Fever

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Lower down than the mouth the chin jutted forward, heavy, massive, shaped like a pebble. The forehead too looked like stone; it was slightly rounded, hard and smooth, with two vertical furrows stretching the skin close to the eyebrows. Near the roots of the hair some tiny spots had broken out, marking the course followed by the drops of sweat. Under this forehead was the bony skull, thick and strong, ready to take blows and bump into obstacles. The brain was well sheltered behind this rampart and could stay there, curled up like an almond, keeping a succession of tiny, haphazard thoughts on the move in their warm, soft bath. The forehead rose high beneath the mass of black hair; but the head didn’t seem to be bounded by anything, it seemed to melt away gradually like this, lying open in a forest of filaments which floated in all directions. The hair was very long, divided in the middle by a kind of semicircular parting from which a dark, glossy wave rippled away on either side. Behind her back the mane fell very straight, the hairs kept separate by electric repulsion. When the comb went down through this mane one heard funny crackling sounds and a breath of air stirred the hair as it went past, so that it floated for an instant over her shoulders and shoulder-blades. All the hairs were separate, alive perhaps, and yet without feeling. They could be cut off in handfuls with no pain to indicate that they had left the body where they had originated; and there were so many of them! Thousands, millions, perhaps milliards, occupying each quarter-millimetre of the scalp, growing upwards like an animal vegetation, warm and soft, all smelling of straw, all polished with grease and sweat, terribly long, sometimes stirred by slow downward movements that spread out into waves and curls, made up of unbreakable threads in all colours intermingled, blue-black, grey, ash-blond, white, auburn, jet-black, tawny, brown, sepia, burnt Siena, nut-brown, yellow ochre, whose shapes were all mixed up together, twisting into tangles where the comb got caught and hurt, short sturdy ones, thin ones, interminably long ones, healthy ones, scurfy ones, and those that were split once, twice, or even three times.

  Roch plunged his hands in the soft mane and played with it for minutes on end. He buried his face in the middle of the forest and felt the thousands of little tentacles brushing against his skin, getting up his nose and trying to smother him. Then the hair got into his mouth and he tasted its insipid, rather salty flavour, he inhaled its strong, familiar perfume, the captivating odour that made a slave of you.

  Roch was still alone on his sweaty bed, and yet he could feel the woman’s body sliding slowly through his hands. The whole of it—face, torso, hips, slender legs and supple arms—flowed suddenly into him, sending a thrill of delectable bliss all through his body. He held the melting flesh in his hands, drinking it in like a blind man, through his skin, with the tips of his nerves. And he entered the secret partitions, he curved into the shoulders, the breasts, the hollows of belly and loins, as though he were the soul that was to inhabit this statue. For, a stranger in spite of everything, she would die at once if it weren’t for him, that was sure; inside this envelope of veined, supple skin was nothing but emptiness; this frail breast breathed only nothingness and destruction; these hands, with their long, quivering fingers, were already lifeless, they no longer clung to anything. He, stretched on his bed, could save her only for a brief moment; he was going to give her life, by a sort of ardent, desperate transfusion. He was going to love her at last.

  Wherever his eyes turned, in the stifling, empty room, it was on her that they fell. The shape of Elisabeth’s face swayed in the air, filling the whole place. And her body, the mass of well-closed skin that contained her hermetically, that too was everywhere. It walked about, bent forward, lay down, glided across the floor or flew close to the ceiling, that elusive body; it danced, it divided up, it could be smelt, touched, heard, it was radiant light.

  It was as though there had been a series of mirrors stuck on all the flat surfaces and reflecting endlessly, from constantly changing angles, the same beautiful gesture made by a woman in a room. But Roch was inside the mirrors, so to speak. Yes, it was he, in reality, who was reflecting his wife’s body, who was continually breaking it up and altering it, with every deep breath he drew, with every nerve-stimulus from without, with every flash of harsh light, even at the mere contact of a shrill sound arriving over the roofs. The image, but it was more than an image, was pouring over him like water he thirsted for, trickling down his body, slaking him delicately with its drops of rain and coolness; every gesture of her arms, now, each familiar movement, drawing back the curtains, opening the shutters, combing her hair, pulling down the zip fastener of a white dress—each pure, luminous gesture travelled across to him and wrapped him round in a damp cloth that soothed his whole skin.

  These things were to last for centuries, no doubt; nothing could stop them. The divine bath was to continue, with no pause and no fatigue. For the gestures were being repeated endlessly, as though they were going backwards through time, snatching seconds from annihilation, coming quite fresh into the zone of disturbance, unhurriedly widening their dazzling white halo. They did not come forward automatically, but with a kind of magic that caused them to be born and multiply without reason, so as to nourish Roch, for his sake alone, in this room, in this odour of sickness and loneliness.

  The gestures did not stop; but in a few minutes they were coming so close together, they were so calm, so elongated, that it was like a single, eternal gesture of triumph, a fusion of white arms and dark hair, a radiant phantom, glimpsed in every imaginable pose, coming to enfold Roch in its motionless whirlwind. Thus it was that Roch received Elisabeth’s body, he clothed himself in it unawares, quite naturally, and lived in its coolness.

  Now he had himself become this woman, passion had as it were turned him inside-out, breaking off the state of outsideness and putting him inside. And yet, although inhabiting the form of Elisabeth, feeling around him, instead of walls and furniture, things that did not belong to him, that had never belonged to him, scattered fragments of woman that floated about and kept telling him over and over again, ‘I’m here. I’m here. You are in my dwelling-place,’ although captive in a new and altogether delectable abode, Roch still felt an obscure, violent, outrageous need to dominate and destroy. It was as though this woman who had come that afternoon, in the heat and loneliness, in the very midst of sickness, had confronted Roch with two deep abysses divided by a sword-blade. Then she had pushed Roch, and he had fallen on the blade, and his body had been sliced down the middle, and each of the two halves had fallen into the gulf yawning beneath it, and been swallowed up. Never, never would he be able to stick the two halves together again; he would have to live in the two gulfs, with half of his body and head, one arm and one leg. In the right-hand gulf Roch was bathed in the world of Elisabeth; in the left-hand gulf he was in possession of a soft, living object that looked like a woman’s body, which he was clutching in his hands, which he was perhaps going to strangle, which he was going to outrage.

  For in the last resort that was what was meant by inhabiting a woman; it meant being lost in a universe even more demented than that of illness. It was a real anger, attacking not only the senses and the intuition, but the mind’s whole will towards order and comprehension. Gusts of hatred and love were rising up simultaneously in Roch; and the terrifying thing was that as they rose the gusts mingled as though they were of the same nature, combined to form a single scorching, icy cloud, a sort of arid cyclone, a sphere of torment, the ultimate in pain and pleasure, thrusting everything aside along its passage and rising, always rising, up and up, and carrying him up with it, dragging him and dissolving him in its wake, him, Roch, the sick man.

  The narrow framework of the room had splintered now. The whole world, by this time, was the habitation of this cool, dark-haired woman. The continents were her habitation, the Americas, Australia, Greenland. She was spread out over them like drapery, covering them softly, dropping the folds of her shroud over all mankind; and it was the whole world that Roch was fighting. With rage, with a kind of shuddering despai
r, he made a weapon of himself, he yelled in silence, with all his strength he pounded at the tremendous burden of the heavens and the earth.

  Yet the man and the woman would both be vanquished one of these days, there was no doubt about that. The sweet, tender face, the deep, emerald-green eyes, the mouth, the lithe, pale body, would give away beneath his blows. There would be a sort of death, when the airy veil would be rent. And then the alien elements would be able to rush through the breach thus made, pour into them and drown them. For neither of them would be spared. When Elisabeth, her body pierced with holes, surrendered to the dreadful temporal profanation, all would be over for Roch too. A staggering blow would thrust him back, send him in reverse the way he had fallen, fast, very fast, and plant him again on the hot mattress, on the bed, pinned down in the old room with the damp walls and the yellow sun oozing across the outside of the shutters. All that, which was normal, which was hard, in preparation for the agonies, the poverty, the faceless days and nights when one was back at home.

  When it was all over, this moment of crisis, sickness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, Roch got off his bed and went into the kitchen. He sat down for a minute at the table which was cluttered with dirty dishes, and he waited. On a shelf above the gas cooker was a clock that said half past seven. Outside in the courtyard a dog began to bark; it went on for a long time, with funny hoarse barks, as though it couldn’t stop. It was probably beginning to get dark, with a beautiful purplish sunset over the hills. Elisabeth must have called for him at the agency. She’d be surprised to discover that he had ceased to be a member of the staff since early that afternoon. But it wasn’t the first time Roch had got the sack; he had run through a lot of different jobs, in the Post Office, in the Railway administration, at a bookshop, even in a bank. She must be used to it by now.

  Roch stood up and went out of the flat. He walked out of the house, took the safety-chain off his bicycle, and set off across the town. Once, just before he turned into the boulevard, he glanced up at the sky; but without uneasiness, now: the sun had completely vanished, somewhere over the horizon. Already the bats were beginning to swoop between the roofs at their crazy speed, and moths hung in clusters on the street lamps where the light was turning blue. In the streets everything had dried up since the afternoon. There was not a drop of water on the ground or on the house-roofs. A kind of dust had settled on the tarmac, something like volcanic ash. It was all that remained from the gigantic conflagration which had raged here for a whole day: ashes, scraps of charred match-sticks, cigarette-ends crushed into cinders. Everything smelt of burnt rubber, and little wrinkles could be seen on flat surfaces, like signs of old age.

  Roch rode his bicycle through this dusty debris. As he was going along a narrow street, keeping close to the wall of a house, a shovelful of broken plaster fell on his head. Further on, a girl on a motorized bicycle crossed his track; she was sitting very straight, and the wind was blowing into the front of her blouse. Yes, the drought was really total. One was living in a town the sun would never stop hitting, where its painful rays sank into the ground by day, only to emerge again at night. There was no respite.

  Roch came out on the promenade. He saw the dark membranes that covered the sky and the mass of water. In the distance the lighthouse was flashing intermittently, following some mysterious code. Because of all that powdery dust, those dry grey slabs, Elisabeth’s face had faded out of Roch’s head. All that remained at the bottom of his memory box was a kind of slate-coloured eye staring all by itself in folds of wool. But that might equally well be the blind spot the sun had left on his retina.

  Roch abandoned his bicycle and walked over the beach. And although that eye was spying on him so persistently, it was with no small pleasure that he plunged his body, shivering and still burning, down into the water.

  2. The day Beaumont became aquainted with his pain

  THE first time Beaumont had to become acquainted with his pain was in bed, towards three twenty-five in the morning or thereabouts. He turned over on the mattress laboriously, and felt the resistance of the sheets and blankets, which took part in his rotary movement, but incongruously, by opposing it. As though an invisible hand had twisted the bedclothes round his torso and his motionless hips. After a few minutes, or seconds, he tried, with his eyes shut, to release himself, by tugging with his left hand at the creases in his pyjamas and the folds in the sheets. He only managed to imprison himself even more closely, and getting cross at this, he kicked hard in the coils of what must have been beginning to seem more and more like a straitjacket. Both his feet got through at the same moment, and appeared at the foot of the bed, livid, suddenly thrusting out into the cold. The last vestiges of sloth—he was still dulled by sleep, no doubt—kept him in this position, but with a mind increasingly conscious of stealthy discomfort, of a very intellectual, yet physical unease. His brain was beginning to function again. Fleeting, almost imperceptible images were flickering in and out on his retina, sheltered by the joined eyelids, like neon shop-signs. There was a wooden boat drifting down a misty stream, and he was rowing with all his strength; then he knew he was in this boat, and the story began: naturally the boat capsized, the island came swimming slowly towards him, and beaches, mud-flats, filtered under his belly and carried him on, tickling gently. Or his footsteps were ringing on the pavement, rhythmically but lightly; and other footsteps, other feet approached, the dancing presence of a girl whose face he could not get a glimpse of, but who must have some kind of long, light-auburn hair and bare arms that were very white, almost luminous. Phosphorus words were being born in silence, buried in the furthest depths of his head, towards the nape of the neck perhaps, and these words, too, were lighting up and going out, against the darkness of the prehistoric void, ready to arrange themselves in sentences, ready to modulate adverbial, conjunctive and interrogative clauses. As though points of suspension were binding them together. When Beaumont sensed that this invasion, far from flagging, was moving faster and steadily advancing, he realized he would be unable to go on sleeping. His eyelids quivered, still squeezing tighter from time to time, but with a nervous jerk; and then, all at once, he didn’t know how or why, his eyes were wide open. In contradiction to what he had always been told, that it takes a little time for the retina to get used to the darkness and begin to make things out, Beaumont saw everything, immediately. He was lying on his right side, because of the heart, and the room looked to him just as it did by day, except that light had been replaced by darkness. It was a room in the style of a photographic negative, with a high black ceiling, four greyish walls and a greyish floor, and strips of white darkness coming in through the shutters. Beaumont lay there on his side, with his eyes open, completely motionless in the knots and strangulations of his sheets. The ticking of his watch came to him in the end, gradually, as though it had been a leak in a water-pipe where each emerging drop had clung to the previous one and built up a kind of moving stalactite that penetrated his grey matter millimetre by millimetre. He heard ‘tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick,’ and flung off the bedclothes, down to his feet. He switched on the bedside lamp and looked at the time: three thirty-two a.m. So it was now about seven minutes since he had become acquainted with his pain, and he didn’t know it.

  Beaumont got up, went down the corridor and through the dark rooms, urinated, drank a big glass of iced water from the refrigerator. As he went back to his bedroom, his bare feet pressing alternately on the damp floor, he did really feel that something was happening. Since he woke up he had vaguely realized there was some abnormal detail, inside him or somewhere else, that had taken possession of his mind. Impossible to make out what, exactly; it was rather like the idea of a change, let’s say rain suddenly beginning to fall outside the window, or the remembered crash of a collision between two cars, down in the street, near the crossroads. Instead of getting into bed again and taking advantage of the warm hollow he had made there, he walked across to his table, pulled out a chair a
nd sat down. He was shivering; his flannelette pyjamas weren’t warm enough for the time of year. But neither the cold, the silence nor any outside influence could induce him to move. He was preoccupied by an intense emptiness, which now filled his whole body and kept him in this meditative position, with his head held upright and his arms propped on the edge of the table. He was staring straight in front of him, in the direction of the opposite wall, and hardly breathing; his brain, in some strange way, had turned into a funny kind of animal, a worm, for instance, and the animal was turning round on itself, searching for some unknown thing. The cold creature would crawl imperceptibly forward, then stop short and slowly twist its squat body so as to look behind it. No eyes, but something resembling antennae, or snail’s horns, rose placidly out of the cartilaginous mass and, very softly, touched the wall of the skull, the object covered with pink meninges. Beaumont suddenly realized that this fluffy worm writhing inside his head was his brain, his intelligence, himself; whereupon he felt himself invaded by an unfamiliar fear, a precarious, shameful sentiment which he would probably not confess to anybody. He picked up in his right hand a broken looking-glass that lay among the papers on the table, and stared at his reflection. He saw his commonplace features, thirty-five to forty years old, with their weak lines, his cheeks, neither plump nor lean, where the beard had grown already, like the face of a dead man. He drew back his lips and saw his eye-teeth, projecting from his gums through a faint ring of tartar. Then his eyes, presumably blue, set in the mass of lined flesh, like doll’s eyes. His very slightly receding forehead, his hair, his ears, his nostrils, the two symmetrical depressions he had at the condyles. He saw his chin, the corners of his lips, the scar left by a beauty-spot he’d had removed, and above all, more and more, he saw his skin, that expanse of white skin, peppered with holes, bristling with hairs, the elastic, healthy skin, the withered, brown skin, the skin where spots and fever sores formed, that tissue of inflammation and eczema, that extraordinary map that belonged to him and in which he lost his way, like a tiny little fly walking over a living body. Next time he moved it was to light a cigarette; he liked to watch himself smoking, so he propped the mirror up on the table, against a pile of books, and slowly put a cigarette between his lips. But that night he couldn’t manage to repeat the customary movements in their proper order. Not that he was trembling, but he couldn’t manage to see himself. It all happened too quickly. He would have had to begin again and again, putting the cigarette back into the packet and the packet into the drawer. Then taking the packet out again, with a very natural air, putting his thumb and forefinger into it with a pincers movement, and choosing the cigarette he wanted. Raising this to his lips, with a perceptible series of movements of his forearm, his elbow still propped on the table edge. Tearing a match off the cardboard strip and striking it with a downward gesture. The match ought to have caught light, only once, but properly, once and for all. And to have set fire to the tip of the cigarette, and to have gone out; and the cigarette should have smoked away in his mouth and throat, like a fine, dramatic gesture. Instead of which it was all done absent-mindedly, as though it weren’t he who was smoking, who was going to smoke, who had smoked, but someone else, the man in the looking-glass, for example. Beaumont stopped looking at the broken piece of mirror. He leant back with his shoulders against the back of the chair. Out of doors, in the cold and indifference, in the electric light from the street lamps, there was a noise like a waterfall coming down. Sheets of noise, rending the silence, spreading out along the pavements, echoing against the mudguards of the cars, bouncing from wall to wall, tearing shreds off the posters. It was rain, or something of that kind. Perhaps a watering-cart, perhaps a broken gutter-spout. Beaumont sat inhaling the smoke from his cigarette, and his eyes were fixed on the table top. With prickles of pain he made out the scattered objects that lay there, the ashtrays full of ash, the ball-point pens lying higgledy-piggledy in an old tin, two or three cardboard beer-mats, and hundreds of sheets of paper, piled one on top of another. A small yellow sheet in the foreground caught his eye by a few centimetres, and he found himself being as it were compelled to read it, with infinite trouble and application: