The Book of Flights

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Do you see it, now? A woman’s head whose face has no features, whose two black eyes shine with a fixed stare, and this head is floating all by itself in the centre of a grey river, breathing through its open mouth, a mouth from which no word, no kind of cry or prayer or curse ever escapes, nothing but silence, silence, silence?

  TRAVELLING, ALWAYS URGED on by hatred. Today, I am advancing along the river. On the gliding boat, I am walking along the river. The water is very calm, the colour of metal, with great white reflections. I can hear, far behind me, the chugging of the engine. The water flows past the stem, sends out little ripples as it parts, shivers. The reeds sway aside as the boat glides between them. The sky’s heat is reverberated on to the sheet of water, produces great flashes of lightning. The world is nothing but water now, water that is magical where the light strikes. I am walking along the endless mirror, watching the double image dance. I am in a stupor. The water washes the banks, washes the buffalos, washes the women’s bodies. The water is stretched taut under the white sky, delicate as a spider’s web, solid as marble. The heat is so fierce that it is as though a layer of cold had descended on everything. The air is motionless. Decayed things float in the river, drift with the boat. The water is full of snakes. The long lake is a flow of rubber, a cascade of spittle. Everything is crawling. The sounds come from far away, the sounds are sleeping curled up in a ball inside their shiny scales. There are millions of drowned men in the water, waiting expectantly for one to join them. The river descends toward the sea, it winds its way slowly across the green earth. Sometimes the loops join up, producing odd crescent-shaped puddles that evaporate in the sun. Insects skim the surface, mosquitoes, dragonflies and solicitous spiders. The boat moves forward, caresses, moves forward. It glides into the middle of the invisible boiler and is swallowed up. There are islands, and capes. The water is a lens from a pair of dark glasses, impossible to see what is on the other side. The black raft drifts along this silvery river, with its white sky, its reflections, its chalky mists, the raft disappears among all this steel dust, all these drops of quicksilver. My features can just be made out in the light-dazzled snapshot, a few grey and black lines that will soon fade away.

  I would like it so much if nothing were separate from me any longer, if estrangement were banished for ever.

  Exoticism is a vice, because it is a way of forgetting the true aim of all quests, self-awareness. It is an invention of the white man, bound up with his mercantile conception of culture. This desire to possess is sterile. There can be no compromise: anyone who seeks to arrogate to himself the soul of a nation by nibbling away at it, by hoarding sensations or ideas, is incapable of knowing the world; is incapable of knowing himself. Reality is not to be won on those terms. It demands humility.

  This country should be loved in another manner. It should be loved not because it is different, or distant (distant from what?) but because it is a country that does not allow itself to be possessed easily; because it is a country that defends itself against intrusion, because it is an inner truth that I shall doubtless never know. Because it is, like my country, a locality of this world, a moment of present time that is not reducible to theories and diagrams. There is no artifice in its makeup. Everything to be found there belongs to it. How can one fail to speak freely of a free country? How can one fail to be moved by so many natural contradictions that balance serenity with violence, dirtiness with beauty? These contradictions are real. The earth is neither fabulous nor paradisal. And therefore it is not hell.

  No, what is interesting, what is refining, what finally dissolves the veil that separates each individual in this world from his fellows, is precisely a land such as this, an ancient land inhabited by men who speak the same language and work at the same things. Not a legendary land, but real soil supporting human beings with real faces, an ancient, always young people which has taken root slowly, and which has chosen this place for its own.

  What invisible wall guards this people, what secret love unites these beings, what name defends them and protects them? Give me this name, if only for a single moment, so that I shall not forget it, I who am in full flight . . . It is this same questioning that always reasserts itself, whether on the fringe of this flat, watery land, under this lowering sky, in the thick heat pouring down from the sun, or in the centre of the terrible anthill of this gigantic city. Diverted and obscured under the conditions of an existence based on aggression, this questioning receives a clear answer here. As though from the top of a lighthouse, one sees the vividly outlined spectacle, the astonishing destiny by which men are grouped and given affinities. One is there oneself, a speck among all the other specks, unessential, without remedy, a prisoner of one’s language and one’s race, a prisoner of one’s time, and yet, at the same moment one is beyond all forms of expression, one is indefinitely FREE!

  I would like, most of all, to talk about silence. A silence which is neither an absence of words nor a mental blockage. A silence which is an accession to a domain beyond the bounds of language, an animated silence, so to speak, a relationship of active equality between the world and man. The botched universe of immediate significance, of useful words and actions, is no longer particularly important. What counts is this harmony of rhythms. One cannot forget this journey, this passage of thought into material existence.

  In the centre of this flat countryside, on the Ayutthaya road, for example, when the terrible heat of noon holds sway. Steam rises from the scorching ground. I look around me. All I can see is the great expanse of earth moist with sweat, sweeping straight to the sky, with no horizon in between. There is no sound, and the light bounces back upon the huge puddle. There is no movement. The whole experience is indescribable. Then, quite naturally, without the slightest wrench, words, ideas and actions have all ceased to exist. All that remains is this prolongation of time over space. Somewhere, in this land of inherited wisdom, people are living, are working in the rice fields. Their thoughts and words are present, mingled with this soil and this water. It is as though, gently and smoothly, the veil separating me from reality had grown thinner, had worn away its texture, ready now to rip apart so that the great forces may pass through. It has become transparent, almost transparent. I can just make out, through its immobility, the blurred symbols of the replies that are about to flow forward. They are symbols of silence.

  Or else, sitting in the bows of the boat, on the river. The heat glows on the metal-edged waves. Square-stemmed canoes plough upstream, through the bulging mass of water that flows between rows of wooden houses. Their motors screech. And that, too, is silence. For the weighty river is a voice; and what this voice says is more important and more beautiful than a poem.

  In the hot night, cockroaches prowl. The booths of a fair have been set up inside the temple’s courtyard. Men, women and children are squatting on the ground, in front of one of the booths, watching a play in which the masked actors are at this moment frozen in quivering poses, while music blares from the loudspeakers. The quickened rhythms of the Auk Phassa, the nasal songs of the Rabam Dawadeung, the intoned chants of the Ramayana. Old, violent tableaux under the neon lights, tableaux of a continuing life, music born of the sounds of the world, magic rhythms that one no longer hears, silence which demands that I should listen, that I should at last stop interrupting what is being ceaselessly communicated to me.

  Rhythm of the day and the night, rhythm of the baths, rhythm of the Ja-Ké, rhythm of the pitch-accented language of Klong verses, of Kap and Klon verses. Rhythm of the light, of the rains, of the architectures whose roofs brandish claws. Rhythm of the wooden houses whose verandas slope gently downward so that the evening breeze can waft its way as far as the sleeping bodies inside. All these rhythms are silence, because they extinguish other rhythms in me, because they oblige me to be quiet.

  This silence from beyond words is not apathetic. This peace is not a sleep. Together, they are a rampart built against the aggressions of the sun, of noise, of war. Pride and will-power
are written on the naked face of this woman standing in the centre of her canoe. On her fixed mask, cast from the primordial matrix of her race, is written the text of the ancient deed whereby this people exchanged its soul with that of this piece of land. Every day, in the centre of the river, this face confronts the invisible enemy. She is not aware of the fact, no one really suspects it, but this combat is joined each day, each minute, and it is a mortal combat. Is she even aware that she is victorious? Is she aware of the strength and violence that animate her, when with her slow swaying movement she leans on the oar, propelling the fragile craft beneath her feet into the centre of the river? She is neither aware nor unaware, for she is she, and this river is she, and each of her gestures is noble because it is not gratuitous. She describes her destiny, her civilization.

  Against the fearful noise that threatens every man, against hatred and anguish, she sets the harmony and peace of her silence. And at moments, beneath the enormous pressure of this sun, in the presence of this flat, waterlogged land bereft of horizon, or else in the face of the giddy swirl of this crowd with similar faces, similar thoughts, all moved by the same mysterious breeding instinct, this silence opens the way to a rare miracle that is the privilege of lands of self-awareness: the miracle of perceiving, through the fine net curtain separating us from reality, the exact design of the adventure.

  These things happened not long ago, in Bangkok, in Bang-Pa-In, or in Djakarta.

  THE FLUTE PLAYER AT ANGKOR

  HOGAN SAW THE little boy who was playing the flute, sitting on the ground among the ruins. There was this great dusty weed-covered amphitheatre, surrounded by the crumbling remains of walls and by stunted trees. It had not rained for a long time, and everything was dry and powdery. The time must have been about four in the afternoon: the sun was high in the sky, though it vanished, at regular intervals, behind globes of cirro-cumulus. Patches of grey shadow advanced across the ground like clouds of ash, glided noiselessly across the grass amphitheatre. The walls changed colour, became black, then red, then black again. In the hollows near the piles of stones, there must have been lots of lizards, all changing colour, too.

  The little boy was sitting on the ground, in the centre of the amphitheatre’s weeds and dust, paying no attention to the ruins. He was not exactly sitting: he was squatting on his heels, his naked legs doubled up, the top of his body leaning slightly forward. He was blowing into a long bamboo flute on which the craftsman had burned the image of a snake that wound itself round the tube. He blew into the flute without looking to the right or the left, expressionless, eyes staring straight ahead. His forearms were resting on his knees. Only his hands were moving. The brown fingers with their grimy nails raised and lowered themselves rapidly, without shifting position. The flute was pointed towards the ground, and the child’s mouth was just touching the upper tip. From time to time the little boy stopped playing, to get his breath back. Then he placed his lips around the flute’s mouthpiece, and his cheeks swelled, palpitating imperceptibly. The air descended the bamboo tube, creating odd kinds of invisible nodes, and clusters, and interferences. There was a series of holes running down the flute: seven along the top, one at the right-hand side, and another underneath. The holes were small and perfectly round, drilled through the wood, aligned behind each other, tiny bottomless wells. A red ribbon hung from the lower end of the flute.

  The little boy played away tranquilly. When the sun was shining, he was playing his flute in the sun. His shadow squatted in the grass, right behind him.

  When Hogan approached him, the child stopped playing and looked at him. His two hands lowered the flute to the ground, his fingers blocking all the holes. The child hesitated a moment, watched Hogan warily. Hogan squatted down in the grass, too, and lit a cigarette. In the blue sky, the cirrocumulus clouds were very high, like grains of salt scattered at random. This meant that the sun was continually catching alight, then dying out again. The child looked at the sky to see what was happening. After that, he paid no more attention to Hogan than if the latter had been a dog that had come and sat down beside him. He lifted his flute and started to play once more.

  The music was speaking all by itself in the centre of the circle of ruins, there on the dusty grass. It was always the same melody that emerged from the flute, a series of ascending notes, a hesitation, a new ascending series, a hesitation, then four or five low notes, a hesitation, a series of descending notes. But one immediately understood that it was an inexhaustible melody. Nothing began it, nothing could stop it. Or rather, one could stop it at any moment at all, in the middle of a hesitation, for instance, or else there, on that low trill, or again there, after that sequence of three semitone notes. The sound of the flute was very piercing, sharply defined, soaring straight into the dense air like a flight of birds, never wavering a fraction from its path. That, too, was something difficult, inaccessible, something beyond the mind’s grasp.

  Hogan was squatting in the grass, watching the little boy stare straight ahead as he played his flute. At one moment, he felt like getting up and asking the child what one had to do to play the flute like that. He felt like having a try at blowing into the flute, himself; he felt like using his fingers to stop up the nine holes along the bamboo tube, by placing his thumb over the hole underneath, his arched index over the hole at the side, and the middle and other fingers of his right hand over the first three of the seven holes along the top. And the snake engraved with a red-hot iron would have wound itself round as far as his mouth, and the red ribbon would have dangled between his knees. But a moment later, he did not think about it any longer, he just went on listening and watching.

  There was no one in this grassy amphitheatre. On the other side of the ruined walls, tourists were strolling around and posing for photographs. They were reading books which explained all about bas-reliefs and apsaras and the invention of the movie camera. Women draped in long robes were selling bottles of mineral water. Thick-set men were running to and fro, waving paintings, proffering bits of pottery, bronze heads, key-rings.

  The sound of the flute pierced the silence. It rose very high, with little sharp cries that vibrated intensely. It fell again quickly, sliding from note to note, and the ten fingers closed upon the tube. From time to time, the little boy slid his thumb down toward the base, and lifted his index finger: then the sound broke abruptly, and what emerged now was a sort of wailing very far away in space, a gentle rustling of leaves, an almost undetectable creaking sound. He stopped the lateral hole again, and the creaking became increasingly shrill, while the agile fingers released hundreds of quarter-tone notes, something like the cries of a bat, rising, descending, rising again, sweeping over the plain with their clumsy urgency. The flute was not confined to a single voice. It possessed several, dozens perhaps, all of them powerful: locomotive whistles, ships’ sirens, whining of bullets, murmurs, doleful grating noises, squawks, hiccups, and various laughs, voices for gaining height rapidly, and voices for hovering, voices for imitating the voices of women, and voices for imitating the wind. But all this was achieved simply, unaffectedly, without any striving for virtuosity, without emotion. The flute did not want to make people emotional, or sad. It did not search the soul, it did not try to convince. It was there, there only when it had to be, an upsurge of wind and noise in the middle of the walls’ silence, proclaiming nothing, awaiting nothing. The notes came and went, always the same, breaking off, dividing up, filling empty space for a fraction of a second. It was there like a blade of grass, or like a lizard; it had no will.

  Hogan listened to the flute’s music without daring to budge. When he had finished his cigarette, he stubbed it out under a clod of dry earth, between the weeds. He saw that the sun was a little lower in the sky, about half an inch lower. He saw that the clouds had crossed towards the right, the odd-looking balls of cirro-cumulus floating nearly four miles up in the air. At ground level, the stunted trees needed water. There were a few more ruined walls, scattered at random around the weed-filled
plain, but no one was interested any longer. It was the flute’s shrill music that had emptied everything in this way. It sucked things up from the world, dissolved them gently, made them disappear. The unique sound emerged from the bamboo tube between the little boy’s hands, and wandered through space. Although it could not be seen, it travelled quickly, like a spreading crack, like a thin trickle of water down a slope.

  It was the voice of a woman, perhaps, a flexible, firm voice with nasal intonations, with long clear syllables that reverberated in the silence. The voice, in a sense, of eternal woman, with her expressive face framing candid eyes, with her mouth and teeth, with her black hair, with her generous bosom and wide hips. She invaded space, she covered the earth. Wherever one looked, she was there . . . She was dancing barefoot, stretching out her arms, splaying her fingers.

  The music had ceased to be strange. It formed an integral part of everything, its sound issued clearly from the earth, the stunted trees, the old tumbledown walls. It gushed ceaselessly from the sky, floated along with the ball-shaped clouds, arrived at full speed with the light. There was no longer any reason to listen. Or to be far away. One no longer had ears. One was close, face to face with it. The music was long drawn out, no longer had an ending. It had never had a beginning. It was there, infinitely motionless, exactly like an arrow poised in mid-flight.

  That is what the flute was saying, while the little boy squatted, blowing and moving his fingers. That is what it was seeing. The ductile notes had turned into a true gaze, a long gaze of awareness that lingered over the countryside. It came and went, it roamed over the blades of grass, it passed through the branches of bushes, through walls, through people’s bodies. The calm gaze travelled as far as the most distant horizon, and then still farther, it soared into the transparent sky, it played over the cirro-cumulus four miles above the earth, it reached as far as the sun and the invisible stars, it visited all the island-universes fleeing through space. With a single leap it had attained the limits of the real world, had passed through existence like a shiver. The flute’s keen gaze had seen everything. It had travelled effortlessly through human understanding, more rapidly than the millions of competing words, and it was still continuing its journey, farther than time, farther than knowledge, farther than the dizzy spiral in the process of boring its way into a madman’s skull.