War

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  The black limousine drove on like this, along the motorway, for a long time. There were many bridges, bends, steep gradients, luminous signs. There were petrol stations as big as towns, lit by giant neon tubes.

  At one moment Monsieur X said simply:

  ‘The police.’

  Everybody sat up. Bea B. was horrified to see, just a few yards ahead of her, the menacing shape of a black car that seemed to be floating along the road. She also saw something perfectly extraordinary, the golden star rotating on the car’s roof, the revolving searchlight that sent its flashing message of danger and fear in all directions. The American car gradually overtook the police car, as Bea B. watched the star grow bigger. Now she could make out the filaments inside the bulb, each time that the pivoting searchlight pointed its plexiglass hood in her direction. Her heart began beating very fast. The pale-faced young woman in the back had stopped smoking. She, too, was watching the star. Monsieur X reduced speed slightly, and the American car edged slowly past the police car. Just for a moment Bea B. could see the black profiles turned towards her from behind the windows. But nothing happened. The patrol-car remained behind and began to dwindle away into the night. Monsieur X glanced at the vanishing star in the rear mirror, then said:

  ‘I don’t like that.’

  The pale-faced young woman giggled nervously.

  ‘If they only knew what we were up to!’

  ‘I don’t like that,’ repeated Monsieur X, ‘we’d better turn off at the first exit.’

  ‘Yes, that’s safest,’ said Starrkrampf. ‘In any case, there’s nothing worth hunting on the motorway.’

  Monsieur X accelerated. When he saw the sign announcing the exit, he turned the steering wheel slightly; the car moved over to the shoulder of the road, which suddenly broadened ahead of them, and then the car was descending a steep banking slope. At the end of the ramp there was a toll-booth, a white concrete cabin with a barrier attached. Monsieur X lowered the window and held out the ticket and some money to a man in black, who took it without speaking. Then the barrier lifted, and the American car was off again.

  Now they came onto a road bordered by trees, and a bridge. The car passed under the bridge and began cruising along the road. They were in a very broad plain stretching flat under the black sky, dotted with occasional thickets and a few hills. The road went straight across the plain, between lines of poplars. The car was riding the crest of the road, with headlamps blazing. Bea B. saw that the car’s other occupants were straining forwards in their seats, staring intently into the space lit up by the headlamps’ beams. They were waiting. Something was going to happen, something terrible, but the girl could not bring herself to guess what. She, too, watched the road ahead, her eyes smarting from fatigue, her mouth full of the bitter taste of Starrkrampf’s tincture. Very occasionally a pair of headlamps would come into view at the other end of the plain, and the girl watched them come slowly closer, floating over the dark earth, veering left, then right, sometimes flashing dazzling beams at them. The American car travelled on like this for a long time, and no-one any longer had the slightest idea where they were. Then, all of a sudden, Monsieur X said in a muffled voice:

  ‘There!’

  At the same time he dimmed the lights. Less than a hundred yards away, the outline of a man appeared at the side of the road. Then everything happened very fast. Monsieur X switched off the lights and gripped the steering wheel hard. The engine began snarling more loudly and insistently as Monsieur X accelerated. Through the windscreen Bea B. could see the road rushing towards them at a dizzy speed, although the black surface was only just visible in the night. The verge struck the wheels with great thumps that jarred the car’s frame, and flying gravel stung the doors and windows. The outline of the man walking by the side of the road grew bigger and bigger. It seemed to float in the misty air like a stunted shrub. The car continued to hurtle along the verge of the road, ripping away lumps of earth and crushing the grass flat. Monsieur X hunched himself over the steering wheel and shouted something, but his voice was so hoarse that no-one could understand him. Fascinated, Bea B. watched the grey outline running desperately, just ahead of the car. For a split second, she had a vision of the man as though suddenly illuminated by a flash-gun, a motionless figure wearing a grey overcoat, the back of a neck, black hair, two hands hanging down at each side of the body. Then there was a dull thud, followed quickly by a sort of hunh! that rose from the ground. Not a cry; rather, a violent movement of the diaphragm, and it was perhaps the pale-faced young woman, or Geberckx, or the fourth man who had uttered the sound, or else it was the girl herself, unconsciously, and the big American car continued bumping over the grass verge for a few seconds. Then it swung back onto the road, and began speeding along once more, effortlessly, almost noiselessly, in the centre of the night-shrouded plain. This happened some time or other during the anonymous war, when people used their cars to go man-hunting in the night.

  Ñan pacha kkacc illarimunña.

  Lacca lrappata kkacc-chaspa.

  Rauracc Inti huachchimunña.

  Teccsimuyuyta kkancchaspa.

  Hinantin runa causachecc . . .

  Quechuan ritual.

  The aggressive nature of suicide among the Mataco is undeniable. They make use of it as a threat, demonstrating the deliberate intention, when they kill themselves, of punishing the person against whom they bear a grudge.

  Alfred Métraux.

  OVERTHROW THE HUMAN RACE! ! !

  Henry A. Flynt, Jr

  BEA B. LISTENS to the malediction of Monsieur X:

  ‘Let him who has ears give heed, for the moment has come to say all these things. The movement and the noise are dying down now, the machines are stilled at last, and in this silence I can write down the words I know, the final words perhaps. He who seeks to know is fated to stand rooted to the ground like a tree, his eyes rigid. Fear has entered into him and petrified his muscles, turning him into a statue. Let him who seeks to learn renounce idle chatter and make his ears deaf to the sounds of songs and sweet music. In the kitchens of flats that resemble concrete cells the television sets, too, are talking all the time; but I no longer hear their words, I no longer see anything through their portholes but millions of little blue dots moving continuously from right to left.

  & I am alone now, with the words I have to utter, attempting to penetrate the cells’ steel walls.

  What I say is the truth. I do not lie. Year after year you have been hearing nothing but the truth; everything around you proclaimed it. But you did not want to listen. You have preferred to keep your ears and eyes closed to the spoken and written word, you have closed the door to thought. That is why it is too late, now, and why you are entering the kingdom of shadows, by my side.

  Everything around you showed you the right path, but you refused to take it. Cursed be speech, since it has been unable to convince you. Cursed be the intellect, since it has been incapable of understanding the truth.

  & indeed, speech was no longer speech but the frenzied clatter of machines. Words were no longer words but merely witless insects dancing in the lamplight. There were thousands of languages, millions of them, even, since each person spoke his own private language: futile noises that conveyed nothing, that had nothing to convey. It would have been better if every woman had torn out her sons’ tongues at birth, it would have been better if she had punctured her children’s ear-drums, rather than that they should be false to truth.

  But they were all born with unmaimed tongue and ears, and for centuries now they have lived in the midst of noise. Their futile words have swept over the earth like a cloud of locusts, obscuring the sun’s brightness and turning the fields into deserts.

  The storm has been gathering its clouds and sparks for centuries on end, and today it is about to break. Power in all its forms is contained within the sphere that hangs, the colour of molten metal, above the world. One cannot utter so many words with impunity. One cannot make so much noise without fearing les
t one day, after having travelled through the crystal labyrinth, the noise’s terrible echo may suddenly return, ten times as loud, to shatter the ear-drums. I know it is coming, I can even hear its arrival. But I cannot halt it. Nobody can halt it any longer. The vengeance of objects and noises is raising its whirling funnel in the sky. Let those who are able to run, flee fast. Let those who have ears listen.

  Beauty has been invented by the tiny-minded. Together, they have raised the pretentious monuments that defy space and time. For centuries on end they have been creating their towers of stone and cement, their squat breakwaters that keep the sea at bay, their tarred roads that bisect deserts. They have done all that and more. They have invented panes of glass with bottomless reflections, great walls of liquid colour that sparkle with light and life, mirror-cliffs that a single pebble hurled by a single hand could smash to smithereens. Inside these cages they have stored their wealth, their priceless treasures, mountains of gold-dust and precious stones. And these treasures comprised mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. Century after century, this eager throng has been constructing its machines with their gleaming engines, their wheels, their crankshafts. Forces of energy were broken down, then imprisoned in vast ovens. Sweet sap flowed from all the trees, the earth was disembowelled, rivers of mud were diverted from their paths. So much labour, so much power, everywhere!

  I am going to tell you what I see. It is a terrible vision, like that of the bone beneath the flesh, a vision that traces its fiery pattern across window-panes and cement slabs alike. It is a vision that I see not only with my own eyes but with all the millions of other open eyes. The camera lenses are focused on the scene, with apertures wide open. I shall try to say with words what everybody sees with their eyes, even if I die in the attempt. There are so many words flying in from all directions: how to pierce this thick cloud of insects? I shall try, I shall try.

  The riches are enclosed in concrete buildings. Food lies waiting in the halls of gigantic stores. I can see tons of meat, rice, fruit, sugar, salt. Inside the tin cans, food is bathing in its own blood. The light illuminates the mountains of food, makes it all gleam fabulously. Flashes of icy light stream over the cellophane wrappings, the plastic containers conceal many flavours, the glass bottles are full of yellow oil. All possible riches are housed within the aluminium bins inside the white stores. But no-one can get at them. They are very far from the mouth, and they glow dimly, like unreachable planets.

  Hunger gnaws at the stomach. A long-drawn-out sound can be heard coming from somewhere inside the earth, a rumbling sound that never ends. It is the sound of hunger. Stares shatter against the plate-glass windows, stares shoot their darts vainly against the reflected tins of food. The human floodtide advances, swirling in huge eddies around the stores. It tightens its circle gradually, pressing with all its hands against the doors and windows. How much longer still? How much longer will this great human mass continue to endure hunger and craving? The living waves break against the white walls. Already the first cracks are beginning to run along the plaster, then quickly fanning out across the surface of the concrete pillars. The façades of the newly-completed buildings are already crumbling into ruin, their windows have already become black holes through which life is leaking, escaping fast.

  Beauty is awe-inspiring. It wears a great black breastplate that sends out sparkles. It is cased in iron and bronze, like a samurai. It stands alone in the middle of the sandy desert, like some herculean dynast. To vanquish, to vanquish constantly, that is beauty’s aim. All its arms, its daggers, its shields, are massed and ready. The anonymous waves roar down upon it. I do not want to know who will emerge the winner. I do not want to witness any of this. But torrential forces gush endlessly from the grottoes, pour from the mouths of garages, fill the highways and byways with their myriad wheels and headlamps and wings, sweep onwards, leaving ruin in their wake. Might and power have emerged from the ironworks that fashioned them, and now, after a long march, they are rounding on themselves. Enough. At all costs, not to see all that, not to hear all that any longer! But I am nothing. I am merely a mouth full of words, building sentences at random. And these words, too, have become knives, filled with a lust to destroy and kill, like all the others. There are other voices around me, above me. Habbakuk, Micah, Amos, Obadiah. Joel: Proclaim this among the nations: gird your loins for war. Let all the men of war approach and mount! Forge swords out of mattocks, and spears out of bill-hooks. Let the weak say: I AM STRONG.

  Nahum: Woe to the murderous city! It is filled to the brim with falsehood and violence. Pillage is rampant within its walls.

  The sound of the whip, the shattering din of wheels; horses galloping, chariots bounding forward. Horsemen charging, swords flashing, spears sparkling; and a multitude of wounded, great piles of skeletons; there are corpses past counting, and men stumble over the bodies of their own brothers.

  Draw water for the siege. Fortify the ramparts, tread the clay, build brick-kilns, fashion them into powerful resources.

  There, fire will consume you, the sword will cleave you, they will devour you like locusts. Multiply, then, like locusts. Multiply like the jelek!

  Your merchants are more numerous than the stars of the sky. The locust destroys, then flies away; your princes are like locusts, your captains are like hordes of locusts swooping down onto the hedgerows as the night grows cold. When the sun rises they vanish once more into the unknown.

  Jeremiah:

  ‘My bowels! My bowels! I suffer in the very depths of my being. My heart is tortured. I can no longer remain at peace; for, oh my soul, you have heard the sound of the trumpet, the sound of the war alarm.

  Destruction upon destruction is foretold. The whole earth is devastated. My tents are destroyed, my flags ripped asunder with a single blow.

  How much longer shall I see the standard wave, and hear the trumpet sound? For my demented people does not know me. They are demented children who do not understand. They are apt at doing mischief, but they have no skill in doing good.

  I look at the earth, and behold it is empty and ravaged; and at the heavens, and their light is no more.

  I look at the mountains, and behold they totter, and the hills tremble on their foundations.

  I look, and behold there are no more men, and the birds of the sky have fled.

  I look, and behold the fertile earth is a desert, and all the towns are razed.

  Hasten away, children of Benjamin, escape from the centre of Jerusalem, and sound the trumpet in Tekoa, and raise the signal of alarm upon Beth-haccherem: for evil is watching from the north, and great destruction lurks.

  They say: peace, peace. Whereas there is no peace.

  I harken to all these voices that trace their neon signs in the night, and it is true that there is no longer peace. External forces are about to unleash their might: they are impatient and poised to leap. They are inhuman forces, born in molten steel, in the interior of explosive machines, in stone, in fire, in the terrible heat concentrated at the very core of things. These thousands of forces are everywhere. Human flesh is a soft fabric into which claw, hook and bullet will plunge. Human flesh, so warm and tender, soon to be consumed by fire. The gutters lie waiting for the streams of blood, the deserts of sand have turned their plains into vast sheets of blotting-paper. Do not linger. Flee! But there is no escaping. It is late now, the gates are closed, the lights have been extinguished, all is dark.

  There are no colours any more, there can never be any again. The blues of the unfathomed deep, the verdigrised madnesses, the purples of sensual pleasure, the grey deaths, the pearly lustre of eyes, the bronze-hued flights, the white white skies, the plains of mud, the torrents of blood, all the colours shall be black, black do you hear, black! For the earth is criminal . . .

  The foolish folk were living inside the war, and did not know it. They thought that war was something alien, something that happened very far away, in forgotten countries, in savage forests, or else in the depths of the sinister v
alleys that fringe the earth. They thought that war was like the murmur of a storm brewing far beyond the horizon, and that they thus had the time to number the hairs of their women’s heads and write poems about the death of their pet dog.

  But they were living in the midst of war. They were living at the very centre of the massacre, they, their women and their dogs. Each day the fearful whirlwind forms around them, each day the nameless forces hurl themselves furiously at each other. Forces that are bent on slaying sight, on slaying thought. The forests are alive with electricity, whole towns are ruins of stone released from gravity. With their oak beams and their steel bars they strike, yell into ears, gnash at eyes, rip nostrils. Strange foreign cities with murderous walls! Killers, killers, killers, all killers, the walls, the smooth plaster surfaces, the gold bricks that echo the grating of fingernails. Killers! All objects rush headlong at me, while volumes ripple, grow hollow with dizziness and change shape. Angles alternately sag and bulge, reflections dissolve into rain. Sounds seethe along the pipes of organs, then burst forth. Inside the white stores the objects glow with hatred, and the mirrors reflect back the arrows of looks. Words come to birth deep in the throat, words bristling with stings and mandibles, words that pour forth relentlessly. They leap from the pages of books, from the loudspeakers of television sets, from magnetic tapes, from gramophone records and from the darkness of cinema halls. And none of these words mean peace, or love.