The Book of Flights

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  It was the melody of a fugue relieved of all its useless noises. Become pure. Stripped of all the humming, become the simple breath of a man who has no desire to describe the world, who has no desire to imitate the wind or the rain, who no longer has anything to do with the real. True respiration which utters its little cries, which raises its taut stems in the transparent air, which is itself, magnificently itself, itself for itself, the essence of itself.

  No houses, no towns, no spaces that have been reconnoitred, either on maps or in wars. But a sound that carries you away, a rhythm that sweeps you off the ground, a calm, unerring glide; and the sorrowful sound emerging from the reed tubes is the sound of a running engine.

  Suddenly, the man stopped and lowered the pan-pipe from his mouth. He was exhausted, scarcely able to breathe. Hogan could see the drops of sweat running down the man’s cheeks, could hear the sound of the man’s breath. Without saying anything, he placed a silver coin on the ground, and he saw that it shone with a very harsh glitter, like the tin sun on the man’s forehead. Then he went away, crossing the square where the cold wind was still blowing.

  THE WORLD IS small. The world has become so small that, suddenly, one can hardly see it. The world has become just like a precious stone, a sort of alexandrite attached to a young woman’s slender hand. Peculiar violet dot so small that the eye looking at it loses its way. Myriads of minuscule contracted rainbows reign inside the bevelled crystal. The world has become similar to a window always opening on to the same scene, a little herb garden, an old palm tree with fissured bark, two or three pots of dusty geraniums, a sky, a cloud, sometimes a live bird engaged in flying.

  The world is narrow, today. One is balanced on its rim, like on the edge of a new Gillette blade. One progresses with gliding movements, sometimes cutting oneself, scarcely grazing the thin ground. One is on a blade of grass. The world has shrunk like that, in one or two nights, and no one has been able to discover how it happened. The world is a weight raised laboriously by the thoracic cage eager for air There is no air left. There is almost no water left. Just a few more drops, standing out in beads on the leaves of brambles, and it will all be over. The world is sweating like a sick stone. The world scarcely lasts longer than the phrase one writes, not even as long, scarcely as long as a quick cry such as ‘Wa!’ or ‘Ho!’

  The world is there, hidden at the back of the camera obscura, perceptible for the time it takes to press a button, when the terribly swift eyelid opens and closes again, while the star of light flashes above the lens.

  World, snapped, stolen, tiny crumb of a world, flicking of fingers, synchronism of the machine-gun that perforates the circle of the airplane’s propeller with a single streak of its lightning.

  DEAD EVERLASTING END

  Don Aurelio watches the sun sink behind the mountains and says, simply: ‘Suppose it never rises again?’

  SELF-CRITICISM

  COMEDIAN! HAM ACTOR! It is time to bring your pantomime to a halt. It is time to stop your mumbling, time for your muscles to reabsorb their tremors; for all your roads to take to the air like drawbridges. Nobody is taken in by the performance any longer. You pretend that you are not there, but you are, you are! You pretend to be bigger than you really are. You wear the masks of masters such as you will never be, you want to imitate the gestures which you yourself could never create. Incapable of conquering the world, you reject it. But the figure who really occupies your skin, deep inside you, is the court jester. Stop grinning and grimacing. It is time to put on an anonymous face, the face of the man who does not speak. It is time to assume your name.

  Thought is so vast that no one will ever be able to identify it. Thought is so distant, gushes forth so fast and so vigorously that it can never be reduced to scribblings on paper or on walls. No more analysing, from now on. No more looking at things which should not be looked at. Come out from your warren! Come out into the light! Lose yourself! Just because you were acquainted with this and that, you would have liked to find that the world could be expressed in a few reveries. What an illusion! The wind blows across the centuries on to your words, and carries them away. The great storm that constitutes the universe does not care a rap for the screens you set up. It hurls at you its millions of miles per hour, crushes with all its light, with all its lives which are neither proofs nor explanations but miracles. You would have liked to find that death extinguishes the world; oh yes, you would. That the language of man is equally that of stones and cacti. You would have been delighted if there were never any children around. You would have liked so much to be able to turn into a table or an apple, as the mood took you, just so as to escape from your skin, to flee your prison. You would have been delighted if passions and feelings ceased to exist, thinking how much simpler things would be.

  To go away and change completely. If only there had been lands where the people never died, where the women are always beautiful and always know how to love. Things would have been very simple. But there were no such lands. If only there had been some terrible catastrophe, one day, one that set the horizon ablaze from one end to the other, or perhaps a thousand year war, that would have arranged things nicely, would it not? But there were no wars, and the people who died suddenly, while working in their fields, never knew the reason. When steel-shelled automobiles shot off the expressway and crashed slowly into ditches, there was nothing else to say but: ugliness, ugliness.

  In the rectangular, low-ceilinged room. Seated in the sort of balcony that surrounds it. Yellow light, grey shadow. Sounds of spoons, plates, glasses. Sounds of footsteps. Sounds of tongues chattering, jaws chewing, throats swallowing. In the centre of the room, illuminated heads, mirthful faces. Suddenly, the gaze settles on a point in the room, a red apparition trembling on the far horizon. This sun is setting, here, night is coming, the stars are beginning to stir. In the world’s isolated grotto, inside the concrete fortress, like being in the centre of an impregnable blockhouse. Nothing can penetrate as far as this. Nor can anything slip through the stone walls and escape. It is the end of the world, here, its heart, its skull, its fist.

  Or again, the ceiling is low, padded, its stifling surface covered with ventilation louvres puffing out air. On the tables, plastic flowers stuck into copper vases. There. That is all. The human forms move, eat, talk, think or simply do nothing. A young girl dressed in white passes by, carrying, as though it were a chalice, a tall glass filled with whipped cream and ice cream topped by a cherry. A cloud of cigar smoke mingled with words and laughter rises from a table set for a banquet.

  There. It is nothing. That is all there is to it. The world has been locked up, yet again, in a concrete room, and the look that settles on no matter what point of the red wall, the look that wants to understand, is lost for ever. It has fled from reality, it has quit the photogenic world. No matter how efficient the men may be in their head waiter’s costumes, or how demure the women may be in their white smocks, he who enters here is lost. It is like being deaf in downtown Chicago at midday, or blind at the ocean’s edge. It is to come back to the tiny corner that one should never have left, to let truth glide along with its terrible serpentine motion, to forget all that one ever knew. The big room with its four thick walls – so thick that even a thousand years of nibbling away with the teeth and scratching away with the nails would not pierce them – is here, there, there too, everywhere throughout the world. The soft, whimpering music cannot help, nor can the rain falling outside, nor can the sun. Room lined with concrete and marble, room lined with padding and glass, room of light and shadow peopled with mysterious desires, this is my body, my skull, my sack of skin. It’s me, only me. This being so, how could I still write to you, joy, gentleness, calm, peace, love. Since, in this place, it is WAR.

  I no longer want to be this comedian who never knew when it was time to stop. I shall certainly have to renounce my pretensions, sooner or later. It had seemed to me that all these gestures were unassailable. I had not made them from habit, or unconsciously, but be
cause I was afraid. I have acted my part, like the others. Now the stage is emptying. Who will applaud me? I did not want to recognize the true problem, the one that is not so easy to resolve:

  Twelve children singing in a choir.

  Are they twelve soloists?

  The ineluctable presence of time, space, night, the incomprehensible: is it, then, true that I shut this presence in with me only at the moment when I found out there would always be something on the outside? Have I only been myself in contrast to others? And all the same, am I not the person that I am because I try to appropriate the world (and occasionally succeed)?

  He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever brought anything back from voyages through dream worlds. But perhaps that is exactly what I have always aimed at, without knowing it: not to teach, never to teach any lesson at all?

  I suppose I have no choice but to go along with this strained comedy for some time yet.

  What really bores me stiff about writing is that it is too brief. When the sentence comes to an end, how many things have remained outside! Words have failed me. They did not move quickly enough. I did not have the time to strike out in all the necessary directions, I did not possess enough weapons. The world slipped away from me, under my very eyes, in a fraction of a second, and I would have needed millions of eyes to recover it, to see it again. Men make wretched hunters. Their language is a catapult at moments when it needs to be a machine gun. One second, just a single second, and I shall have written you books for eternity! The absolute is demoniacal. It taunts me, in the fleeting spectacle, it pulls faces at me, it zooms through the air like a fly, it plunges into the very depths of the ocean. I had fled in order to rediscover the world. I had rushed headlong down my path, in order to recapture time in action. But I found out that the world fled more quickly than I did.

  I no sooner look at the wall of that twelve-storeyed building than it vanishes. I seek a face in the crowd, a true face amid that sea of mobile masks, a face, yes, just one face that will pause and offer itself to my contemplation. But everything is too rapid. There is too much of everything. And while I write, throngs of walls, mountains and human faces escape, carrying me away with their weight. They want to make me experience the genuine fall, that fatal drop down into oblivion and silence. I wanted to imagine, but it was impossible: one invents nothing. The most one achieves is to brush blindly against the outer fringes of the crowd. I wanted to describe, but it was a fraudulent attempt: one does not describe. One is described. Muffled blows dealt out by the world which jostles me, jolts delivered by life: it is from you that all thoughts and systems derive. Words lie. Words say what they had never hoped to say, what was decided for them at the last moment. Dialectic of what? Inventory, what inventory? No, no. Rather, darkness, illusion, stupid sensations always lagging behind the real, and garrulous feelings floating 20,000 feet above their point of birth. I have fled. I have claimed that I have fled. But it is not true. It is the world which has fled from me. It has drawn me along on its path, and I never attained freedom.

  I wanted to say everything, I wanted to do everything. I saw something happening in front of me, one day, very long ago: it was life emerging from the spoken word, as sharply defined as a dream, applied flawlessly to reality. I saw the precise pattern of the space over which I must leap, and I thought that that leap could be accomplished. But it could not. I remained a laggard, overtaken by my own thinking, left behind by the thinking of the grasses and seaweeds, by the thinking of light and stars.

  I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. It gives nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one’s feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.

  Writer, comedian, eager for sensations, whipping out his little notebook and jotting down: ‘Dry air. Clouds. Poverty. The barriadas of Lima. The dancer who has had painted on his chest a fair-haired Christ crucified in front of a blue sky in which a red sun shines. Violence. Earthquakes.’ What does all that mean? If the world were a sum of experiences, it would all be so easy. But it is not like that at all. Palestine cannot be added to Nepal, or Arkansas to Japan. The woman Laura and the man Hogan convey no real idea of themselves. Flint has nothing in common with limestone. Man as intellectual, eager to get to know things so as to be able to construct his systems. Man as comedian, eager to forget the world so as to make a witty remark. But the world is not a sum. It is an inexhaustible enumeration in which each figure remains itself, in its variation and its flight, in which no one has rights over anyone else, in which unknown strength and desire and action all hold sway together. Which is not a logical fusion, but an indescribable intermingling of myriads of bonds, threads, fissures, branches and roots. Comedian, yes, a comedian because you were afraid of silence, and all your talking was to cover up that fear and to intoxicate yourself with the idea of your own materiality!

  I could have told you about the sea which swells and subsides around the flat triangular rock. I could have told you about the Pachacamac desert which is rotting away, about the Mombacho volcano, or about the odour of fish at Lofoten. I could have told you about the colour of the sky at Khartoum, about the size of the mosquitoes in Mukkala, about the state of the weather in Calcutta. I could have told you, too, about the cry the jaguarundi utters to lure birds, and about the armoured eyes of the praying mantis. At a pinch, I could have told you something about the feelings which flutter through tender souls when a (handsome) (young) man meets a (beautiful) (young) girl. Then, about the hatred that produces clenched fists, the long, brooding hatred that produces dreams of crimes, of exploding cars hurtling over steep cliffs. About the loneliness that people assault savagely with kicks and blows, or electrocute with the lightning flashes of pleasure. But there it is. Writing is too brief a process, and I did not have the time. I did not choose what I have said. It arrived by chance, without my knowing why. It arrived back from the farthest point of the voyage towards consciousness; in the wink of an eye, it arrived, burst apart and scattered its 127,680 words through the air. Just the space of time required to press the stud that retracts the pen’s ballpoint, and only three or four words were left. Applied thought, ponderous old beetle flapping about amid the flies’ bright streaks! Thought that expresses itself, adrift in the middle of the vastness of liberated thought where all is speed, light, reality! One of these days, we shall have to find new ways of writing books: with electronic machines, with radar units, with the bubble-chambers of atomic laboratories.

  CRITICISM OF THIS SELF-CRITICISM

  And then, what is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

  AND ONE DAY, inevitably, the same road passes through a village called Belisario Dominguez. The ramshackle buses leave early in the morning, at about six, and are off in a cloud of dust. They cross a succession of rock-strewn mountains, pass through fields of maize and valleys watered by mountain streams. The sky is blue, and the sun beats upon the sheet-iron roof, forcing its heat through the metal. The engine roars its way up hills, then makes the descents explosively. Sometimes the bus stops at the edge of a stagnant pool, and the driver pours buckets of water into the radiator. Finally, around two in the afternoon, from the top of a mountain, one catches one’s first glimpse of the village in th
e distance, with its square houses and parallel streets. It is there, nestling in a fertile valley, a sort of blob the colour of dust and chalk.

  That is how Young Man Hogan arrived in the village. He took a room in the hotel in the main square, and dropped his bag on the bed. Then he lay down beside the bag and slept for an hour. The room was dark, windowless. The folding doors gave on to a sort of inner courtyard where there were green plants, and children playing around. A copper tap was dripping into a basin. In the centre of the courtyard there was a fresh-water well. At the far end, a row of planks concealed latrines that swarmed with flies. Behind the latrines, three sleeping pigs were wallowing in mud and excrement.

  When he had slept long enough, Young Man Hogan left the room. He washed his hands and face under the copper tap, and lit a cigar. Then he left the hotel and began walking around the square. He studied every detail of the large rectangle of dust surrounded by arcaded houses. The sun was very high in the sky, and the patches of white light lay motionless on the ground. There was a garden, too, in the centre of the square, and a cast-iron kiosk. A little farther away, on a pedestal, a black statue depicted a man on horseback brandishing a sword and a flag. There was no noise. Just faint sounds coming from somewhere far away: bells ringing, muffled explosions, tremors that passed through the sluggish air and faded away again, back in the same direction. The light burned the eyes, the nape of the neck, the chest. A slight wind lifted the dust.