Terra Amata

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  ‘And I’d learn such a lot.’

  ‘Of course it would really be best to be invisible.’

  ‘The trouble with that is it could be dangerous. People can’t see you, so they walk all over you and poke their cigarettes in your eye!’

  ‘Ha ha!’

  ‘I read a story once about a chap who invented a machine to make people invisible, something to do with directing light rays.’

  ‘You directed them somewhere else?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t it, it was like with sound waves. You know if you speed up sound waves you produce a noise so high it’s inaudible, well, it was the same thing here, you speeded up the light, no, you slowed it down, or, no, I forget.’

  ‘But isn’t the speed of light always the same?’

  ‘Yes, no, but what he—He said it was like a propeller turning, when it turns very fast you can’t see it.’

  ‘So you have to turn very fast to be invisible?’

  ‘Ha ha, no … No, I can’t remember.’

  ‘Another thing I’d have liked to do is go backwards in time.’

  ‘Oh yes, I used to think I’d like that too.’

  ‘To spend a while among the Romans, say, or go and see Buddha.’

  ‘Yes, that’d be fun.’

  ‘What would you choose?’

  ‘I don’t know, I think I’d have liked to live in 1863.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’d have gone to America, and there’d have been the Civil War and the Gold Rush, and so on …’

  ‘Yes, it must have been fun then.’

  ‘In 1863 there were still Indians all over the West, Sioux, Apaches, Navajos, and they still owned the land.’

  ‘Yes, it must have been very interesting.’

  ‘Or else I’d have liked to live 500 million years ago—you know, at the time of the brontosauruses and ceratosauruses and pterodactyls.’

  ‘And mammoths.’

  ‘No, I think the mammoths came later, after the mastodons. No, at the time I meant there must just have been amphibians and reptiles, and seas and lakes and swamps everywhere.’

  ‘And another thing that would be fun would be to live 50 million years from now.’

  ‘Yes, that would certainly be very strange.’

  ‘Do you think there’d still be human beings?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps people wouldn’t die any more then?’

  ‘The world would just be a single town—’

  ‘With other towns in space, on Mars, on Venus, everywhere.’

  ‘Yes. Difficult to imagine.’

  ‘Frightening.’

  ‘I read, I read in some book that every species lasts about the same time, about 300,000 years. That’s what happened with all the animals that are extinct. After 300,000 years a species dies naturally, of old age, as people do.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Yes, and I think the human race is estimated to have lived about 150,000 years so far. So if the theory’s correct that means man has got just as long to live again. And after that he’ll just gradually disappear, down to the last one.’

  ‘What will the last man be called? I’d love to know.’

  ‘It may be a woman …’

  ‘How awful for her … All alone in an empty world.’

  ‘Perhaps she wouldn’t even realize it. If all that’s true, you know, it means the human race has already reached its highest point. Henceforth it will just gradually decline. All that’s been invented will be forgotten, people won’t know how to write any more, fire and tools and language will all be forgotten. They won’t know how to walk on two legs any more, and then one fine day it will be all over.’

  ‘It’s awful to think of it.’

  ‘Not really. There may be other species, other forms of civilization.’

  ‘It’s still awful to imagine. All that trouble for nothing.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s only natural.’

  ‘Yes, but just the same it’s hard, terrible.’

  ‘After all, people don’t think about the men who were alive 2000 years ago or more …’

  ‘Yes, but they know that they were there.’

  ‘No, they don’t know. People judge everything in relation to, in relation to what they are themselves.’

  ‘But the—’

  ‘People don’t think now as they used to think before.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘No, I mean, they thought they possessed the truth and decided what should happen in the world and knew everything. And look where they are now.’

  ‘Yes, that’s terrible too.’

  ‘It’s true, you know, there must have been a chap, or a woman, in 722 B.C. say, who thought he knew a great deal, thought he knew the truth. It’s queer when you think of it. He spoke, he believed in God, he ate and drank, he was really alive. And now he’s gone, and there’s nothing left of him, perhaps not even a little piece of bone, or a tooth.’

  ‘Yes, and people who are alive are descended from him.’

  ‘What do you think he did?’

  ‘Hunted bears with a stone axe and let out horrible yells, rrrhaaoou rrhaaoou!’

  ‘Do you think he thought about us?’

  ‘Hardly likely!’

  ‘Yes, it’s depressing in a way to think about all that.’

  ‘One day my grandmother said something terrible that shocked me very much. She was eighty, and I was twelve or thirteen, something like that. And she said to me, “People don’t realize it, but a life is soon over.” That really upset me. It’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes, touching.’

  ‘It must be terrible to grow old.’

  ‘Yes, when everything is all over. You don’t know how much time you’ve got left, a day or a year.’

  ‘Fortunately most people don’t think about it.’

  ‘The worst must be—the thought that your life is ending.’

  ‘Eighty years seems such a long time, and yet to her it was nothing.’

  ‘When people think about eternal life what they’re really thinking of is youth.’

  ‘Yes, they wouldn’t want eternal life at eighty years old.’

  ‘It’s the active part of life they want to keep. They don’t see themselves living eternally with lumbago, or paralysed.’

  ‘Yes, it’s queer.’

  ‘Do you believe in it?’

  ‘What, eternal life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, no, do you?’

  ‘No, neither do I.’

  ‘It depends, what I think is—I mean, I can’t believe that you can just die like that, in five minutes.’

  ‘How do you mean, in five minutes?’

  ‘Well, yes, there was someone there, and then five minutes later there’s nothing. That’s what I can’t believe.’

  ‘Why, because it’s humiliating?’

  ‘No, that’s not it, but—I just can’t believe it, that’s all.’

  ‘That a person can die in five minutes?’

  ‘Yes, not just die, but suddenly disappear just like that. A whole life, just like that, in five minutes.’

  ‘Perhaps it takes a whole lifetime to die.’

  ‘I—I knew a girl once, at school. We weren’t exactly friends, but we knew each other very well. Her name was Hélène and she was a year younger than me. She lived near me and we went to the beach together sometimes. I was sixteen then, and she was just fifteen. We didn’t talk much, but we knew each other quite well without it. And then she was very like me—tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. That was important to me because all the other girls were dark, with black eyes. Then one day I heard that she’d been drowned. I was stunned. She’d gone out in a boat and—and there was a storm and the boat overturned and three days later they found her. I couldn’t believe that she’d gone like that, so easily. Drowning’s such a terrible way to die, and I still saw her as she was when she sat next to me in class, and I rem
embered everything, her voice, her face, her hands. I—she was such a live person to me, and when I heard, when I read it in the papers, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t believe it was her …’

  ‘Hmm …’

  ‘And I did something very silly, do you know what I did, I rang up her home straight away and said, “Hallo, can I speak to Hélène Marchese, please?” It was the first time I’d ever telephoned her, and her mother said, in a strange voice, “You shouldn’t do things like that”, as if it were a practical joke, and I hung up quickly without saying who I was. But it upset me so much, I—’

  ‘Hmm …’

  ‘Yes, it’s very hard to believe, how you can be there one minute, and then suddenly it’s all over.’

  ‘I know someone who was killed in Algeria during the war. He was a pacifist, and I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was him. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing to happen to him. Apparently he was shot in the back of the neck with a machine-gun. Eleven bullets.’

  ‘Yes, it’s—’

  ‘Especially as he didn’t even know how to use a gun.’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s all over as easily as that.’

  ‘I’m afraid it may be.’

  ‘In five minutes?’

  ‘Yes, five minutes. And all that about eternal life and resurrection and Karma, etc., I’m afraid all that’s just illusions, dreams.’

  ‘Yes, it seems rather childish, I know, but—’

  ‘Have you ever thought about all the millions, billions of people who are dead, wiped out, swallowed up, just like that, and no one has the least idea that they ever existed?’

  ‘Mmm, yes, it’s true, it’s ter—’

  ‘And yet they did exist, and had children and wives and—and ideas, thoughts, and there’s nothing of it left.’

  ‘Yes … And yet I still can’t—I still can’t believe that that girl, Hélène, that she was drowned, and that as she was choking in the water all her life was being wiped out, all her soul and personality and—’

  ‘But I’m afraid that’s how it is.’

  ‘Do you—You don’t believe in God, then?’

  ‘I don’t know, I—it depends.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, at certain moments I believe and at others I don’t.’

  ‘And you—’

  ‘I’m often afraid that’s just an illusion too, a prop, to give oneself hope.’

  ‘Yes, I think that sometimes too.’

  ‘And then sometimes I feel as if—as if it were an abyss, and I were in the process of understanding something very—very important, very strange. But anyhow, now I wonder if all that really matters very much.’

  ‘What, whether God exists?’

  ‘Yes, I mean, it’s all I think about, but I feel more and more that I shall never know, that it’s, er, what shall I say? A sort of inscrutable malediction.’

  ‘But you can’t forget about it.’

  ‘No, you can’t forget about it.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Gone half past ten.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No—are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you are we can go out if you like.’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’

  ‘Yes, please, later on.’

  ‘It’s funny …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being here like this, with you.’

  ‘In this room?’

  ‘Yes, no, what I mean is, when I saw you the other day on the beach, I didn’t think I’d be here, with you, talking about God and all the rest of it.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, I—I wanted to get to know you, but you looked so, I don’t know, distant.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Hmm-hmm.’

  ‘I expect that was because of Ribert.’

  ‘Did he irritate you?’

  ‘Yes, he looked so proprietary, I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘He’d be flattered if he knew that.’

  ‘Jealous, too.’

  ‘What does all that matter, I’m very happy.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Yes, it’s funny.’

  ‘I feel as if I’d, as if I’d been with you for years.’

  ‘Yes, same here.’

  ‘And it’s nice, being here like this, in this hotel.’

  ‘Freer.’

  ‘Yes, and beautiful in a hideous sort of way, with the red walls and the—the carpets and the black armchairs.’

  ‘Like a cinema.’

  ‘Yes, and we’re making the film ourselves.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘False and true at the same time.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Realist.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘But it’s nice, not bad at all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we’re fighting against time.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten all about it.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten, but it doesn’t matter any more, it’s like centuries and centuries.’

  ‘Century-seconds.’

  ‘360,000 years to every hour.’

  ‘That’s a long time …’

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  You could have gone on for hours and hours like that. From time to time Chancelade would stop talking and lie on Mina and caress her. Or sit on the edge of the bed and take a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table. Mina would close her eyes. Mina would pick up a page of the paper and stare at it. The watch on Chancelade’s wrist ticked away imperceptibly, and the fine second-hand turned and turned on itself without ever stopping. The room was sealed, hermetically sealed, and the light-bulbs burned behind their shades with a fierce, unforgettable glare. Outside the night was oppressive, and mosquitoes lurked round the windows searching for blood. Being in the hotel room was like being inside a ship, at once free and a prisoner, travelling towards an unknown country. In a few months or a few hours the ship would arrive at Callao, or Singapore, or Tel-Aviv. And you’d have to come out of your dark hiding-place and confront the terrible sunlight beating up from the specks of mica in the dust.

  Then, little by little, the vortex invaded the room, Nothing had changed, the steel and black leather furniture was still there and the red walls were still identical, hard, impassive and without a chink. Over the bed the engraving showed the same horseman among the pack of hounds, and the lamps now off, now on, now off again, had not stirred. And yet as the hours went by a sort of fury, or a sort of illness, settled in the corners, distorted the lines, dwelt inside the metals and the materials, saturated all the plaster and paper and glass and plastic. A hatred perhaps, or perhaps merely a great fatigue had made its way into the room. It had become a sort of bubble imprisoned in the surrounding liquid and ceaselessly trying to burst. The world around the room bore down with all its weight, searching for a crack through which to pour floods of noise and heat.

  Chancelade lay on the bed as on a raft that drifted yet never moved. The floor had already melted, and waves of red mud lapped slowly along the walls and spread around the bed in noisome puddles. Mina slept, her head on the pillow and her hair over her face. She breathed in and out regularly, and Chancelade listened : it was a disturbing sound that threw him back on his solitude.

  In order to put up a struggle he bent feverishly over the inert body. He breathed into the warm ear, bit the foreign flesh, he even spoke. But the body remained motionless, curled up, unconscious. Chancelade looked around him with eyes that burned with fatigue. He saw the black insects hovering in the air, and the swift white flashes that ran from wall to wall. Now the void, noisy and dangerous, had entered into the room. It could no longer be escaped or expelled. All you could do was watch it advance, spreading like a cloud along
the walls, piling up on the ceiling, stretching out its transparent tentacles between the legs of the table, sitting in the armchairs, walking on the balcony among the pots of geraniums.

  And finally they had come. Through every possible opening they had come, all the invisible men who now peopled the room. They came and went soundlessly over the blue carpet, they emerged from the walls like clusters of bees, they walked across the ceiling in long lazy caravans.

  Then Chancelade sat up on the bed with his back against the wall. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five to three, but that didn’t mean much any more. Reckoning with some difficulty he made out that this was the third day, but that didn’t mean much now either. He reached out over Mina’s body for the packet of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and lit it with a match from the folder marked

  ATLANTIC PALACE

  600 rooms—Air-conditioned

  Private Beach

  Then he turned towards the window and studied the sort of vertigo that was invading the room. The phosphorescent mist, mixed with the grey smoke of the cigarette, began to palpitate in the middle of the air like a monstrous heart lit up by X-rays. The air became dense and warm like a lung, slowly enveloping everything hard in its billions of little trembling cells. The smells varied too, sometimes sharp and pervasive, sometimes mild and sweet, almost sugary. Nerve fibres ramified all over the walls of the room, and here and there strange pains appeared, shooting like electric currents. Chancelade had a pain in the steel cupboard, then in the lamp by the window, then in the left corner of the ceiling. He felt a pang at once secret and distant spurt like a spark in the bathroom. The floor began to suffer too, groaning and creaking under the load of invisible feet. The air itself stifled, the light itself was struck, and along the skirting-boards strange insects with sharp jaws gnawed atrociously at the wood’s tender flesh. The cigarette glowed like a sixth finger added to Chancelade’s hand, giving off an unbearable smell of burnt nail and skin. That was death then, perhaps, the inevitable slow collapse towards suffering matter, the great disease that eats away the world’s millions of living forces, the flow of pus, the terrible osmosis. Chancelade was being devoured alive by the monster without thought and without love, and soon he would be nothing but a room, a mere room with bloodstained walls, hard furniture, and a window of cold glass.

  To try to still this vertigo, Chancelade sank down on the bed and closed his eyes. His right hand groped for Mina’s body, and clutched at it. But the vortex did not stop. Slowly, painfully, it took possession of the room, the bed, the two outstretched bodies. Chancelade was no longer the centre. He was only a particle going round in the maelstrom, swept along, jostled, drained of all resistance. His name disappeared. His consciousness disappeared. And soon he vanished into the void, lost somewhere in the midst of the rout, become a piece of wood, a used match, a crumpled old ball of paper rolling faster and faster towards the mouth of the gutter. And nothing else remained certain but this infinite series of boxes one inside the other: the bed in the room, the room in the hotel, the hotel in the town, the town in the country, the country in the world, the world in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, the galaxy in the total of galaxies, the total of galaxies in space, space in space, space in space, space in space. There were no more men, no more women, no more anything anywhere. Just perfect and magnificent extension, empty extension, without a word, without a thought, without a gesture that might make it possible to measure, or understand, or even guess.