The Book of Flights

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Hogan looked at the variegated warts that had sprung up on the face of the earth; from the top of his hill he watched the columns of smoke drifting skyward.

  Then he stopped and sat down on a stone, and he too created smoke, by means of a cigarette. And since he had nothing to do, since he really had all the time in the world, he sank into thought:

  Thoughts by young Man Hogan

  while surveying Barrio Colorado

  the town just outside Naucalpan

  that looked like a cemetery

  ‘Maybe I’ll stop there, you know. Maybe. It’s an extraordinary place, with lots of hills and valleys. The most extraordinary thing of all is the dust. It is fine and grey, you can’t see it but it covers everything. Even the water here must be made of dust. The dust never stops sliding down from the tops of the hills toward the town, it floats through the air in very long streaks. It has even replaced the clouds. It penetrates everywhere. It is in the food one eats and the water one drinks. It lines the bottom of the throat when one inhales. Isn’t that extraordinary? Everything one tastes has the taste of dust. The cigarettes one smokes are full of it. The other day, I had bought a can of apricots in syrup, because, after all, one still needs the occasional luxury. I opened the can: it was filled with dust. There is so much dust here that if vacuum cleaners had been invented yet they would be choked to death in a few seconds. This dust pays no attention to the wind. Whether there is any wind or not, it floats calmly, unhurriedly, in the air, settling down, then making off again. I think it must be alive. It is almost weightless: light, so very light. If one looked at it under a microscope, perhaps one would see that it has wings and legs. Or perhaps one would see that it does not exist, that it is simply in the imagination. Not everybody likes the dust. There are some people who wear things like handkerchiefs over their mouths when they are out of doors. But I’m really fond of the dust. I inhale as much of it as possible. I am never so happy as when I am coughing or sneezing. And then, the dust is a good thing. One is never alone when it’s around. It is there, always drawing attention discreetly to the fact that it is there. It makes sure that one forgets nothing, that one remembers every second, that one always knows where one is, what one is doing. The dust is truly my friend. It does me so many good turns. For one thing, it swallows up the noises that I don’t need. When there is a rather loud noise, a child’s cry, an explosion, an alarm siren, the dust spreads over it and swallows it up. The noises become grey, then turn into ashes. And the dust swallows up the light that I don’t need. It makes a pall in front of the sun and absorbs the fierce rays. Thanks to the dust, the sun is always like the glowing tip of a cigarette. Visible but harmless: an extraordinary object, an object made of dust. And at night-time, the night is never really black. It is grey. And when the weather turns cold, the dust makes an extra covering around me, it stops up all the holes in my skin. I can tell you all the extraordinary things that the dust knows how to do: it makes mirrors grow dim; it puts out small outbreaks of fire; it keeps the hair matted when the wind blows; it is nourishing, like flour; it slows up the mechanism of watches; it keeps mosquitoes away; it gives flavour to the water; it makes a carpet at the bottom of shoes; it polishes women’s skin; it dirties the lenses of spectacles; it stops car engines; it conceals messes; it destroys cobwebs; it fills up cracks; it prevents people from looking at each other; it eats up old newspapers; it makes people want to die, or go to sleep; it wears away jagged boulders; it uproots useless weeds, brambles and trees; it hides the stars; it makes a halo round the moon; it wipes out footsteps; and so many more things besides.’

  Hogan shifted his position on the rock he was sitting on, and stretched his legs out in front of him. He looked at the grey town, the millions of houses spread out before him. He thought:

  ‘Maybe I’ll stay on here, yes, for a very long time. I didn’t tell you that from where I live one can see the sea. Not from the windows, there aren’t any. But if you stand at the door, you can see the hill sloping down, in front of you, with its shacks made of planks and tin sheeting. And right at the end, you can see the sea. It is a great grey-blue sea with great white rocks sticking up vertically through its surface. In this sea, cars are speeding along straight roads with asphalt surfaces, although from where I am they are invisible. At sunrise and sunset, beautiful light-effects spread over the sea, red glints and violet patches. It is most impressive. I had always dreamed of having a house like that, with a view of the sea from the top of a hill. I can sit in front of the door and watch the sea while smoking a cigarette or drinking a cup of Nescafé, and I can hear the sound of the waves. It is a very distant noise, a continuous low rumbling coming from the sea and reaching the tops of the hills. If I feel like it, I can have conversations with people while looking at the sea and listening to it. Sometimes a procession of men and donkeys passes by my home. They are Otomis on their way back from market, returning to their mountains without a glance for anyone on the way. Their faces are closed like masks, and as they climb the path they urge their donkeys on by making peculiar noises with their mouths. The sky here is limpid and soft, because of the dust. Everything is so dry that time seems stationary. Everything is so quiet that it always seems to be the same hour. You, though, you can never have had those sensations. You live in a town which I do not know. You go to the movies. You are continually getting in and out of cars. You go off to work in offices filled with leather. Whereas, during all that time, I am living in a precise pattern. I have my hut, on top of a hill. I am not expecting anyone. I have my cube of dust. When night falls, the sea down there lights up with thousands of little lamps. Some of them move, the rest are stationary. It is marvellous to be able to see such extraordinary things without needing to leave one’s own home.

  That is what I have to think about: the idea of staying here, or in a similar place. The dust will never drive me out. When one lives in a cemetery, one doesn’t have far to go to die. When a man comes into the world he is entitled to about 14,400 days and 14,400 nights. There are so many things to see, so many things to do, so many things to say, from the top of this hill, that it quite takes my breath away. And one can see so far beyond the mountains and the barriers of walls that emptiness can no longer possibly exist anywhere. Let us never again mention the indecent word truth. I talk about dust because I do not know how to talk about this man whom I met the other day. He, his wife and his three children had been walking for months, to get to this town. His handsome face was thin and intelligent. He was cradling their youngest child, a two-year-old boy, in his arms. He and the children were all barefoot. When I had given them something to eat, none of them said thank you. They ate quickly; even the two-year-old ate quickly. Then, since they were tired, they stretched out on the ground, just where they were, and went to sleep. The man smoked a cigarette before going to sleep. He said he was going to stay in the town to work. He told how they had been chased off their land and told to go to this town. He said he was going to stay here, in this cemetery-town. He had eyes that taught you something. Not eyes to kill you with a glance. But eyes that could teach you something. Now I know. Before saving the world, before becoming the spokesman of the poor, I want to stay here in this place, and live for 122 years so that I can understand.’

  Y. M. H.

  Stupid ugliness of scruffy towns spread over the ground! Loneliness of wretched streets, wretched wastelands! Casemates! Prisons made of red brick walls, leprous backyards, tin and cardboard shacks! Great heaps of filth! Nothing to be done about it, nothing to be done but look and suffer. The silent malady has taken hold. Malady of sadness and fear. It marks the skin with its big, brown blotches, it has left its trail of fever pustules and agues. Joyless cities, cities of the destitute in the cold air of five o’clock in the morning. Streets that no one has had time to tar, trees that have not had the time to grow, polluted rivers that have not had the time to obtain water! Patches of humiliation, drab spaces where the sunlight is merely an additional dullness. Nights without lamps!
Each day they pour in: cowed men, women, children wearing woollen rags. They squat in the corners of huts, under the arches of bridges. They light fires with bits of broken crates. Then, first on one hill, then on others, they start building more mud huts, top them off with bits of metal sheeting, put stones around the edges of the roofs to stop them from blowing away. Sleeping towns. Tapeworm towns casting out their dead rings. The building sites are frozen into immobility. The walls come to a halt. There are mountains of sand, himalayas of black earth and scrap metal. Great empty districts where people prowl rather than walk. Razed tracts of ground, cold plains crossed only by the trains and trucks. Evil places where the wind whistles and the dust grates, places that are blotches of shadow, blotches of rust, blotches of oil: innumerable blotches. Places where everything has been used and reused countless times! Battered jalopies lie shipwrecked in broken-down sheds. And the people sleep in their doorless, windowless shells, curled up on their greasy mattresses. Ghost towns where one never expects anything. The grey here is a murderous grey! Square miles of gloomy silence, square miles of nothingness! Towns where people do not wash! Towns where people do not eat! Towns where people do not read or speak! Great hollow cisterns in which nothing happens! These are places where the adventures are called ratadis, croup, tuberculosis, smallpox, nutritional deficiency, typhoid. There are no hours. The mind is coiled up in a ball: it is neither asleep, nor awake, simply elsewhere. Inexhaustible recitation of solitudes, maladies, sadnesses: absence of location, location that cannot be seen. There are these circles of emptiness around the glittering towns, circles that have dug their trenches, squeezed their rings tight. Everything might very well topple into these gulfs and disappear. What the towns reject is emptiness, and the excrements of emptiness pile up around the towns, encircle them. Places fated to remain perpetually foreign, places without nationality or language. They are the rims of the crater. They are rings of jetsam, and the traveller passes through them without noticing. Fringe of dirty foam, soapy froth, rings of dirt. In the closed cabins, the smoke spreads out and trickles through the cracks under the doors, the smoke of cold and hunger. Armies of rats race through the night. The living skeletons of dogs spin round and round in the vacant lots. Towns where people gnaw away! Sacks full of old papers, mounds of earth-coloured bones, black oil-drums. City of junkmen and ragpickers! Everything is lost, everything has been submerged beneath oblivion and hatred. The chimneys of the glowing factories manufacture smoke. In the centre of the grey deserts, the silver spaceships squat, without ever soaring away. These places are gasholders, oil tanks, cold metal reservoirs gleaming in the sun. Tubes traverse the air, electric cables sag. These places surely do not possess a word for hope, or for despair. Only a slow word for the waiting process, a word destined to last for centuries. Hunger gnaws at stomachs. Hunger is a third eye, a sort of pineal eye keeping watch from the summit of human brows. Sometimes, an unreal airplane glides along, high in the sky. Its shadow flies over the mud huts, makes the children blink, undulates along the tin roofs, and the harsh noise of its jet engines fills the emptiness. Concrete bridges span these dim zones, soaring over paths where the mud never dries. Thousands of vehicles stream over the bridges, and the wind buffets them as they speed away from the unsavoury environment. The important thing is to forget. To get away, right away. But is it possible? How to erase one’s knowledge of all this? How to contrive a return to the sparkling shops, the movie houses, the bars, the churches gleaming with varnish? Committed, uncommitted: meaningless words. How to contrive an interest in abstract effigies, in language, in the reasoning of a thought process that feels no pangs of hunger? Is that really where flight is bound to find its goal? How to contrive to remain apart from all of this, now, so as to create revolutions out of flags and books, so as to believe in a God who is not ugly? Curse emanating from subterranean towns, towns that people hide away. One discovers them at random, one day, and knows one will never forget them. Each day, the brown blotches spread farther. They spread over dead skins, they slither backward, they drag away toward oblivion . . . The grey blotches hurt, they squeeze, they sink their empty wells around human consciousness. All the blotches are silent. They make no noise. They ask for nothing more than space, sheet metal, mud, rats. They proclaim nothing. They do not march in the streets. They have no ideas, no words, no images. They are nothing but slabs of silence, trenches, tumbledown walls. Those who inhabit them are not trying to make conquests. They are merely children, there to people the emptiness, to multiply emptiness. They are foreigners. They speak languages that no one understands, they are hungry: not for a meal or a snack, but hungry for thousands, for millions of meals. They do not die: they disappear. They do not make love: they couple quickly, attaching no importance to the act. They do not breathe. They are not there. Poverty. Strained look that never penetrates but darts from one wall to another. The inhabitants of the blotches have faces like blotches, and eyes like pebbles. Air-planes were not made for them. The highways were not made for them. Neither electric wires, nor trees, nor underground drains were made for them. What really is made for them is rusty scrap metal, broken cartons, bits of glass, gashed tyres, the rain, the cold, the burning sun, the silence of wastelands. And also, dogs with protruding ribs, dust turning into mud, the odours of gas and garbage. And the trucks that drive over the bumpy road, stopping in front of each cube of tin and brick to sell cans of grimy water at prices that make watering a pot of geraniums more extravagant than owning a swimming-pool; water so expensive that after people have brushed their teeth they wash their hands with the water they have just spat out. Dead towns, cemetery towns, towns in ruins even before you have been built, it is your turn now! Go on, avenge yourselves! Avenge yourselves!

  Grey sky

  Grey town

  All there, today, thousands of grey walls

  Prison town, fortress town, town motionless under the sky

  I know you:

  I have nothing more to tell you

  In the whole wide world there is only a single town

  A single giant house

  Four concrete walls

  A zinc roof

  Windows, doors

  A woman is walking

  Over the macadamized surface

  Where can she be going?

  Where can she be going?

  With a measured pace that sets her hips swaying

  There is nothing certain on her face

  What one can read on her face

  On the skin of her legs

  Is:

  WALLS

  Town, O Towns that are never seen

  Towns without contours

  May I live in you?

  City of the dead

  Mighty palaces built for wars

  Towns laden with artificial trees

  Explorations by pigeons and rats

  There are women

  There are men

  There are dogs which make their kennels in the holes of your walls

  Towns, wait for me

  I am coming, I am going to come, I may possibly come

  I shall visit you

  One cannot really talk of you, towns

  O Nineveh

  O Byzantium

  O Tlaxcala, Pachacamac, Warsaw, Pitsanulok

  O Tenóchtitlan

  One cannot write words of love on your walls

  Until you are dead.

  SELF-CRITICISM

  I WISH I were able to write the way one speaks. I wish that, one day, the thin barrier of white paper that protects and isolates me might dissolve. What can there be behind this dazzling rectangle, what paradise or hell is hiding on the other side of this opaque window? Yes, how I wish I knew all that. The great hypocrisy of writing – and also this huge joy at the distance established, the gloves I put on in order to touch the world, to touch myself – resides precisely in this matter which interposes itself between me and myself, this circuitous route by means of which I address myself.

  Those who claim tha
t one cries out, those who want one to love or to hate, who want one to be oneself, just like that, directly and naturally: they are lying. There are no cries in literature, there can be neither voices nor gestures in literature. There is nothing but murmurs, sounds coming from very far away after having travelled for centuries from one end of the universe to the other.

  When I write, I am he who does not speak.

  My thought is abandoned throughout the vast, outstretched night that separates my instant of self-awareness from the moment which liberates the word. My thought has fled, aimless, formless. Who speaks of the significant and the signified? Why analyse my spoken word so as to detach it from real movement? All of it false, all of it language about language. What remains true, and constant, is writing’s abandonment of reality, loss of meaning, logical madness. Faced with the sight of a tiny fragment of the world, I conceive nothing, I invent nothing. I recite, following the ancient system that was bequeathed to me. The fact is that it really is a game, the cruellest, most nugatory of all games. To conceive on the basis of the norms of conception, to write on the basis of handwriting, to be on the basis of being. There is no table, chair, clenched hand, blue ballpoint pen with chewed end. There is no white paper, nor a twist of black paper that creeps forward by leapfrogging over itself. None of that exists. There is nothing but the fearful void which I measure ceaselessly, the infinite which I measure with my slide-rule in my hand. So, where is the world? Where is the square of sun and air, of steam, of sulphur, of metal hidden in the earth, of shadow, of perfume, of bitter or salty tastes? It is there, just there, behind the immaculate onion-skin lying flat on the wooden table. (‘Leaf, be crumpled up!’)