Sheets of metal, iron-panelled doors, sidewalks, walls, safes, tin roofs, hardness everywhere, impenetrable surfaces.
The hand cannot pass through, the hand of thought.
The havens are false, they lie.
The skin is hypocritical, only cold steel can pierce it.
The face with familiar features,
is a mask of plaster and tinplate, it never says anything. There is nothing more dead than this living person. There is nothing that radiates greater silence.
Play performed for the other person, game for nothing, game that is not gentle, game played to win, and never to lose.
AND ONE ALWAYS WINS.
Carapaces, breastplates, skins, costumes, habits, words, gestures, ideas; exclusive games. I mean, as far as I’m concerned I’ve had enough. Played enough. Pretended long enough to believe in the game, spent enough time closing my eyes, mouth, nose, ears. Had enough of being sold out, enough of buying up.
I mean, why shouldn’t they make me a present of a double defeat, one day, without reason, just like that, in a restaurant with white strip lighting? My own defeat, and someone else’s?
Why shouldn’t they give me the gift of a weakness, one day, without necessity, so that I may take it and make it mine?
Let me look through his shattered windowpane, this scandalous breach through which vicious strength disappears and scatters, let me see the reverse, the interior, life’s red hollow, the fissure, the ball of fear and love, pain that has spread, yes, perhaps, the hidden number of the domino which no longer wants to win the game.
Far away from unkindness
far away, very far away.
Far away from vice, unhappiness, hatred,
Carry me far away
very far away
far away
on board ships
on board iron aircraft
along tracks of thunder.
I want to be set down far away,
so far away, in a country so foreign
that I can no longer recognize myself.
Far away
in the country of the far away
of the huge, of the burning, of the vibrating
of the distant far away.
That’s what I need to do, then: devour landscapes. Like someone who could never be sated with earth, with life, or with women, who would always need more of all these. It’s not a matter of understanding, or of analysing. No, it’s a matter of turning oneself into an engine, into a monster of hot metal, pulling its weight towards something unknown. I move forward, quickly, quicker still, exerting every effort, I propel myself along the unknown road, I move, I traverse the air, I fly as straight as an arrow toward other regions which will open up in their turn. There is no end to the doors. I hear nothing. Hear what? Stop where? Languages pullulate, faces surge up and then are shattered. Understand what? There is nothing to understand, nothing at all. There are no chains of events, no reasons. Got to keep moving at all costs. Scamper across the thorny fields, hurry down the slopes of hills, run beneath the sun’s rays, strike the earth with the soles of the feet. I devour landscapes, like that, and then people, too, and young women’s lips, old men’s hands, I gnaw children’s backs. Everything that presents itself changes incessantly. I draw my body out taut across space. It is necessary to start breeding. I cover the sequences of miles. It is necessary to start measuring. It is I who sets the course, eating it up as I do so. A river? I throw a bridge. A mountain? I bore a tunnel. A sea? I drink and drink. I would like to have maps, a lot of maps. I spread them out and I read the names of towns and villages, the lines of roads, the numbers of meridians. I change the time of day: 10.30, 0.25, 2.10, 4.44, 23.00. I read all the dots, all the crosses, the contours of the coasts. Capes, islets, sierras, alluvial plains, deserts, subtropical forests, ice caps, névés, tundras. I look at all the countries that are mine, all the rivers that flow for me. I look at this painted mask that is the face of my earth. I take possession, as though from the top of a tower. I am at home everywhere. I devour my territories, I masticate them slowly, and the juice trickles slowly down my throat. Earth containing plants, earth containing lagoons and fjords, earth full of red, humid, acrid earth in which millions of worms wriggle. With my mouth, with my hands and their splitting nails, with my feet, with my eyes, nostrils, ears, with all the adventurous holes of my body, I take possession. I urinate upon it in a never-ending stream. Like someone who has not eaten for centuries, I swallow tons of earth: everything that grows on its surface slips into me. Houses, trees, birds, cacti, dense crowds, twinkling cities, I eat, I eat! My hunger is not one that can easily be satisfied! I need towns of six million inhabitants with fleshy faces, I need forests through which one hacks one’s way, month after month, through all that wood, all those leaves. I advance quickly, preoccupied as a black-beetle, for what I take I do not return.
Flee, never stop fleeing. Be off, leave this place, this time scale, this skin, this thought process. Extract myself from the world, renounce my possessions, reject my words and my ideas, and go away. Leave, for what, for whom? Find another world, inhabit another town, get to know other women, other men, live under another sky? No, not that, I could not truthfully claim that. The chains are everywhere. The town, the crowd, the familiar faces are everywhere. Those are not the things that have got to be left behind. What is the point of a slight geographical displacement, a little slide to the right, or to the left? Flee, that is to say, betray one’s heritage, vomit up what one has digested through the centuries. Flee: flee flight itself, deny oneself even the ultimate pleasure of negation. Enter into oneself, dissolve, evaporate in the fire of consciousness, be reduced to ashes, promptly, inexorably.
First of all, pulverize one’s name, one’s mask. Remove the cardboard and plaster carapace, take off one’s makeup.
The fine cutis scarcely veils the bones. A single abrasion, the shuddering of a vehicle’s metal casing, for example, would be enough to burst the fragile envelope and send its contents gushing out, flowing on and on until they had filled forbidden space. That is the truth. Not what is true, not what brings forms together for the glory of a new name, but what succeeds in drawing aside painfully the theatre’s two grey curtains.
Behind them is the magical scene, behind them, unknown to anyone, the scene of passion and bright light. It glitters, this vast hall lined with infinite mirrors. Hall one does not enter. Cathedral of glass and steel, a sort of giant ship, vibrating, sinking into the water’s mass. It is here. I shall not set foot in this place. I do not want to set foot in it. I simply want to see it, as though with a backward glance, because this glance is the sole link between my flight and reality.
I speed away from this unknown place at thousands of miles an hour. I am launched like a torpedo in the direction of another magnetic objective which will soon destroy me. And life’s light-show continues to speed away from me, irremediably; quickly, so quickly. It recedes, it disappears into the black gulf, well of hatred, crater, it grows smaller and smaller, vanishes, leaves me, exists no longer.
Am I really in full flight? Or is the world perhaps rotting away under my tread, a kind of slimy sand closing its mouth over my footprints?
I am fleeing from you, earth, so as to get to know you better. I am leaning towards you, disc cracked with fissures, as the sun stands directly overhead. Here and there, foothills, faults, gorges, steep cliffs. Dotted around, a tree, a fern, a plant with dusty leaves. And a splintered boulder, a single splintered boulder, pointing its sharp tip upward. Signs, perhaps, scripts, ancient hieroglyphs engraved in the hard crust. Wrinkles, very finely etched crow’s-feet, cracks, too, that have spread over the fragile glass surface. Deep holes that the wind has plugged up, but whose channel must surely plunge deep inside the earth, as far as its seething centre, perhaps. Miniatures, tiny faces painted on medallions, surrounded by rose-bushes, thistledown, limb joints, broken metatarsals strewing the ground after a storm of hands and feet has rained down.
Decorative
flourishes, minute scars left by thousands of whirlwinds. The air has passed over this ground, the rain has often flowed in these valleys. What has been put down in print, there? What is marked on this slab? The names of the dead, perhaps, and the spiral-shaped imprints of the living. Signatures, too. The days’ dates, and the hours’ figures, the years’ numbers, 1002, 1515, 1940, 1967, 2001, 36628. The phases of the moon, the winds and tides, the solar eruptions. The number of leaves on all the trees, of scales on all the snakes, of legs on all the centipedes. Fish-bones without number, ancient vestiges, leftovers from the feast, crumbs, all crumbs! This is my realm, my prison. I shall never leave it. But I want to count the grains of sand and give a name to each one, for this is the only way of filling the dizzy emptiness of my flight.
I no longer want to know. What good would it do me? I simply want to measure the space that separates me from the starting point. I want to be an integral part of my fall, I want to become part of the force that is urging me on.
I am a railroad car. Beneath my wheels, the cold rails are stretched out tight, let me conjure a spark from the heat of my onward rush. The sinister sound of the air, as it strikes, is my silence. Motion is my tranquil truth. The trees flickering by, along my flanks, the singing in the ears caused by the tunnels’ air-pockets, the flashes of darkness and light slap me ceaselessly. This whirlwind is my thought process. By the time each silhouette appears, it is already wrapped in the darkness. In the endless motion, the earth breathes, it moves, it has tentacles and jaws. It gapes, yawns, snaps shut again, moves away, buttresses itself, crouches for a spring, strikes, sways, melts, burst, into flames.
Beckenham Junction, Mont-de-Marsan, Ventimiglia, Trieste, Constantinople.
Reality smokes. Reality wears makeup. The earth is soft, and the thousands of ships with sparkling breastplates, made to last a century, are slowly sucked under. I, too, am a castaway of the earth, at least I think I am.
FARTHER STILL, LATER still. There were more and more towns, more and more people walking in the streets, in the sun. There were the oil-streaked waters of harbours, there were shanties, and big marketplaces smelling of fruit and garbage. There were ravenous dogs with protruding ribs, their rumps scarred with kicks, competing with small children for the possession of scraps of rotting food. There were mumbling beggars with glazed eyes, slaves dripping with sweat, flies, lizards, black rats, hard-eyed policemen, three-months-pregnant prostitutes, dark lanes with lines of washing dripping overhead, old jalopies. There were stocky men with brown faces and deep-set eyes, who remained sitting for hours at the edge of the sidewalks. There were women with long black hair, gleaming eyes, wide mouths, who strolled along the streets on shapely legs, laughing, talking loudly in drawling voices. Their heavy-breasted bodies were clad in light linen fabrics, and patches of copper-coloured flesh could be glimpsed through the tears in their blouses and dresses.
Above all, there was the sun. The white-hot searchlight always trained on the earth, sending out an endless wave of heat. From every direction, it could be seen blazing in the depths of the empty sky. High up above the roofs and terraces, it darted its rays, it hovered, almost motionless; or else it plunged earthward with terrifying speed, boring a hole through space, passing through infinity in a second, already illuminating with a great splash of yellow its chosen point of impact in the universe.
Above the towns, the treetops, the napes of men’s necks, there was always this indestructible white disc. Even after closing one’s eyes, one went on seeing it, stationary, a blind blob pressed against the retina, swimming in a bath of blood.
Young Man H. had been travelling for days in the direction of the sun. For years, now, he had been walking, looking straight ahead, guided by the white disc from which light gushed out in spouts. He had been born like that, perhaps, and the first image he had seen had been this one: through the window suddenly flung open, against the grey wall, the immense eye, the crazed eye plunging its pitiless gaze into the depths of his pupils. It was an appeal, and at the same time a threat, an implacable judgment that had condemned him in advance. There was no way of resisting. At night, when the eye was no longer there, one could sleep. But when one wrenched one’s lids open in the morning, the eye was back again, ominous as ever.
Sitting on a stone, facing the road, Y. M. H. wrote a poem to the sun on a sheet of paper. It was:
Here is S
Mortal face
with high forehead marked by 4 wrinkles
with eyes that see
with vertical nose pierced by 2 holes
wrinkles in his cheeks
and around his smiling mouth
Baby’s countenance
Face!
Forehead!
Eyes!
Mouth!
Baby!
The world is flat and never wants to be anyone.
Then he hid the message under the stone and went away.
It was that day that he began to cross the desert.
Just outside the town, he saw this ochre wasteland stretching out to the horizon, these black mountains, these dried-up bushes, this naked sky, and, in the middle of all that, the road going straight ahead. He began walking along the road, his steps following the tracks of the truck wheels. He did not walk very fast, because of the heat, and the blue bag slung from his shoulder banged against his hip. From time to time, there was a pile of stones by the side of the road, and he could see the sharp points glinting in the sun. He could hear nothing. To the left and to the right, the sand dunes absorbed all sounds within their hillocks. The road was flat. Y. M. H. walked for several hours, without stopping, his head and shoulders burnt by the sun. Once, when he felt thirsty, he took a lemon out of his bag and started chewing it, as he walked along. He listened to the odd sounds the bitter needles made inside his mouth. A little later, he looked around and saw the town very far away, dancing between the dunes. It was rather like a spangled dress stretched tight over a woman’s belly, but the woman was invisible. All that could be seen were the diamonds and the cheap flashy jewellery that leaped up and down, very far away, in the haze of rosy dust.
He lit a cigarette and smoked as he walked. But the smoke of the tobacco mingled with his saliva and formed a mucilage inside his mouth that made breathing difficult. He had to throw it away without finishing it; the burning stub fell in the sand and lay there smouldering.
Fine dust spurted up from the ground at each step, forming a little cloud that rose into the air. The tracks left by the truck tyres made hard depressions in the road’s surface, straight lines that came together, then veered apart again. People had once passed that way, heavy machines filled with men and raising clouds of sand as they crossed the desert. Y. M. H. studied the tracks that slipped away under his feet; they had imprinted signs in the sand, series of Zs and Xs, and sometimes Ws. The soles of his shoes crushed them at regular intervals with a little dry noise, and on the road behind him there were these oval marks striped with symmetrical bars, which signified that a man had walked that way.
The sun had gradually climbed into the sky; now it was right above his head, suspended there like an electric light bulb. The ground was dry and sparkling, the tiny grains of sand had lost their shadows. The silence and the light weighed down upon the plateau, and it became an effort to remain standing. The only way was to press forward, head held high, back stiffened, hands dangling at the end of the arms, resisting with all one’s might. If one lowered the head, or began to count one’s footsteps, one ran the risk, after a few minutes, of falling flat on the hard sand.
Y. M. H. halted. He urinated at the side of the road, watching the yellow puddle that the sand drank up thirstily. Then he looked around him. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing. The town’s trinkets had disappeared, a moment since, behind the dunes. The sand flowed away in all directions, swallowing itself up. Great congealed waves waited. Farther away, at the end of the visible road, the outlines of the black mountains remained unaltered, neither nearer nor more dis
tant. The path pursued its unswerving line straight ahead, receding towards the horizon. Bushes continued to poke out of the ground: roots of a sort pointing skyward, blackened claws, old calcined branches. Fire had swept the earth, no doubt. A scorching flame had descended from the sun, one day, and consumed everything. Trees, lakes, rivers, soft ground, everything had vanished in the blazing mass, everything had melted. And today there remained nothing but these ashes, these twisted fragments, this vitrified surface covering the stone ground. Everything glittered, everything gleamed in the sun; that was because flames still lurked inside the grains of dust. They wanted to burn the world to a cinder, evaporate the last drop of water, destroy the last living flesh. The empty sand was covered with cruel mouths that wanted to drink and go on drinking. The razor-edged stones were dizzy crevasses that drew you into them, seizing your legs, tearing strips from your skin. And over there in the distance, the dunes were slowly raising their walls, reducing gradually the size of the amphitheatre through which the man was moving, closing the prison of their circle. It was like having fallen into the ant lion’s pit, one day, without hope of escape. In the centre, the soft-bellied insect waits for its prey to grow tired and slip into its jaws. It was like being an ant imprisoned in a sandpit dug out of the beach by an eleven-year-old boy.
The road had begun to climb. It went up steeply toward the sky, a thin vertical stroke drawn on the stone wall. With constricted throat, Y. M. H. began scaling the cliff, leaning his whole body forward. Sweat poured down his back and his face, and his legs stumbled violently against the ground, as though they had been worn away up to the kneecaps. In the silence, he could hear the rasping of his breath, a sort of deafening kchch kchch like a locomotive. At the top of the dust-clogged cliff was the sky’s wall, a veritable sheet of steel dominating the earth. And somewhere in the metal lid there was this drop of molten matter, this blast-furnace mouth blowing its blinding heat. He, a man of tender skin and liquid blood, was the prisoner of this iron landscape. The world wanted him destroyed, no doubt about that, had already condemned him to death. It was useless to walk quickly, stub his toes against stones, raise little clouds of dust with his feet. The sand went faster than he did, swirling to and fro on the same spot, like the sea. The little square grains rolled over each other, covered the road, filtered into his body through his mouth and nostrils. The sky set its steel dome turning round and round, and the furnace’s gaping mouth blew and blew. He walked under the volcano’s crater while the scorching breath beat down upon his head and penetrated his spinal column. An icy fire that numbed the fibres of his muscles and blanked out his thoughts.
The Book of Flights Page 8