Terra Amata

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Michel Tschann

  Dol

  Gomez

  Faureze

  Colette Frau

  Ansorg

  Blua Michèle

  Carassas

  That was after all how you ought to live. With a number, a blood-group, finger-prints, a mastication coefficient, one eye with 8/10ths vision and the other with 5/10ths. You were entered on your card and the card was put in a special drawer among a lot of others. Then no one had to be himself any more, and everywhere there reigned the great peace of ordered disorder.

  There were so many men here, so many women, and children, and cars, and dogs, and houses, and roads, and street-lights, and stones, and trees. So much dust. So many colours and movements It was impossible not to feel intoxicated at the spectacle of all this abundance. You were one of them! You were in the midst of them! You were them! Chancelade became one with the baking earth, the blank sky, the damp air, the thick smells. He was embodied in the thousands of milling bodies, he had all these faces, all these eyes, all these bellies, all these backs, all these legs. He walked with all these feet and revolved his thousand arms like spokes. He looked, was looked at, looked at himself with all these seeing eyes, an infinity of mirrors transparent or opaque moving in all directions. It was exhausting, but it was remarkable: there was no end to breathing in through all these chests, feeling with all these skins, hearing the general murmur with all these ears. There was no end to suffering and enjoying with all these lives at once different and the same, and with one’s own as well! You were overcome with happiness and despair at thinking with these thousands of brains, speaking with these millions of words all issuing from the throat at once and gushing forth into the air, intermingled, indistinguishable, incomprehensible, and yet so splendidly in harmony.

  It was the unique noise arising from the earth, the full growl from all the houses and all the streets, ascending like a dark cloud to throw the huge shadow of the human monster upon the screen of the void. What were they saying? What did they want? What did they see? What were they looking for? They were saying nothing, they wanted nothing, they saw nothing, and they were looking for nothing. But the hot and stormy murmur continued to rise above towns, fields, beaches, valleys, even above deserts, unchanging, unvarying, so vast and so brutal that no one could understand it. All the languages rumbled away in time with one another, all the engines muttered in the middle of their hot smelly halo, all the transistors blared the electric music of organs, violins and guitars.

  And Chancelade was caught up in all this expanse. As he passed along the kerb he would say, for example:

  ‘Hey there!’

  or

  ‘Tchakkk!’

  And the sound rose straight up to join the dense cloud over the earth. He would stretch out his hand to tap the ash off his cigarette into a litter-box, and his gesture was lost in an immensity of similar gestures. He looked for a few seconds at a girl with red hair walking along the beach in her swimsuit, and somewhere in the grey eternity peopled with girls there was the image of that white body advancing on its long legs, wearing a pink bikini and with the wind blowing through her red hair.

  Yes, somewhere there was this kind of total consciousness that belonged to no particular person and that instead of reflecting things was the things themselves: the world in the process of living, continually, without collisions, without deaths, year after year, century after century, never born, never ending. Somewhere or everywhere, there was this brain that thought. There were these nerves that vibrated. This tongue that tasted, these eyes that saw, these ears that heard, this nose that smelled. There was this language that told its interminable story. And, magnificently, what it told was happening at that very instant on the earth and in the universe.

  This world was too alive, you couldn’t conquer it. This space had too much space, this time had too many seconds, days, weeks, millenia. So there was nothing more you could do to try to understand it. You couldn’t any longer meet the terrifying glance of the absolute. You had to become an insect again, swarm on the overcrowded plateau, wave your arms, wave your legs about. You had to hurl yourself with all your strength into the vortex, and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, and give birth, like that, without peace, without mercy; play the cruel insatiable game of the insect world because there was really nothing else to do. One day you were there. Another day you were dead. But that didn’t matter at all in this moving ocean, it wasn’t even tragic. It was slightly ridiculous, rather moving, a twist of the lips, a furtive tear drying on the eyelid. And the giant strength of the world went on bearing down, dragging, turning the wheel. A blind force, without utterance, without desire. The calm and terrible power that is scattered through the glands, through fire, through the tremors of minute particles.

  When Chancelade had become this almost invisible speck on the landscape, he stopped walking through the midst of the whirling crowd. He went and sat on the beach, in the sun. He sat right near the water, between a dark girl lying face down on the pebbles and reading a paper, and a group of men, women, children and dogs gathered round a red parasol.

  Leaning on one elbow he watched the surface of the sea scintillating in the sun. He steeped himself in the colour blue, in the sound of the waves scraping regularly at the stones, and in the musty odour wafted by each breath of hot air. Every so often people would get up and hobble across the stony beach to enter the sea. And on the ochre skin of the girl reading there were little round drops that dried in the sun.

  After a little while a big four-engined jet flew across the sky above the beach. Its thunder covered the landscape like a storm of rain as the strange machine advanced, shining in the sun. Chancelade watched it, that powerful metal machine moving forward slowly like a star in the centre of its eyrie of noise, and thought that its appearance there might really be lasting for years. It glided painfully through the layers of the air, unreal, distant, annihilating every second the few millimetres traversed, fixed in an image continually renewed, a long silver cylinder with outspread wings which the dazzling light shone through like glass. The shriek of the jets pressed down upon the surface of the sea, perhaps causing invisible waves, and it was like some fabulous sign, a comet or a falling star, appearing to men to warn them of approaching catastrophe.

  When the plane disappeared on the other side of the bay, probably to land on the airfield, Chancelade looked at the sky; and for a few seconds he could still see the phosphorescent wake, like the track of a snail, that marked its path. Then the white waves merged together and the sky closed up again, swallowing up in its wilderness the last echoes of the din that had reigned there so long.

  Then Chancelade went, too. He walked a little way along the beach, stepping over the bodies stretched out on the dusty pebbles. He looked at the multicoloured skins, the black, red, blue, mauve, green and white swimsuits. He gazed at all those navels in the middle of all those bellies. He breathed in briefly again the disagreeable bitter smell of sweat and sun-tan lotion. He walked among all those bodies stretched out in the cruel sunlight as if they were corpses. But they weren’t really corpses. Everywhere, all round him, life burst forth—grotesque, parodic, full of parrot-like cries. At the same time as the smells of sweat and sewers there arose from the baking earth a vague and terrifying trembling, a murmur, a feverish shudder, a cramp, a din, a mad agitation, a tetanic contraction! All these hearts beat ponderously, and the sound echoed through the earth. The blood was hidden, the swift, thick, hot blood! In those gourds of skin there on the beach there were gallons of blood; if you’d smashed them one after the other they’d have gushed out on to the sloping stones and soon poured in red streams down to the sea. After a few days, or weeks, the sun would look down on a great crimson expanse, and the sky itself would be pink.

  Chancelade walked for a long time through the crowded streets. He went past rainbow-windowed shops where the goods on display calmly gave off their vulgar attractive odours. He passed café terraces with brightly coloured t
ables, where women drank fruit juice and ate ices. He went through veritable clouds of noise, and the deep murmur of juke-boxes clung to his skin. He caught snatches from open mouths, like:

  ‘Hey there, you coming?’

  ‘But I tell you …’

  ‘The heat!’

  ‘Ciao!’

  ‘Ciao!’

  He crossed the road between the bonnets of stationary cars, inhaling the smell of burning. He watched the red traffic lights change to green, and the intermittent ones being intermittent. He looked up at the white houses, and on the balconies covered with dingy flowers he saw people looking down. He stopped at an ice-cream stall for a glass of lemonade and spoke to a girl who was drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola through a straw. She must have been about thirteen or fourteen, and was rather plump, with a brown skin and a two-piece turquoise swimsuit.

  ‘Is it nice?’ said Chancelade.

  ‘What, this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘I prefer lemonade.’

  ‘Lemonade makes you thirsty.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t like that stuff.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘It tastes—it tastes of liquorice.’

  The girl laughed, and waddled over on her short legs. Chancelade got out his cigarettes.

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Chancelade lit the cigarette and she puffed at it rapidly without inhaling.

  ‘Are you on holiday here?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chancelade.

  ‘So am I. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hm-hm.’

  ‘I’m staying at the camping site. You know, just beyond the main road. The Azure.’

  ‘Original name,’ said Chancelade.

  She laughed again, sipped at her drink, then puffed at her cigarette.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Is it nice there?’

  ‘Mm, it’s all right.’

  She put the bottle of Coca-Cola down and wiped her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Over there …’

  ‘What are you, German?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And there are lots of Germans here.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Janine. What’s yours?’

  ‘Karl.’

  ‘Are you camping too?’

  ‘No, I’m staying in a hotel, down that way.’

  After that Chancelade went on walking along by the beach. He met thousands of other men, women and children. It was the end of the afternoon now, and the neon lights were beginning to come on everywhere, over bars, in shop-windows, on top of concrete turrets.

  Gradually night descended over everything, and darkness covered the roofs of the houses, the cars, the trees, the stones on the beach. It was a hot thick darkness trembling with noise, shot through with red and white flashes. Car lights went on, scarlet stars behind the two white patches in front. Reflections flashed in all the windows, and here and there light and shadow alternated indefatigably.

  Chancelade continued to walk by the sea in the midst of this darkness. He had emerged now from the tumult, but the intoxication of it still lingered. Somewhere on this bit of earth was the seething crucible of hell, like the crater of a volcano belching incandescent lava. You couldn’t forget it. Even fleeing alone along the road, with cars whizzing past at sixty miles an hour in the darkness, you couldn’t escape the kind of painful blister that swelled the world. In the dense shadow, or rising up at the entrances of motels, restaurants and service-stations, pale forms stood and watched you pass. From the ground arose the groans and rhythmic beats of guitar music, and it was as if you were walking on a living, suffering skin that trembled at each step and was suffused with blood. The trees stood up vertical like bristles, and in every hollow lay pools of water or sweat. The earth was the recumbent body of a giant, over which you were walking for ever. He was not asleep. He never slept. With all his skin, with all its immense cells, the giant watched the fleas walking over his body, and did nothing.

  After about half an hour Chancelade began to feel tired. He left the main road and went along a path of pebbles that led to the sea. Then he lay down on the black beach not far from an open-air dance-hall from which the music came in snatches. He listened for a moment to the unceasing rhythm, a metronomic tak-tak, tak-tak, and to the sound of the sea, of the cars, and of his heart. He smoked a last cigarette and put it out on a flat stone. Then he shut his eyes and went to sleep.

  I PEOPLED THE EARTH

  Another thing you could do was have a son. For months Mina would walk through the streets, and there would be this mushroom hidden in the folds of her swollen belly. And one fine day at about four o’clock in the morning she would start to have pains. Then the child would be born, and you’d give it a name. If it was a boy you’d call it Emmanuel, and if it was a girl you’d call it Cuné-gonde.

  The years would go by very quickly, without your noticing, while you watched the child grow. It would be rather like sitting in a dark room staring at a flower unfolding. The skull would gradually form, the shape of the nose, the outline of the lips, the chin, the cheekbones, the eyebrows, and eyelashes. The hair would grow, fair with a few streaks of brown. And between the eyelids there would be those two grey-green spheres that would get more and more blue, grow more and more alive. The body would grow too. The limbs would become longer and imperceptibly thinner, the shoulders more muscular, the bones heavier. So life would take possession more surely every second, and it would be fascinating to watch. Moving, too, sometimes. There would be the woman talking to the child, not thinking that here was a piece of her flesh, a stump almost. With her head slightly tilted, her mouth smiling, her hair hanging down on her right shoulder, she would listen to this human being, possess him, hold him under her sway as if he were no more than an article bought at the shop on the corner.

  Or there would be the first cries, in the cradle, like peevish incomprehensible words:

  ‘Aaaa … aaaa … Heu, heu, heu … Aaaa … Aaaa …’

  The outstretched hands try to catch hold of the light, noises, images. The mouth wants to suck, the belly to swell, the lungs to cram themselves with air; the whole body already wants to live, eagerly, as if there was not a second to lose. At twenty-four months you’re already old; you’ve been alive two years. And it may even be that death is already there, deep in the dim look, or in the urine spreading over the mattress, or in the red wrinkles of the hands with their fluted nails.

  But meanwhile there was this miniature man launched into life, abandoned, a prisoner of the world. He already had a name, a sex, a religion, ideas, and what might be called thoughts. He ate, slept, dreamed from time to time. There were millions of children like him in the world, born of a mother and father and methodically growing up. Black children with shining eyes, fair children, ginger children, dark children. Hungry children sitting on the ground with bloated bellies, their eyes haggard with want. Overfed children with fat legs and fat hands and rolls of fat on their backs. Children dying, children going to the cinema, children playing with plastic revolvers. The dwarf people were everywhere. They spoke their own language, performed their own rites, learned, hated, were afraid. There were Germans, Swedes, Americans, Poles. Finns, Hindus, gipsies, Chinese. Nahuatlacos, Goahuitlecs, Hokans, Maribichocoas. Navajos. Payas, Xicaques, Lencas, Xincas. Lacandons, Mams, Chujes, Jacaltecs, Motozintlecs, Ixils, Aguacatecs, Cakchiquels, Uspan-tecs, Pokonchis. Mosquitoes. In villages of dried mud, in arid squares where the sun beat down, they played with dogs and old tyres. They were everywhere, little swift-eyed men and dwarf women with narrow hips and flat chests. They weren’t gentle or peaceful; they watched eagerly for the moment of death in order to take their place among men. Without knowing it they slowly murdered that other absurd race of grown-ups and hustled their withered and mutilated bodies a
way into the dark.

  It was no use trying to escape or to forget: it was a total war, without mercy. Every second a new body was born somewhere on earth, pushing an old body into the abyss. They were everywhere: these dwarfs with men’s and women’s faces spied on you ceaselessly from gardens, out of car windows, from behind trees, or from the shadows. They listened. They continually stole your thoughts, your words, your acts, your passions. They ate your food, breathed your air, they even went off with your wives.

  But after all it was not really so unfair: it was simply the truth. For you had stolen before them; like them you had killed in order to live.

  And one day, towards the middle of his life, Chancelade was on the beach with the boy that was his son. They sat in the sun for a bit before noon, then went in swimming. Chancelade came out of the water first and stretched out on the pebbles to dry. The boy came up a few minutes later and lay down on Chancelade’s right. He was rather a tall child for his age, which was about twelve or thirteen, thin, with a handsome face and fair hair slicked down by the sea. He wore navy blue trunks with a fish on the left hip, and his clothes were rolled up under his head as a pillow. He lay for a long while without moving, stretched out on his back with his eyes shut, feeling the drops of salt water contract and evaporate all over his body. Then he turned over on his front so as to dry his back, and began to watch what was going on on the beach, his chin resting on his fore-arm. What he saw was:

  A girl with bleached hair undressing. She unzipped her green dress and her body appeared in the sun, all white except for the two red patches of her bikini.

  A family just departing, that consisted of: a hairy man, a fat woman, a ten-year-old girl, also fat, an eight-year-old boy, also fat, a baby in a carrier, a transistor, and an orange-striped sunshade.

  Two men unloading a van.

  A flash of light deep in the hills.

  An empty brilliantine bottle caught between the pebbles.

  A helicopter.

  A man and a woman lying on the beach and embracing.