes gently, pitilessly, to drag you out and plunge you once more into the living vortex. She has claws and fangs and a calm imperious voice, and she hurts you, hurts you at the same time as she helps you. Beauty.

The sky is shrouded, lightning suddenly tears the dark clouds, big drops of rain begin to fall: it is she. In the blackberry thicket a thorn suddenly pierces a finger, adding to the pearl of blood a whitlow germ: it is she, it is still she. On the grey trees the fruit swells and hangs heavily from the branches: it is she in each orange, each lemon, each medlar. On the motor-way the tar melts in the sun and the cars stop, their radiators boiling. It is she. Beauty.

So that was what that landscape was like — there on that piece of earth facing the sea, beneath the naked sky, with at night the moon and stars, and in the day the solitary stare of Kax, the sun.

Bare as a drawing by a four-year-old, reduced to the essentials: a horizontal line, a tree as tall as a tower, a house with a pointed roof, and, in a sky divided into squares, on the right a kind of shining grasshopper and all over the rest, scribbled huggermugger and indistinct, the spirals of the stars, the zigzags of the birds, the patches of cloud and the discs of jet-planes and flying saucers. It was the simplest of places. There was no country in the world but it. It was as if you had been alive for ever, hidden somewhere, for centuries and centuries, drawn in one corner, scribbled down just like the others. Yes, you’d always been there, with all the rest of them, with Kax, with Maa the sea, with Manuel, Kalar, Azor, Gélo, Silicoe, Prixt, Gaur, Tony and Amadeus. With the tarantulas Brux and Géochs, with Nathan the crab and Fueco the salamander. With Bryant the cockroach and Alex the caterpillar. With the cockchafer Go.

A few letters had been written higgledy-piggledy, spelling your own name: CHANCELADE.

I WAS BORN

The little boy whose name was Chancelade was sitting in the sun outside the old house. He wore a pair of cotton trousers and a red shirt, and his feet were bare. On his right wrist was a toy plastic watch with the hands pointing to half-past twelve. But no one could have said what the real time was. He was sitting on the second of the steps up to the door, picking his nose.

It was the beginning of summer, or autumn. The sun shone motionless in the middle of a grey-blue sky. The trees stood peacefully in the earth, and the wind blew through their leaves with the sound of falling rain. In front of the red-brick house was a sort of fallow garden bounded left and right by a bamboo hedge and at the end by a stream that served as a drain. It wasn’t a very big garden, but it had lots of plants and grasses. A few trees too here and there. Two very tall palm-trees with ivy round their trunks. An orange and a lemon, both stunted. A cherry-tree with a big white gash full of ants. A medlar, a laurel, and a mandarin. In the middle of the garden, surrounded by a border of pebbles, an olive spread its ample branches in every direction. All around it little bushes sprang up out of the grass where the olives had fallen, rotted, then sprouted. And right at the bottom of the garden, by the evil-smelling stream, was the eucalyptus. It was very tall, with smooth trunk and sickle-shaped leaves, and it gave off a slow stale smell and rustled in the wind. It must have been between seventy and a hundred and twenty years old.

The boy walked about in the grass for a few minutes, careful where he put his feet because of the scorpions. Then he went back and sat on the same step again and began as usual to play with the potato-bugs.

Potato-bugs were running about all over the grass and on the concrete path below the steps. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, coming and going in all directions, stopping, starting again, trying to climb the walls and falling back defeated. They were all the same, with a black head, finely curved black legs, black feelers, and a body covered in red and black stripes that shone in the sun. They didn’t go about in ordered caravans like ants, but helter-skelter, each searching separately for something he could never find, going over the same ground ten times, bumping into one another, groping at one another, never weary. Chancelade watched them for a long while from his step, not thinking. Every now and then one of them would climb on to the ankles of his trousers or on to his toes, and then he would lift them off gently and toss them back on to the grass.

It could have gone on like that for hours. You could have stayed there for hours watching them teem over the concrete path. Or if you liked you could have tried to follow just one, that one for example, the one that’s just emerged from a tuft of grass and begun to walk over the concrete. He hurries along two bandy legs at a time. He passes another bug going in the opposite direction, then another. He doesn’t even see them. He overtakes a potato-bug standing still, then turns round and goes back past it again. He turns to the right and goes towards a little heap of sand that someone must have emptied out of their beach-shoes. He goes round it to the left. Stops. Comes back. Meets three other potato-bugs walking round the heap of sand. Stops. Feels the antennae of the first potato-bug. Feels the antennae of the second potato-bug. Feels the back of the third potato-bug. The path’s clear: off he goes again. He turns about and starts going round the heap of sand again to the left. Another potato-bug. Two. Three. Four. He goes over a twig that moves slightly as he does so. He stops. Starts again. Goes very fast. Turns to the right and heads for the wall. Meets one potato-bug. Overtakes another. Walks without noticing over a group of Argentine ants and scatters them. Comes to a scrap of rotten cardboard. Stops. Feels it with his antennae. Tries to stand on his hind legs and climb over it. But the cardboard moves and he gives up. Then he goes off the way he came, but more slowly now. Goes past a group of three potato-bugs standing facing one another. Turns left, right, left, right again then left again. He crosses the groove in the path. Stops. Stays still for four or five seconds, then goes off again as fast as he can, fleeing some incomprehensible danger. He clambers over another twig, passes another potato-bug. He makes straight for a fly but just as he’s about to hit it it takes off. He overtakes one potato-bug on the right and another on the left. He changes direction and goes back towards the wall. When he reaches the foot of it he runs along towards the steps. Every so often he stops, turns towards the wall and tries to climb it. But he hasn’t got the strength. Then he holds his feelers out towards the garden, trying to see what’s happening in those layers of air where the misty unknown peacefully pulsates.

You could amuse yourself watching him for hours, inch by inch, every moment of his vain excursion. Or you could take another potato-bug, for instance the one pacing along the edge of the path next to the garden. Or the one that’s climbed right up the geranium stalk, or again the one that’s just standing still in the middle of the patch of concrete waiting for heaven knows what.

You could follow every one of them, each with its life, its microscopic adventures, its heart, eyes, feelers, intestines, sex-organs, and its red-and-black-striped back. And you too had your life, closed in and warm, as if somewhere there were someone sitting on some huge steps, looking down and watching you without thinking.

When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs’ god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.

He slid down and sat on the bottom step. Then with his right foot he pulled the iron footscraper towards him. He picked up the metal grille then put it down again to mark out the limits of his kingdom. The interstices of the bars formed thirty little separate cells. Chancelade bent down beside it, collected thirty potato-bugs, and arranged them one in each cell. When all the holes were occupied he knelt on the ground and saw what he had made; and behold, it was very good. Inside the metal enclosures the potato-bugs were all struggling to escape, putting their front feet on the iron and trying to hoist themselves up. But after a few seconds they all dropped back: they were too heavy and their feet slipped on the metal. Some even fell on their backs and made desperate efforts to right themselves, waving all their legs, their brown bellies exposed. The boy helped them up with the tip of his finger, but no sooner were they on their feet than they started trying to climb the walls of their cells again.

Chancelade looked at the prison he’d made. In every square of the grille you could see the red-and-black-striped backs and tiny feet of the potato-bugs moving and waving about. It was like looking down on a town, a real town of steel and concrete with rows of windows opening into the little sealed boxes of apartments. It was a town that you could bomb or destroy or set fire to or raze to the ground. You could annihilate the inhabitants one by one, at random, without their being able to do anything to defend themselves. Chancelade looked down on the town from his own height and began to reign over it. He spoke to it, though he knew that none of his words would be understood. Every so often he would utter sharp orders. He’d say:

‘You, there.’

‘Yes, you. You think I haven’t seen you, do you? You just wait a bit.’

‘Stop! No trying to escape, do you hear?’

‘Go on, march, you over there — go round in circles!’

‘That’s right, keep it up!’

‘Watch what you’re doing, potato-bug No. 6!’

‘Up you get! And now what?’

‘Take it easy there, take it easy!’

‘Halt!’

‘And what about you? Do you think I can’t see you? I can see everything, let me tell you — everything!’

‘Hey you — leave the wall alone!’

‘Watch out or I’m going to get angry …’

Chancelade began with the bug in cell No. 16. It was a strong little creature and when the boy got hold of it between his thumb and forefinger it struggled and tried to escape by clinging on with its feet. Chancelade brought it up close to his face, looked at it and rebuked it gently. Then with his left hand he pulled off its legs one by one. When the punishment was concluded he put the bug back in its cage. It lay there motionless for a few seconds, as if dead. Then it tried to crawl along the ground, its whole body quivering with helplessness. Only its feelers went on waving to and fro in the air, searching for something to feel. Then Chancelade picked it up in his fingers again and put it down beside the scraper. Quite quietly, without anger, he spoke to it again. He said:

‘You see. You oughtn’t to have done that. You ought to have done as I told you. Now you can’t move any more. You haven’t got any legs.’

The boy got up, went and looked in the garden for a sharp stone, then came and knelt down again by the potato-bug. He saw that its wing-cases were partly open and it was trying to spread its brown wings.

‘Like to fly away, would you?’ said Chancelade. ‘But you can’t.’

With a desperate effort the insect managed to unfold its right wing.

‘In any case you won’t get anywhere,’ said Chancelade, ‘because I’m going to kill you with this stone.’

He gave it a little push with the stone and it rolled over on its back. Chancelade noticed that one of its back legs hadn’t been pulled off completely: the stump was moving back and forth as if the insect was trying to row with limbs that were no longer there. The feelers on its head opened and shut mechanically.

‘In any case you’ll be better off like this,’ said the boy. And he banged the sharp stone down as hard as he could. Then he looked, and saw the potato-bug squashed on the concrete, in the middle of a little pool the colour of tomato sauce.

A sort of anger rose in him. He suddenly had the feeling that his people had betrayed and abandoned him. He looked at the town with hatred. Then he spoke again. But his words fell on the earth like thunder, and his breath burned like the blast from a volcano. He told them he was going to kill them all, all, as he’d just killed potato-bug No. 16. They hadn’t trusted him. They’d rebelled. They’d refused the kingdom he’d offered them and hadn’t wanted him as their only god. For that they would know his vengeance. He was going to kill them all without exception.

To start with the boy banged with his stone at the inside of the cells. But the stone was too big — it had to be brought down four or five times before it would smash a potato-bug’s back. Some of them weren’t quite killed and dragged themselves round leaving patches of tomato-juice. Chancelade’s anger didn’t last. He threw away the red-stained stone and said:

‘Listen, all of you. I’ve found a way to punish you. I’m going to kill you with the scraper. I shall drop it on you and it’ll cut your heads off. I’ll be generous too — any that aren’t killed by the scraper, I shan’t do anything to them. They can live. Do you hear? All right then, move — see you’re not one of those that gets it in the neck!’

The boy crouched down, got hold of the scraper with both hands, lifted it up and held it in the air for two or three seconds. Below, the population of potato-bugs began to swarm in all directions. Some tried to escape, running as fast as their legs would carry them. Some shammed dead, crouching curled up with their legs and feelers drawn in under their bellies. Some lay there crushed or half-crushed, stuck in their pools of blood-red liquid. Several others, trying to run away, got their feet stuck in these pools and stood there feeling the bodies with their antennae, their mouths perhaps sampling the fluid that issued from their brothers’ entrails. Chancelade held the scraper poised above the insects a little while longer, without speaking, without thinking. All menace had entered into him, and hatred, and pity, and something that resembled fate. Then he opened his fingers and let the heavy grille fall on the town. The clatter of the metal on the concrete was followed by a dull silence.

Chancelade bent down and looked. He saw that nearly all the potato-bugs had been killed. Most had been sliced in two by the bars of the scraper: tomato sauce had spurted all over the grey metal. Some of them still crawled about, horribly mutilated, with half of their abdomen gone or their back torn away. Others had had their legs severed, and limped about in circles. Everywhere were gashed heads, slashed bellies, crushed thoraxes, broken limbs, wings torn to pieces. One had even been hit on the hindquarters by the corner of the scraper just as it was trying to escape. The heavy metal had pinned it to the ground, but all the free part of its body was still alive, and strained with all its legs to get away. At last it did succeed in freeing itself, but it left half its belly behind under the scraper. It managed to crawl along for a few centimetres, leaving a trail of innards. Then, at the end of the red streak, it died.

No groan, no cry of pain arose from the ravaged town. On the contrary, a strange silence reigned, as if everything were quite normal. But that silence was much more terrible than lamentation: it was an intense, tragic silence that entered into the boy’s ears and slowly chilled him. It was a distant silence, like some extra-terrestrial disaster, when a star explodes suddenly millions of light-years away and disappears into the darkness of space as if it were no more than a lamp switched off.

What had just taken place, though Chancelade did not fully realize it, was something terrible. It was more important than the place or the moment, more important than himself. It was something unbearable to anyone who could free himself from this piece of earth and judge the truth of the event as a whole. Here once again fate had acted alone. Fate, ignoble fate that prepares events, had chosen the path to this murder, for nothing, merely so that the act should be accomplished. This patch of concrete had been made for it. This house, this garden, this grass and these trees had gradually been put there, year after year, just for this. This sky had been filled with clouds, this sun had risen and climbed to the zenith, this wind had blown, this water had flowed in the streams, these planes had droned above the horizon, only for this: so that this boy, born one day, should come and sit on the second step outside the red-brick house and kill this town of insects without thinking.

All cataclysms and all wars were there in the squashed bodies of the potato-bugs, in their scattered entrails, in the thick red liquid spattered over the sharp bars of the grille.

The avalanche had fallen silently, engulfing the tiny bodies in its tons of white powder. In the quiet night, for no reason, the dam had burst and the slimy flood of mud and water hurled itself on the village, knocking down houses, uprooting trees, filling the mouths and nostrils of sleeping men, women and children.

Or else war had burst over the captive town. There’d been one enormous flash and in a second the blinding wave had blown millions of living creatures to atoms. And now there was this sort of wound or cancer on the earth that would leave a scar for ever. A few things still stood upright around the churned-up crater: walls a thousand years old, half-burned telegraph-poles, old scraps of metal, bits of brick inscribed with the shadow of a man now vanished into thin air.

It was all these things at once that had just taken place here on this concrete path, with these steps, and this boy, and this scraper, and these potato-bugs. One more murder, just one more murder. And already it was forgotten.

The boy collected up all the potato-bugs that were still alive and put them in an empty match-box he’d fetched from the kitchen. Then he swept up the corpses and threw them on the grass.

In the match-box there were six potato-bugs: Antis, Goliath, Vélo, Ajax, Potato and Bug. Chancelade went and sat on the top step with his back against the kitchen door and played with them. He tried to teach them tricks. He tried to teach them to fight. He tried to make them walk along two by two and play football with a paper pellet. He tried to feed them. But it was no use. They wouldn’t see. Every now and again Chancelade would hold one of them in his hand and feel the little feet walking over his skin and the jaws nibbling at his fingers.

When, when he’d had enough, he went and got a match from the kitchen and set light to the box. And so died Antis, Goliath, Vélo, Ajax, Potato and Bug, sole survivors of the great massacre that took place that day among the potato-bugs.

A LIVING MAN

You could try to express what bliss it was in those days to be alive. Of course there were bothersome things here or there. Terrible things, if you looked too closely. There was the dreadful burden of everything that’s too much alive, all that mingles with air, earth and water in an attempt to destroy you. There was the malice of men, the voracity of beasts, and the indifference of objects. There were all the sounds and sights and smells like continual dagger-thrusts in the flesh. It wasn’t easy to live with all those things; no, no one could have said it was easy. But all the same it was funny in a way, touching and funny, a splendid adventure complete with emotion, language, consciousness, and perhaps, in some recess of the memory, a kind of nostalgia for silence and peace.

Yes, what was happening to you was an unforgettable and unique adventure. No one else would ever know about it, and no one would ever really want to know. And yet you had been there one day on the earth, a living man. You’d learned to walk and talk and eat and read and write. You’d smiled for the first time. You’d begun to love, or hate. You’d tried to understand, you’d looked at the sky, the clouds, the sun, the yellow flowers. You’d waved your arms about. You’d been afraid. And all this hadn’t happened to somebody else: it all concerned you, it was you it was all about. Your face. Your skin. Your hair and nails and tufts of whiskers. Your brain. Your inside, your heart. Your hands, your arms, your legs, your ankles, your elbows. Whatever happens now, whatever the outcome of this too long story, you can’t pretend it wasn’t you. You can’t avert your eyes or skip the pages or shut the book and do your nails with a little pocket-file. It won’t wash. Other people might believe you’d forgotten, but not you. You can’t get away from yourself. You must live, and go on living. You must go on reading the picture-book that tells your story, like this, right to the very end.

It’s an interesting story because it’s about you. You could even say it’s the only interesting story you’ll ever come across. You get up from the bed you’re lying on or the chair you’re sitting in. You walk up and down the room, you look out of the window at what’s going on in the street or the garden. Then you come back into the middle of the room and pretend to light a cigarette with a match or maybe a lighter. Or you undo the cellophane wrapping round a mint and put it in your mouth. You scratch your left ear. If there’s someone else in the room, your wife for instance, you say:

‘What’s the time?’

‘What?’

‘I asked what the time was.’

‘Ten past five.’

‘Shall we go for a walk?’

‘Where to?’

‘Oh? I don’t know. I thought we might—’

‘But we have to be here at six.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

‘And look at the weather.’

‘Yes, it’s going to rain.’

‘Don’t you want to read any more?’

‘No.’

‘Is it any good?’

‘We-e-ell.’

‘I bought a very good detective story the other day when I was out with Annie.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘The book? — Along the Dotted Line.’

‘Who’s it by?’

‘I can’t remember — an American, I think, or perhaps an Englishman. It’s about a chap that sends people letters with typhoid germs all over them. Good idea, eh?’

‘Not bad … And you can’t remember the name of the author?’

‘Bowling, Rowlins, something like that.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Or perhaps it was a German called Reuter.’

‘Oh?’

‘I was with Annie. We were walking along the street because she had an appointment with—’

‘What about going to the cinema?’

‘Eh?’

‘What about going to the cinema this evening?’

‘What’s on?’

‘Nothing special, I don’t think.’

‘The cinema every evening — I’m beginning to get fed up with it.’

‘What else would you like to do? I suppose you’re not suggesting we go to the theatre?’

‘Are you joking?’

‘No, but seriously, why not?’

‘If you can’t think of anything else do a crossword puzzle. I’ve got work to do.’

‘If we only had a telly it’d be something.’

‘It was you who were against it it. You said it made you seasick.’

‘Yes, if you watch it every evening.’

‘You would watch it every evening.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘I know you.’

Then you light another cigarette. You breathe out blue smoke through your mouth and grey through your nostrils, in little puffs. You pick up a magazine and flick through the pages, looking at the photographs and the captions, the advertisements for brassières and corsets, the advertisements for cars and refrigerators and milk chocolate and nut milk chocolate. You look at the dim photographs with girls smiling and climbing out of cars revealing sun-tanned thighs, girls running along beaches in skin-tight blue and orange swimsuits, their long hair blown across their faces in the wind and sunshine. You look at all this in silence, not happy, when really you ought every second to rush out into the street and carve in the bark of every plane-tree, scrawl on every wall and on every sidewalk:

JUNE 11, 1966

I AM ALIVE

But that wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to be everywhere at once, on the tops of the mountains when the Northern Lights appear, at the bottom of the sea for the silent explosions of volcanoes, inside the trunks of trees when the rain begins to plop gently down on every leaf. You’d need to be there in the midst of war, stretched out in the mud when all the bombs whistle down together and dig their black craters in the fields. Or rushing along inside a jet-plane, not thinking, filled with the blind imperative that orders you to kill and kill again. You’d need to be there at every accident at every intersection, and walk through the shattered glass and pools of petrol looking at the bodies lying in the road covered with white blankets. You’d need to be able to think everything, speak everything, try to understand everything. To imagine every town lying in the curve of a valley under a sky cloudy or clear, with every river sending its muddy waters under the spans of the bridges. You’d need to be able to live everywhere, your whole life through, with a wife and three or four children, friends, a car, a dog, a cinema, a house of your own. In Dar-es-Salaam for example, right in the terrible heat reflected back off the brick walls. Or in Agrigentum, a prisoner of the chalk-coloured mountain, while the flies buzz through the heavy air. In Lima, crushed by the never-ending drought, or Bristol, breathing in factory-smoke and fog strewn through the dark air. In Sherbrooke in the stifling snow; in Gorman, California, away in the depths of darkness. In Hamburg, Calcutta, Syracuse. You’d need to live a long time on every acre of the earth, breathing its air, drinking its clear or cloudy water, eating its meat, exposing your skin to its dull or blazing suns. Leaving your excrement everywhere to glide away through the mysterious channels of the sewers. Living with dark women or with pale women, speaking all the incomprehensible tongues, worshipping all the innumerable gods with thousands of prayers, gestures and offerings.

And then you’d need to go further still. You’d need to have left this blue planet and rummaged around in space. To have been born millions of light-years away on an earth of metal or mercury, with a red sky and six tiny suns spinning round the horizon.

You’d need to have waited for centuries and centuries and seen the mountains slowly worn away by the wind and the sea drying up in its bed like a pool of petrol. Other species might come, and other cataclysms. A sudden gash might open in the midst of the land, and tons of lava pour out and gradually cover the whole planet.

Or you could go backwards in time and creep all hairy through the hostile jungle. Huge animals with sharp claws would lurk in the depths of the forests and you would flee with beating heart. And in the evening, crouched in a tiny cave, you would make odd scrawls with a stub of charcoal to try to tell what happened during the day.

You’d have had to do all that to be really happy. You’d have had to live all those lives at once to be happy as a god. But obviously it wouldn’t have been very easy.

So, like Chancelade, you got up at night because you couldn’t sleep. Outside in the darkness the animal cries echoed strangely. Toads croaked on the other side of the valley, calling to one another from hundreds of yards apart. Drunken crickets whirred crazily. In the yard of some sinister invisible house a dog howled in fear. Everywhere arose mysterious creaks, tiny reports, scrapings, buzzings, rustlings of wings — all telling that the house, the whole world, was a prey to the army of unknown insects. And somewhere in the garden, hidden in the heart of a tree, a nightingale uttered every six seconds its artificial cry, that always contained three words:

‘Phui phui, rrrwoooïïï, rrrhouyouyou’

‘Koutyou, kreuhühü, hui, hui hui’

‘Hou hou hou, huïtheu, kut’

‘Hapuuuu, hahui hahui, hou hou hou’

‘Frrriiooo, krieu, pou-tou pou-tou’

‘Houhüüü houhüüü, pioo pioo pioo, trrriiit’

‘Phui phui, phuu prriootyou huitki, kooo’

You leaned your head against the cold window and tried to look out through the slits in the shutters. But all you could see was a great formless darkness, with perhaps the misty star of a street-lamp in the distance. Then you listened to all the sounds that unfurled in disorder in the night, and they became a sort of strange language telling the long long history of living life. And little by little you realized that you knew all these words, all these names, and that in a way you’d always known them. What they said was simple: they told of battles, of flights through the air or the grass, of food spied on for hours and stolen in a flash. They also told stories of love, of the urgent appeals from the female to her mate, and the lewd scents that madden across miles of separation. Bodies were ready to couple, and sought one another through the labyrinth of night. Feathers were sleek, eyes bright, muscles flexed. They told stories, too, of eggs that must be laid in a warm place, and larvae swelling in their cocoons. All these stories were alike yet each was different. The novelty of life was endless, and adventures repeated themselves over and over unceasingly. The stories paralleled one another, phrases learned by heart and never forgotten; they called to one another; passed one another in the evening air; bored their way through the night; and they all came together blindly and by chance to make up the greatest story of all, the most beautiful, the one and only story that never finishes being told.

I GREW UP

There was also that other day, a real day of conflagrations. A day with boiling sun, white haze, east wind, motionless mountains, motionless sea, motionless sky, sweat on the back and under the armpits, shirt sticking to you, and a black storm riding the horizon. The boy Chancelade had left the house immediately after lunch and walked through the streets of the town towards the sea. He’d put on a red sweater with white stripes, and round his neck he wore his beautiful new green towel. He’d stuffed it into his satchel before he came out so that his parents wouldn’t see he wasn’t going to school. Then he’d hidden his satchel in a disused drainpipe, keeping only his beautiful green towel, which he hung round his neck. He’d walked in the sun, he’d crossed several intersections with nobody about, gone through streets silent and deserted. He’d gone by a hot garden where an old man in blue trousers and a straw hat was raking the grass into heaps. He’d dragged his feet through the dust, he’d walked along the tops of walls. He’d crossed a level-crossing. He’d picked up a round stone with a hole in it and thrown it at a cat that was sitting between the wheels of a car. In this way he’d crossed the whole belt of villas, houses, kitchen gardens and waste land that you had to go through to get to the sea. Sometimes he’d walked fast, sometimes slowly, whistling, singing, talking to himself, or saying nothing. But every so often he whirled his beautiful green towel round his head like a sword. He’d passed several boys and girls on their way to school, walking in twos and threes in the opposite direction. He’d looked at them scornfully because he knew about five or six of them — Delpire for example, and Villand, Roussel, Gioffret, Dunan, Maryse, Falchetto, Chantal and Calmet — and they were on their way to school whereas he had decided not to go any more. They had turned round to watch him go by, and must have said something like:

‘Did you see him? He’s going swimming.’

‘We ought to tell, that’d teach him.’

‘Yes, they’d chuck him out for sure.’

Then they’d gone on to something else — Delpire’s father’s new car, probably.

When he got to the boulevard that led to the sea the boy had bought himself an ice-cream cone. He’d been wanting to do that for a long time: go swimming on a Friday during algebra, and buy a big ice-cream cone. The woman at the stall looked at him and said:

‘What flavour?’

‘What flavours are there?’ he asked.

‘Vanilla lemon coffee strawberry chocolate,’ said the woman.

‘Vanilla strawberry,’ Chancelade said.

‘Vanilla strawberry,’ she repeated.

Then he went on down the boulevard licking his ice. When the ice-cream was finished Chancelade threw away what was left of the cone and wiped his hands on his beautiful new green towel.

A little way further and he was at the beach. It was a level stretch of flat pebbles with a narrow strip of white sand at the water’s edge, dumped there by lorries for the tourists. The boulevard still continued parallel to the beach and the boy walked on for a while to find a good place. There were lots of people on the beach. Fat men, fat women and fat children lay on the stones, their pink skins gleaming with sun-tan lotion. Beside them were hampers of provisions, rubber life-belts, transistors or dogs. A kind of strong odour, sweat perhaps, or the alkaline smell of water and urine mixed, wafted up from the flat sunny beach. You could hear shouts too, sudden exclamations, the squeals of little girls, twangs of music. Chancelade sat down on the low wall separating the beach from the road and watched, holding on to both ends of the green towel round his neck.

He watched a hairy man picking his way carefully towards the water so as not to hurt his feet. He waded in till the water was halfway up his thighs then plunged forward and disappeared. In the other direction, to the left of a heap of sea-weed and rubbish, a three-year-old in a cap suddenly started to howl because he’d been stung by a wasp; Chancelade watched his mother come and carry him away. An Alsatian lay blinking and panting under a big striped sunshade. And nearby a girl with fair hair slowly rubbed cream into the back of another girl with dark hair.

Chancelade decided that the best thing to do so as not to be disturbed was to go as close as possible to the water. He slouched across the beach, going round several bodies lying on the pebbles, and went and sat down no more than a few inches from the water’s edge, where there was a little bit of sand between the stones. He sat there for a few minutes watching what went on around him. The sea lay stretched out like a slab of concrete, grey, heavy, thick, with only, from time to time, a sort of swell that seemed to stay in the same place. The occasional gusts of wind bore a sharp and disagreeable odour. The sky was blue. The sun shone fiercely almost in the centre of the atmosphere. When Chancelade felt himself beginning to perspire he threw the green towel down on the beach and undressed. Then he stretched himself out on the ground, the red and black check of his bathing-trunks contrasting oddly with his over-white skin.

Chancelade let the sun’s warmth lap round and enfold him. He waited second after second to feel each separate square inch of his skin being burned. It was strange: it was like having a mobile eye that shifted hither and thither over the thin surface of skin, roving about, at the whim of chance or of the will, to make contact with the world. Eyes shut, deaf to the sounds that rose from the beach and the sea, the boy lived entirely in his skin as revealed by the sun. He no longer had any hands or legs or stomach or face, or red and black check bathing-trunks. He was an old wrinkled tree-trunk, a leafless twig, a spongy mass, or one covered with identical scales on all of which the hot air weighed down with equal pressure. A stranded jelly-fish, a puddle of dirty water, a bit of earth enclosed in the earth. The tingling caused by the sun came and went with slow shudders just like the movements of the clouds in the sky and the jetsam on the sea. It was curious, that: he was at once here, lying with his back pressed firmly against the ground and his chest and stomach facing up into the vault of the sky — exposed, rooted; and at the same time there, elsewhere, floating somewhere above the horizon, completely detached from the world. Without thinking, without moving, he could separate himself from his own effigy and almost look down on himself from some dream height. Right in the depths of the void, very far away but very clear, he could see this kind of clearing lit by the yellow circle of the sun, and in the centre of the clearing was his white body in red and black check bathing-trunks, lying motionless on its back with its arms flung out. And he could see this place that he inhabited rushing away at a dizzy speed, as if he was being whirled along on a rocket travelling millions of miles per second. And yet the more the flat stretch of beach withdrew from him the more visible its details became beneath the pitiless lens. And suddenly Chancelade understood. He understood that he was there, on that narrow beach, alone in the midst of so many men, women and children, a living corpse.

He was so surprised by this discovery that he felt a stab of anguish shoot through his mind. His forehead and back covered in sweat, a pain in his stomach, he sat up and looked eagerly before him. The sea was still there, smooth and oily, and behind him the beach still echoed with the same shouts and noises. A pale sky still covered the void, and the sun shone on in the same place. A little motor-boat chugged painfully across the bay, its gasps and splutters fitfully audible on the shore. Chancelade wiped his hands and face with a corner of the towel. Then he got up and went in the water.

He swam for a long time, every so often ducking his head under. The bay ended in a sort of steep headland, and Chancelade decided to swim out to it. He lowered his feet on to a flat rock, slippery with weed, that lay at the neck of the headland. He climbed out of the water cautiously because of the sea-urchins. The last time he’d gone bathing on the rocks, with Roussel, the other boy had got a sea-urchin’s spine in his right foot and had to be taken to the doctor for it to be cut out with a scalpel.

Chancelade jumped from rock to rock till he reached a path running along the headland, and followed it away from the beach. Above him were private houses and gardens with lots of trees and plants; but there were no people to be seen. The heat was overpowering here because of the sun continuously reflected from the sea. Big canna and aloe leaves hung down everywhere over the path and had to be pushed aside. There was that smell again too — the smell of cinnamon, beer, urine and iodine that lay heavy on the lungs and made you pant. From the cracks of crumbling walls big grey lizards stared at you fearlessly out of motionless eyes. Wasps buzzed about, and thin flies alighted on your legs to drink the sweat and sea-water.

For a moment Chancelade thought it would be best to go back and lie down on the beach. But he’d never been here before and wanted to find out what it was like.

Suddenly, before you knew how it happened, the path emerged from the stifling undergrowth into an open creek. There was a slight breeze blowing, and Chancelade thought he might cool off for a bit before going on.

The creek was absolutely deserted, and only half lit by the sun because of the tall trees that surrounded it. Between two grey rocks there lay a sort of beach of white pebbles. But this was no ordinary beach. It was strewn with mountains of rubbish. There were tons of old iron, bits of wood and petrol-cans, as if for months and months trucks had been coming to shoot a whole town’s refuse there. But there was no other approach except the little path Chancelade had taken, so all the débris must just have been gradually washed ashore in storms.

Chancelade looked at the strange confusion for a moment, then climbed down on to the beach. He went and sat down on a huge trunk, all white with salt, that sprawled across the pebbles. When he felt restored by the breeze he started to walk up and down the beach examining the bits of rubbish one by one. He threw stones at petrol-cans black with rust. He broke dead branches on the rocks, smashing down with all his strength as though he was hitting an animal, or a man. He threw empty bottles as far as he could, listening each time for the pleasant sound of splintering glass. He tried to pull up a long rusty bar buried deep in the pebbles. He stove in rotten packing-cases on which the printed words were half weathered away. He picked up big rocks and dropped them on sheets of metal. He smashed stones and sniffed the smell of sulphur left by the flying fragments. He flung into the sea cork floats, life-belts, flasks, bits of old tyres. He piled empty tins on top of one another then knocked them all down again with stones. Everything he could find to throw he threw in all directions: rotten old shoes, bolts, saucepans, tins, mouldy planks, branches eaten away by sea-water, stones, broken chairs, castings, plastic containers, bits of brooms, bones, petrol-cans filled with gravel. He worked at it diligently, without respite, jumping over rocks, crunching over pebbles, striding across pools of oil and mounds of broken bottles. He was the adventurer fighting whole armies single-handed, one man alone against ten, a hundred, ten thousand. He rained down bombs. He sank ships with cannon-fire. He laid about him with his sabre. He had eyes everywhere and nothing could take him by surprise. From time to time he would utter some guttural order in an unknown language, harsh and barbaric:

‘Brox wanyahou wandorh!’

‘Pradjo!’

‘Afadanstar dboï!’

‘Hiarrh-to hiarrh-to!’

He brought the war to an end by smashing in with an iron bar a broken metal barrel that gave off a trickle of oil This was the moment when in the ordinary course of events he ought to have set light to all the dead wood and climbed on a rock to watch it burn. But Chancelade hadn’t any matches and felt too tired to try to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. So he sat down on the stones and looked at the sea and did nothing.

When he started off again he picked up a bit of wood to keep as a souvenir. It was a little flat piece of worm-eaten pine, on which was written: ORSOVA.

He began walking along the path again. Just before he reached a level stretch that ended in a wall he saw the corpse of a seagull flattened against a sharp rock.

The wall was very high, about ten or twelve feet, but there was a gap to one side of it and Chancelade sneaked through on all fours.

On the other side the landscape was quite different. It was a sort of enormous garden stretching down to the sea, with lots of flowers and leaves and brambles and trees. Chancelade walked through the undergrowth towards the tip of the headland. The sea wasn’t so grey here and you could see queer green patches near the shore. He thought it would be a nice place to bathe: it was cool and there were no people. He climbed down across the rocks to find a good spot. He decided on a flat rock like a paving-stone that sloped down into the water. But when he got down there he saw that there was another rock just like it a little further off, with someone on it. It was a little girl in a red swimsuit sitting with her feet in the water. Chancelade made his way along to where she sat. When she saw him coming she turned her head right round and he saw that she was wearing dark glasses. He climbed down on to the stone, looked at her for a moment, and said:

‘Do you live here?’

The girl looked surprised.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

‘No, I don’t either,’ said Chancelade.

He sat down beside her and put his feet in the water too.

‘Did you get in through the hole in the wall?’ said the girl.

‘Yes,’ said Chancelade.

He looked at the girl again and saw she had quite long hair with a parting on the left.

‘My name’s Chancelade,’ said Chancelade. ‘I’m twelve and a half.’

The girl splashed her feet about in the water to make bubbles.

‘My name’s Sonia,’ she said. Then she added with satisfaction, ‘And I’m thirteen.’

‘People aren’t allowed here,’ said Chancelade.

‘I came with my father,’ said Sonia. ‘He’s down there fishing a bit further along.’

‘I came on my own. I swam,’ said Chancelade, pointing at the sea.

‘I couldn’t,’ said Sonia.

‘Yes, it takes some doing. I’m tired.’

Chancelade leaned back and lay on the stones.

‘But I’m sure people aren’t really allowed in here,’ he said. ‘I saw a. notice just now in the garden that said “No Entry”.’

‘Who does it belong to?’

‘I don’t know. But if they send a keeper or a dog I’ll swim away.’

‘So shall I.’

‘Yes, but you have to be a good swimmer because of the currents. If you’re not a good swimmer you get swept away and drowned.’

‘Yes. Down, down, down and that’s that!’

Chancelade and the girl both laughed.

‘Can you do the crawl?’ he asked.

‘No, it’s too difficult, I—’

‘I’ll teach you, later on,’ said Chancelade.

He pointed to the girl’s dark glasses.

‘Can I try your glasses on?’

The girl took them off and passed them to him.

‘They’re very good,’ said Chancelade. ‘Not too tight.’

‘Yes, and they were expensive — they’re filtered lenses.’

‘Yes, they’re very good.’

He looked through the smoked lenses at the sea and the sky and the girl, then held out his hand and looked at that.

‘They make everything look green.’

‘I’ve got some pink ones too but my father says they’re bad for my eyes.’

‘And do they make everything look rose-coloured?’

‘Yes. Funny, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it must be,’ said Chancelade.

He took the glasses off and put them down on the rock, but the girl didn’t put them on again.

‘What’s your other name — Sonia what?’ Chancelade asked.

‘Sonia Iwaskiewicz.’

‘Sonia what?’

‘Iwaskiewicz.’

‘How do you spell it?’

‘I-w-a-s-k-i-e-w-i-c-z. It’s a Polish name. My father’s a Pole.’

‘Really?’ said Chancelade. ‘Is he Russian?’

‘No, Polish,’ said the girl.

‘Because I’ve got a friend who’s Russian. His name’s Dmitri Filatiev.’

‘My father doen’s like the Russians,’ said the girl. ‘He says they ruined his country.’

‘Dmitri’s a good chap though,’ said Chancelade.

‘It’s all the same to me, it’s just my father. When he talks about Poland he’s sad, and he says it was because of the Russians he had to go away.’

‘It was because of the war,’ said Chancelade.

‘Yes, it was because of the war,’ said Sonia Iwaskiewicz.

‘I can remember the war,’ said Chancelade. ‘I saw the Germans when they came back from Africa. They went by our house and my mother showed them to me. Sometimes they used to fire at the windows because they were frightened.’

‘I was in Switzerland with my father and mother, but I don’t remember anything about it.’

‘I’d have liked to fight,’ said Chancelade. ‘I often hit the target at the fair.’

‘My father keeps a revolver in the drawer of his desk,’ said Sonia. ‘He showed it to me one day and said I mustn’t tell anybody or he’d be sent to prison.’

‘It must be nice to have a revolver,’ said Chancelade.

‘Yes, but you’re not supposed to.’

‘If I had a revolver I wouldn’t be afraid of anybody any more.’

He took his legs out of the water and sat with his feet on the rock.

‘A friend of mine tried to be clever once at the fair. He wanted to shoot the way they do in Westerns. He put the pistol in his pocket and it went off and the bullet went into his leg, just here.’ He showed the place on his thigh.

‘It must have hurt.’

‘Yes, it bled a lot and they took him to hospital.’

‘I went to hospital to have my appendix out when I was ten. You can still see the scar.’

The little girl showed the scar on her belly. Chancelade leaned forward and touched it.

‘It’s hard,’ he said.

‘Yes, but it doesn’t hurt any more,’ said Sonia. ‘I had a friend called Cerise, and she died because they didn’t operate in time.’

‘Did you say she was called Cerise?’ said Chancelade.

The little girl started to laugh.

‘Yes, Cerise.’ She toyed with the frame of her dark glasses. ‘At first everyone made fun of her because of her name. Then they got used to it. She died last year, because they didn’t operate in time.’

‘I know a chap called Clovis,’ said Chancelade. ‘That’s a funny name too, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but not so funny as Cerise.’

‘No.’

They went on talking like this for more than half an hour, sometimes with their feet in the water, sometimes with them resting on the rock. The sun had by this time descended almost to the top of the trees, and the sea had grown dark. Then Chancelade and the girl went into the water. They swam along by the rocks for a little way and Chancelade taught her to do the crawl, throwing her elbows well back. Then they clambered out on to the stone again. The water was cold and they were shivering. Then the girl took Chancelade’s hand and they walked together through the shrubs and low trees. After that the girl said let’s play hide-and-seek, and Chancelade put his hands over his eyes and counted aloud: ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!’ He saw at once that she’d gone along a sort of track that led to a clump of pines. He crept towards the trees quietly, making a détour so as to creep up from behind. And there sure enough he saw the girl pressed against a pine-trunk; she hadn’t seen him. Chancelade tiptoed a little nearer, and when he was only a couple of yards away sprang forward and got hold of her round the waist. She gave a cry, and they both fell down. It was strange to feel her skin and hair and the damp red swimsuit. They played a lot of other games too — tag, catch, blindman’s buff, cops and robbers, cars, duelling. Chancelade wanted to play Chinese wrestling, and won easily. Then they lay down to rest, and played at tickling one another. It wasn’t long until the boy started to stroke the girl’s skin, first her arms, then round the neck and shoulders, then under the damp material of the red swimsuit. She didn’t say anything, but clung tight to Chancelade’s body and put her arms round him. Right before his eyes Chancelade saw her face with its two green eyes and wet lashes and locks of dark hair. He felt warm disturbing breath coming from her open mouth. And she on her side looked at the two dark blue eyes that blended into one, and the freckles, and the two white incisors gleaming between his lips. She put her head forward and kissed him as she’d seen people kiss on the films, her eyes shut. And she thought she’d write all this down in her diary this evening, locked in her room, and that silly idiot of a Monique, with her lipstick and her brassière stuffed with cotton-wool, wouldn’t be able to make fun of her any more. She guided the boy’s hand on to her chest, under the damp swimsuit; but it lay there cold and still as a lizard. When she tried to kiss him for the fifth time he drew his head back a little. He started to sit up, and as he did so he saw on the girl’s white belly, just above the swimsuit, a big black insect with curly legs and waving feelers. He jumped back, staring at it. The girl looked silently down at it for a moment, then let out a yell and leapt up, shaking herself frantically. She jumped up and down in a panic, panting loudly, then ran off through the bushes, even forgetting her beautiful dark glasses with filtered lenses. Chancelade watched her go. He wanted to call after her but no sound would come. So he got up and carefully took off the twigs that had stuck to his arms and legs, then picked up the glasses and went. He felt a bit dizzy and very thirsty. The sun was just disappearing behind the trees and the wind was chill. When he got to the beach he saw that everyone had gone home, and that somebody had stolen his beautiful new green towel.

INSIDE THE DRAWING

It was all like in the drawing. The page had been torn off the writing-pad one day, and some unknown child had drawn those figures with a blue ball-point and coloured pencils. They’d appeared quite naturally, almost as if they’d always been there and only needed to be copied. It was only a vision of the world, after all, one vision among so many others. But here everything was complete, perfect, finished down to the last detail. Fate was there somewhere, perhaps in the shape of the sun or in the black specks in the middle of the eyes. Death was present too, in the teeth of the man on the left or in the scribbles of hair. War, love and ignorance were there. Age that comes too fast, and self-wasting time, and spirit slowly dwindling. It was funny, grotesque, moving, sad, magical. It was an image of life. Yes, it was that and more than that — a witness to life here on earth, the human signature, simple and mysterious. It was the epic, the strange epic, reduced to its simplest form and just set down here, by chance, on this single sheet of paper torn from the block.

Could one really try to understand what it meant? Was there anything there to understand? I mean, the drawing had just appeared, at this moment in this century, produced by the unskilful hand of a child, without any evident necessity. Try as you might you couldn’t find the clue to the enigma, you couldn’t point out the general drift or learn the secret meaning. If there was anything at all on the scribbled page it was the same thing as was in the world. The presence of life, perhaps; the evidence of life speaking for itself. In the face of the terrible void the thin paper surface resisted as if it were marble or tungsten. Nothing could tear it, nothing could break it. It was the soft rampart, the frail and tender shield that was the only reason of life. Not even a word; not even a sign; no, just the screen, the delicate screen that protects and absolves millions of lives and acts. All culture trembled in this square of paper — all cursed and impenetrable culture condensed into a few lines. What was the point in lying? Since the darkest night of time it had always been the same; no one had begun to understand. However many words and theories they heaped on top of one another it was always the same spectacle, strong and hermetic, that offered. All beauty. All ignominy. All passion, all joy, all mourning.

Perhaps, after all, it was a sort of evidence: evidence that there was nothing to understand. There was nothing else to do but take that sheet of writing-paper and draw on it with a blue ball-point and coloured pencils. Just in order to fix history for a few seconds.

Now, on the paper, two human shapes held hands and faced the void. From the middle of their faces their wide eyes looked fearfully into yours. The little boy, on the left, showed his teeth like a corpse. A rabbit looked at you too, from his overall. Above the two figures two roads like a couple of snakes, one blue one green, each joined two houses together. Between them was a tree with two enormous cherries on it, unless it was a street-lamp. Almost at the top of the page was the green and blue sun, like an insect, and above that the line of the mountains and the clouds ran right across the page like a row of teeth.

So when you’d drawn this motionless story there was nothing more to add.

At a pinch you could write something, as Chancelade did, holding the ball-point between his thumb and forefinger; and that too was a sort of human legend.

‘The sea is blue, it has waves. The lion is in the cage. The Panther is angry. The Leopard has claws. The elephant has a long trunk. The Monkey eats monkey-nuts. The wolf is very cruel. The bear can swim.’

And underneath you’d add another drawing, with little men and women, and birds, and butterflies, and flowers, and cats,

THE DAYS WENT BY

Attending his father’s funeral, for example. But before that, Chancelade had gone into the big dark room with the candles burning. He’d smelt the bitter-sweet smell of smoke and lavender. Then someone had put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him forward — his mother, or perhaps his aunt. Then he went towards the white bed where the man lay in the attitude of someone sleeping. But you could see at a glance that he wasn’t asleep: it had all been faked. They’d put the body on unnaturally clean sheets and folded the hands together on the breast, each finger exactly in place. Under the head they’d put a new pillow, and they’d carefully combed the black hair, keeping the parting on the left. At the foot of the bed there were some mauve flowers in a vase, and on the bedside table a Bible bound in red leather with a big gold cross.

Chancelade went a few steps forward to free himself of the hand on his shoulder, and looked at the bed and his father’s body. He’d never seen such a body: white, light, so light it seemed to float over the bed, several inches above the sheets. The hands were white, and so was the face — almost transparent, fragile, on the point of dissolving in the hazy atmosphere. It was like a child’s balloon, or a bubble, that might be blown right across the room by the slightest draught. There was also that pale, delicate light that seemed to emanate from the skin and envelop the body, the clothes, and even the bed of the dead man. However tightly his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils and his ears were closed, the man was still there, shut up inside his skin, and he knew everything that was going on. He was hiding, that was all. He’d hidden in a corner of his skull, or under his left eye perhaps, or else taken refuge, the whole of him, in the forefinger of his right hand; and he was listening to everything that was said and watching everything that was done all around him. Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself and would suddenly make a face and burst out laughing. Everyone else would be frightened, but he, Chancelade, wouldn’t move a muscle, only smile faintly like one who knows.

When the boy had been beside the bed for a quarter of an hour or more, the same hand as before got hold of him again, only this time by the arm, and took him to the other side of the room. He sat down on a chair and watched what went on. The shapes of men and women moved about in the half-light. People came in through the door, bent over the bed, sometimes holding a handkerchief under their nose as if there were an epidemic, then went away whispering. Some came over to the chair where the boy was sitting and looked at him strangely as they patted his cheek. Chancelade watched and listened to them without saying anything, but he felt like laughing when he thought that he was the only one who knew the truth. Every time someone came and whispered in his ear he strained towards the bed to see whether the man hadn’t flickered his eye-lid in a conspiratorial wink. But he was very good at it; his eyes were always shut and you could never catch him..

Chancelade didn’t think he’d ever be so good at pretending, himself. He’d tried shamming dead once or twice with his friends or with his cousin Odile. But he could never keep a straight face for more than a few seconds, and after that he started to blink and bubble with laughter. And if anyone tickled him that finished it.

That was an idea. When the time came to go and the hand took him by the shoulder to lead him out of the room, he pulled himself free and went over to the bed all by himself. Then he leaned forward and touched his father’s arm. So that the others shouldn’t realize what he was doing he acted as though he were very very sad and wanted to be by himself for a moment. But what he really did was pinch his father’s arm as hard as he could. Through the stuff of his jacket he felt the arm, hard and cold, and his nails sank into the flesh. But surprising as it might seem the man didn’t utter a sound. His white face remained impassive and the brown-stained eye-lids did not stir. Chancelade was astonished and went on pinching the arm for several seconds, until his mother came and pulled him away. Then Chancelade was ashamed. He pushed aside the hand that held him and hurried out of the room. Then he went and hid in the kitchen and wetted his eyes with water from the tap to make it look as if he’d been crying. At least that seemed to please everyone who came to look for him, and lots of women bent down and kissed and whispered over him.

A few days later there was the funeral.

Chancelade didn’t know that every so often there was a dead man’s day like this. You know — they get the house ready, paint it black, put hangings all over the place, pedestals, vases with orchids and violets, candles, and tables with saucers full of visiting cards. For a few days everything is different. Some things are hidden away, others are brought out. Clothes, to start with: there are veils, black dresses, black stockings, black aprons, black hats, black scarves, purple socks, black shoes, black suits, bands, ties, sashes. Then there are bits of cardboard with black edges that you put in matching envelopes, and that have written on them:

Madame Claude Chancelade

Monsieur Adrien Chancelade

Monsieur and Madame Philippe Mendes

Monsieur Sébastien Magnan

announce with regret the death of

Jean-Antoine Chancelade

The burial will take place on August 3, 1952.

The funeral will start from the house at 4 p.m.

De Profundis!

There are also the people nobody knows who suddenly invade all the rooms and keep whispering and shaking hands and kissing, dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs. When they speak they say strange and rather disturbing things, like:

‘My goodness, what a terrible thing, what a blow …’

‘Yes, awful.’

‘The worst was getting him dressed. The skin gave, you know.’

‘Oh my goodness.’

‘Yes, we’d put his black suit on and the skin on his back went and we had to clean everything up and start all over again. And then we put on another suit.’

‘You’d never have thought it, he looked so calm, so ha—’

‘Yes, that’s true, but we had to bind the chin too …’

‘And did you powder him?’

‘Of course, what do you expect, he …’

‘Oh how awful, what a trial for his wife.’

‘She couldn’t do anything, poor thing, she was too upset.’

‘What a good thing you were there.’

‘Yes, but it’s dreadful. He soiled the sheets even two days after, you know.’

‘You don’t say!’

‘Ah, it’s all very sad!’

‘Yes, dreadful.’

‘But he didn’t smell.’

‘That’s because the doctor gave him a camphor injection right away.’

‘Yes, it was the only way, otherwise in this heat …’

Or else things like:

‘Did he suffer much?’

‘No, not much, it just carried him off in a few days.’

‘Yes, it was a good thing he didn’t linger.’

‘It was difficult towards the end, but fortunately, no, he didn’t linger.’

‘Did it happen during the night?’

‘Yes, about four in the morning. He was a bit delirious during the night and kept being sick and so on, and then he gave a cry at about four in the morning, and I came running, but it was all over.’

‘I’d never have believed it, he was so young, so—’

‘Yes, but the doctor was always here. It was only to be expected.’

‘But it’s a comfort he didn’t suffer. Some of them drag on like that for years’.

‘Yes, indeed, take my mother-in-law. It was terrible. And the worst of it was she knew she was going. She kept calling out “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me!” And when she saw people round the bed — she was delirious, of course — she used to say, ‘What do all these people want? Send them away, tell them to go away.” Oh, with her it was very difficult for everybody.’

‘Yes, sometimes you wonder whether it wouldn’t be better just to drop down in the street—’

‘And she suffered so much she wanted someone to kill her. She used to say to me: “Please, give me a gun and let me finish myself off”.’

‘Yes, it’s dreadful.’

‘But we shouldn’t really talk about such things in front of the boy.’

‘Poor little thing, he doesn’t understand.’

And so on.

Also, somewhere in the shadows, there’s the veiled face of the woman in black. She sits with both hands in her lap and her back bowed, propped crookedly against the back of her chair. She doesn’t say anything. She just sits there quietly, her body slightly collapsed as if she were asleep. Through the veiling you can just make out a very white face; but you can’t see her mouth or nose or eyes. Only, on either side, the brown mass of her hair. And the middle of the veil rises and falls regularly, there where the warm breath issues from lips and nostrils. The shapes of others come and go about her. Now and then a woman leans over her, puts an arm round her shoulders, brings her face close to the veil and murmurs a few words. But she doesn’t answer; she doesn’t even move. The white expanse of her hidden face stays turned towards a certain spot on the floor, a few inches left of the leg of the table on which the coffin rests. No one can do anything at all for her, or for anyone else. All you can do is look at her, as the boy Chancelade does, thinking proudly that something very unusual is happening to him, and also feeling pity, and wondering how it will all end.

Then everybody began to walk behind the black car that the coffin was in. Chancelade was among the first, holding the hand of a middle-aged woman in a hideous black dress. The cortège began to wind very slowly round the square. The sun was high in the sky, and a sort of dazzling white light was reflected back so strongly from the pavement and the walls of the houses that it made everyone’s eyes water.

Directly behind the hearse the woman in black glided along as though the movement were quite natural to her. It was as if she weren’t moving her legs at all; as if she were a ghost. On her right was an old man in a black suit, and on her left a young woman in a black coat and skirt with a scarf over her head.

At the head of the procession the black car gleamed in the sun. It was a splendid new car. The back part was fitted up as a hearse, and it had gilded metal columns and thick black velvet curtains with silver tears on. It drove along slowly, noiselessly, and the sun struck dazzling gleams from the hubcaps and chromium bumpers. Inside the hearse you could see the dark wood of the coffin with its brass handles, the crimson cushions, and bouquets and sheaves of flowers inscribed with the words:

‘Everlasting sorrow’

or

‘To my beloved husband.’

Before setting out they’d given Chancelade a wreath which he’d had to place solemnly on the coffin. It was a circlet of plastic violets with a silver ribbon across on which was written:

‘To my father.’

As he walked along Chancelade tried to see if it was still there. But it must have slipped off on the way because it had disappeared.

The heat was intense. Chancelade felt himself being gradually overcome with drowsiness. He thought how much he’d like to climb into the splendid black car and lie down on the red cushions and be carried slowly, like that, round the square. He would watch the procession following with measured tread, and wave to the idlers along the side of the road. Some men would raise their hats as a token of respect, and some women would lower their eyes and furtively cross themselves.

It took a very long time to go round the square the first time. Already some of the mourners were starting to feel tired. A big bald man behind Chancelade puffed and blew and mopped the back of his neck with his handkerchief, saying over and over again:

‘This heat! …’

Only the woman in black behind the hearse kept gliding imperceptibly forward like a ghost, looking neither right nor left. The crowd followed her slight figure round the square; seen from above it must have looked like some strange snail or centipede. In the middle of the square, now, an immense emptiness stretched up towards the sky and touched the sun. It was an invisible marble column, like the hub of a roundabout, turning slowly on itself and drawing the long black caravan round in its circle. It was also an eye that judged men and sentenced them; an eye, yes, a sharp pitiless eye was fixed on the square and held it hypnotised. Bodies sweated, buildings rose up like insurmountable ramparts, and the ground melted underfoot. There was no way out, no opening through which to escape. Everywhere there was this inhuman gaze crushing you, turning you into a slave. Everyone was gathered together there, at that moment, to take part in that barbaric rite. And the unwearying engine of the black car drew the crowd along, noiselessly, smoothly, with all the dreadful power of its steel pistons. All the looks that had failed of their objects in the past were now directed on to the dark wooden coffin covered with gaudy wreaths, and avenged themselves for their sufferings. When Chancelade realized that he was in the centre of this hell and couldn’t escape, he felt a strange dizziness, and shivered. He had never seen so much emptiness, so much fated violence, so much fear and fatigue concentrated in such a small space. It was worse than climbing the stairs of an endless tower or walking across a room in the dark. Intelligence was suddenly overthrown, and you were swept by the current of tragedy through the icy regions of that which you do not understand, that which you never will understand, that of which you know you will always know nothing.

You ought to have started to struggle right away — to shout, run, or burst out laughing. Something funny ought suddenly to have happened, like someone slipping on a banana-skin or being seized with a fit of hiccups. But the mechanical crowd went on advancing, one foot after the other, solemnly, black and white, along that terrible furrow. You ought to have been able to give an ear-splitting whistle, or eat an ice-cream cone: but it was impossible.

In order to do something, Chancelade stared with hatred at the dark wooden coffin with brass handles and tried to imagine that it was empty. But that wasn’t amusing. It was more terrifying, even, because after all it was probably true. On the shiny wooden lid the ridiculous leaves and petals of the plastic wreaths and flowers bobbed lightly up and down.

Then, when the procession had been round the square for the second time, Chancelade imagined that he was inside the coffin. His hands were folded in front of him; eyes, nostrils, ears and mouth were closed. Lots of sheaves of flowers had been laid on top of the coffin, and on one of them was written in gold letters:

‘For my lamented self.’

Behind the woman in black, who moved forward as if on roller-skates, a man with black hair wore new shoes that squeaked as he walked solemnly along.

Then a few yards further on the boy thought of something else: it wasn’t a man lying in the coffin, it was a big green and blue lizard. The cat had killed it behind the kitchen door and now they were going to bury it. They’d laid it down on its back in the box among the crimson satin cushions, and folded its little paws on its belly, tied together with pink ribbon. It was being borne along inside the dark chest, slightly jolted by the movement of the hearse, and everyone was walking slowly after it dabbing their eyes. On the lid of the coffin were sheaves of flies threaded on wire, and on the ribbons was written:

‘To my beloved lizard’

‘Sadly missed’

‘To my reptile’

etc.

The procession would go up through the hills to the miniature cemetery. The box would be put into the ground and over it would be placed a slab of marble with the words:

LIZARD

Born May 1, 1951

Died August 21, 1952

Rest in peace.

There’d be graves everywhere for people who’d died and been changed into animals. There’d be the woman who turned into a cat, and on the tombstone would be written: ‘For darling Pussy.’ And the man who’d become a bulldog: ‘Paddy’. There’d be big graves for men who’d become horses or elephants, and women who’d become giraffes and lionesses. There’d be tiny little sarcophagi for beetle-men and white-mice-women. And everywhere pots of flowers, bones, feathers, medals, and slabs of black marble with names on: ‘Wanda who was a sinner’, ‘Mitsou’, ‘Chum’, ‘Tom Tit’, ‘Pierrot’, ‘Mirabelle’, ‘Bathsheba of the flashing eyes’. There would be no more cemeteries for people, only for broken-down horses, dead cats, squashed potato-bugs, and dogs, and parrots, and lizards.

Just before the third tour of the square ended Chancelade had time to make up a poem for the green and blue lizard lying on its back in the dark wooden coffin with brass handles. This was it:

For my Lizard.

Your eyes are so big lizard

Your nose is so flat, lizard

Your teeth are bad, lizard

Your tail is broken, lizard

The cat killed you, lizard

You were trying to steal, lizard

So you got what was coming to you, lizard

Now farewell, lizard

We’re going to bury you, lizard

In the black coffin, lizard

You asked for it, lizard

You’d been told often enough, lizard

That you must never, lizard

Never never lounge, lizard.

It was also from about this moment that Chancelade began to understand that he would never be alone.

AND THE NIGHTS

In the room with closed shutters Chancelade has lain down on the bed and gone to sleep. He lay on his right side with his head near the edge of the pillow. He drew his right leg up so that the knee was touching his stomach and stretched his left leg out to the bottom of the bed. Though the room was stifling hot he pulled the sheet up to his chin and tucked it in round his neck so as not to leave any gap. He flung his right arm out across the mattress and bent the left one up so that the wrist was against his nose. Then he shut his eyes and waited in the darkness for the vision that comes every evening to announce that he’s going to sleep.

This is how it always happens. First the endless fall past the walls of a house, with the windows flashing by one after another. It’s always the same building — a huge block with a white frontage and lots of little square windows without shutters or blinds, through which you can see nothing but darkness. There are hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions. They fly past, and all the time you’re falling, falling, falling.

After that there’s this strange room without any furniture, without floor or ceiling, just two windows, one behind you and one in the wall facing you. And this is where you have to be careful. What you have to try to do is be simultaneously with your back to the inside wall and at the same time right up against the opposite one. It’s not easy, but it can be done if you know how. What you have to do is draw the walls towards one another with all the force of your will, gradually, without ever relaxing, as if you were pulling on a huge piece of elastic. And at the same time, inch by inch, you have to swell out your body to meet the wall. You have to invade all the space in the room, seize every cube of air, blow yourself up by breathing in, drinking, devouring the atmosphere. All means are justified so long as you succeed. You can imbue yourself with the colour brown, or the warmth of wood and plaster, or eat the specks of dust in the air, or touch the draughts. But the most difficult is this: when you’ve pulled the bit of the wall with the window in it right up to you so that it’s touching your legs and stomach, you must also have remained as small as an ant lost in the enormous empty room, so that you see the same grey wall with its bright window distant and far away as if through a dozen mirrors. You see, it’s as if you were in a room small as a coffin yet at the same time vast and chill as a cathedral. Then, when you’ve succeeded in doing this after seconds, minutes, or hours of concentration, there suddenly rises up the sheet of fog that extinguishes the body. First your arms go unconscious, then your chest and stomach, then your back and the nape of your neck and your head. The fog keeps mounting — heavy, thick, uncoiling in great cold whorls. Your head topples and evaporates. There’s nothing left on the bed but the rumpled trace of someone who has become invisible. You’re asleep.

A long dark plain / Grass standing stiff as knives / Sound of water / Sound of footsteps walking through the grass / The heart beats fast, fast / ‘No need to be frightened’ says the voice / ‘No need to be frightened no need to be frightened’ / ‘It’s the wolves prowling’ / ‘Or the sound of the wind’ / ‘Perhaps it’s the rain falling’ / ‘It’s stopped raining’ / ‘Then perhaps it’s the sound of your footsteps’ / ‘I’m not walking I’m not walking’ / ‘You see’ / The clouds are driving across the sky / It’s night and day at the same time / ‘Watch out there’ / You can see the light / ‘There’s a fire in the forest’ / ‘What forest what forest’ / ‘I want to get away from here’ / ‘I want to get away from here’ / ‘I want to go let me go’ / ‘Why won’t my legs move’ / ‘I want to get out of here’ / ‘I want to get away’ / The night is black / The smoke is black / The grass is black / The fire is black / The forest is black / The wolves are bla / ‘Quick what’s the time’ / The night is black / The smoke is black / The grass is black / The fire is black /The forest is black /The wolves are b / ‘Look out I’m falling’ / The night is / ‘Stop, stop it, stop it’ / ‘Don’t you see it’s raining now’ / ‘The rain will put the fire out’ / ‘The wind’s dropped it’s going to rain’ / ‘Listen’ / ‘See the lightning over there’ / ‘My mother said she’d be along right away’ / The night is black / black / black / ‘She’s on her way’ / ‘Yes she’s coming I can see her’ / The night is / ‘Yes yes the night is black the smoke is black the grass is black the fire is black’ / You’re forgetting something / ‘The moon is black’ / And / ‘The spiders are black’ / Yes and / ‘The ink is black’ / The ink is blue-black and / ‘The glasses are black’ / The glasses are black and / ‘The water is black’ / And you were going to say / ‘I can’t’ / Yes / ‘No’ / Yes / ‘No’ / Yes / ‘No’ / Yes / ‘No’ / The / ‘The potatoes’ / That’s not it / ‘The olives’ / No / ‘The cars’ / No the / ‘The’ / Hurry up you’ve got to say it / ‘I can’t it’s too dangerous’ / Quick / ‘I’m frightened’ / Quick quick / ‘The’ / The / ‘The wolves are black’/

THE WOLVES ARE BLACK

Now run quick quick / Run / The lightning flashes / The rain comes down / Bang bang pit a pat / Grrraooo /Run / Run / Feet thump the ground / Knees pound / The grass is wet / There’s broken glass in the grass / A tree over there / Run / Ha ha ha ha / Down / Up / Down / Up / The lightning flashes /Again / ‘I’m slipping’ / There’s a hole full of mud / ‘I’m falling I’m falling’ / The mud / ‘Help’ / The wolves have come / They prowl round / But there’s only one wolf now / He’s as big as a mountain / He prowls round / You can hear his raucous breathing / Rhaaa / Rhaaa / Rhaaa / His mouth opens like a cave / The teeth / The red throat / The raucous breathing / ‘I’m slipping towards his throat’ / ‘I’m going to fall in’ / The eyes light up the whole night / Two red fires flickering in the sky / ‘I must blow the eyes out’ / ‘Blow blow’ / Impossible the eyes are still burning / Everything here has turned into wolf / The mouth / The throat / The teeth / The forest and the back / The grass and the fur / The paws / The trees / The mountain / The cave / The throat / The eyes / The fire / The wind / The rasping breath / ‘Rhaaa’ ‘Rhaaa’ / The hands are coming / The nails shine / The white teeth / The eyes flicker / The night is black / black / The forest is black / black / the grass black / black / The eyes black / black / The fire black / black / The wolves are black / are black / ‘Mummy’ / Roll on to my back / Swim / The slime / The water closes over / The sky is a black puddle / ‘I’m stifling’ / ‘I can’t breathe’ / ‘Help’ / Stifled in the filthy mud / Stifled in the black water / ‘I’m dead’ / No one / Never anyone / Alone / ‘I can’t see’ / At the bottom of the well in the stagnant water / Water coming in through ears and nose / Water coming in through the eyes / Nowhere / Finished / Lost / Alone horrible alone / Blade between the ribs / Cold steel piercing skin and lungs / Breath going / Blood flowing into the water like a cloud / The light gurgles / Bubbles of light / Of blood / ‘I’m dead’ / The night is black the forest is black the fire is / black the grass is black the flame is black the eyes are black the rain is black / The smoke is black the trees are black the sky is black the mud is / black the hands are black the glasses are black the / snakes are black the potatoes are black the wolves / are black the wolves / are black the wolves / are black /

There’s no more forest now, no more plains or fires, no more …

There’s a big room without any windows in the walls.

There’s a great empty room.

All along the windowless walls stand statues.

There is one statue like the others.

It is of grey stone and it stands on the concrete floor.

It doesn’t move, it doesn’t speak, its eyes are motionless.

It stays as it is.

It’s made of hard grey stone, and the walls and ceiling float around it like smoke.

It’s at least six feet high.

There’s no noise, no noise.

Then the statue takes off its stone mask.

It doesn’t move but the mask just quietly disappears.

And under the first mask there’s a second.

The second mask disappears and there’s a third.

A fourth.

A fifth.

A sixth, a seventh.

An eighth mask, a ninth mask, a tenth mask.

The masks are falling at top speed now, so fast you can’t count them any more.

And there’s always another mask made of stone, motionless, with eyes fixed.

With two wrinkles round the empty mouth, and arched brows.

With a hard nose, ears and cheeks of stone.

And the unmoving statue madly sheds its masks.

Noses, mouths, eyes appear and disappear, appear and disappear.

There are ten, a hundred, a thousand every second.

And each time you see it’s a different mask.

Motionless, solemn, hard as stone.

The statue sheds its masks furiously, like running water.

And its face is never seen.

It never melts, it is never ready.

It has no face, it has only millions of falling masks.

Millions of fixed eyes.

Millions of ears.

Millions of foreheads and cheeks.

Millions of black mouths with two wrinkles on each side.

The statue will never show its real face.

And in the same way, all along the walls of the great empty room, the millions of statues shed their masks, here their fixed eyes, there their hard noses, there again their empty mouths with two wrinkles on each side.

The masks frantically come and go from one end to the other of the empty room.

And not a single word is ever spoken.

Chancelade is in a public lavatory. He walked a little way along the low room looking for an empty cubicle. Right at the end he found one with the door open and used that. It was very new and white, with nylon curtains and a chromium chain. He didn’t stay in there long. But when he came out he saw two men waiting for him. One was skinny, with glasses, and the other very tall and stout and stood with his arms akimbo. The thin one came up quietly and said politely:

Chancelade doesn’t quite understand what he’s saying, but it’s something about a brand-new fixture that Chancelade has spoiled. A brand-new collapsible fixture that had been put there to await delivery. He’ll have to pay for it. Chancelade reaches for his wallet and asks how much. The thin man explains that it’s an absolutely new fixture, luxury model, and with the chromium chain you have to reckon about 130 pounds sterling. Chancelade is just about to take out his wallet when he realizes that that’s very dear for a W.C. He says: ‘I’m not paying for a new one when this one can still be used.’ The man with glasses insists but Chancelade makes to go away. Then the tall stout man pushes his companion aside and plants himself in front of Chancelade:

‘That’s enough argument. Give me the mok.’ Chancelade is surprised at having understood him. He didn’t know there was a word pronounced ‘mok’. But he understood that it meant money. And then, before he realizes what has happened, he finds himself out on the pavement again with a knife in his hand. He’s fighting the two men. He easily kills the skinny one with glasses. But the other is too big and strong. Chancelade knows he’s going to die but advances just the same toward the man, who is holding a sharp knife. Chancelade clasps the handle of his own knife tightly in his right hand and inches towards the giant. And he isn’t very surprised when he feels the cold blade enter his heart.

And there’s war too, with whistling bullets, shells, and the mine that explodes under the man’s body and shatters him to pieces. All you can see in the muddy crater is curly hair stained with blood. War, the shark-nosed submarine, the aeroplane spinning down the sky, and the tumbrils of black smoke belched from bombed oil-tanks. A dozen men in uniform shoot another man against a brick wall. The bullets burst and dig their rending hole. Trees collapse with a crash, the barbed wire pierces the skin at the back of the neck, rooks caw along the roads. Out of the dried-up earth come pale hands with fingers gnawed by rats. And all the time the siren turns round and round, imprisoned in the head, shrieking out its sinister call.

Lying on its front on a bed with unnaturally clean sheets. It’s a body. Someone you can’t see slowly brings the syringe and gives the injections. The right hand holds the long syringe and the left rubs with the piece of cottonwool dipped in spirit. And without stopping they keep giving the body injections, terrible injections that enter into the flesh and make it shudder. In the back, on the shoulder-blades, in the buttocks, in the thighs, in the back again, and in the nape of the neck. The needle sinks into the white meat, and the black liquid flows out drop by drop. And although it’s that body there that they’re giving injections to, the pain reaches you and makes you moan, shriek, howl, bellow! Then comes the terrible lumbar puncture and the sharp needle penetrates the spinal column in the middle of the back, and introduces the serum. The pain is so strong, blinding as lightning, that you faint.

And now the last dream of the night, the dream Chancelade has always had as far back as he can remember. It’s the strangest dream of all and the most desperate, because what happens in it is nothing. Perhaps it’s merely the face of truth, inexpressible, impossible to understand, the realest of all dreams. Here in a topsyturvy world there are no more years or days or minutes. When you wake up it will be 9.30 or noon or one o’clock in the morning. You’ll be called Chancelade or Tonibaldi or Brogger. You’ll be twelve years old or thirty-five or ninety-seven. It will be 1966 or 2640 or 722 B.C. Anything’s possible. And, tonight as every night, he’ll have this inspired and terrifying dream, this empty dream. Stretched out on the bed with his face in the pillow and his legs drawn up, Chancelade dreams that he is conscious. He is submerged in consciousness, consciousness without form, without colour, without sound, without words. He sees himself see himself, simply, indefinitely, as if he’d suddenly put his head into the prison of a three-sided mirror. However far into the distance he looks all he meets is his own gaze reflected through space and back again. Body and mind, all is strained to the limit, caught in the vertigo of consciousness. Paralysed, drained, annihilated. And yet in all this deserted kingdom of which it is the centre, his own gaze lives and feeds on itself. Nothing can be done to forget or to escape. There’s no word, like ‘Fire’ or ‘Ocean’, to get hold of. Not an image with which to get away, not a thought with which to distract oneself. There is nothing but this atrociously extended knowledge, this invisible eye ceaselessly photographing its own life and wiping out at the same moment as it creates, as if what it showed was too bright and pure to be anything but darkness. Then, after these centuries of infinity and fury, after these long years and endless seconds of consciousness silently spinning on its own axis, Chancelade wakes, turns over, and pushes the sheet down a bit because he’s bathed in sweat.

I PLAYED ALL THOSE GAMES

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn — you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

In the streets of the town a sort of ant-hill swarmed during the day and sparkled during the night. Each insect hurried without thinking towards its goal, following in the mysterious furrow traced by others. Each had his own life hermetically sealed up inside him, and desired nothing else. Each had his nest, his store of provisions, his eggs, his domestic rites. He had sketched out his own kingdom without realizing it, and it was always the same. Inside each shell, if you had looked, you would always have found the same things: a planet that resembled the earth, a bottle of wine or a glass of beer, a woman with dark hair or fair, a car, a refrigerator, a garden with a wire fence round it, a street, a cinema, two or three newspapers, and a packet of cigarettes, with or without tips. It was quite easy to be alive: all you had to do was be there, standing on the earth, breathing and staring vaguely at something. All the rest followed.

To be alive like Chancelade, all you had to do was go on playing all those games: dominoes, lotto, bridge, casino, truth, twenty questions, beggar-my-neighbour, gallows, drawing lots, draughts, ordinary roulette, blind man’s buff, tag, double or quits, Russian roulette. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else was really serious. You had to play and keep on playing with everything you saw, everything you touched, and with yourself. At forfeits, crossword puzzles, Go. At backgammon, hopscotch, crap, strip poker. At noughts and crosses, blow-football, poor Jenny, heads or tails, basketball, football, volleyball. Anything to stay alive:

You make a shape with some matches and say ‘Guess what it is’.

You drill a hole in the wall and see what’s going on next door.

You hold a piece of paper against your forehead and write your name backwards.

You smoke twenty cigarettes one after the other.

You eat 129 apricots.

You follow a woman in the street.

You kill flies with a piece of elastic.

You stick paper cockroaches on the wall.

You fly to Baghdad.

You drive on the left side of the road (or the right if it’s in England).

You go to the post-office and send yourself a telegram.

You go six days without sleeping.

You go five days without eating.

You go two days without drinking.

You go twenty-four hours without relieving yourself.

You go three minutes without breathing.

You go twenty seconds without thinking.

You light your cigarettes with travellers’ cheques.

You nurse a sick cat.

You write a novel.

You walk twenty-five miles.

You fire shots into the crowd.

You dangle a coin on a piece of string and make it tinkle, then watch people looking for it.

You throw bits of toilet-paper in the air when there are swallows about.

You play the saxophone.

You teach a chimpanzee to draw.

You improvise an election speech on a tape-recorder.

You watch an eclipse of the sun.

Everywhere there are people collecting things. There are the petrophiles who collect stones, the nicophiles who collect cigarette packets, the vitolphiles who collect cigar-bands. The tyrosemiophiles who collect cheese-labels. Some people collect postage-stamps, others coins, cups-and-balls, irons, lavatory chains, playing-cards, old cars, mats for beer-glasses, music-boxes, armour, picture postcards, Malay daggers, keys, typewriters, guns, cinema tickets, soda-water stoppers, door-knobs, comics, Hopi dolls, parking tickets, or matchboxes. There are the tubuniphiles who collect radiators, the azertyphiles who collect adding-machines, the gigantobibliophiles and the microbiblio-philes. There are the barbarologophiles who collect foreign languages, and the sanctusylvestrophiles who collect calendars. There are the transatlantonautophiles who collect ocean liners, the albinelephantophiles who collect white elephants, and the motoroscaphocadillacophiles who collect the engines of American cars adapted as outboard motors. There are the philopantophiles who collect collections. And there are also those who collect pencil-boxes, tea-pots, transistors, retractable ballpoint pens, guns with telescopic sights, forged banknotes, bath-towels advertising the Olympic Games, the autograph letters of George Washington, models of the Eiffel Tower in eighteen-carat gold, magic lanterns, lifts, false teeth, zip fasteners, IBM machines, Cambodian temples, Roman roads, obscene graffiti, Superior No. 2 drawing pins and albino cacti.

The games never end. Every second the wind shifts a blade of grass or the sea breaks on a crumbling rock and something in the world has changed. Everywhere, underfoot, overhead, to the left, to the right, in front, behind, the world seethes and swarms untiringly. Molecules move, microscopic particles jump nervously, waves come and go, meet, collide, part. There’s no peace anywhere. Nowhere any immobility or silence. Everywhere agitation, a kind of precise and mechanical madness. There’s no escaping the world, no thinking about something else instead. They’re ants, as I said, real ants imprisoned in their garden. Living inside their miniature world, dupers and dupes, without the power to withdraw, without the power to choose. They have words and signs for all the things around them, and a sort of thought to give them the illusion of being free. It’s really very funny. And not one of them can ever imagine what there is anywhere else, what extraordinary or sweet or terrible things there are just a few yards away. Not one of them will know what it is to be a jelly-fish for example, or an olive-tree with trembling leaves. Not one will have the least idea of what life is like on that grey planet only a few million light-years away. There on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edal-ecnahc.

But all that was impossible to imagine. It was as if there was nothing anywhere but silence, a dreadful cruel silence through which lightly floated bubbles of sound and life. There was really nothing to be hoped for outside that place, that time, that destiny. One would never penetrate the defences of the unknown, never get away from this old earth. Everything there was was there. You had to play and move about and think without stopping, with all your delirious and contradictory powers. You had to go on with the adventure once begun, without wanting to, torn to pieces by doing so. You had to give each thing its name, and sign each move and event with all the hatred and all the love you were capable of.

You had to advance into the plain in the dusk, following the tracks. Walk for hours and hours through tall grasses and mosquito-ridden swamps. Then, when you came upon the herd of elephants, you knelt down and shouted at the top of your voice the harsh war-cry, the prayer, the song of expiation addressed to the animal about to die.

‘Elephant Lafiaku, spirit of the bush, purse of silver, spirit with the arm between thine eyes, strength that uprootest trees, puller-up of bushes, son of the destroyers of the forest, spirit of the coconut-smasher, elephant who kneelest down in thine enormous mass, thou with thine indestructible defences, thou whose mouth smilest a terrible smile!

‘Foot that makest a path through the undergrowth, elephant, transformer of thorn thickets into open glades, thou who dost force a way for thyself! Ogòkú with a back like a drum, he who maketh a noise like a blacksmith when he greets you with the sound of his hammer óówú!

‘Illustrious elephant, bough born in Èpé! Elephant who lookest behind thee with difficulty, like someone with a stiff neck! Elephant with a cushion on thine head but no cargo! Elephant who dost balance a weight on thine enormous head! Elephant, the hunter sees thee and says, “I will now hunt no more: I must go pray to Ikaru!”

‘Elephant, the hunter sees thee and throws his arrows into the swamp, saying, “If the wire-seller is not dead, I shall have other arrows when I come to his house.” Elephant, we see thee and point at thee with all ten fingers outstretched in sign of consternation, and shout, “Yábà ń yábà!”

‘Kúdù, tall as two hundred hills, thou art a boatman! Whilst the elephant is alive women flee and withdraw their wombs. When the elephant is dead, I shall see my last year’s mistress, and her of the year before that. Elephant, for whom we dig a pit, but who art too clever to walk over it! After thy death thou dost change colour like the Sarcophrynium.

‘When Lojomon the elephant dies the butchers come and cut him up to sell, and those who are hungry come and eat him on the spot.

‘If an elephant passes a certain way but once that way becomes a road, and if his mother passes that way also, that road becomes a plain. The elephant has a head but no neck.

‘Elephant Laaye, enormous animal! Elephant La-n-dede, thy name is “Death, stand aside, I pray thee!” He who says he will slay the elephant, and the hunter who says “I shall bring down an elephant”, receive the elephant’s reply: “If thou knowest the fate of goats, leave me in peace. But if thou knowest it not, come near and I will teach thee.”

‘His eye-sockets are like ládugbós: his throat is like the vase orú. But if no one harms thee, thou dost no harm to any. The elephant has but one arm and yet he can tear up a palm-tree: if he had two he would rend the sky like a rag. Mother who dost cover thine infant like the night!

‘The elephant walks in anger and his body is huge. A man with a year-old charm had best leave following him, for the elephant fears not charms. Animal of the long defences, good angel of him who kneels on thine head! Elephant, who transformest all into dust!

‘When a herd of elephants is gathered together they are like a thick wall. Animal of the long tail! It is thou who dost smash the gourds one against the other! It is thou who art seen in the river washing the cooking-pots and the isáàsùn!’

And so the years went by one after the other. You were still alive, still breathing. Now and then, when you were sharpening a pencil or peeling an orange, the knife slipped and gashed your hand. But the cells sewed themselves together again, immediately, indefatigably, because the body didn’t yet want to die.

Lying fully dressed on his back on the bed, Chancelade took a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table and lit it with a match torn from the little green folder. He scraped the head of the match on the sulphur and applied the little orange flame to the end of the cigarette. He drew on it once or twice, watching the shreds of tobacco and the paper catch alight, then blew the match out and put it in the empty ashtray on the bedside table. It was made of blue metal with ALITALIA written on it. There was a little dip at each corner for resting a cigarette in. Chancelade smoked and looked at the ceiling. He’d breathe the smoke in through his mouth, keep it there for a few seconds, then form his lips into an O and let out a few blue rings. Then he’d swell his lungs and inhale the smoke that was left. Finally, sometimes through his mouth, sometimes through his nostrils, he would breathe out a thread of grey mist which at once mingled with the air of the room and vanished. This too was a fascinating game. You could have stayed like that for hours, doing nothing but breathe the grey smoke in and out and watch the ceiling. It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side of the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.

LOVED

Spending three days and nights shut up in a hotel room with Mina without sleeping or eating. You were capable of doing that for no particular reason, just for the pleasure of being free and able to keep writing, on pieces of hotel paper headed

ATLANTIC PALACE

600 rooms — Air-conditioned

Private beach

I’m alive I’m alive.

Chancelade had chosen it because it was a luxury hotel, with a lift, a garden, a beach, terraces, and an enormous reception hall with shops and a hairdresser’s. In was one of those magnificent hotels with stupid flashy names like ‘Oriental’, ‘Vistamare Palace’, ‘Château Fleuri’ or ‘Majestic Palace’. That’s to say it had soft music, bars with concealed lighting, red plush, uniformed bellhops, imitation crystal chandeliers, mirrors, mosaics, black leather armchairs, and American, Japanese, German and Brazilian tourists in weird get-ups and talking every language under the sun.

Chancelade had gone into the reception hall with Mina and said to the man at the desk:

‘I’d like a room.’

The man had consulted a chart, held out a yellow slip, and said quite simply:

‘Room 312. Would you mind filling in this, please?’

On the card Chancelade had written:

Surname: BURNS

Christian names: Charles

Occupation: Student.

Nationality: Guatemalan

Date and place of birth: August 6, 1939, Champerico (Guatemala)

It was a beautiful brand-new room with dark red walls, black armchairs, a metal table, a metal wardrobe, and a double bed with a dark blue spread. There were also white radiators, an air-conditioner, a blue carpet, and a big window with net curtains as well as two other pairs, one blue and one black. Outside the window was a balcony with a view of the sea and a few pots of geraniums. Lamps with white or red cloth shades were scattered about the room. And on the wall over the bed there was an imitation antique engraving of a horseman surrounded by a pack of hounds. On the table to the right of the bed was a white telephone without a dial and a pottery ashtray.

On one side a cream-painted door opened into the bathroom. It was a small room lined with white tiles and contained: a bath (white); a washbasin (white); a wardrobe with a mirror (white); a towel-rail (white); towels (white); a point for an electric razor (220 volts); a W.C. (white); a toilet-roll (pink); a stool (white); a ventilation-shaft (dirty); and a smell (turpentine) that came from a shiny disc in a little plastic cage attached to the wall.

Chancelade spent a little while taking possession of the premises. While Mina lay on the bed with her shoes on reading the paper, he made a tour of the room, putting out a cigarette in the ashtray on the table, opening drawers, looking at himself in the glass, going out on the balcony, switching the lights on and off, fiddling with the knobs of the air-conditioner, pulling both sets of curtains, turning on the radio, going into the bathroom, using the w.c., pulling the chain, washing his hands and face in the basin, drying himself on a clean towel, combing his hair, reading the notice tacked on to the door of the room, and so on.

Outside it was the end of the afternoon or the beginning of the evening. The sun was still quite high above the horizon and it was very close. Inside the room with the curtains drawn you sensed that there was still a good deal of light left, hard white light that wanted to force its way into the room. You could hear the sound of car-engines too; the road passed just behind the hotel. Then Chancelade would walk over to the bed and sit down beside Mina. He’d take her hand and speak. Mina would go on reading the paper, and from time to time lift her head and look at him. She answered what he said too, or else asked him questions. They were merely trivial conversations, not the sort you find in books. Words that just came and went, without order or logic, snatches of ideas, exclamations, stammerings, grunts. At any moment, on the bed, or standing in the room, or sitting on the floor of the balcony, or in the bath up to the neck in water. There were movements too, gestures, shrugs, shivers, caresses, scratchings, rubbings of the eyes, yawns, coughs, laughs, the swallowing of saliva. If you tried to remember one particular moment, say when Chancelade talked about his mother, sitting on the edge of the bed, or when Mina told the story of the seagull she found once in the forest, you could have written it in the form of a dialogue, complete with time and place:

10.10 p.m.

Mina lies on the bed, her head on Chancelade’s chest.

Chancelade lies on the bed, his left hand on Mina’s shoulder, his right holding a lighted cigarette,

An ashtray on the bed.

Three lighted lamps about the room.

A mosquito.

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, very nice.’

‘No noise.’

‘No, not much.’

‘Hotels are usually very noisy.’

‘Yes, but this is an expensive one.’

‘There are usually people quarrelling, or drunk, and cars, and—’

‘Yes, you can’t hear anything here.’

‘Do you think there is any noise?’

‘It must be soundproofed.’

‘Yes, otherwise someone would have banged on our wall.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Do you know, this is the first time I’ve ever liked being in a hotel.’

‘What I usually dislike about hotels is the idea that there might be hidden microphones.’

‘Yes, behind the pictures or in the lamps.’

‘Yes, I always feel someone’s listening to what I say.’

‘There wouldn’t be much point.’

‘What, in listening to what people say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, but it bothers me all the same.’

‘I—’

‘And you might be a murderer, or a spy, mightn’t you?’

‘No, what frightens me are those other things.’

‘What things?’

‘You know, those little holes in the wall.’

‘Oh, yes, like spy-holes.’

‘Yes, or television cameras hidden in the lights.’

‘Yes, that’s really—’

‘And transparent mirrors, with people on the other side watching you.’

‘Don’t even talk about it.’

‘Do you know what I’d do if I owned a hotel? I’d have two or three rooms fitted up like that and I’d watch through the mirrors and the holes in the walls.’

‘You’d soon get fed up with it.’

‘No, it’d be very interesting.’

‘The naked women, you mean?’

‘Yes, that, and watching people moving about, walking, sleeping, living. Very interesting.’

‘I hope the chap who owns this hotel isn’t like you.’

‘Look, you could have one hole over the bed and another by the window.’

‘And one in the bathroom.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You could make it pay, in any case, by charging people to watch.’

‘Wouldn’t you enjoy it?’

‘Yes, perhaps, but it’d get to be disagreeable in the end.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Because … because people are so ugly when they think no one can see them.’

‘Yes, but that’s what’s interesting.’

‘No, what I’d really enjoy would be hearing what people said.’

‘Yes, through microphones.’

‘Yes, or like the chap who built that prison, in Syracuse.’

‘In the shape of an ear?’

‘Yes, the hotel could be built in the shape of an ear and I’d be in the middle.’

‘Yes, but you’d hear everything at once.’

‘Not necessarily, you could have a system of … er …’

‘And you think that would be interesting?’

‘I don’t know, yes, I think so.’

‘You’d hear husbands and wives quarrelling.’

‘Yes, and crimes being planned, and secrets, that sort of thing. Ordinarily people never say anything, so like that …’

‘Yes, it’d seem queer meeting them afterwards down in the restaurant.’

‘And I’d learn such a lot.’

‘Of course it would really be best to be invisible.’

‘The trouble with that is it could be dangerous. People can’t see you, so they walk all over you and poke their cigarettes in your eye!’

‘Ha ha!’

‘I read a story once about a chap who invented a machine to make people invisible, something to do with directing light rays.’

‘You directed them somewhere else?’

‘No, that wasn’t it, it was like with sound waves. You know if you speed up sound waves you produce a noise so high it’s inaudible, well, it was the same thing here, you speeded up the light, no, you slowed it down, or, no, I forget.’

‘But isn’t the speed of light always the same?’

‘Yes, no, but what he — He said it was like a propeller turning, when it turns very fast you can’t see it.’

‘So you have to turn very fast to be invisible?’

‘Ha ha, no … No, I can’t remember.’

‘Another thing I’d have liked to do is go backwards in time.’

‘Oh yes, I used to think I’d like that too.’

‘To spend a while among the Romans, say, or go and see Buddha.’

‘Yes, that’d be fun.’

‘What would you choose?’

‘I don’t know, I think I’d have liked to live in 1863.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘I don’t know, I’d have gone to America, and there’d have been the Civil War and the Gold Rush, and so on …’

‘Yes, it must have been fun then.’

‘In 1863 there were still Indians all over the West, Sioux, Apaches, Navajos, and they still owned the land.’

‘Yes, it must have been very interesting.’

‘Or else I’d have liked to live 500 million years ago — you know, at the time of the brontosauruses and ceratosauruses and pterodactyls.’

‘And mammoths.’

‘No, I think the mammoths came later, after the mastodons. No, at the time I meant there must just have been amphibians and reptiles, and seas and lakes and swamps everywhere.’

‘And another thing that would be fun would be to live 50 million years from now.’

‘Yes, that would certainly be very strange.’

‘Do you think there’d still be human beings?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps people wouldn’t die any more then?’

‘The world would just be a single town—’

‘With other towns in space, on Mars, on Venus, everywhere.’

‘Yes. Difficult to imagine.’

‘Frightening.’

‘I read, I read in some book that every species lasts about the same time, about 300,000 years. That’s what happened with all the animals that are extinct. After 300,000 years a species dies naturally, of old age, as people do.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Yes, and I think the human race is estimated to have lived about 150,000 years so far. So if the theory’s correct that means man has got just as long to live again. And after that he’ll just gradually disappear, down to the last one.’

‘What will the last man be called? I’d love to know.’

‘It may be a woman …’

‘How awful for her … All alone in an empty world.’

‘Perhaps she wouldn’t even realize it. If all that’s true, you know, it means the human race has already reached its highest point. Henceforth it will just gradually decline. All that’s been invented will be forgotten, people won’t know how to write any more, fire and tools and language will all be forgotten. They won’t know how to walk on two legs any more, and then one fine day it will be all over.’

‘It’s awful to think of it.’

‘Not really. There may be other species, other forms of civilization.’

‘It’s still awful to imagine. All that trouble for nothing.’

‘Yes, but it’s only natural.’

‘Yes, but just the same it’s hard, terrible.’

‘After all, people don’t think about the men who were alive 2000 years ago or more …’

‘Yes, but they know that they were there.’

‘No, they don’t know. People judge everything in relation to, in relation to what they are themselves.’

‘But the—’

‘People don’t think now as they used to think before.’

‘Don’t you think so?’

‘No, I mean, they thought they possessed the truth and decided what should happen in the world and knew everything. And look where they are now.’

‘Yes, that’s terrible too.’

‘It’s true, you know, there must have been a chap, or a woman, in 722 B.C. say, who thought he knew a great deal, thought he knew the truth. It’s queer when you think of it. He spoke, he believed in God, he ate and drank, he was really alive. And now he’s gone, and there’s nothing left of him, perhaps not even a little piece of bone, or a tooth.’

‘Yes, and people who are alive are descended from him.’

‘What do you think he did?’

‘Hunted bears with a stone axe and let out horrible yells, rrrhaaoou rrhaaoou!’

‘Do you think he thought about us?’

‘Hardly likely!’

‘Yes, it’s depressing in a way to think about all that.’

‘One day my grandmother said something terrible that shocked me very much. She was eighty, and I was twelve or thirteen, something like that. And she said to me, “People don’t realize it, but a life is soon over.” That really upset me. It’s terrible.’

‘Yes, touching.’

‘It must be terrible to grow old.’

‘Yes, when everything is all over. You don’t know how much time you’ve got left, a day or a year.’

‘Fortunately most people don’t think about it.’

‘The worst must be — the thought that your life is ending.’

‘Eighty years seems such a long time, and yet to her it was nothing.’

‘When people think about eternal life what they’re really thinking of is youth.’

‘Yes, they wouldn’t want eternal life at eighty years old.’

‘It’s the active part of life they want to keep. They don’t see themselves living eternally with lumbago, or paralysed.’

‘Yes, it’s queer.’

‘Do you believe in it?’

‘What, eternal life?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, no, do you?’

‘No, neither do I.’

‘It depends, what I think is — I mean, I can’t believe that you can just die like that, in five minutes.’

‘How do you mean, in five minutes?’

‘Well, yes, there was someone there, and then five minutes later there’s nothing. That’s what I can’t believe.’

‘Why, because it’s humiliating?’

‘No, that’s not it, but — I just can’t believe it, that’s all.’

‘That a person can die in five minutes?’

‘Yes, not just die, but suddenly disappear just like that. A whole life, just like that, in five minutes.’

‘Perhaps it takes a whole lifetime to die.’

‘I–I knew a girl once, at school. We weren’t exactly friends, but we knew each other very well. Her name was Hélène and she was a year younger than me. She lived near me and we went to the beach together sometimes. I was sixteen then, and she was just fifteen. We didn’t talk much, but we knew each other quite well without it. And then she was very like me — tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. That was important to me because all the other girls were dark, with black eyes. Then one day I heard that she’d been drowned. I was stunned. She’d gone out in a boat and — and there was a storm and the boat overturned and three days later they found her. I couldn’t believe that she’d gone like that, so easily. Drowning’s such a terrible way to die, and I still saw her as she was when she sat next to me in class, and I remembered everything, her voice, her face, her hands. I — she was such a live person to me, and when I heard, when I read it in the papers, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t believe it was her …’

‘Hmm …’

‘And I did something very silly, do you know what I did, I rang up her home straight away and said, “Hallo, can I speak to Hélène Marchese, please?” It was the first time I’d ever telephoned her, and her mother said, in a strange voice, “You shouldn’t do things like that”, as if it were a practical joke, and I hung up quickly without saying who I was. But it upset me so much, I—’

‘Hmm …’

‘Yes, it’s very hard to believe, how you can be there one minute, and then suddenly it’s all over.’

‘I know someone who was killed in Algeria during the war. He was a pacifist, and I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was him. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing to happen to him. Apparently he was shot in the back of the neck with a machine-gun. Eleven bullets.’

‘Yes, it’s—’

‘Especially as he didn’t even know how to use a gun.’

‘I can’t believe it’s all over as easily as that.’

‘I’m afraid it may be.’

‘In five minutes?’

‘Yes, five minutes. And all that about eternal life and resurrection and Karma, etc., I’m afraid all that’s just illusions, dreams.’

‘Yes, it seems rather childish, I know, but—’

‘Have you ever thought about all the millions, billions of people who are dead, wiped out, swallowed up, just like that, and no one has the least idea that they ever existed?’

‘Mmm, yes, it’s true, it’s ter—’

‘And yet they did exist, and had children and wives and — and ideas, thoughts, and there’s nothing of it left.’

‘Yes … And yet I still can’t — I still can’t believe that that girl, Hélène, that she was drowned, and that as she was choking in the water all her life was being wiped out, all her soul and personality and—’

‘But I’m afraid that’s how it is.’

‘Do you — You don’t believe in God, then?’

‘I don’t know, I — it depends.’

‘How?’

‘Well, at certain moments I believe and at others I don’t.’

‘And you—’

‘I’m often afraid that’s just an illusion too, a prop, to give oneself hope.’

‘Yes, I think that sometimes too.’

‘And then sometimes I feel as if — as if it were an abyss, and I were in the process of understanding something very — very important, very strange. But anyhow, now I wonder if all that really matters very much.’

‘What, whether God exists?’

‘Yes, I mean, it’s all I think about, but I feel more and more that I shall never know, that it’s, er, what shall I say? A sort of inscrutable malediction.’

‘But you can’t forget about it.’

‘No, you can’t forget about it.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Gone half past ten.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘No — are you?’

‘No.’

‘If you are we can go out if you like.’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘Yes, please, later on.’

‘It’s funny …’

‘What?’

‘Being here like this, with you.’

‘In this room?’

‘Yes, no, what I mean is, when I saw you the other day on the beach, I didn’t think I’d be here, with you, talking about God and all the rest of it.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I don’t know, I–I wanted to get to know you, but you looked so, I don’t know, distant.’

‘I did?’

‘Hmm-hmm.’

‘I expect that was because of Ribert.’

‘Did he irritate you?’

‘Yes, he looked so proprietary, I couldn’t stand it.’

‘He’d be flattered if he knew that.’

‘Jealous, too.’

‘What does all that matter, I’m very happy.’

‘So am I.’

‘Yes, it’s funny.’

‘I feel as if I’d, as if I’d been with you for years.’

‘Yes, same here.’

‘And it’s nice, being here like this, in this hotel.’

‘Freer.’

‘Yes, and beautiful in a hideous sort of way, with the red walls and the — the carpets and the black armchairs.’

‘Like a cinema.’

‘Yes, and we’re making the film ourselves.’

‘Hmm.’

‘False and true at the same time.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Realist.’

‘Hmm.’

‘But it’s nice, not bad at all.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’re fighting against time.’

‘I’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘I haven’t forgotten, but it doesn’t matter any more, it’s like centuries and centuries.’

‘Century-seconds.’

‘360,000 years to every hour.’

‘That’s a long time …’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘Hmm.’

You could have gone on for hours and hours like that. From time to time Chancelade would stop talking and lie on Mina and caress her. Or sit on the edge of the bed and take a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table. Mina would close her eyes. Mina would pick up a page of the paper and stare at it. The watch on Chancelade’s wrist ticked away imperceptibly, and the fine second-hand turned and turned on itself without ever stopping. The room was sealed, hermetically sealed, and the light-bulbs burned behind their shades with a fierce, unforgettable glare. Outside the night was oppressive, and mosquitoes lurked round the windows searching for blood. Being in the hotel room was like being inside a ship, at once free and a prisoner, travelling towards an unknown country. In a few months or a few hours the ship would arrive at Callao, or Singapore, or Tel-Aviv. And you’d have to come out of your dark hiding-place and confront the terrible sunlight beating up from the specks of mica in the dust.

Then, little by little, the vortex invaded the room, Nothing had changed, the steel and black leather furniture was still there and the red walls were still identical, hard, impassive and without a chink. Over the bed the engraving showed the same horseman among the pack of hounds, and the lamps now off, now on, now off again, had not stirred. And yet as the hours went by a sort of fury, or a sort of illness, settled in the corners, distorted the lines, dwelt inside the metals and the materials, saturated all the plaster and paper and glass and plastic. A hatred perhaps, or perhaps merely a great fatigue had made its way into the room. It had become a sort of bubble imprisoned in the surrounding liquid and ceaselessly trying to burst. The world around the room bore down with all its weight, searching for a crack through which to pour floods of noise and heat.

Chancelade lay on the bed as on a raft that drifted yet never moved. The floor had already melted, and waves of red mud lapped slowly along the walls and spread around the bed in noisome puddles. Mina slept, her head on the pillow and her hair over her face. She breathed in and out regularly, and Chancelade listened: it was a disturbing sound that threw him back on his solitude.

In order to put up a struggle he bent feverishly over the inert body. He breathed into the warm ear, bit the foreign flesh, he even spoke. But the body remained motionless, curled up, unconscious. Chancelade looked around him with eyes that burned with fatigue. He saw the black insects hovering in the air, and the swift white flashes that ran from wall to wall. Now the void, noisy and dangerous, had entered into the room. It could no longer be escaped or expelled. All you could do was watch it advance, spreading like a cloud along the walls, piling up on the ceiling, stretching out its transparent tentacles between the legs of the table, sitting in the armchairs, walking on the balcony among the pots of geraniums.

And finally they had come. Through every possible opening they had come, all the invisible men who now peopled the room. They came and went soundlessly over the blue carpet, they emerged from the walls like clusters of bees, they walked across the ceiling in long lazy caravans.

Then Chancelade sat up on the bed with his back against the wall. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five to three, but that didn’t mean much any more. Reckoning with some difficulty he made out that this was the third day, but that didn’t mean much now either. He reached out over Mina’s body for the packet of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and lit it with a match from the folder marked

ATLANTIC PALACE

600 rooms — Air-conditioned

Private Beach

Then he turned towards the window and studied the sort of vertigo that was invading the room. The phosphorescent mist, mixed with the grey smoke of the cigarette, began to palpitate in the middle of the air like a monstrous heart lit up by X-rays. The air became dense and warm like a lung, slowly enveloping everything hard in its billions of little trembling cells. The smells varied too, sometimes sharp and pervasive, sometimes mild and sweet, almost sugary. Nerve fibres ramified all over the walls of the room, and here and there strange pains appeared, shooting like electric currents. Chancelade had a pain in the steel cupboard, then in the lamp by the window, then in the left corner of the ceiling. He felt a pang at once secret and distant spurt like a spark in the bathroom. The floor began to suffer too, groaning and creaking under the load of invisible feet. The air itself stifled, the light itself was struck, and along the skirting-boards strange insects with sharp jaws gnawed atrociously at the wood’s tender flesh. The cigarette glowed like a sixth finger added to Chancelade’s hand, giving off an unbearable smell of burnt nail and skin. That was death then, perhaps, the inevitable slow collapse towards suffering matter, the great disease that eats away the world’s millions of living forces, the flow of pus, the terrible osmosis. Chancelade was being devoured alive by the monster without thought and without love, and soon he would be nothing but a room, a mere room with bloodstained walls, hard furniture, and a window of cold glass.

To try to still this vertigo, Chancelade sank down on the bed and closed his eyes. His right hand groped for Mina’s body, and clutched at it. But the vortex did not stop. Slowly, painfully, it took possession of the room, the bed, the two outstretched bodies. Chancelade was no longer the centre. He was only a particle going round in the maelstrom, swept along, jostled, drained of all resistance. His name disappeared. His consciousness disappeared. And soon he vanished into the void, lost somewhere in the midst of the rout, become a piece of wood, a used match, a crumpled old ball of paper rolling faster and faster towards the mouth of the gutter. And nothing else remained certain but this infinite series of boxes one inside the other: the bed in the room, the room in the hotel, the hotel in the town, the town in the country, the country in the world, the world in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, the galaxy in the total of galaxies, the total of galaxies in space, space in space, space in space, space in space. There were no more men, no more women, no more anything anywhere. Just perfect and magnificent extension, empty extension, without a word, without a thought, without a gesture that might make it possible to measure, or understand, or even guess.

HAPPY

How were you to say you were happy, at that moment, on that part of the earth, with that woman, with yourself, and with everything else? It wasn’t easy to say, and yet you had to say it. You had to forget the fatal issue, pain, decay, the minute but effective assaults of time. You had to forget the void, the being abandoned, the being alone, and live out your own adventure with joy. Nothing counted any more but this explosion of life, an explosion beautiful and unique. Out of the long night, opaque, insensible, there issued now this ball of fire more luminous than a million suns, shut up inside the body and blazing there. The glare is harsh, it hurts, it flays, but the pain is also the greatest of pleasures: it is the power of life. There were so many things to believe, so many things to love, hate, touch, drink, look at, feel, understand, listen to, judge, suffer, hope. There was so much fear, so much evil, gentleness, noise or cold. From farthest time or space this wealth had come to Chancelade, a man among men, an inhabitant of this planet, and had changed him into a bomb. Everything was there, present, palpable. It called for more than words, it called for shouting, for howling at other people at the top of your voice in the street. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood, but that’s what you ought to have done: open your mouth and yell as loud as you could at three o’clock in the afternoon with the veins standing out on your neck and temples bursting:

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRH!

Then run like mad through the stone streets, leaping over cars, skipping up to the roofs and jumping from building to building, bashing your fist through shop windows, like that, without ever stopping. Run across the burning country, through fields of maize or beetroots, pull up grass and swim in icy streams. Those are the things you ought to have done, with anger and with joy, with all the strength of your muscles and with your will steeled like a weapon to break down the walls of silence. Seize a stonebreaker’s hammer, for instance, and smash the pieces of rock with terrible blows. The sharp fragments fly, the sparks burst forth, and a sort of bitter-sweet smoke smelling of sweat spreads through the air, pleasant to breathe.

There are all the things that can’t be said in words because they’re too lovely, too clear, because they’re self-evident and seem to have always been. There’s the transparency of the air, the fluidity of water, the heat of the mid-day sun, the blindness of the night. There are the stars, sparkling in the furthest depths of space. The pale moon slipping behind the clouds. The bats skimming the earth, then darting up and swooping through the darkness. There are the cries of birds in the morning in the trees. The movement of goldfishes’ fins. The screams of parrots. The exhausting sound of the sea, the sound of raindrops, the thunder echoing through mountain caves. There’s the earth drying in the sun, and the marks of tyres in the mud. There’s this woman’s body, white and peaceful, or burning with fever and desire. There are eye-lashes, eye-brows, nails. The pores of the skin. The pattern of the flowered dress, the lipstick, the dirty comb. There’s the transistor radio, gleaming white and gold, with its long chromium antenna. There are the dark glasses. But it’s inexhaustible, and you can never see everything.

So you must plunge, like Chancelade, into the glittering chaos, and give yourself up to the sounds, the colours, the smells, the millions of simultaneous and perfect sensations. Perfect earth, beloved earth, abhorred earth, earth where nothing is lacking, where there is nothing to be desired. A new abyss, an ant-hill that swallows you up in a few seconds, but with what delightful torture! You can also just sleep quietly, or sing the sad and silly little songs of childhood. You can recite over and over again in a funny little twang:

Hallo, Billy boy, had your dinner?

Yes indeed, ma’am, I had a pie.

What was in it?

A nice fat linnet.

One two three

And out goes he.

Aide la belle s’en est à sa fin alede

A A KOTKI DWA

SZARE, BURE OBYDWA

PRZYSZLY DO NAS NOCOWAĆ

MAŁY CHANCELADE PIASTOWAĆ

Ajakaa Hiljaa Sillalla

In a thousand years, in ten thousand years, will there even be anyone alive who’ll remember you existed? Perhaps in a museum, deep in some strange building of concrete and glass, there’ll be a skull with empty sockets, eaten away by time, worn, broken, with a sort of jaw stuck with rotten teeth. In the glass case, beside the skull, there’ll be a few mysterious objects unearthed by the archaeologists: a rusty lighter, two or three dim coins, a telephone disc, an earth-blackened ball-point pen, and, set out like some object of magic, a pair of dark glasses with gilt frames and one lens broken. There’ll be an entry in the catalogue corresponding to the number in the glass case, say B 10078:

Maldec skull and jawbone found 6/19 666 at Saatac. (Carbon 14 dating: 15,000/18,000)

Maldec man is a Caucasoid of the last post-Ice Age, belonging to the advanced civilization of Northern Europe and America. This exhibit may be compared with the skulls from Combe Capelle, Mladeč, Zlatý Kůň, Rothekopf, etc. But Maldec man seems to have been a direct descendant of the higher neolithic races. Tall in stature (6 feet 1 inch), Maldec man seems to have had a graceful skeleton and a cranial capacity of 1,800 cubic centimetres (just below the present average). He belonged in fact to a very advanced culture in which machines already occupied an important place. Maldec man is often considered to have been contemporary with the atomic era, though no proof of this has been adduced. He left numerous buildings, and had attained a very high artistic level. Various objects found near the skull were probably ritual objects, Maldec man having a highly developed religious sense.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to racial or religious differences. The civilization of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.

Little is known with certainty of the language spoken by Maldec man, and his writing has not so far been deciphered. It is generally supposed to have been an articulate and descriptive language. It must have been spoken all over Europe, and is sometimes called the Paleo-European language, though it must also have been used in other parts of the world. Some also maintain that the pre-desertic civilization was contemporary with the first inter-stellar flights, but it is more reasonable to suppose that these came in the post-desertic era.

The site where the Maldec skull was discovered is a characteristic one (sites typical of the last pre-desertic period are towns, roads, pyramids, aqueducts, buildings of concrete). It must not be forgotten that most of these sites were afterwards severely damaged in the drought and the atomic wars. Garraza’s machine, the paintings of Jong and the steel tower at Han Pringk are usually attributed to the Maldec civilization.

Bibliography:

— Z. Arkham: The Discovery of the Maldec Skull.

— Ostra: Man in the Upper Pre-desertic Era.

— Parsindom G.: Maldec Man — Witness of the Cataclysm?

— Sestemas: Paleo-European Civilization: Its Arts, Manners and Wars.

— Ramahot: Before, During and After the Desert.

That’s more or less what will be written in the catalogue of that museum, in ten or twenty thousand years. That’s all that will remain of Chancelade, his life, his thoughts, his love and his hate. Engulfed, worn, ground to dust, scattered in the wind and rain, buried in the mud, his brain, his soul, his body, his passions. Mingled with the earth, with the weathered rocks, with the roots of shrubs. And all these buildings, and all these houses of steel and concrete, and all these familiar objects near at hand, gas-lighters, sun-glasses, red and blue ball-points, cigarettes, handkerchiefs, coins and telephone discs; wrist-watches, keys, nail-files, cuff-links, imitation crocodile note-cases: all will have descended slowly into the dark ditch, forgotten, rejected, abandoned to the heedless elements. It was the long sacrifice of wearing away, which had never begun and which would never end, the mere passing from one bottomless abyss to another bottomless abyss.

Chancelade had always known this, even when he was nothing, even when he just performed every act in the sheer momentum of life. This was why he was in a hurry now, why he was struggling as hard as he could. This was the real cause of his intoxication, the main reason for his madness. He was walking on the beach at night holding Mina’s hand, and somewhere in the depths of his consciousness a queer mechanical voice was slowly reciting:

521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527, 528, 529.

A little further on he was sitting looking at the sea throwing stones at the waves and the voice went on counting:

586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594.

He breathed in the smell of grass from Mina’s hair, he touched the skin of her belly under the mauve dress, he kissed her lips, her ears, her brow, her nose, her neck, her bare arms:

599, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 607.

He lit a cigarette 740, he watched the blinking lights of an aircraft taking off 777, he shut his eyes 781, opened them again 782, he breathed in deeply 783, breathed out with a sigh 785, said a few words to Mina, ‘Pleasant, isn’t it?’ 797, ‘Yes, I don’t feel a bit tired’ 801. So each little thing had its figure, and each figure could be infinitely divided 853 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and so on). There was no end to it. However far back you went in time, however deep you dug and with whatever frenzy or haste, all you found was time and yet more time. You never arrived at peace, at the chill luminous zone, the chill black zone where nothing happens.

But this wasn’t a cause for despair; it was a sort of intoxication, a continual hallucination, a nightmare fiesta in which everything exploded simultaneously, everything sparkled and burned, and somewhere, untiring, the great magic wheel turned through the earsplitting noise of loudspeakers.

Chancelade advanced into the midst of the fair, jostling the crowd, his left hand holding the hand of the girl. There was so much noise and movement he couldn’t speak any more. Neon lights flashed on all sides, and loudspeakers on posts mouthed incomprehensible cries. The stalls all glittered in the darkness, blinking out their barbaric names:

CASSIDY CASSIDY CASSIDY

In places there arose the strong smell of frying or toffee, actual pink and grey clouds floating a few feet above the ground. The crowd advanced, withdrew, advanced again like a long tapeworm twitching mechanically. The faces kept changing, the masks appeared and disappeared in the livid avalanche of light. Eyes shone cruelly, open mouths uttered raucous cries. In dark corners men and women coupled in bestial postures. On platforms outside booths hairy men yelled into megaphones, or a fat woman with yellow skin danced in a whirl of red and green lights. The sound of shots skimmed the ground; you could smell the bitter smell of gunpowder. Chancelade staggered into the middle of the chaos, scarcely looking or listening. He was already lost, forgotten in the centre of the human sea, unknown, anonymous. The sweat was trickling down his back, and mingled on his hand with sweat from the hand of the woman. He’d been walking through the tumult for hours, hours, months, years perhaps. It was as if it would never be daylight again, as if there would never be another cold clear morning. Only this darkness shot through with flashes, this din, these crawling smells, these bodies crammed together and stifling. All the chaos of the universe had descended on this square in the centre of the town. Galactic vortices, solar storms, explosions of super-novae, impenetrable nebulae, falling stars, all had come together here in the darkness. There was little left to understand or to desire. Giant caterpillars whizzed round, sirens shrieking. Trucks rushed unaided up into the sky, then hurtled down with a noise like thunder. Planes went up and down, up and down, at the end of steel arms studded with lights. Hammers struck gongs, lottery wheels clicked round, rifleshots rang out. All was movement, pointless movement to kill and conquer and crush inertia. Neon suns rose everywhere, then set in blood-red twilights, and comets drew dazzling ellipses across the sky. The ground never stopped trembling underfoot, as though a herd of buffalo were charging. Monstrous faces of cardboard and plastic rolled their phosphorescent eyes. And everywhere broken mirrors reflected all this movement into other mirrors, and they into others again, endlessly. You were caught. You were shut up inside the furious labyrinth. You walked with the others, staggered with the others, laughed and cried with the others. You breathed in the smells of sweat and grease, you ate doughnuts and red toffee, you drank fruit drinks, you touched women’s flesh, you fought with crop-headed athletes. The thousand different voices of the music joined together and entered into you as one great unvarying cry, an inhuman and barbaric howl that vibrated in your chest, your innards, and the nape of your neck, and issued from your mouth as a cry. The light too was reduced to one, red, white and black, which spun round in a circle over heaven and earth, sweeping you along in its mad current. But what was worse and even stranger still was that there was no longer any Chancelade or any fair-haired girl called Mina; there was only a great living, palpitating mass, like a giant body sprawling on the ground and living its thousand blended lives. A body without head or belly or sex, an opaque and naked body wallowing on the ground and writhing there in the midst of a web of electric sparks. It trampled with its thousand legs, breathed through its open pores, sweated, devoured, vomited in all directions at once. There was no more thought. No more speech. There was only one huge strange desire burning in this body’s every cell: to people and cover the earth, to spread out and possess it, to snatch fire from heaven and engulf everything — time, space, the world, and itself. It coiled up voraciously and felt with its thousands of antennae, jaws, feet and suckers at the world that was set before it.

A long time after, Chancelade and Mina were cast out again. Before they left the terrible zone in which the beast with no head and no belly thrashed about, they looked at the dodgem cars. They saw the little trucks gliding over the black floor in all directions giving off sparks. They moved about at random, colliding, stopping, starting for no reason beneath their antennae. This was the boundary of noise and madness. Beyond the dodgem cars was the black night, silence, solitude. Chancelade took the girl by her left hand this time, and in that direction they disappeared.

ALL THESE LANGUAGES I SPOKE

There were so many ways of saying such things without speaking. You could do a drawing, for example, a portrait of a woman, with two shadowy anxious eyes, fair hair down to her shoulders, a delicate nose, and a mouth with parted lips revealing very white teeth. You could write a letter, a long letter full of adjectives and adverbs in which, lying slightly, you tried to say what you think.

At the end you’d put:

‘Yours with love

C.’

Then you’d put the letter in an envelope, and the envelope in the letter-box, trying not to think that it might get lost or end up screwed into a ball in a dustbin.

Or you could go down to the sea-shore with an empty bottle and put a note in it with a message. Then you’d throw the bottle in the water and watch it drift along the coast.

It was all very simple really. All you had to do was leave messages anywhere and everywhere, under stones, fixed to trees, between the pages of the telephone directory or the Divine Comedy, and one day Mina would come and find them, one after the other, and understand.

Or you could take a knife and carve letters on the leaves of aloes or in the trunks of plane-trees. It was there all round you if you could only read. Inside the bells on dogs’ collars, inside sardine-tins. In Coca-Cola bottles, or on the backs of cinema tickets. One letter here, another there. You took the V from television, the O from florist’s, the Z from Cinzano. And you made up your message. There was nothing mysterious about it, or even hidden. If only you wanted to be able to read, the message appeared in the street, over the sky, or on the grassy earth. All the millions of different messages that all meant the same thing.

You could send a telegram something like

SO SAD PRETTY DRAUGHTBOARD OF

RASPBERRIES STOP SO SAD

MAHARADJAH OF RAGE STOP CHANCELADE

Or you could send a book, with the relevant words underlined. Or a message in code, putting i for o, t for b, k for z, u for i, and o for a. You could leave signs in the street — a knotted handkerchief, a broken match, a chicken-bone, two crossed cigarettes, an arrow chalked on the pavement. At the end of them all would be perhaps the treasure. Drinking water, or happiness.

It was quite easy, really, to talk to each other from a distance There were so many games, so many languages! There were marks on trees, heaps of stones, semaphore, shadows, ciphers, smoke signals, the highway code, fingerprints, seeds, shells, carrier pigeons, Quipu, coins, calendars, classified advertisements, rebuses, charades:

My First is a nut to crack.

My Second is a nut to crack.

My Whole is a heart to break.

But that’s not all. You can speak in gestures like the Nootka Indians; with wings like bees; by whistling like porpoises; by making faces like gibbons. You can feel with your fingers like the blind, or play the organ like musicians. The world is spread out all around, perfectly comprehensible. The wind makes a noise in the trees, the clouds mass on the horizon: that means it’s going to rain. The moon is yellow with a misty halo: that means that winter’s coming. The insects grate furiously, the frogs croak in the darkness: that means it’s summer. A few waves move over a perfectly flat sea: it means a ship is passing, or there’s a submarine earthquake somewhere. All that’s quite plain and evident. The world is intelligent, transparent and pure, and all you have to do is sink into it and disappear.

When night fell Chancelade went up to a hill overlooking the town. Then he turned towards the west and began to speak silently with his electric torch. He said:

Chancelade peered into the darkness, straining his eyes to the utmost. But in the house far away at the other side of the town the yellow light went on burning without interruption. So Chancelade put the electric torch in his pocket and went back down the slippery stairways that led to the town.

GESTICULATING

Another time, Chancelade and Mina spoke in deaf-and-dumb language. They went into a café in the town centre and sat down without saying anything. When the waiter came Chancelade merely pointed at the ashtray, which had PHOENIX BEER written on it, and put up two fingers. The waiter gave him a queer look, then went to fetch the two glasses of beer. It was easy to make yourself understood without speaking. Then, as he lit a cigarette, Chancelade looked at Mina, and started to make signs with his right hand, just moving his lips:

C: Open hand profile little finger down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing up. Closed hand thumb and little finger up.

M: Open hand profile fingers touching. Hand profile two fingers up.

C: Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Hand closed little finger up. Open hand profile little finger down. Closed hand profile. Hand profile outside thumb. Closed hand thumb and little finger up.

M: Two fingers pointing down. Open hand profile fingers touching.

C: Open hand profile. Open hand profile fingers touching. Three fingers pointing down. Hand profile forefinger inside thumb. Closed hand thumb and little finger up.

M: Closed hand thumb and little finger up. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand profile. — Closed hand thumb up. Two fingers pointing down. Hand profile index pointing — Closed hand thumb and little finger up. Open hand profile fingers touching. Two fingers together pointing up.

C: Three fingers pointing down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Open hand profile fingers touching. Open hand profile fingers touching.

M: Hand closed little finger up. Three fingers pointing down. — Hand profile two fingers moving down. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing. Hand profile index pointing. Closed hand thumb and little finger up.

C: Three fingers pointing down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Open hand profile fingers touching.

M: Closed hand profile. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand thumb crosswise. — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. hand profile two fingers moving down. Hand closed thumb up. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. — Hand profile forefinger inside thumb. Hand closed thumb up. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. — Three fingers up. Open hand profile fingers touching. Three fingers pointing down. Hand closed thumb up. Two fingers pointing down.

C: Three fingers up. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Hand closed thumb crosswise. Open hand profile little finger down. Hand closed thumb crosswise.

M: Open hand profile fingers touching. Two fingers pointing down. — Closed hand thumb and little finger up. Open hand profile fingers touching. Two fingers up. Open hand profile little finger down. — Open hand profile little finger down. Hand closed little finger up. Hand closed index pointing. Hand closed two fingers moving down. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb.

The waiter brought the two glasses of beer and put them down on the table. Chancelade signed that he wanted to pay and held out a note. The man took the money and gave another rather disgusted look over his spectacles. Then he handed Chancelade his change and went away without saying anything.

Chancelade stopped talking for a moment and looked round the café and out of the window. Nothing was happening. Outside the sun beat down on the pavement and people went to and fro, in and out of shops. Inside the bar everyone was drinking and talking all at the same time, but what they were saying wasn’t very interesting. Mina took a sip of beer and said:

M: Three fingers up. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Hand closed thumb up. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Hand closed profile. — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Hand profile two fingers down. Hand closed thumb crosswise. — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Hand closed little finger up. Three fingers down. Hand closed thumb crosswise.

Chancelade looked at his watch, then lifted four fingers and crossed his hands, Then he said:

C: Hand profile forefinger inside thumb. Hand closed thumb crosswise. Hand closed thumb crosswise. Forefinger up. — Forefinger up. Hand closed little finger up. Hand profile two fingers up. Hand closed thumb crosswise — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Hand closed thumb crosswise. — Hand profile forefinger inside thumb. Forefinger up. Hand closed little finger up. Open hand profile. Hand profile two fingers up. Hand closed profile.

M: Three fingers up. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. — Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Open hand profile fingers touching. — Hand closed profile. Hand closed thumb crosswise. Hand closed thumb crosswise.

C: Closed hand thumb up. — Three fingers up. Hand closed thumb crosswise. Hand closed profile. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. Hand closed thumb crosswise. Open hand profile little finger down. Two fingers pointing down.

M: Open hand fingers touching. Hand profile two fingers up.

Inside the café, between the voices, you could hear the sound of a fly buzzing about or the monotonous hum of a fan stirring up the warm air. Chancelade throught it would be fun to have a café like this, in the centre of the town. You could come and spend your afternoons sitting behind the zinc counter watching people. They’d come in and sit down quite trustfully at the tables that were set out for them, and chat as they drank their beer. All you had to do was write BAR over the door and they just came in, without thinking that it might be a hairdressing saloon or a funeral parlour; without thinking that you could easily put cyanide in their glasses or their cups of coffee. They would arrange themselves in the café, go to the cloakrooms and put their ash in the ashtrays, all without asking any questions. And it would be really interesting to watch and listen to them. They’d talk about politics, racing, women, cars, illness, all together, with the same words and the same gestures. And it would make a level incomprehensible din that would echo through the room together with the bursts of music from the jukebox. It would be even more interesting than a film or a novel, and the hours would go by, the days and the years would go by pleasantly, quietly, inside the bar.

Then Chancelade went on, his hands moving nimbly:

C: Three fingers pointing down. Hand closed little finger up. Two fingers pointing down. Closed hand thumb up.

M: Open hand profile. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Closed hand thumb up. Two fingers pointing down. Open hand profile. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Forefinger up. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing up. Closed hand thumb crosswise.

C: Hand closed little finger up. — Forefinger up. Open hand fingers touching. Two fingers up. Closed hand thumb crosswise. — Closed hand thumb and little finger up. Open hand profile fingers touching. Two fingers together pointing up.

M: Three fingers pointing down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. — Hand profile forefingers outside thumb. Open hand profile fingers touching. Open hand profile fingers touching.

C: Hand closed profile. Closed hand thumb up. Closed hand thumb and little finger up. — Hand closed little finger up. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb.

M: Two fingers pointing down. Open hand profile fingers touching.

C: Three fingers up. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Closed hand thumb and little finger up.

But the girl didn’t answer. She only glanced round her as if she was afraid someone might understand what they were saying. Chancelade said:

C: Hand closed profile. Hand profile two fingers moving down. Closed hand thumb up. Forefinger up. Forefinger up. — Three fingers up. Closed hand thumb crosswise. — Hand closed forefinger pointing. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Hand profile forefinger outside thumb. — Three fingers pointing down. Closed hand thumb up. Open hand little finger pointing down. Open hand little finger pointing down. Hand closed little finger up. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Hand profile index pointing up.

The girl looked away again, then signed that she’d like a cigarette. Chancelade held out the packet and she took one from the right-hand side. She lit it with a metal lighter with her initials engraved on it: M.M. Chancelade watched her smoking for a moment. To his right the big drunk woman was sitting at her table, her great legs stuck out in front of her, trying to get into conversation with everyone. She kept saying disconnected snatches of sentences, like:

‘Little women adore me, they can’t get enough of me.’

‘Yes, they show me their little lace slips, and their little panties, and even what goes inside!’

Then she’d turn to the bar:

‘A glass of absinthe’s what I need!’

‘My grandma always used to say that everything comes right in the end.’

Then, lifting her glass of Ricard:

‘Love walked right in and stole my troubles away …’

And towards the bar, which was being repainted orange:

‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may … My old time has flown!’

Then Mina put on her dark glasses, Chancelade put his cigarettes in his pocket, and they went to look for a cinema showing a silent film, in which the people really were dumb.

SAYING INCOMPREHENSIBLE WORDS

Woolikanoc mana bori oclakokok. Zane prestil zani wang don bang. Geod de molladda apudax predongxi, ette, lalarus toolynk füranpelek gene, etti sali akka mundiu, chien roxudal woombyi waa nochli maabara sata klo kluoc. Fam rezon, fam loop griçetka sama super.

‘Bojun vendery?’ banje Zaka.

‘Kaz.’

‘Abele m’n poostu! Trix slamoc jdiokdong denyl, para munok fla monkx belu rezon mana jel silurgonge, staars hok.’

‘Kaz.’

‘Stumbo arhun chlajondyi.’

‘Ho. Bendri ravuda kok Trekeï?’

‘Trekei.’

‘Ho.’

‘Kazneibolsk, pojnun handreï Trekeï doulowo yan’de assa-mabulok.’

Frejena degun paramanuk mizkanulunre delbo anuk delco, de Wü.

‘Wü-to-kuchun-punku-rügani-yugwi-van-ntü-m(ü).’

‘Tumengao-ak.’

Betsewdepaw dungsk selo-ubo-uti, mana bori aklako oak, pendeba, m, astaro flemdiüs; grebonk flüstye merced, ozier ellgok vaarista, junje sapir trebik gonoktogo-ak duÿz banje samovülk vuntu arboo dochlawatznyé. Ob dabok-ka-paok toorp inisak, skoop tzevar atcheng-b(ü) eueg xong paxang selcojwii kapagaris nemaoun’m ü doolyi.

‘Stevak Onailgis?’

‘Sigliano okluk(ü) k.’

‘Kaz.’

Braatke ymena achede ooz-mere-patü. Leongè sdentem waaha benitongbolo-menurastiibok bili fandangguerzeb(ü), etti, enne, ach’ sedac xamenac, folo-ubi, etti, parst, yedem plemmich’x knimmen, vàà zwo trabun. Delbro sterodok-Kao egeganjle goajar redwion dabustraminipelok plààs, ankte-te-rabouam.

‘SOBIESIBOM OOLES-PONK’

Kwk-abèd: demboo, ymena, vanark xaté-demboo. Waletudo sani-a me oki-ho antè-orok. Yostlö sabur delespooka nüge m’zen irü, mana xamena yan’derch. Hagenor kaazpaalidumbok anek chlawo zani de-m(ü)-fatur krysbonara deach’de sada; ob prjessa, ob asaour honnibulskanovok-nok, awù didwoomyi s’palaturao-ak, atte te-chenbong füllola. Benidzjem den deach’doolo trix stumbok pudurum. Banje Elvaarak sakokok:

‘Velledaj acharach nooz?’

‘Ho?’

‘Ho-kuk.’

‘Alle intok cuxta narab bela kokteno-ku.’

‘Vazilikur nuwooj brez—’

‘Tonk.’

‘Har’m’doo. Niwoo. Deluz xupic hamak.’

‘Hertinabal klaspak gudur ching-fo ho. Kaz debribisziniyi heng ette, sallabang-drabor!’

‘Kaz. Strepomutzenizic ho bok anuk.’

‘Ende de ach’de.’

‘Ma-wo to-pü wü suntun kachac.’

‘Zel.’

‘Zello bucastor arta-numa-pawac.’

‘Yootense garl enzemound(ü).’

‘Kaz.’

‘Abore mana peri trizocoklok ho.’

‘Wünü-si.’

‘Karaminx zel ach’de m phoo goulaz.’

‘Galla tapassarius doko hok. Ama ana atti steze tchekkaz-kaok, kaz mok, honti!’

‘Honti hovar!’

‘Tonkao.’

Jenüs deli-h-anta patarak vahand-hang, trexidü abolomina ahaa-ra-s, wii ato-m(ü) kazzakadakok, mong framaha puchun disthakalla unà umok. Elevero-bezü, Mookach sellis, Oïnoï-atü, renobello iveillaha akastrak ch’demo n, ontoselomisku nulowadek, hech’arun, fam etti salla apak, garewodzje xamun pelladan rong-betok gonik. Wïïlla hon, enni, hottaü rus.

Salussi-nom, galla parang matatitanek àrazu-ho tong-ak tang-xaximenok Dogü.

OR ASKING INDISCREET QUESTIONS

Are you happy?

Why are you reading this book?

What do you think is the worst thing that could happen?

Where would you like to live?

Have you read the dictionary?

Do you ever cry?

Do you like looking at yourself in the mirror?

Are you sentimental?

Which brand of cigarettes do you like best?

Do you know your mother’s date of birth?

Who would you like to be if you weren’t yourself?

What is your ideal of earthly happiness?

Who is your favourite poet? Your favourite painter?

Your favourite composer?

What animal would you have liked to be?

What do you like best in a woman?

What do you like best in a man?

Are you a racialist?

Would you have liked to be a tree?

Do you write with a ball-point pen?

Do you like getting letters?

Do you wear dark glasses?

What do you like on television?

Do you think what you say?

Do you like drink?

Do you take drugs?

Which Christian names do you like best for men?

For women?

What’s your favourite surname?

How tall are you?

How much do you weigh?

What’s your pulse-rate?

Do you consider yourself normal?

Which are your favourite illnesses?

Are you obsessed with sex?

Are you a morning person or a night person?

What do you like about night?

About day?

Why aren’t you me?

What do you dream about?

Do you like money?

Are you capable of killing someone?

Are you generous?

Would you like to go to the moon?

What is just?

Would you have liked to have slaves?

Why do people forget?

Why doesn’t the sun explode?

Why is there a little hole in the top of a fountain-pen?

Why are match-heads red?

What is ugliness?

What will it be like a million years from now?

Are you afraid of the dark?

Do you feel yourself to be alive?

How can there be such a thing as infinity?

Where is God?

How can one think of nothing?

Do you know who you are?

Do you know that there are people dying of hunger?

What would you do if you were king?

What is truth?

What is passion?

What is freedom?

Would you hate someone if they damaged your car?

Have you got a feeling for nature?

What do you consider the greatest film ever?

The greatest novel?

The most beautiful painting?

The most beautiful sonata?

The most beautiful woman?

Do you believe in the Loch Ness monster?

Why is thought a closed system?

What is genius? What is talent?

What is light?

Is there a human community?

What is your favourite word?

Do you read the advertisements in magazines?

How long can you hold your breath?

Did you invent your signature straight off?

Why am I asking these questions?

Do you know what is the capital of Honduras?

Is everything beautiful?

Can you give an example of something unimaginable?

Do you feel useful?

What do you thing is the most important thing in the last 5000 years?

Are you superstitious?

Do you believe in art?

Are you a sadist?

Do you think the world only exists in the human mind?

Can you conceive of the absolute?

Do you ever have insomnia?

Anxiety?

Do you like children?

What’s your favourite object?

Are you moved by the story of Jesus Christ?

Are you free?

Do you know that you’re going to die?

Why will you grow old?

Why is there an end?

Why do things wear out?

Why do people die?

Why are they forgotten?

What is the most important thing you’ve ever done so far?

What’s your present state of mind?

Have you got a soul?

How would you like to die?

Have you read Ecclesiastes?

Have you read Sri Aurobindo?

Have you read Mao, Tse-tung?

Have you read Proust?

Does evil exist?

Do you think there won’t be any more wars?

Are you afraid of the atomic bomb?

What must one do to be happy?

To see things clearly?

Is it silly to ask questions?

Is it impossible to live without suffering?

Do you believe in love?

Does talking do any good?

How will it all end?

IN A REGION THAT RESEMBLED HELL

One day Chancelade went through a region that resembled hell. He was sitting in a blue car driven by his wife. The windows were open because it was very hot, and there was some kind of queer electric guitar music on the radio. Every so often a man’s voice would interrupt the music to announce the next disc, ‘Manuella’, ‘Tallahassee Baby Blues’, ‘Wow’, ‘I want to Die Tonight’, or something like that, but the music was always the same. The guitar ground out its metallic sounds, sometimes voluble and swooping up and down with nervous rapidity, sometimes sharp and choleric with roughly struck chords intermingled with long sweet discordant notes that burst forth then united in strident whirrs. The rhythm was echoed heavily in the background, and you could also hear the ‘dum dum dum te-dum dum’ of the double-bass. It was a strange kind of music, sad and sweet at the same time, which reverberated round inside the car like some organic sound; yes, it was just as if there was a heart inside this carapace of metal and plastic, a heart and mechanical lungs, and as if the whole world were inhabited by steel robots.

The blue car drove on by itself along the road, and Chancelade looked at the sea and listened to the strange and powerful music of the electric guitar. He smoked another cigarette without saying anything, the prisoner of the metal machine bowling along, and of the music, and of the fierce reflections of the sun on the sea and the fronts of the houses.

At one point Mina turned to him and said:

‘What’s the matter?’

At another:

‘What a scorcher, eh?’

‘Don’t you feel hot too?’

‘The traffic! We shall never get to town before two.’

But Chancelade didn’t hear. He just continued to lie back on the cushions gazing avidly at the world rushing by. There were lots of people on either side of the road, and even on the sea. People went to and fro beneath the flood of white light dressed in loud shirts or bathing suits, their red skins glistening with sweat. You caught a brief flash of their eyes embedded in their flesh, little black eyes, probably cruel. Some of the women wore strange dark glasses with white frames shaped like butterflies, and looked at the car with dazed smiles. Others had hair dyed red that blazed in the sun. And everything was in motion, passing slowly by the car as if on a conveyor belt.

Inside the metal cubicle the music sounded louder now. Perhaps the young woman had just turned up the knob lightly as she drove. Or perhaps they were nearer now to the transmitter, with its tower radiating concentric circles of the sound of the guitar. The rhythm drummed out powerfully, like pistol shots hitting an iron plate; and each beat was a pulse-beat driving a wave of blood through the metal coachwork and along the chromium and through the fibres of the plastic cushions. The sound mingled with the light and exploded regularly in the body of the car, and each explosion pierced Chancelade with a separate pain.

It was strange to be alive here, in this blue box advancing along the road; it was a sort of prison radiant with heat and sound, drawn mysteriously along by some blind force and gliding helplessly along its rails towards its unknown destiny. Chancelade, his elbow on the car-door, hunched in the imitation leather seat, was gradually seized with paralysis. At one point he tried to raise his cigarette to his lips and inhale the smoke; but he couldn’t; his fingers opened and the cigarette fell out of the window and twirled away in the air-stream. Chancelade had the idea of lighting another, but as soon as the idea occurred to him he forgot. The fanatical rhythm of the electronic music engulfed him and bound him to his seat.

Suddenly the car came to a halt. There’d been an accident somewhere along the road and the flood of cars drew to a standstill. They were drawn up in three lanes, and you could see hundreds, thousands of roofs sparkling in the sun. They were all colours, blue, red, black, grey, white, green, fawn, yellow; there was even a gold one shimmering like the back of a beetle. The light struck down on all these domes and rebounded in great shafts of crystal. Around the motionless caravan the heat too rose upwards trembling, and an acrid smell of overheated radiators spread out a few inches above the ground. From time to time there was a gust of wind but that only made things worse: it brought with it the nauseating smell of the sea, a strong musty mixture of urine, sweat and stagnant water.

Through this sort of dream Chancelade heard Mina’s voice saying something like:

‘What a jam, eh? And the heat! We’ll be here all night at this rate’, etc.

But the underground rhythm of the music carried the words away as soon as they appeared.

And gradually the landscape was tranformed. It didn’t really change; but everything began to shine more harshly, more violently, as if the damp softness of the air had been removed. It was as if for days a terrible wind had been blowing, a furnace discharging desert sand that grain by grain weathered the world to the bone, leaving nothing to be seen but bare angles, points, edges and spikes. The ground was dry now, burned by the light, and nothing grew up between the pebbles but thick weeds with long sharp prickles.

The crowd continued to walk along the pavement, echoing the ponderous rhythm. With every crack of the whip its flesh seemed to flinch and start at the biting thongs. But were they really men? For the faces were all the same, and the bodies always alike. Perhaps it was the same men and women just going round and round to mock Chancelade: pretending to move forward but always going back to where they were, darting at the window of the car their bright sharp eyes. Chancelade tried to look away, but it was no use: everywhere the light glared in livid slashes, sparkling on the roofs of the cars, rebounding from the windows, darting like a dagger from the lenses of dark glasses, jutting from the roofs of concrete and the walls with their overcrowded balconies. Both the light and the noise from outside penetrated the car and mingled instantly with the electric music. Everywhere there was the same fury of faces, the same shrieking voices, smells of gas and hot oil, and desperate movement. To the left arose the huge white walls of blocks of flats. In the middle the tide of cars buzzed in its burning cloud. On the right the beach with its sharp pebbles was seething with noisy men and women, and beyond it rose the other wall of the sea, blue, solid and covered with sharp little wrinkles.

All the colours throbbed in time to the music, as if they were suspended phosphorescent in the void. There was no longer anything calm or insignificant. The bare sky was of an incomparable blankness, the sea atrociously blue. There was nothing on every side but blows in the face, punches delivered by red dresses, dazzling shirts, red or yellow hair, brown faces, gold teeth, glittering wrist-watches, shoes, black and white swimsuits, scarlet shoulders, green or mauve glasses, flowers, cars, children, dogs, motorcycles, pebbles, patches of melting tar. The torrid colours collided, stuck together, spread in soft waves. The burning colours hurtled towards you like bullets. They were all there, foaming together like bubbles or else like steel blades, hovering, menacing, ready to disembowel you.

Nor could you escape from all the names spread out everywhere; on signs swinging in the breeze, written in letters of fire, gashed with great brush-strokes, the senseless words exploded like grenades, and the pieces penetrated your brain. They were also knives, these words, razor-blades eager to carve your skin and make your blood flow. Their dumb cries, more terrible even than the cries of men, arose on every side at once. No matter where you looked it was impossible to avoid them. Strange, beautiful, violent, they lay there like traps, and just as you looked at them they disappeared. To left, to right, before, behind, above, below. On the walls of service stations, over bars, in the gardens, on the beach, and even in the sky, on the long stream trailing behind the aeroplane:

CASTROL

CASTROL

CASTROL

Hot Dogs Hot Dogs Hot Dogs

SOLEX

air way in way out camping site outboard motors

kingsize beach plot orangina

tripe-shop restaurant

bleupunkt

gold

SATAM

Chancelade read all these words inside his throat; he couldn’t stop. He sang them and yelled them without respite, KELVINATOR, disappearing into each other, REMINGTON, swallowed up by the syllables, HONDA, exhausted, incapable of forgetting, SALEM, incapable of shutting his eyes or extinguishing his voice.

This was the real curse of this place, the infernal power that was taking possession of his mind and body in order to reduce him to slavery. The world had suddenly turned over to show its hidden face, and nothing was any longer comprehensible. As the words exploded the landscape gradually fell to pieces, showering the motionless car with the debris of human bodies and artefacts of civilization. But this destruction, instead of making the spectacle more endurable, only rendered it still more harsh and impenetrable. Men and women clustered on the edge of the pavement, their empty eyes masked by dark glasses, their gaping mouths uttering incoherent sounds.

A fat woman came up to the car door and pointed at Chancelade; then she began to speak, and Chancelade listened in terror to the grunts and stammers and gurgles that came out of her mouth. He heard her say:

‘Argl, gaur haurgl, baarh heu-heugogl meug eth at-t-teu argl …’

She burst out laughing, and all round her Chancelade saw children, men, and other women laughing loudly and showing their gold teeth. He looked at them eagerly, fascinated, unable to turn away. When the fat woman had gone he saw a man who limped, an expectant mother with varicose veins, a group of boys, a girl with a broad beam and bare feet and breasts that jiggled as she walked, an old man covered with grey whiskers, a woman in a bikini, two women with untidy hair, another girl in a black swimsuit, a woman with pimples on her shoulders and legs, three soldiers, and a man carrying a transistor. He looked at them without understanding, trapped inside a clear nightmare. He saw all those eyes embedded in the soft flesh, the misshapen noses, the cheeks, the smooth or rough hair, the veined hands dangling from the arms, the shoulders, the fleshy backs, the pot bellies, the breasts, the sweating rumps, the crooked or skinny or swollen legs. He smelt the matching odours, heard the grunts and gurgles of the familiar voices. The colours sparkled in the light, and sky and sea were become as hard as sheets of linoleum.

So it was here, the centre of the furnace, the crater, the heart of the ant-hill. Sweat began to trickle gently from Chancelade’s face, arm-pits and back. He felt that he was gliding into the landscape of madness, in time with the electric music. Soon he would be one of them, an insect among insects; the crowd would close around him like a mouth and digest him greedily. He would slip along the undulating corridors like a piece of food, gradually losing his flesh, his muscles and his mind. Multiform folly would engulf and press in on him from all sides, sucking up his substance, drinking up drop by drop the liquid of his personality. And suddenly he would disappear in the human sea, he would vanish, swallowed up, unconscious, and no one would ever know that he’d been there.

Chancelade gazed with longing through the window at the moving crowd. Somewhere deep in his body, in his belly, in his genitals, in the network of his nerves, he felt the call of the void urging him to mingle himself in what he saw. It was like a funnel drawing him outwards, towards the landscape with its dense colours, towards a world as thick and hot as a succulent steak. The rays of the sun were tentacles tugging at him gently and without pity. The noises stretched out gluey filaments that clung to his skin. The movement turned on its own axis, drilling outwards its endless spiral, and you could only follow, follow. You had to tear yourself off the imitation leather cushions, open the door of the car, and leap right out, abandoning the seething prison of the blue car, with a woman’s voice crying vaguely in the distance, though you didn’t even listen:

‘What on earth are you doing? What are you doing? …’

With quickened heartbeats Chancelade began to walk through the midst of the crowd, along by the sea. He went back along the line of stationary cars, gulping in the smell of petrol and oil and staring at the starry reflections of the coachwork till his eyes were full of tears. The sun was right in his eyes, and he went along through the mist of light hardly seeing where he was going. He was moving fast. His feet thudded on the ground and rebounded as if on a thick carpet. His arms swung at his sides, his hands clenched and unclenched, his lungs breathed in and out, and sweat ran in little streams down his back and down his cheeks.

In front and around him the crowd opened then joined together again; bodies jostled against him, massive masculine bodies, the warm bodies of women in swimsuits, the light bodies of children or girls. There were waves of vulgar and delightful smells: frying, sun-tan lotion, perfume, sweat. Never had there been so many remarkable things, so much richness and life. Ugliness was everywhere, glowing sumptuous ugliness in blazing colours that never dimmed. On the left an absolutely flat sea shone an unwavering blue. There had never been such a blue anywhere. The sky shone too, colourless, mercurial, teeming with a million tiny specks. Underfoot the ground echoed, cracked and buckled, and the heat clung to your clothes and skin like a sheet. Inside Chancelade’s skull now there was no more echo; nothing but a bottomless hole, an insatiable void devouring all it could, drinking in all it could as if for the first and last time.

And perhaps it was the last time. He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices. He’d been travelling all his life in order to arrive here, in hell, to burn with all the others in this hideous yet delectable furnace; yes, it was undoubtedly hell, but it was unimaginably interesting. It was solid life, life compact, thick as syrup, dense, bitter, sweet, nauseating, narcotic, the strange whirlwind that swept up all in its path. Resistance was vain. The crowd broke over you like a wave and you were carried away in its febrile dance. Now you were shouting the words that were written in the middle of the yellow stars: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, or ‘D.D.T.! D.D.T.!’, or ‘Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!’ The whites of everyone’s eyes glared with madness between darkened lids, and all breaths panted in unison, strewing the air with a low raucous hum. Car hooters blared ceaselessly, there were grotesque yells of laughter, and cries, and the music of the electric guitar reverberated from all the transistors: and it was a calm harmonious concert that stirred your inside and made you tremble.

All this had been prepared to crush and conquer you. There was no mildness anywhere, no hiding-place of gentle shadow. Everywhere there were stars of noise and heat and light, in the trees, in the grey pebbles, in people’s faces, in the folds of upholstery and clothes, in the middle of the earth and the centre of the sea. These darts were set everywhere, charged with their sudden poison, ready to pierce the skin. Chancelade advanced into their midst, proffered perhaps as their prey, making no attempt to defend himself. He melted into the folds of the crowd, he crumbled away piecemeal in the sun, he mingled continually with the downward flood of dirty water. Soon perhaps he would reach the meeting-point, zero, and disappear without more ado. He would vanish like a splash drunk up by the sand, merged into the huge ocean of men and things, there on that square of anonymous earth, lost in the eternal plenitude. He would be forgotten. He wouldn’t be dead, but he would cease to be the only living being in the world. He would be no more than a tiny seed in the silo, sifting down with all the other grains, closed in on all sides, with nothing left that bore any resemblance to hope, or freedom, or sorrow. He would never be mentioned again. He wouldn’t even be allowed his insupportable soul; nothing more would be expected of him. He would just be there, between a bit of yellow plastic and a woman in a blue and white swimsuit, with somewhere or other the blind sun, a scrap of blue sky, a block of flats with a hundred windows all exactly the same, and of course the flat sea with its trivial little wrinkles. One name among the rest, one name in the forest of names, and a toneless voice would read out mechanically:

Zisman

Calane Henri

Apaydin

Cadopi

Queru Marie-José

Benezit

Bavastro

Lesueur

Garibaldi

Camous

Gonigres

Malivoire-Filhol de Camas

Vandamme

Uhl Josette

Eliaou Elizabeth

Marie Angst

Pyée Mireille

Almaleh Klod-Korin

Amigo Martine

Chancelade

Michel Tschann

Dol

Gomez

Faureze

Colette Frau

Ansorg

Blua Michèle

Carassas

That was after all how you ought to live. With a number, a blood-group, finger-prints, a mastication coefficient, one eye with 8/10ths vision and the other with 5/10ths. You were entered on your card and the card was put in a special drawer among a lot of others. Then no one had to be himself any more, and everywhere there reigned the great peace of ordered disorder.

There were so many men here, so many women, and children, and cars, and dogs, and houses, and roads, and street-lights, and stones, and trees. So much dust. So many colours and movements It was impossible not to feel intoxicated at the spectacle of all this abundance. You were one of them! You were in the midst of them! You were them! Chancelade became one with the baking earth, the blank sky, the damp air, the thick smells. He was embodied in the thousands of milling bodies, he had all these faces, all these eyes, all these bellies, all these backs, all these legs. He walked with all these feet and revolved his thousand arms like spokes. He looked, was looked at, looked at himself with all these seeing eyes, an infinity of mirrors transparent or opaque moving in all directions. It was exhausting, but it was remarkable: there was no end to breathing in through all these chests, feeling with all these skins, hearing the general murmur with all these ears. There was no end to suffering and enjoying with all these lives at once different and the same, and with one’s own as well! You were overcome with happiness and despair at thinking with these thousands of brains, speaking with these millions of words all issuing from the throat at once and gushing forth into the air, intermingled, indistinguishable, incomprehensible, and yet so splendidly in harmony.

It was the unique noise arising from the earth, the full growl from all the houses and all the streets, ascending like a dark cloud to throw the huge shadow of the human monster upon the screen of the void. What were they saying? What did they want? What did they see? What were they looking for? They were saying nothing, they wanted nothing, they saw nothing, and they were looking for nothing. But the hot and stormy murmur continued to rise above towns, fields, beaches, valleys, even above deserts, unchanging, unvarying, so vast and so brutal that no one could understand it. All the languages rumbled away in time with one another, all the engines muttered in the middle of their hot smelly halo, all the transistors blared the electric music of organs, violins and guitars.

And Chancelade was caught up in all this expanse. As he passed along the kerb he would say, for example:

‘Hey there!’

or

‘Tchakkk!’

And the sound rose straight up to join the dense cloud over the earth. He would stretch out his hand to tap the ash off his cigarette into a litter-box, and his gesture was lost in an immensity of similar gestures. He looked for a few seconds at a girl with red hair walking along the beach in her swimsuit, and somewhere in the grey eternity peopled with girls there was the image of that white body advancing on its long legs, wearing a pink bikini and with the wind blowing through her red hair.

Yes, somewhere there was this kind of total consciousness that belonged to no particular person and that instead of reflecting things was the things themselves: the world in the process of living, continually, without collisions, without deaths, year after year, century after century, never born, never ending. Somewhere or everywhere, there was this brain that thought. There were these nerves that vibrated. This tongue that tasted, these eyes that saw, these ears that heard, this nose that smelled. There was this language that told its interminable story. And, magnificently, what it told was happening at that very instant on the earth and in the universe.

This world was too alive, you couldn’t conquer it. This space had too much space, this time had too many seconds, days, weeks, millenia. So there was nothing more you could do to try to understand it. You couldn’t any longer meet the terrifying glance of the absolute. You had to become an insect again, swarm on the overcrowded plateau, wave your arms, wave your legs about. You had to hurl yourself with all your strength into the vortex, and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, and give birth, like that, without peace, without mercy; play the cruel insatiable game of the insect world because there was really nothing else to do. One day you were there. Another day you were dead. But that didn’t matter at all in this moving ocean, it wasn’t even tragic. It was slightly ridiculous, rather moving, a twist of the lips, a furtive tear drying on the eyelid. And the giant strength of the world went on bearing down, dragging, turning the wheel. A blind force, without utterance, without desire. The calm and terrible power that is scattered through the glands, through fire, through the tremors of minute particles.

When Chancelade had become this almost invisible speck on the landscape, he stopped walking through the midst of the whirling crowd. He went and sat on the beach, in the sun. He sat right near the water, between a dark girl lying face down on the pebbles and reading a paper, and a group of men, women, children and dogs gathered round a red parasol.

Leaning on one elbow he watched the surface of the sea scintillating in the sun. He steeped himself in the colour blue, in the sound of the waves scraping regularly at the stones, and in the musty odour wafted by each breath of hot air. Every so often people would get up and hobble across the stony beach to enter the sea. And on the ochre skin of the girl reading there were little round drops that dried in the sun.

After a little while a big four-engined jet flew across the sky above the beach. Its thunder covered the landscape like a storm of rain as the strange machine advanced, shining in the sun. Chancelade watched it, that powerful metal machine moving forward slowly like a star in the centre of its eyrie of noise, and thought that its appearance there might really be lasting for years. It glided painfully through the layers of the air, unreal, distant, annihilating every second the few millimetres traversed, fixed in an image continually renewed, a long silver cylinder with outspread wings which the dazzling light shone through like glass. The shriek of the jets pressed down upon the surface of the sea, perhaps causing invisible waves, and it was like some fabulous sign, a comet or a falling star, appearing to men to warn them of approaching catastrophe.

When the plane disappeared on the other side of the bay, probably to land on the airfield, Chancelade looked at the sky; and for a few seconds he could still see the phosphorescent wake, like the track of a snail, that marked its path. Then the white waves merged together and the sky closed up again, swallowing up in its wilderness the last echoes of the din that had reigned there so long.

Then Chancelade went, too. He walked a little way along the beach, stepping over the bodies stretched out on the dusty pebbles. He looked at the multicoloured skins, the black, red, blue, mauve, green and white swimsuits. He gazed at all those navels in the middle of all those bellies. He breathed in briefly again the disagreeable bitter smell of sweat and sun-tan lotion. He walked among all those bodies stretched out in the cruel sunlight as if they were corpses. But they weren’t really corpses. Everywhere, all round him, life burst forth — grotesque, parodic, full of parrot-like cries. At the same time as the smells of sweat and sewers there arose from the baking earth a vague and terrifying trembling, a murmur, a feverish shudder, a cramp, a din, a mad agitation, a tetanic contraction! All these hearts beat ponderously, and the sound echoed through the earth. The blood was hidden, the swift, thick, hot blood! In those gourds of skin there on the beach there were gallons of blood; if you’d smashed them one after the other they’d have gushed out on to the sloping stones and soon poured in red streams down to the sea. After a few days, or weeks, the sun would look down on a great crimson expanse, and the sky itself would be pink.

Chancelade walked for a long time through the crowded streets. He went past rainbow-windowed shops where the goods on display calmly gave off their vulgar attractive odours. He passed café terraces with brightly coloured tables, where women drank fruit juice and ate ices. He went through veritable clouds of noise, and the deep murmur of juke-boxes clung to his skin. He caught snatches from open mouths, like:

‘Hey there, you coming?’

‘But I tell you …’

‘The heat!’

‘Ciao!’

‘Ciao!’

He crossed the road between the bonnets of stationary cars, inhaling the smell of burning. He watched the red traffic lights change to green, and the intermittent ones being intermittent. He looked up at the white houses, and on the balconies covered with dingy flowers he saw people looking down. He stopped at an ice-cream stall for a glass of lemonade and spoke to a girl who was drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola through a straw. She must have been about thirteen or fourteen, and was rather plump, with a brown skin and a two-piece turquoise swimsuit.

‘Is it nice?’ said Chancelade.

‘What, this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not bad.’

‘I prefer lemonade.’

‘Lemonade makes you thirsty.’

‘Yes, but I don’t like that stuff.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘It tastes — it tastes of liquorice.’

The girl laughed, and waddled over on her short legs. Chancelade got out his cigarettes.

‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes.’

Chancelade lit the cigarette and she puffed at it rapidly without inhaling.

‘Are you on holiday here?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Chancelade.

‘So am I. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘Hm-hm.’

‘I’m staying at the camping site. You know, just beyond the main road. The Azure.’

‘Original name,’ said Chancelade.

She laughed again, sipped at her drink, then puffed at her cigarette.

‘Mm.’

‘Is it nice there?’

‘Mm, it’s all right.’

She put the bottle of Coca-Cola down and wiped her mouth with her hand.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Over there …’

‘What are you, German?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘It’s obvious.’

‘Really?’

‘And there are lots of Germans here.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Janine. What’s yours?’

‘Karl.’

‘Are you camping too?’

‘No, I’m staying in a hotel, down that way.’

After that Chancelade went on walking along by the beach. He met thousands of other men, women and children. It was the end of the afternoon now, and the neon lights were beginning to come on everywhere, over bars, in shop-windows, on top of concrete turrets.

Gradually night descended over everything, and darkness covered the roofs of the houses, the cars, the trees, the stones on the beach. It was a hot thick darkness trembling with noise, shot through with red and white flashes. Car lights went on, scarlet stars behind the two white patches in front. Reflections flashed in all the windows, and here and there light and shadow alternated indefatigably.

Chancelade continued to walk by the sea in the midst of this darkness. He had emerged now from the tumult, but the intoxication of it still lingered. Somewhere on this bit of earth was the seething crucible of hell, like the crater of a volcano belching incandescent lava. You couldn’t forget it. Even fleeing alone along the road, with cars whizzing past at sixty miles an hour in the darkness, you couldn’t escape the kind of painful blister that swelled the world. In the dense shadow, or rising up at the entrances of motels, restaurants and service-stations, pale forms stood and watched you pass. From the ground arose the groans and rhythmic beats of guitar music, and it was as if you were walking on a living, suffering skin that trembled at each step and was suffused with blood. The trees stood up vertical like bristles, and in every hollow lay pools of water or sweat. The earth was the recumbent body of a giant, over which you were walking for ever. He was not asleep. He never slept. With all his skin, with all its immense cells, the giant watched the fleas walking over his body, and did nothing.

After about half an hour Chancelade began to feel tired. He left the main road and went along a path of pebbles that led to the sea. Then he lay down on the black beach not far from an open-air dance-hall from which the music came in snatches. He listened for a moment to the unceasing rhythm, a metronomic tak-tak, tak-tak, and to the sound of the sea, of the cars, and of his heart. He smoked a last cigarette and put it out on a flat stone. Then he shut his eyes and went to sleep.

I PEOPLED THE EARTH

Another thing you could do was have a son. For months Mina would walk through the streets, and there would be this mushroom hidden in the folds of her swollen belly. And one fine day at about four o’clock in the morning she would start to have pains. Then the child would be born, and you’d give it a name. If it was a boy you’d call it Emmanuel, and if it was a girl you’d call it Cuné-gonde.

The years would go by very quickly, without your noticing, while you watched the child grow. It would be rather like sitting in a dark room staring at a flower unfolding. The skull would gradually form, the shape of the nose, the outline of the lips, the chin, the cheekbones, the eyebrows, and eyelashes. The hair would grow, fair with a few streaks of brown. And between the eyelids there would be those two grey-green spheres that would get more and more blue, grow more and more alive. The body would grow too. The limbs would become longer and imperceptibly thinner, the shoulders more muscular, the bones heavier. So life would take possession more surely every second, and it would be fascinating to watch. Moving, too, sometimes. There would be the woman talking to the child, not thinking that here was a piece of her flesh, a stump almost. With her head slightly tilted, her mouth smiling, her hair hanging down on her right shoulder, she would listen to this human being, possess him, hold him under her sway as if he were no more than an article bought at the shop on the corner.

Or there would be the first cries, in the cradle, like peevish incomprehensible words:

‘Aaaa … aaaa … Heu, heu, heu … Aaaa … Aaaa …’

The outstretched hands try to catch hold of the light, noises, images. The mouth wants to suck, the belly to swell, the lungs to cram themselves with air; the whole body already wants to live, eagerly, as if there was not a second to lose. At twenty-four months you’re already old; you’ve been alive two years. And it may even be that death is already there, deep in the dim look, or in the urine spreading over the mattress, or in the red wrinkles of the hands with their fluted nails.

But meanwhile there was this miniature man launched into life, abandoned, a prisoner of the world. He already had a name, a sex, a religion, ideas, and what might be called thoughts. He ate, slept, dreamed from time to time. There were millions of children like him in the world, born of a mother and father and methodically growing up. Black children with shining eyes, fair children, ginger children, dark children. Hungry children sitting on the ground with bloated bellies, their eyes haggard with want. Overfed children with fat legs and fat hands and rolls of fat on their backs. Children dying, children going to the cinema, children playing with plastic revolvers. The dwarf people were everywhere. They spoke their own language, performed their own rites, learned, hated, were afraid. There were Germans, Swedes, Americans, Poles. Finns, Hindus, gipsies, Chinese. Nahuatlacos, Goahuitlecs, Hokans, Maribichocoas. Navajos. Payas, Xicaques, Lencas, Xincas. Lacandons, Mams, Chujes, Jacaltecs, Motozintlecs, Ixils, Aguacatecs, Cakchiquels, Uspan-tecs, Pokonchis. Mosquitoes. In villages of dried mud, in arid squares where the sun beat down, they played with dogs and old tyres. They were everywhere, little swift-eyed men and dwarf women with narrow hips and flat chests. They weren’t gentle or peaceful; they watched eagerly for the moment of death in order to take their place among men. Without knowing it they slowly murdered that other absurd race of grown-ups and hustled their withered and mutilated bodies away into the dark.

It was no use trying to escape or to forget: it was a total war, without mercy. Every second a new body was born somewhere on earth, pushing an old body into the abyss. They were everywhere: these dwarfs with men’s and women’s faces spied on you ceaselessly from gardens, out of car windows, from behind trees, or from the shadows. They listened. They continually stole your thoughts, your words, your acts, your passions. They ate your food, breathed your air, they even went off with your wives.

But after all it was not really so unfair: it was simply the truth. For you had stolen before them; like them you had killed in order to live.

And one day, towards the middle of his life, Chancelade was on the beach with the boy that was his son. They sat in the sun for a bit before noon, then went in swimming. Chancelade came out of the water first and stretched out on the pebbles to dry. The boy came up a few minutes later and lay down on Chancelade’s right. He was rather a tall child for his age, which was about twelve or thirteen, thin, with a handsome face and fair hair slicked down by the sea. He wore navy blue trunks with a fish on the left hip, and his clothes were rolled up under his head as a pillow. He lay for a long while without moving, stretched out on his back with his eyes shut, feeling the drops of salt water contract and evaporate all over his body. Then he turned over on his front so as to dry his back, and began to watch what was going on on the beach, his chin resting on his fore-arm. What he saw was:

A girl with bleached hair undressing. She unzipped her green dress and her body appeared in the sun, all white except for the two red patches of her bikini.

A family just departing, that consisted of: a hairy man, a fat woman, a ten-year-old girl, also fat, an eight-year-old boy, also fat, a baby in a carrier, a transistor, and an orange-striped sunshade.

Two men unloading a van.

A flash of light deep in the hills.

An empty brilliantine bottle caught between the pebbles.

A helicopter.

A man and a woman lying on the beach and embracing.

A woman with a deep tan coming out of the water and leaving a trickle of water behind her as she limped over the burning pebbles.

Two children playing ball and squealing.

A seagull.

An old woman reading a love-story under a mauve parasol and fanning her face very close with a fan that had Hotel Ristor-ante ‘La Tonnara’, Amentea, Statale 18, written on it; or something like it.

All round the boy the beach curved gradually away. At a hundred yards, or even less, you could no longer distinguish the pebbles; you only saw a sort of grey and white mass hazy in the heat. The air danced, the ground buckled gently, and the blue sea moved ceaselessly, throwing up here and there a spatter of hard light. The sun blazed right in the zenith like an electric light bulb crazily screwed into the cupola of the sky. When the boy got tired of lying on his front and looking at all this he turned over and sat facing the sea. He looked for a moment at Chancelade, who was still lying on his back. He gazed curiously at the tall muscular body, the two symmetrical feet, and the face lit from below with its two black holes of nostrils. He looked at the red and black nylon bathing trunks, and saw under the belt, to the right, the trade-mark in big letters: DIVE.

He picked up a pebble and examined it idly, thinking perhaps that it would be easy to kill his father with, or perhaps that it was the amoebas’ Mount Everest. Then he threw it into the sea, not aiming at an old tin can that was drifting along the shore. The pebble flew through the air without a sound, almost invisible in its speed, and following a predetermined curve. When it hit the surface of the water between two waves there was a brief ‘plop’, then nothing more. The boy did it again, once, twice, three times, and each time it ended in the same way.

Chancelade sat up, looked round him for a moment, lit a cigarette, and said:

‘Half past twelve.’

The boy threw a stone and said:

‘Yes.’

‘It’s hot,’ Chancelade went on.

The boy threw another stone and said:

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll probably end in a storm,’ said Chancelade.

The boy picked up some pebbles with his left hand and threw them one by one with his right. Each time he followed the trajectory closely until the stone disappeared in a swift whirlpool, the sea opening and immediately closing again.

‘I wonder—’ he said.

Chancelade wasn’t paying much attention. He was smoking. A small rivulet of sweat ran down between his shoulders.

‘What?’ he said.

‘That,’ said the boy. ‘I wonder how the stone gets from here to there.’

Chancelade shook the ash off his cigarette.

‘Because you threw it, I should think.’

‘No, I—’ said the boy. Every time he threw a stone he stopped talking. ‘I wonder what it means — You see, when I watch the stone there’s a certain moment — There’s a certain moment when it isn’t touching anything — it isn’t touching my hand, or the ground, or anything, and yet — And yet it goes on flying through the air — Like that, and if you took it at that moment — If you took it at that moment perhaps you’d find it contained something — Something new, energy, or — I mean if you could get hold of it without stopping it — Because otherwise it wouldn’t be the same, it—’

‘Yes, but all the same it’s your hand that threw it.’

‘I know, but that’s only the initial reason — But suppose — Suppose someone just opened his eyes now at this moment — He might wonder how this stone — Came to be flying through the air like that — Without any apparent reason—’

‘Yes, but suppose he opened his eyes a second later. Then he wouldn’t see anything.’

The boy threw another pebble into the water. It was reddish and flat, and bounced once on the surface before it disappeared. The boy thought for a moment and said:

‘That doesn’t prove anything. Because if he’d counted the stones at the bottom of the sea he’d know there was one more, and he might — he might wonder where it came from.’

He turned his head and saw that his father wasn’t listening. The man in the red and black trunks was lying on one elbow, smoking his cigarette and looking vaguely out over the sea. The boy tried to see what it was Chancelade was gazing at, but there was nothing: just the curved blue expanse of sea and the waves sparkling like bits of broken mirror.

The boy thought for a bit longer, holding a stone in his hand. Then he said, as if to himself.:

‘Yes, but anyhow — Anyhow, that’s not what I meant. I meant that for these stones, first here, then there, the idea of time is really only — only a matter of bearings. To be able to say that a stone has travelled from the beach to the sea you’d have to have seen me throw it, otherwise it’s as if nothing had happened. And that’s funny, because—’ He groped for words for a few seconds.

‘Because it’s as if you could go to sleep, and time not pass. Suppose someone slept for a year, or even for ten, say; then, when he woke up he’d think only one night had passed, because he usually only slept for one night.’

‘Yes, but the ten years would have passed just the same.’

‘No, because I mean, I mean it’s an individual matter. It isn’t the same for any two people. Of course there are clocks and calendars and all that, but they’re just artificial, just bearings that have to be interpreted. If you did away with them, or if you stopped anyone from interpreting them, that would be that. For some people it’d be ten years, for others one year, and for others three or four days or even only a few hours.’

‘Maybe. But how could you do away with all the bearings?’

‘Watches go wrong …’

‘And what about the sun and the night and the seasons, and all that?’

‘You could live in the dark.’

‘And what about meal-times?’

‘Yes, of course, it’s impossible. But you can imagine it, and if you imagine it it’s already happened. And all these ideas of time and so on that are based on reason, they’re only valid in a certain type of society, under a certain system. If you do away with those you do away with the lot: there’s no time, no cause and effect, no — no anything that seems necessary to the reason.’

He stopped again, then went on:

‘I remember I used to think it was an insect that made watches go. I called it the watch-insect. But after all that’s just as true as to say there’s a spring that uncoils and drives a balance-wheel and cogs and all the rest. No, it was just as good to believe in a watch-insect that pushed the hands round with its legs. I mean, the relation between cause and effect was just as sound.’

He glanced quickly round him, as if he were looking for something.

‘It’s the same with everything you see. Sky, sea, clouds, cars, and everything. The connections between them are incomprehensible. The relations between them are mysteries. The sky doesn’t exist because there’s a sea, and cars don’t exist because there are roads. There may be reasons, of course, very profound ones, but we don’t know them. So it could be insects everywhere, sky-insects and car-insects and beach-insects and so on.’

‘Yes, but the—’

‘I wouldn’t be all that surprised myself — No, I really wouldn’t be very surprised to find out one day that one of those famous machines is just a cheat. I mean, you’d open up an electronic brain, say, and inside you’d find a dozen poor wretches in chains totting up figures with pencils and paper!’

Chancelade laughed and threw his cigarette in the sea. It floated for a moment between two waves, then disappeared from sight. The boy left the stones and watched a boat some way out pulling a man on water-skis. He thought he might have talked about the boat too, and said perhaps it was a fixed point, only a fixed point. Or that you could predict its course, and that even if it didn’t fulfil that course, yet in a way it still did. But he didn’t feel like pursuing it. He thought that perhaps he might write it all down one day in an essay at school or perhaps in a poem. He even imagined the first few lines of the poem, and when he shut his eyes he could see them all written down on a sheet of white paper:

THE SEA IS BLUE

THE BOAT IS BLUE

THE SKY IS BLUE

THE MAN ON WATER-SKIS

IS BLUE

IS BLUE

THE HORRIBLE

That was all. The boy wondered what it could be that was horrible. The speed? The course of the boat? The limiting horizon? Or the man gliding along on his water-skis, all blue on the blue sea? But the boat had already disappeared on the other side of the bay, and no trace remained of its passage.

Soon after this Chancelade and the boy went to buy ices at the wooden kiosk on the other side of the road. The boy had a double one, strawberry and lemon, and Chancelade had just a single vanilla. They went and ate them on a bench under a sort of plane-tree. They went on chatting for a bit. Things like this:

‘Delicious, isn’t it?’

‘Mm, not bad.’

‘Freezing cold.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hurts my teeth.’

‘They’re the best ices round here.’

‘Yes, they really are good.’

‘Specially the vanilla.’

‘The strawberry too.’

‘I prefer the vanilla.’

‘Better than Kapi’s ices anyway.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Not dear either.’

‘Better than Rand’s too — do you remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Arosa’s?’

‘Mm-mm.’

‘The only trouble is the cornet leaks.’

‘That’s because you don’t know how to manage it.’

‘What are you supposed to do then?’

‘Turn it round as you lick it.’

‘Like this?’

‘Yes, and bite off the bits that overlap.’

‘That’s why it hurts your teeth.’

‘Granita’s nice too.’

‘Do you like those Italian ices?’

‘Well …’

‘I’m not very keen.’

‘Neither am I.’

‘Another kind I like are those things they serve in glasses.’

‘Where?’

‘At Noel’s.’

‘Gratta Kekas, you mean.’

‘Yes.’

‘I used to like them but I’ve had too many.’

‘They’re nice with mint syrup.’

‘Yes, but not so nice as this.’

‘And rather dirty.’

‘Yes, they drag the ice all along the ground before they crush it.’

‘Yes …’

‘Can you feel the little lumps of ice?’

‘Yes, every so often they crunch.’

‘He makes his ices himself.’

‘So I believe.’

‘What a job, eh?’

‘Yes. Imagine spending every day of your life doing that.’

‘And in the winter he makes pancakes.’

‘What a life.’

‘Yes.’

‘It looks as if it’s going to rain.’

‘Yes, it’s getting overcast.’

‘It’s coming from the mountains. It’s black over there.’

‘Yes, there’s going to be a storm.’

‘We could do with one.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Have you finished your ice?’

‘Not yet, look.’

‘Look how much I’ve got left.’

‘You eat it too fast.’

‘Yes, but if you don’t the cornet gets all soft.’

‘I eat mine right down to the last bit.’

‘Hurry up or we’ll get wet.’

‘We had a nice bathe though, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, not bad.’

‘And not too many people.’

‘No.’

When the first drops began to fall Chancelade and the boy took shelter under a tree with more leaves in the middle of a public garden. The rain made a strange noise on the sanded paths and the leaves, like the sound a typewriter, with a series of quick taps, then a silence, then a few slower taps, another silence, another rush of quick taps, and so on indefinitely. The sky had become black and grey, with clouds swirling in all directions. There were occasional gusts of cool wind, and the slow smell of dampening earth. The grass and the trees began to perk up a little in the rain, and just underground the hairy roots drank thirstily.

The boy leaned against the trunk of the tree and watched the rain falling. From time to time he’d speak:

‘Just look at it coming down!’ Or:

‘It’s funny watching the rain when you’re out of it like this.’

Chancelade heard his voice but didn’t answer. He’d been suddenly snatched away, by a gust of air, or by the mechanical sound of the raindrops. He was still there under the broadleaved tree, smoking a cigarette perhaps. But it was as if he was going to be there for ever. He looked with amazement at the face of the child that resembled him, that had been born of him. He looked at the round chin, the mouth, the delicate nose, the gently curved brow that contained the brain. It was too late now to understand. Much too late. There was this child now that was not him, who lived a few inches from him, absolutely detached. One day this child would be a man, he would live in society, with his own job, his own wife, his own house. He would come to be an old man, an invalid with trembling hands, and yet it would still be the same. You could no longer get away from the truth. You had to live with this life scattering itself ceaselessly forward, creeping across the long layers of the future. You had to do all these trivial things, devote a crazy attention to all these microscopic adventures. It was comfortable, there, in the tribe. You fought against the wild beasts, you tore at raw meat with your teeth, you gulped down water from cool springs. And you fought against other men too, you protected your wife and your child. You were jealous. You possessed. That was how it was: you were alive, and this life never stopped bursting through one after the other the curtains of death. There was a definite order, come from nowhere and inhabiting your own flesh and bones and muscles, that demanded that the name of Chancelade should never die out. It was hidden here in this body, a magnificent name in letters chased in fire, a pure and magic name that signified centuries and centuries of life.

CHANCELADE

And now the boy also bore this tattooed name, and would never lose it. Later on he would pass it on to another child, who again would give it to another. The years would pass, the water would fall from the sky, the sun would bake the earth, and there would be a sort of old tree with a wrinkled trunk stretching forth its branches. In the evening, in the kitchen, Chancelade watched Mina eating; opposite her the boy sat eating too, and talking now and then or drinking water out of a glass. And it was always Chancelade eating with the boy’s body. Or he sat on a chair and watched television, with blue reflections playing over his face. He learned Latin words, read a geometry book, played with toy cars made of plastic, drew a naked woman on the last page of his note-book. At night, crouched over a piece of paper in the noise and heat, with the electric light bulb burning overhead, he wrote a poem. And it was Chancelade who wrote the words one after the other:

Rubbish

Memory of oranges

and sardines.

The circles widen

here

at the bottom of the house.

Gilette

parcels up the departures.

The first cigarette

smoke.

I must be brief

and cry

Time oh the time

of bitter coffees

and the pounds oh the pounds

of stale bread.

When

The legs are vain

The spectacles

ill

and horror

a thing of every day.

TO CONQUER THE SILENCE

Then, when you’d played all those games for years without number; when you’d walked through all the streets of the town until you knew them by heart; when you’d eaten all those dishes, drunk all those drinks, smoked all those cigarettes, known all those women; when you’d written down all the names of all the people who’d lived at the same time as you, with their jobs, their ideas, and their passport photographs:

DIEFOLD Jeanne: salesgirl in Prisunic. Brown eyes.

STOJEBA: mechanic.

GUERNICCI: laywer (smokes a pipe).

GANGOLPHE Michel: owner of the Azure bar. Has spots.

ORTAL Yves: friend.

GUEVARA Lise: student. One day in the street she said: ‘The only thing I’d have liked to do is kill my mother. I don’t give a curse about all the rest.’

CARAVEL Manuelle: pretty girl.

BERMON Phillippe: typical bore.

BUIGUES Clairette: left-wing intellectual, frustrated, wears glasses.

BENCIVENGO: plays the guitar.

BESSIS Joseph: philosophy teacher.

DUPEUBLE: childhood friend, antipathetic.

SIMON: childhood friend, sympathetic.

OTTO Hélène: blonde, fond of games. Has modelled for Vogue.

SOULODRE Henri-Paul: dentist.

LAMAS: Insurance.

KADYSS: Funny name.

HUC Marie-Claude: Funny name.

SANTAMARINA Alain: owes me 500 francs.

VEROLA August: neighbour. 80 years old. Always says: ‘There’ve been two great men in human history: Jesus Christ and Napoleon.’

VALAUDE Maurice: friend (lends me his car sometimes).

ANDELFINGER: no comment.

AZAR Gabrielle: she wrote a good poem.

LAVRADOUR Chantal: must give back the records she lent me.

BEDAYAM Myriam: always smiling.

D’ANGELI Anne-Marie: neuropath (failure neurosis, desertion neurosis).

FRANCE: friend.

PAGEL: enemy.

there wasn’t anything much left to do. You could stay shut up in a room lying on a bed beside a woman’s body, Mina’s for example. After you’d talked for a bit, or read the paper, or drunk a glass of pineapple juice, you bent over her and slowly caressed her, thinking of the millions of years past and the millions of years to come.

It was amazing, a woman’s body. On the white sheets the whiter skin, almost transparent, as if there were a light inside. The hair was scattered over the pillow, now dark, now fair, now dark again. The head rested in a hollow, motionless, almost dead, and inside that head was a living soul that drove back the darkness, like that, without effort, from its invisible diadem. From between the parted lips the breath came softly, regularly, without a sound. The nostrils fluttered. In the neck, and at its base, the blood beat lightly, showing the rhythm of the heart.

Chancelade brought his face near Mina’s, until it was so close he couldn’t see any more. Then he slipped his own body over this motionless one and felt every part of his own skin melt into this other skin not his. It was like entering a bath, and the dense mass of hot water swung back and forth. Soon the whole room, and the bed, were caught up in this slow and powerful movement; the white ceiling, the walls, the door, the windows, the furniture all grew and diminished in time with it, and the noise of his breathing rasped his throat as it mounted higher and higher. Chancelade couldn’t see anything any more. He couldn’t hear anything or feel anything; he was caught up in a deep swinging movement that shook the whole world. A strange tempest blew through the room, digging sudden inexplicable gulfs, then as suddenly filling them up again with a swift invisible tide.

There was no more thought. There was no more action or time or place. Perhaps the world itself had disappeared, even, just suddenly disappeared leaving a painful wound behind in the darkness of space. All that was left was this whirling movement that surrounded Chancelade and Mina; and they too were being slowly absorbed by this silent vortex, which was drinking up their flesh, tearing out their hair, melting their bones and their nails. A sort of heatless heat, a calm too great and too precise, was thrusting them into the anonymous mud and drowning them. Chancelade, suffocating, tried to lift his head, but was at once overcome again by fatigue and fell back once more into the tumult.

He tried to think, too, for a few seconds. Through the fog he tried to compose a long sentence that might do duty as a thought. Something like:

‘I’d like a cheese and tomato sandwich.’

But it was no use. The sentence too fell into the bath, and the liquid mass swung it too backwards and forwards, dissolving it word by word.

Chancelade made several more attempts. He said:

‘I’d like a cup of black coffee with sugar.’

‘The ChanChan civilization was wiped out by that of the Incas at the battle of Paramonga in 1400.’

‘Cigarettes burn at 300 degrees Centigrade.’

But it was never any good. Silence had established itself in the room and devoured every sound. Words just entered the nebulous white mass and disappeared before they had time to leave a trace.

So Chancelade gave up the struggle. His mind completely empty, he threw himself into the continuous movement of the room, the bed, his own body and that of Mina. He let himself go, he even positively acted. He moved his hands, his back, his legs, his head, in the prescribed fashion. He let his breath rasp in and out of his throat and nostrils without restraint. He sweated.

And all this too he did as if for the last time, or the first. In the distance, in the nocturnal depths of times forgotten, there was a sort of pale mirror reflecting the grotesque and agile image of an entwined couple. It was taking place this year, here, with the body of this woman, and yet it was taking place eternally, or almost. It was a rite, an energetic and absurd act commanded from without, but impossible to destroy. In his right hand Chancelade held a swathe of hair damp with sweat, and it was all happening in this room, on this bed, at this moment, with this hand, this hair, this sweat and no other. He breathed, moved, his lips tasted the fine soft trembling skin. There couldn’t be anything but this instant, either in the future or in the past. All mirrors were broken, all books burnt, all signs effaced, leaving at last a paper indelibly white.

It was the moment in which you were inscribed totally, body and soul, on the slab of colourless marble; engraved and gashed with scissors, by your own hand, on the oily walls of the cave. Once upon a time there lived in this country a man called Chancelade and a woman called Mina. Once upon a time there was this life, this room and this bed, these windows, this door, this bedside table with a yellow lamp, a tube of aspirin, and a gold wrist-watch that said ten to five.

That was how things had been: shut up in an impregnable fortress, imprisoned in that blue sky, those clouds, that red earth, that line of spray at the edge of the sea. Chancelade had touched that hand, looked into those eyes that looked back at him. He had pronounced those trivial sacred words, those fragile words that scattered at once into the air. He’d said thirst, biscuit, shampoo, woman. He’d panted. He’d been out of his mind for a few seconds while somewhere in the room, miles away or perhaps only inches, that low moan of pleasure and pain had arisen and spread over the trembling walls. And the moan was repeated millions of times all over the earth, as if there was nothing anywhere but one great woman with fevered skin, wide eyes, distended veins and pounding heart.

For a few seconds everything in the world was woman. Chancelade saw the long lands floating on the water, whiter than mother-of-pearl. He saw America and Africa with bodies magnificently tensed. He entered the leaves of women-trees, women-grasses, women-algae. Everywhere you could see voracious curves, incestuous wells, long rivers with devouring currents. The light trembled in the air like gossamer hair. The strange silent figure danced inside every flame, and in the deepest hollows of the sea-bed slept the wide-hipped grey silhouette. Even all sounds were soft and grave, as if rounded red lips had given every one of them passage.

For a moment Chancelade managed to struggle against the cool white tide that slowly rolled his body over and over; then he gave in and became a woman, the same invicible woman who possessed the earth from the dazzling centre of her body, and who was no more either thought or word, but simply a sign of life eternally deployed throughout the universe.

TO TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH

Everywhere you could hear the murmur of life. At every point on the earth, and even elsewhere, the millions of engines that were in action hummed softly, diffusing their electric trepidations. From ten thousand feet up you could see the ochre expanse of earth and the puddles of the oceans. Here and there were little black knots on the floors of valleys or on the edges of wide bays. All these motionless cities lay beneath the sky waiting for who knows what, nothing perhaps, and buzzing like beehives. The long grey ribbons of the roads between them were dotted with insects moving along slowly, going round the curves, climbing up the slopes, stopping at the intersections, disappearing into the tunnels. It was all very funny, and a bit disturbing. It was as if there had been an untruth somewhere, an indiscernible lie, a joke, a pun, a riddle. Someone had said one day, without noticing, the rather simple sentence ending with a question mark:

‘But what the devil are we doing here, eh?’

And ever since it had been written everywhere, between the lines of books, in bright-coloured paintings, on the fronts of white buildings, on women’s mascaraed eyelids, on the pavement or right in the middle of the road, in the sky, on the sea, and on the sides of the snowy mountains. There was something amiss somewhere, someone lying, but it was impossible really to find out what it was.

It was that perhaps that made apartments like prison cells and streets like labyrinths. People had names and jobs and visiting cards; but there was always a mistake somewhere, a spelling error, a blot, a strange diabolical sign that cancelled all the rest. In a block of twelve floors they’d left out one number. One day somebody would notice and the whole place would collapse in a cloud of dust. Jet planes flew high, high in the air with their ear-splitting shriek. And one day a small boy would see one go over and ask:

‘But why doesn’t it fall down?’

And the plane would immediately dive down and crash, and all the thirty-five passengers would be killed.

Or you’d be staring at the setting sun one evening from the top of a hill, and the sun wouldn’t be able to disappear. It would hang there just above the horizon, floating for ever in a blood-red sky like a huge orange cut in two.

It was strange, all the questions that arose out of reality; all the lies and legends that lurked like a mist and hid the true face of things. At the end of every sentence there was a queer curly sign with a dot underneath, which meant that there was nothing really sure:

Is the earth round?

Can trees think?

Must people eat?

Is the sky blue?

Is God good?

Does matter exist?

E=mc^2?

2+2=4?

Does Mina love me?

Am I going to die?

Outside cinemas and shops, over garages and bars, the words shone out brightly in pink and blue neon letters. But they were lying too: they were there to deceive people, to draw them into issueless adventures.

Truth had disappeared from the face of the earth. She had been painted and made up age after age, and now there was nothing left but a hard insensible skin that lied all the time. Birds flew through the sky only to deceive and caricature. Boats floated in the water, waves unfurled, dust slowly covered the furniture in rooms, but none of it was true. It was not true that car-wheels turned, not true that watch-hands told the time, not true that seeds from trees split open in the earth to produce other trees. Everything that happened here, or there, or further away still, happened as if in a precise and magical dream that you dreamed with your eyes wide open.

Sitting at the open window, Chancelade simply looked out at the beautiful pure landscape sparkling in the sun. The trees shook gently in the breeze, the red and purple flowers were out, and the sky was blue, so blue you couldn’t even see it any more. And yet perhaps none of all this existed.

It was all too alive. It all breathed too much, vibrated too much, swallowed its saliva and exhaled its sweet and haunting perfumes too much. There was too much beauty, too much sweetness everywhere. All these things were tense with the will to live, braced in the posture of existence.

Chancelade looked at the square landscape through the open window and shuddered; he touched the crystalline strata of the air, he listened to the rustlings, the murmurs, the cries. So much mortal splendour was unbearable. You felt like standing up and tearing down this real picture, rending it with your nails; like burning down the trees, trampling underfoot the too beautiful flowers, gashing the pure sky with a knife. You felt like putting your fist through the window, this odious invisible window that always divided the world in two. But it was already too late; already you yourself had become a lie. Within your body there was already this pun, this unsuccessful joke, this riddle that had destroyed the name and delivered it over to vanity:

CHAMP SALADE

Everywhere men were telling far-fetched stories in order to fill the silence, in order to be admired, to be listened to. Prophets declaimed prophecies from the tops of lonely mountains, poets recited poems gazing at the moon, or the sea, or the sunset. On Sundays men sat in front of squares of canvas and tried to copy what they saw with brushes and paints: a ruined tower, a fishing port, a naked woman lying on a red divan. Novelists wrote novels, directors directed, embroiderers embroidered, fishermen fished. Everyone had his place and played at the serious game of life and death in order to try to understand the immense lie that lay all round them. In Reno (Nevada), Indian chief Fiery Horse told the crowd about his voyage through space on a flying saucer:

‘My voyage through space began on July 12, 1959 near Sapulpa, Oklahoma, when I was preparing the ground for a camp. I’d seen fourteen flying saucers since 1949, but on the day I’m telling you about one landed that was 75 yards in diameter and 8 yards high. I spoke to the members of the crew; there were three of them, and they looked like human beings. I finally decided to go with them. I thought it would be a new experience.

Kissing in the Korean style

‘When I got on board I met a fantastically beautiful woman nearly seven feet tall. She had long black hair and lovely blue eyes. She gave me food and tucked me up in bed, after bestowing on me a kiss in the Korean style, that’s to say she tapped me on the cheek with three fingers. Our first landing was on Mars. The landing-area was on a building made out of lunar rocks. After refreshing ourselves with food not unlike that which we eat here on earth, we set off for the Moon, and there we saw people, buildings, animals, ice and snow. The next stop was Venus. But it happened to be cloudy when we got there and we could only stay an hour and twenty minutes. Nevertheless I was still able to see a car powered by electro-magnetic energy; it was driven by a man from North Platte, Nebraska. I wasn’t able to find out his name. The next halt was on Clarion, where we only stopped for twenty minutes.

A paradise

‘On Orion, a planet with an ultra-modern society, I saw magnificent buildings and churches: the life there is so different I can’t describe it all. But I remember eating some delicious blackberries, so big that three would fill a whole jam-jar. I’d have liked to stay there, but I wasn’t allowed to. When I asked why they said it was because if I did I might disclose the most powerful works of creation. They also told me to say that nuclear explosions ought to be stopped, because they interfere with life on Orion.’

(All the details of Fiery Horse’s stay on Orion can be heard on copies of the tape-recording he brought back with him. Price 15 dollars a copy.)

Then there were all those commonplace gestures, the tics and rituals and rhythms that were repeated day after day, each time marking off the calendar with a little blue cross. There were all the cigarettes first lighted, then put out in dirty ashtrays. The morning coffee, the midday steak, the bread and honey at four o’clock, the soup at seven, the chewing-gum at ten, the toothpaste at eleven. The aspirins and the vitamin tablets. The glasses of beer, the cinema, the television, the drives in the car. Work. Fine days, cloudy days. Winter, then spring, then summer, then autumn. Everywhere were hidden the mysterious signs of true and false, and it was impossible really to tell them one from the other.

Chancelade sat motionless in a warm bath making the dirty water vibrate as if with invisible earthquake tremors. Here or elsewhere. Now or later. This or that. The ship was adrift. The circles were open, and out gushed their imperceptible substance. In the dazzling white bathroom the various threads of the world are united and destroy no longer; they present their speed too swift to measure, their plenitude more vast than the void, their presence more chill than absence. But Chancelade has lost the clue through the labyrinth. He doesn’t believe any more, he can’t believe in the precise adventure. He is already down in the centre of the earth, swallowed up in his own dream, absorbed in his own thought. He is adrift.

Sitting at his desk in the closeness of the evening, young Emmanuel is reading a book he doesn’t understand. Written on the yellow page that shines in the electric light, underneath some regular drawings in the shape of a star, are the words:

APOLLONIUS’S THEOREM

In any triangle the sum of the squares on any two sides is equal to twice the square on half the third side, together with twice the square on the median bisecting the third side.

PTOLEMY’S THEOREM

A quadrilateral is inscribable in a circle when the product of its diagonals is equal to the sum of the products of opposite sides.

But it might just as well have read:

A convex coleopter is imputrescible when the product of the bacchanalia is equal to the sum of the products of the possible pies.

The boy stared at the shining page and soon the print began to dance about before his eyes. The H’s grew huge and stretched their arms and legs all over the paper. The O’s opened and shut like fishes’ mouths. The T’s sank, the I’s toppled over. The S’s writhed like worms, the U’s went up and down, the Y’s sprouted leaves. Here and there the Z’s bestrode the page like great flashes of black lightning, then faded. The letters even came off the yellow page, lined up on the desk, and started fighting a pitched battle with loops, full-stops, apostrophes, angles and curves. The A’s and K’s and X’s and W’s and Z’s won, and walked in a long procession over the battlefield singing a squeaky song of triumph made up of their own sounds.

In another room Mina was washing her hair in a wash-basin. The warm water flowed continuously out of the metal tap, running through the hair like invisible fingers. The lather was washed away slowly, and ran down beside her face in long snowy streaks. Mina wasn’t thinking about anything. She stood with her head bent down and her eyes closed, tasting the soapy, slightly acid and bitter water that seeped in through the corners of her mouth. And the tap went on pouring into the soft hair, separating and swishing it about like great dark waves, or running them together in heavy tresses that hung down almost into the outlet of the basin.

When she’d finished washing it she lay on the bed for ages doing her hair, her right hand holding a mirror covered with finger-marks. She rolled the hair round little steel sausages which she fixed in place with pins. And her arm, bent over her wet hair, seemed fixed, frozen so to speak, immovably.

She was thinking about death, about the shopping she must do tomorrow, about the holidays, about her mother, about the spot she’d noticed on her face.

In the stifling little high-walled room, with a whitewashed ceiling and a light-bulb over the bolted door, Chancelade sat without moving. He looked at a place on the wall, a sort of scar in the paint that someone had made with their nail. Behind him the pipes gurgled and hollow thuds sounded in the walls, and mysterious creakings signifying nothing.

Here too time had come to a halt, buried in the cube of ochre paint, stifled by the thick walls, drowned in the pale light. Chancelade was in a cubicle at the ends of the earth, in the middle of Greenland or Siberia, and the ramparts were heaped up round him in order to extricate him from life. He sat there without moving, breathing in the smell of ammonia and disinfectant, listening intently to the tiny sounds, staring fixedly at the mark in the paint on the wall. The door was bolted, no one could come in. There was neither cold nor heat, only a sort of gentle unfeeling calm annihilating all desires. There wasn’t even really any light: light entered there by chance out of the bulb over the door, but it might just as well have come from somewhere else. Sounds and smells were there by chance too, and so were colours, lines, marks, corners, dust; it was a miniature grotto, a classical mausoleum of marble and stucco, an air-tight sarcophagus. Time might pass away, the years might clatter by with their noisy crowd of men and women. But here they would never enter, here they would never issue their orders and appeals. You were there, perhaps on the way to eternity, put inside a little box in unmoving space. The flies buzzed back and forth from wall to wall, continually repeating the same journey. Drops of water hissed in the cistern, and rust gradually accumulated on the old metal. What use was the sun? What use was the moon, trees, poppies? There was no longer any world, no longer any grotesque and noisy hell. There were only these walls so high and thick and covered in ochre paint, and this ceiling, this light-bulb, this red-brick floor that made your feet so cold. It was as if you had uttered a great cry inside yourself, yelled out your own name in the depths of your body, and it had suddenly been transformed into silence. Perhaps you would never speak again. You’d be silent for ever, sitting in this tiny room; you’d never make another sound to anyone.

When he got tired of this Chancelade stood up and went out, the cistern flushing loudly behind him.

I LIVED IN THE IMMENSITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

There are mirrors everywhere in the world. Great dazzling mirrors on the fronts of houses, mirrors inside rooms, on the windows, on the doors, on the pavements. The street-lights are covered with long vertical sheets of metal that sparkle all the time. Cars are so varnished and polished they disappear beneath their own reflections. The earth is a great cold mirror that shines with a strange grey and white gleam. The sea is a mirror, and the supple waves are bits of twisted glass shot through with crooked refractions. On the crystal trees the wind twirls millions of little round looking-glasses, and the sparkling rooftops are huge mercury-coloured sheets for ever deflecting the light. And over all is that infinite mirror curving above the shimmering planet, reflecting the strange spectacle; neither grey nor blue, it is a deep void where gleams of light continually come and go, and it retains in its indefectible prison the wild flickerings of entrapped life.

So Chancelade set out through the labyrinth covered with mirrors. He began to walk along the streets with their exhausting reflections, looking vaguely about him at the hundreds of identical images mutually repeating one another. The street was perfectly straight, encased between the huge glass panels of the buildings, and you couldn’t see the end of it. To left and right was an infinity of other streets all the same, long corridors of chill sunlight that led into one another and desperately mingled. The shopfronts sparkled with light, the windows, the hundreds of similar windows, shone fiercely, but you couldn’t see anything through them; you could only see the same thing always, black lines stretching towards the horizon, lines broken or engulfed by the opaque glass. And all along these lines, so many that it would have been impossible to count them, was a crowd of men like Chancelade, all walking, advancing towards one another, going this way and that, passing one another, fleeing from one another as far as the eye could see.

There was nothing left to get hold of. No opening anywhere. Not the smallest patch of dullness, not the smallest bit of stone or tar where the light would stop and rest. The light rebounded ceaselessly from one panel to another without ever penetrating, moving furiously through the lucid air, reversing a thousand times, starting off again, colliding, separating, coming together, whirling round in a sort of stationary angular maelstrom that couldn’t be dispersed. All was surface, hard slab, sharp metal, cold glass, impenetrable reflection.

Everywhere there were those pitiless eyes that reflected, rejected, destroyed you. Chancelade crossed first one street then another. He threaded his way between a row of cars, disgusting shiny monsters with windows raised and headlights shining, advancing slowly as over an ice-rink. He saw his own silhouette coming to meet him from the other side of the pavement, hands dangling, white shirt dazzling, pale face like a mask of glass with diamond eyes. Underfoot, too, he saw his body upside down, moving along with him like a white shadow. The heat reverberated like the light. It came and went all the time between the four walls of the glass prison, its waves crossing and recrossing, stopping then starting again but never finding anywhere where it might melt away. There was no more water in the world, no more cool or shade. The rivers were transformed into long ribbons of crystal, and the rain had dried on the pebbles leaving only a crust of mica and salt. There were no more hollows or caves; holes had become sharp spikes sticking up like darts, and incandescent light poured out of the windows of the houses; all openings had turned into volcanic craters, spewing out clouds of white-hot gas and tons of molten lava.

One day there had been a spark, and since then there had been no rest anywhere. Light was unleashed in the streets of the town, on the flat mirror of the sea, the earth and the sky. The ground had become a desert waste, a landscape of salt-pans and chalk shimmering in the transparent air. Chancelade looked at the sky and saw in the centre of the great white mirror, so deep that you could not say where it ended, the dazzling disc of the sun. And it was like a disc of glass, steady as a magnifying-glass, which reduced and then reflected the desperate efforts of the light. Everywhere, on the earth, on the windows, between the little glass beads on the trees and the crystal spears of the grass, there were other identical suns fiercely raging.

Chancelade had never seen anything so beautiful and so terrible. As far as the eye could see it was always the same annihilated landscape, hard, transparent, without reality. White light came from every direction at once, never ending, never dimming. The air throbbed furiously, and the reflections moved in gracious procession, like caravans of calm clouds. Human shapes rose up smoothly from the street, appearing, disappearing, sometimes even floating in the air. Stars shone on the shop-windows, or a sun would rise at a corner of the sidwalk and glide along an imaginary orbit. Sometimes, quite near Chancelade, human faces showed themselves, strange shining faces with phosphorescent eyes. And the pavement went on vanishing under his feet, a long carpet of crushed glass whose thousand depths were peopled by moving figures. Groups of women approached in dresses with countless facets. At the very instant that Chancelade caught sight of them they would disappear round a corner, mere pale reflections wiped out by the twist of a mirror. The words written on the walls disintegrated easily too, losing their letters one by one or mingling together till there was nothing of them left.

Chancelade went through the paths of the glass labyrinth, but he never got anywhere. It was always the same street ever renewed, showing new angles, new lines, new vistas. And his glance always came up against the same surfaces, to rebound indefinitely in the disorder of the light. He would turn his head to the right, for example, to look at a tree; but his glance would slip on the trunk, return, hit the windows of a car, set off upwards again and reach the sky, then come down once more to the pavement, bounce like a ball, bump into the wall of a block of flats, go off again, zigzag around, and cast about desperately but in vain; now interrupted, now restored, now thrown back again, it flew all over the place unable to rest and unable to spend itself. And everything came back to Chancelade. The town was a shining trap into which he advanced without knowing what he was doing, and its gates would never open and let him out. He was a prisoner for life of his own vision, a slave of his own knowledge. Eyes were everywhere, not only the hostile eyes of others but also his own, with dilated pupils observing himself from all sides, the cold lenses of an indestructible camera whose only purpose was to film himself. There were mirrors on all sides, huge, tiny, broken, crushed, melted, or curved, and all reflected the man who passed before them, the millions of men all exactly alike who walked and walked and walked in all directions!

Nor did the mirrors reflect images of light and heat alone: from every corner of the town came also eternally repeated echoes of noises from another time. The hum of engines, shouts, hooters, the tapping of high heels, the squeaking of soles, the rustling of materials, the barking of dogs, the shriek of jets, sirens, telephones ringing, the deep murmur of music — all returned without respite, to mingle or merge or separate for unknown intervals. They were echoes, and echoes of echoes. There was nothing left that was true or real. These sounds had occurred in the past, long long ago, but none of them had been lost. On the contrary, they had been concentrated by their comings and goings in the hermetic cave of the world. They had been to the furthest depths of the sky, and recoiled with claps of thunder on to the sheet of glass. Thus with each journey they grew, their waves doubling back on themselves within their prison; one day perhaps they would grow too strong, and the universe would shiver to pieces like a crystal ball.

Chancelade tried in vain to escape from this hell of mirrors. He kept to the walls, stopped at a crossroads, went round a square, took ten different streets; but it wasn’t any use. Always, before him, beneath him and overhead were the impenetrable sheets of glass alive with meaningless reflections. He tried to hide behind a parked lorry, but the white metal shone fiercely and gave him back his own image in caricature. He went towards the sea, and was driven back by the horror of the great flat leaden expanse. Here too, in the curve of the bay, the sun shone thousands of times, on the edges of the waves, on the facets of the pebbles, on car-windows, on the walls of the houses along the front. A white plane crossed the mirror of the sky, and prepared to land on the other side of the town, giving off shining sparks. And in the distance Chancelade could see the mass of the hills and mountains, like huge jewels glowing through the torrid haze.

There was no hope. You couldn’t escape from yourself; the whole world’s business was to give you back your own image. It was an endless, pointless process, like a conflagration consumed in its own flames, and time was a mechanism that could no longer be halted. Nothing was simple any more; nothing happened at the proper time, magically, once and uniquely for all and then no more. All that happened here, under this sky, beside this sea, in this city of shimmering faces, happened millions of times elsewhere, under other skies, beside other seas, with other faces. It was as if some diabolical command had turned everything into a deathtrap. The cycles began over and over again without flagging, without ever forgetting. Flowers, the flight of wasps, the songs of birds, the soft sound of tyres on tarmac had ceased to be unique. They were all the others, and they wanted to destroy; and when they attacked, their furious strength was multiplied tenfold by the age of the world.

A man stood smoking a cigarette by a post with a yellow light at the top of it. And this transparent figure with its fixed gesture was there for ever, on all the pavements, by all the lamp-posts all with the same yellow light. In a corner by a glaring white wall an old woman squatted holding out bunches of flowers, and it was as if the whole population of the world was sitting there in rags, its wrinkled face and expressionless eyes and toothless mouth upturned, offering in its dirty gnarled hand a bunch of flowers without either colour or smell.

Or a woman with painted face, her dress steeped in crimson light, was standing by a door and smiled at you as you passed; and the smile suddenly opened her face, cleaving the shining eyes and distending the mouth like a wound. Then outside all the doors of all the houses of the town there appeared this same mask of glass and metal with strangely gleaming eyes; in every mirror was seen this ghost with flaming hair and steel body enclosed in scarlet silk; and this shape signed to you to follow her into her lair, to go with her into the reversed world where you could see infinity. The rough, cracked voice whispered endlessly into your ear the words that no longer had any meaning, the empty words inhabited by maddening echo:

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

On the pavements the café terraces were all ready. The tables were set out, and on their shiny surfaces the glasses and bottles stood quietly, emitting their grey and white gleams. Bodies were sitting at the tables, their pale faces poked forward — so many more smooth mirrors without relief. There were no more noses or chins or cheeks or mouths or eyebrows. All that was left were the eyes, huge eyes that had swallowed up the rest of the face, wide, incomprehensible, like rows of identical windows. Chancelade walked by all these distended pupils, and in the depths of all these mirrors he saw his own image advancing, dim, violent, wavering along the cold path that the others had prepared for him.

A girl leaned against the wall waiting for a bus or a taxi or a man. But the light lit up her white face and her legs and hands and hair as if she were a statue. Chancelade walked by slowly and tried to catch her eye, to say something to her and try to escape, to find something to cling on to. But he could see nothing. The vague countenance shone faintly in the flood of white light, its two eyes without depth, its nose indistinguishable, its mouth closed and not breathing. She wasn’t in the street, she couldn’t be there on the pavement just a few inches away from Chancelade. She was on the other side of the mirror, lost in the sheet of yellow-speckled foil. Between her and Chancelade there was the misty thickness of the glass, and she looked at him, at once near and far away, out of her own inaccessible dream. She looked at him out of her dim eyes from behind a series of aquaria of muddy water that magnified her glance like lenses. Chancelade realized that he could never reach her; she was only a reflection, the reflection of a reflection, that had appeared on this white patch of wall by chance, the fleeting result of a series of refractions from one end of the earth to the other; she was unreal, without a body, without warmth, without breath or words or thoughts.

And all the rest of the world had become like her. Reality had drawn in its claws and hidden its whiskers and scales and prickles, and all that was left was this surface covered with floating images, shot through with inverse lightning; this negative in which the darkest shadows appeared like masses of snow and light resembled coal-dust. Cinders, clouds of sparkling dust and flakes of fire filled all the interstices of a space that had once been free. Chancelade walked in the midst of all this debris, painfully and slowly. He pushed aside the twigs. He went through bushes of luminous prickles, and each thorn clung to his skin and held him back. Sometimes the waves of noise and heat fell on him like breakers, and he felt himself being sucked back by the undertow. He wasn’t going anywhere now. The horizon was endless, the streets were endless. There were open squares, great salty lakes sparkling as far as the eye could see. Then straight avenues lined with the motionless skeletons of trees. The fronts of the buildings shrank back and parted, to reveal other frontages just the same, vast tall walls from which the heat rebounded. Corridors succeeded corridors, doors doors, streets streets, alleys alleys. Flights of stairs went up and down and up again. Every so often there would be a glimpse of the sea, a sheet of beaten aluminium on which the sky bore down. Gardens revealed their scintillating crypts, their caves with heavy stalactites of metal. Then more streets, house-fronts, bay-windows, balconies, terraces, open doors through which the sombre light rushed in. Groups of windows appeared now high up, now low down, now left, now right. Car roofs lit up one after the other, sending out spirals of pale coloured fire. The street-lights stood there in line, with the trees and the telegraph-poles and the shapes of men and women with bodies in armour. And always, over everything, the lid of the sky threw back the tons of light, opposing its own opaque and vertiginous mass in a dance that went to and fro and never ceased.

Chancelade walked in the midst of the storm of glass and crystal without ever getting anywhere. It was like crossing a huge cemetery full of marble tombs, or leafing slowly through an album that had nothing written on its thick white pages.

And all around him the crazy vision never stopped. It came and went, carrying his image thousands of miles then bringing it suddenly back; throwing it against walls, pavements, trees, anywhere that there was one of the merciless mirrors. There were as many Chancelades as there were specks of dust, pylons, roofs, manholes, men, women, children, dogs or birds. There were some on the bed of the sea, gliding over the black mud. There were some in the distant hills, engraved on the purple sharp-edged mountain faces. There were even some in the air, in the air you breathed, and this countless host entered your lungs through your throat and spread through the body like millions of living needles. There were the microbes too: the invisible seething mass, this race with identical cysts, flagella, and membranes greedy to devour and destroy. Trypanosomes, bacteria, viruses, staphylococci, bacilli and amoebas. All gathered together in infinite hosts, secreting their toxins and waging their eternal battles. Chancelade had been carried into them too by the mad shimmering; and cut up and minced into invisible fragments he returned to his own body to destroy it.

There was no possible end to this life. It was caught inside the furnace and consumed itself on the spot, in the heat and the light, each particle bearing within it the fire that devoured it.

And so Chancelade walked through the town. He went everywhere, along the glass sidewalks, between the walls of houses, under the leaden sky, beside the steel sea and the diamond hills. There was no more fatigue, and no more rest. Only hate, a sort of hate that was also love and desire. Each step he took over the hard earth was counted, weighed, divided. Each gesture was recorded; each breath went straight to the depths of the world, then spread and was lost. Each thought that flashed through his mind shone out over all the earth, sending down roots in the windows of houses, clinging to roofs, trees, clouds charged with electricity. Television aerials thought at the same time as he, and so did the waves and the traffic-lights and the mountain gullies. Words sprang up out of the earth like will-o’-the-wisps, silent words that vanished before they could be read. Now they had replaced the images of matter; the world was no longer dumb or stupid. It spoke with its myriads of mouths, antennae, legs, wing-cases, pistils and stamens. Its voice and consciousness rose continually in the air, and Chancelade was only one sound in that voice, a feeble, distant sound drowned by all the rest. Intelligence shone everywhere, terrible, insensible. The power of a superior language weighed down on Chancelade, heavier than fifty atmospheres, and crushed him. In the precisely moving street the coachwork of the cars threw off their gleams of thought, and the boiling engines purred their accurate words. The walls rose with their invulnerable facades, the iron and concrete lamp-posts stood solid, pure and invariable in their strange unhoping will. The windows were cold and beautiful, and each of their words could kill. The transparent shapes of men moved over them, and it was a language above reason. The invisible air thought. The smooth sky thought, and the rivers, and the trees with their dusty leaves, and the dogs, the rocks, the algae, the broken bottles. And in the centre of the great sparkling dome was one unique thought, more violent than the others, pressing its cone of passion down upon the earth. Chancelade was lost. He hadn’t disappeared, but he was buried in the town itself, like a place in the left-hand corner of a big brightly-coloured tapestry. The dark green shadow on the fretted edge of a rose leaf, for example, or the white gleam in the black pupil of a bird of paradise. One little place in the web, one single point in the huge tapestry depicting the world.

He walked about interminably in the midst of all these thoughts. He went to the right, to the left, to the right again. He walked for hours, minutes, seconds.

He went into a café where the walls and ceiling were covered with mirrors, and drank a glass of beer. And it was a thought. He went out to the cloakroom, and that was a thought too. At a nearby table a young woman with black hair lit a cigarette with a match; the red flame burned alone at the tip of the little stick of white wood, and its thought was a wavering speck in the grey chaos of the smoke. The yellow linoleum lay over the floor under the table, a flat language on which walked the dull thuds of the words of men. The reason of the walls with their dirty mirrors, and of the transparent ceiling, talked without a pause. Chancelade sat for a moment, listening to the sort of conversation going on endlessly in the room:

‘Flat …’

‘Up, up, up’

‘Forward, back, forward, back …’

‘Cigarette’

‘Ceiling’

‘Floor’

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …’

‘Flow, float, slide …’

‘Black coffee?’

‘STAR!’

‘The blue straw breaks in the empty glass’

‘Here’

‘Six twenty-three and forty seconds, ping!’

‘Round, curved, and spiral’

‘Pool of chocolate, granulated sugar, and …’

‘Dog! Cat! Mouse! Snake!’

‘Michel? Ready?’

‘Disinfectant’

‘Juice’

‘Sun, eh? Moon, eh?’

Then he left. As darkness fell slowly over the mirrors of the town, Chancelade was in turn: standing in front of a shop-window looking at a grey and black reflection that looked back at him. Sitting on a bench, with the rows of cars and the confusion of human legs like a painful river tearing bits of earth from the mountainside. Walking beside a girl in the street, and what they said was already too far away to be understood. Standing on the waterfront by the deep waters of the port; on the surface dark and calm as a cistern, red and white lights were already beginning to appear. With his head turned towards the hills, just in time to see the red disc disappearing beyond the horizon. Chancelade was also at the cinema; he looked through the dark auditorium at the sort of pearly mirror with ghosts dancing and shouting. But that was a subterranean thought, and the world was built around it as on a distant planet; you didn’t know where you were any more — in the caves of the Métro, in hell, or somewhere else.

When night has come down over the town the mirrors are turned back to front, the light and the heat no longer vibrate, the sky and the sea are extinguished, and all the roads are overtaken by slowness. But it is worse than it was before.

In the high-walled labyrinth the neon lights flash on and off without a pause, incomprehensible appeals indefatigably repeated. Black darkness has glided down over the great sheets of glass, opening up terrible depths. Everything has disappeared, almost, and yet everything is still there. You are on the bottom of the sea, in the folds of the icy ocean that presses down and paralyses. These mountains are submerged mountains, riven by sudden abysses whose slopes are clad in dark weeds. On the muddy floor that trembles slowly to and fro, long files of creatures crawl, covered with warts and tentacles. Reflections still reverberate even under water, but so slowly that you can see them approaching through the opaque space, sweeping aside as they come thousands of little moving mirrors that give forth a brief damp slimy gleam. There are trails of bubbles, bloodstained trails that move towards an unknown object and disappear in the darkness. Here noises move with difficulty, surrounded by a sort of halo; they shine as they radiate like stars; each explosion lights its own star. You can no longer see clearly; vision is veiled by a funereal eyelid, and from behind this dusky membrane, lowered like a blind, it seeps out imperceptibly, a light cloud of blood hovering round a wound. Everywhere are heard the tremulous thuds of a life ice-cold and silent and murky; it’s as if danger lurked somewhere, hidden among the steep black cliffs riddled with yellow holes, in the invisible sea-bed, in the air, the sea or the clouds. Everything is unknown. You have to guess and watch all the time, in fear, with cold sweat dampening brow and nape.

The mirrors dazzle no longer; they have become transparent, and on the other side a diabolical world seethes with its great black whirlpools. The mirrors are windows now through which evil will enter, fragile windows that will break from one moment to the next and let in the floods of foul revenge. Everywhere there are these giant aquaria full of sleeping congers and morays with bloodshot eyes, these glass cages in which pythons and vipers coil as in a dream. The nightmare of darkness possesses the town, and every object, every concrete corner, every streetlight vibrates dully with the threat of death. The walls will give. The pavement will open up. The invisible sky draws gradually nearer, bringing down inch by inch its mass of mud and water.

The people are terrible too; they change shape as they pass through the pools of white or blue or pink light, they make exaggerated gestures and their shadows keep deserting them and coming back to them. Some walk along close to the walls, their wan faces peering forward, and instead of eyes they have dark glasses with thick lenses which give off reflections like spikes of steel. The women tap the ground with their sharp heels as they walk, in a rhythm that makes you tremble and follow them. Chancelade is standing still, and a woman arrives at the end of the street and keeps changing colour; first she is blue, then green, then grey, then red, then white. She disappears for a moment in a lane of shadow, and when she appears again she is the colour of blood. She comes nearer, a dull scarlet that seems to be painted on her body and clothes and hair. Chancelade sees the features growing larger on her red face: the closed mouth, the nose, the eyes with their specks of pupils, the forehead, the cheeks, the eyebrows, the quivering hair. The red is in her, entered into her body like a thought. It is her thought become visible, so that she has no need of words or signs. Chancelade watches the red woman approach, and is afraid. Then at the last moment, just as he is about to turn red too, she changes colour as suddenly as if someone had pressed a switch; she turns grey, and is gone.

This is what night is. Ink-stains spreading over damp paper, flowing, contracting, streaming, drawing up the ever-changing map of the prison from which there is no escape. Sparks darting higher and thither from one hiding-place to another, black streaks, dust, viscous mud: and here again, red lights like falling stars that get farther and farther away and never disappear.

Chancelade walked alone through the submerged city, touching nothing. It was too far away now, much too far away. Too cold. Rejected.

Then he went into the big building with twenty-nine floors. He went through the glass door and along the corridor full of clear mirrors. Electric light bulbs shone in the ceilings, hidden inside pale globes. He walked without making any noise to the metal door of the lift. He saw the glass button with its strange winking red light. When he pressed it a green arrow lit up and there was a faint sound inside the walls. The sound grew louder every second. At last the metal door opened and Chancelade entered the steel-coloured cubicle. The door closed. Chancelade pressed the top button, which was marked 29. The cubicle immediately began to rise. You could see nothing. It went on rising. The steel-coloured walls vibrated calmly. The white light that came from the ceiling also vibrated on the walls. The cubicle still rose. Every three seconds there was a kind of sharp click and a green number lit up over the door: 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. The cubicle pursued its vertical way without effort, with only that click from outside, followed immediately by a faint sigh. This too was incomprehensible; a movement away from nothing and going nowhere. The floor rose, the steel walls rose, the ceiling with its pale light rose. The clicks followed one after the other, and so did the little sighs. You were in the belly of the whale perhaps, or in a capsule travelling towards nothingness. You had stopped falling. You were retracing the course of time, and the stifled years were reappearing one by one with a click like the sound of a telescope being shut up. 21. 22. 23. Why should it ever end? The tower had no roof. It disappeared into the ether, unravelling gently into the impossible infinite. The world was a cubicle with steel walls, closed in, hermetic, full of signs and arrows, with a luminous glass ceiling. The world rose along its cables, for no reason, just for the sake of rising, in order to continue its magic journey towards a non-existent summit.

When the lift stopped Chancelade stood by the open door for a few seconds without moving. Then he got out and went to find the staircase leading up to the roof. He went up the concrete stairs one by one, listening to the echo of his footsteps. At the top of the staircase there was a door. Chancelade turned the handle and the door opened on to the night.

The wind was blowing fiercely over the concrete roofs. Chancelade did up the neck of his shirt and went forward gingerly over the slippery surface. The roof stretched around him absolutely flat, scarcely gleaming in the darkness, and everywhere you could see ventilation shafts and television aerials. Gusts of warm air heavy with human odours came out of the openings; but they were whirled away as soon as the icy wind rushed howling hollowly among the chimneys. Chancelade tried to walk into the wind, but he grew breathless and had to stop. He turned the other way and let himself be driven towards the edge of the roof, using his legs as brakes. When he got near the edge he caught hold of a chimney with one hand and looked around him. As in a dream he saw the town stretching away as far as the eye could reach, crushed against the earth at a dizzy distance, dark and empty. It was still night, and yet, seen from this height, everything was pure and sharp in its still outline. The black houses, the straight streets, the fixed specks of light, the glimmerings of the cars — everything was there below, gathered together, intact. The grey ocean had withdrawn and the relief of the earth could be seen, grey, black, purple, magnificently put together. Farther away was the inky curved mass of the sea, and further still the rolling hills and jutting mountains.

Chancelade took another step forward, without letting go of the chimney. While the wind threw itself against his body to blow him down, he looked towards the foot of the building; and the sort of black well immediately rose towards him, with its shriek of terror and hatred: the lighted street and the cars, the hundreds of lighted windows, the soundless movement of the crowd. The void grew harder, aiming an invisible shaft at him that pierced his belly, his glands, his groin, and even his brain. He stood petrified for a moment, then leapt back and drew away shivering from the precipice.

The wind was still howling among the chimneys. Chancelade noticed that he was cold. He looked round for somewhere to shelter, but the roof was flat and there was nothing but the concrete tubes of the ventilation shafts and the bristling television aerials. Then he went to the centre of the roof and lay down full length facing the sky. He stayed there for a long time, listening to the sound of the wind and looking at the black sky and the hard bright stars.

Here, in the terrible cold that swept the roof, the glass dome looked perfectly smooth. It stretched there still and cold, thousands of miles away, like a huge drop of ink on the nib of a fountain-pen. There was no light. There was no speed. The white specks of the stars were fixed in the dense block, frozen eyes that did not see. It was the wilderness or something like it. Nothing, either in or around, nothing offered to the view, nothing seen. The efforts of the light, the rumbling sounds, the chaotic movements, all were lost in the deep well. There were no legs or fins or suckers; only this hollow belly into which everything had disappeared, in which everything was digested. This flat hollow, this infinity suddenly drawn back, this shop-window out of all possible reach. Slowly, eternally, all vain things ascended towards the sky, and the shafts they raised were gradually dissolved. The world’s reflections were swallowed up by darkness — the thoughts of horses and men, the cries of parrots, wars, cycles, sufferings, joys, and deaths. The sky thirsted for life and light. It sucked up relentlessly the savours of the earth, menacing, weakening it with all its strength. All lines led towards it, seeking a meeting-point in its space. But it was always elsewhere.

Scraps of matter floated and glided in the void. Suns exploded, stars contracted, archipelagos of planets whirled round upon themselves and disappeared. Bits of diamond were heaped together in some corner of a vast room with movable walls. Specks thrown into the silence hurtled along at thousands of miles a second. Clouds of gas transparent or opaque hung motionless, yet wisps streamed towards the earth with the speed of light. There was no more chaos or order. Only gulfs, gulfs opening on gulfs, hollows, abysses, unfathomable rifts, gullies, pits, and endless couloirs; and darkness kept flowing endlessly, cramming and ever spewing clouds of vapour into the swelling glass vase. You couldn’t read any more; you could neither hope for anything any more, nor despair. Nor hate. Nor love. Nor curse. Nor try to do anything. You couldn’t make little marks on paper any more and look at them with satisfaction, thinking that the surface of the empty mirror reflected the dazzling face of a man with a gentle smile and a brow covered with blood. The sun itself had been confounded. It could no longer blind you. Its place in the sky had been taken by this kind of hollow, this screw digging ever deeper, and the movement that bored this terrible hole was the movement of the mind dying. On top of the 29-storey building, Chancelade realized that he was going to start ascending again. But this time it was not inside the steel-walled cubicle. The whole earth had now become a lift, gliding on invisible cables up through the strata of the dark sky.

The ceiling kept receding before Chancelade’s eyes. The higher the earth rose, exposing the plateau of concrete and light with the living body outstretched, the more distant, hard and inaccessible became the polished marble dome. Chancelade fixed his gaze on a certain point in the sky, among half a dozen bright stars. He tried to drill a hole through the heavy mass, to try to see something, to understand, to mingle. In vain. The eye blunted itself on the dull armour, without even leaving a scratch. Then Chancelade began to speak, first under his breath, then louder. He uttered the words at random, between clenched teeth, in the direction of the giant drop of ink overhead. He said:

‘I’m going to speak now. I’m going to speak. I’ve waited long enough. You don’t want to listen to me, but I don’t care. Perhaps you don’t understand. Perhaps I’m not talking loud enough. Perhaps I ought to talk with bombs, to make you understand. Or with a machine-gun. If I had a stone I’d have thrown it in your face as hard as I could, do you hear, but I — There aren’t any stones here. I haven’t got anything. That’s why I’m talking to you like this from this roof. I’ve always thought that’s what one ought to do one day: go up on the roof of a very high house, and talk, without lowering one’s eyes. Afterwards I may jump off. Or I may not. I don’t know yet. But I’ve always thought I ought to speak like this, one night, lying on a roof thirty floors up. That’s why I’m here. If I don’t jump off I know what I shall do. I’ll buy a big pot of white paint and write shit everywhere, on the walls, on the road, on the, in the middle of the airport. In letters as high as a house. I’ve waited long enough. I’ve — All I’ve done. All I’ve looked at, listened to, learned. Yes, I want to know once for all now. It’s difficult to talk like this, looking up into this sort of sky, with the stars not moving and the wind whistling in the ventilation shafts. It’s rather ridiculous. Fortunately there’s no one here. Only the television aerials and the chimneys. Not even a bird. If there’d been any kind of animal here, a cat, a rat, a cockroach, anything, I’d have talked to it. Because it’s so ridiculous. But there’s nothing but those things, those ventilation shafts and aerials. In a minute, before I go, I’ll tear them down. Some people will be watching a cowboy film, or a woman singing, and all of a sudden they won’t see anything any more, and all because of me! If I had some dynamite I’d stick it everywhere, in all the chimneys, and light the fuses. Perhaps you’d hear something then … Yes, for a long time you haven’t said anything. For a long time no one’s seen anything around here. The sun dancing in the sky, for example, or a crossing of the Red Sea, or a burning bush. Show us something. Make an effort. No one will know. Make a triangle appear in the sky. Please. Or strike me down with a thunderbolt. Kill me with it. What have you got to lose? It’s so easy. Just a flash of lightning here on my forehead, and that would be it. What are you waiting for? Eh? It’s so easy.’

Chancelade gazed at the surface of the black sky. But there was nothing new, not even an aeroplane or a falling star, and the cold wind still howled inside the ventilation shafts. But Chancelade didn’t shut his eyes. He went on:

‘Who are you? Who are you, eh, what’s your name? Have you even got a name? I have, all men have, so has this house, I saw it as I came in, Residence of the Sun, Vistaréo, something like that, and all these stars have names. So why haven’t you got one? I’ve got an idea, I’m going to call you something, anything, and then you can’t disappear into the void of things that haven’t got a name. I’ll give you a very ordinary name, slightly ridiculous, the name of a baker or a jeweller. Loubet. Jacques Loubet. What do you say about that, eh? Jacques Loubet, profession: infinite and eternal … There, that means something. Before, I didn’t know how to address those what-do-you-call-thems, you know, prayers. I used to think it was daft just talking into thin air, just pretending to talk to someone. God — that doesn’t mean anything. Nobody here’s called that. Jacques Loubet, now, that’s a very good-sounding name. It could belong to a general, or the chairman and managing director of a big firm that makes soap, or vegetable oil. Vote for Jacques Loubet. Monsieur Jacques Loubet, chairman and managing director of the Loubet Salad Oil Company, limited capital twelve million francs. You could put photographs in the papers showing a woman pouring oil into a salad and grinning from ear to ear. Why did you hide yourself all this time? Now I know where you are. In the advertisements for toothpaste, menthol cigarettes, grape juice, typewriters. That’s it. You dictate orders to your secretaries, smoking a cigar, and everyone listens with his head respectfully bent. You buy. You sell, speculate, buy theatres that are named after you and hotels with your initials, J.L. No one knew you were still living on in the world like that. People thought you’d abandoned them. But it wasn’t so, was it, it wasn’t so. You were called Loubet, or Coca-Cola, or Hilton. And you lived amongst men though they didn’t suspect it. Everywhere anyone went they saw your name up on posters, ashtrays, along the sides of the roads, on moth-eaten old houses, or on the backs of air-tickets. And that meant you were there, looking at what the world was doing. Hi! Jacques Loubet! Can you hear me? I’m talking to you, lying on the roof on the top of this house, which certainly must belong to you. Was all that leading to this? I mean, was it really worth it, all those — all those exoduses and crimes and wars and temples and tablets of the Law and angers and exterminations? Was it worth it? Look at where I am now, if you like, if you can. Just look once on this roof. You’ll see a sort of insect grimacing and talking to itself. Look everywhere in this town, look at all these men and women doing nothing special, nothing extraordinary. Was it worth it? Personally I think the play is over and the curtain’s about to fall. It wasn’t much of a play, was it, and the last act was very weak. We’ve seen a bit of everything on the stage, the first moments of chaos, the childishness, the sacrifices, the great pretentious declamations; the adult tricks, the wars, deceit, lies, vanity; then doting old age, the last twitches of muscles trying to cling to life, and despair and anguish because truth is approaching like a runaway horse. And now here at last is the moment when everything has to end. It’s time, everyone wasn’t beginning to get a bit tired. But just the same it’s not easy; no, it hurts. The throat has to be slit, the trap-door opened. It’s going to be painful, Jacques Loubet, very painful. But it’s all over, isn’t it? There’s nothing more to do now. So I’

It was the moment, just the moment to do it. On this hard concrete surface, with its little bits of gravel that penetrated through your clothes into the skin of your back, and the bare sky with its frozen stars, and the cold, and the solitude, the invisible gulf hollowed out before your eyes, the glass that was at once near and far, and the sort of silence. It was the moment to yell as loud as you could anything that came out through your mouth.

‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’ or

‘There’s nothing, nothing! There’s nothing, you’re alone, there never has been anything and there never will be!’

And the words went on coming out of his mouth, and his nose, and his eyes, spreading out into the darkness. It was as if no one was really talking any more, or as if a countless crowd all huddled together were mumbling indistinguishable phrases. Chancelade was still there, lying on his back on the top of the skyscraper staring at a scrap of the dark metal vault. But what he was saying was no longer audible. What he was saying came from everywhere at once, from hotel bedrooms with creaking springs, shining streets, bars, cinemas, garages. From stationary or moving cars, boats, planes, trains. From cupboards where junkies hide their drugs, from the handbags of prostitutes crammed with greasy notes, or the rusty roofs of shanty-towns. It was in the rasping breath of the horse being dragged towards the knacker’s hammer. It was said with the voice of the man on the hospital bed, shivering with fever and exhaustion; in the voice of Georges Doulens or Philippe Cordier. With the voice of that young woman in red with the tired face and eyes hidden behind dark glasses that reflected the passing headlights. Help! Help! cried the hoarse voice, the voice of fear. Fire, murder, help, help! I’m falling, help me! I’m slipping, help me! I’m burning, give me some water, telephone the police, quick, no, open the windows, throw me a rope, a lifebelt, hold out a stick! Isn’t there anyone there? Where have they gone, where has everyone gone? Why are there only mirrors all round me? Break them, smash them! What am I doing here on this lighthouse in the middle of the sea? A little while ago there was a town, and noises, women, and children, you could see their hands and shoulders. Why is everyone wearing a mask? Tear them off! Let me see your faces, take off your glasses, your false noses, your false teeth, your artificial kidneys, your wooden legs! I want to see someone like myself! I want to see someone who isn’t me! All I can see are roads disappearing in the distance, horrible streets, and houses like clouds. Everyone mocks and grimaces. Mirrors, echoes. I don’t want to see this book any more; close it. Hide the pages. Take away the quotation marks. My thought is written down in the world, my thought is a knife. Tear all these pages up and burn them. Burn all those exoduses and kings and geneses. Make a heap of all the trigonometry books and travel books and history books and Greek grammars. Give me a chance to breathe. Throw all those poems down the lavatory, stop doing those tragedies over and over again, I want to hear real words. Fools! You, there, swine, with all your illnesses! Hunchbacks, drunks, air-swallowers! I’m going to catch all of them, all the illnesses that eat you away and kill you! Basedow’s disease, Albers-Schönberg’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, anal pruritus, narcolepsy, abortive fever! California and Chagas and Filatow-Dukes’ and Katayama disease! Austin-Flint’s murmur. Cushing’s syndrome, craw-craw, and parenchymatous goitre. Koraskoff’s psychosis, Ludwig’s angina, Woillez’ and Morvan’s and Nayukayami’s diseases. Shingles and xerophthalmia. Bell’s paralysis, Pel-Ebstein’s pyrexia, Pautrier’s micro-abscess, Reiter’s syndrome, St. Vitus’ dance, the Rumpel-Leede symptom, Friedrich’s ataxia, and Sheehan-Simmonds’ disease. Von Jaksch’s disease. Skoda’s rattle, the Levi-Loraine syndrome, and the Da Costa, Gradenigo and Weber syndromes. Bockhardt’s impetigo. Oh yes, and I know what I’m going to have: the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, and I’m going to walk along the streets kicking my legs about and shrieking out volleys of curses every ten seconds. And yes, I’ll repeat everything I hear. I’ll hear people say, ‘Hallo, nice day,’ and I’ll go on yelling for hours, ‘Hallo, nice day, hallo, nice day, hallo, nice d—’

That’s what the world is like. A sort of skin covered with tics, a face ceaselessly grimacing and twitching. Nerves, nerves everywhere. It tries to pull itself together. It cries, but the tears fall with indifference, like sweat. It smiles, and its teeth shine in its mouth without any joy. That’s where we’ve got to. That’s what I am. A caricature. A drawing. A photograph. A tapestry that I shall never see the end of. That’s enough! Let’s stop! Leave me alone! I can’t bear the sight of these wreaths any more, these circlets, and hearts and curls and zigzags, all these magnificent and hideous things they’ve made out of my skin. I don’t want them to sew with my hair any more, or patch with my skin, or use my bones as whalebone and my eyes as pearls! But what’s the good? The game still goes on, in front, behind, above, below. There are shouts. Colours are painted on, shadows are made across them, electric light bulbs send out rays. Everyone everywhere is talking at once. There’s the slightly damp voice of a woman talking to her Siamese cat. There’s the voice of a woman talking to her child in a room. There are orders, supplications, words of love, of jealousy, swear words, last words. But nobody hears anything any more. Out there in the sky, in the darkness, on the earth and on the sea, and on the windswept roof of the skyscraper with the chimneys howling, there’s nothing else but that. All the cries and all that hymn, for no one. Trees full of twittering birds, plains with barking dogs, airports full of loudspeakers! No one listens and quietly takes it to heart. What a marvellous solitude. A black desert, a white desert. A deep and immense desert of glass, that’s what I live in. There I am, and my life is my real revenge. I’ll never forget what’s been done to me. All these mirrors — I made them myself, to remind me always, so that nothing escapes me. I’ve set traps everywhere like that, and what I catch I keep. Is it I who think the world, or the world that thinks me? I don’t care which it is, now. I’m here, they’re there, to infinity if you like. And what I’ve written I’ve scored with a knife, and inscribed in matter with an axe. I’ve left my signs everywhere, scratches, graffiti, excrement, dandruff, bits of match and cigarette ends. If anyone follows the trail he’ll certainly come to me, on this roof. And if nobody comes, it doesn’t matter, I’ll wait. And if, one day, or in a minute from now, I jump off the roof, it won’t really be to die, nor even to squash myself on the pavement like a fig. It will be to go on talking, to say once for all that the difference between the roof and the ground is nothing extraordinary, nothing miraculous, just the cold air rushing into my nostrils, and the sound of the interminable seconds inside my heart. There. What I really ought to have done instead of talking was make a life-size model of the earth and launch it into space. Or have children by a female hyena. Or write a very long sentence adding one word every day. Then people would be able to read the sentence and know what it was like to be me. What do you think about that? Eh?

I RAN AWAY

The eternal flight began. It began one day by chance, in a room with fawn paper on the walls and no curtains, wooden furniture and a bare electric light bulb hanging from a black flex. And since then no one has stopped. Perhaps it’s liberation, or perhaps it’s fate. Things with their million aspects fly towards their unique image, worlds enter into each other one by one, sentences grow mute, and as material truth, which is but itself, defines itself, the sphere of time grows full. Unless all flies towards man alone.

Chancelade flees along infernal streets, or magic avenues. He ceaselessly descends staircases, dashes right into concrete caves, opens and shuts doors with glass doorknobs. Every so often, at the end of a corridor, there’s the face of a woman shining softly. But it’s only a reflection, and the flight continues. When day breaks he flees the dazzling light and its killing rays. When night falls he flees the dense darkness that insinuates its slime everywhere. No question of resting. No question of stopping and groaning. Everywhere the ways are open and the roads stretch out for you to rush along them. Chancelade can breathe: he’s running away. He looks down from a window: soon he’ll have to change and find another window, and then another. He’s lying by the soft body of a woman, but it’s always another time. Space demands something new, time consumes itself. Mustn’t stop. Mustn’t turn round to see what’s coming: it’s dangerous. As soon as you turned you’d be enveloped in the icy wind that turns you into a statue.

There are no more countries. Canton, Callao, Penang — how far away all that seems. Now there are only more and more streets. Chancelade walks more slowly and reads the names as he passes: rue Gallieni, rue Papon, rue Lascaris, rue Cassini, rue Rude. And then the avenues, boulevards, passages, alleys, and cul-de-sacs: avenue des Fleurs, boulevard Carnot, passage Ségurane, chemin de l’Abbaye. By the gardens there are overhanging branches of mimosa and brambles. Dogs bark. Uphill, down, and up again. It will never end, it can never end.

The terrible ways of flight have been traced on the crust of the earth. It is the ancient malediction surviving still, the sort of universal order vibrating inside life itself. It is inscribed in the centre of every object, like a long crack that grows and divides. In the beginning, right at the start, there was this explosion, or fear, and ever since the world has never stopped rushing vainly across the immensities of the unknown. The whole of space has become this charge. Time has become this flight. Every second, every day, every year that passes is an animal leap towards the horizon. The very movement itself is a flight annihilating all reason and all hope.

But nothing threatens Chancelade from behind. In fact it looks rather as if the dangers are in front of him. But that’s because the flight is vain, and because each gulf left behind only deepens the void that will ultimately be victorious. Death is already in the flight, its claws already driven into the flesh of its prey, and will never let go. The maddened animal can shake its head and rush all over the plain, but the jaw that has closed on it will still sink slowly farther and farther in, through fold after fold of flesh until it crushes the cervical vertebrae.

Chancelade knows he can’t escape. He has always known it. He also knows that his executioners have charming gentle names, the names of flowers and trees and drops of water. They are called Sun, Pigeon, Daddylonglegs, Mat, Cigarette, Geranium. They are called Mina too, and perhaps the weapon is hidden in the touching face surrounded by fair hair, in the dimple on the right of the mouth, inside the gold-sprinkled blue iris. Perhaps the murder is there, hidden in the calm breath that gently lifts the breasts, or in the pink-painted toenails. But he goes on running away, escaping as best he can, running along the infinite roads of language. He talks, thinks, tries to understand. But it’s only in order to escape. He says life interests him, that he’s fond of the stars, insects, and the secrets of the human body; but it isn’t true. What he really likes is to run away, scamper away like a rat, get away as quickly as possible from the place of unspeakable menace.

In the darkness the crickets cry furiously, and their tense cry is that of flight. The sea is flat, and brassy, wrinkled with thousands of identical waves. I’m like that. Clouds pass over the white sky as if you were looking at them through a window. I, Chancelade, am in each one of them. Rivers cross the walls of mountains, the fields are infinite, the horizon ever recedes. All the time I’m with them, farther, farther, keep going. Thought is a void driving into the void, you look straight in front of you and never find anything fixed to rest on. In short, I’m in among the hurtling planets, the balls of hot lava, fifty million degrees Centigrade, that rush away from one another in no matter what direction.

The lizard runs away over the old sunbaked wall. When he goes by a dark stone he turns brown, and when he goes by a leaf he turns green. Isn’t that a truth in its way? Everything hides when danger comes. They sham dead, and the type of the secret of the void is already in their shells. The stick insect pretends to be a twig. The leaf insect acts a leaf. The moth pretends to be only a dark patch, and the butterfly pretends to be a flower. The aloe opens its sharp-toothed jaws, the corn makes its ears bristle. The tiger wears the stripes of his fear, the bison crouches like a rock. And the crocodile is like a floating log, unless it’s that a floating log is like a crocodile. All fears work towards their mysterious design, the enigma painted on skin or scale that means there is always a prey and always a hunter. It’s as if at the moment of the Creation there was a sly old man whose cruel laugh echoes still.

So with Chancelade or anyone else you could play the final game of metamorphoses:

Chancelade turned into a mouse; death turned into a cat.

Chancelade turned into a fish; death turned into a net.

He turned into an apple; death turned into a knife.

He turned into a microbe; it turned into a sulphonamide.

He turned into fire; it turned into water.

He turned into a cigarette; it turned into a lighter.

He turned into a window; it turned into a stone.

He turned into a mountain; it turned into wind and rain.

He turned into dust; it turned into a vacuum-cleaner.

He turned into a hair; it turned into a razor.

He turned into a bird; it turned into a gun.

He turned into a tree; it turned into an axe.

He turned into a king; it turned into a revolution.

He turned into a snail; it turned into a boot.

He turned into a town; it turned into a volcano.

He turned into a corpse; it turned into a worm.

He turned into matter; it turned into anti-matter.

He turned into writing; it turned into crossing-out.

THEN I GREW OLD

Old, now. The little boy who was called Chancelade was sitting in a wicker armchair in the kitchen. There was a table covered in crumpled newspapers in front of him, and nearby a television set, switched off. It had been hot for some days, months even; and all that heat and light had entered the kitchen, penetrating the yellow paint on the walls, thrusting into the tiled floor and the furniture, and slowly melting the oilcloth and sheets of plastic. Everything sweated: skin, ceiling, clothes, gruyère cheese, glasses. There was a sort of glue over everything, and you couldn’t move.

And the boy didn’t move; he sat on his wicker armchair gripping the arms with his trembling hands, back bowed, legs tucked under the seat. His old, emaciated face had difficulty staying still on his shoulders. It kept threatening to fall on the floor, heavy as a ball of lead. His eyelids kept shutting too; they slipped down over the damp spheres of the eyes and it needed a lot of effort not to fall asleep. On the thin face, which wasn’t white any more, merely pale and yellowish, there was a curious permanent expression of anxiety, fatigue, and incipient sleep. Chancelade looked straight in front of him, but you couldn’t have said for certain what he was looking at. Perhaps at the pages of the paper on the table, or the grey television screen, or the wall with nothing on it.

In spite of the light of all those hot months, all those bright and burning years, the kitchen was dark. What was white anywhere else, here was grey. What was red or blue was brown. And what was black was invisible. Outside there was a cobalt-blue sky and houses with red roofs. Trees, with masses of leaves and branches, faint smells, scents of sugar or pepper, rustlings, cries, sudden flashes. But they couldn’t get through the closed window, and even if they could enter the room they couldn’t be recognized any more. It was all so far away now it might never have existed. It was like a curtain of mist above the horizon, it was a blanket of clouds and vapour without movement and without relief.

The boy called Chancelade was old: he’d lost his teeth and hair, his body had gradually emptied bit by bit. His bones were fragile as glass, and his muscles had no more strength in them. The cracks of a thousand wrinkles had appeared on his skin, advancing by little bounds all over his body, drawing their little signs, a sort of writing leaving its series of hooks and loops. You could read it everywhere, the x’s at the corners of the eyes, the y’s on either side of the mouth, the z’s round the navel and on the palms of the hands. The veins too had revealed their routes along the thin arms and the calves. They sprang out on each side of the neck and stood out on the temples, the skull, and round the eyes. They made crossroads on the backs of the hands, were vivid on the thighs in little blue patches. Or else they knotted themselves into hard blocks that formed bridges and tunnels, stiff black lumps on the ankles, legs and arms. There was nothing all over Chancelade’s body but these signs and scribbles and scars. Time had weathered that skin. The sun had withered, the light had yellowed, the rain had drenched and worn and chapped it. Clothes had rubbed against it. Cushions, the straw of chairs, mattresses had hardened it. Illness and suffering had tattooed it thus for endless years. If you’d had a microscope you could have read on that body all that had happened during more than eighty-one years. Here were marked wars, there love, passion. There again on the pale forehead was a little star which meant that you’d once believed in God, or that you’d had a soul. There was a little curved vein at the corner of the left eye that meant you’d read The Grapes of Wrath. That mark on the cheek was Dostoievsky; this wrinkle between the eyebrows The Battleship Potemkin. Everything, absolutely everything, was written on this body. Nothing had been forgotten, nothing had been suppressed. It was a notebook in which the invisible hand had written all the time that elapsed, the illnesses, the desires, the thoughts, the fears. One day long, long ago Chancelade had found a wounded seagull on the beach. It was dragging itself across the pebbles with a broken wing, and had been quite easy to catch. He’d taken it home and looked after it for two months. He’d given it a name: Maya. Every day he took it down to the sea in his hands, and it used to look at the water and cry sadly: ‘Khéeeoooh kek kek kek kek kek!’ It had a very white body with black tail and wing-tips, a red beak, red feet and grey eyes that were as hard and transparent as the surface of the sea. And then one day, when its wing was almost cured, a dog came into the garden and killed it. When Chancelade came there was nothing left but a heap of bloodstained feathers and earth, and he’d thrown it right out into the road, without crying, so that the dog could finish eating it. But the bird had remained, marked there on his body, a sort of asterisk carved in the skin of his brow, a strange sort of wrinkle shaped like a bird.

Another time, also very long ago, Chancelade had upset a cup of coffee on the beach, at Acireale, or Calamayor. And the brown patch slowly absorbed by the sand was also marked on his body for ever; somewhere on the skin, or in a nerve.

Everything was written down. Everything could be read on this skin as on the skin of the world. Wrinkles, weals, spots, excrescences: faults, deposits, volcanoes and mountains! These signs had been engraved one by one, and now on the body of the little boy become an old man there were sentences and pages and chapters telling the history, the only true history, the one a man writes with his life.

Not a second was forgotten. Everything was there: the woman’s face lit up red on the dark staircase as she lit her cigarette. The whistle of tracer bullets. The broken tooth. The first kiss. The summer mosquitoes, the blue flies of winter. The moon on September 12,1951. Marriages, deaths, births. The sound of the pebble breaking. Lightning, snow, the doleful wail of the wind. Voices, voices for ever wandering in the distance, with everlasting echoes. A living novel, an epic with four limbs, armpits, hairy parts, and an expressive face. A poem born one day in the belly of a woman, which launched on his own had grown up into the greatest poem in existence. Perhaps that’s what one ought to do instead of trying to remember: learn to read life on living bodies. Keep all these mummies in huge refrigerated rooms, and come there every day and peacefully decipher every detail that’s written on them. Perhaps there’s no other art but that. Perhaps there’s no other language but that real, mysterious and beautiful script individual to each person, where nothing is omitted and nothing altered or distorted in the service of some artificial and futile beauty.

It was good to have grown old like Chancelade. You were still the same, and yet you’d changed body and soul. And one day you found yourself there at journey’s end, sitting without moving in a creaking wicker chair in the kitchen. The noise and agitation had ceased, the fever had subsided. Violence and hatred had slowly withdrawn, and now in their place was silence.

With difficulty Chancelade got out a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches; jerkily he selected a cigarette and put it in his mouth. Then his left hand, trembling, took hold of the matchbox, and the right hand tried to strike the little wooden stick, which broke. The hand hesitated a moment, then took another match; this time the orange-red flame spurted up. Chancelade raised it wavering to the cigarette and the tobacco caught alight and spread clouds of grey smoke.

Chancelade went on smoking like that endlessly. Every so often the cigarette would go out and he’d have to grope for the box of matches in his coat pocket. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, or five o’clock, or six. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter any more. His gaze was fixed without moving on the wall, just over the table with the papers on it, a little to the left of the silent television set. He never looked at himself now; he was lost, buried in the yellow paint, tucked right inside the wood and plaster as if between sheets. From time to time a few words would come to his lips; they came from far away, they’d crossed such vast lands, they’d travelled so long; and when, trembling, they crossed his lips, they stopped at once, mingled with the rasping breath. They said snatches of sentences, and the silence that followed them said nothing.

‘It’s funny, I …’

‘I must, I must …’

‘But what …’

The words were not addressed to anyone any more. Men, women, little children, they were all dead, easily, just like that; Mina, Alfred, Jean, Étienne, Emmanuel. Servat, Manzoni, Filippi. Schwob. Nichols. Corelle. Ensin. Alata, Tallon, Jérôme Banyors, Vultureni, Roland. All of them had gone, all. The world had swallowed them up one by one. The sea had drowned them, the sand covered and the fire consumed them. Dogs, cats, rats and scorpions had disappeared too. There was nothing left but him, the little boy with the face of an old man who was called Chancelade. In the hot kitchen with the door and windows shut, life still beat on. It had become a tiny speck in the middle of the desert, the crater dug by an ant-lion for example. It still palpitated slightly, a gentle flicker of the eyelid. It shone, a pale spark almost imperceptible in the immense chaos of the dense night. You could hardly distinguish it from nothingness. As you drew near the wicker armchair you could hear the panting breathing, the gurgling of the intestines, the sound of the throat trying to swallow a little saliva. You could even stammer the name between your quivering lips: ‘Chchchan-cece-celllladdde …’ but it scarcely meant anything now. It had become a strange almost sad name from an old civilization, a name mutilated even before it was engraved in the leprous stone. This empty bubble still preserved life and its changing reflections. But in the closed room the light and violence of the world pressed in on all sides, and the thin partition had difficulty in resisting. Everything conspired to break this bubble at last. The table wished it, with its square legs. The yellow walls wished it. The luminous window and the dull television screen wished it. The crumpled newspapers, the red floor bore down, and so did the wicker chair, clenching its arms and hardening its back; the grey light and the heat had gripped Chancelade’s head in their vice, which turned and tightened slowly and inexorably. The struggle wasn’t over, but it was now without object. The little boy had surrendered long ago, but the battle continued out of habit, because the fly goes on trembling long after the terrible blow that crushed its abdomen.

Then Chancelade began to move. First he stopped looking at the old yellow wall and turned his head towards the kitchen window. Through the dirty panes he could see the blue sky, the branch of a tree, and the pots of geraniums on the terrace. He gazed for a few moments at this unchanging fragment of the world. Then he gripped the arms of the chair and rose slowly to his feet, all his muscles trembling with the effort. At last he was standing up beside the table. He was wearing a pair of red slippers with blue heels, and his feet weighed down on the floor like two painful plinths. The little boy straightened his bent back and took a deep breath. But the air too trembled as it entered his lungs, and it was difficult to keep his balance. Chancelade peered about for his stick. It had fallen down a couple of yards from the table. For a moment he thought he’d have to call someone, his son, or his daughter-in-law, or even Daniel, the baby. But then he remembered they’d gone out for a drive after lunch and wouldn’t be back until the evening. He’d have to pick the stick up himself. He moved very slowly round the table, leaning on his right hand. Then he bent forward, and his body started to tremble even more. His glasses fell out of his coat pocket and broke on the floor. Chancelade had never imagined the ground was so far away. It was like seeing it from the top of a tower, a gleaming flat expanse of red brick, covered with little bobbles of dust like clouds. Ants hurried along the cracks between the tiles, stopping every time they came to a scrap of food. It was as if your legs had grown enormously long during the night, so that the earth was now at the bottom of an unfathomable abyss. Chancelade stretched out his left arm and groped for the stick. At last, after many attempts, his hand encountered the wood and picked it up. Then he stood up and leaned on it. A sort of thin sweat had broken out on his forehead and dampened his shirt. His legs were trembling with fatigue. He hesitated there for a few minutes, standing by the table leaning on his stick. Then he looked out of the window again and set off.

When he reached the street he stopped again and looked about him in terror. The storm of movement and colour all descended on him at once, and he had to lean against a wall so as not to fall. As far as he could see there was nothing but a tide of violence and rage. The loud long waves swept slowly down on him, the undertow dragged at his legs, flashes of light rained down without a pause on his face. The crowd marched rhythmically along the pavement with heavy, crushing feet. In the road the cars hurtled by, devouring space with their rotating black tyres. An ambulance made its way along the middle of the street, the strident shriek of its siren issuing frenziedly from the painted metal body. It was there, everywhere, distended, tensed, stretched to breaking-point: life, still the same life with its furious flickerings, life leaping forward, pullulating, felling, breaking bones. Multiple torture, wheels laden with broken bodies, gibbets with strangled corpses, garottes, guillotines, axes, pincers, gouges, whips. Still the same ditch crawling with centipedes and snakes, and the heavy flail of the sky above. Still the light with its numberless knives. Still the white walls with windows in them, the thick tar, the stifling smell of petrol. The trees. The pale panes of glass tougher than steel. Mirrors with their eternal fires. Hooters, harsh cries, voices, words lost and found and lost and found, endlessly, without respite. Still that pain, or that pleasure, it was hard to remember which, that gnawed at the pit of the stomach and made the temples throb.

The boy Chancelade went along the street step by step. He dragged his red slippers with their blue heels over the rough pavement, striking the echoing ground with the rubber end of his stick. On he went. His legs moved trembling back and forth and his body advanced bearing aloft the old wrinkled face with its grey eyes and hair. Men kept meeting or overtaking him; women glided along flaunting their hips, the sharp tap of their heels fading rapidly along the street.

Chancelade went along close to the walls, not knowing where he was going. For a little while there had been certain instructions in his mind, words of some kind that indicated something. He’d seen them as if they were written up on white hoardings:

CIGARETTES

SWEETS

PAPER

COFFEE

Then the words had disappeared and the streets no longer led anywhere. He stumbled along on his shaky legs, one step, another step, stick forward, one step, another step, stick forward, and so on. He could see the grey pavement unfolding slowly in front of him covered with signs and markings; here dogs had wet, there a child had thrown away a half-eaten ice-cream cone. All you had to do was follow these tangled tracks, walking slowly and carefully like this. You were bound to arrive somewhere. Bound to find someone, or something. Chancelade noted as he passed all the details on the ground that would help him not to get lost:

Black patch.

Dog’s dirt.

Greasy paper.

Cigarette-end.

Cigarette-end.

Screwed-up blue paper.

Banana skin.

Scratch.

Feather.

Man-hole.

Piece of paper.

Match.

Cigarette-end.

Cigarette-end.

Cigarette-end.

Spit.

It was the unknown way that led across time like this, gently, gently. Men, women, dogs, cats, pigeons, cockroaches had without knowing it marked out their path on the earth. They had left tracks so that one day someone might chance to follow them to their lairs. They had left the signature of their lives as they passed, abandoning a little of themselves with every second. Their sweat had stained the ground, and their scales, bits of skin, hairs and waste products told that they were still alive, that they hadn’t stopped living.

But the whole world had become unspeakably old. The boy Chancelade went on walking along by the walls, against the stream of the noisy tumultuous river; and everywhere there was this continual trembling. Beneath his red slippers with their blue heels the earth quivered as if it were about to open. The asphalt was damp and gave to the tread like sand. The walls of the houses trembled, the windows were soft, the mirrors clouded. A deep weariness had invaded the whole town. In the street human shapes lurched about drunk with sleep. Cars drove of their own accord along the road, sleepwalkers advancing on nothingness. Chancelade stopped at an intersection, leaned on his flexible stick, and contemplated the spectacle of universal weakness. He saw the buildings swaying on their foundations, the ailing lights, the stutterings, the stumbles. Around, and within, everything had begun to totter. It was as if some strange disease had struck the whole town, a sort of sleepy sickness. A hypnotic sun shone in the middle of the sky, and as they fell on the earth its rays slowly paralysed things and bodies.

Nothing was certain any more, nothing rebelled. The trees slept where they stood in their capsules of heat and silence. The street-lamps too were motionless, vanquished. In the dark corners by doorways the dust accumulated speck by speck. Everything was long, slow, and far away. Even the air, that used to be so light and pure, now hung over the earth laden with heavy odours like the breath of an old woman.

Chancelade felt himself being overtaken by dizziness. He had to hold on to a wall so as not to fall. He leaned there for some time, gazing at the pavement. He listened to his heart beating faintly somewhere in his chest.

Then he started walking along the wavering street again; at the end of it there was a little shelter with a seat where people waited for the bus. It took Chancelade half an hour to reach it; then he sat down on the seat. The world was inexpressibly old. It shook like a dotard, slobbered, wet its clothes, sweated, was losing its senses. But he, Chancelade, didn’t forget anything. He was more alive than any of them, the only man left on earth. Sitting on the bench he watched the buses drive up and off again one after the other, carrying their cargoes of invalids. At one point a young woman came and sat down beside him. Chancelade looked at the youthful body, the slender hands, the smooth face with its bright eyes. With effort, hearing his voice wavering as he spoke, he said:

‘It’s funny, you know — It’s very funny … I, I’d never have believed that one day …’

The young woman looked at him in surprise.

‘What’s funny?’ she said.

But the boy Chancelade went on without taking any notice. Perhaps he’d even gone deaf.

‘Today, here, on this seat … At the 16 bus-stop. It all happened so fast, you see, so fast … I can’t remember the details, it happened so fast … I was born just the other day … Yes, just the other day … And today it’s almost all over. In one night, it happened in one night … While I was asleep, all — all those years went by without my noticing. Today I wake up, and it’s all over … Nearly over … Don’t you think that’s funny? Don’t you? It’s like, like a dream, a nightmare, I don’t know … I’ve forgotten — I’ve forgotten how it began. But now — Now I know it’s true. Sitting here on this seat with the buses coming up every five minutes. All that, all that in one night!’

The young woman tried to say something nice, something like, come now, you’re still in excellent health, you don’t look at all old, very well preserved in fact, and so on. But the boy Chancelade wasn’t listening. He spoke again:

‘It was only yesterday, or the day before. I was talking to a woman like you, yes … She was just like you, it might even have been you … She was there, and so was I. It’s funny to think that all that, all that can have disappeared in a single night. And yet nothing has changed … I can recognize everything. But it’s so far away now. So old. I can’t understand that. I—’

He swallowed his saliva with difficulty. The words were now beginning to come back to him; but it was too late.

‘How old are you?’ asked Chancelade.

‘Me? Twenty-two,’ said the young woman.

‘Twenty-two … Forty-two, sixty-two, eighty-two, what’s the difference? Yesterday I was twenty-two. I sat here on this seat waiting for the bus. To go to the cinema or go and buy some writing-paper in a department store. And I didn’t think it would be like that, so quick. They call it — They call that a life. A life! It didn’t even last an hour! Just the time between two buses … It’s really—’

‘But just the same you—’

‘No, no, I didn’t do anything! It all went by so fast. I was there, and now I’m here, with so many things still to do … I might have — I don’t know, gone to Vladivostock for instance, or got to know women, or work, or learned dozens of things. Sanskrit. Biology, cosmography, botany, archaeology. I might have had hundreds of children, gone into politics, lived in India or Peru. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have time. It all went by so quickly, that life, it’s hard to believe … It’s as if I’d been asleep, or dreaming. I was born only the other day …’

The boy Chancelade saw that the young woman was looking at him with her bright eyes. He tried to smile, but because of his toothless mouth could only produce an ugly grimace.

‘Listen,’ he said, and his voice began to quaver; ‘listen — I’m going to tell you while there’s still time … Live every second, don’t waste any of it. You’ll never have anything else, you’ll never—’ He hesitated a little: ‘You’ll never have another chance … Do everything … Don’t waste a minute, not even a second, hurry up, wake up … Tomorrow — tomorrow it’ll be you sitting here on this seat … It’s terrible, I — you …’

Chancelade’s voice broke, and at that moment the bus drew in along the pavement. The young woman jumped up and got in without a backward glance. Out of his dim eyes the boy Chancelade saw the green-painted mass clicking regularly. Then the bus drove off in a cloud of smoke, and nothing was left in the streets or the sky or anywhere but the kind of dizzying weakness wheeling round like a vulture in ever-decreasing circles. When the abyss finally closed and the bird dropped like a stone, there’d be no more noise, or words, or grotesque movements; only the featureless face and ageless unwrinkled skin of the world as it is.

I DIED

Dead, now. Peaceful as poison in the body of the snake. Violent as the knife in the killer’s hand, burning as love in the skin of a man who possesses a woman. It came one night, in the early morning, and for the last time the little boy called Chancelade was alone. His pale face was turned to the ceiling, and his body arched under the sweat-soaked sheets; his breath whistled through his open mouth. The chill of infinity mounted slowly through the legs, wiping out the living cells one by one. The heart struggled. The tongue fell, a dumb choking mass, into the throat. The ceiling of fog began its slow descent, to crush and grind and cover up for ever and ever. The walls drew in inch by inch, moved by the pitiless mechanism. The dark room had become the size of a ship’s cabin, then of a cupboard, then of a wardrobe, a suitcase, a match-box. Now it is only a tiny hole in the hard rock, a minute hollow not big enough for a fly to live in. And yet for Chancelade it’s huge, big as the waiting lounge of an airport, and the walls are so far away and the ceilings so high that it’s hardly a room at all any more but the world in which one lies lost, floating deserted and hopeless in the cold void, alone, abominably alone.

In the temple of moving walls the body of the boy Chancelade is dying. There is too much space, or not enough. There is too much air, and time, and light, and the solitude is stifling. What you ought to do, now is the time, what you ought to do is stretch out your arms and try to stop the walls. And take your tongue out of your throat and shout as loud as you can, for those who are not there: ‘Help! Help! I need you! Help!’

The white ceiling has become a mirror too. The last mirror before unconsciousness; and what the little boy sees in it is horrible. He sees a face that is very old and very white, with a mouth like a dead fish, dim eyes, and cheeks already darkened by patches of shadow. The face is his own, and he grimaces with pain and rage. Vain mouth, foolish eyes, hollow cheeks dark and unshaven, tousled hair. Forehead white with stupor and streaming with big drops of icy sweat. The ceiling is gently dying, shaken by ridiculous twitches that spread across the white paint in strange concentric waves.

In the middle of the ceiling hangs a black flex with the skull of an electric light bulb at the end of it. A head decapitated, then hung.

The horror of white sheets clinging to the skin, of the pillow slowly engulfing the head like a quicksand. The furniture is dying too. You can hear the sinister creaking as cold paralysis creeps over it. The table splits, the chair is consumed where it stands. Carpets and curtains unravel, undo all the weavers’ work. Everywhere dust falls, and little rivulets of chalky powder run along the cracks of the tiles and disappear into the sea of the floor. Enough! All this must be halted. The damage must be mended, the bits of wood and glass stuck together, the holes stopped up. That’s enough, I tell you! The joke’s gone on long enough, put on the lights again. There’s been enough drama, we’ve been frightened quite enough. Now let everything go back to what it was before, sun, clear air, peace, sea, strength, beauty. Isn’t everything eternal? Isn’t everything normal, quite normal? Who started this grotesque farce? The walls are there, the ceiling’s there, the chairs and tables aren’t dying. There isn’t any face on the white ceiling, there isn’t any skull hanging where the light bulb ought to be. I’m here. I insist. I have my body, my eyes, my mouth, my mind and its thoughts. So that’s enough of this ridiculous comedy! Am I not eternal? I was never born, I’ve always been here, always, always. Birth and death are only fables. As far back as I can remember I’ve always been here. Wasn’t I here in 1952, when it was so hot the asphalt stuck to the soles of your shoes? And in 1943, when there was some sort of war, didn’t I watch the tracer bullets shooting through the sky? And in 1960, when it snowed on the road to London, or 1964, when there was the earthquake in Naples. I was there, I was there all the time. And it was me in 1834 too, crossing the Rocky Mountains westwards and shooting at Jim Rattlesnake’s gang. It was I who crossed the Beresina, who was called Marco Polo, Eric Bloodaxe, or Hui-tsang who died of thirst in the huge Gobi Desert. I took part in the Anabasis, the exoduses, the migrations to the West. It was I who populated Asia, Africa, America. I was there all the time, every day, with the sun and the rain and the wind and the ice and the fire. I was in the dense jungle, and the stretches of white sand. On the mountain-tops, and on the misty lakes. I was everywhere, always. So why is this dust falling down from the walls, why are there these eyeless faces on the ceiling and the windows, why is there this creeping silence, and these sheets, this sweat, this abyss? Let me tell you I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid.

My intelligence must be immortal. My eyes have pierced to the heart of the world like a shaft of steel. And all these objects and other bodies and landscapes and trees and animals have been connected with me from the first by the substance of knowledge. They can’t betray me. They can’t abandon me. I have entered into the trunks of the palm-trees and lived in the sweet mounting sap. I have been right inside the shells of insects and felt the faint vibrations of the engine that moves their legs and wings. I have been in the bellies of cows and in the very flesh of whales and octopuses. Yes, I have lived in all those masses of organs, red muscles, fragrant genitals and silky pelts. And I’ve been in the centre of the rocks, caught between narrow layers of flint and granite. I have lived numberless years inside great mountains, hidden under tons of stone and old earth. I have had the bodies of rivers and clouds and air; I have been in stopped-up wells, I have been thrown back by obstacles, I have flown round jagged peaks and over marshy plains. I’ve been seen everywhere, heard everywhere. I’ve been used, given every name and every age. So why have the gates of life been closed on me now, why have these walls been put up?

All I’ve known, and all I’ve failed to understand, all is far away now, leaving nothing but the atrocious void. It’s as if my eyes had been suddenly torn out and the secret links that bound me to the universe broken as the bloody spheres rolled somewhere outside my body, their retinas registering nothing. The sweet fluid has ceased to come and go, the blood of vision flows no more, and I have begun to float, icy and attached to nothing, in huge empty space. The world has shrivelled up, and objects roam about lost and aimless, like fleshless stumps from which life has receded.

So that’s what has happened now to the little boy who was called Chancelade. It was coming for a long time. It was written up everywhere, all around him, on the white skin of women and in the flesh of fruit. It was written inside him too, in the skeleton’s creaking bones, in hair, nails and teeth. The great withdrawal had begun in the very first instant, and the whole of life had only been a series of random gesticulations to slow it down.

The pit had gradually deepened in the too-soft pillows. Cold had penetrated the folds in the sheets, the blankets, the mattress, and gradually enfolded the thin body, making it shudder. Chancelade was still breathing, lying on his back with his mouth open. The raucous sounds filled the room, now quick, now faint and far apart. On the bedside table, among all the medicine bottles and tubes, the clock went on ticking regularly, as if to show what had to be done. On the white dial the hands showed something like six o’clock in the morning. When the hand was on five, you’d been born. When it was on seven, you’d be dead. That was the truth about time, truth itself in the form of a clock with a little steel knob that you turned from left to right every so often to wind it up.

Outside, cars let out sudden growls as they started up. A bus made a sneezing noise as it braked, and there were strange incomprehensible cries. Somewhere in the east the sun was rising behind a twelve-storey building, and the grey and pink light spread over the pavements as usual. It was today, or yesterday. Or perhaps tomorrow. It was here, or there, or farther away still. It was true or false, beautiful or ugly, peaceful or violent. It was infinity, or the gummed square inch of a postage stamp.

The boy Chancelade has started to play the last game of all. In the soiled bed, on the collapsing mattress, he has arranged his body for the last little adventure. He is playing against himself, with his own body, skin and mind. The game is quite simple: you have to lose as slowly as possible, suffering as little as possible. You lose a toe, then another, then another. An ankle, a finger. A word. An image. The trifles disappear one after the other into the dark hole. All that you put down you lose. All that you win you abandon at once to the dark river that strips and laves so carefully, and washes everything away.

It isn’t a new game; in fact, it’s the last episode in a game that began a long time ago, so long ago that no one remembers. Every cigarette that was lit, every word that was spoken, every act performed was a move in the game, and one didn’t know it. It was a mistake to think that there was no enemy; the enemy was there from the very beginning, lurking in the depths of mirrors. He had your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your nose, your chest, your legs, your fingerprints. He had your thoughts and spoke your language, but every word of yours that he echoed automatically cancelled out its original. Your enemy was you, you.

Consciousness had killed consciousness. Sight had turned on itself and gone blind; your light struck against the opacity of the world, rebounded, and annihilated you. Intelligence was also stupidity. Creation was destruction. The light of day contained impenetrable darkness. In every reason there was frenzy. In every word the approach of silence.

They’ve come. They’re gathered in the room, around the bed on which the body now scarcely stirs. The boy suddenly saw them all standing there round him like a wall. He knows their faces but he can’t give them a name. Who is this man with the thin unmoving face and sunken eyes? Who is this black-haired woman holding a handkerchief to her nose? And that other woman with swollen eyelids? That girl in white? Who is this man with thick glasses who takes hold of Chancelade’s wrist? What are all these people called, and what are they doing here? Chancelade tries to slide to the bottom of the bed and disappear through the pillows and the mattress, sink through the floor; but in vain. With horror he sees the crowd slowly growing in the grey room and looking at him. What do they want? What are they looking for? There are faces everywhere, familiar faces become unrecognizable. The harsh light of the new day throws dark shadows on their cheeks and noses and eye-sockets. Under the heavy lids the eyes shine feverishly, like balls of steel. Chancelade is on show. His body, stretched out on the bright white bed, is exposed to curiosity and disgust. Faces are bent towards him, fingers stretched: he is the cynosure, a sort of wax-faced hollow mummy in which everyone tries to see the signs of a brotherhood betrayed. For they have abandoned him. They have denied him. No one wants anything more to do with him, he must be forgotten, forgotten. The last metamorphosis has taken place, in this closed room, in the soft and weak half-light.

And the eyes in the faces round the bed have formed the final mirror, the great sheet of tarnished foil that separates off the world of the living. There beyond the glass they are afraid of nothing. They can watch the old snakeskin writhe in the dust, the grey rag that no longer has a name or a shape. They have all come to perform the rite of exile. Father, mother, wife, friends, mistresses, children, doctors and lawyers. They have emerged from the darkness where they were hiding, and now they keep thrusting, thrusting him away.

Chancelade has slipped back even farther. He has opened his mouth wide, and he shrieks out his curse at the same time as the whistling death-rattle. He cries out, he tries to cry out, but the words cannot get past the opening of his throat. He says, looking at all the marked faces round the bed:

‘What are they doing here? Go away! Go away! I don’t need all these people round me. Tell them to go away, leave me alone. Go away! Go away!’

But no one listens. The ghosts will all stay there till the end. The woman with black hair will lean over to the man and whisper:

‘It’s awful — awful — I can’t bear it …’

‘He ought to be given an injection of caffein, but …’

‘Tell Emmanuel to go away, he oughtn’t to—’

The strange whirlpool has begun. Chancelade looks at the walls going round. He starts to laugh, choking, as the faces of the bystanders keep going past. At one point he says:

‘Hallo? I’m speaking direct to my bladder. Hallo, are you there?’

And he laughs louder, and chokes more. The doctor draws back, saying: ‘… delirious …’

After hours and hours of black and white dizziness, Chancelade sees the face of the little boy approaching the bed. He’s about eleven, with short fair hair and two staring blue-grey eyes that look at him strangely. From the midst of his dream Chancelade sees the little boy who resembles himself, and talks to him softly, stammering a little.

‘What, what’s your name?’

‘I, it …’

‘So you came?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t — I can’t remember.’

‘Yes, you do, it’s easy, it was when you got lost in the forest at Turini, don’t you remember?’

‘Oh yes, there was a, there was a winding road.’

‘And trees everywhere …’

‘And dark, it was dark, wasn’t it? And it rained a little.’

‘And you started to run as fast as you could, and call out.’

‘I–I was frightened …’

‘You thought there were wolves behind every tree.’

‘Yes, I kept on running and calling out.’

‘There, there were people watching you go by.’

‘I didn’t know what I was doing, I …’

‘You kept running till your legs hurt …’

‘And I was calling out … calling out all the time …’

‘That’s right … I remember quite clearly …’

‘Why are you here?’

‘You know that too, don’t you?’

‘I–I’m ill.’

‘Yes.’

‘And all these people, why are there all these people?’

‘Where? I can’t see anyone.’

‘Yes, there, all round me. Tell them to go away.’

‘But there isn’t anyone.’

‘Can’t you see them?’

‘No …’

‘Everything — everything’s so far away now.’

‘But you remember that?’

‘What, the thunderbolt that fell on the mountain?’

‘Yes, and the, the rock that toppled over. Like a bees’ nest.’

‘Yes …’

‘The rain makes a funny noise falling.’

‘Yes, on the corrugated iron roof, and—’

‘And a funny smell too, in the concrete huts.’

‘At Abakaliki, yes, I remember.’

‘And the ant-hills burst open when you hit them with a stick.’

‘Yes, and the red ants bite your legs …’

‘There are pools in the rocks.’

‘Yes, at Belle Croûte Bay …’

‘And the wind blows.’

‘At Highlands, yes, I remember …’

‘Well, I’ve come to say goodbye.’

‘Already?’

‘Yes.’

‘What time is your train?’

‘Half past six.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s going to be a hot day.’

‘What month is it? August? September?’

‘Right, I must go now.’

‘And what year? What year is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I can’t remember anything any more, and yet — and yet, it’s there just at the back of my mind.’

‘What?’

‘Those trees, those — mimosas, acacias.’

‘Hmm.’

‘And the black empty forest, with the road that—’

‘It takes such a long time, all that.’

‘Yes, it’s never-ending.’

‘Thousands of days in the sun, and nights, and …’

‘I didn’t think it could ever end.’

‘It doesn’t. Perhaps it’s only beginning.’

‘Perhaps you have to count, to stop it ending?’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine …’

‘Right, well …’

‘I shan’t be able to. I–I get mixed up.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s quiet now.’

‘Yes, you can’t hear anything any more.’

‘And there’s no one here.’

‘It makes you want to sleep for years.’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, I must go.’

‘Perhaps we’ll see each other again?’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Right, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘So long.’

‘Goodbye.’

And now the boy Chancelade was quite alone. All around him had disappeared. The brutal faces had melted into the shadow, and the shape of the child who was like him had slipped softly away into the mist. The room had vanished too: the walls had suddenly disappeared, and the ceiling had melted away among the molecules of the empty sky. Chancelade was alone in the centre of a huge plain, lying on a gently floating bed. The horizons had drawn back, the sky had hollowed its grey gulf even deeper, and the earth was only a heaving paste of sand and water.

Rubber earth, sea of moving particles, liquid trees and stones and air! Everything is gradually retiring, like an indrawn breath. And the blood is removed drop by drop from the exhausted body, each pulsation taking away instead of giving a flush of warmth.

Now is the moment of departure, yes, now.

The vile trap has been put there on the table by the hand of men, and the terrible yet indifferent tragedy is in progress. For flies, for example:

A cake that is irresistibly attractive to

FLIES …

and FATAL!

As a magnet attracts steel and a candle moths, so FLY CAKE irresistibly attracts flies. And it rids you of them once and for all! This new American discovery will kill every fly in the house in the space of a few seconds.

A MASSACRE!

Yes, it’s true: no fly can escape, for every one is irresistibly drawn to FLY CAKE, and FLY CAKE kills flies on contact.

Why a cake?

Everyone knows that you can’t catch flies with vinegar.

American chemists therefore concluded that the best way was to offer them something they liked; i.e. something sweet.

That is why FLY CAKE is prepared as a real treat for flies. It is made of ingredients that give off a scent perceptible to flies alone. As soon as they smell it they rush towards it. But they are rushing to their death.

As soon as they alight on FLY CAKE flies roll over on their backs, and in five seconds they are dead.

What has happened?

What has happened is that as soon as their feet touch FLY CAKE flies are paralysed. The poison in this product directly attacks their nervous system. The advantages of this method are obvious. First of all death is almost instantaneous. And above all the flies don’t go away and die somewhere else; they expire on FLY CAKE itself! But FLY CAKE has other virtues too. It never wears out. Thanks to carefully researched stabilizing elements, the product retains 100 per cent effectiveness as long as the smallest fragment of it remains. So FLY CAKE can last for months and kill thousands of flies.

FLY CAKE gives astonishing results: thousands of victims in only a few minutes. Once in place it ensures continuous slaughter day after day without the slightest further attention.

Murder! Murder everywhere! All over the world, in broad daylight, in the terrible light of the sun, murders are committed. Flies take five seconds to die; five times the length of eternity. Everywhere knives are sharpened and razors ready to cut throats. Spines crack, bones break, flesh is sundered by vice-like jaws. Warm blood flows down the throat, the reeking blood of death. Guns spit out their bullets, which go straight into the panting body instead of the shoulder. The wounded ox falls bellowing to its knees. The horse rears as the gun goes off in its ear! The fish suffocates on the rotting planks of the hold, its open mouth still trying to eject the hook that tore away half its jaw. The snail eats the poison and goes stiff. The weapons of destruction are everywhere, in peaceful hands. But they will kill. They will make a hole in the skin and root out the marrow of life. The white stalls have been set up, the hooks are ready to exhibit the murder. The hatchet will split the ribs, the sharp knife slit up the rosy lungs. They are there on all sides, menacing, mechanical, mallets, iron bars, garottes, sacks, harpoons, banderillas, saws, daggers. Buckets of boiling oil, pots of boiling water where shrimps will writhe an instant before being fixed in a red cramp with bulging eyes and shrivelled legs. Green poisons, white poisons. Traps that suddenly clamp down on the neck of the little mouse-grey creature, strangling lakes, drowning pits. There is a sweet scent of lavender in the air, but the perfume is one that’s deadly. Bright-coloured ribbons hang from the ceiling, and on them hundreds of insects are trapped by the legs and die of hunger and exhaustion. Car wheels on the roads seek eagerly after dogs, and sharp stones cut off the heads of toads. Three children keep turning an octopus over and over on a slab of stone in the sun; and on the oozing star of flesh the organs stifle and death begins to shine like a pearl.

Sordid violence is everywhere displayed. Everywhere there are hard-nailed hands strangling and mutilating. Eyes look on avidly at the icy yet burning spectacle; the world is nothing but food. Murder approaches unhurriedly along the road of round links that leads towards us. It’s nearly here. It’s here. The pale plate for the sacrifice waits on the white table with silver knives and glasses of cut crystal. Then someone throws on to it the square of meat with its dead cells slightly oozing blood. Eat up. But this time, this last time, to your helpless horror, it’s yourself you are served with. It’s you that’s going to be eaten!

For countless years, devouring years, day after day he committed all these murders. Hour by hour he burned, uprooted, sliced, crushed, drowned, raped. He drank the blood, he ate the body of others. Now he must pay the price. He must slowly fall into the pit where the mandibles wait. Earth and air cry out, water and fire call for their revenge. The dread game will go on, but he will be playing no longer. He will be divided up, and the blind worm will have this part, and the roots of the briar that. There’s nothing more to be said now. Chancelade has left the world of picture postcards and red-headed matches. He’s away. He has been extracted. Who was it who thought something? Who was it that said a few words? Who wrote ‘I love you’ on a cigarette paper and then smoked it? Who picked a flower and put it in a glass of water? Who ate a vanilla ice on September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour? Who believed in God? Who studied art? Who lived the 946,900000th second of his life as if it must be the unique and only and sempiternal one? Who drew a horse, a pear, a naked woman lying on her back, who wrote about stones and waste land and women as if that was all you had to do to become immortal? Who fought in a war? Who had children, grandchildren? Who posed for photographs, smiling slightly, unafraid of the grimacing countenance shining faintly through the negative? Who did all that, eh? Who?

But that’s enough of inventing. There is no Chancelade, there never was any Chancelade. All there ever was was me, writing these words and knowing they hid nothing. As the black scribble advances over the white page like manifold footprints, the only truth that motivated it escapes and is lost. And in the seething mass of untruth there appears the other truth, the one that covers everything, digests everything, celebrates everything, a sort of darkness.

The world is coming to an end, it is on its deathbed. Suddenly on the surface of the earth the great dome of light has exploded like a volcano. A colourless vortex has risen upwards, spreading a black cloud that gives off flashes of fire. The giant flame stood there a moment, as if it would never disappear. Then the rampart of the air fell away, rending all in its path. Time seemed to draw suddenly back, engulfing countless ages. A scorching wind passed over the earth, throwing shadows on the creeping desert. The circle grew larger and larger. And that was the last crime of my life, the greatest and most terrible of all. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t do anything. I was just there in the dazzling circle that spread out over the earth, the circle of my intelligence and my hatred. It was the last of my wars, the one I didn’t wage alone, the one that everyone waged with me. That day, some where, in some book or other, an anonymous voice relates the history of that war. And it is my voice, mine:

Ionic radiations are released during the explosion in various ways, including neutrons, gamma and beta rays. A small part of the explosion causes the rapid radiation of neutrons, which have a high penetrating power but lose their energy at once on passing through matter. More important is the gamma radiation, which also has high powers of penetration. Beta rays do not travel more than a few yards. When a nuclear explosion takes place in the air the products of the fission or fusion are dispersed and contamination takes place by fall-out. Surface or submarine explosions are more dangerous because of direct exposure and inhaling.

Symptoms: The principal effect of radiation is a cellular attack leading to necrosis of the tissues. Erythron and lymphoid tissues and the nuclei of growing cells are the most vulnerable. Haemorrhage may be produced as a result of vascular disturbance, thrombocytopenia, and perhaps the presence of an anticoagulant in the blood. Temporary or permanent sterility is frequent. Little is known about the carcinogenic or genetic effects of ionic radiation. Contamination by radioactive dust can cause cancer, and isotopes lodged in the bones remain active for a long period. An increased incidence of hereditary defects is to be feared in future generations.

In case of thermo-nuclear war, losses can be divided into four groups according to their seriousness. But the clinical picture must also take into account burns and wounds caused by the explosion:

Group 1. After exposure to intense radiation, nausea, vomiting, and shock appear in a few hours. There is increasing loss of weight, fever, diarrhoea, and death from toxaemia in two weeks.

Group 2. In the case of less severe exposure the symptoms take three weeks to appear. Loss of hair, aplastic anaemia, pneumonia, gastro-enteritis, and death at the end of six weeks.

Group 3. In those who survive the 6th week the anaemia becomes chronic and many die of pneumonia, enteritis, and other forms of secondary infection.

Group 4. In benign cases leucopenia, diarrhoea and loss of hair may be the only irregularities.

The dazzling halo has filled the whole sky, which now rises pear-shaped. A face appears in the patch of incandescent light, a mild sad face with indistinguishable features. The snow-white face has taken the place of the sun, and smiles down mysteriously on the world. Everything goes towards it, automatically attracted and absorbed by that powerless plenitude. The last gleam of light has set forth its round mirror. On it, in it, vision can at last submerge itself, and with it liberty. The world is coming to an end in this ball of fire. Beyond, there is nothing. After this futile moment in which one rather unimportant person is undone, it is the end of the universe made visible; the fated end of ages and ages of civilization, of hope, literature, love and faith.

The great sphere shines dully at the other end of infinity. This too had to happen. It was written. It was written in the very heart of the long adventure of men, this threat of dissociation and chaos. Already we are thousands of miles away. We have fled this place, this time, and we look out of the darkness of space at what is going on down there, far away, at the other end of the dark room. All wars have become one. For a second they all burn and pound together, then like a flare of straw die down, and night may begin again.

In the room full of dense shadow the projector has suddenly been switched on, and absolute light flows towards you in a spiral. Here is the last crime, the last anger of time with its trembling hour- and minute-hands. The moth, caught in the merciless beam, has begun its dance of death. It flies blindly towards the centre of the world that calls it. It goes towards the blazing hole, to force the door that separates it from eternity. The fire utters its continuous strident cry, which nobody can resist. It orders you to hurry, to rush to the gaping mouth, to melt into its laugh, to be crushed and burned so that nothing is left but that devouring furnace. Like the moth, like Chancelade, like him, you and I; all men return to the fire that conceived them. In the white light is the secret. In each nucleus of each atom is the secret that explodes and liberates. There are suns innumerable. There are nothing but volcanoes everywhere. It is towards them, towards all of them that the last consciousness turns its eyes. While in the distance but also near at hand there floats vaguely the powerless face whose soft sad smile means nothing; while seas evaporate, rocks flow in long gleaming rivers, and the universe explodes in a single but infinite conflagration; the spirit, free at last, no longer anything, plunges into matter, burns with it, performs strange arabesques with it, becomes a particle of light, an anonymous speck of real light. Total is the last word. Vanished, accepted. Dead, dead. Born into boundless life, into a life that is no longer inner nor outer, but at last, and for ever I hope, itself.

On the earth by chance

I was born

a living man

I grew up

inside the drawing

the days went by

and the nights

I played all those games

loved

happy

I spoke all those languages

gesticulating

saying incomprehensible words

or asking indiscreet questions

in a region that resembled hell

I peopled the earth

to conquer the silence

to tell the whole truth

I lived in the immensity of consciousness

I ran away

then I grew old

I died

and was buried

AND WAS BURIED

Under the inescapable sun the landscape is still the same. Nothing has changed, almost nothing. There have merely been a few landslides here and there, a few scratches, a few avalanches. What was flat expanse is still flat, the mountains still stand wearing out their hard summits against the steel of the sky. Below, the sea is still the same, curved, heavy, opaque, rolling its tiny waves one after the other. There are clouds, either smooth or ragged, from one end of the horizon to the other. All the trees stand motionless in the red earth, like silent lamp-posts with living leaves.

Everything is very quiet now; very rested. All seems purity and order; it’s as if there had never been anyone to destroy, or to hope. Words have re-entered into things and mingled with them. Nothing says anything. Nothing has a name, nothing has a cry. Or else each particle of matter has become its own cry, its own appeal launched with all the still strength of its mere presence. These cries are buried everywhere, and none is lost. They are nails, knives, rivets driven into space, and their meaning is plain, for no one needs to understand any more. Their words are short, concise, they don’t overflow any more, they can’t try to annex anything. What they say remains hidden, a secret inside a greater secret, an even cry with no more beginning or end, no more joy or pain, no more love or hate, but only the self, living and present: Tree! Beetle! Crystal! Bird! Bird! Flint! Metal! Water! Dust! Thus they speak, all together, with their dumb flesh and impenetrable scales.

Nothing is necessary any more. But neither is anything unnecessary. The world is fulfilled, the world is perfect. On the huge map on the invisible wall every object has been reproduced life-size. You can wander for ever in the maze of lines, dotted and continuous; you can enter between the round cross-sections of the trees or the concentric contours of the hills. You can write down bearings, altitudes, distances, depths. You are never lost. You are always somewhere. You can walk for days and days, with the feet of foxes or of wild cats. You can swoop along aerial corridors on the wings of gulls or of eagles. You can dig a hole in a dry mound or a damp, with the claws of moles. Or crawl over hot stones with the bodies of vipers. You can go among the grasses vibrating your cockchafer’s wings; feel misty space with your snail’s horns; even float in pale water in a halo of luminous threads, and be named jellyfish. There was always matter before, beneath and around you. There were always walls of gentleness and violence, ceilings of smells, floors of noise and heat, incidents of colour. The room is everywhere, yes, everywhere. Nothing has been left behind, nothing lost.

You are with all the men and all the women too. In the hollows in the earth, on the shores of the seas, across all the little trickling streams, there are all these beautiful cities. Timbuktu, Nineveh, Byzantium. Memphis, Lexington, Los Angeles. Addis Ababa. Zoppot, Tallin, Mukkula. You are there somewhere, now, through all times, through all ages. Inside the lamp-posts, for instance, or in the sharp angle of the pavement. You echo dully beneath the millions of footsteps, you tremble under all those wheels with their tyres marked with x’s and z’s. You stand at the deafening crossroads with your three lights going regularly on and off: red, orange, green, red, orange, green, red, orange, green, red, orange … You walk along all these streets with the same names, you live in all these boxes with square windows, lowered blinds, buzzing air-conditioners, and walls painted fawn and grey and blue. Caught in the china wash-basins, ensconced in the sprinklers of showers, shut in the ballcocks of cisterns. What else is there? Where, how, why? What is it? The cities are eternal, they will never end. They too speak their total language, and what they say is the truth. Their signals of stone and concrete are installed on the ground, they seek no more conquests. Floor! Gutter! Road! Pavement! Roof! Car! Aerial! Tar! Traffic-light! Car-park! Garden! Factory! The cries of cigarette-ends on the pavement, the cries of rusty ashbins, of lumps of paint, of glowing windows. Hard cries, armed cries, cries put together like blocks of cement. They don’t rise up to the sky, they don’t creep along the sloping ground; they remain intact, the terrible cries of ageless matter.

And every human body also carries you along with it, for a moment or for life. You are there in the right lens of this girl’s dark glasses, full of moving reflections. You are in that blue-and-red-striped silk tie, and the stiff collar of that nylon shirt. You are in the fastener of the black brassière, the hairpin, the 777th square of the tartan dress. The bodies carry you within them like an invisible child. You are in that mole under the blonde woman’s left breast, in the iris of the old man’s eye, in the chapped thumb of the woman on her way home from the shops. Sometimes you are in the wart on the little boy’s knee, in a hunchback’s hump, in a goitre, or in the black lump of the woman who’s going to die of cancer.

Human society seethes and swarms, perhaps for ever; the cities are also rooms, with thousands of walls, ceilings, and linoleum-covered floors. There is nothing else but this lump of matter, without thought, without acts, without words. It is hell and heaven joined together in the same place, and you can’t inhabit one without inhabiting the other. Passions frozen, passions set out on placards and posters, for nobody to see and judge. So you must suffer, then, and love, love until death, and even after. You must have your name written up with all the other names and offer it in the enormous perpetual market. True, all these names are also the names of all the men and all the women. Their infinite identity is written there, along with many other things. They are called Bar, Beach Restaurant, Drugstore, Tobacconist, Rialto Cinema, Ricord’s Wineshop, Rhônelec, Pax Cinema, Butcher’s, Philips, Interflora, Barclays Bank, Forum Cinema, H. Thomas, Dental Surgeon, Casino, B.P., Mercedes, Toyota, Evinrude. Telephone. Station. Airport. George’s Hair Salon. Waterman. Pepsi-Cola. Whisky. Cinzano. Kodak. Motorway. Krung Thong. Chesterfield. Perugina. Caution, icy surface! Danger, lorry exit. Silence, hospital. All the voices speak at once, with their neon letters, their hooters and sirens, their blood-red paint. But what they say is beyond comprehension, and beyond despair; it is simply evident. Pure evidence. Compact matter, deaf, dumb, from which nothing can be taken away and which therefore nothing can destroy. Death has disappeared from this realm. Or rather, it is still there, but neither more terrible nor more absolute than the movement of the ants over the earth, or the crater of the ant-lion.

It has taken a long time to enter into the game. It has taken all those tiny chances during century after century. But now the thing is done. You can’t forget the world any more. You’ll just go forward gently, or perhaps faster than the speed of light, across the issueless design.

Quiet, now. Peace, now. War that will last a long time, murders infinite. There are all names, all shapes. The world is true from one horizon to the other. In the depths of the black sky the void is full, the stars are near. The sun burns, then goes out. Balls of fire pursue their unknown courses, explosions explode, births are born, deaths die. Everything that happens happens in that very instant, without a millionth of a second’s delay. There is nothing figurative anywhere, because everything is self-sufficient. There is no imagination. Nothing is isolated, and nothing communicates.

In the neat little garden with unreal bounds the crouching plants live unstirring. The dwarf cactuses have their spines ready, but it’s for a war that nobody will win. In the mirror-lake surrounded with green sand, the tin bird still stands on one leg, and its truth will not emerge from its image.

Perhaps it’s there that one ought to look for it. Perhaps one ought to slip inside the little tin man with the Chinese hat, so as one day to be able to write, if that’s what one ought to write, on the streamer of paper that he holds out in front of him:

EPILOGUE

There. That’s more or less what I wanted to say. In a few minutes now you’ll shut the book and go away. First you’ll go hastily through the last lines. That’s where novels end, the moment when the murderer’s face is suddenly revealed in detective stories. When it’s finished you’ll close the cover over the wad of pages and put the book down on the table; or else somewhere on the bookshelves among others of the same kind. It you’re on a train or a boat or a plane you’ll put it in your travelling bag along with the papers and magazines. If you’re on the beach you’ll put it under the heap you’ve made of your clothes, and not look at it any more. You’ll do this quite naturally, without thinking, as if it were a box that had had new shoes in. And the book will go on existing without you, as long as the paper and cardboard last. Nor will the printed letters wear out; they’ll stay there marked on each white page, childish little twirls, little numbers, little capitals; and they’ll go on living their imaginary life, clinging to the world, like colonies of silkworms or beds of mussels.

There’ll be this world shut up, hidden, inside the black and white parallelepiped, this sort of tyrannical paradise of language which will really have been the truth at least once in the universe. Perhaps this separate world is odious, or terrible. The programme of a few hours in a life, of a few spasms of a civilization. Everywhere, all over the world, other books have been opened, then shut. The agitation of the life contained in them will not have overflowed its frontiers. Thought and deed remain. What fades is the communicating link that existed for a moment with the reader. And it is you who by turning the last fatal page have unwittingly killed the adventure. Homer is dead, Dante and Dostoievsky and Pirandello are dead, and it’s you who wiped them out each time; who thrust them a little deeper each time into the inexorable mud, trampled and crushed with every speck of dust under your leaden soles. Every time you’ve said law, happiness, space, year, love, it was so many knife-thrusts into the flesh of man. Every time you’ve moved, every time you’ve swallowed an aspirin with a glass of cold water, every time you’ve bought a piece of meat at the butcher’s, you’ve taken something away from that abolished world. All the novels and poems and films and pictures that you created without thinking, simply by being alive, only served to efface those other works that were their real flesh and blood.

But books are not eternal. A mere trifle, a few flames, a bit of quicklime, an open dustbin, or just being forgotten, and a book is dead. The ragmen go through the streets every evening, their singsong cry always asking for paper and yet more paper. Here the book props up the leg of a wardrobe, there it stops up a broken window. It hangs from a nail in the bogs of bug-ridden hotels, and everyone tears off a handful of pages full of strange life. Take your revenge while there’s still time. Learn to hate the words of others, culture, and the faceted mirror of intelligence; otherwise there is no peace. My eyes are at war with yours, my bones and organs have no worse enemies than those other bodies that resemble them. Exercise your muscles and learn to tear books apart with your bare hands, first two, then three or four or five at a time. Don’t stop until the ground’s strewn with confetti with a mutilated letter on each piece. Then scatter the little bits of coloured paper in the wind, and see how the novel flutters back to the matter it betrayed!

You’re in a fast train, and each echoing jolt of the steel wheels jerks out a new thought. In the hot stifling air, or in the buzz of the aircraft cabin, thought flies, and the earth moves slowly, crushed by the thousands of yards of distance; they are words, sentences, ideas. In the dusty street a dog sleeps in the sun with its mouth open, amid a forest of human legs. That is a poem. The rain drips down on the roofs, windscreen-wipers moan back and forth. A curved poem, based on the earth, a poem with a living womb. Starving children look up with bloodshot eyes like stupid jewels in their great dwarfs’ heads. A poem transparent and immediate, deep as the wind, airy as light, huge as the great dirty lake. Or a toothless old woman leans against the wall and stares uncomprehendingly. A soldier kneels in the mud, and the blood runs slowly from his mouth. It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed. Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires.

On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly. What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside. What is one day’s reading in a lifetime? What is one line of writing among all the endless scribbling that fills the world? There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization. There are millions of things everywhere. Isn’t the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder?

I didn’t really write what you’ve just read. How can one bear witness? I am only an actor who doesn’t know the play he’s acting in. What I’ve done I’ve done by chance, like a gnat in a strong wind. I’ve said first one thing, then another. I’ve written pins, tobacco, passions, suffer, nylon, seed. You’ve read zip-fastener, top, beauty, woman, cigarette, cloud. And accurate chance is now in motion, each speck descending into the machine along its own individual path. But I’ve said enough. Now it’s your turn.

Content

J.M.G. Le Clézio
Terra Amata

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

ON THE EARTH BY CHANCE

I WAS BORN

A LIVING MAN

I GREW UP

INSIDE THE DRAWING

THE DAYS WENT BY

AND THE NIGHTS

I PLAYED ALL THOSE GAMES

LOVED

HAPPY

ALL THESE LANGUAGES I SPOKE

GESTICULATING

SAYING INCOMPREHENSIBLE WORDS

OR ASKING INDISCREET QUESTIONS

IN A REGION THAT RESEMBLED HELL

I PEOPLED THE EARTH

TO CONQUER THE SILENCE

TO TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH

I LIVED IN THE IMMENSITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I RAN AWAY

THEN I GREW OLD

I DIED

AND WAS BURIED

EPILOGUE