The Book of Flights

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  ‘I write that I do not know any longer. But when I write that, it is with the hand, the inspiration and the words of the white man. I say that I am no longer on this earth. But I say it while resting my weight upon this earth. Ancient trick of an ancient double-dealing people! I make use of negatives, but behind me, within me, is an imperceptible phantom nodding “yes”.

  ‘What men, then, are capable of teaching me something? The farther I advance in space, the farther men retreat. There are no Malays, or Laotians, or Chinese, or Maya Quichés, or Huichols. There is only the white man, everywhere, wearing tawdry fancy-dress to help him delude people more effectively. Miserable secret society that brings into the world and baptizes . . . What I deny, I affirm twice over.

  ‘Now, here is what other men can give me: the name of INTRUDER.’

  The Indian? The Indian, the Arab, the Negrito, the Karen, the Burmese highlander. Those whom they do not kill, they turn into clowns. Accursed white race, to which I belong, and which wants nothing to change. Anthropologists, priests, merchants, philanthropists, travellers: all of them, soldiers in disguise.

  But see: the Indian, diminutive though he may be, looks down on you. He will never forget; not he. He knows very well who you are. He has judged you since childhood. He knows very well what you are hiding.

  You go forward to meet him, your hand outstretched, exuding your white man’s coarse, smug frankness; and you say to him, in your coarse, smug voice: ‘Kea Aco!’, as though, in a flash, everything was going to be forgotten. But he turns his head away, refusing to look at you. He does not give a damn for your greeting. If he is feeling polite, if he is not particularly angry with you, he goes away without answering. But if he takes a dislike to you, then he turns brusquely, and there is a strange light glowing in his eyes which bodes you no good, no good at all. He thrusts his hand out in your direction, and spits out a single word, an order:

  ‘Cigarillo!’

  What alternative is there but to give him his cigarette?

  Language: secret code. Food for thought, there, for ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists. All those who come along with their tape recorders and their notebooks, to manufacture dictionaries. They want to learn the native’s language, so as to steal his secrets, so as to saddle him with theses. What impudence! Then they sit under a tree, at midday, and produce a book. A beautiful, fat book such as white men are so good at producing, six hundred close-set pages covered with little black signs. Text! With a fine abstract title such as civilized people are so good at producing. Something like WORDS AND THINGS. The Indian, naturally, is immediately distrustful. Following the letters with his finger, he reads the title on the cover:

  ‘Vorreddess antt theengess.’

  He laughs. Happy not to have understood. The sounds which his mouth has just pronounced are magic.

  So now he has to be made to translate that. Into Spanish, first.

  ‘Las palabras y las cosas.’

  The boy laughs. He still does not understand. It has to be explained to him.

  ‘Las palabras . . . Y las cosas . . . Es que dice.’

  ‘Las palabras . . . Y las cosas . . .’

  ‘Si! Ahora, como se dice en Huichol?’

  The boy draws his face back. He is slightly scared, or ashamed. Now he is serious. He does not want to answer. Supposing it were a trap? Why should this fellow of a different race want to know all that? He hesitates, then, slowly and ironically, and with a note of alarm, too, utters the first phrase that every Indian learns, the phrase that he invariably brings out when he senses danger.

  ‘Quien saaabe?’

  A little later, when he has got used to the idea:

  ‘Come now, how does one say that in Huichol?’

  ‘That is not said.’

  ‘What, that is not said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look. Las palabras, what is the Huichol word for that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, look. Las palabras. When someone speaks, how does one say that?’

  ‘When one speaks?’

  ‘Yes, to speak, like that, to speak, what is the Huichol for that?’

  ‘Quien saaabe?’

  ‘How do you say to speak?’

  ‘To speak?’

  ‘Yes, to speak?’

  ‘Niuki.’

  ‘Niuki?’

  ‘Niuki.’

  ‘Good, niuki. And things, then, what is the Huichol word for things?’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Yes, things.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There is no word for things?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Things, I mean . . . There is no word for trees, flowers, houses, food, all that?’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Yes, and shoes, cigarettes.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘All things, yes.’

  ‘Perhaps, yes, who knows?’

  ‘What is the word for that?’

  ‘Pinné.’

  ‘Peenay?’

  ‘Pinné.’

  ‘Pinné is things?’

  ‘Yes, things in groups.’

  ‘Good, now, Niuki, words, Pinné, things. How does one say and?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And? that is Tenga.’

  ‘Tenga?’

  ‘Tenga, tenga.’

  ‘Good. So, niuki tenga pinné. Niuki tenga pinné. Words and things.’

  And immediately, unexpectedly, peals of laughter ring out, laughter which means, though you will never realize it: what a clown, huh, what a donkey, that one trying to speak a language that doesn’t belong to him . . .

  The fact is that, for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros’ hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious.

  Of course, in such circumstances, it is impossible to transpose and translate. The word has no equivalent because, fundamentally, it evokes nothing apart from what the community designates.

  This closing-in of language is aggressive. It is a flight. But it is the very direction of language. Not everyone who wants, can speak. If a person can speak, it is because he has received, by birth, the implicit authorization of the speaking community. The antithesis is simple, and provides the proof of the intransgressible secret: those who do not speak Huichol are mute. Their foreign language is incapable of becoming another modality of the expressible; it is made of nothing but noises. Coherent noises, which correspond to certain exchange values, but noises all the same. The Huichol language is not a system of signification. It is a religious, political, family system. Like all true bonds, those of family or of faith, it cannot be acquired. It is magic.

  Look of astonishment and distrust on the face of the Indian whom the white man or the half-breed addresses in his own language.

  ‘Kea Aco!’

  ‘Buenos dias,’ says the Indian, and he is on the defensive. What kind of stranger is this, trying to steal words?

  Face frozen immediately, irritated disdain.

  ‘Kepettitewa?’

  Face of stone. Mouth set tight, eyes narrowed, ears that do not want to hear.

  ‘Kepawitaripahoca?’

  Body of stone, too, man turned into statue, who does not want to, who does not want anything. Soul curled up in a ball. He has understood. It is perfectly clear that he has understood. But comprehension has come upon him like a moving wall, and has forced him to take refuge in inaccessible places. The words arrive, devoid of meaning. They come like projectiles, and so he shrinks back, withdraws into his shadow.

  ‘Hawtya. Ac kixa neninakeriaga niuki? Jé?’


  It is not a question of fear, it is a question of an intrusion, the most odious of all intrusions. Rather as though a dog were suddenly to raise its head and say to its master:

  ‘I beg your pardon, but the whale is a mammal.’

  Alternatively, he begins laughing, leaning his head a little to one side.

  ‘No entendio. Quien sabe que dice?’

  Is it my fault if I belong to the race of thieves? The white man has always stolen everything from everyone. From the Jews, Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes, Aztecs, Japanese, Balinese. When he has had his fill of stealing territories and slaves, the white man has begun stealing cultures. He has stolen religion from the Jews, science from the Arabs, literature from the Hindus. When he finished stealing the bodies of Negroes, he stole their music, their dances, their art. When the Christian religion, a religion that became contemptible, a religion for philistines, no longer satisfied him, he turned back toward the religion of India. In Mexico, the white man is first and foremost a stealer of lands. Then, in next to no time, because land itself was not enough, he develops into a stealer of souls. First he seizes the towns, then he razes the temples. And when the conquered people has nothing left, when the white man has despoiled and enslaved, when he has destroyed the people’s language and faith, when he has evicted him from the best lands, when he has forced him to taste poverty, the real poverty of the white man; when he has ruined his race by stealing his women, when he has turned it into a tribe of servants at his beck and call, the white man still feels dissatisfied with his achievements. So what does he do? He steals the conquered people’s past. In newspapers, books, lectures, on statues: ‘Indian? Ah yes, Indian. I have Indian blood, myself. My ancestors, the Aztecs, Cuauhtemoc, Moctesuhzoma, Tlaloc, Cuauhcoatl, Tonatiuh. The Pyramids. Teotihuacan. Tezcoco, Mitla, Tlaxcala. That’s what my ancestors did.’ But if you draw him aside, you will immediately see hatred in his eyes, his ancient hatred for the vanquished. ‘The Indians? Listen, the only solution is extermination. When there are no more Indians left, we might accomplish something around here.’ The same thing when a young girl quarrels with a cab driver in the street. She searches her mind quickly for the worst, most comprehensive insult. She finds it suddenly: ‘Indito!’

  Then he had another thought:

  ‘There they are, in the dense, humid forest, those who did not know how to refuse. Those whom the world is in the process of annihilating with its airplanes, tape recorders, Bibles and vaccines. They did not realize how ignoble it was to be Lacandon, in the eyes of people named Smith or Dupont. They did not realize that there were people thirsty for blood, watching for the right moment to pounce upon them, mummify them, palatalize them, analyse them to death!

  Tourists, missionaries, explorers, journalists, prospectors, colonists, conquerors, sailors, prospectors for gold, peddlars of exoticism, trail-blazers, aviators, suntanned holidaymakers, hunters of precious stones, visitors of pagodas and museums, devotees of colour transparencies, the whole pack of you, incompetent philosophers of relativity, hunchbacked apostles of universalism, wily urbanists, economists, indigenists, messengers of peace and civilization in the style of soap salesmen, and you, cultural missions, embassies, Franco-Sudanese or Argentine-Khmer friendship societies, Goethe-&-Co.-type institutions, world experts, bushrangers, safari organizers, Alpinists, Indologists, Pygmy-lovers, Maori-worshippers, and you, comic opera revolutionaries, socialists imprisoned within the walls of your manifestoes, wreckers, and you too, drinkers of peyotl, chewers of hallucinogenic mushrooms whose jaws will grind out books about it, marauding drug-addicts, sharks, property owners, men who have only one god, and only one wife, cloud of locusts, army of rats intoxicated with everything unusual, I HATE YOU.’

  Signed:

  ISKUIR

  DURING THAT TIME, Y. M. Hogan was travelling by pirogue along the Rio Chucunaque.

  The Rio Chucunaque flowed slowly down to the sea. It went on flowing down, day after day, never stopping. At its mouth, it was wide and dirty, a muddy lake in which rotting tree trunks floated. Motorboats ploughed furrows through its moving mass. Higher up, the Rio Chucunaque was clear, narrower, with whirlpools, rapids, and oily shallows. Y. M. Hogan was seated in the front of the pirogue, peering closely into the sparkling water, and putting out his left or his right hand to give warning of dangers. Along the banks, among the trees, were the openings of other rivers, the Rio Chico, the Rio Tuquesa, the Rio Canglón, the Rio Ucurgantí, the Rio Mortí. Liquid branches never ceased sprouting from the main stem. During that time, Y. M. Hogan was paddling upstream along the Rio Chucunaque.

  Rivers.

  Rivers.

  Roots of the sea.

  THE FLUTE PLAYER AT CUZCO

  ONE DAY, HOGAN met the man who played a kind of flute at Cuzco. This happened in a big, deserted square surrounded by arcaded houses, at about eleven at night. It was cold. The sky was black, and the square shone dimly in the light of the street lamps. There was no noise. Even the cars were asleep. On one side of the square there was this big pointed building, with a portal that was open. As he passed by, Hogan had noticed this opening in the black walls, and deep inside, this sort of immense grotto glittering with gold. He had seen that image in a split second: in the centre of the house looking like a castle, the rain of yellow gold and rays of light. Women’s knees were rubbing against the stone slabs. The gold crushed the men standing in the nave; the golden vault weighed on the women’s shoulders. In the silent cavern, where the cold battled against body temperature the poor and wretched had all become children. He had seen that, too: the nervous gesture of fingers flying to the brow, the chest, then the mouth. In the castle’s great hall, the kneeling men and women were engaged in touching the golden god.

  A little farther on, under the arcades, Hogan had noticed the flute player. He was not playing at that moment. He was leaning against a wall, waiting. A few children were standing around, watching him. When Hogan stopped near one of the pillars, the man stepped forward one pace. Then he said, in an odd, husky voice:

  ‘Now, the gringo’s tango.’

  And he began to sing a tango tune. At the same time, he danced. He raised his arms and spun round. He swayed to the left, then to the right, then spun round. Hogan and the children watched him without saying anything. The cold wind blew steadily along the corridor of the arcades, carrying bits of paper along with it. The man was wearing coarse linen trousers, scuffed shoes and a mouldy-coloured old sweater. His eyes were almost slits in his brown face, and his cheeks were wrinkled. His hands were red with cold.

  When he had finished dancing, he rummaged in a bag propped against the wall. The first thing he took out of it was quite extraordinary: a sun cut out of a metal can with a pair of scissors. He fastened this to his forehead with a piece of string. He did this slowly, gravely, and the sun began shining on his forehead with the brightness of tin. The next thing he took out of the bag was a big, seven-tubed pan-pipe called an Arca. He blew into all the tubes, to try them out. Then he looked at Hogan and said:

  ‘Virgen de Calakumo.’

  Or something like that. He began playing.

  From the first moment, Hogan realized that it was not music. The sounds coming out of the pipe’s flutes were cries, not music. The harsh sounds tumbled out, rose, descended. They lacerated the silence with their breathy noises, they hesitated; it was not their nature to explain, or to construct. The raspings of loud breath grated against the walls of the house, pierced through the icy wind, bombarded the ears. They were sharp and rapid, and at the same time they exhaled heavily and dolefully.

  The man wearing a tin sun on his forehead went on blowing into the pan-pipe’s flutes. He was hunched over the reed tubes, blowing with all his might, his mouth darting to and fro. From time to time he paused to recover his breath, and one could hear the air whistle as it entered his lungs. Then the harsh sounds started up once more, hesitated, striking the silence one after the other. Around him, the square was almost deserted because of the cold, and
the walls of the houses were like rocky cliffs, without doors or windows. The children did not move. Hogan did not move. Under their feet, the slabs of concrete sent out icy waves which crept up their clothes and settled in the region of the heart.

  With his back against the wall, the man wearing the tin sun on his forehead began to move. Still bent over the outsize pan-pipe, he began to lurch. He lifted his legs high in the air, one after the other, then stamped his feet hard on the ground, so that the heels rang. He leant his head to one side, then threw it back, and the tin sun glittered on his black face. And all the time, the pipe’s cries gushed and rasped. It was always the same thing that emerged from the seven attached flutes. Three ascending notes. Then three descending notes. It had no ending. The sounds of breathing hesitated, lurched; the grave, heavy voice, the voice that emerged from solitude and cold. The voice gasped, crept over the concrete ground, broke its way through the silence and the night. What are the sad apertures through which the reeds cry out?

  On the bronze-hued forehead, the tin sun fastened with string rose and fell. In the dim passageway it shone with harsh reflections, like a car’s headlamp.

  That is what happened. The man played, kicking up his legs and swaying to and fro, and Hogan knew that music could never exist again. From now on, there would be nothing but these cries of birds, these stridulations of grasshoppers, this raucous breathing of a dying animal. From now on, there would be nothing but these efforts, this labouring over the pipe’s tubes, indefatigably, these three notes rising, then falling, these six eternal tones which composed the world. The man had come from far away, crossing dusty mountains in ancient buses with broken windowpanes. He had left a place called Cojata, or perhaps even the high plateaux of Bolivia, to play his six notes on his pan-pipe. Each time he arrived in a town, he fastened the tin sun to his forehead, rested his back against a wall, at one side of a deserted square, at night, and blew. Sometimes people gave him food. And he danced heavily, making harrowing noises with his mouth as it glided along the reed tubes. Certainly, it did not mean anything, it demanded neither tears nor clicking of the fingers. It was a labour like any other, monotonous, a labouring of lungs and lips. It was like blowing down a long metal tube and watching the globule of glass swell and fill out. At first the glass is the colour of light, then it becomes red, then grey, and the glassblower whirls it round, above his head, to stretch it thinner.