Terra Amata

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  And so Chancelade walked through the town. He went everywhere, along the glass sidewalks, between the walls of houses, under the leaden sky, beside the steel sea and the diamond hills. There was no more fatigue, and no more rest. Only hate, a sort of hate that was also love and desire. Each step he took over the hard earth was counted, weighed, divided. Each gesture was recorded; each breath went straight to the depths of the world, then spread and was lost. Each thought that flashed through his mind shone out over all the earth, sending down roots in the windows of houses, clinging to roofs, trees, clouds charged with electricity. Television aerials thought at the same time as he, and so did the waves and the traffic-lights and the mountain gullies. Words sprang up out of the earth like will-o’-the-wisps, silent words that vanished before they could be read. Now they had replaced the images of matter; the world was no longer dumb or stupid. It spoke with its myriads of mouths, antennae, legs, wing-cases, pistils and stamens. Its voice and consciousness rose continually in the air, and Chancelade was only one sound in that voice, a feeble, distant sound drowned by all the rest. Intelligence shone everywhere, terrible, insensible. The power of a superior language weighed down on Chancelade, heavier than fifty atmospheres, and crushed him. In the precisely moving street the coachwork of the cars threw off their gleams of thought, and the boiling engines purred their accurate words. The walls rose with their invulnerable facades, the iron and concrete lamp-posts stood solid, pure and invariable in their strange unhoping will. The windows were cold and beautiful, and each of their words could kill. The transparent shapes of men moved over them, and it was a language above reason. The invisible air thought. The smooth sky thought, and the rivers, and the trees with their dusty leaves, and the dogs, the rocks, the algae, the broken bottles. And in the centre of the great sparkling dome was one unique thought, more violent than the others, pressing its cone of passion down upon the earth. Chancelade was lost. He hadn’t disappeared, but he was buried in the town itself, like a place in the left-hand corner of a big brightly-coloured tapestry. The dark green shadow on the fretted edge of a rose leaf, for example, or the white gleam in the black pupil of a bird of paradise. One little place in the web, one single point in the huge tapestry depicting the world.

  He walked about interminably in the midst of all these thoughts. He went to the right, to the left, to the right again. He walked for hours, minutes, seconds.

  He went into a café where the walls and ceiling were covered with mirrors, and drank a glass of beer. And it was a thought. He went out to the cloakroom, and that was a thought too. At a nearby table a young woman with black hair lit a cigarette with a match; the red flame burned alone at the tip of the little stick of white wood, and its thought was a wavering speck in the grey chaos of the smoke. The yellow linoleum lay over the floor under the table, a flat language on which walked the dull thuds of the words of men. The reason of the walls with their dirty mirrors, and of the transparent ceiling, talked without a pause. Chancelade sat for a moment, listening to the sort of conversation going on endlessly in the room:

  ‘Flat …’

  ‘Up, up, up’

  ‘Forward, back, forward, back …’

  ‘Cigarette’

  ‘Ceiling’

  ‘Floor’

  ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …’

  ‘Flow, float, slide …’

  ‘Black coffee?’

  ‘STAR!’

  ‘The blue straw breaks in the empty glass’

  ‘Here’

  ‘Six twenty-three and forty seconds, ping!’

  ‘Round, curved, and spiral’

  ‘Pool of chocolate, granulated sugar, and …’

  ‘Dog! Cat! Mouse! Snake!’

  ‘Michel? Ready?’

  ‘Disinfectant’

  ‘Juice’

  ‘Sun, eh? Moon, eh?’

  Then he left. As darkness fell slowly over the mirrors of the town, Chancelade was in turn : standing in front of a shop-window looking at a grey and black reflection that looked back at him. Sitting on a bench, with the rows of cars and the confusion of human legs like a painful river tearing bits of earth from the mountainside. Walking beside a girl in the street, and what they said was already too far away to be understood. Standing on the waterfront by the deep waters of the port; on the surface dark and calm as a cistern, red and white lights were already beginning to appear. With his head turned towards the hills, just in time to see the red disc disappearing beyond the horizon. Chancelade was also at the cinema; he looked through the dark auditorium at the sort of pearly mirror with ghosts dancing and shouting. But that was a subterranean thought, and the world was built around it as on a distant planet; you didn’t know where you were any more—in the caves of the Métro, in hell, or somewhere else.

  When night has come down over the town the mirrors are turned back to front, the light and the heat no longer vibrate, the sky and the sea are extinguished, and all the roads are overtaken by slowness. But it is worse than it was before.

  In the high-walled labyrinth the neon lights flash on and off without a pause, incomprehensible appeals indefatigably repeated. Black darkness has glided down over the great sheets of glass, opening up terrible depths. Everything has disappeared, almost, and yet everything is still there. You are on the bottom of the sea, in the folds of the icy ocean that presses down and paralyses. These mountains are submerged mountains, riven by sudden abysses whose slopes are clad in dark weeds. On the muddy floor that trembles slowly to and fro, long files of creatures crawl, covered with warts and tentacles. Reflections still reverberate even under water, but so slowly that you can see them approaching through the opaque space, sweeping aside as they come thousands of little moving mirrors that give forth a brief damp slimy gleam. There are trails of bubbles, bloodstained trails that move towards an unknown object and disappear in the darkness. Here noises move with difficulty, surrounded by a sort of halo; they shine as they radiate like stars; each explosion lights its own star. You can no longer see clearly; vision is veiled by a funereal eyelid, and from behind this dusky membrane, lowered like a blind, it seeps out imperceptibly, a light cloud of blood hovering round a wound. Everywhere are heard the tremulous thuds of a life ice-cold and silent and murky; it’s as if danger lurked somewhere, hidden among the steep black cliffs riddled with yellow holes, in the invisible sea-bed, in the air, the sea or the clouds. Everything is unknown. You have to guess and watch all the time, in fear, with cold sweat dampening brow and nape.

  The mirrors dazzle no longer; they have become transparent, and on the other side a diabolical world seethes with its great black whirlpools. The mirrors are windows now through which evil will enter, fragile windows that will break from one moment to the next and let in the floods of foul revenge. Everywhere there are these giant aquaria full of sleeping congers and morays with bloodshot eyes, these glass cages in which pythons and vipers coil as in a dream. The nightmare of darkness possesses the town, and every object, every concrete corner, every streetlight vibrates dully with the threat of death. The walls will give. The pavement will open up. The invisible sky draws gradually nearer, bringing down inch by inch its mass of mud and water.

  The people are terrible too; they change shape as they pass through the pools of white or blue or pink light, they make exaggerated gestures and their shadows keep deserting them and coming back to them. Some walk along close to the walls, their wan faces peering forward, and instead of eyes they have dark glasses with thick lenses which give off reflections like spikes of steel. The women tap the ground with their sharp heels as they walk, in a rhythm that makes you tremble and follow them. Chancelade is standing still, and a woman arrives at the end of the street and keeps changing colour; first she is blue, then green, then grey, then red, then white. She disappears for a moment in a lane of shadow, and when she appears again she is the colour of blood. She comes nearer, a dull scarlet that seems to be painted on her body and clothes and hair. Chan
celade sees the features growing larger on her red face : the closed mouth, the nose, the eyes with their specks of pupils, the forehead, the cheeks, the eyebrows, the quivering hair. The red is in her, entered into her body like a thought. It is her thought become visible, so that she has no need of words or signs. Chancelade watches the red woman approach, and is afraid. Then at the last moment, just as he is about to turn red too, she changes colour as suddenly as if someone had pressed a switch; she turns grey, and is gone.

  This is what night is. Ink-stains spreading over damp paper, flowing, contracting, streaming, drawing up the ever-changing map of the prison from which there is no escape. Sparks darting higher and thither from one hiding-place to another, black streaks, dust, viscous mud: and here again, red lights like falling stars that get farther and farther away and never disappear.

  Chancelade walked alone through the submerged city, touching nothing. It was too far away now, much too far away. Too cold. Rejected.

  Then he went into the big building with twenty-nine floors. He went through the glass door and along the corridor full of clear mirrors. Electric light bulbs shone in the ceilings, hidden inside pale globes. He walked without making any noise to the metal door of the lift. He saw the glass button with its strange winking red light. When he pressed it a green arrow lit up and there was a faint sound inside the walls. The sound grew louder every second. At last the metal door opened and Chancelade entered the steel-coloured cubicle. The door closed. Chancelade pressed the top button, which was marked 29. The cubicle immediately began to rise. You could see nothing. It went on rising. The steel-coloured walls vibrated calmly. The white light that came from the ceiling also vibrated on the walls. The cubicle still rose. Every three seconds there was a kind of sharp click and a green number lit up over the door: 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. The cubicle pursued its vertical way without effort, with only that click from outside, followed immediately by a faint sigh. This too was incomprehensible; a movement away from nothing and going nowhere. The floor rose, the steel walls rose, the ceiling with its pale light rose. The clicks followed one after the other, and so did the little sighs. You were in the belly of the whale perhaps, or in a capsule travelling towards nothingness. You had stopped falling. You were retracing the course of time, and the stifled years were reappearing one by one with a click like the sound of a telescope being shut up. 21. 22. 23. Why should it ever end? The tower had no roof. It disappeared into the ether, unravelling gently into the impossible infinite. The world was a cubicle with steel walls, closed in, hermetic, full of signs and arrows, with a luminous glass ceiling. The world rose along its cables, for no reason, just for the sake of rising, in order to continue its magic journey towards a non-existent summit.

  When the lift stopped Chancelade stood by the open door for a few seconds without moving. Then he got out and went to find the staircase leading up to the roof. He went up the concrete stairs one by one, listening to the echo of his footsteps. At the top of the staircase there was a door. Chancelade turned the handle and the door opened on to the night.

  The wind was blowing fiercely over the concrete roofs. Chancelade did up the neck of his shirt and went forward gingerly over the slippery surface. The roof stretched around him absolutely flat, scarcely gleaming in the darkness, and everywhere you could see ventilation shafts and television aerials. Gusts of warm air heavy with human odours came out of the openings; but they were whirled away as soon as the icy wind rushed howling hollowly among the chimneys. Chancelade tried to walk into the wind, but he grew breathless and had to stop. He turned the other way and let himself be driven towards the edge of the roof, using his legs as brakes. When he got near the edge he caught hold of a chimney with one hand and looked around him. As in a dream he saw the town stretching away as far as the eye could reach, crushed against the earth at a dizzy distance, dark and empty. It was still night, and yet, seen from this height, everything was pure and sharp in its still outline. The black houses, the straight streets, the fixed specks of light, the glimmerings of the cars—everything was there below, gathered together, intact. The grey ocean had withdrawn and the relief of the earth could be seen, grey, black, purple, magnificently put together. Farther away was the inky curved mass of the sea, and further still the rolling hills and jutting mountains.

  Chancelade took another step forward, without letting go of the chimney. While the wind threw itself against his body to blow him down, he looked towards the foot of the building; and the sort of black well immediately rose towards him, with its shriek of terror and hatred: the lighted street and the cars, the hundreds of lighted windows, the soundless movement of the crowd. The void grew harder, aiming an invisible shaft at him that pierced his belly, his glands, his groin, and even his brain. He stood petrified for a moment, then leapt back and drew away shivering from the precipice.

  The wind was still howling among the chimneys. Chancelade noticed that he was cold. He looked round for somewhere to shelter, but the roof was flat and there was nothing but the concrete tubes of the ventilation shafts and the bristling television aerials. Then he went to the centre of the roof and lay down full length facing the sky. He stayed there for a long time, listening to the sound of the wind and looking at the black sky and the hard bright stars.

  Here, in the terrible cold that swept the roof, the glass dome looked perfectly smooth. It stretched there still and cold, thousands of miles away, like a huge drop of ink on the nib of a fountain-pen. There was no light. There was no speed. The white specks of the stars were fixed in the dense block, frozen eyes that did not see. It was the wilderness or something like it. Nothing, either in or around, nothing offered to the view, nothing seen. The efforts of the light, the rumbling sounds, the chaotic movements, all were lost in the deep well. There were no legs or fins or suckers; only this hollow belly into which everything had disappeared, in which everything was digested. This flat hollow, this infinity suddenly drawn back, this shop-window out of all possible reach. Slowly, eternally, all vain things ascended towards the sky, and the shafts they raised were gradually dissolved. The world’s reflections were swallowed up by darkness—the thoughts of horses and men, the cries of parrots, wars, cycles, sufferings, joys, and deaths. The sky thirsted for life and light. It sucked up relentlessly the savours of the earth, menacing, weakening it with all its strength. All lines led towards it, seeking a meeting-point in its space. But it was always elsewhere.

  Scraps of matter floated and glided in the void. Suns exploded, stars contracted, archipelagos of planets whirled round upon themselves and disappeared. Bits of diamond were heaped together in some corner of a vast room with movable walls. Specks thrown into the silence hurtled along at thousands of miles a second. Clouds of gas transparent or opaque hung motionless, yet wisps streamed towards the earth with the speed of light. There was no more chaos or order. Only gulfs, gulfs opening on gulfs, hollows, abysses, unfathomable rifts, gullies, pits, and endless couloirs; and darkness kept flowing endlessly, cramming and ever spewing clouds of vapour into the swelling glass vase. You couldn’t read any more; you could neither hope for anything any more, nor despair. Nor hate. Nor love. Nor curse. Nor try to do anything. You couldn’t make little marks on paper any more and look at them with satisfaction, thinking that the surface of the empty mirror reflected the dazzling face of a man with a gentle smile and a brow covered with blood. The sun itself had been confounded. It could no longer blind you. Its place in the sky had been taken by this kind of hollow, this screw digging ever deeper, and the movement that bored this terrible hole was the movement of the mind dying. On top of the 29-storey building, Chancelade realized that he was going to start ascending again. But this time it was not inside the steel-walled cubicle. The whole earth had now become a lift, gliding on invisible cables up through the strata of the dark sky.

  The ceiling kept receding before Chancelade’s eyes. The higher the earth rose, exposing the plateau of concrete and light with the living body outstretched, the more distant, hard and i
naccessible became the polished marble dome. Chancelade fixed his gaze on a certain point in the sky, among half a dozen bright stars. He tried to drill a hole through the heavy mass, to try to see something, to understand, to mingle. In vain. The eye blunted itself on the dull armour, without even leaving a scratch. Then Chancelade began to speak, first under his breath, then louder. He uttered the words at random, between clenched teeth, in the direction of the giant drop of ink overhead. He said:

  ‘I’m going to speak now. I’m going to speak. I’ve waited long enough. You don’t want to listen to me, but I don’t care. Perhaps you don’t understand. Perhaps I’m not talking loud enough. Perhaps I ought to talk with bombs, to make you understand. Or with a machine-gun. If I had a stone I’d have thrown it in your face as hard as I could, do you hear, but I—There aren’t any stones here. I haven’t got anything. That’s why I’m talking to you like this from this roof. I’ve always thought that’s what one ought to do one day: go up on the roof of a very high house, and talk, without lowering one’s eyes. Afterwards I may jump off. Or I may not. I don’t know yet. But I’ve always thought I ought to speak like this, one night, lying on a roof thirty floors up. That’s why I’m here. If I don’t jump off I know what I shall do. I’ll buy a big pot of white paint and write shit everywhere, on the walls, on the road, on the, in the middle of the airport. In letters as high as a house. I’ve waited long enough. I’ve—All I’ve done. All I’ve looked at, listened to, learned. Yes, I want to know once for all now. It’s difficult to talk like this, looking up into this sort of sky, with the stars not moving and the wind whistling in the ventilation shafts. It’s rather ridiculous. Fortunately there’s no one here. Only the television aerials and the chimneys. Not even a bird. If there’d been any kind of animal here, a cat, a rat, a cockroach, anything, I’d have talked to it. Because it’s so ridiculous. But there’s nothing but those things, those ventilation shafts and aerials. In a minute, before I go, I’ll tear them down. Some people will be watching a cowboy film, or a woman singing, and all of a sudden they won’t see anything any more, and all because of me! If I had some dynamite I’d stick it everywhere, in all the chimneys, and light the fuses. Perhaps you’d hear something then … Yes, for a long time you haven’t said anything. For a long time no one’s seen anything around here. The sun dancing in the sky, for example, or a crossing of the Red Sea, or a burning bush. Show us something. Make an effort. No one will know. Make a triangle appear in the sky. Please. Or strike me down with a thunderbolt. Kill me with it. What have you got to lose? It’s so easy. Just a flash of lightning here on my forehead, and that would be it. What are you waiting for? Eh? It’s so easy.’