He was still looking out of the window. He watched the ground slide away along the sides of the bus, and his mind was a blank. Not everything moved at the same speed. First, nearest the window, were the embankments, springing forward so fast that one did not even notice them. The concrete poles, too, rapid, darting toward the rear like propeller blades. The low, sagging telegraph wires undulating with a vertical movement. After that, the houses, the fields, the walls. But they were still apparitions, openings, winks of the eye. White face, red face, pile of stones, white face, tree, tree, tree, white face, yellow face, pile of stones. A little farther away, the houses lumbered forward like huge trucks, like huge boats. The beige-coloured blocks floated above the trees, then veered aside, and became heavy, laden rafts as the current carried them away. The tops of the trees thrashed around, drooped, made their little leaves sparkle. Occasionally, a branch, higher than the others, stretched up and passed across the sky like the arm of a drowning man. Still farther away, the motionless hills, with their cubes of houses, their patches of fields. After that, the landscape was no longer motionless: it retreated. Enormous blocks of mountains, cliffs, reservoirs of the sea, capes, black islands. Their slow movement twisted the earth, ripped the forests and headlands. Lastly, overhead, in the sky, the clouds altered their shapes completely as they merged, then drew apart again.
The cumulative effect was one of dizziness. All these superimposed movements that were destroying the landscape were heavy, painful, tragic, filling the eyes and creating a hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach. The grumbling of the engine went on and on, constructing its own silence out of all its multiple waves that swarmed all over you.
The world crumbled, very quickly and very slowly at the same time. And each departing thing stripped the back of your mind of an idea. Each uprooted tree fleeing towards the rear was a vanished word. Each house proffered for a single second, then spurned, was a desire. Each face of a man or a woman that had appeared in front of the window, and been repudiated in the same instant, was a strange mutilation, the abolition of a very tender, much beloved word.
He went on looking out of the window, lost for words.
Some were off in a flash, BOOK, CAT, CIGARETTE, the time it took two or three concrete poles to fall back. Others flew by interminably, WALL, IDEOLOGY, LOVE, INNOCENCE, while the black mountain slid forward, leaned, pitched forward, and gradually sank into the earth. There were tattered cloud-ideas which disappeared mysteriously: they hovered in the sky like great birds, then, circle after circle of them, melted into space. And there were ant-ideas which swarmed among the tufts of grass, and which were crushed in millions by the headlong flight. Each mile he became more impoverished. Dumbness entered his body. Perhaps it was the engine’s noise, its regular throbbing that was sending waves through him.
Trees toppled, carrying clusters of figures, 10,000s, 200,000s, 1,000,000s. Gaping garages in which whole books were sound asleep, philosophical treatises, scientific textbooks. Fallow fields where dictionaries had made their home. Streams full of poems. Barns stacked with politics, vats brimming with sport, lakes of songs and movies, railroad tracks of love. It was all going away, but that was perfectly all right.
In addition, he lost gestures, motions of the right hand towards cigarette packs, of the left hand towards brass cigarette lighters. Winkings of eyelids, shivers at the base of the neck, swallowings. He lost consciousness. The names emerged from him and fled, GÉRARD, ANDRÉ, SÉBASTIEN, RIEUX, DUNAN, SONIA, CLAIRE, JANE, MARIGOLD, GABRIELLE, LAURE . . .
(Her face bent forward, Laure watched. Her made-up eyes blinked lightly, the moist pupils changing colour, becoming green, then blue, then golden. Locks of hair tumbled over her forehead, etc.)
He lost names of streets, avenues, boulevards. He lost mile upon mile of sidewalks, bread-smells, soap-smells. He lost dogs, pigeons, fleas. It was all going away, coming out of him. Soon, there would be nothing left. The bus would be an empty torpedo, flying towards its target, toward combustion.
At one moment, so as to remember, he had wanted to light a cigarette. But he had hardly exhaled the first cloud of smoke before the driver had half turned his head and shouted something like:
‘. . . smoking, you down there!’
And he had had to crush the glowing tip under the sole of his shoe.
That is what it was, then, the solitude of movement. Something had been broken, a cord, or a chain, and now one was rushing forward. Fear, perhaps, the ancient mask that covered people’s faces. The sun was very high in the sky, directing its merciless heat on to the metal roof. It was the sun that one was fleeing in this way, it was the light of unbearable truth. One was fleeing the glaringly white town, the eternally straight walls, the sound of footsteps, the traffic noises, the pangs of knowledge. One was going away so as not to see some woman, some child any longer, so as not to have to listen to any more café conversations, so as not to have to answer, ever again:
‘Very well, thank you, and you?’
Crushed, rejected, trampled under foot, that vile town. Covered with cinders, with old papers. Forgotten, the open sewer awash with putrescence. The town’s grave had been dug, then manure had been piled high on top of it. The steel bus sped through the country, and its wheels crushed armies of slugs. Already, perhaps, down there, very far behind now, the explosion destined to wipe out everything in four seconds had suddenly sent up its immense column of fire.
Those who are motionless on the wandering earth: the voyagers.
Those who flee over the motionless earth: the stay-at-homes.
But those who flee over the wandering earth, and those who are motionless on the motionless earth: what should they be called?
SELF-CRITICISM
WAS IT REALLY worth while writing all that, just like that? I mean, where was the necessity, the urgency of this book? It might have been much better to wait a few years, perhaps, thinking quietly about it and saying nothing. A novel! A novel! I’m genuinely beginning to detest these threadbare little accounts, these tricks of the trade, these redundancies. A novel? An adventure, supposedly. But that’s exactly what it isn’t! All these efforts at co-ordination, all this machinery – this playacting – for what? Just so as to grind out yet another story. Hopeless dishonesty of the person who doesn’t dare say ‘I’. Clumsiness of the person who flaunts his nettle-rash and his inflammation of the bladder and then tries to camouflage them so that no one will know that it is he who is the sufferer! Sickly, shifty-eyed creature! One tries to intercept his glance, hoping to pass through the windows of his eyes, to enter his being. At the last moment one finds oneself staring at a mask, a mask with empty eye-sockets.
If only it were a work of imagination in the style of Swift, or Jules Verne. Even Conrad would be better than nothing. But no, he doesn’t even try to make up a story. He presents you with the bag from his daily hunting expedition. Tittle-tattle he has picked up indiscriminately, tag ends of notebooks, newspaper clippings, sob stories. Stendhal, Dostoievsky, Joyce, etc.! Liars, all of them, liars! And André Gide! And Proust! Little effeminate geniuses, crammed with culture, intolerably smug, watching themselves live and for ever churning out the same old tale! All of them in love with suffering, adept at talking about it, happy to be themselves. ‘I write for future generations.’ What twaddle! Do you know where these future generations are? In the grey classrooms of high schools, woolgathering in front of an open textbook, grinning and nudging one another every time the word ‘woman’ or the word ‘love’ crops up!
Create reality! Invent reality! As though it were possible! Horde of ants, that has stockpiled its culture in precious tomes! Horde of monkeys, that deserves the gang of charlatans that leads it! And if all this were even funny. But no, it’s quite serious, done with a great deal of enthusiasm, accompanied by endless meditation. Perhaps it is the language of mankind, but language stripped of all its music and clamour. These kinds of mischievous insects not only dare to exist, in the name of logic; they have even decided
to take blank sheets of paper and write stories on them. Why? To entertain? To help them flee far away? No, to stick fast, rather, to smear the world with their lime, and then sneak off. Yes, just that: to save your own sneaking little life, and to hell with the others!
No masks are barred. What one says, of course, is – I’m an analyst. I reveal human character. I go in for psychopathology, I provide others with the keys to consciousness. Psychology! Does it really exist? As if the human spirit could be reduced to a few gestures, a few words. There is also, needless to say, the study of passion. You know: how the life together of a man and a woman suddenly acquires fresh meaning, by means of this great contest. The next step was to invent the love story. Which, it seems, is eternal. That is the only true novel form: the handsome young man meets the beautiful girl, resulting, successively, in:
Love at first sight.
Crystallization.
Union.
Breakup.
Extraordinary, isn’t it? The idea that those things really happen. But people are happy. They have the impression that that’s how things were with them, and they are delighted to come across things they recognize. Don’t start talking to them about the adventure of a glass with a toothbrush, or about a ruttish encounter between a turkey-cock and a turkey-hen. Don’t try to tell them what goes on inside a tree. They couldn’t care less. They will turn the pages, looking for that spicy bit where the girl with red hair, after having sipped drinks and made conversation, unclasps her brassière and offers her two pointed breasts to her lover’s kisses.
Novels that mumble, novels that drivel away like old women. Novels without adventures, written by people without a past! Novels written like one plays billiards . . . Novels written in the first person, but the author is very far away, hidden behind his great walls of paper. Psychological novels, romantic novels, cloak-and-dagger novels, realistic novels, saga novels, satirical novels, detective novels, science-fiction novels, new novels, verse novels, essay-novels, novel-novels! All of them designed specially for human beings, knowing their failings, flattering their cowardice, purring gently along with them. Never novels about the hereafter, never novels for rebirth, or for survival!
Novels about people:
Written by women:
‘Lucie is a young woman of thirty. Etc.’
Written by men:
‘Carlos has gone through the war without ever getting caught up in it. Now that it is over, what should he do? What future awaits him? Is it Beatrice, his wife, in whom he has lost all faith? Etc.’
And along comes a thirty-year-old woman, and a man called Carlos, who buy the book, and promptly say:
‘How well put. That’s me all over.’
Pleased that there was nothing to be surprised about.
So what have I got to say, then? Carlos, Hogan, Lucie, aren’t they the same thing? Don’t I talk about problems, too? Am I writing for human beings, or for flies?
The Book of Flights, fine. But, in fleeing, shouldn’t I turn round from time to time, just a quick glance, merely to see whether I’m not perhaps going too fast, whether people are still following me? Hmm?
MEANWHILE . . . THEY HAD crossed chains of mountains, wide rivers, grey plains, and now there was this big town sprawling along the edge of the sea. A town made of concrete, flat, white, with straight streets crossing at right angles. It was in Italy, or Jugoslavia, or else Turkey. It was 1912, or else 1967, or 1999. No way of knowing. An unreal town, perhaps, simply a mirage in the vast desert.
Young Man strolled through its streets, without knowing where he was going. He followed the maze of streets, keeping to the sidewalks except when crossing over. He studied the faces of all these unknown people. He passed under dark archways where beggars were squatting. Brightly coloured photos were on display outside an open-fronted shop. They were pictures of the Bosphorus, the Acropolis, or else the Isle of Krk. Young Man bought a few photos and wrote on the back:
Best wishes
Y. M.
Then he mailed them.
The sun was directly overhead, its rays scorching the flat surfaces. The town hummed, rustled, exploded in all directions. Young Man began to feel tired. He looked around for somewhere to sit down. But it was the town centre, where no one ever thought of sitting down. Young girls with black hair and black eyes passed close by him without seeing him. Bald men, sweating in their nylon shirts, strode along rapidly. There was the same strange dizziness in the air here as a little while ago, back there; an odd sort of whirlwind was dancing like a top, flinging the human bodies backward. The vacuum zone in the centre of the whirlwind was moving slowly forward. Soon it would surely be on top of him, and he would feel all the tiny legs crawling over his body, all the mandibles gnawing at him. Something had to be done. This is what he did.
He went down to the sea. It was there, on the left, down there, about half a mile away. He walked very quickly, keeping to the edge of the sidewalk, avoiding the human torrent streaming back up. When he reached the promenade he saw the great expanse of grey and blue and all the sparkling waves. It was the sea. He looked at it as though for the first time, or as though someone had just drowned in it. The horizon was still in the same place, a faint line blurred with mist.
Young Man sat down on the concrete parapet. He put his beach bag at his feet, lit a cigarette and started looking.
What he saw was quite extraordinary: perhaps man’s dominion reached no farther than this point. Men had smoothed the earth’s surface, had ploughed it and made it fertile, they had hidden it behind walls and under layers of tar. But the earth came to a halt here, along the coast, hesitating. And there began the domain of liquidity, of blueness. Everything was blue. Not a dull, washed-out blue like the blue one sees in the sky or in paintings. But a deep blue, a living blue, which breathed, expanded, became lost in its own depths. An unknown, absolute blue without the least hint of pink or violet or green.
Young Man shifted position, to face squarely into the blue, not wanting to see anything else any more. At first it was difficult. There were various distractions: the shouting of people, the screeching of cars, the rasping of the surf. The solution was to concentrate one’s whole attention on the colour, without noticing the waves’ undulations or the sparkling lights along them. Then suddenly the sea ceased to exist. There was no more swell or foam. Above all, there was no more earth. One had slipped into the bath of colour, one was floating in it, stretched out flat, a wafer-thin skin blended with the surface. Then one could look upward, and everything was blue.
Young Man sank into the astonishing colour, and remained there for some minutes. Then a cloud passed by, a car hooted, an orange floated, and the colour vanished abruptly from the sea.
At the end of the promenade there was a pebble beach and a jetty. He went over and sat down there, to look once more at the demarcation line between sky and sea. A wall, an absolute wall that went deep under the water and held the world up.
Then he looked at the outline of the coast, gulfs, capes and peninsulas stretching as far as the horizon. It was a prehistoric coast, full of the ancient remains of the age of squids and savage animals. Dirty water gushed out of the rotted bones, out of the black, slime-covered vertebrae, out of the seaweed-entwined skulls. There, too, one could sink in and disappear into the thickness of time. A curious weary sigh was rising slowly from the swirling waters, a breath laden with heavy odours. The town was leaking into the water through the mouths of all the sewers. All the excrements were slithering along the pipes, sliding down the sea’s long slope. Without a doubt, one was just a part of that moving mass, a black turd pushed forward by the water’s gulp, on toward fabulous countries . . . But when will the earth be dry at last? When will this basin, this froth-filled tub, be drained? One day, perhaps . . . One day the sun will blaze down at last upon a great desert, and the clouds will no longer be made of water but of sand, dust and ash. And secret caverns will appear, all black from the thousands of centuries spent far from the reach of day.
While waiting for this to happen, Young Man retreated from the scene. He turned his back on the sea and walked in the direction of a big dusty square where some pine trees clustered in the centre of the asphalt. He sat on a bench, there, in the shade, and saw all these people whom he did not know. He tried to remember each one of them, and to do that he took a notebook out of his blue bag, and with a ballpoint pen wrote down descriptions of everyone who passed by:
Little girl with a Band-Aid on each knee.
Man looking like Hemingway.
Man with wine stain on thigh.
Woman suffering from tuberculosis.
Man in shorts, scratching his genitals as he walks.
3 women of various ages wearing 3 identical hats.
A group of romanies, dressed predictably and wearing dark glasses.
Girl with bare midriff.
Girl with FLORIDA written across her bosom.
Man with squashed face.
Little girl throwing a box up into the air.
Woman with target between breasts.
Little girl with an aquiline nose.
Man with dark glasses tucked into the collar of his blue jersey.
Little girl crying out Ahoua Aho Ahoua.
Ice-cream cart pushed by an old man and an old woman.
Human cork.
Girl wearing green slacks, with the head of a doll protruding from a pocket.
Woman with a very long nose accompanied by a son with identical nose.
Little girl with rings round her eyes.
Two young women with mascaraed eyes.
Small boy blowing into a harmonica.
Two girls pass by, one chewing bubble gum, the other singing ‘No matter who no matter why’.
The Book of Flights Page 5