War
Page 7
All the swarms of flies, may-bugs, vultures, pterodactyls and vampires: they fly back and forth above the seemingly ruined city, seeking blood, seeking sap. Where do they come from? So many furiously waving legs, so many wing-sheaths, membranes, talons! Might they be the war’s real messengers? The girl looks out of the window of her room on the fifth floor and sees the air tremble with these winged cloud-formations.
Lower down, in the street, whole packs were on the move. Hordes of wolves, peccaries, baboons. Caravans of ants in search of a body. Oozing streams of snakes, scorpions, black spiders. They were all words. But equally they were unknown threats, desires, glandular secretions. One was never left in peace. Fondly imagining one was secure at the top of one’s tower, here on the fifth floor of the building. Getting into bed and burrowing inside the sheets and blankets. Until the fluttering, quivering army discovers you there, in your nest, and gnaws you to the bone.
The girl could do nothing about it. For this is fear, which enters the body and then breaks out in tiny drops of cold sweat.
The girl, Bea B., wanted to break down all barriers. The barrier of silence, and then also that of noise. That of sleep, that of death. She was alone, yet gripped by thousands of hands, arms, legs. She possessed an eye, a single eye swimming in the centre of her black consciousness, as well as dust-specks of eyes that sparkled in the night from one end of the world to the other.
It is so that they will no longer be afraid that men read pornographic publications in squalid little shops. They stand around in the ill-lit back rooms, fingering the magazines. The glossy pages are filled with black-and-white or coloured photos of naked women, women with heavy breasts, white bellies pierced by a navel, buttocks, legs, feet with corn-encrusted toes. One of them is spread over a double page. She is smiling gently with her great red mouth, and her tow-like mane is draped over her right shoulder. Her left arm is positioned across her belly so as to conceal the pubis. All the rest of the body is visible, in salmon-pink hues, with odd reflections at the points where the spotlights are aimed. To start with, there are the two plump, round breasts, the left one slightly larger than the right. Each of these sleek balloons displays a big reddish-brown blotch with a protuberance in the middle. These are the areolas, where the skin is marked by a series of small swellings rather like goose-pimples. There are grey shadows in the form of half-moons on the two breasts. Beneath them, the heavy belly traversed by folds and punctured by a puckered navel. Then the fat round hips, and the long rosy thighs, and the wrinkled knees, and the shin-bones, and the ankles where the veins are just visible, and the two long feet each ending in five toes: one big toe with a split white nail, and four small toes of diminishing size, the last one curled inwards.
Bea B. was genuinely fond of pornographic publications. These magazines that she bought at the news-kiosks and took back to her room were also personal friends of hers. She gazed for a long time at the photos of naked women, and it was one way of fighting silence.
Each one had her own name, her own life, her own thoughts. It was only necessary to take a magnifying-glass and scrutinize the folds of the flesh, the swollen mounds, the breasts, the hair. Their story soon swam into focus.
They had names. It was all written down in large letters beneath the colour photos, for example:
Rita Rose
the summer’s belle
is a woman without secrets
When the hot sunny days arrive, Rita escapes from town and runs across the fields. She likes woods and birds and fields of wheat, and also stock-car racing. She comes from Holland, and feels nostalgia for the broad plains and the wind.
Which doesn’t stop her having her feet planted firmly on the ground.
‘Happiness’, Rita tells us, ‘is to be beautiful and free.’ For our happiness too . . .
Nadja Séguilah
Daughter of the Aurès
the Savage
the Berber
the Amazon
Sabine Sun
Her preferences:
Czech films
American short stories
mineral water
sad men
Russian music
and riding in the sidecar of a motorbike
These days
Amphitrite is simply
a big girl.
She no longer heeds Neptune’s call,
she disdains chariots
even if they are
drawn by dolphins.
Tritons and sea-horses have remained
in the ocean’s stable
because Annabel
has no need
of anyone’s help to get ahead.
It is quite enough for her to rise
from the waves;
ANNA BELLE
when this child appears
the circle of her friends expands
continuously.
But don’t start thinking
that Annabel will allow herself to be caught
in your net.
No mesh is tough enough to withstand
her fierce strength.
Bea B. had many such friends. They were true friends, who never changed or grew old. They lived peacefully in the pages of magazines, without worrying themselves about hunger or cold. They knew nothing of the war. They had nothing to fear in their Technicolor world. No-one wanted to destroy them. They were pure and beautiful, their triumphs came easily, just like that, lying on beds or astride black motorcycles. Their look was unclouded by fear. Between the heavy lashes, the star shone steadily, shedding light like a diamond, but never any tears. They bore magical, gentle names, Sophie, Handa, Molly; names like whiplashes, Vick, Dolores, Patricia, Estelle, May; names like the names of cars. Perhaps they were already on the other side, soldier-women from Venus or α Centauris, who had decided to conquer the earth. Perhaps it would be easy to go away with them. The girl would strip off all her clothes and, naked but for a bronze pendant and a leather headband, would hurl her tall bronzed body into an assault upon the planets. She too would have her own name, and her disturbing story would figure on the pages of pornographic albums:
Bea of the
war the very real queen
of a future Ys
she
who wishes to save
the world
from boredom.
Wreaking vengeance
on all contempts all nullities
she gives her body
and takes it back again
her body made of bronze
which, with a single sweep of the arm,
will send crumbling into dust all the old decaying walls
of Jericho!
It was truly difficult not to be engulfed. It was difficult to swim above the muddy waves when they wanted her to founder. She would need to be prouder than a ship, harder than a torpedo, more mysterious than an iron submarine. All around her, endlessly, people were sinking, disappearing into the terrible depths. The light gnawed away, the noises and odours nibbled at the flesh, everything everywhere ate ravenously.
Or else it was a gigantic fire, an endless blaze ravaging the earth. Flames higher than buildings danced over the ground, and the heat transformed everything into water, then gas, then nothing.
From her high room, Bea B. watched the inferno. She saw the street’s corridor stretching away to infinity, and it was a throat, a long gullet whose burning acids dissolved its victims ceaselessly.
Down below, on the pavement, people were moving forward, never suspecting what fate had in store for them. She knew them all well. She watched them vanishing in death’s direction, her heart heavy, her eyes brimming with tears. She murmured to them, from behind the window-pane, and each word created a halo of steam before her lips:
‘Farewell, Monsieur Geoffroy . . . And Madame . . . Farewell, Dick . . . Farewell, Jules . . . Farewell, Simon. Farewell, Monsieur Soulier. Farewell Sébastien. Farewell Héloïse. Farewell Lucie. Farewell Germaine. Farewell, farewell . . .’
She wanted to lean out of the window, to cry out to them with all her strength:
‘Stop! Stop! Don’t go in that direction! Come back! Danger! Danger! Come back quickly!’
But no-one would have heard.
It is not too late yet, Monsieur X. We shall fight. We must take the initiative, we must fight back. We shall make use of any weapons that come to hand. We shall fight against the motorways with your mighty 500 cc BMW. We shall speed like the wind among all the black cars, and each time you pass one it will be like inventing a new word, *Schlemp, for example, or *Grunge,
We shall use music as a weapon, howling like coyotes for hours on end, and then croaking like frogs for hours on end.
We shall fight the shop windows by breaking them with iron bars, and by listening to the alarm bells clanging in the night. Is it not a fact, Monsieur X, that there are not enough bellies for all the waiting kicks, not enough mouths for all the waiting punches? The crushing sky is made of concrete: we shall set up iron spikes which will pierce it through and through, we shall construct towers of Babel which will transform it into a great landing in a building.
At night, the city shuts its doors and assumes its dead mask, its mask that wishes to see nothing. So we shall race the engine of your bike in the silence, and wake up everyone who is asleep while I cannot get to sleep.
We shall fight the clocks by tearing their hands off, we shall fight the lamp-posts by smashing their bulbs with shots from a catapult. There are so many things to do. We must start right away. When we have demolished everything, just like that, house after house, street after street, town after town, then perhaps it will be time to think of other things, agreeable things such as daybreak or forests of poplars. But for the moment the poplars are inside matchboxes, and each tiny stick is tipped with a red head that explodes and flares up. Meanwhile, the world is strewn with cigarettes, waste paper and Pepsi-Cola crown-caps.
I want to wage war against everything that moves, against everything that eats. I want to wage war against everything that passes by too rapidly for the eye to see, streaks of lightning, flashlights, cars, reflections, winking lights, drops of water, men’s words, women’s glances, the flights of flies and aeroplanes. I no longer want people to change their names and their ideas all the time, I no longer want to see films unreeling at twenty-four frames a second, or to hear the vibrating rhythms of electric guitars. I want, I would like to make something stop, anything at all, an electric light bulb or an oil-drum would be fine: I would get inside, and at last I should have peace.
Let us try with an electric light bulb. I don’t know whether you have ever looked at an electric light bulb, Monsieur X. Maybe not. It is something really extraordinary. First of all, there is its base, a sort of disc of black bakelite with two small blobs of lead rising from it, gripped by one end of a brass tube that spreads out, near the other end, to a wider circumference. Near the end of the brass tube that is gripping the bakelite disc, two short prongs are sticking out opposite each other. All this is extraordinary enough, as it is. But there is more. Rising from the brass and bakelite and lead base is a huge bubble of transparent glass that is pear-shaped rather than spherical. It is the most beautiful, most perfect thing imaginable. A bubble of very thin colourless glass that catches fleetingly an endless range of grey, blue, mauve and reddish reflections. Inside the bubble there is a kind of little crystal tower like a lighthouse, resting on the bakelite foundation. The tower’s base is rounded, but a little higher up it flattens out, and an air-bubble can be seen trapped within its mass. Two wires ascend, from the left and the right sides of the tower’s base, passing through the lighthouse’s plinth. Inside the glass, these two conducting wires are red, but on emerging from the tower they become black. They splay out as they rise, leaning slightly backwards at the same time.
Right at the top of the tower the glass bulges out, and it is from here that the seven wire filament-holders radiate, like the rays of a star or the legs of a spider. Of these seven little lengths of wire, four point upwards and three downwards, and they are all fused into the top of the glass tower. Each of these metal arms ends in a loop, and the fine, trembling filament zigzags its way through these loops, circling the lighthouse and so surrounding it with a sort of heptagonal crown. The filament begins its voyage from the tip of the left-hand conducting wire and ends it at the tip of the right-hand conducting wire.
I have never seen anything as beautiful as this electric light bulb. Something is written on the very summit of the glass bubble. This is what it says:
Electric light bulb, electric light bulb, save me! Come to my aid. Permit me to enter your sphere of silence within your fragile glass bubble. Let me glide along your wiring, let me pass through the bakelite and lead entrance-way and rise inside the brass tube, all so very quickly, and then gush out into your universe where emptiness reigns.
I shall no longer be called Bea B., nor you Monsieur X, and Pedro will no longer be called Pedro, nor Rita Rose Rita Rose. We shall no longer be saddled with all these stupid names, all these names of people who think. We shall all call ourselves by one identical name, something tender and genuine, a name that will launch our bodies in unison, in swift particles, in an assault upon the glass bubble. We shall call ourselves ELECTRICITY, for example.
Somewhere in the room’s darkness, the girl’s hand feels along the wall, fingers outstretched. Suddenly her hand encounters an object protruding from the dividing wall. The forefinger rises towards the china hemisphere and discovers a little switch. With a rapid movement the forefinger presses the switch downwards, and a click can be heard.
What happened then was quite extraordinary. Within a hundredth of a second I had sped along the cord hidden in the wall and inundated the miles of wiring with my fluid body. After spurting as high as the ceiling, I flowed down again along the plaited cord that dangles in the centre of the room. I passed as quick as lightning through the brass tube, then scaled the little glass tower in the centre of the bubble. The tenuous tungsten filament lay there before me, a fragile slender crown. Then in a flash I set my body ablaze, since otherwise it would have overwhelmed the element, and began bombarding the room with photons. In the middle of the floating globe I lit my arc of light and heat, and it was as vast and as beautiful as the sun, a thought gleaming by itself in the night, a living thought that I fabricated ceaselessly with my speedy body.
Electric light bulb, which I have inhabited. Come and join me here, Monsieur X, inside the crystal globe, in the vacuum-filled space-ship that explores the world. There is no more I, no more you, no more they, in the middle of the electric light bulb. There is nothing but this action, this W of white-hot wire which comes to life as our strength pours through. I lead a clear-cut, useful existence. I am not afraid of anything. Hanging from the ceiling, all the time, with my eye which scans the shadows and repulses darkness and dust. Come, let us scale the tiny glass tower together, and you too shall utter your commands. It is an ideal place from which to wage war. It is a place for being big and fierce, for being ablaze. When night comes, we shall wander around all the rooms and caverns of all the buildings, spying things out. We shall see the people moving around, eating, coupling together on mattresses, or else writing, as they lean upon the plateau of a table. We shall make journeys. During the day, flies will come and settle upon the glass globe. At night-time, we shall madden the moths and mosquitoes. And when we die, it will not be with a few last gasps and rattles, but with a terrifying explosion while a round spark rolls around in the glass bubble. Come!
And when we grow tired of living inside electric light bulbs we shall drop them from the window onto the roofs of passing cars, and we shall listen to the noise that they make as they burst.
There are so many things to learn to see. Nobody marvels at anything. People are living in the midst of miracles, without even noticing them. There are so many extraordinary and beautiful objects, things with chrome plating, with wires, with engines and lights! There are scissors, ballpoint
pens, watches, inkpots, driving mirrors, bottles of soda water, forks, cigarettes, window-panes, hair dryers, scales for weighing things, pullovers, automatic lifts, bicycles, coins, typewriters, transistors.
Transistors. The other day I opened up my transistor radio for the first time. When I saw what was inside I almost closed it up again right away. It was terrible and secret, like the entrails of a living being. Wires, coils, tubes, little balls of plastic, soldered joints, tin plates, screws, little bits of metal. At the top left-hand side, there was a sort of tube around which was wound an endlessly twisting length of very fine red thread. Nearby, I saw a half-moon made of superimposed metal plates, which revolved upon itself and dovetailed into a sort of comb. In the centre, there was what is called a loudspeaker, a disc of black cardboard in an iron armature, with a wire leading up to it from either side.
It was a labyrinth, and anyone who entered through one of the orifices in the white plastic shell would have to walk for hours and hours before he could get out again. Although the radio set was scarcely larger than a book, everything was written inside it. Perhaps, indeed, it was the pattern of destiny that had been outlined there, within the white shell. The complex pattern of everything that had happened on earth for the past ten thousand years, of everything yet to come. Who can tell? Perhaps the world is simply a network of wires and coils, with, here and there, the little cylinders of transistors and condensers. If one fails to see that, it is because one is inside, advancing there between rows of soldered joints. To see all that, one would need to be suddenly thousands of miles distant, thousands of centuries distant. You know, Monsieur X, I think that at last I understand what is troubling me, and what makes us all blind: it is that things are separated from one another. So we become telltales; so, too, we tell tales that pass for history. We want there to be a voyage, a way through. Thus we continue, from one coil to the next, and each time we say: this is the centre, yes, this must be where the navel is.