Mother and daughter, each with an inflamed boil on the leg.
It was inexhaustible. One could settle down there, day and night, with one’s notebook and one’s ballpoint pen, and do nothing but write, write, write.
On the ground, people’s feet came and went endlessly. That, too, was something new. Young Man studied the concrete surface over which the feet were moving. The shoes all had their own way of treading on the ground. Some came cracking down hard, heel first. Others progressed more slowly, twisting very slightly at each step. There were women’s sandals with stiletto heels which left tiny half-moon imprints behind them. There were fraying espadrilles, sneakers, tennis shoes with perforated uppers. There were scuffed clogs, there were beaten-up old loafers from which the big toes emerged. There were naked feet, the toenails black with grime. All that, moving, moving to and fro, never stopping.
Suddenly, Young Man detected a sound that he had never heard before: a low, disturbed noise, a sort of deep rasping that drowned all the other sounds. It rose unrhythmically from the ground, reverberated, fell like spadefuls of sand, smouldered into powder. It moved forward, too, but over the same spot. A rubbing sound, an endless CRRR, CRRR that seized you and gradually buried you. It was the sound of shuffling feet, the soft, listless, terrible sound of feet in the process of walking. Impossible to forget that sound. Suddenly, the earth, the sky, and even the sea, far away down there, began to ring with this sound of footsteps, and everything became a path for these feet.
TOWN OF IRON and concrete, I no longer want you. I reject you. Town of valves, town of garages and sheds, I have frequented you long enough. The eternal streets hide the earth, the walls are grey screens, so are the posters and the windows. The glaring cars glide along on their tyres. It is the modern world.
The people who hammer the hard ground with their heels, in rhythm, have no idea what they are doing. But I have. Which is why I am leaving.
A habitat arranged in groups, but at the same time split up, multiplied, annihilated. Black throng that repudiates itself, herd with movements that cancel each other out: the town reverberates; the town speaks; the town writhes; the town eats, drinks, fornicates, dies. The roofs are grey: that is where the raindrops strike. Piles of dust lie in the angles of the walls. Calcined trees sprout through the surface of asphalt deserts. Starved dogs roam around, and cats. At night, rats dart between the wheels of the parked vehicles. Town filled with the odours of food, smoke, vomit. There are people who were born in the town, and died there. Surely the earth is one vast town from which escape is impossible? Surely the streets plunge under the surfaces of seas, misty boulevards stretching to infinity, peripheral rings rising and dipping, beyond imagination? Escape? Where to? Avenue number 8. Detour. Endless expressway leading to yet more blocks, roofs, streets . . . Town with a visible skeleton, monster infested by minute parasites that quietly gorge themselves with blood. And then town in ruins too, pathetic walls sticking up, defying the sky’s emptiness. Town, the great infinite town, is perhaps simply the invention of man’s fear. Not a refuge, nor a secret cell, but a cluster of harpoons with old shreds of skin fluttering from their barbs, pointed constantly towards the distant body of the sky’s enormous whale.
That town is the one I am in. It is my time, my space. How could it not be? I am there, this day, this hour, I and the town’s millions of inhabitants. I no longer know what was there before this slab of concrete, before these fake mountains that are hollow and riddled with openings. I am no longer in a position to know. One moment, throughout the universe, this kingdom happened; like a book, just like an open book in which the words describe a self-sufficient scheme of knowledge that no one can really understand but that no one can really remain unaware of, either. One never knows what one is doing. One does it, that’s all. It’s the same with the town. It is there; either one is in it, or one isn’t in it. If one isn’t, that’s another story. But when one is, there’s basically no means of realizing the fact. One is a townsman, and from the depths of one’s casemate one gazes at the sun and the sky. It is the town that is the object of one’s hatred. But one hates it with insults welling up from one’s innermost being, with other roofs, other sidewalks. One longs to kill it in one’s soul; and suddenly one’s soul is this black limousine gliding to the sound of its hot engine along the white streets.
Town? Woman, all woman. She stretches out her hand and it is an intersection of radiating streets. Her made-up face is an inhabited house, her body a department store. So that’s what it is. Everything is there: drains, streams, noisy roadways, streetlamps, winking lights, reservoirs, public gardens, fountains, depots; curious names that are her own:
Groin Street
Avenue of the Five Senses
Boulevard of the Femoral Arteries
Vena Cava Street
Ministry of Breasts
Pubic Garden
Kneecaps & Co.
Larynx
Suburbs of the Anus
Sex District
Occipital Lobe Grand Theatre
It is she, my town, my town that is all woman. Now do you understand why I visit her so assiduously?
I am walking. I move through the town, and my feet slap the tough ground. Silence has closed around me. I walk on the horizontal ground and hear nothing. The silence has swollen horribly in my head, has pressed against me with all its strength. I advance without knowing where I am going, the world has suddenly been emptied of its sounds. The ground is hard, flat. The walls are high. The roofs are not visible. The sky is an immense, deserted esplanade. Around me, the movements of fast cars, the itineraries of people. From behind my glass screen I can see them, unobtrusive, humble. But I hear nothing. I walk like a deaf man, enclosed within my peaceful bubble. People cry out and I hear nothing. Cars spurt forward with roaring engines, jet aircraft fly through the clouds, and I hear nothing. Well, I do hear them in a way, I register the rumblings and the horn blasts. My ears vibrate with noises. But it is inside my head that I am deaf. All these ruthless, earsplitting sounds are around me. I can see them all, really, just as they are, large dark splotches bearing down on me, pack of mad dogs, circular waves radiating from the sun, arrows, thick patterns. But inside my head, as I walk, nothing. I have no sooner registered them than they are forgotten, gone without even leaving a scar. Or else I am under water, 3,000 fathoms deep, in a world of slime that quivers and swirls into sluggish clouds under my feet.
No, I hear nothing. Silence is in my head. I do still hear something, but it is so hard and so terrible that it thrusts me even farther into silence, it hurls me yet more light-years away from a free existence: it is the sound of my footsteps. One, two, one, two, one, two, dull blows of heels on the sidewalk’s concrete, blows as though I was driving nails in with my feet. Plodding of my footsteps, alone, in rhythm, tenaciously, alone, quite alone. I walk over myself and bury myself. The noise of my heels echoes through the world, it is just as though I were hastening, knowing that escape was necessary, along a deserted corridor reigned over by a silence that was tubular.
It is this silence which abstracts me. It is because of this silence that I am no longer there; silence dense as an ocean in front of which one sits and stares. Silence of cast iron, of ferro-concrete, silence of a lake of mud. I should never have thought such a thing possible: to be in the midst of so much noise, so much matter and light, and hear nothing. Balls of wax thrust into the auditory canal, balls of calm water. Screen of unbreakable glass that has been raised without my knowledge, isolating me. I shall never be able to re-experience the music, the long, complex music of anonymous cacophonies.
But I am mistaken: I do hear them. The bus brushes the sidewalk as it passes, and I feel myself engulfed by the piercing shriek of its engine. It scrapes the ground, spreading out like a volley of sharp flints. It zigzags, it spits from the machine gun’s barrel, and its bullets ricochet explosively from the walls, smash into human flesh and open up little stars of blood. The heavy machine gun fires upon the crowd
, while a peculiar grey-blue cloud spreads out, acrid, deadly, the cloud of mortal dust, the dangerous fog which penetrates through the pores of the skin and disintegrates life.
Or else, the aircraft crosses the blue sky, heavy silver bird bombarding the earth with its din.
Or else, the subterranean cries of television sets, the music of radios, the jolting kicks of jukeboxes at the back of dim cafés.
Or else, the human voices, the brief little yelps going on and on in a universal chorus.
The barking of dogs.
In the trees, the screeching of birds.
On the smooth rails, the black tumult, sweating oil and sending out sparks, that heralds the approaching train.
Hubbub, outbursts, confusion of languages, clicks, ticktock, slitherings, jets of steam, uncoilings, fluids, muffled rhythms, luminous rhythms, tremolos, castings, births, hiccups, gongs, gargles, deep vibrations, scratchings, and then, flight, so many ways of fleeing.
I hear everything. I register everything. But I am there, slightly withdrawn, late perhaps, or a tenth of a second fast, and nothing is true any longer. EVERYTHING IS AT STAKE. In my body reigns a desert that has no parallel anywhere in the world. In the centre of my head there is a boundless ocean. What is that? What does that mean? I am at the centre of events, practically invisible. Suppose I don’t really exist at all? Suppose I am nothing but a node, the interference point of sound waves? Or alternatively, is this all a dream that I am dreaming?
The world surges, never-endingly, from my head, like rays, like a gentle mechanical sound filled with the whirring of springs and caroming of cogwheels of a wristwatch. I am mad, I am right, I am alone, I hear, but I am deaf, I see, but far, always, elsewhere than myself, without myself.
And the sound of my footsteps at the back of my skull inflates, swells up, fills everything in me that is inexhaustibly, painfully HOLLOWED OUT.
A café waiter in blue
sets a glass of beer
on a cardboard disc in
the centre of a red table
To walk in the sun
The calm vase of flowers
Nothing can really affect me any longer. Everything that happens, happens very far away, as though in another world. I am seated, facing eternity perhaps. Accidents, passions, desires, dreads, I contain them all, they all shift around, grow lively, carry on their struggle. While I look on. I create. And the familiar spectacle that results cannot become tedious, being BEGOTTEN.
I WALK ON THIS FLAT LAND
WITH NEVER ANY PURPOSE
THERE WAS ANOTHER way of fleeing. I will tell you about it. One evening, around ten, Young Man Hogan found himself in a strange part of town, a different town. The night was pitch-black, and he instinctively made his way towards the places where there was some light. He walked at a fairly brisk pace, swinging his arms. The night became less black as he approached the district of bright lights: the sky gradually took on a reddish hue, as though there had been a volcano over there, or at least a big blaze.
Y. M. paused a moment to look at the lights. At the end of the street, there, they were shining with fierce flashes, launching their appeals, blinking on and off unwaveringly. They were crazy stars, motionless on the frontages of bars and stores, blood-red planets, green comets, nebulas, suns with paws. He had never seen anything like it. Under the night’s dark blanket, all these lights danced, trembling in the humid air, changing colour, stretching and contracting their convulsive rays.
For a moment he was scared and wanted to turn back. He looked behind him. Over there, in the opposite direction, the town disappeared into the night. One could see the streets outlined dimly by streetlamps, and the headlights of the vehicles gliding along them. But over there, too, danger awaited. Peculiar animals made of steel prowled the ravines, their wings glittering savagely, a disquieting gleam in their eyes. When they turned their backs, two red points lit up and sped into the distance. Hereabouts, mechanical life held sway. In vanishing below the horizon, the sun had left the field free to all these little lights, and now they were gnawing away, gnawing away tirelessly. The night was made of steel. The town had been overlaid with hard sheeting, had unsheathed its razors, was lying in wait. In the depths of the sky, there were no mirrors, and in place of the sun a great bleeding hole gaped where perhaps a molar had been wrenched out. The sea had probably emptied, leaving the hollow of its basin rimmed by a dizzy precipice. The earth itself had disappeared, had ceased to be solid. One was on an unknown planet, Jupiter, or Neptune, a planet made of gases trailing in layers above each other.
In the great monoliths of houses, the skylights were blocked up. The people had shut themselves up in their grottoes, because they were frightened, or else because they did not want to see. In the hermetically sealed boxes of their apartments, they were sitting under electric lamps, they were watching screens from which waves of blue light flowed. Here and there, in enormous temples, people were sitting in rows of armchairs. On the far wall, facing them, a dazzling blur. It was The Savage Eye, or The Little Soldier, or else Woman of the Dunes. But that was of no importance, because what the people had come to see was not stories or images, but light, simply light.
Y. M. lit a cigarette with his lighter, and walked towards the place where all the flashes were coming from. It was a very long street, its sidewalks jammed with people and lined with cars. Entering the street, Y. M. had to screw up his eyes because the light was so intense. He stopped a moment, to look at the neon signs. They were everywhere, on walls, above shop windows, at the backs of shops, and even suspended above the street.
Some of them were static, burning intensely like suns in the centre of vague haloes. Others flashed on and off, endlessly. Or moved. There were red ones which cast their stark scarlet rays straight ahead of them. White ones striping the night, blue ones going round and round. Sharp-angled signs wrote strange names, like flashes of lightning travelling through clouds. The letters gesticulated above doors, revolved, formed themselves, then erased themselves. In the centre of a huge white design undulating like a carpet, a word continually appeared and disappeared: RONSON. Above an empty department store, a red-and-green arrow advanced, streamlined point foremost. Then it touched a circle, and in an explosion of gold the word WALLACH was spelled out in black. As well as all these letters there were crosses, triangles, circles which never stopped radiating outward, spirals of fire, zigzags, dots, bubbles, explosions. The whole lot talked at once, emitted mute cries, underlined, exhibited, spat. There was no peace. One was inside an erupting volcano, caught up in the gouts of magma, or in the centre of an electric storm. The neon tubes crackled in the air, the light flickered like rising fumes. Y. M. advanced slowly down the street, changing colour, his eyes full of sparks. There was no pity. At one moment, he stopped under the KELVINATOR that opened and closed its red letters. He looked at the trembling street, and at a very big sign right at the end of it, on which COCA-COLA swam in the centre of a star that turned from red to white to black. It was towards this sign that he made his way.
He ended up at an intersection where the frenzy of the lights was at its height. Here, hundreds of words called out in all directions; but they were false alarms. Behind the flamboyant letters there was nothing but a maze of tubes and wires. The windows of the building lit up harshly, the façades became red. It would have been easy to stay a long time, here too, reading everything that was written all around. With a little effort, it would have been possible to write a poem with these words, a poem composed of fugitive letters, unfinished sentences, chaotic thoughts. One could have set one’s words up, riveted them to the walls of houses, and launched one’s appeals. One could have written something like:
S S SI SI SIL SIL SILEN SILEN SILENCE SILENCE
DEATH
HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME
PLEASE
LOVE ME
ap ap ap ap ap ap
APPEAR!
Or else one could have drawn things, with all those electric bulbs and neon tubes.
An immense heart in the process of beating, clamped to the sixth floor of a building, and then, along the whole length of the street, a gigantic woman with green eyes that lit up and blinked on and off, with a candy-pink body, with breasts that heaved with each breath she took, a great woman floating on a blue-and-mauve carpet, holding in her right hand a cigarette with a wisp of smoke rising from its glowing tip.
That, all that, was madness, perhaps. Somewhere in the world, in the middle of the night, there was this node of throbbing lights. The appeals were desperate because they were getting nowhere. There was no path opening up behind the words, only walls and plate-glass windows. Everywhere, one came up against these impenetrable barricades. The cold flames danced in the night, leaped up mechanically, and it was all meaningless. This roaring, this extraordinary and beautiful explosion, echoed around the earth, but it was for nothing. The objects had sped far away, their steel doors shut tight. The crazy words repeated to you, tirelessly, ‘Eat!’, ‘Drink!’, ‘Smoke!’, ‘Come here!’, ‘Love!’, and nothing was ever offered. Here was the dizziness of empty space, here was the vortex filled with great eddies of light. There was no language. There were no signs, no colours. There was no day. Only night, nothing but night, absence.
Around Y. M., people came and went. Couples strolled by, lit by the strange glimmers. Men passed quickly, tight little groups talking as they strode along. On the roadway the cars followed each other in an endless stream, their side-panels and tops reflecting broken light patterns, their fenders loaded down with headlamps, winking lights, red warnings.
Y. M. entered a bar, and drank a glass of beer at the counter. This place, too, was decorated with neon tubes: green, white and pink stripes. There were some people in the room, drinking. On the walls, great sheets of mirror glass reflected the light. Even the glass that Y. M. was holding in his hand was luminous, as though carved out of a diamond, and the beer was the colour of gold. Y. M. lit a cigarette, and for a moment the lighter’s flame was a spark, the centre of the universe with its countless galaxies. He looked outside. Near the entrance door were two pinball machines and a jukebox. The jukebox was sparkling with all its might; on top, it sported a sort of glass crest inside which one could see halos of colours, iridescent patterns, concentric circles all swimming around. Music with a heavy pulse mingled with the flashes of light as it boomed from the apparatus, then settled over the people in the room. Each drumbeat was a hovering sheet of electricity, and beneath it the rapid sparks of the guitar sputtered up to the ceiling. In front of the jukebox, a girl was standing, swaying her hips in rhythm with the music. She was gripping the warm cabinet’s raised rim with both hands, staring at the sort of iridescent mouths that were opening and shutting inside the glass crest . . . Beside the jukebox, the two pinball machines gleamed. Green electric lights flashed on and off on their glass indicator-panels. On one of these was depicted a girl in a bikini, whose eyes suddenly blazed, for no apparent reason, like gun barrels. Two men were standing around one of the machines. One of them was playing, his body shaken by spasms. The other was watching him playing, without saying anything. From time to time this second man would take a coin from his pocket and place it on the glass tabletop, with a deliberate gesture of the hand. Each time the coin disappeared into the machine’s slot he placed another coin on the glass. And his eyes glittered like those of the girl in the bikini.
The Book of Flights Page 6