She stopped talking long enough to light a cigarette in front of the mirror.
‘Anyhow, you see the kind of thing. But at the paper they were all delighted. That was the last straw. They illustrated these things with absolutely beautiful, rather pretentious photos that Henri took. It was the same with Henri. He was delighted, too. He thought we were going to get married, he wanted us to have a child, a son. He wanted all sorts of things. But I couldn’t keep up with him, though I pretended to go along. The point is, everyone seemed to be positively radiating intelligence, whereas I’d have preferred the whole world to be silent. Their minds were so full of important ideas that they didn’t want to bother themselves with day-to-day problems. That’s why I came to live here, to have time to look at what was really happening. They tried to make me understand. They arrived one after the other, my parents, Henri, Jérôme, Pedro, and all the others, plumped themselves down in my room, and said their bit. Then eventually they lost interest, and even stopped ringing up. They found someone to replace me. Funny, huh? I would never have believed that one could disappear so easily.’
While this was going on, the rest of the city was busy digging its crater round the girl’s head. The streets spun around the mirror-wardrobe, thrusting their perspectives very far into the depths of the glass and the silvering.
Somewhere in her head there was a fixed point. A white spot on a convolution of the cerebrum, perhaps, or else the memory of a pain. The day when she had been walking barefoot along the beach and had trod on the rusty nail protruding from an old plank.
The day, the terrible day, when she had realized that she would never be really alone.
So then she began mapping out the city, to stop the whirling motion. But it was not easy. She started off from the centre of her head, and tried to count: first whirlpool, second whirlpool, third whirlpool. Current. Reef. A cape. String of islets. Sand-bar. Thudding of rollers. Fourth, fifth whirlpool. Vast esplanade, oil-slick, smooth sea. Calm, calm. Off-shore breeze. Flight of seagulls. Shallows. Short beach, dotted with stranded jelly-fish. Air corridor. Break in the clouds.
The map disintegrated continually. Everything was still hazy, in constant flux.
She started again: first peak. Second peak. Cliffs. Ravines. Glacial valley, long and curving, blocked by névé. Puy. Third peak. Fourth peak. Sea of ice. Sea of dazzling snow. Black peaks thrusting above the snow. Shadows creeping along the fissures. Wind of silence.
Or again: first nebula. Second nebula. Third nebula. Pocket of emptiness. Constellation. Galaxy gliding through the black desert. Nova. Dead silence. Pain of sharp stars in the centre of the immense anaesthesia. Falling. Fourth nebula.
And this is how things really happened: in a room with yellow walls, at night, around 0 o’clock, a girl was seated in a chair in front of a mirror-wardrobe. She spoke aloud, puffing at a cigarette, and thinking of some fellow named Henri, or Stephen. Then she took up a little book covered with blue plastic material, on which was printed in gilt letters:
‘EZEJOT’ DIARY
and with a ballpoint pen started writing rapidly:
Saturday 9 January
Been here a year already. How time flies! Yet I still don’t know a soul. I divide my time up between lectures, the library, cafés and my own room. It’s cold. Raining. Men are a bunch of creeps. One-track minds. Girls, too. Me too! What a load of rubbish. All this business about sex. Why on earth should some people have one sex and others have a different one? It’s completely ridiculous. I’ve been going to the cinema. The last thing I saw was Skolimowski’s Walkover. In the street, I intercepted Monsieur X’s blue gaze. He is ugly but personally I find him beautiful.
Then she put the blue notebook away in a drawer, and smoked another American cigarette. She went across to the window and watched the street through the slits of the closed shutters. She brushed her teeth, standing over the washbasin, rinsed her mouth and spat.
That night she dreamed that a great train with wheels as sharp as those in ham-slicing machines was journeying to and fro across her body, transforming it into a series of neat round slices.
The war is not on the point of ending, far from it! It still erupts savagely: eruptions of light more murderous than bullets, eruptions of eyes from their sockets, eruptions of metal. All things are rampant, bent on annihilation. Death to everything that is self-contained, everything that is inherently singular! No more thought! No more action! From now on, surrender . . . The war bursts from mouths of flame. The screens are rolled back and the gun barrels unmasked. A black car drives down the sloping street: suddenly a machine-gun protrudes above its roof and starts mowing down the passers-by. The word kill is hidden everywhere, echoing in every other word. But it is not a question of killing. When the blood finally gushes from the wounds, what peace! When the bus leaves the roadway’s invisible grooves and crushes two or three children or a couple of women against a wall, something becomes freed. A sort of joy or truth manifests itself.
When violence becomes crime, it invents freedom.
But everything that is contained! Everything that is squeezed tight into the volcano’s subterranean gallery, and that nothing can save! The spasms that rack the bowels of machines, all the jolts and quiverings: savagery! blind hatred! ignorance! dumbness!
What exists in the depths of the colour black, in the heart of the flame. The will to obliterate the world’s outlines, to cancel utterly. Unending miscarriage, dilation of muscles, grimace, yet nothing comes!
The world watches with its millions of eyes, and its stare is more fascinating than the pupils of tigers. It thrusts its syringe deep into the soul, and sucks. The stare wills one to drain oneself of one’s substance, to contribute to the fearful haemorrhage. The universe is a vast empty space that needs endlessly to be filled to the brim. Such things should never have been allowed to come to pass. The dragon with gaping jaws has peopled the sky and the earth. He has endless need of fresh flesh to gorge upon, and he is never satiated. Soldiers, deliver us from the world! He is too substantial. We shall not be capable of resisting, we shall glide gently towards his great mouth in which the digestive glands are already visible.
In the city, the eager whirlwind is born and has fashioned its funnel. How to resist so much intelligence, so much beauty? Must one make oneself ugly, like some black object curled up into a ball in the dust? I want to be transformed, this very day, into a dog’s stale turd coiled like a snake on the pavement. Perhaps I will not be noticed. Perhaps I will not be noticed by him?
Monsieur X, you who are a soldier, come to my aid. Fight him. Slay him. Crush him under the wheels of your motorbike. But first gouge out his eyes, all his eyes. He has so many. In the evening, when the sun sets, these little glass globes streaked with threads of colours can be seen shining behind the windows of cafés. In the morning, when the sun rises, they are all bloodshot.
Smash all electric light bulbs, demolish all illuminated signs. They, too, are eyes, that do more than stare: that devour. On the façades of buildings and all along the streets they glitter together in the night as they trace their symbols. I have no time left to think. I dash myself against them like a foolish moth.
An end to being! Existence is a never-ending rout, a stampede towards all these luminous dots. The messages draw nearer together, encircle us. All men and all women are victims. They are already in the dragon’s mouth, and they do not even realize it. They are fornicating between the dragon’s very jaws!
No way of remaining alone. I have lived in hiding for so long now. I was buried under old rags, I was a black dot among countless black dots. But the war is a lighthouse that, in a single flash, can send its beam out into the night to worm out nooks and crannies. A column of light tunnelling the darkness to force the terrified beasts from their lairs.
Fear: the eyes dilate, the heart beats furiously in its narrow cage. Everything grows hard. Impossible to escape. The doors are closed, all the doors that control the entry of things. Before that, one could ente
r into a tree or a telegraph pole. One fitted oneself inside, standing very straight, and became as cold as cement. Or else on the great stony beach, a few inches away from the sea. The sun blazed down. The waves burst over the pebbles, one after the other, with a raking sound. The sky was blue. Then one could close one’s eyes and, by lying on one’s back, enter into the beach. One became as flat, as stretched out as the beach, with millions of round pebbles piled deep.
One was like this and then also like this
Who opened the flood-gates? Who demolished the dyke that held back the sea? And who switched on these sun-guns everywhere? Now there is no more sea, no more beach. There is mind everywhere. Nothing but mind.
The earth is a patch of tar, the water is made of cellophane, the air is nylon. The sun in the centre of the fibre-board ceiling burns with its great 1,600-watt bulb. Somewhere, there must be a vast factory, its fiery machines throbbing as they churn out ceaselessly all the products of falsehood: false skies painted blue, fake mountains of duralumin, tinsel stars. Trees of indiarubber sway in the breeze from ventilators. Their green leaves never die. In fruit-baskets, the violet grapes, the bananas, oranges and apples never rot away. The machines have shaped them and stamped them out. Artificial geraniums sprout, without hope of growth, in flower-pots. Nylon fur-coats sparkle in the light. Space no longer exists, and everything is flat. Burglar-proof windows have barred the way to the infinite, sheets of tin and layers of cement have obtruded themselves everywhere. Rain falls occasionally, but it is no longer rain. The drops are pellets of translucent plastic that roll harmlessly off the roofs. The cracks in the surface of the macadamized ground will remain unchanged for all eternity. The world is polished and new, smelling of chlorophyll and benzene. Crystalline powder, phosphorescent snow, rigid structures whose components are immutable. Everything is simply horny matter and mother-of-pearl. Rivers of steel glitter everywhere, and the sky revolves very slowly, pivoting on its immense hinges.
In a setting filled with circles and cross-strokes and occasional triangles, men and women glide past each other. They come from the end of the world, from where the rumbling machine moulds bodies and faces, and they calmly cross the impenetrable street. The air’s fringes play upon their shining bald pates. Their piercing eyes glitter behind the lenses of spectacles. Their metallic lounge-suits are buttoned down the front. Their varnished shoes creak. Their hands are closed over hard bone-like objects: umbrellas, bags, satchels, white cigarettes. Over the ground pass bakelite Negresses, nylon Chinese, pink celluloid Whites and leatherette Red Indians. Their thoughts emerge from their mouths like the thin squeaks of bats, or else form clouds of steam in the sky, like polystyrene foam.
Monsieur X, come, together we will track down the spot where the great factory turns out all these things.
But now there is no longer a girl. The one called Bea B. has disappeared. She has vanished. All that remains, where she was sitting in front of the mirror-wardrobe, or walking quickly down the multicoloured streets, is a sort of mechanism with protruding cog-wheels.
The moulded body, with its two linked symmetrical segments, is topped by a doll’s face. Plastic sphere with vague protuberances, on which the eternal features are painted. The short nose with its two apertures, the twin arches of the brown eyebrows, the eyes of green bottle-glass, the eyelashes of black-tinted nylon, the eyelids that blink, the unwrinkled brow, the strands of chestnut hair stitched together on the skull’s cap, the ears made of gristle, and the lips lacquered blood-red, lips that smile gently without saying anything.
Perhaps the war has already overwhelmed her, petrified her, just like that, with strokes of light, noise and movement. Perhaps nothing more is needed to conquer her. Perhaps, indeed, she exists as an automaton, a carnivorous doll that will never grow old, never die. Perhaps all her gestures and all her desires are wheels that rotate and light bulbs that flash on, deep within the shell of her body. And her thoughts, her words: the marks of stiletto heels in the asphalt, cigarette stubs, reflections on the surfaces of cars, magazine pages showing nothing but photographs of unknown people.
But it was not a novel, it was a letter, and it is also what I would think if I were not a little girl, that is to say if I had the courage to be ugly all the time. There are so many powders for the face, so many shades of lipstick, so many false eyelashes, so many coloured lining pencils, so many dyes for the hair, that being a coward no longer means anything.
Claude Grenier.
‘YOU KNOW WHAT we’re going to do?’ said Bea B. to Monsieur X.
‘We’re going to go over to the attack.’
She got up and started walking around the room in her bare feet. She lit a cigarette with a match.
‘We’re going to become soldiers and demolish everything, that’s what we’re going to do.’
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at herself in the mirror.
‘Do you agree?’
She decided her eyes were still too gentle, and put on her dark glasses.
‘We’re still talking too much.’
She got up, put on her shoes, opened the door and went out.
‘FORWARDS!’
First, though, a uniform. All genuine soldiers wear uniforms. It would be possible to dress as a café waitress (Monsieur X as a bartender). Or else as a nurse (Monsieur X as a doctor). Or else as a Sister of Charity (Monsieur X as a clergyman). Or else as a prostitute (Monsieur X as a pimp). Or else as a widow (Monsieur X as an undertaker). Or else as a student of molecular physics (Monsieur X as a professor of political economy). The great thing was to disappear, to be very far away, in unsuspected spots.
Bea B. bought a housemaid’s costume. Monsieur X, a plumber’s outfit. In his right hand he carried a little iron tool-box, like those that plumbers usually carry.
First, they went into this café at the end of a street full of people and vehicles. The café was called the Rond-Point, or the Pergola, or Sanborn’s, or something similar.
They went and sat down at a table, and drank bottled beer while they chatted. Bea B. told Monsieur X that they must never again talk about important things. They must say very simple things, without attempting explanations. For instance:
‘I’m going to tell you how I took the plane. Well then, I was in the seat next to this character wearing spectacles. He was reading a newspaper. On the other side of him there was this little porthole and these little nylon curtains that were blue with a pattern of little yellow flowers. And so I sat in my seat, waiting. From time to time I leaned across the character with his nose in his newspaper and I saw clouds that looked like kapok. And then, do you know what, an air hostess suddenly came up and handed me a plastic tray. So I put it on the little table that unfolded in front of me. It was really very odd: on the tray there was this kind of plate shaped like a figure eight, containing a wedge of meat, some string beans and some mashed potatoes. And there was a little plastic bowl, too, containing some fish and some salad. And then there was another little plastic bowl containing slices of pineapple. And do you know what, right in the centre of these round slices there was a candied cherry!’
‘No!’
‘Honestly! And that’s not all. There was also a glass of mineral water, and a little cellophane bag that held a fork, a blunt knife and a small spoon, and three tiny packets, one of pepper, one of salt and one of sugar.’
‘And then?’
‘And then there was an empty cup, and a paper napkin.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘So I started by eating the fish and salad in the bowl. It wasn’t too bad.’
‘And then, after that?’
‘After that, I ate what was on the figure-eight-shaped plate. The meat and string beans. But not the mashed potato.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I think it was a bit dried up.’
‘Did you take a drink?’
‘At the end. After I’d eaten the pineapple slices and the cherry. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you tha
t there was also a bread-roll, and a little pat of butter wrapped in gold-coloured foil that had the brand-name Viralux or Luxor or something like that on it.’
‘You ate it?’
‘No, because the bread was stale. After that, I drank the mineral water, and wiped my mouth with the paper napkin, and rolled the napkin into a ball. And then, after that, I lit a cigarette and scattered the ash around a bit, over the mashed potato in the plate, and into the pineapple juice in the bowl, and the character sitting next to me watched with a rather disgusted air. When I had finished smoking the cigarette I stubbed it out in the fish bowl, among the leftover bits of lettuce, and that produced a weird crackling sound.’
They began sipping their beer in silence. Then Bea B. asked:
‘And you? What have you been up to?’
A little later, Monsieur X started up his motorbike and they drove off to watch the cars and lorries going by on the motorway. They stopped near a bridge, and watched the string of vehicles moving along the road. The weather was chilly, because it was winter time. Drizzle fell sporadically from a grey sky.
The vehicles whizzed along the highway, engines screeching harshly. Bea B. saw them arrive from very far away, balanced squatly on their four tyres. The sky’s reflections glistened on their rounded bonnets, on their metal bodies. The windscreens were like fragments of mirror. As the cars came up to the bridge they could see the wet asphalt racing away between the front wheels. Along the embankments, the telegraph poles jumped backwards, one after the other. The cars arrived, then in a split second they had passed, sundering the bridge’s shadow and vanishing uphill.
War Page 3