War

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Monsieur X, if you are still there, go and take a look at this drawing. You will find it quite easily; it is in the esplanade-cum-car-park, in the fourth lane along, between the one hundred and twelfth and one hundred and thirteenth cars.

  Everything that one imagines is true, some time or other. It is you yourself who told me that. I am not the only one to seek for signs of victory. I sometimes find such signs on walls and pavements and plastic tablecloths in restaurants. I am trying to discover the war’s mechanism, as are all the others. I do not know any of them. I do not even know when they die. But I know their name. They are called THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA.

  They are everywhere. I read the papers, and occasionally I see that they have won a battle. They fight against money, against noise, against enslavement. They fight with everything they have, with words, with photos, with pebbles, with music, or just with silence.

  Sometimes I stand in front of the entrance to some great department store that is flooded with light and riches. And I see a little boy peering inside with queer empty eyes. Then I know that he is simply destroying the store gently with his eyes.

  Or else I see a North African standing in line at the post office. He is waiting, like all the others. He scarcely even moves. But he is swathed in a sort of whirlwind of silence, and that whirlwind is his weapon of destruction.

  Sometimes, too, there is a girl sitting at the terrace of a café in the centre of town. She is wearing a white raincoat and carrying a red nylon travel-bag with TWA written on it. She is drinking a cup of coffee and writing something in a little blue rexine notebook which has stamped on it, in gilt letters, ‘EZEJOT’ DIARY. I do not know what she is writing. No-one will ever know what she is writing. She is wearing dark glasses with blueish lenses, and from time to time she raises her head and watches the passers-by. Strange flashes leap from her glasses, shoot straight ahead, and pierce little holes in the bases of the pillars that hold up prisons, museums, banks and new office buildings. Enlist in the Invincible Armada. Stop being blind. It is the eyes that will be the first to be free.

  Peace.

  Bea X.

  5. As in any of the above [types of orgasm]; but culminating in extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting of subject. Sometimes happens only in the boy’s first experience, occasionally occurs throughout the life of an individual. Regular in only a few (3%) of the pre-adolescent or adult males. Such complete collapse is more common and better known among females.

  Alfred C. Kinsey.

  FROM THAT MOMENT onwards, there has not been much time left for sleeping. How can anyone sleep when so many things are going on everywhere? The girl called Bea B. lies down on the mattress, and rests her head on the foam-rubber pillow. But her eyes remain open. Her eyelids retract, revealing her two eyeballs. A flat grey ceiling hovers in the air, and a dangling cord ends up as a bulb. Everybody’s eyes are open. At night, paths of white light stream from neon tubes, headlamps, lightning flashes, incandescent bulbs, cinema projectors. This indefatigable light furrows the earth and sky with its countless trajectories. Swiftly-moving, untamable light, that seeks to flow through eyes so that it may live within the body. Inside skulls, dreams are starting to run their true-life films. How can anyone feign death when there is so much life and movement around?

  Days and nights race past, galloping feverishly along the trails, and through the sombre valleys between the blocks of buildings. There is a terrible amount of movement everywhere. Clouds scurry along the aerial corridors, swim through space, send their shadows gliding over towns.

  The girl is living inside the picture that she is in the process of creating: a series of superimposed bars and circles held up by black threads. Distant grey discs, with orange stars, and mauve, pinkish and red cylinders gliding by in front of them. Signs, church steeples. Purplish-blue bottles. The figure 9 standing on its tip, balanced on an ink-coloured streak. It is a picture that she is painting at random, not only with her hands but with her whole body, with her feet, thighs, belly, breasts, shoulders and mouth, a picture that she sweeps with all the hairs of her head and body, that she spits out, vomits, urinates, a picture that is nothing but a rainbow-hued stain slowly spreading out around her.

  She does not know what she is doing. She does not know when she started, nor when it will all be over. It is beyond her, and the colours leak out of her, sweat ceaselessly from her body. She studies the picture, trying to understand it. But, each second, she sees a new detail, a magical silhouette of a man running, a shadow lying across the white ground, a snake, a mask, or else a clouded mirror in which the effigy of a chalk-white woman with purple hair floats above the mist.

  The picture fades away. The girl has entered by one of the grey openings and so slid through to the other side of the stain. She hears voices now, but she cannot catch sight of anyone. The voices echo, as though inside a grotto or a great amphitheatre. Soft voices springing from all sides at once, voices announcing awful truths with complete indifference. She tries to understand what is being said, but each time that a sentence begins, something breaks in and cuts it off midway.

  There are many voices. Hundreds of them, perhaps, emerging from invisible wells. Some speak louder than others, shouting, slurring their words. The girl turns full circle, trying to see the open mouths, or the loudspeakers’ black discs. But there is nothing to be seen. Perhaps at that particular moment she is blind, and the voices are amusing themselves by tormenting her; or else it is a torture chamber where all the floodlights have suddenly been switched off, and a confession is being wrenched from her. If only she could succeed in understanding a single phrase, it would all be over with. The lights would come on again, walls would reappear with their windows and doors and all the other holes for getting in and out. But the voices speak faster and faster. Occasionally the girl catches a few words in sequence, but they are mere obscenities, such foul abusive words that a feeling of panic overwhelms her. She too would like to speak. She opens her mouth, opens her throat and nostrils, and breathes air with all her might. The air whistles out of her lungs, but her vocal chords are paralysed, her tongue and lips are dry, and the sounds that come out are not words but the kind of shrill snarl that crocodiles produce.

  All of a sudden, without knowing how, the girl discovers an exit. Leaping forward, she escapes as fast as she can. The cries and phrases remain behind. Now she cannot hear them any longer. All she can hear is the sound of her feet slapping the hard ground. She flees barefoot along the asphalt road. It is evening, and the landscape is obscured by the gathering shadows. There are forests, mountains, rivers perhaps. The wind blows, an icy wind that stings the cheeks and takes the breath away. The girl runs frantically along the road. Now her voice is restored, for she can hear it crying harrowing words from deep in her throat: ‘Smash! Kill! Smash! Kill!’ She is frightened because she knows that it is useless, that no-one will hear her, that they will very soon catch up with her. But she cries out all the same, as she runs. This lasts for days, for years, for an eternity. She never stops running. She is determined not to look back: if she turns her head for even a second, they will be upon her. She glances down at her feet. They are striking the black tarred surface with lightning speed, grazing the soles each time. The gravel lacerates the skin at each stride. She can see her feet being gradually grated away, while the blood flows. She leaves twin trails of blood along the road. She can hear her voice screaming with pain, while her feet continue to pound the ground, murdering themselves, turning into horrible stumps. They no longer make the same sound as they did to start with; now they squelch, like someone running in waterlogged shoes.

  There is another noise behind her, now. The sound of footsteps approaching at a gallop, making the ground quake beneath their massive boots. A man running up the road behind her. Or perhaps a car approaching on its four rolling tyres? It is a deep menacing vibration, a noise like very close thunder. It is both: a car with its snarling engine, and a man breathing heavily. Hour after hou
r the noise creeps slowly closer. The girl is exhausted, breathless. She goes on running, stumbling now over the gravelled roadway. Before her stretch the same distant mountains, massive, black, standing out against the grey sky. She strains her eyes to catch a glimpse of something, anything, a hiding-place, a tree, a telegraph pole. Her eyes long to see something, but there is nothing new. The tarred road makes a turning in the middle of the plain, then continues in a straight line. What was the reason for that sudden turning? She is scared of traps. She knows that there are traps; someone once told her so. Cunning tricks, quicksands, red lights. The girl peers through the shadows, anxious to identify these traps. But she has no time. The galloping noise of the car is right behind her now, and she can make out the distinct sound of each rubber boot as it hits the ground in turn. She sees a city ahead of her. What she had taken for mountains was in fact a city. She enters it. There are vast buildings to her left, to her right, in front of her. She runs along the asphalt esplanades, trying to find a door. But they had forgotten to make doors for these buildings. All they had made were walls reaching a quarter of a mile into the sky. No-one lives in this city. The girl is quite alone as she runs along the asphalt esplanade, while the giant’s dim hulk looms closer. She is so tired by now that she would like to lie down on the ground and go to sleep. She would like to lay her head on the black ground and close her eyes. That is what the man’s voice is saying to her, just behind her. She had not been paying attention, but he had been speaking. He had been saying the same thing to her all the time, as they ran: sleep, close your eyes and sleep, lay your head on the ground and sleep. His voice is a peculiar blend of soothing and roaring elements, since he is speaking with his engine. She would never have dreamed that it was possible to talk like that, with an engine. She knows this voice well, this calm and terrifying voice. It belongs to the man who was speaking, just a while ago, in the dark room. He had disguised his voice to give the impression that he was several people; but it was he.

  The end is near. One cannot run as far as time itself. The girl collapses onto the hard ground, grazing her hands and her knees. She picks herself up, staggers on for a few yards more. Already the shadow is closing over her like a cloud. Her feet stumble and trip, incapable of running any longer. She can no longer breathe. She is drowning. The buildings are even higher, now, even more vertical. The esplanade is as wide as a prairie. The bits of gravel gleam like little knives. Everything is fierce, cold, everything is shiny, watertight. The man’s voice is in her ear. The girl picks herself up once more and starts crawling along the ground. Her half-open mouth gasps for breath. But the man’s mouth glues itself to her own, and she starts suffocating. She falls. She begins to fall, and while the man’s hands tear at her clothes she sees the sky falling at a dizzy speed. The windowless buildings crumble as their walls topple outwards, crashing against each other. The body embraces her with its steel-hard muscles, the legs grip her so tightly that her bones start snapping. Swarms of bipeds pour out of the shattered buildings and run in all directions, spreading out over the esplanade. The girl would like to call to them for help, but they would certainly never hear her, and besides they have other things to do. The man’s hands wander over her whole body, probing deep inside its secret recesses. Teeth sink into her skin, tattooing it with semicircles of blood. All over the undulating splitting ground the bipeds hurl themselves at one another, crushing each other’s skulls with bludgeons. The girl watches the mass-slaughter as she lies there, head strained backwards, and now the mob looks just like vermin crawling over a rotting ceiling. She sees a great red glow approaching between the ruined buildings, tongues of flame spewed out by iron dragons. She sees the explosions of dynamite that hollow red holes out of the mass of bipeds, but the holes close up again immediately, and the destructions are soundless. It is all taking place at the bottom of the ocean, in the depths of empty space. It is all taking place far away from reason. The girl continues to struggle against the body that is crushing her and penetrating her, but slowly the struggle turns into a dance, a sinuous crawl. She is helpless. She knows that that is how it is: at the end of every hunt there must be this crushing weight, this pain that becomes ever fiercer, ever more sharply etched, until it turns into enjoyment. She hears the voice speaking very close to her ear, a voice broken by gasps and grunts. It was like a secret that one has known for a long time, a genuine secret. And the voice is splitting her in two, rummaging inside her body. There is nothing hidden there, that is what she would like to say. You will find nothing, no magic stone, no foetus, nothing. Her eyes are rolled back, pressing against the folds of the eyelids, ready to drop out. The swarms of bipeds seethe over the dark ceiling. What are they up to? They cling on, forming moving clusters full of waving feet and feelers, they jump frantically up and down on the endless textured surface, like agglomerating bacillae. They are the image of massacres photographed at high speed, a sequence of snapshots tracing the shapes of their charnel-houses around her. They have constantly changing names, familiar names that she recognizes as they pass by; they are called Pourrières, Babi Yar, Dachau, Cholula, Figueras, Song Mai. But these are no more than parodies, for there are massacres on the way that have not yet found their names. Each time they appear on the topsy-turvy earth, the pain darting through the girl’s body will annihilate them. She is gliding horizontally; her skin is sleek with soap, and she is sliding and skidding along. But the man lying on top of her has dug his nails into her, harpooning her. His strange gaze has entered inside her and is examining her. The man fondles each organ, each cell, each gland, each nerve. He surges up inside her like a submarine, and she senses with horror that he is searching for her heart. Like a giant tapeworm, he writhes around in her belly, crawls upwards, explores her entrails inch by inch. He will soon be here, now. It is desperately urgent for her to see what is going on over there, between the ruins, on the dark esplanade, before he reaches her heart. Quick, quick, she has only a few seconds left. Monsieur X advances into her body, hollowing out a cave inside her belly. Only a few seconds left, to understand what is happening over there, what is taking place. An intense glow sets the esplanade ablaze and scorches the eyeballs. What is it? Why is it all happening? Perhaps they are writing words down, over there, words which will resolve all problems. The solution lies at the far end of time. The girl can no longer move. She feels heavy inside this body of hers that is lying spread-eagled, naked, on the black esplanade; as though her uterus were filled with concrete. She no longer attempts to rise, realizing that it would be impossible. She is alone, with Monsieur X’s face gazing at her from within herself. Then she rolls her eyeballs still farther back in their sockets, trying to see what is happening over there in the future city. She can see the biped population waiting between the ruins. She can see them standing among their dead, and she knows that they have found something. They are far away, they are happy. They are dancing up and down in front of the raging fire. They are at the far end of time, while she is only at the beginning.