But the girl looks, and this is what she sees: the curtains draw back, the buildings’ immaculate façades split open, the phosphorescent windows suddenly peel off their filmy golden skins, the dark glasses become transparent, and slowly there appear great grey slabs that stand silent and rigid, charnel-houses, knackers’ yards, rotting slums, swamps, cemeteries. They are all well hidden. They all existed on the other side of life. They were rather like a dream that can be erased on waking, simply by rubbing the eyes. People everywhere were frantically burying their excrements, but the sewage rose again immediately, bubbling up to the face of the earth; and then they could no longer ignore the war.
The girl has gone right up to the grille. She has put her hands against the knitted wires. On the other side of the grille lies a concentration camp; that is what she is staring at with all her might. The huts, put together from planks and sheets of corrugated iron, are lined up, row upon row, along the sunken terrain. The dust rising from the alleyways covers the camp with its cloud. There is not a soul to be seen here, either. There are only distant ghostlike shapes walking down the alleyways, entering or leaving the huts. Ragged urchins are playing among the rubbish-heaps, yelping with their shrill voices. Grossly fat women with childish faces wander through the camp and disappear inside the huts. Time is hourless, here. It is very early in the day, or close to nightfall. The odour of sweat and urine rises from the camp, and the girl breathes it in. She is devoid of feeling. She does not want to know the taste of feeling, does not want to have it in her mouth like an acid-drop. She simply wants to see the war, the one that kills slowly and has no heroes. Occasionally an aeroplane takes off ponderously and flies over the concentration camp. But it drops no bombs, fires no rockets. It just flies very low in the sky, its silver fuselage gleaming, its two broad outstretched wings making shadows on the ground. To the right and to the left, cars are pounding along the motorway, making a noise like the ocean. So the girl goes away. She travels on in search of similar beaches waiting to be discovered behind the white cubes of the brand-new buildings, behind the hills, under the cement bridge, in the depths of ancient dried-up valleys.
These great hells are quadrangular and have a door at each cardinal point; the base is made from slabs of red-hot iron; and the walls close upon these slabs of red-hot iron; and these hells are as broad as they are lofty, they are square, and each face measures a thousand yot, a yot being a thousand wa; the thickness of each of the sides and of the base and of the upper surface is nine yot, and in these hells there is not a single empty place. All the beings in these hells must perforce be packed against each other in great masses, and the fire of these hells never abates for a single instant, but burns everlastingly throughout time’s course until the end of ages . . .
Trai P’hum (attributed to P’hia Lit’hai, King of Siam).
THE GIRL WHO was called Bea B. has vanished. She simply disappeared from view, one fine day, without anybody noticing. She melted into the crowd, and nobody knows what has become of her. She has gone off with her red bag containing a small blue notebook filled with writing, a lipstick, a mirror, a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. She has gone off with her tales and troubles, her adventures with Monsieur X, Danièle, the Invincible Armada, the mighty BMW 500 cc motorbike, the black American sedan, the preserved food in its metal container, Anna Belle, the electric light bulb and the transistor radio.
She has got lost in the middle of the city. It is very easy to get lost there, and the chances are that she will never turn up again. At a pinch one might put a classified advertisement in the newspaper, for example:
Lost, young girl 20–25 years, av. height,
av. build, brown hair, green eyes,
wearing white raincoat, black shoes.
Red airline bag marked TWA, blue notebook
marked ‘EZEJOT’ DIARY. Special
peculiarity: bites nails. Urgent.
One might also hire a private detective, or launch appeals on the radio. But she would never be found, because she has gone into hiding. She has learned to distrust people who look at her; she has many disguises to throw her pursuers off the scent. She disguises herself as a nurse, or a shorthand-typist, or a fashion journalist, or a bit player in films, or a nude model for stag magazines, or a social worker. She has a whole string of names that will vanish with her: Bea B., Lea D. Lions, Nadia, Florence, Claude G., Tranquilina, Carol, S. D. B., Alexandra Tchkonia, Evelyne . . .
This is how it all happened. It was evening, in the centre of the city, at the moment when the valves seem to open, and the crowd’s torrents gush out. Bea B. walked between the high walls. She had been walking continuously for several days. She had explored cafés, car parks, empty sites, factories, churches, stores, airports. She wound her way through the throng of people on the pavement. She forged ahead through thousands of shadows and reflections. The sky was black, the lights from the lamp-posts and advertising hoardings leapt in all directions. Bea B. used the pedestrian crossings when she wanted to cross the street, and carefully skirted round all obstacles. From time to time she felt a great urge to stop, but on each occasion she immediately encountered the piercing gaze of two eyes fixed upon her, and so she went on a little longer. The buildings opened and closed their glass doors unendingly, and the girl could see yet other unknown beaches, chalky voids, swift combats. She no longer even had the time to distinguish the faces of the combatants. Just sudden flashes, the glassy gleam of a dagger, the rapid phttphtt of a pistol fitted with a silencer. Occasionally a shout or a brief cry, ‘arrgh!’, ‘rrhaa!’, things like that. Flashing images began to appear, now, all over the place, needles of pain that stabbed through the murky partitions in less than a second, and then faded away. Occasionally, the truncated bellow of a hooter from deep within the mass of snarling cars.
Eyelids raised and lowered a single time: the diamantine star of the eyes’ gaze had come and gone like a spark. It was strange, and at the same time perfectly plain. There was, after all, no continuity behind this spectacle in which one had pretended to believe; in the end, there was nothing but these tremors, these false starts, these explosions; gestures swarming everywhere, agitating all the machines; hidden engines shuddering of their own accord. And the girl moved onwards through these impulsive forces.
Then she started drifting with the crowd, letting herself be swept along by it. At one point there was a sort of open mouth in the pavement, and Bea B. saw people being swallowed up by the gaping cavity. She went quickly down the black steps that sparkled with gold particles, and began to walk through the subterranean vaults.
It was a frightening place. Four hundred feet underground, the intestines spread their tubes in all directions: Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western. The human floodtide gushed along these tubes in waves of heads, shoulders, arms, legs. The vague shapes, jammed tightly together, hurried along as fast as they could, then vanished. Other pallid shapes clambered back towards the surface, in a headlong rush for the black staircase that led outside. Already, one was no longer oneself. Already, one had difficulty in distinguishing the features of any girl at all in the dense crowd. One could still see the bright splash of her hair when she passed under an overhead lamp. She queued in front of a plexiglass window that had an opening at the bottom, and bought a little piece of cardboard covered with signs. Then she crossed the foggy grotto and went up to a machine. Standing in front of it, she pressed some of the buttons and watched the itineraries light up on a map. The electric wires were ready and waiting; they outlined the war plans, and showed the movements of the brutish troops in each other’s direction. The Western front carried out its encircling operation, while the tanks and armoured cars stormed straight through to the final objective. The girl was probably breathing hard, inhaling the combined odour of the thousands of breaths that were floating along the tube-like tunnels. Maybe she lit a cigarette, at that point, and started smoking as she made her rapid advance through the intestines. Maybe she heard her own heart beating, if i
t really was her own: there were so many hearts, all beating, there, under the ground.
She was afraid once more. She betrayed her fear by getting her dark glasses out of her bag and propping them up in front of her eyes. When girls put dark glasses on, underground, like that, it means they are afraid.
She walked quickly along the intestinal tubes. The feet of men and women struck the ground all around her, sending out echoes. The tunnel descended in a spiral, plunging ever deeper beneath the earth. The black ground sparkled with mica particles; electric lamps screwed into the ceiling at ten-yard intervals manufactured their own haloes of pale light. The girl plunged downwards with the crowd. She gave furtive glances at the faces of those walking alongside, but they immediately slipped away, were carried far away. On the tube’s walls, rows of large pictures placed edge to edge showed women smiling, women in brassières holding a rose in the right hand, children with their mouths full of cheese, babies, cats, packets of cigarettes, more women still smiling, men with their mouths full of macaroni, women with their mouths full of liqueur chocolate.
Bea B. glided along very fast, by the side of the concave wall, stroking the posters with her hand. Sometimes weird-shaped strips had been torn off the paper pictures, or else words – brutal insulting words – were written in black crayon across the smiling faces; or obscene drawings were scrawled over the bodies of the girls wearing brassières, rapid angular strokes designed to express hatred and derision; or there were traces of blows, holes bored into the pubis and bosom, cigarette ends stubbed out on the navel, chewing gum stuck to the tips of the breasts. The girl saw all this, through her dark glasses, as she walked along, and she was afraid.
The gallery continued to plunge towards the centre of the earth. Already, the sound of panting from all sides showed that it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. The air swept through the cramped corridor in hot violent blasts that were heavy with fetid odours. It came from the subterranean swampland, an exhalation from the mouth of a great iguana, perhaps, and it was impossible to make headway without lowering the head and leaning forwards. From time to time, stairways opened up underfoot, flights of steps lined with metal that rang under the steady tramp of feet. Fresh galleries followed, funnelling the crowd into separate routes in its plunge towards the centre of the earth. The descent seemed eternal. The surface, the air, the sun fell farther and farther behind, until one forgot they existed. All the forking galleries were leading their jostling throngs towards the same spot, though no-one realized this yet. Sometimes the network of tubes made a pretence of going upwards; a few steps had to be climbed, and the legs had to be hauled up, one after the other. But this was a trick: just ahead there was always another stairway leading downwards again, and then the ceiling suddenly started tilting, and the walls started to sweat moisture. There were also great halls, something like nebulous crossroads, filled with echoing sounds that could be heard coming from a long way off. The monotonous music of an accordion or a flute wailed nasally along the corridors, growing increasingly loud and shrill. At the crossroads one stepped over the outstretched legs of beggars, one made one’s way around the robot-like blind musicians interminably churning out the same three notes on their accordions, the cretins, the paralytics, the disabled ex-servicemen chewing at their mouth-organs, the drunkards bawling songs, the ragged women with swollen bellies, whining out their woes. No-one even saw them. The crowd continued to trudge steadily along the sloping pipe-line, gradually losing their sense of direction. The air grew heavier and heavier as it fought its way back, up along the network of tubes, in its efforts to reach the surface. There were sulphurous vapours, a kind of iron dross blackened the ground and walls, and the electric lights could scarcely pierce the gloom. One was exploring the galleries of a volcano, one was dropping to the bottom of its shaft, very slowly, sluggishly, with all one’s arms and legs. Perhaps one would never see daylight again; perhaps that was what was written on the little yellow cardboard ticket with a round hole in it. Or else one might shelter there, in the bowels of the earth, for months on end, listening to the faint murmur, the very distant rumbling, of the war that was raging on the surface. Bombs would open craters in the streets, the glass-walled buildings would come crashing down, the overheated engines would explode. And one would wait there, in the underground domain, sleeping on the ground that sparkled with its myriads of mica particles, and one would go on hoping for months on end, years on end, whole centuries.
The girl was swallowed up by the crowd, as she hurried quickly down the slope. From time to time there were metal barriers, and then the human mass split into three segments that pushed tirelessly at the banging gates as they filed through, then coagulated again as they continued on their way. The grubby posters stuck against the walls were always the same, an endless repetition of the same smile, the same breasts, the same babies, the same cigarettes.
Then, all of a sudden, at the bottom of a flight of steps, one found oneself in a long brightly-lit hall, a great grotto with a high ceiling, and walls plastered with gigantic photographs. The crowd spread out along the cement platform and stood there, waiting. There were steel rails emerging from a gallery at one end of the hall and disappearing into a gallery at the other end. The two human masses stood facing each other along the twin platforms, observing those on the other side, and it was as though there had been a great mirror in the centre of the pit where the rails ran. Identical anonymous forms, the men wearing grey raincoats, the women carrying black plastic handbags.
The silence was oppressive. Warm air gusted through the grotto, raising dust and scooping up old newspapers. The giant posters loomed above the crowd, always showing the same images of their gods and goddesses: monstrous children devouring cheese; gigantic men smoking cigarettes; divinely beautiful women, as big as buses, displaying to the sun their mountain of rosy flesh, their forest of golden hair, their red mouths, their greenish-blue eyes, their teeth like ice-cubes. The people gazed at the images with amazement, with humility, with hatred, too, and went on waiting. For these were the idols of war and noise and murder, revealed at last to the eyes of man. There was not a single place in the world where one could escape them, not a single piece of unoccupied territory; their temples were everywhere, their religion was everywhere, at the summit of lofty peaks, in the sun, as well as in the depths of caverns four hundred feet underground.
The six steel rails glittered in the light, down the centre of the pit. They ran over a bed of black pebbles; sharply-defined, bright, invincible rails. They too were observing the scene, and their gaze was so hard and pitiless that it was difficult to stay on one’s feet. Eventually, no doubt, some man or woman, knees buckling, would stagger out of the crowd lined up near the platform’s edge, and would pitch forwards without even uttering a cry. In the centre of each track there was a third, even tougher, rail resting on porcelain insulators. No-one dared to stare straight at this rail: it was charged with surging electricity, charged with deadly hypnotic powers. Its force opened up dizzy chasms. It was furiously determined to discharge its energy upon anything that came its way: metal wheels, broken bodies, it made no difference.
After a short time, a distant rumbling can be heard coming from all directions at once, and the ground begins to tremble. A light is approaching from deep inside the tube, coming from the other end of the earth, growing gradually bigger. The rumbling has become more unambiguous, now, more urgent. The illuminated coaches are hurtling towards the opening, spitting sparks. The crowd has drawn back slightly, and the long metal machine has roared into the grotto, brakes screeching. The doors have been sucked back by pistons. All the waiting men and women have pushed their way into the coaches. The doors have banged shut. The train is on its way again. All this has happened very fast, in the space of a few seconds at most.
Now one is travelling along inside the galleries. The metal-plated train is speeding through the rock, almost brushing against the walls as it lurches from side to side, and there is so much energy
in the air that one might almost be travelling inside a flash of lightning. And one can hear the sound of thunder, too, a steady rumbling that sends its metallic echoes reverberating along the underground network.
That is the way one vanishes. Far beneath the earth’s surface, buried under tons of rock and mud, lost in the uncharted labyrinth, one no longer has a name, a thinking mind, a soul, anything at all. One sways in rhythm with the jolts. The train stops briefly in other grottoes, on its onward journey. The faces inside the iron coaches are strange deeply-creased white masks. Their bulging eyes are like fat cockchafers with glaucous wing-sheaths, as they seek out girls’ eyes and settle on them. Just below, their mouths breathe in and out, anus-mouths of anemones. There are women whose red hair is ablaze, women with arched black eyebrows, and nostrils that are black cavities from which snakes come writhing. Masks, masks on all sides, massive casings for the brain’s jelly, armour to hide the whole body, its sex, its tufts of hair. At close intervals the doors slide apart and more masks push their way in. They glance warily at each other, press tightly together, quiver like the surface of a mosquito-infested pond. The rapid train streaks along the corridors with their bouncing lines of electric cables at one side. It bursts into the stations like a high-explosive shell. It is bearing its rows of yellow windows ever deeper inside the earth as it twists and turns, makes great circles, burrows its way underground, plunges foot by foot towards the planet’s core. It is looking for an exit, an exit that it will never find.
War Page 26