The Book of Flights

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  The alley was unpaved, muddy patches alternating with the dusty surface as it wound its way through lines of grey brick hovels and the shells of tin shacks. As he progressed, Young began to see silhouettes appear. They loomed up suddenly from open doorways, ominous, stunted figures that vanished again immediately like ghosts. There was no noise, except for the occasional blare of music announcing some radio commercial, coming from transistors at the back of the shacks. And groups of children ran up and down the path, yelling, disappearing into invisible backyards. Young looked at the walls of the houses, the tin roofs. Sometimes an open window projected its blurred image towards him as he passed by: the floating shapes of two or three women eating round a table on which lay a naked child.

  Or else, at the back of a cell-like dwelling so white that it seemed to have no roof, there was a brief glimpse of a young woman dressed in a long robe, combing her black hair with great, slow motions, from the crown of her head down to her hips; and for a few seconds, walking along the alley, Young Man Hogan could see nothing but that girl, that hair, so long that it covered her face and half her body, and that naked arm coming and going, sweeping downward, slowly, gravely, royally.

  Somewhere in one of these shanties, under the corrugated tin roof where lizards scuttle, an old woman called Min was dying, lying on her side on a straw mat.

  Farther away, a woman was in labour, in the corner of a room, her two hands gripping her sister’s wrists, uttering cries of pain. But all that meant nothing, it was like dust, household dust or the grit on pathways.

  Young Man Hogan turned right and walked along another alley. Then he turned left into yet another alley. And right, and left, and right again, and there were always more alleys ahead of him. The houses were never identical, there was always some minute difference, the shape of the bricks, for example, or the colour of the rusted sheets of tin, or else in the appearance of the pile of garbage beside the door.

  After an hour, Young Man Hogan found himself in a slightly wider street, full of taverns. The doors in the brick walls were closed by canvas curtains, from behind which seeped a noise blended of music and upraised voices. Young dawdled past the fronts of the bars, trying to see what was going on inside. When he reached the end of the street, he saw a tavern on the opposite side, with its door curtain pulled back a little. He crossed over and looked inside. But the interior was pitch-dark. Music was blaring somewhere inside the building, and men were yelling drunkenly. He was about to go away when a man emerged, a skinny little man in a sweat-stained shirt, who whispered something into his ear. Young followed him inside the tavern. The man showed him to an iron table at the back of the room, and brought him a bottle of beer. When his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, Young saw that there were not many other people in the room. A few drunks were asleep, with their heads slumped on table tops. The music was filled with the buzz of frantic flies, but the flies themselves could not be seen. Young drank straight from the bottle and listened to the music.

  After a moment the skinny little man in the sweat-stained shirt returned and beckoned him to follow. Young crossed the room behind him. The skinny little man opened a door giving on to a kind of yard that had a row of wooden latrine huts down one side. On the opposite side, the little man stopped in front of a tin-roofed shed. He pushed the door open and beckoned Young to go in. When Young entered the shed he saw that it was a sort of a theatre, with a lot of people sitting on benches made from old crates. The shed was as dark as the bar-room had been, except at the far end where a wooden stage was lit by three big electric lamps. The skinny little man escorted Young to the fifth row and showed him his place. Before going, he demanded a few dollars which he promptly stuffed into his trouser pocket.

  The shed echoed with the sound of the raucous music coming from a record player. In the room, the men waited, sitting on the benches, talking, smoking marijuana, drinking beer from cans. The air was heavy and sluggish. Little rays of daylight filtered through the boarded-up windows, and danced in the smoke. The heat was suffocating, and Young Man Hogan felt the sweat oozing from his back and armpits, trickling down his temples. The atmosphere was more oppressive than down a coalmine, 2,000 feet underground. The air pressed down on the face and throat, crushed the lungs like a rubber ball, forced the eyelids to close over the eyes. One was the prisoner of an endless nightmare, but it was worse than a nightmare. The men sat listlessly on their benches, mopping the back of their necks with dirty handkerchiefs. Young saw their eyes glitter in the depths of their glowing faces. The music sputtered between the brick walls, a music made meaningless by the sheer din it was creating, the chief feature being a constant thunder of drumbeats. At the far end of the shed the three light bulbs threw their splashes of violent light like three drops of molten lead swimming in the air. Beneath them the stage was bare. At each side of the white rectangle the linen curtains were motionless. Young began to stare hard at the light, as though that had been the promised show; for several minutes on end he screwed up his eyes and studied the three sparkling stars. Then he tried smoking a cigarette, but he choked and had to stub it out on the ground after only one puff. From time to time the music stopped and a terrible silence welled up inside the shed. Then someone invisible put the same record on again, and the screeching noises and heavy drumbeat recommenced.

  Suddenly, the curtain to the right of the stage began to undulate, and all eyes turned in that direction. The music blared out even louder, the light bulbs sent out a dazzling blaze of light. The curtain was drawn aside and a heavily-built woman appeared. She walked barefoot over the floorboards that sagged under her weight, and up to the centre of the stage without looking at a soul. On the benches made from crates the men leaned forward, their dripping faces shining in the light. The music had reached a shattering crescendo, soaring up out of control. The air pressed down on the backs of people’s necks, throwing bronze-coloured patches on to the floor of beaten earth. Layers of smoke wavered between the brick walls and swirled against the tin roof. The woman was motionless on the stage, and one could see the thick outlines of her body, her dress of flowered cotton, her pudgy arms, her flat-skulled head with its frizzy black hair. She did not move. The light from the three light bulbs illuminated her violently, reflecting back from her sweating brown skin. The music beat against her, too, great drumbeats on her head, frantic screeches hurling themselves at the red and green flowers of her dress. Her naked feet with splayed toes were set flatly, heavily on the floorboards. This scene lasted hours, there, underground, at the bottom of the coalmine, far from the sun and the free air, far from the sea, far from the bird-filled trees. It lasted months, like a motionless voyage in the bowels of the earth, like a dream where thought and desire have been obliterated. It remained fixed on the retina like the image of the young woman combing her long coal-black hair at the back of the roofless white cell. The men looked at the stout woman standing on the stage, they said nothing, and the sweat trickled down, making detours round their eyes. They looked at the cotton dress with its red and green flowers twisting round in spirals, they looked at the two naked feet on the floorboards, the pudgy arms dangling along the hips. They said nothing. No one said anything. The music said nothing: it shrieked its sounds so loudly that they were like heaps of bricks thudding on to the ground. The men went on looking, in the suffocating heat, and what they were looking for was perhaps simply air, great gulps of air to drink. In the sealed shed, everything had turned into desperate expectation, hatred of the time that refuses to come, hatred of the too-white light, criminal intent, perhaps, criminal intent against the stout, ugly woman who refused to move.

  Then, all of a sudden, everything happened very quickly. Between two or three flashes from the light bulbs, between two or three palls of dingy smoke, the men sitting on the benches saw the stout woman lift her dress up over her head. The music grated, banged its drums, deafeningly. The stout woman bent forward, with her cotton dress around her head. She went down on all fours, on the floor. The ligh
t beat upon her hideous body. Now there is a huge Alsatian dog on the stage. It comes forward, barking, bounding over the boards that sag under its weight. It runs through the patch of sizzling light, and it cries:

  ‘Haw! Haw! Haw!’ And the music shakes the shed to pieces while the dog hurls itself upon the kneeling woman and covers her with its rearing body. The obsessive image will remain fixed on the retina for a long time, while already the stout woman is getting up and pulling down her green and red flowered dress, and the same skinny little man comes to fetch the dog and lead it back toward the curtain beside the stage. The image of insanity and humiliation, the violence of the dazzling light, the loathsomeness of the moist flesh and the rapid beauty of the great dog with hard muscles. Now the stage is empty again. The men get up one after the other, try to shake off their torpor by pretending to laugh. But in their sunken eyes, on their foreheads dripping with sweat, there are ineluctable traces of something like a great unavowable fear.

  All of a sudden the music has been cut off. Emptiness has entered the shed, has chased the crowd of spectators out by the door. Cigarettes are lit up, bottles of beer are tilted towards mouths. The night is very near, now. In the tavern’s dark room one crosses the path of the crowd of men going to watch the next performance. Then one is again walking along the alleys, through the great hollow shantytown. Perhaps one has passed by the silent house where Min is in the throes of dying on her mat, coughing a lingering cough. Perhaps one has forgotten all one knew, and is empty, empty, empty. One has never been so far from the earth, and at the same time so utterly upon the earth. The fact is that there are not a thousand ways of being alive, there are not a thousand words to say one is alive.

  There was nothing much more to do here. Young Man Hogan left this town as quickly as he could. The scene was Macao, or Manilla, or else Taipeh, during the year 1967. If my memory serves me.

  SELF-CRITICISM

  I WANTED TO write an adventure story, no, it’s true, I really did. Well, too bad, I shall have failed, that’s all. Adventures bore me. I have no idea how to talk about countries, how to make people wish they had been there. I am not a good travelling salesman. Countries? Where are they, whatever became of them?

  When I was twelve I dreamed of Hongkong. That tedious, commonplace little provincial town! Shops sprouting from every nook and cranny! The Chinese junks pictured on the lids of chocolate boxes used to fascinate me. Junks: sort of chopped-off barges, where the housewives do all their cooking and washing on deck. They even have television. As for the Niagara Falls: water, nothing but water! A dam is more interesting; at least one can occasionally see a big crack at its base, and hope for some excitement.

  When one travels, one sees nothing but hotels. Squalid rooms, with iron bedsteads, and a picture of some kind hanging on the wall from a rusty nail, a coloured print of London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower.

  One also sees trains, lots of trains, and airports that look like restaurants, and restaurants that look like morgues. All the ports in the world are hemmed in by oil slicks and shabby customs buildings. In the streets of the towns, people keep to the sidewalks, cars stop at red lights. If only one occasionally arrived in a country where women are the colour of steel and men wear owls on their heads. But no, they are sensible, they all have black ties, partings to one side, brassières and stiletto heels. In all the restaurants, when one has finished eating one calls over the individual who has been prowling among the tables, and pays him with a promissory note. There are cigarettes everywhere! There are airplanes and automobiles everywhere!

  I wanted to flee by going farther than myself. I wanted to visit countries where no one speaks, countries where it is the dogs that write novels, not men in horn-rimmed glasses. I wanted to get to know countries where the roads peter out voluntarily, where people are greater than thoughts, brand-new countries, lands of uncertainty where one could die without shame, without anyone noticing. I wanted places where fires blaze night and day for years on end, where the tide rises and never ebbs again, where the lakes empty out like enormous washbasins.

  I wanted to write, too, to write in a single session some stirring tale, a woman’s quest, for example, or the revolutionary struggle. That’s what a real adventure story would have been, not this trembling, this additional agitation among so many, in the middle of the wobbling world.

  I had worked out the plan, I had written it down with a pen on a sheet of paper:

  The end of the world

  POEM

  Adventure story

  Hogan is run out of town. He can no longer understand why people stay in the same place all their lives. What holds together all the inhabitants of a city?

  Why is he fleeing? When did it all start off?

  Crime? Shame? Love? Revolution?

  The landscapes, constant change of landscape. Imaginary journey? If so, what difference? Or else: fixed route.

  The obsession with INHABITING. (To be at home, to be comfortable . . .) The dizziness of movement: dizziness of life. No stopping any longer. Like a speeding train, like . . . To be out in the open. Dizziness of expansion. To fill a vacuum, to be bigger, to be everywhere. To live everywhere. To love everywhere. To be a part. Apart . . .

  The town has become unbearable. Hogan has to leave. Everything is hideous: buildings, bridges, highways and streets, stretches of old crumbling walls, roofs that have caved in, mean lights, mocking eyes, the indecent laughter of hyenas.

  Got to flee, but where?

  And how? In space, in time.

  What boundary will set the limit?

  The greatest, most ancient of all quests: of a habitat.

  Find the place that will preserve one’s peace of mind, keep one alive.

  Walk quietly, calmly toward things.

  Walk toward the most precise image of oneself.

  In search of a landscape that should be a face.

  In search of the eyes, nose, mouth of a woman (LAURA); in search, yes, of a country that should be a body. America, Africa, Asia, Australia, the Oceans: does all that exist? Can one even cross them? Farewell, territories, trees, faces. Leave. Yield to the secret summons that says: be off!

  The person who obeys and goes, not to discover other places, not even to reach a better understanding of himself, but simply to flee from the one unendurable aspect of the vertical position: hatred of death.

  Bare landscapes.

  Cold earth under an empty sun.

  Warmth, moistness, air pressure.

  Delight of familiar retreats.

  Smell of the seasons.

  Sound of the sea.

  Sound of crazed towns.

  Roads, roads, all the roads.

  Handwritings.

  Ancient dream that one has not forgotten, that one

  cannot forget: crossing the horizon.

  Dizziness of simple actions.

  Nearing the far edge of the world.

  Hatred of the loneliness of words. Words like

  iron nails, words that are habits.

  Comprehension of the earth. The language of

  places, the itineraries.

  Or: the march toward the sun

  A few places that resemble hell: LONDON,

  NEW YORK, NEW DELHI, NICE;

  BANGKOK, LIMA, MEXICO CITY

  Hogan leaves the place where he is staying.

  But flight for me too as the writer.

  Flight from woman. Flight through eroticism.

  Steady series of resignations.

  Self-awareness: summons from self-awareness. Search. Truth in ceaseless movement, in distraction. Unity condemns. Plunged into disparity, in search of the anonymous.

  Flight

  escape

  evasion

  The art of traps runaway

  fugitive

  refugee

  deserter

  avoiding

  shunning

  dodging

  running

  route

  wheel

  the
book of flights

  Mixture of chapters of fiction

  and poems. Free-ranging meditation

  (Reflections, notes, key words,

  signals, logbook)

  Beware of that yoke, system!

  Fascination of the modern world: ugliness. Fear. Violence. Beauty. Fleeing figure: from the singular to dozens of persons, then to the crowd, then to nothing.

  Or: scrap the idea of a plan.

  Write as it comes.

  Alternate.

  Let it run out of oneself.

  Poem! Tale! Thought! Dialogue!

  ETC.!

  That is more or less what I wanted to do. Now I can gauge the distance separating me from my waking dream. I see a desert, a misty plain, just where there should have been a mountain peak, black against the silky sky. I must be careful. I must stab the stupid butterflies to death with pins. I am not a cat, I do not want to purr. I refuse to surrender to mirages, I do not want to smile. Why do I never give the names of the places, or the people? What am I afraid of?

  System, repulsive system is there, lying in wait for me. It wants to make me kneel down, or raise my fist. It wants to teach me to possess houses and cars and, of course, women. I want no part of it. I have nothing. So it wants to make me possess destitution. Watch out, there, for style, for words that sound well, for beautiful shock-imagery: it is nothing more than a collision between two motor-scooters! Watch out, there, for metaphysics, for symbols, for psychology! There are so many things to say, beautiful, stupid, interminable things! I would like to write for a thousand years. Watch out, there, for the gaze that begins to waver. If he relaxes, if he stops, for a split second even, everything will collapse. It is the world that will be looking at him.