Terra Amata

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Terra Amata Page 13

by J. M. G. Le Clézio


  A woman with a deep tan coming out of the water and leaving a trickle of water behind her as she limped over the burning pebbles.

  Two children playing ball and squealing.

  A seagull.

  An old woman reading a love-story under a mauve parasol and fanning her face very close with a fan that had Hotel Ristor-ante ‘La Tonnara’, Amentea, Statale 18, written on it; or something like it.

  All round the boy the beach curved gradually away. At a hundred yards, or even less, you could no longer distinguish the pebbles; you only saw a sort of grey and white mass hazy in the heat. The air danced, the ground buckled gently, and the blue sea moved ceaselessly, throwing up here and there a spatter of hard light. The sun blazed right in the zenith like an electric light bulb crazily screwed into the cupola of the sky. When the boy got tired of lying on his front and looking at all this he turned over and sat facing the sea. He looked for a moment at Chancelade, who was still lying on his back. He gazed curiously at the tall muscular body, the two symmetrical feet, and the face lit from below with its two black holes of nostrils. He looked at the red and black nylon bathing trunks, and saw under the belt, to the right, the trade-mark in big letters: DIVE.

  He picked up a pebble and examined it idly, thinking perhaps that it would be easy to kill his father with, or perhaps that it was the amoebas’ Mount Everest. Then he threw it into the sea, not aiming at an old tin can that was drifting along the shore. The pebble flew through the air without a sound, almost invisible in its speed, and following a predetermined curve. When it hit the surface of the water between two waves there was a brief ‘plop’, then nothing more. The boy did it again, once, twice, three times, and each time it ended in the same way.

  Chancelade sat up, looked round him for a moment, lit a cigarette, and said:

  ‘Half past twelve.’

  The boy threw a stone and said:

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s hot,’ Chancelade went on.

  The boy threw another stone and said:

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’ll probably end in a storm,’ said Chancelade.

  The boy picked up some pebbles with his left hand and threw them one by one with his right. Each time he followed the trajectory closely until the stone disappeared in a swift whirlpool, the sea opening and immediately closing again.

  ‘I wonder—’ he said.

  Chancelade wasn’t paying much attention. He was smoking. A small rivulet of sweat ran down between his shoulders.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘That,’ said the boy. ‘I wonder how the stone gets from here to there.’

  Chancelade shook the ash off his cigarette.

  ‘Because you threw it, I should think.’

  ‘No, I—’ said the boy. Every time he threw a stone he stopped talking. ‘I wonder what it means—You see, when I watch the stone there’s a certain moment—There’s a certain moment when it isn’t touching anything—it isn’t touching my hand, or the ground, or anything, and yet—And yet it goes on flying through the air—Like that, and if you took it at that moment—If you took it at that moment perhaps you’d find it contained something—Something new, energy, or—I mean if you could get hold of it without stopping it—Because otherwise it wouldn’t be the same, it—’

  ‘Yes, but all the same it’s your hand that threw it.’

  ‘I know, but that’s only the initial reason—But suppose—Suppose someone just opened his eyes now at this moment—He might wonder how this stone—Came to be flying through the air like that—Without any apparent reason—’

  ‘Yes, but suppose he opened his eyes a second later. Then he wouldn’t see anything.’

  The boy threw another pebble into the water. It was reddish and flat, and bounced once on the surface before it disappeared. The boy thought for a moment and said:

  ‘That doesn’t prove anything. Because if he’d counted the stones at the bottom of the sea he’d know there was one more, and he might—he might wonder where it came from.’

  He turned his head and saw that his father wasn’t listening. The man in the red and black trunks was lying on one elbow, smoking his cigarette and looking vaguely out over the sea. The boy tried to see what it was Chancelade was gazing at, but there was nothing: just the curved blue expanse of sea and the waves sparkling like bits of broken mirror.

  The boy thought for a bit longer, holding a stone in his hand. Then he said, as if to himself.:

  ‘Yes, but anyhow—Anyhow, that’s not what I meant. I meant that for these stones, first here, then there, the idea of time is really only—only a matter of bearings. To be able to say that a stone has travelled from the beach to the sea you’d have to have seen me throw it, otherwise it’s as if nothing had happened. And that’s funny, because—’ He groped for words for a few seconds.

  ‘Because it’s as if you could go to sleep, and time not pass. Suppose someone slept for a year, or even for ten, say; then, when he woke up he’d think only one night had passed, because he usually only slept for one night.’

  ‘Yes, but the ten years would have passed just the same.’

  ‘No, because I mean, I mean it’s an individual matter. It isn’t the same for any two people. Of course there are clocks and calendars and all that, but they’re just artificial, just bearings that have to be interpreted. If you did away with them, or if you stopped anyone from interpreting them, that would be that. For some people it’d be ten years, for others one year, and for others three or four days or even only a few hours.’

  ‘Maybe. But how could you do away with all the bearings?’

  ‘Watches go wrong …’

  ‘And what about the sun and the night and the seasons, and all that?’

  ‘You could live in the dark.’

  ‘And what about meal-times?’

  ‘Yes, of course, it’s impossible. But you can imagine it, and if you imagine it it’s already happened. And all these ideas of time and so on that are based on reason, they’re only valid in a certain type of society, under a certain system. If you do away with those you do away with the lot: there’s no time, no cause and effect, no—no anything that seems necessary to the reason.’

  He stopped again, then went on:

  ‘I remember I used to think it was an insect that made watches go. I called it the watch-insect. But after all that’s just as true as to say there’s a spring that uncoils and drives a balance-wheel and cogs and all the rest. No, it was just as good to believe in a watch-insect that pushed the hands round with its legs. I mean, the relation between cause and effect was just as sound.’

  He glanced quickly round him, as if he were looking for something.

  ‘It’s the same with everything you see. Sky, sea, clouds, cars, and everything. The connections between them are incomprehensible. The relations between them are mysteries. The sky doesn’t exist because there’s a sea, and cars don’t exist because there are roads. There may be reasons, of course, very profound ones, but we don’t know them. So it could be insects everywhere, sky-insects and car-insects and beach-insects and so on.’

  ‘Yes, but the—’

  ‘I wouldn’t be all that surprised myself—No, I really wouldn’t be very surprised to find out one day that one of those famous machines is just a cheat. I mean, you’d open up an electronic brain, say, and inside you’d find a dozen poor wretches in chains totting up figures with pencils and paper!’

  Chancelade laughed and threw his cigarette in the sea. It floated for a moment between two waves, then disappeared from sight. The boy left the stones and watched a boat some way out pulling a man on water-skis. He thought he might have talked about the boat too, and said perhaps it was a fixed point, only a fixed point. Or that you could predict its course, and that even if it didn’t fulfil that course, yet in a way it still did. But he didn’t feel like pursuing it. He thought that perhaps he might write it all down one day in an essay at school or perhaps in a poem. He even imagined the first few lines of the po
em, and when he shut his eyes he could see them all written down on a sheet of white paper:

  THE SEA IS BLUE

  THE BOAT IS BLUE

  THE SKY IS BLUE

  THE MAN ON WATER-SKIS

  IS BLUE

  IS BLUE

  THE HORRIBLE

  That was all. The boy wondered what it could be that was horrible. The speed? The course of the boat? The limiting horizon? Or the man gliding along on his water-skis, all blue on the blue sea? But the boat had already disappeared on the other side of the bay, and no trace remained of its passage.

  Soon after this Chancelade and the boy went to buy ices at the wooden kiosk on the other side of the road. The boy had a double one, strawberry and lemon, and Chancelade had just a single vanilla. They went and ate them on a bench under a sort of plane-tree. They went on chatting for a bit. Things like this:

  ‘Delicious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mm, not bad.’

  ‘Freezing cold.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hurts my teeth.’

  ‘They’re the best ices round here.’

  ‘Yes, they really are good.’

  ‘Specially the vanilla.’

  ‘The strawberry too.’

  ‘I prefer the vanilla.’

  ‘Better than Kapi’s ices anyway.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Not dear either.’

  ‘Better than Rand’s too—do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Arosa’s?’

  ‘Mm-mm.’

  ‘The only trouble is the cornet leaks.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t know how to manage it.’

  ‘What are you supposed to do then?’

  ‘Turn it round as you lick it.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Yes, and bite off the bits that overlap.’

  ‘That’s why it hurts your teeth.’

  ‘Granita’s nice too.’

  ‘Do you like those Italian ices?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I’m not very keen.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘Another kind I like are those things they serve in glasses.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Noel’s.’

  ‘Gratta Kekas, you mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I used to like them but I’ve had too many.’

  ‘They’re nice with mint syrup.’

  ‘Yes, but not so nice as this.’

  ‘And rather dirty.’

  ‘Yes, they drag the ice all along the ground before they crush it.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Can you feel the little lumps of ice?’

  ‘Yes, every so often they crunch.’

  ‘He makes his ices himself.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘What a job, eh?’

  ‘Yes. Imagine spending every day of your life doing that.’

  ‘And in the winter he makes pancakes.’

  ‘What a life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It looks as if it’s going to rain.’

  ‘Yes, it’s getting overcast.’

  ‘It’s coming from the mountains. It’s black over there.’

  ‘Yes, there’s going to be a storm.’

  ‘We could do with one.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Have you finished your ice?’

  ‘Not yet, look.’

  ‘Look how much I’ve got left.’

  ‘You eat it too fast.’

  ‘Yes, but if you don’t the cornet gets all soft.’

  ‘I eat mine right down to the last bit.’

  ‘Hurry up or we’ll get wet.’

  ‘We had a nice bathe though, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, not bad.’

  ‘And not too many people.’

  ‘No.’

  When the first drops began to fall Chancelade and the boy took shelter under a tree with more leaves in the middle of a public garden. The rain made a strange noise on the sanded paths and the leaves, like the sound a typewriter, with a series of quick taps, then a silence, then a few slower taps, another silence, another rush of quick taps, and so on indefinitely. The sky had become black and grey, with clouds swirling in all directions. There were occasional gusts of cool wind, and the slow smell of dampening earth. The grass and the trees began to perk up a little in the rain, and just underground the hairy roots drank thirstily.

  The boy leaned against the trunk of the tree and watched the rain falling. From time to time he’d speak:

  ‘Just look at it coming down!’ Or:

  ‘It’s funny watching the rain when you’re out of it like this.’

  Chancelade heard his voice but didn’t answer. He’d been suddenly snatched away, by a gust of air, or by the mechanical sound of the raindrops. He was still there under the broadleaved tree, smoking a cigarette perhaps. But it was as if he was going to be there for ever. He looked with amazement at the face of the child that resembled him, that had been born of him. He looked at the round chin, the mouth, the delicate nose, the gently curved brow that contained the brain. It was too late now to understand. Much too late. There was this child now that was not him, who lived a few inches from him, absolutely detached. One day this child would be a man, he would live in society, with his own job, his own wife, his own house. He would come to be an old man, an invalid with trembling hands, and yet it would still be the same. You could no longer get away from the truth. You had to live with this life scattering itself ceaselessly forward, creeping across the long layers of the future. You had to do all these trivial things, devote a crazy attention to all these microscopic adventures. It was comfortable, there, in the tribe. You fought against the wild beasts, you tore at raw meat with your teeth, you gulped down water from cool springs. And you fought against other men too, you protected your wife and your child. You were jealous. You possessed. That was how it was: you were alive, and this life never stopped bursting through one after the other the curtains of death. There was a definite order, come from nowhere and inhabiting your own flesh and bones and muscles, that demanded that the name of Chancelade should never die out. It was hidden here in this body, a magnificent name in letters chased in fire, a pure and magic name that signified centuries and centuries of life.

  CHANCELADE

  And now the boy also bore this tattooed name, and would never lose it. Later on he would pass it on to another child, who again would give it to another. The years would pass, the water would fall from the sky, the sun would bake the earth, and there would be a sort of old tree with a wrinkled trunk stretching forth its branches. In the evening, in the kitchen, Chancelade watched Mina eating; opposite her the boy sat eating too, and talking now and then or drinking water out of a glass. And it was always Chancelade eating with the boy’s body. Or he sat on a chair and watched television, with blue reflections playing over his face. He learned Latin words, read a geometry book, played with toy cars made of plastic, drew a naked woman on the last page of his note-book. At night, crouched over a piece of paper in the noise and heat, with the electric light bulb burning overhead, he wrote a poem. And it was Chancelade who wrote the words one after the other:

  Rubbish

  Memory of oranges

  and sardines.

  The circles widen

  here

  at the bottom of the house.

  Gilette

  parcels up the departures.

  The first cigarette

  smoke.

  I must be brief

  and cry

  Time oh the time

  of bitter coffees

  and the pounds oh the pounds

  of stale bread.

  When

  The legs are vain

  The spectacles

  ill

  and horror

  a thing of every day.

  TO CONQUER THE SILENCE

  Then, when you’d played all those games for years without number; when you’d walked thr
ough all the streets of the town until you knew them by heart; when you’d eaten all those dishes, drunk all those drinks, smoked all those cigarettes, known all those women; when you’d written down all the names of all the people who’d lived at the same time as you, with their jobs, their ideas, and their passport photographs:

  DIEFOLD Jeanne: salesgirl in Prisunic. Brown eyes.

  STOJEBA: mechanic.

  GUERNICCI: laywer (smokes a pipe).

  GANGOLPHE Michel: owner of the Azure bar. Has spots.

  ORTAL Yves: friend.

  GUEVARA Lise: student. One day in the street she said: ‘The only thing I’d have liked to do is kill my mother. I don’t give a curse about all the rest.’

  CARAVEL Manuelle: pretty girl.

  BERMON Phillippe: typical bore.

  BUIGUES Clairette: left-wing intellectual, frustrated, wears glasses.

  BENCIVENGO: plays the guitar.

  BESSIS Joseph: philosophy teacher.

  DUPEUBLE: childhood friend, antipathetic.

  SIMON: childhood friend, sympathetic.

  OTTO Hélène : blonde, fond of games. Has modelled for Vogue.

  SOULODRE Henri-Paul: dentist.

  LAMAS: Insurance.

  KADYSS: Funny name.

  HUC Marie-Claude: Funny name.

  SANTAMARINA Alain: owes me 500 francs.

  VEROLA August : neighbour. 80 years old. Always says : ‘There’ve been two great men in human history: Jesus Christ and Napoleon.’

  VALAUDE Maurice: friend (lends me his car sometimes).

  ANDELFINGER: no comment.

  AZAR Gabrielle: she wrote a good poem.

  LAVRADOUR Chantal: must give back the records she lent me.

  BEDAYAM Myriam: always smiling.

  D’ANGELI Anne-Marie: neuropath (failure neurosis, desertion neurosis).

  FRANCE: friend.

  PAGEL: enemy.

  there wasn’t anything much left to do. You could stay shut up in a room lying on a bed beside a woman’s body, Mina’s for example. After you’d talked for a bit, or read the paper, or drunk a glass of pineapple juice, you bent over her and slowly caressed her, thinking of the millions of years past and the millions of years to come.

 

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