War

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Impossible to love such things. One could love the shade, or the sun, or the trees with their rustling leaves. But one could not love these mountains. One could talk about water, or silence, or the round pebbles to be found on beaches. But one could not talk about these mountains. One was beneath them, eternally beneath them, a speck of motory flesh moving about at the foot of these calm masses. Death prowled around the great buildings but could not penetrate them, for it was their function to be impregnable and to repulse time with their gigantic flanks.

  The great towers rose up, neither living nor dead, with their eight hundred windows on each face. The giant flippers soared straight up from the ground into the sky without ever touching each other. The pyramids displayed their tiers. The stretches of wall formed semicircles, or else undulated like the bases of eucalyptus trees. There were enormous arches resting on the ground. Pylons of black iron, cables as thick as tree-trunks. Series of balconies revolving above the giddy void, right angles, sharp blades, darts, opaque discs. Three hundred feet above the ground the wind blew eternally through great empty esplanades. Indistinct striations opened fissures like lidless eyes in the white façades. Needles huge enough to absorb a thousand lightning flashes bristled from the tops of the towers. Wherever she went the girl could see nothing but cement, steel, glass and sheet-metal.

  No, it was no longer fear. One could no longer feel fear before so much beauty. It was something else, something more powerful, more universal. Something opening up above her head, then suddenly rending space and carrying it far away. Those were the consequences of language: after the manner of a hurricane flattening forests and transforming the earth into a desert, after the manner of the wind.

  Bea B. walked among the giants, looking at their words that stood erect upon the ground. She was not really walking upon the earth: she was gliding along these immeasurable toboggan-runs, guided despite herself towards the unknown goal, empty of thought or desire, while the void gaped beneath the soles of her shoes. The bridges were so long that they spanned entire arms of the sea. The tunnels intersected outer space between two galaxies. The motorways, jammed with vehicles, crept along like boa constrictors, each curve of their body thrashing slowly across the plain at 500 mph. A four-engined jet plane flew for hours between two white mountains pierced by windows. In the south, cloudbursts discharged torrents of sooty water. In the east, at the same moment, the setting sun flooded with its light the glass dome where two harsh words shone forth:

  GULF LIFE

  Then Bea B. realized that she was in no ordinary place. She was walking in the city of time. These enormous words hanging in the air, these plains of asphalt, these cliffs, were more than simple objects; they were whole centuries looming heavily out of the history of mankind, bringing with them the whole of knowledge. When she understood this, quite suddenly, a sort of dizziness swept over her. It was as though a fissure had opened savagely in the grey sky, allowing a glimpse of the night beyond. The towers, the roofless columns, the iron and concrete structures, and all the other things that seemed so new and so pure were in fact thousands of years old. They were bones polished by time. There was no way of escaping from this spectacle. They told all the stories that make up history, they made long ancient gestures heavenwards, they thrust their roots down as far as the earth’s centre.

  Bea B. caught a glimpse of the crowd scurrying along in the shadow of the walls, and beside them the cohorts of cars rolling along in their slots. The immobile buildings displayed their flat frontages. They knew. They had always known. A cloud of ashes floated over them, each particle gliding past the windows. The earth was fragile, its substance merely cinders. Strange tremors ran through the ground, weird shudders of life. And the white towers continued to shoot up. The iron constructions proliferated as far as the horizon. They covered farther plains, farther valleys. Even the sea had been encroached upon by floating platforms. Was there a single free space left? Bridges joined the buildings to each other, soaring above the broad fields of sand. Ponderous aeroplanes criss-crossed the city on their way from one airport to another. Giant ships got under way. Nothing but blocks, huge blocks everywhere! Men lived imprisoned in these caverns. They thought that they could live for the moment, they imagined that they were still the masters. But they died quickly, crumpled in a corner of their cells, and meanwhile the tower of stone and cement had become larger still, a little higher still. Language was passing overhead, above them, above her; the giants were talking to each other as they raised their menhirs. They spoke sentences that lasted for centuries, containing adjectives that lasted longer than the oldest man alive.

  Now night was setting in. The sky became a dirty white, then grey, then ashen. But the girl was not tired. She continued to walk along the streets, between the great slabs of buildings. As the shadows thickened, so the walls seemed to grow less dense. A kind of drunkenness welled from the cemented cliffs and the window-panes and spread through men’s bodies.

  Bea B. had forgotten all that, the looks, the sounds made by shoes, the reflections on car bonnets. In her airline bag the tin of foodstuff clinked against a bunch of keys. Bea B. wanted to visit all these places, from top to bottom, all these corridors and cells. She pressed her hand against the cement surface of the walls, she touched the iron railings. She paused in front of entrance-ways and gazed in at the vast imitation-marble halls lined with mirrors. She entered two or three buildings, taking the aluminium lifts that climbed silently up to the fifteenth floor. Then she came down again immediately, pressing all the buttons on the way. The lift doors slid aside slowly, to reveal identical landings.

  In the street the cars continued their endless vibrations. Lights came on, one after the other, and started glowing steadily. The great towers projected lakes of shadow against the ground, but their summits were so high that they were still gleaming in the sun.

  Everything was poised motionless, there, in the twilight. Like primordial rocks overhanging the sea, or iguanas with spiky crests. Bea B. paused for a moment, too, while the night closed in rapidly. She sat down on the front steps of a building and concentrated on becoming very tall and vertical, like a tower. The prongs of television aerials sprouted from her skull, and her skin turned smooth and white and cold. Thousands of windows opened up across her belly, her back, her face, surrounded by spiralling balconies. Then she got up, and her legs buttressed themselves against the stone-clad ground, steadying the scaffolding of her bones right up to the top of her body. Her mouth contained no more words, no more sentences, nothing. Her eyes were two searchlights scanning beyond the horizon, beyond even the sky’s sphere, beams stabbing the starry blackness of outer space. And in the place of her heart there was an odd sort of lift, an aluminium box that rose silently and went on rising . . . The girl called Bea B. remained like that for a long time, standing there among the towers, in the night, in company with all the lighted street-lamps.

  It now began to be known and talked of in the Neighbourhood, that my Master had found a strange Animal in the Fields, about the Bigness of a Splacknuck, (an Animal in that Country very finely shaped, about six Foot long) but exactly shaped in every Part like a human Creature; which it likewise imitated in all its Actions; seemed to speak in a little Language of its own, had already learned several Words of theirs, went erect upon two Legs, was tame and gentle, would come when it was called, do whatever it was bid, had the finest Limbs in the World, and a Complexion fairer than a Nobleman’s Daughter of three Years old.

  Jonathan Swift.

  AT NIGHT, AIRPORT buildings are white. There are fifty suns shining together in the great empty halls. From all sides simultaneously the light flashes as sharp and bright as a razor blade, and sparks fly: from the glass walls, from the plastic floor-tiles, from the ceiling that is a single transparent slab. Soldiers at war, like Monsieur X and Bea B., for example, are bound to find themselves there sooner or later. You remember where it is: at the end of the motorway that plunges straight through the night, climbing, descen
ding, turning gradually in great banked curves. At the end of the road, one sees this sort of fortified castle rising out of the strident plain, bathed in light and looking just like an aircraft-carrier at anchor.

  The glass doors slide back as the girl approaches them, and she enters the cavernous hall. There is no-one there. There is no shadow. Nothing but light, bouncing to and fro between the walls, its waves colliding in mid-air. No matter how hard one may look in corners, under baggage-trolleys, in table recesses, there is never any shadow to be seen. Light streams from everywhere at once, a strange white glow that serves no other purpose than to illuminate itself.

  The girl continues through the great grotto, saying nothing. For a long time now she has wanted to speed through the night along the motorway, and enter the airport, like this. Anyone who wants to know the war’s origins, its ebb and flow, its history, must of necessity visit all these extraordinary places, these railway stations, hospitals, canteens, morgues, slaughterhouses, casinos, bars, cut-price shops, butchers’ cold rooms, banks, petrol depots, churches, Social Security offices and airport buildings. Once inside them, one begins the search for all that is mysterious, unknown, for thought itself. One looks at all this light that hurts the eyes, one listens to all these noises that echo through the plastic labyrinths.

  Bea B. walks the whole length of the great hall. A row of gleaming counters lines one wall from end to end. Above the counters are red circles, golden stripes, blue panels, white panels. Flags. And then, writing:

  PAN AM LUFTHANSA IBERIA ALITALIA

  LOT KLM BEA JAL GARUDA

  crazy words, scraps of mute words that flash on and off. The counters are empty. The vast brightly-lit hall is full of empty counters. Bea B. sits down in one of the red imitation-leather armchairs facing one of the counters, and studies the posters and bits of paper fastened to the wall. Monsieur X remains silent, too, as he smokes a cigarette. Bea B. studies the advertisement-ashtray that has PAN AM written on it in big white letters, together with a caricature of the world and its meridians. She notices that the ashtray contains three crushed stubs and some ash. Then she picks up her red plastic travel bag that has TWA written on it in big white letters, and takes from it a little blue vinyl-covered notebook that has ‘EZEJOT’ DIARY written on it in big gilt letters, and writes very slowly:

  The dreadful silence that accompanies me everywhere.

  Then, since she has nothing more to say, she closes the notebook and stows it away in her bag. The hall surrounding her is rectangular, made of great slabs that rest upon each other. There are aluminium pillars rising to the ceiling. The air is white, cold, silent. All is calm. Occasionally, a noise of thunder can be heard coming from somewhere outside in the night, but it stops almost as soon as it starts and there is no way of telling what it means. Occasionally, too, a woman’s voice echoes through the loudspeakers, but she says things of little significance, full of names of towns or people. For instance:

  ‘Monsieur Joëts is requested to report immediately to Channel Two control point, thank you.’

  ‘Air India flight 136 destination Cairo, Bombay, New Delhi, departing at 0130 hours.’

  Or:

  ‘UTA announce a delay in their flight 1841, destination Abidjan. Provisional departure time is now 0345 hours.’ But Bea B. is not listening. She never listens. No-one is calling her name, the woman’s voice is not speaking for her. Bea B. simply looks at the smoke rising from Monsieur X’s cigarette, and at the ash that has fallen into the ashtray. The time does not pass quickly. Outside, the night is an opaque sea pressing down with all its weight upon the plastic cockpit. The enormous room is higher than a grotto, but there are no bats hovering. Everything is bright and clear, there is absolutely no mystery. The war is very near, now, but there is no longer any fear. The girl is there, sitting in the middle of the room, without speaking, without thinking. And there is nothing apart from what she sees.

  She knows that she is at last involved in reality, in the truly harsh world. There are no glaucous swamps to be seen, nor troubled skies. No earth, nor stones. No trees, no folds of flesh, no signs of sorrow. No, there are only these panels riveted to other panels, these cubes and spheres and lines. And there are words to be seen: written words in rows on huge luminous frontages; gigantic words written in letters six feet high, EXIT 1, EXIT 2; tiny words printed on the back of airline tickets, words like ants, so small that you have to hunch right over them in order to read them out.

  Then she says:

  ‘You know, it’s nice being here.’

  ‘Yes, it really is an extraordinary place,’ said Monsieur X.

  ‘It’s so beautiful, so pure, here, like, I don’t know what – a museum, something like that, no, even more beautiful, an immense cinema screen.’

  ‘Yes, and then there’s nobody around at this hour.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, like an empty department store. You know, I’ve never seen such a beautiful place before. When I was small I used to enjoy wandering through the supermarkets because they were just like this, white, with great empty corridors, and metal objects gleaming on all sides.’

  ‘Yes, there are a lot of extraordinary places like that, but people don’t pay attention, they don’t know how to.’

  ‘Did you notice the ceiling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that great white wall over there? And the glass doors with the metal knobs? You know, I used to dream of living in a place like this, I used to tell myself that one day, if I had money, I would have a supermarket built specially for me to live in. Or a cinema hall, with all those armchairs and balconies and passage-ways. I wonder why people go on living in rooms with little beds and little chests of drawers, with a Gauguin reproduction in one corner, when they could all live together in places like this.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, communal houses would be a good idea; people could take over town-halls, too, for instance.’

  ‘There are so many extraordinary things around,’ said Bea B.

  It was true. There were many extraordinary things. There were sliding doors that were noiseless and very gentle; there were electric clocks that recorded 01 12; there were great illuminated notice-boards crowded with numbers and signs; escalators that started moving when you passed through two yellow eyes; carpets of royal-blue nylon; Coca-Cola vending machines; huge mauve-tinted panes of glass; book-stalls full of novels by Hemingway and Chad Oliver; sparkling aluminium trolleys rolling along silently on rubber tyres; dimly-lit bars with music and low-slung armchairs; electrically-lit arrows pointing upwards, downwards, north, south, east and west. It was inexhaustible. Maybe one was in another world where time and space no longer existed. One was floating over the earth in a gigantic abandoned aircraft-carrier, bound for unknown atolls.

  Bea B. remained seated for a long time in front of the empty counter, watching, and running her fingers along the edge of the plastic table. Monsieur X smoked several cigarettes, stubbing each one out in the publicity-ashtray. There was no need to talk; soon, no doubt, one would never talk again. One would no longer murmur all those phrases into another person’s ear, inhaling a faint whiff of the odour of skin and hair. One would never again say, in a strange husky voice:

  ‘I . . . I love you, I’

  ‘I’m afraid’

  ‘I don’t ever want to die’

  ‘You are so beautiful, oh so beautiful’

  ‘Make love to me’

  ‘I – I never – never – want to be alone again’

  There would be no more need to flee. Because everything would be so soothing, here, everything would be so pleasant that there would no longer be anything else to hope for.

  Suddenly, Bea B. heard a noise approaching her. She heard it coming from the far end of the deserted hall, sending echoes ahead of it. It was the noise of shoes walking, one after the other, rapping the soles hard against the glazed tiles. She turned round in her seat and saw a policeman advancing slowly, his hands behind his back. The man in black walked towards
her, his eyes like ink blots in his white face. Bea B. turned her head away, because she was frightened. But she could still hear the sound of the measured steps advancing straight across the hard floor. Bea B. pretended to read her airline ticket, but her hands trembled. She listened to the squeak that each shoe made as it started to leave the ground. As the policeman passed behind her he stopped for a moment. Bea B. waited, her heart pounding. Then the noise moved away again, as the shoes continued their journey towards the opposite end of the hall.

  It had become dangerous to remain seated. Bea B. got up and started making her way towards the rear of the airport building. She hesitated for a moment because there were two alternative directions: the toilets and the lift. Monsieur X pressed the button for the lift, and the two metal doors slid open. The hermetically sealed box was empty. While the lift rose, Monsieur X lit a cigarette. The smoke rose, too, making little clouds.

  Up above, the airport building was empty. Bea B. found herself on a sort of balcony overlooking the hall. She could see the perspectives of roof and walls, the white chasm receding towards the horizon. Down below, on the glazed floor, the policeman was beginning a half turn.

  Bea B. started walking quickly along the corridors. After crossing a dark work-site full of building debris, she came out onto a terrace, under the night sky. The air was black, and a cold wind swept the walls. Monsieur X leaned over the guard-rails and looked downwards. He could see the main runway gleaming dimly in the night. Out here, too, it was extraordinarily beautiful. The ground was flat, a desert of tar. Over an area of twenty-five acres there was nothing. Nothing but these flattened black sheets under the sky, and the sound of the wind. It was rather like the sea, silent, grey, blending into an invisible horizon, something that one could look at for centuries on end. The world had been sliced into segments by a scythe blade of magnetic steel, the world had been broken in two, and no-one was able to put the split halves together again. The wind swept quickly over the sheets of tar, without finding any dust. Far away, close against the night sky, the sea’s waves broke into foam, inaudibly.