Terra Amata
Page 11
Do you feel useful?
What do you thing is the most important thing in the last 5000 years?
Are you superstitious?
Do you believe in art?
Are you a sadist?
Do you think the world only exists in the human mind?
Can you conceive of the absolute?
Do you ever have insomnia?
Anxiety?
Do you like children?
What’s your favourite object?
Are you moved by the story of Jesus Christ?
Are you free?
Do you know that you’re going to die?
Why will you grow old?
Why is there an end?
Why do things wear out?
Why do people die?
Why are they forgotten?
What is the most important thing you’ve ever done so far?
What’s your present state of mind?
Have you got a soul?
How would you like to die?
Have you read Ecclesiastes?
Have you read Sri Aurobindo?
Have you read Mao, Tse-tung?
Have you read Proust?
Does evil exist?
Do you think there won’t be any more wars?
Are you afraid of the atomic bomb?
What must one do to be happy?
To see things clearly?
Is it silly to ask questions?
Is it impossible to live without suffering?
Do you believe in love?
Does talking do any good?
How will it all end?
IN A REGION THAT RESEMBLED HELL
One day Chancelade went through a region that resembled hell. He was sitting in a blue car driven by his wife. The windows were open because it was very hot, and there was some kind of queer electric guitar music on the radio. Every so often a man’s voice would interrupt the music to announce the next disc, ‘Manuella’, ‘Tallahassee Baby Blues’, ‘Wow’, ‘I want to Die Tonight’, or something like that, but the music was always the same. The guitar ground out its metallic sounds, sometimes voluble and swooping up and down with nervous rapidity, sometimes sharp and choleric with roughly struck chords intermingled with long sweet discordant notes that burst forth then united in strident whirrs. The rhythm was echoed heavily in the background, and you could also hear the ‘dum dum dum te-dum dum’ of the double-bass. It was a strange kind of music, sad and sweet at the same time, which reverberated round inside the car like some organic sound; yes, it was just as if there was a heart inside this carapace of metal and plastic, a heart and mechanical lungs, and as if the whole world were inhabited by steel robots.
The blue car drove on by itself along the road, and Chancelade looked at the sea and listened to the strange and powerful music of the electric guitar. He smoked another cigarette without saying anything, the prisoner of the metal machine bowling along, and of the music, and of the fierce reflections of the sun on the sea and the fronts of the houses.
At one point Mina turned to him and said:
‘What’s the matter?’
At another:
‘What a scorcher, eh?’
‘Don’t you feel hot too?’
‘The traffic! We shall never get to town before two.’
But Chancelade didn’t hear. He just continued to lie back on the cushions gazing avidly at the world rushing by. There were lots of people on either side of the road, and even on the sea. People went to and fro beneath the flood of white light dressed in loud shirts or bathing suits, their red skins glistening with sweat. You caught a brief flash of their eyes embedded in their flesh, little black eyes, probably cruel. Some of the women wore strange dark glasses with white frames shaped like butterflies, and looked at the car with dazed smiles. Others had hair dyed red that blazed in the sun. And everything was in motion, passing slowly by the car as if on a conveyor belt.
Inside the metal cubicle the music sounded louder now. Perhaps the young woman had just turned up the knob lightly as she drove. Or perhaps they were nearer now to the transmitter, with its tower radiating concentric circles of the sound of the guitar. The rhythm drummed out powerfully, like pistol shots hitting an iron plate; and each beat was a pulse-beat driving a wave of blood through the metal coachwork and along the chromium and through the fibres of the plastic cushions. The sound mingled with the light and exploded regularly in the body of the car, and each explosion pierced Chancelade with a separate pain.
It was strange to be alive here, in this blue box advancing along the road; it was a sort of prison radiant with heat and sound, drawn mysteriously along by some blind force and gliding helplessly along its rails towards its unknown destiny. Chancelade, his elbow on the car-door, hunched in the imitation leather seat, was gradually seized with paralysis. At one point he tried to raise his cigarette to his lips and inhale the smoke; but he couldn’t; his fingers opened and the cigarette fell out of the window and twirled away in the air-stream. Chancelade had the idea of lighting another, but as soon as the idea occurred to him he forgot. The fanatical rhythm of the electronic music engulfed him and bound him to his seat.
Suddenly the car came to a halt. There’d been an accident somewhere along the road and the flood of cars drew to a standstill. They were drawn up in three lanes, and you could see hundreds, thousands of roofs sparkling in the sun. They were all colours, blue, red, black, grey, white, green, fawn, yellow; there was even a gold one shimmering like the back of a beetle. The light struck down on all these domes and rebounded in great shafts of crystal. Around the motionless caravan the heat too rose upwards trembling, and an acrid smell of overheated radiators spread out a few inches above the ground. From time to time there was a gust of wind but that only made things worse: it brought with it the nauseating smell of the sea, a strong musty mixture of urine, sweat and stagnant water.
Through this sort of dream Chancelade heard Mina’s voice saying something like:
‘What a jam, eh? And the heat! We’ll be here all night at this rate’, etc.
But the underground rhythm of the music carried the words away as soon as they appeared.
And gradually the landscape was tranformed. It didn’t really change; but everything began to shine more harshly, more violently, as if the damp softness of the air had been removed. It was as if for days a terrible wind had been blowing, a furnace discharging desert sand that grain by grain weathered the world to the bone, leaving nothing to be seen but bare angles, points, edges and spikes. The ground was dry now, burned by the light, and nothing grew up between the pebbles but thick weeds with long sharp prickles.
The crowd continued to walk along the pavement, echoing the ponderous rhythm. With every crack of the whip its flesh seemed to flinch and start at the biting thongs. But were they really men? For the faces were all the same, and the bodies always alike. Perhaps it was the same men and women just going round and round to mock Chancelade : pretending to move forward but always going back to where they were, darting at the window of the car their bright sharp eyes. Chancelade tried to look away, but it was no use: everywhere the light glared in livid slashes, sparkling on the roofs of the cars, rebounding from the windows, darting like a dagger from the lenses of dark glasses, jutting from the roofs of concrete and the walls with their overcrowded balconies. Both the light and the noise from outside penetrated the car and mingled instantly with the electric music. Everywhere there was the same fury of faces, the same shrieking voices, smells of gas and hot oil, and desperate movement. To the left arose the huge white walls of blocks of flats. In the middle the tide of cars buzzed in its burning cloud. On the right the beach with its sharp pebbles was seething with noisy men and women, and beyond it rose the other wall of the sea, blue, solid and covered with sharp little wrinkles.
All the colours throbbed in time to the music, as if they were suspended phosphorescent in the void. There was no longer anything calm or insignificant. The bare sky was of an incomparable blankness, the sea atr
ociously blue. There was nothing on every side but blows in the face, punches delivered by red dresses, dazzling shirts, red or yellow hair, brown faces, gold teeth, glittering wrist-watches, shoes, black and white swimsuits, scarlet shoulders, green or mauve glasses, flowers, cars, children, dogs, motorcycles, pebbles, patches of melting tar. The torrid colours collided, stuck together, spread in soft waves. The burning colours hurtled towards you like bullets. They were all there, foaming together like bubbles or else like steel blades, hovering, menacing, ready to disembowel you.
Nor could you escape from all the names spread out everywhere; on signs swinging in the breeze, written in letters of fire, gashed with great brush-strokes, the senseless words exploded like grenades, and the pieces penetrated your brain. They were also knives, these words, razor-blades eager to carve your skin and make your blood flow. Their dumb cries, more terrible even than the cries of men, arose on every side at once. No matter where you looked it was impossible to avoid them. Strange, beautiful, violent, they lay there like traps, and just as you looked at them they disappeared. To left, to right, before, behind, above, below. On the walls of service stations, over bars, in the gardens, on the beach, and even in the sky, on the long stream trailing behind the aeroplane:
CASTROL
CASTROL
CASTROL
Hot Dogs Hot Dogs Hot Dogs
SOLEX
air way in way out camping site outboard motors
kingsize beach plot orangina
tripe-shop restaurant
bleupunkt
gold
SATAM
Chancelade read all these words inside his throat; he couldn’t stop. He sang them and yelled them without respite, KELVINATOR, disappearing into each other, REMINGTON, swallowed up by the syllables, HONDA, exhausted, incapable of forgetting, SALEM, incapable of shutting his eyes or extinguishing his voice.
This was the real curse of this place, the infernal power that was taking possession of his mind and body in order to reduce him to slavery. The world had suddenly turned over to show its hidden face, and nothing was any longer comprehensible. As the words exploded the landscape gradually fell to pieces, showering the motionless car with the debris of human bodies and artefacts of civilization. But this destruction, instead of making the spectacle more endurable, only rendered it still more harsh and impenetrable. Men and women clustered on the edge of the pavement, their empty eyes masked by dark glasses, their gaping mouths uttering incoherent sounds.
A fat woman came up to the car door and pointed at Chancelade; then she began to speak, and Chancelade listened in terror to the grunts and stammers and gurgles that came out of her mouth. He heard her say:
‘Argl, gaur haurgl, baarh heu-heugogl meug eth at-t-teu argl …’
She burst out laughing, and all round her Chancelade saw children, men, and other women laughing loudly and showing their gold teeth. He looked at them eagerly, fascinated, unable to turn away. When the fat woman had gone he saw a man who limped, an expectant mother with varicose veins, a group of boys, a girl with a broad beam and bare feet and breasts that jiggled as she walked, an old man covered with grey whiskers, a woman in a bikini, two women with untidy hair, another girl in a black swimsuit, a woman with pimples on her shoulders and legs, three soldiers, and a man carrying a transistor. He looked at them without understanding, trapped inside a clear nightmare. He saw all those eyes embedded in the soft flesh, the misshapen noses, the cheeks, the smooth or rough hair, the veined hands dangling from the arms, the shoulders, the fleshy backs, the pot bellies, the breasts, the sweating rumps, the crooked or skinny or swollen legs. He smelt the matching odours, heard the grunts and gurgles of the familiar voices. The colours sparkled in the light, and sky and sea were become as hard as sheets of linoleum.
So it was here, the centre of the furnace, the crater, the heart of the ant-hill. Sweat began to trickle gently from Chancelade’s face, arm-pits and back. He felt that he was gliding into the landscape of madness, in time with the electric music. Soon he would be one of them, an insect among insects; the crowd would close around him like a mouth and digest him greedily. He would slip along the undulating corridors like a piece of food, gradually losing his flesh, his muscles and his mind. Multiform folly would engulf and press in on him from all sides, sucking up his substance, drinking up drop by drop the liquid of his personality. And suddenly he would disappear in the human sea, he would vanish, swallowed up, unconscious, and no one would ever know that he’d been there.
Chancelade gazed with longing through the window at the moving crowd. Somewhere deep in his body, in his belly, in his genitals, in the network of his nerves, he felt the call of the void urging him to mingle himself in what he saw. It was like a funnel drawing him outwards, towards the landscape with its dense colours, towards a world as thick and hot as a succulent steak. The rays of the sun were tentacles tugging at him gently and without pity. The noises stretched out gluey filaments that clung to his skin. The movement turned on its own axis, drilling outwards its endless spiral, and you could only follow, follow. You had to tear yourself off the imitation leather cushions, open the door of the car, and leap right out, abandoning the seething prison of the blue car, with a woman’s voice crying vaguely in the distance, though you didn’t even listen:
‘What on earth are you doing? What are you doing? …’
With quickened heartbeats Chancelade began to walk through the midst of the crowd, along by the sea. He went back along the line of stationary cars, gulping in the smell of petrol and oil and staring at the starry reflections of the coachwork till his eyes were full of tears. The sun was right in his eyes, and he went along through the mist of light hardly seeing where he was going. He was moving fast. His feet thudded on the ground and rebounded as if on a thick carpet. His arms swung at his sides, his hands clenched and unclenched, his lungs breathed in and out, and sweat ran in little streams down his back and down his cheeks.
In front and around him the crowd opened then joined together again; bodies jostled against him, massive masculine bodies, the warm bodies of women in swimsuits, the light bodies of children or girls. There were waves of vulgar and delightful smells: frying, sun-tan lotion, perfume, sweat. Never had there been so many remarkable things, so much richness and life. Ugliness was everywhere, glowing sumptuous ugliness in blazing colours that never dimmed. On the left an absolutely flat sea shone an unwavering blue. There had never been such a blue anywhere. The sky shone too, colourless, mercurial, teeming with a million tiny specks. Underfoot the ground echoed, cracked and buckled, and the heat clung to your clothes and skin like a sheet. Inside Chancelade’s skull now there was no more echo; nothing but a bottomless hole, an insatiable void devouring all it could, drinking in all it could as if for the first and last time.
And perhaps it was the last time. He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices. He’d been travelling all his life in order to arrive here, in hell, to burn with all the others in this hideous yet delectable furnace; yes, it was undoubtedly hell, but it was unimaginably interesting. It was solid life, life compact, thick as syrup, dense, bitter, sweet, nauseating, narcotic, the strange whirlwind that swept up all in its path. Resistance was vain. The crowd broke over you like a wave and you were carried away in its febrile dance. Now you were shouting the words that were written in the middle of the yellow stars: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, or ‘D.D.T.! D.D.T.!’, or ‘Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!’ The whites of everyone’s eyes glared with madness between darkened lids, and all breaths panted in unison, strewing the air with a low raucous hum. Car hooters blared ceaselessly, there were grotesque yells of laughter, and cries, and the music of the electric guitar reverberated from all the transistors: and it was a calm harmonious concert that stirred your inside and made you tremble.
All this had been prepared to crush and
conquer you. There was no mildness anywhere, no hiding-place of gentle shadow. Everywhere there were stars of noise and heat and light, in the trees, in the grey pebbles, in people’s faces, in the folds of upholstery and clothes, in the middle of the earth and the centre of the sea. These darts were set everywhere, charged with their sudden poison, ready to pierce the skin. Chancelade advanced into their midst, proffered perhaps as their prey, making no attempt to defend himself. He melted into the folds of the crowd, he crumbled away piecemeal in the sun, he mingled continually with the downward flood of dirty water. Soon perhaps he would reach the meeting-point, zero, and disappear without more ado. He would vanish like a splash drunk up by the sand, merged into the huge ocean of men and things, there on that square of anonymous earth, lost in the eternal plenitude. He would be forgotten. He wouldn’t be dead, but he would cease to be the only living being in the world. He would be no more than a tiny seed in the silo, sifting down with all the other grains, closed in on all sides, with nothing left that bore any resemblance to hope, or freedom, or sorrow. He would never be mentioned again. He wouldn’t even be allowed his insupportable soul; nothing more would be expected of him. He would just be there, between a bit of yellow plastic and a woman in a blue and white swimsuit, with somewhere or other the blind sun, a scrap of blue sky, a block of flats with a hundred windows all exactly the same, and of course the flat sea with its trivial little wrinkles. One name among the rest, one name in the forest of names, and a toneless voice would read out mechanically:
Zisman
Calane Henri
Apaydin
Cadopi
Queru Marie-José
Benezit
Bavastro
Lesueur
Garibaldi
Camous
Gonigres
Malivoire-Filhol de Camas
Vandamme
Uhl Josette
Eliaou Elizabeth
Marie Angst
Pyée Mireille
Almaleh Klod-Korin
Amigo Martine
Chancelade