War

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  MULLIGAN

  NAPOLEON

  LOUIS FALCHETTO

  and their aim is never to be mistaken, never to be lost, never to fall. They have suits of solid armour, and axes, whole quantities of axes. Come, XX, perhaps you are the one person who can do something, if you choose. We can roar through the city, or across plains and mountains, on your mighty 500 cc BMW. We can try to abolish names. Perhaps there are places still untouched by the war, I mean places within. Let us go and watch the iguanas, maybe they have something to teach us. I know a place where there is a tree growing by the edge of the sea, with its roots embedded in a wall, and with odd-shaped branches that skim the surface of the water and have a pungent odour. I know a hill called MOUNT BORON and a hill called BALD MOUNTAIN. If I ever get to know, even for a moment, why it rains and how the wind blows, perhaps the war will stop. And I don’t like war. I like peace.

  As for the definitely polycalic or confederated colonies, . . . they often include as many as two hundred nests, each of which may contain from five thousand to five hundred thousand inhabitants, and they may occupy a circular area whose radius is two hundred yards or more. Dr McCook, a distinguished and highly conscientious observer, tells us of an enormous city of Formica exsectoïdes in Pennsylvania which covered an area of fifty acres, and consisted of sixteen hundred nests, many of which measured nearly three feet in height and twelve feet in circumference at the base. Comparing its volume with the dimensions of the insect, McCook calculated that it was relatively eighty-four times the size of the Great Pyramid.

  Maurice Maeterlinck.

  THEN ACROSS THE city, a city filled with tremors of the death that must come to it one day. All these great buildings that are too white, too beautiful, that have too many windows; all these roofs that are too high, festooned with antennas and wires. All these roads that are too long, stretching endlessly ahead. Evening was approaching, and the girl called Bea B. was returning home because she had found nothing. She was sitting in a bus that had electrically operated doors, watching the walls of the houses as they rushed past on the other side of the window. Then she got down from the bus and started walking through the slowly dying city. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds, and the sky was grey. Historic buildings, frozen vertically to the ground, stood there while pigeons fluttered between their colonnades. Along the streets, shop windows gradually assumed a steely, slate-grey hue. The surface of the pavement was leaden. Trees protruded their wintery trunks from the cement, and manhole covers sealed hermetically the mouths of the subterranean channels.

  The girl went on and on, surrounded by this incomprehensible beauty. She saw the vast wall areas soaring upwards, white cliffs sparkling with unbearable brightness. She walked along the bottom of a sort of deep valley hollowed out of the rock by thousands of years of water and wind, or perhaps by a few hundred hours of bulldozer. She passed countless street-lamps, strange long-enduring trees made of cast iron. Sometimes she crossed the asphalt roadway, the old black river, patched and worn, imprinted with the grid left behind by the soles of shoes and the treads of tyres. Chiefly, she looked at the polished metals, the tinted windows, the blocks of reinforced concrete, the networks of electric wires: all those things which signified that she was not walking here, or anywhere else, but that she was walking upon time itself.

  This is how it was: gigantic blocks of cement standing upright and pressing their thousands of tons against the earth, miles of roads and railway lines, forests of masts and telegraph poles, lakes, great cubes of glass, shores of nickel, plains of corrugated iron. No landscape throughout the world had ever been so vast and deep. There had never been such high mountains, such vertiginous canyons. Never, so much iron and stone, so many transparent and opaque substances. All the violence of the universe, all its energy and power had converged upon this place and traced their pattern there. As the girl walked through the city, in the early evening, she did not feel at peace. She saw the pyramids defying time, and all the arches and windows keeping the sky’s vault at bay. Beauty was not gentle, did not sing with a woman’s voice. Beauty had set out to challenge silence, its muscles were tensed for the onslaught upon empty space.

  At one moment Bea B. passed by a great white building. She saw that it was floating on the ground like a giant steamship on the Arctic ocean. It glided silently over the surface of the sea, driven by an invisible engine, carrying its cargo of rectangular windows to America. It vanished, very quickly, yet very gently, and the girl read out the name painted in big black letters across its stern, the tragic name

  TITANIC

  It sailed straight ahead, slicing through the steel-blue waves with its enormous bulk, noiselessly, smoothly, motionlessly. And there were others like that, huge aircraft-carriers, blind-snouted submarines, oil tankers, banana boats, freighters with holds full of coal, canal barges, factory-ships propelling their inferno over icy oceans.

  All these monumental structures were fleeing together over the grey sea, carrying their insect populations towards unintelligible destinies. Nothing was secure, nothing penetrated the earth with the sharp-clawed fingers of roots. The earth itself flowed ceaselessly underfoot, like a tide of mud; whole esplanades were drifting towards the horizon, slabs broken off some huge ice-floe, with long black fissures running through them.

  A little farther away, a glass and concrete tower trembled on its base. Watching it, the girl realized that it was trembling from fear and hatred. Making enormous efforts, the tower strained upwards towards the clouds, pressing down against its four cemented pillars. But the sky was drifting far away from it, and that is why it was trembling: because there was nothing left for it to support. Neither its efforts nor its pillars were of any use; so fear and anger entered its body, and emptiness rushed down its stairways and plunged down inside its lifts. How much longer could the tower last? To all intents and purposes it was already disintegrating where it stood, like a tree eaten away from within, collapsing in a cloud of white dust and with a noise of splintering glass.

  No-one suspected for a moment what was really happening in this city. Bea B. saw the people’s faces, and their hands, and their shoe-encased feet. They came and went, between the gigantic blocks, they walked in the shadow of the great walls, they even lived inside the flats with their identical cells. When they were hungry they ate, and when they were thirsty, or wanted to urinate, they entered some brightly lit café and said:

  ‘Waiter! A half of lager!’

  Or alternatively:

  ‘The toilets are on the left, at the back, huh?’ When they felt a twinge they went to the dentist; when they felt like hating they watched a sports match on television, or thought about Hitler or Westmoreland; and when they felt like loving they thought about Gary Cooper or Barbara Steele.

  Meanwhile, all around them, the great silent edifices trembled from fear and hatred, and glided very fast and very gently over the Arctic ocean.

  It was all quite extraordinary. Emptiness was the cause, the black emptiness that surrounded the world with its fatal liquid. The girl scanned the sky and the low clouds, trying to see the sun, but it had disappeared behind the cubes of the houses, and only the light was left. Perhaps, if the sun had been there, things would have been different. Perhaps she would have been able to turn her face towards it, drawing her hair back from her face, feeling the heat settle upon her cheeks and mouth, like the palm of an open hand an inch or so away from her skin. Perhaps she could have thought very fast, while her eyes filled with tears, and said:

  ‘Stay with me, Monsieur X, stay here, I don’t want to be alone.’

  And then the colours of the red dresses and the blue cars would have been genuine, not simply illusions of cone-like and rod-like cells. Perhaps the walls and street-posters would have ceased to absorb all but one of the colours of the spectrum, and the world would have become a single immense rainbow, a single gigantic jelly-fish.

  The girl called Bea B. was crossing the city just as it was on the point of crumbling i
nto dust. She could feel beneath her feet the kind of dull vibration, the distant rumbling that announced the end. The menace was not yet visible, but already one could hear the gallop of its approach. In what form would it appear? Would it be a cloud of locusts in the sky, unheralded, or a cloud of tiny flies? Would it be a rain of fire? A second sun, but this time a black sun stabbing the earth’s surface with its rays of nothing? Would it be made of water? Of air? Of stone?

  Suddenly, Bea B. saw them. They were there in the street, at the windows of houses, inside the shells of cars. The men, and the women, and their children, who would one day destroy the city.

  The white buildings as tall as mountains, the towers, the poles, the highways, all these had sprung straight from human skulls, the imagination’s simple images, ancient dreams come to life. Then these things had been abandoned, left all alone upon the earth amid stretches of cement and tar, and thus delivered up to fear and death. They had remained upright, pointing skywards, heavy fragile nacelles incapable of soaring away. Huge soap bubbles quivering in the atmosphere, streaked by blue reflections that turned green, then red, then orange, then yellow, then white: after they turned white they would explode.

  The earth shuddered beneath Bea B.’s feet. Not the solid fertile earth that nurtures plants and weeds, but the flat surface imagined by mankind. The great white walls wrapped around iron skeletons were resting upon this soft sludge. It only needed a ten-year-old-boy, for example, or a twenty-one-year-old girl, eyes flashing with anger, to say aloud:

  ‘Go on! Fall! Fall!’

  and it would all be over right away. That is why the metal towers and the skyscrapers and the TOTAL service stations were so afraid.

  The whiter they were, the higher and the more beautiful they were, with their concrete ramps and their serried ranks of window-panes, the more they became the towers and skyscrapers and TOTAL service stations of fear. That is how things were.

  The girl walked quickly along the streets, between the giant draught-screens. Her feet struck the ground. She followed with her eyes the lift cages that rose slowly behind transparent walls. She stretched out her hands to touch the imitation marble, still warm with daylight, around the doorways. She watched out for the rays cast by electric light bulbs. In the depths of the supermarkets’ hiding-places she saw riches of every kind: tin cans, gaudy cartons, bottles, plastic bags. She saw them screaming with mouths wide open. She saw their hearts beating: a word written in blood-red letters, striking repeated blows in the centre of a white circle.

  The Supermarket was ablaze with the light of two hundred neon tubes as she entered and walked very quickly between the display shelves. She saw terrible things, very soft objects in satin cases, violent objects, silent objects, objects that had no name. She picked them up, then put them down again. There was a huge nylon basket filled with thousands of rectangular boxes fashioned from polished tin, with a picture painted on one side, and the words, written in black letters:

  SARDINES IN OLIVE OIL

  COMAC S.A.

  MOROCCO

  She took the cold smooth tin, the beautiful oblong sculpture, and she thought that nothing so beautiful had been made for centuries, and that nothing remotely resembling it would ever be made again. She took it with her to the far end of the shop and paid for it with some coins. Then she left, and started walking through the streets once more, the tin resting at the bottom of her airline bag.

  The girl busied herself with things like this as she fled through the city, to keep fear at bay.

  The city trembled from its constant efforts to speak. The words were stuck inside it, inside its walls, inside its deep throat-shaped wells. Bea B. heard the words forcing themselves up the vocal chords, rumbling such deep vibrations that no human syllable could ever represent them. The words swayed to and fro at the brink of every mouth, upsurges of lava that the earth had kept in check for centuries. It was just that: words heavy with time and space, bringing with them all the power that the world had stored away. Around the white cliffs that sparkled with a million panes of glass, the roads split, joined up again, then split once more. Steel girders soared skywards, the angles of the roofs were as sharp as iron spear-heads. Clouds of smoke clung to the sides of the building, curled along the balconies, and dispersed like a pale vapour into the cross-currents of air. Birds flew into these frozen ramparts, and died. Fists thudded into these glass doors, faces smashed against their own reflections. And the noise of the pent-up language sounded gaspingly from the depths of matter. No doubt the sea, the great viscous reservoir, was to be found somewhere far, very far beneath one’s feet, beyond the slab of cement and tar, beyond the pipes and cables. But it was not in the sea that speech originated; nor was it in the grey sky, nor the air, nor the deserts. Speech was born in these vertical blocks, lived in their cavernous depths, constructed its words from concrete and steel.

  The girl moved on up the street, looking at the words that were at last visible. They were not really words, like those that hang in shop windows and mean: ‘Come, come, buy, quick, quicker!’ No, these were the words of an unknown language, something greater than man or woman, something that one understood immediately without any need for explanations. Blows, perhaps, heavy-fisted words that struck hard, tons of bombs and violence, storm-clouds, cliffs engaged in confronting the sea, or snowy peaks engaged in moving through the air. There was so much force, here, in this city, that no-one would ever again be important. Beauty does not exist. What does exist is force.