War

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  There were thousands of vehicles, all similar and yet different. They were moving along in three lanes, the fastest on the left, the slowest on the right. They followed each other in a line. They overtook each other, and then there was a sort of yellow star that blinked on and off just above the front wheel. Before reaching the bridge they followed a long curve, without swerving an inch. The roadway was marked out with a series of lines in white paint, and the vehicles drove between them.

  From time to time, heavy tankers rumbled by, skirting the kerb, and the ground trembled under their wheels. There was no end to it all. There was no end to the machines. They flowed on endlessly, disappeared, flowed, disappeared. The wet road surface made a continual swishing sound beneath the tyres, while clouds of exhaust gas dung to the embankments. The grey sky was blank. But at ground level there was this rapid movement that raced through the air, this wind that whistled in the ventilators, these chromium-plated radiators in which reflections glowed. Talking was no longer necessary. Bea B. and Monsieur X smoked their cigarettes, sitting on a gravel pile near the bridge. They watched the traffic go by. Sometimes they just watched a small strip of the road, and then it was as though they had been looking at a door continually opening and shutting. Or as though it were a sky in which the sun has slipped behind the clouds, and dark patches and clear spots follow each other, accompanied by flashes of lightning. At other times they looked up the road, tracing it back with their eyes to its point of origin somewhere in infinity, and then the roofs of the cars were piled on top of each other.

  No-one could see Bea B. The car windows were opaque. The motorway was a hard desert on which the rain fell in winter, off which the sun’s heat bounced in summer. Perhaps the world was made of metal, and that is all there was to it: sheet metal, chrome, bolts and rods. Perhaps mankind had vanished, all the men and all the women.

  The motorway had plunged into a great gully of cement. It had the appearance of a frozen river, a motionless glacier, a dried-up watercourse, something like that. Even the noises were no longer distinct. They arrived like the roaring of an aeroplane engine, each blade of the propeller, prisoner of the central boss, emitting its long screech. Each wave thundered against the ancient beach’s wall of pebbles, making its own particular din, but it was always the same wave in the process of falling.

  Of course there were a number of things that remained incomprehensible. But that was the result of being at the edge of the road. To understand properly, it would have been necessary to lie down on the wet asphalt, by the side of Monsieur X, and feel all the tremors run along the earth’s surface, all the round rubber-sheathed wheels, all the burning sparks of engines turning at 4,000 rpm.

  Rectangular coaches passed by, with their human cargo imprisoned behind the windows. These people saw nothing. The tinted windows had made night fall, and the little drops of rain that streamed backwards made them think that they were travelling deep beneath the sea.

  Up front, the twin windscreen wipers folded in two, then forced themselves up again, squealing against the glass of the great wide-viewed window. But nobody saw anything. They did not see the vast roadway stretching from one end of the earth to the other, they did not see the gentle curves, or the telegraph poles, or the grey sky. They did not see that the world had become metal. Nor did they see the concrete bridge, nor, at the foot of the bridge, this heap of sand with this motorbike lying on its side nearby, nor, on the heap of sand, this strange sight: two bodies lying pressed against each other, clothes dishevelled, struggling together, breathing heavily, mingling their gasps, their limbs, their bellies. With the whole world in the grip of war, who still cares about a pair of bellies?

  Forwards, Monsieur X! Let me ride behind you on your mighty 500 cc BMW, and we shall speed through the streets of the city. We shall circle the block fifty times, then maybe take a few one-way streets in the wrong direction. Your bike has a headlamp and at night you will switch it on and the beam of yellow light will sweep the darkest shadows. The sound of your engine’s exhaust will shatter the night’s silence, sending echoes bouncing to and fro in the buildings’ entrance-ways. With your powerful bike you will overtake all the cars, almost brushing against them as you pass. Each time a new street appears, to the left or to the right, you will tilt the bike over to one side, without slowing down, and we will watch the sloping ground as we take the turning. It will be like being in a plane. The wind will blow very hard, there will be blinding swirls of dust. Our mouths and nostrils will be filled with cold air, and our eyes with tears. We shall never go to the cinema. In those sealed halls the people slumped in overstuffed armchairs will be enduring suffocating heat and humidity. But we shall not join them. The bike will whizz past the waiting queue, giving us just time to read the posters, THE TRAPEZE, WAY OUT WEST, CASTLE OF THE SPIDER. We shall drive right to the outskirts of town, into districts containing nothing but gas-works and marshalling yards. Doing ninety miles an hour, we shall roar along the outer boulevards that cut a swathe through waste ground. When we are tired and freezing cold we shall stop at a café. But not the kind of café to be found in the centre of town, where people sip coffee and discuss psychosis and metempsychosis and things like that. No, some café for heavy-transport drivers, for plumbers and electricians, for small punters. You will pull up in front of the door, and we will walk into the café and tell the fellow behind the counter: ‘Two beers.’ We will drink the glasses of beer, and smoke cigarettes, and never say anything brainy, just: ‘Cold, huh! Really not too warm outside. Beastly rain. Well, so long as it’s fine tomorrow for the match.’ Sometimes we will go as far as the airport and watch the planes take off. We will try to understand why they taxi gently along the concrete runway, their coloured lights winking on and off. Then, how they manage to soar away from the end of the airfield, leaping high into the sky with their four jets screaming.

  After that, we went into two or three bars, drank more beer and listened to the music. This very beautiful music came out of a metal machine. The same sort of machine as cars and aeroplanes, with a lot of shiny chrome and winking lights. The barmaid’s hair was dyed white. She leaned over the machine, dropped a coin in a slot and pressed some buttons with her forefinger. The machine had a motor whose wheels turned secretly inside its belly. It was so full of electricity that there was a halo of sparks around it, and the girl’s fingers crackled as they touched the buttons. The electricity ran through her veins and forked out into the room, giving off a peculiar blueish gleam like fluorine. And each time that the music started coming out of the machine, everything else was forgotten. They were war songs, that’s why, their rhythms were all made for killing, for savagery. First, a few heavy, very deep thuds which reverberated in the ground and penetrated you from the feet upwards, spreading, continually spreading out. Sounds of death, no doubt, and it was possible to feel the cold making its divisions within the spinal cord and the loins. The sounds fell slowly, slowly, lingering on for hours. Then came other sounds, sharp hesitant notes blending in with the great deep thuds. At that stage it became quite clear what all this meant: it meant that there would be no more future, that the past had ceased to exist, and that all time’s holes had been probed, had been scraped to the bone.

  The electric machine hurled sounds as far as the end of time, obliterated all the years’ numerals: 637, 1212, 1969, 2003, 40360, Aa 222, Year VI. Nothing remained. It hurled its notes as far as the end of language, too, it crushed words underfoot. One became dumb: there was no more to be said. The machine thought for you, I swear it did, it had a monopoly on thought. Nothing but circuits of wires, fog-lights, small symbols stamped into the cellulose plastic, and dizzy movements in the condensers. Everyone in the bar was like that: sitting in a chair, in front of a table, eyes engaged in seeing the window’s white rectangle, while the machine grimly aimed its waves at these minds, slowly setting the rotors turning, making the fan blades whirl faster and faster under the alternate blows of the electric current, and IT WAS THAT THAT CONSTITUTED T
HOUGHT.

  Then, words could be heard boring into the café’s silence; they emerged from the scintillating machine and vibrated in the hermetically sealed air, and the people there heard these words with blank minds. The voice murmuring against the microphone was very gentle, very faint, the voice of a young woman or maybe a child, but its words devoured space. They rippled through the network of electric wires, became amplified, reverberated, spurted from the mouths of loudspeakers, ran quickly along the ground, or just flew slowly through the heavy air. They said nothing. They were beyond intelligibility, simple vibrations drowned by the vibrations of the guitar and the double-bass, and the young woman doing the singing was visible everywhere, opening and closing her thick lips. The words danced in the café’s cube of air, accompanied by cigarette smoke, slurred whispers, the clearing of throats, the sounds of water and breathing. They said nothing. Or rather, what they said was:

  Ba de bi dooo doo da ti da dooo

  Wha di toodoo daaa ni na beuh deuh dooo

  Chitti dan wi wachamidamoo doo doo

  Ra la mi ma ma mi ooh oh eh eh

  Ta long whon di nimamoo wa ta

  Ti da doo bi da Wa wa

  And this was truly the most beautiful language imaginable, gentle incantations full of moist noises, murmuring, spelling out their simple sounds, agglutinating their powerful vowels. It was a language that hurled one backwards, that made one forget the war, perhaps. Or maybe it was their own war-chant that was coming from their electric mouths in long-drawn-out stresses, and for the first time the question of defeat no longer seemed important.

  In any case, this language was not that of woman, or of man, or of any living thing that kills for food, or of dogs, or the offspring of cows, or ants. It was more like a language of trees and plants, a tremor concealed within the fibres, a vibration in the sun’s light or the rain’s downpour, an outcrop of roots.

  Monsieur X, this is what poetry has become, today. No longer little phrases jotted down in notebooks, no longer little lines carefully arranged on sheets of paper by beslippered poets in stale-smelling rooms with closed shutters.

  This was it, true poetry. Emanating from the mouth of a bulky thinking-machine at the back of a plastic-coated café. The poetry that should be the same for everybody.

  Would you care for a short list of some of the great poems of our time?

  Shaking all over (Johnny Kidd and the Pirates)

  Heloise (Barry Ryan)

  Satisfaction (Rolling Stones)

  Obladi oblada (Arthur Conley)

  End of the world (Aphrodite’s Child)

  Shake it, baby (John Lee Hooker)

  I’m sicky’ all (Otis Redding)

  Sous aucun prétexte (Françoise Hardy)

  Kansas City (James Brown)

  Sir Geoffrey saved the world (The Bee Gees)

  A whiter shade of pale (Procol Harum)

  When there is no living word left upon the earth, that will mean that the war is over. It will be peace, then. It will be possible to open one’s eyes again, and look around. It will be possible to hope for happiness in both love and business affairs. There will be nothing left to invent. It will be possible to sprawl on a beach, in the sun, without seeing the great bleeding hole in the sky, and it will be possible to walk in a city of fifty million inhabitants without scanning walls for crannies that have no eyes pressed against them, without deliberately seeking out the company of the blind. No-one will feel obliged, any longer, to possess genius, and to live alone on the top of a pile of garbage, cursing. No-one will write any more of those intimate little poems inscribed laboriously on a sheet of paper with a ballpoint pen, the words set down one beside the other, taking great care that they are poetical words, and not banalities of one kind or another, such as

  ‘I enjoy living’

  or:

  ‘The sky is blue’.

  When the war is over, Monsieur X, we will spend a lot of time in these plastic cafés. We will listen to the language that stirs in the silence, and the electric music with its different accents. We will go to the cinema to watch the very white images of a man and a woman, naked, caressing each other for hours on end. We will go to the theatre to see a very beautiful play in which everything will be obvious from the beginning: the stage will be covered by a network of electric wires, and rails, which will constitute a sort of map of human thought revealed at last in its totality, and that will mean that one will have emerged from the labyrinth at last, for good. No more departure or arrival! No more dream or reality! No more why or how! Everything will be clear. Everything will be true. Everything will be beautiful. Maybe we will both be dead before all this happens, but that’s another story . . .

  In case it should help in making my intentions clear, I may say that it was after having constructed a pair of spectacles, the lenses of which bristle with needles threatening to pierce the eyes, that I felt the urge to recreate objects in terms of the memory, instead of actually showing them.

  Daniel Spoerri.

  EACH SUCCEEDING DAY, evil makes visible progress. It does not really advance. It stays put. Only, things become more clear-cut, develop angles, solidify. Hooks and claws appear, peculiar hands with outstretched fingers that emerge from the ground or from walls. Everywhere, mouths gape open, giving a glimpse of yawning red throats. There are wheels spinning very fast, with wisps of smoke and streams of sparks escaping from their smouldering hubs. There are eyes that open in the light, eyes whose hard glances seek to vanquish. In the tarred streets the air is a motionless block; but the bodies of tiny specks of dust vibrate across it. Each of these is a planet, inhabited by a man endowed with vision and judgment. Drops of rain fall from 16,000 feet or more, each one tracing a long glowing ray in space.

  Solid buildings straddle the earth, bearing down with all their massive weight. Everywhere, it is possible to feel the pain inflicted by their foundations, to feel the zones of congestion on the skin. Thirst, too, an unquenchable thirst that parches language in the mouth and turns the blood into paste. Ribbons of bituminous crust wind like tightly-squeezed lodes across the earth; these are the long asphalt roads that cars pound ceaselessly. And the grey, blue or black sky is contracted between the walls of houses as aeroplanes pass painfully through it.

  Everywhere, at random: telegraph poles carrying endless wires, the white towers of skyscrapers, tunnels through which blind trains burrow, streams, rivers, drains, building sites, factory chimneys, antenna-festooned metal turrets, waste land, reservoirs, motorway intersections, railway junctions, traffic lights, the snarling of engines, clouds of fumes, windows. All that: all these aches and pains, all these teeth, all this skin.

  One calls them by their name. One looks them in the face. And they stare back with steady, hate-filled eyes. One talks to them occasionally, telling them things in a worried tone of voice because fear is stirring within. One stops in front of a traffic light and says:

  ‘Oh how beautiful you are, I love you, you know, metal pole, I really do. I love you because you have a beautiful cast-iron base for dogs to piss against, and because your roots are invisible beneath the pavement. I love you because you are not a tree. And yet you bear beautiful fruit at the top of your body, three beautiful fruits, a green one, a yellow one and a red one. If you were a tree you would not be so beautiful. Trees die. Sometimes they are struck by lightning and split in two and turn black. Sometimes a man comes along with a power-saw and cuts the trees up into matchsticks. If you were a man you would not be so beautiful. Because instead of having three lights that wink on and off you would have eyes, and it would become obvious right away that the whole set-up serves merely to churn out thoughts, to think ME ME ME and then again ME ME ME and then ME GOD GOD, so what’s the point? You are an iron pole, a beautiful iron pole with three lights. Down below, you have a beautiful electric motor that hums, and you never stop flashing your three lights on and off, GREEN LIGHT and the cars dart forward with roaring engines, YELLOW LIGHT and they all go crazy, some braking,
while others accelerate and rattle on, RED LIGHT and their over-heated engines come to a halt. Inside the cars’ shells, people get impatient and start picking their noses, but you don’t give a damn, you just wait, then you put on your GREEN LIGHT and the people hurriedly feel for the little stumps protruding from their gear-change boxes.’

  A little farther on, stopping in front of a manhole cover, one says:

  ‘Beautiful beautiful manhole cover.’

  There are so many things to greet, everywhere in the city. One recognizes them, in passing by, because they never move. They are there one day, and also the following day, and also the day after that.

  The girl called Bea B. looked at the temple-like edifice that had been built in the centre of town. It was a pyramid, a pagoda, a cathedral and an acropolis all at the same time: a vast white building with glass panels from top to bottom, colonnades, a pointed roof. The entrance-way was quite extraordinary. Standing on the opposite pavement, Bea B. studied this giant portico with its four glass swing-doors through which the crowd was squeezing.

  People went in and came out in a never-ending stream, shuffling their feet as they pushed at the golden, S-shaped handles that glittered in the four glass doors. Like grotesque black insects, the people were continually swallowed, then regurgitated, by the great building. The light from the neon strips at the back of the display windows and above the doors made big white haloes in the daylight. The entire population was heading for the temple. It had been built there, in the very heart of the city, and people were heeding its summons.