You kill flies with a piece of elastic.
You stick paper cockroaches on the wall.
You fly to Baghdad.
You drive on the left side of the road (or the right if it’s in England).
You go to the post-office and send yourself a telegram.
You go six days without sleeping.
You go five days without eating.
You go two days without drinking.
You go twenty-four hours without relieving yourself.
You go three minutes without breathing.
You go twenty seconds without thinking.
You light your cigarettes with travellers’ cheques.
You nurse a sick cat.
You write a novel.
You walk twenty-five miles.
You fire shots into the crowd.
You dangle a coin on a piece of string and make it tinkle, then watch people looking for it.
You throw bits of toilet-paper in the air when there are swallows about.
You play the saxophone.
You teach a chimpanzee to draw.
You improvise an election speech on a tape-recorder.
You watch an eclipse of the sun.
Everywhere there are people collecting things. There are the petrophiles who collect stones, the nicophiles who collect cigarette packets, the vitolphiles who collect cigar-bands. The tyrosemiophiles who collect cheese-labels. Some people collect postage-stamps, others coins, cups-and-balls, irons, lavatory chains, playing-cards, old cars, mats for beer-glasses, music-boxes, armour, picture postcards, Malay daggers, keys, typewriters, guns, cinema tickets, soda-water stoppers, door-knobs, comics, Hopi dolls, parking tickets, or matchboxes. There are the tubuniphiles who collect radiators, the azertyphiles who collect adding-machines, the gigantobibliophiles and the microbiblio-philes. There are the barbarologophiles who collect foreign languages, and the sanctusylvestrophiles who collect calendars. There are the transatlantonautophiles who collect ocean liners, the albinelephantophiles who collect white elephants, and the motoroscaphocadillacophiles who collect the engines of American cars adapted as outboard motors. There are the philopantophiles who collect collections. And there are also those who collect pencil-boxes, tea-pots, transistors, retractable ballpoint pens, guns with telescopic sights, forged banknotes, bath-towels advertising the Olympic Games, the autograph letters of George Washington, models of the Eiffel Tower in eighteen-carat gold, magic lanterns, lifts, false teeth, zip fasteners, IBM machines, Cambodian temples, Roman roads, obscene graffiti, Superior No. 2 drawing pins and albino cacti.
The games never end. Every second the wind shifts a blade of grass or the sea breaks on a crumbling rock and something in the world has changed. Everywhere, underfoot, overhead, to the left, to the right, in front, behind, the world seethes and swarms untiringly. Molecules move, microscopic particles jump nervously, waves come and go, meet, collide, part. There’s no peace anywhere. Nowhere any immobility or silence. Everywhere agitation, a kind of precise and mechanical madness. There’s no escaping the world, no thinking about something else instead. They’re ants, as I said, real ants imprisoned in their garden. Living inside their miniature world, dupers and dupes, without the power to withdraw, without the power to choose. They have words and signs for all the things around them, and a sort of thought to give them the illusion of being free. It’s really very funny. And not one of them can ever imagine what there is anywhere else, what extraordinary or sweet or terrible things there are just a few yards away. Not one of them will know what it is to be a jelly-fish for example, or an olive-tree with trembling leaves. Not one will have the least idea of what life is like on that grey planet only a few million light-years away. There on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edal-ecnahc.
But all that was impossible to imagine. It was as if there was nothing anywhere but silence, a dreadful cruel silence through which lightly floated bubbles of sound and life. There was really nothing to be hoped for outside that place, that time, that destiny. One would never penetrate the defences of the unknown, never get away from this old earth. Everything there was was there. You had to play and move about and think without stopping, with all your delirious and contradictory powers. You had to go on with the adventure once begun, without wanting to, torn to pieces by doing so. You had to give each thing its name, and sign each move and event with all the hatred and all the love you were capable of.
You had to advance into the plain in the dusk, following the tracks. Walk for hours and hours through tall grasses and mosquito-ridden swamps. Then, when you came upon the herd of elephants, you knelt down and shouted at the top of your voice the harsh war-cry, the prayer, the song of expiation addressed to the animal about to die.
‘Elephant Lafiaku, spirit of the bush, purse of silver, spirit with the arm between thine eyes, strength that uprootest trees, puller-up of bushes, son of the destroyers of the forest, spirit of the coconut-smasher, elephant who kneelest down in thine enormous mass, thou with thine indestructible defences, thou whose mouth smilest a terrible smile!
‘Foot that makest a path through the undergrowth, elephant, transformer of thorn thickets into open glades, thou who dost force a way for thyself! Ogòkú with a back like a drum, he who maketh a noise like a blacksmith when he greets you with the sound of his hammer óówú!
‘Illustrious elephant, bough born in Èpé! Elephant who lookest behind thee with difficulty, like someone with a stiff neck! Elephant with a cushion on thine head but no cargo! Elephant who dost balance a weight on thine enormous head! Elephant, the hunter sees thee and says, “I will now hunt no more: I must go pray to Ikaru!”
‘Elephant, the hunter sees thee and throws his arrows into the swamp, saying, “If the wire-seller is not dead, I shall have other arrows when I come to his house.” Elephant, we see thee and point at thee with all ten fingers outstretched in sign of consternation, and shout, “Yábà ń yábà!”
‘Kúdù, tall as two hundred hills, thou art a boatman! Whilst the elephant is alive women flee and withdraw their wombs. When the elephant is dead, I shall see my last year’s mistress, and her of the year before that. Elephant, for whom we dig a pit, but who art too clever to walk over it! After thy death thou dost change colour like the Sarcophrynium.
‘When Lojomon the elephant dies the butchers come and cut him up to sell, and those who are hungry come and eat him on the spot.
‘If an elephant passes a certain way but once that way becomes a road, and if his mother passes that way also, that road becomes a plain. The elephant has a head but no neck.
‘Elephant Laaye, enormous animal! Elephant La-n-dede, thy name is “Death, stand aside, I pray thee!” He who says he will slay the elephant, and the hunter who says “I shall bring down an elephant”, receive the elephant’s reply: “If thou knowest the fate of goats, leave me in peace. But if thou knowest it not, come near and I will teach thee.”
‘His eye-sockets are like ládugbós: his throat is like the vase orú. But if no one harms thee, thou dost no harm to any. The elephant has but one arm and yet he can tear up a palm-tree: if he had two he would rend the sky like a rag. Mother who dost cover thine infant like the night!
‘The elephant walks in anger and his body is huge. A man with a year-old charm had best leave following him, for the elephant fears not charms. Animal of the long defences, good angel of him who kneels on thine head! Elephant, who transformest all into dust!
‘
When a herd of elephants is gathered together they are like a thick wall. Animal of the long tail! It is thou who dost smash the gourds one against the other! It is thou who art seen in the river washing the cooking-pots and the isáàsùn!’
And so the years went by one after the other. You were still alive, still breathing. Now and then, when you were sharpening a pencil or peeling an orange, the knife slipped and gashed your hand. But the cells sewed themselves together again, immediately, indefatigably, because the body didn’t yet want to die.
Lying fully dressed on his back on the bed, Chancelade took a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table and lit it with a match torn from the little green folder. He scraped the head of the match on the sulphur and applied the little orange flame to the end of the cigarette. He drew on it once or twice, watching the shreds of tobacco and the paper catch alight, then blew the match out and put it in the empty ashtray on the bedside table. It was made of blue metal with ALITALIA written on it. There was a little dip at each corner for resting a cigarette in. Chancelade smoked and looked at the ceiling. He’d breathe the smoke in through his mouth, keep it there for a few seconds, then form his lips into an O and let out a few blue rings. Then he’d swell his lungs and inhale the smoke that was left. Finally, sometimes through his mouth, sometimes through his nostrils, he would breathe out a thread of grey mist which at once mingled with the air of the room and vanished. This too was a fascinating game. You could have stayed like that for hours, doing nothing but breathe the grey smoke in and out and watch the ceiling. It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side of the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.
LOVED
Spending three days and nights shut up in a hotel room with Mina without sleeping or eating. You were capable of doing that for no particular reason, just for the pleasure of being free and able to keep writing, on pieces of hotel paper headed
ATLANTIC PALACE
600 rooms—Air-conditioned
Private beach
I’m alive I’m alive.
Chancelade had chosen it because it was a luxury hotel, with a lift, a garden, a beach, terraces, and an enormous reception hall with shops and a hairdresser’s. In was one of those magnificent hotels with stupid flashy names like ‘Oriental’, ‘Vistamare Palace’, ‘Château Fleuri’ or ‘Majestic Palace’. That’s to say it had soft music, bars with concealed lighting, red plush, uniformed bellhops, imitation crystal chandeliers, mirrors, mosaics, black leather armchairs, and American, Japanese, German and Brazilian tourists in weird get-ups and talking every language under the sun.
Chancelade had gone into the reception hall with Mina and said to the man at the desk:
‘I’d like a room.’
The man had consulted a chart, held out a yellow slip, and said quite simply:
‘Room 312. Would you mind filling in this, please?’
On the card Chancelade had written:
Surname: BURNS
Christian names: Charles
Occupation: Student.
Nationality: Guatemalan
Date and place of birth: August 6, 1939, Champerico (Guatemala)
It was a beautiful brand-new room with dark red walls, black armchairs, a metal table, a metal wardrobe, and a double bed with a dark blue spread. There were also white radiators, an air-conditioner, a blue carpet, and a big window with net curtains as well as two other pairs, one blue and one black. Outside the window was a balcony with a view of the sea and a few pots of geraniums. Lamps with white or red cloth shades were scattered about the room. And on the wall over the bed there was an imitation antique engraving of a horseman surrounded by a pack of hounds. On the table to the right of the bed was a white telephone without a dial and a pottery ashtray.
On one side a cream-painted door opened into the bathroom. It was a small room lined with white tiles and contained: a bath (white); a washbasin (white); a wardrobe with a mirror (white); a towel-rail (white); towels (white); a point for an electric razor (220 volts); a W.C. (white); a toilet-roll (pink); a stool (white); a ventilation-shaft (dirty); and a smell (turpentine) that came from a shiny disc in a little plastic cage attached to the wall.
Chancelade spent a little while taking possession of the premises. While Mina lay on the bed with her shoes on reading the paper, he made a tour of the room, putting out a cigarette in the ashtray on the table, opening drawers, looking at himself in the glass, going out on the balcony, switching the lights on and off, fiddling with the knobs of the air-conditioner, pulling both sets of curtains, turning on the radio, going into the bathroom, using the w.c., pulling the chain, washing his hands and face in the basin, drying himself on a clean towel, combing his hair, reading the notice tacked on to the door of the room, and so on.
Outside it was the end of the afternoon or the beginning of the evening. The sun was still quite high above the horizon and it was very close. Inside the room with the curtains drawn you sensed that there was still a good deal of light left, hard white light that wanted to force its way into the room. You could hear the sound of car-engines too; the road passed just behind the hotel. Then Chancelade would walk over to the bed and sit down beside Mina. He’d take her hand and speak. Mina would go on reading the paper, and from time to time lift her head and look at him. She answered what he said too, or else asked him questions. They were merely trivial conversations, not the sort you find in books. Words that just came and went, without order or logic, snatches of ideas, exclamations, stammerings, grunts. At any moment, on the bed, or standing in the room, or sitting on the floor of the balcony, or in the bath up to the neck in water. There were movements too, gestures, shrugs, shivers, caresses, scratchings, rubbings of the eyes, yawns, coughs, laughs, the swallowing of saliva. If you tried to remember one particular moment, say when Chancelade talked about his mother, sitting on the edge of the bed, or when Mina told the story of the seagull she found once in the forest, you could have written it in the form of a dialogue, complete with time and place:
10.10 p.m.
Mina lies on the bed, her head on Chancelade’s chest.
Chancelade lies on the bed, his left hand on Mina’s shoulder, his right holding a lighted cigarette,
An ashtray on the bed.
Three lighted lamps about the room.
A mosquito.
‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, very nice.’
‘No noise.’
‘No, not much.’
‘Hotels are usually very noisy.’
‘Yes, but this is an expensive one.’
‘There are usually people quarrelling, or drunk, and cars, and—’
‘Yes, you can’t hear anything here.’
‘Do you think there is any noise?’
‘It must be soundproofed.’
‘Yes, otherwise someone would have banged on our wall.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Do you know, this is the first time I’ve ever liked being in a hotel.’
‘What I usually dislike about hotels is the idea that there might be hidden microphones.’
‘Yes, behind the pictures or in the lamps.’
‘Yes, I always feel someone’s listening to what I say.’
‘There wouldn’t be much point.’
‘What, in listening to what people say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, but it bothers me all the same.’
‘I—’
‘And you might be a murderer, or a spy, mightn’t you?’
‘No, what frightens me are those other things.’
‘What things?’
‘You know, those little holes in the wall.’
&
nbsp; ‘Oh, yes, like spy-holes.’
‘Yes, or television cameras hidden in the lights.’
‘Yes, that’s really—’
‘And transparent mirrors, with people on the other side watching you.’
‘Don’t even talk about it.’
‘Do you know what I’d do if I owned a hotel? I’d have two or three rooms fitted up like that and I’d watch through the mirrors and the holes in the walls.’
‘You’d soon get fed up with it.’
‘No, it’d be very interesting.’
‘The naked women, you mean?’
‘Yes, that, and watching people moving about, walking, sleeping, living. Very interesting.’
‘I hope the chap who owns this hotel isn’t like you.’
‘Look, you could have one hole over the bed and another by the window.’
‘And one in the bathroom.’
‘Naturally.’
‘You could make it pay, in any case, by charging people to watch.’
‘Wouldn’t you enjoy it?’
‘Yes, perhaps, but it’d get to be disagreeable in the end.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Because … because people are so ugly when they think no one can see them.’
‘Yes, but that’s what’s interesting.’
‘No, what I’d really enjoy would be hearing what people said.’
‘Yes, through microphones.’
‘Yes, or like the chap who built that prison, in Syracuse.’
‘In the shape of an ear?’
‘Yes, the hotel could be built in the shape of an ear and I’d be in the middle.’
‘Yes, but you’d hear everything at once.’
‘Not necessarily, you could have a system of … er …’
‘And you think that would be interesting?’
‘I don’t know, yes, I think so.’
‘You’d hear husbands and wives quarrelling.’
‘Yes, and crimes being planned, and secrets, that sort of thing. Ordinarily people never say anything, so like that …’
‘Yes, it’d seem queer meeting them afterwards down in the restaurant.’
Terra Amata Page 7
