Flight is not silence. It is, all of a sudden, an avalanche of noises compounded of rustlings, creakings, murmurs. Flight means talking, no longer with the aim of being understood, but so as to make a noise, one more noise among all the others.
Flight can never be solitude. Rather, it means finding oneself unexpectedly in the incredible crowd with its whirlwinds of movements. I think about rats, and at once I have eight billion brothers. I think about clouds, and there, outlined against the sky’s sphere, I see all my aerial companions floating around me. I think about ants, and from that moment on, it is impossible to be lonely. I think about the grains of sand in the Mojave desert, and I immediately exist in each grain: if you know how many grains of sand there are in the Mojave desert, you will know exactly how many friends I have.
MEANWHILE . . . HOGAN REACHED the coast of the Gulf of California, at a point where an island lay off shore. He scrutinized it, from where he was standing on the beach. On the horizon, the island floated tranquilly, like a big black fish, above the blue and white sea. The air was dry and harsh, and the wind blowing along the dunes sent sand into one’s eyes. Hogan climbed back on to the road and started walking north. He occasionally passed American tourists in shorts, going fishing. On the outskirts of the village there was a brand-new motel with stuccoed walls, a bar, and air-conditioning units blowing scorching air out into the warm air. A little farther on, an old man wearing dirty linen trousers was repainting his delivery-truck blue. On the beach, a group of girls, their skins flushed from sunburn, were uttering piercing shrieks as they splashed about at the edge of the sea. Hogan had slept on the beach and felt tired. When he had woken up, he had seen the island rising there, above the sea, and had decided to go there. That is why he was walking along the beach, in the sun.
This island was called Shark Island. It had been inhabited for centuries by people called Kunkaaks. They had chosen this island because it was the wildest place around, and because the sea gave them additional protection from the marauding of other humans. It was a desert girdled by the sea, a mountain rising sheer out of the water, with just enough stunted shrubs and half-dried-up streams to make survival possible there. At low tide, the island is only a few cable-lengths from the coastline. But when the tide rises, great eddies cut it off as effectively as though a drawbridge had been raised.
There was this island, then, this black mountain with dry cliffs, grey beaches, and deep waters the colour of gasoline. The Kunkaaks lived on the island for part of the year, then went off on fishing expeditions for whole months on end, sailing away in their long, slim boats. When the fishing had been good they continued sailing northward, sometimes as far as the United States frontier, and sold their fish. Then they were away again as suddenly as they had arrived.
Nowadays, there are no more Kunkaaks on Shark Island. It was decided to create a game reserve on the island, for the benefit of millionaires and their high-powered rifles. It was decided to build motels made of concrete and glass, and cocktail bars, and beaches on which girls could get sunburned. The Kunkaaks have been expelled. They have evacuated their island in their long, slim boats, together with their women, their children, their dogs and their cats. But since it was their island, that they had once upon a time chosen for themselves, they have stayed on the coast, right opposite, where the land juts out into the sea and points at the island, and there they wait. They never stop gazing out over the water at the island. Since the Kunkaaks do not like concrete motels, or bars, they are in the process of dying. Not individually, like everyone else: they are dying as a collectivity. They are gradually becoming extinct, untouched by calamities or epidemics or murders, simply fading away.
Hogan walked a long way along the coast, following a path in the sand. About midday, he found himself at the top of a hill, from which he could see the place called Punta Chueco, framed between cacti and scrub. There, fields of dusty bushes slope down towards the sea. Right at the bottom is a sort of ill-defined beach that the sea laps hungrily. A grey sandspit juts out into the water, rather like a finger pointing at the open sea. At the tip of this finger, but separated from it by a blue platform, the island stands motionless. Hogan saw that the spit housed an encampment of tents made from torn sheets of sailcloth stretched over poles. The evidence of poverty, hunger and boredom became increasingly visible as he descended the path towards the village: rubbish littering the beach, rust-eaten food cans, rotted cartons, empty oil-drums, broken pots and pans, fish-heads, tangles of old rope.
The sand is not white. It is not made for the naked feet of young women in bright-coloured bikinis. It is a drab sand made of hard, coarse grains, a sand that yields an unwanted detritus, interspersed with thorny plants. Razor-like blades of grass cut through the salty deposits, and slant in the same direction that the wind blows. Dry rivulets have left their traces in the mud: thousands of furrows that signify old age, solitude and many things of that nature. Wind, rain, and spray from the hostile sea sweep over their patch of ground. The sun beats down upon it with evil rays when the desert wind blows through a cloudless sky. Here, beauty is not beautiful, but bitter and sad. The blueness has nothing gentle to say, has slammed its door on words. Here is what the world thinks and truth does not derive from men, neither from their speech, nor from their books, nor even from their religion. Truth does not derive from men, but from the world, the world. Truth derives from the light that radiates from the sky, the blue sea, the wind, great stretches of sand. The eyes of animals. Truth can be recognized: oscillating, shimmering, black island glowing on the horizon. Even the spoken word does not derive from men, it is in the vast, unendurable blue colour that covers the universe. Mountain-truth, harsh and profound truth, uniquely naked beauty, reign of the eternal verities, of all that touches directly without needing to use fingers.
As for the rest – men, words, ideas: lies, all lies.
In front of Hogan, now, stretches the opaque mass of the greenish water. Behind him, the mountains’ jagged spines bristling with dry scrub. Above him, the naked sky, the weight of purplish-blue air. Nothing, here, offers repose, gentleness, maturity. It is a place that was born with the world itself, fierce and distrustful, a landscape toughened by solitude and aggressiveness.
Hogan began walking down the central alley. Men and women are squatting in the shelter of the rags of spread canvas. Fires are smouldering between piles of stones. Children are sprawling on the sand. Dogs are sniffing round piles of foul muck. A black pig, attached to a cord, goes round and round in a circle. Big boats are lying high and dry, as though resigned to their fate, all along the spit jutting into the open sea. The wind is blowing over the sand, raising invisible clouds that move horizontally and sting the face.
In front of Hogan, a man has risen to his feet and is walking along with great strides. His long black hair floats out behind him and flaps back against his face. Inside the tents, women are suckling babies, cooking food in earthenware pots, gnawing scraps, waiting, looking straight ahead. Dogs with arched backs are running around, their noses to the ground. The nasal sound of music from a transistor radio spurts from the dark depths of a tent set a little apart from the others. Then the music stops, and a man’s voice begins speaking very fast in Spanish, talking about all sorts of things that no one can understand.
This is how the hours pass, each day, on the sandspit jutting out into the sea. The long, senseless hours and the shadows move in a regular rhythm over the grains of sand and over the thorny plants. Cormorants skim the water, skipping over the waves’ rollers.
Along the sand, beside the beached boats, the men gaze at the sea. Right in front of their eyes, the heavy mass of the Isle of Sharks drifts without moving. The men and women have learned to decipher the form of each peak, the grey mark of each bay, the site of each tuft of grass. They have learned to see from afar what they had once touched with their own hands. They have learned not to desire any longer what they see. In the distance, the island sails over the sparkling water, truly inaccessible
, truly unreal, like a steamboat about to cast off. The men are sitting on the beach, their long black hair floating on their backs. They have learned to remain seated beside their decaying boats, and wait for the sun to sink towards the island’s summits.
The tides swell the sea, then drain it away into the Infernillo straits. But the sea never drains away sufficiently for the island suddenly to become attached to the tongue of sand stretched out towards it. The wind blows in from the open sea, the wind of the sea’s desert. It never brings a twig or a speck of dust or an odour from the land that lies over there, on the other side.
Standing in front of his canvas house, in which his wife and his child are squatting, wrapped in blankets, the Kunkaak has drawn himself up to his full height. He looks at Hogan. The skin of his face is brown, almost black, and wrinkles radiate from his thick mouth. On his arched nose are perched a pair of dark glasses given him one day by a marauding German anthropologist. Behind the tinted lenses the narrow eyes stare at him intently. The wind ruffles the man’s clothes, bends the rim of his broken hat. The thick jet-black hair is braided into two plaits which hang down his back, over his white shirt and as far as his belt; the ends of the plaits are tied with red ribbons.
When he speaks, his voice is hesitant, husky. He tells Hogan what life had been like on the island when the sea yielded great hauls of fish. He shows him the place where he used to get fresh water before going away for several weeks. Then he describes how policemen, armed with rifles, came and told them to go. He says: ‘There, there, and there, they are going to make fine houses. Fine houses.’ He walks down to the beach, stooping. Then he stands, facing the sea, and looks. His copper mask registers no emotion of any kind. The two eyes hidden by the sunglasses gaze without hatred, without sorrow. The wide mouth remains closed, the nostrils inhale regularly. There is neither sorrow nor desire. The wind beats against his shirt and his trousers, and the naked feet are planted on the cold sand like two chunks of stone. There is no more desire, no more future. The male Kunkaak looks at the island, over there, on the other side of the stretch of water. He sees the waves advancing, one behind the other, sending out reflections like ground glass, and he looks at them, too, because they come from the island. Then he looks once more at the enormous silhouette floating on the sea, at each detail of the outline that he learned by heart many years ago. More distant than a star, ugly, black, deserted, the island emerges from the waves like a steamboat riding at anchor, like a huge, shadowy animal filled with indifference and sadness.
A FEW DAYS later, Hogan entered a town where automobiles reigned. This town was at the top of a mountain, in the bottom of a basin lost in the earth’s silence, a vast city marked out by straight boulevards, and by row upon row of little square houses. Neither men, nor birds, nor trees were to be seen in this town: only streets, grey asphalt channels through which the automobiles sped at seventy miles an hour.
It had all happened suddenly: the vehicles had taken over the town, one day, and now they never stopped still for a moment. They hurtled down the forty-mile-long avenues, they vanished into tunnels, they crossed bridges, they went round traffic circles. Sometimes, in the middle of the boulevards, a red light glowed on top of a pylon, and all the vehicles obeyed. Human silhouettes hastened to cross over in front of the snarling bonnets. On the other side of the street, another long line of vehicles whizzed by, plunging between the rows of houses. Then, the red light suddenly went out and a green light glowed on top of the pylon; and it was as though some huge change had occurred in the world.
The vehicles had won their war. They were there, lording it over the country that they had conquered with their steel breastplates and rubber wheels. They passed between the houses, by thousands, making their grumbling noises. They were charged with menace. Hogan watched them as he strolled along the sidewalk; he knew quite well what they wanted. They wanted to kill him. One day, no doubt, they would finally achieve this aim. They were utterly ruthless. Old women, wrapped in their shawls, crossed the streets with short steps. And suddenly the steel bonnet snatched at them, broke their bones, dragged their shattered bodies along in the gutter.
Here, life revolved around these machines. Hogan walked along a dusty avenue that was divided down its centre by a raised strip in which willows grew. On each side, to the left and the right, lines of cars and trucks passed, whistling and yelling. Clouds of exhaust gas more terrible than clouds of flies floated down the avenue. As Hogan walked along, he looked at all the corpses of dogs that were rotting away on the centre strip of ground. There were hundreds of them, sprawled out on the yellowing grass, their bellies swollen, their stiff paws raised skyward. The vehicles felt a need to kill. It was their function. If they did not kill dogs, they would kill men. That is why, at night-time, the men amused themselves playing the game of dogs and trucks.
They sit by the side of the road, smoking cigarettes and drinking tequila out of a greasy tumbler. They hold a dog between their hands. And when a truck approaches, a gigantic truck with headlamps like balls of fire, racing along and making the ground tremble under its fourteen tyres, when the truck is almost there, just a few yards away, they hurl the dog into its path. Some dogs scramble to their feet and gallop along in front of the truck, howling with fright. Some just stand there, watching the dazzling headlamps grow enormous. Some see nothing; having landed sideways, they start investigating the shoulders of the road, to see what is going on there. The trucks’ bonnets roar, their tyres flatten themselves against the ground with liquid noises. The dogs have all sorts of different ways of dying. Some leap high into the air, their paws splayed out. Some open up like fruit, some squash flat like pancakes. Some emit piercing shrieks, while the bodies of others reverberate like drums. Some even escape death by crouching down as the rows of tyres pass on either side, and then scuttling off into some wasteland in the depths of the night.
Hogan tried to recognize the names of the vehicles as they passed. He recited them in a low voice, while their great, heavy, shining metal frames sped on down the avenue.
‘1955 sky-blue Chevrolet’
‘Dodge Dart’
‘1960 wine-red Studebaker’
‘Ford Mustang’
‘Red Volkswagen’
‘White Chevrolet Impala’
They were all names of the cuirass-clad soldiers who had, conquered the town. They had subdued it with their wheels, with their scorching engines and with their chrome-plated bumpers, and for the present the town belonged to them.
Hogan walked for a long time in the streets where the automobiles were swarming. He crossed streets between the bonnets, he listened to the terrifying din which rose and enveloped the houses and trees. He gazed at all the harsh reflections on the metal shells, he looked in all the shop windows, white or blue, that caught the sun’s glare.
Buses passed, close in to the sidewalk, with screeching noises. They carried their engines at the back, in the open, and one could see everything, the cylinders, the fan, the leads. In the cabins with hot metal walls, people were jammed together in clusters, their arms hooked to the roof. The hanging clusters of people swayed to and fro each time the brakes were applied. Hogan stopped at a street corner and watched the buses come along. Some of them were very beautiful, square, with gleaming chrome plating and tinted windowpanes. Others were decrepit, with glassless windows, lurching along in the midst of a cloud of blue smoke, their metal panels wrenching apart at each jolt. One could climb into any one of these buses, adhere to the mass of arms and legs, and let oneself be carried away to unknown places. The wide-fronted machines permitted every kind of parasite to enter their body. They carried them without even noticing, too busy making their motors screech into the surrounding air, too busy banging with their tyres against the pot-holes in the roadway. They carried strange names, which were their own names, written above the windshield: RIO MIXCOAC, TLANEPANTLA, ZOCALO, OCOYOACAC, RIO ABAJO, COYOACAN, NETZAHUALCOYOTL. When a bus drew up, carrying the name NAUCALPAN, Hogan climbed i
nto it.
At the end of all the streets dedicated to vehicles, after having changed buses twice, after having passed all those houses with closed shutters, after having seen all those faces, there was this terrible zone, this great area of silence and dust, where Hogan lived. He had decided to make his home there, for a little while, because there were no more roads or vehicles here, only paths gouged out by rainstorms, clay hills, gullies, and tin shacks. It was known as Shantytown.
For miles on end, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but these dirt hillocks covered with huts, and silence weighed heavily over the scene. Now Hogan began climbing a path that rose steeply. He scaled the chunks of dried mud, the boulders, the stair treads hollowed out of the earth by feet. He found breathing difficult, perhaps because of the silence. The rest of the town stretched out behind him, right to the horizon, a grey sea in which, here and there, white skyscrapers glittered. He passed brick houses from which swarthy women glanced out at him furtively. He crossed fields of compressed dust. The path climbed to the top of the hill. All around him he could see other identical hills, with their cubes built of clay bricks and their corrugated iron roofs.
Perhaps it was a cemetery filled with many-coloured tombs. But the dead still lived: he could see them everywhere, walking along silently, crossing wasteland, jogging down steep slopes, climbing abrupt paths with buckets of water in their hands. It was a cemetery in which dogs roamed freely in search of bones and orange peel. Groups of dust-coloured children ran around between the tombs, piercing the silence with their shrill yells. Higher up, Hogan walked along a sort of terrace overhanging the dry bed of a stream. Casemates bristled everywhere, serried rows of them from which there was no hope of escaping. They had dug themselves into the earth with invisible claws, and nothing could tear them out. They had sprung up on every conceivable site: along the sides of the hills, on the slopes, on slight protuberances, in holes, on the edges of holes, on the sides of holes. Some were balanced precariously on the very edge of gullies, ready to crash down at the first tremor or the first rainstorm. Others were flattened out at the bottom of crevasses, imprisoned within a crater of dust. Yet others had sprouted on the faces of steep cliffs, and day by day leaned a little farther out into space. They were all similar, and yet never absolutely identical. There was always something intangible, some trifling little detail that was not apparent at first glance; the house’s true identity was provided by a patch of rust on the roof, or else a bit of cardboard inscribed in red letters with a phrase such as GAS INC, or ATLANTIS, or perhaps an old crate, a green plastic door, a fuel-can for water, a truck tyre being used as a seat by an old woman. These characteristics served the same purpose as the bunch of flowers or the plastic wreath on the tombstone, indicating that these walls harboured living people, people that had not stopped breathing yet.
The Book of Flights Page 20