The Book of Flights

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Hogan crossed the square slowly. He saw that he was not alone. There were many women and children moving about in the bright light, carrying various loads. Men were sitting around on stone benches or with their backs against the trunks of trees. They were doing nothing. Round the statue, skinny old men were squatting on the ground, talking. Some young men were sitting on the steps of the kiosk, smoking silently.

  A little farther on, Young Man Hogan walked through a market set up along the sidewalk. He stooped to pass under the awnings that were secured by strings, and stepped over the displays of vegetables and pottery. Women were sitting on their haunches under the stretched canvasses, waiting there in the dust. Hogan looked at the things they were offering for sale. He saw little piles of red chilis, little piles of lemons, little piles of seeds. He saw things that looked like bloated skins, and strips of boiled leather, and chunks of whitish fat set in the centre of green leaves. He saw flapjacks, and loaves, and cakes. All this was for sale, waiting there patiently. Up and down the corridor of flapping sails, the crowd jostled, peered, munched. The air was thick, glistening with dust and sweat, pulsating.

  Before leaving the market, Young Man Hogan bought two oranges from a fat woman with plaits. He chose the fruit himself, paid for them, and carried them away in his hand.

  Then he returned to the square and sat in the shade, between the columns of a house. He finished smoking his cigar and crushed it under his foot in the dust. In front of him, the square was white with light, and above his head the sky was blue. Young Man Hogan took his jack-knife out of his pocket and set about peeling the first orange. He cut thin strips off the peel and dropped them on to the ground in front of him. When he had removed the whole peel he picked away the white pith lining the skin of the fruit. Then he divided the orange into segments with his fingers, and ate them one after the other. The powerful odour rose slowly toward him, impregnating everything. The white square, the kiosk, the black statue, the sky and the dusty houses began to smell of orange. He swallowed the little sacs of pulp, and the acid taste flowed through his mouth. Perhaps it was the houses, the sky and the square that he was swallowing, now. There were one or two pips in each segment, and Y. M. Hogan spat them out in front of him, together with the bits of chewed skin. These fell on the ground and made little humid patches in the middle of the great dryness.

  When he had finished eating the first orange, Y. M. Hogan shook the drops of juice off his fingers; then he ate the second orange.

  It was good, eating these pieces of fruit, like this, while looking at the square as the sun beat down on it, and the silhouettes of the people crossing the sidewalk. That meant that there was not much farther to go, now. That he was quite close, just a few paces away, perhaps. Y. M. Hogan saw all the little patterns swarming in front of him, the tiny circles, the wrinkles, the fine lines engraved on the skin. The windowpane, the terrible glossy windowpane had vanished. The air was transparent, and weightless particles hovered in the light: midges, grains of wood and flour, seeds from trees. They danced above the ground, each detail clearly visible. Y. M. Hogan spat out the orange pips into the road in front of him. Then he studied them, and they gave an impression of certainty and immediacy, like immovable islands in the middle of a storm-tossed sea.

  Y. M. Hogan chewed the orange’s tender flesh, swallowed the spurts of juice. There would be no more hunger, ever again, no more thirst. There would be no more sadness or waiting, ever again. No more haste. The square occupied the centre of this village, which surrounded it with its houses made of dried mud. In the square, people were coming and going, dogs were sleeping curled up, the trees were indestructible. Someone was smoking a cigarette. Someone was fastening his sweat-soaked horse to a wooden post. Someone was sleeping in the shadow of a truck, his head hidden under a straw hat.

  On this particular day, Y. M. Hogan was sitting in the centre of this village where peace reigned. He saw that in this place words had ceased to wound. Something had happened here, once upon a time, not so very long ago. Something had erased harshness, misery, crime. No one knew – no one knew yet – what that something was. Time had halted its damnable course, perhaps, and the years had rolled back. Or else space had entered his own body, abruptly shrinking its thousands of miles. The houses rested on their mud foundations, clouds of dust quivered in the wind, and the sun was high, hanging in the sky like an electric-light bulb.

  Hogan was neither late, nor early. He was exactly there, clad in his linen trousers and white shirt, naked feet in dark brown thonged sandals. He ate the last remaining segment of the second orange, then snapped his knife shut and put it back in his pocket. He took out a big red handkerchief and wiped his fingers and mouth. Then he took another of the green, unidentified cigars from the breast-pocket of his shirt, and lit it with a match. He smoked the cigar with his eyes closed.

  In front of his feet, the orange pips and chewed skins slowly aged. Farther away, a red house cast its shadow across the square, and the sun slipped backward. Swarms of flies buzzed around, then settled on the edge of the stone slab where Hogan was sitting, settled on the ground, on his linen trousers, on his hands. Flies with flattened bodies and outspread wings. Hairy flies. Flies with tiny blood-red heads.

  It was that that needed to be said, before anything else: nothing killed. Nothing came out of the shadows, eyes gleaming with hatred, wielding sharp machetes like huge razor blades. Nothing sped along the vertiginous highways, any longer, headlamps and radiator grilles eager to commit murder. There were no shark-snouted airplanes in the sky. Men’s boots did not seek for corpses to trample. The surrounding noises were not armed. The flashes of light were pure, gushing forth like springs from rock, clear, cold, innocent of evil. The people’s eyes . . . but I do not want to mention the people’s eyes, yet.

  And also: nothing went away for good. Y. M. H.’s wrist still had fastened to it a sort of circular machine with figures and pointers on it. And if he held it to his ear he could hear a very fast ‘Tk! Tk! Tk! Tk!’ But that no longer meant anything. Here, the time of day had stopped existing a long time ago. The springs of all the clocks had unwound their steel spirals right up to the tips, and now it did not matter one way or the other. The sun was here, then there, without anything having changed. In the centre of the square, the cast-iron kiosk swivelled its shadow slowly round, and then? Nothing went away for good.

  The bricks of the walls were held together by cement; the air was a block of glass filled with little bubbles. Even the dust was faithful. Eddying gusts of wind scooped it up for a moment, then it sank back into place, each grain fitting exactly into its allotted hollow. The flies were no longer traitors: they always realighted on the hand that had shooed them away, or on the corner of the eyelid. They had their reasons for this faithfulness . . . Happy the men whose wives are like these flies!

  And also: nothing was dead. Nothing was rotten. The village was a little cemetery in the sun, with its neat rows of tombs painted pink and blue, and no one could disappear. Oblivion had stopped hovering menacingly in the depths of the empty sky. The intense dryness had hardened the surfaces of the walls and dusty roads. The kind of water that corrupts was infinitely absent. There was nothing but these flashes of light, this heat, these sharp shadows, these trees with leaves cut out of aluminium. No, one could not die, here. One could no longer be engulfed by the night, or crushed by the day. It was enough to be sitting, watching men’s silhouettes walk through the white square. Nothing was alone any longer. No more walking along endless roads, listening to the intolerable clacking of heels against asphalt. No more swirling crowds, plunged into, then left behind. Those shop windows that were really made of steel, not glass, did not exist here. And all those figures and caricatures – grimaces of pain, grimaces of passion, grimaces of fear, grimaces of toothache – had disappeared. They had abated. The loneliness that encouraged one to flee, always farther, eternally opening and closing the doors of the great hospital; loneliness with doglike eyes; the loneliness of giants s
triding through the ocean of heads; that of dwarfs striding through forests of legs; the loneliness that makes a man cling to his woman, to any woman, like a leech. The curtain had risen, today, revealing the miracle of a scene full of warmth and light, almost within reach. Y. M. Hogan saw it stretching away before him, pulsating with life, the scene in which he figured, the scene that he was at last playing, with all the strength at his command. Suddenly he felt like laughing. He felt like lying on his back in the dust and laughing. Perhaps the world would have imitated him, and there would never have been any more wars again, anywhere.

  It is still too early to tell you about Simulium, the coffee fly. So, for the moment, let us talk about dung-beetles. Young Man Hogan watched the dung-beetles pushing their balls of excrement across the square. They worked away with all their feet, tiny tanks advancing across the desert. Let us talk about the red cockroaches and the grey cockroaches that lie in wait in dark hollows. Let us talk about the white scorpions that hide under flat stones:

  Scorpions lead solitary lives.

  If you should see two together, it means that one

  of them is either courting or eating the other.

  Let us talk about vultures, spiders, vampire bats, horned vipers. Y. M. Hogan felt a sense of disquiet growing in him. Something false and terrible seemed to be exerting menaces from very close at hand. A secret, perhaps, a horrible secret which should have been jealously guarded and never told to anyone. To fight this feeling, Y. M. Hogan started thinking to himself:

  Thoughts by Y. M. Hogan

  Belisario Dominguez

  (State of Chiapas)

  3.30 pm

  ‘Laura, it is here, I have found it. I do not think I shall ever flee again. I have shaken off my enemies, once and for all. Al Capone, Custer, Mangin, MacNamara, Attila, Pizarro, De Soto, Bonaparte, you know, all my enemies. Not to mention Chevrolet, Panhard, Ford, Alfa Romeo. All those who were after me. They have lost track of me, I think. It is a miracle. And General Beautiful, Colonel Good, Field Marshal True. Admiral Evil. Major God, Captain Satan. All those who were on my trail. With their uniforms. With their swords. All my enemies in dark glasses, with their striped ties and slicked-down hair. And some women, too, Rimmel, Mascara, Garters. Those who were lying in wait for me behind the glossy pages of magazines, with their finely honed bodies, with their breasts, with the spears of their legs: the ones who had eyes of steel, black lashes, and coral-red lips. Those who set their disdainful traps for me, and laughed to see me stumble. The women called Love, the woman called Sweet, Beautiful. They will never get as far as this. Their skins could never stand the intense light that explodes everywhere. Their ears could never stand the silence. The gold and silver of their hair could never stand the dust. I am free, almost free! Come, now. I have kept a place for you beside me, on the stone step in the shade of the arcaded house. I have kept a place for you in the iron bed inside the windowless room. Come. Take boats, airplanes, trains and ramshackle buses, and get here! It is time. You could be here before the sun sets. Don’t waste a moment! Get here! You will never again be far away. You will be finished with windowpanes, walls, clothes. You do not know what air is. You have no conception of a glass of water. Come, I will show you. Together, we shall discover so many things. We shall look inside houses, we shall climb up to the tops of mountains, we shall trace rivers back to their sources. There are herbs that one can eat, herbs to make the hair grow, herbs to produce delicious dreams. We shall follow the ant trails. We shall have nineteen children, whose names will be William, Henry, Maria, Jerome, Lourdès, Conception, Irene, David, Luz Elena, Yoloxochitl, Jésus, Suriwong, Bernard, James, Alice, Elzunka, Laura 1, Laura 2, Gabriel. We shall be so full of life that we shall need to use up 166 years before we can die. The sky will be so blue during the day, and so black at night, that words will fail us. The sun will be so hot that we shall become Negroes. Come, everything is ready. We shall eat oranges. We shall spit the pips out on the ground. We shall work all day in the coffee plantations, for a boss who will own a Rolls Royce and a jet plane. We shall drink coffee as thick as syrup out of stained glasses. We shall eat roots, and we shall talk to everybody. Come: the people here do not wear dark glasses. On the deserted road, at the entrance to the village, there is a big skeleton of a horse, standing upright and secured to a post by cords. Belisario Dominguez was a deputy. To take revenge on him, Victoriano Huerta imprisoned him, then had his tongue torn out. There are lots of things like that to tell you. Quick! Don’t hesitate! I have some cigars for you, long cigars of green tobacco, that I buy by the hundred. I smoke them while watching the square shine in the sun. I exhale the acrid smoke through my nose and my mouth, and the smoke evaporates in the air. I am in the village. Here, absolute peace reigns. You will not be afraid of anyone because you will belong to the landscape. Isn’t it marvellous? Isn’t it?’

  A little later, Y. M. Hogan got up. He crossed the square again, steering clear of the people who were groping their way along. He stopped at the outside counter of a grocery store and bought a small bottle full of a yellowish liquid. As he made his way back to the spot where he had been sitting, he noticed that his place had been taken. Someone had parked himself on the stone step in the shade of the colonnaded house. When he got closer, Y. M. Hogan saw that it was a young man, thirty years old at most, wearing linen trousers and a white shirt, his naked feet in thonged sandals. His thin face was the colour of terracotta, and he had very black hair. His face was covered with peculiar-looking grey patches containing clusters of little nodules: they were on his forehead, around his eyes, and on his cheeks. The tiny, flat flies flew ceaselessly around the man’s face, making a halo of black dots. From time to time, the man shooed them away with his hand, but they returned immediately, swarming around the pustules.

  Y. M. Hogan sat down beside the man. He greeted him. The man replied in a husky voice, without turning his head. When Y. M. Hogan prised the cap off the bottle with the blade of his knife, the man gave a start.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Hogan, ‘just a soda.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the man, reassured.

  Hogan drank from the bottle. Then he held it out to the man.

  ‘Would you care for some?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The soda. Would you care for a drink?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said the man. And he held out his hand. He took three gulps of the soda and handed the bottle back. He wiped his mouth with his hand.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ he said. ‘You a stranger?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hogan.

  ‘Ah yes. Are you a doctor?’

  ‘No,’ Said Hogan.

  The little black flies strolled around the man’s eyes. Y. M. Hogan noticed that the eyes were swollen, red, gummed by tears.

  ‘Pity,’ said the man. ‘We could certainly use one here.’

  ‘What a terrible disease,’ said Hogan.

  ‘Yes,’ the man answered, simply. His sharp profile was motionless in the shadow. Only the flies moved.

  ‘It seems these filthy things are responsible,’ said the man, sweeping his hand through the air.

  ‘The flies?’

  ‘Yes, these gnats.’ He rubbed his eyes with his fingers.

  ‘The gnats which infest the coffee plantations. They lay their eggs under a man’s skin. Then he gets a fever. And since there is no doctor around, everybody catches it. You don’t have this disease, yourself?’

  ‘No,’ said Hogan. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘And it hurts,’ said the man. ‘It burns the head, the eyes, the nostrils, everywhere. Your head feels like it’s on fire.’

  Y. M. Hogan fished out a cigar and gave it to the man.

  ‘Smoke is good against the gnats,’ he said.

  He lit the man’s cigar first, then his own.

  ‘I could still see a little, ten days ago. Now, I’m finished. Nothing. Blackness.’

  ‘You work on the plantation?’

  ‘Yes, every day. Below the village.’
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br />   ‘How do you manage?’

  ‘There are cords stretched right along the rows. You hold on to the cord with one hand, and pick with the other.’

  The man blew a cloud of smoke in the air. The gnats scattered hastily. But Y. M. Hogan could see them dancing in the light, waiting. When the cigar was finished, they would come back.

  ‘Feel better?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Thanks for the cigar.’

  ‘You from here?’ asked Hogan.

  ‘From here, yes. From Belisario.’

  ‘You live alone?’

  ‘No. With my family. Over there, near the plantation.’

  He passed the glowing end of the cigar along his cheek, close to the skin.

  ‘They say it’s good for the pain,’ he explained.

  ‘So there’s no doctor here?’ said Hogan.

  ‘No,’ said the man. ‘There was one who came, three months ago. He said the first thing to do was spray DDT everywhere. But the boss refused. He said it would cost him the crop. Then the doctor went away. He said he would make a report. And we never heard any more of him.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She . . . Is she, has she, too?’