Here too time had come to a halt, buried in the cube of ochre paint, stifled by the thick walls, drowned in the pale light. Chancelade was in a cubicle at the ends of the earth, in the middle of Greenland or Siberia, and the ramparts were heaped up round him in order to extricate him from life. He sat there without moving, breathing in the smell of ammonia and disinfectant, listening intently to the tiny sounds, staring fixedly at the mark in the paint on the wall. The door was bolted, no one could come in. There was neither cold nor heat, only a sort of gentle unfeeling calm annihilating all desires. There wasn’t even really any light: light entered there by chance out of the bulb over the door, but it might just as well have come from somewhere else. Sounds and smells were there by chance too, and so were colours, lines, marks, corners, dust; it was a miniature grotto, a classical mausoleum of marble and stucco, an air-tight sarcophagus. Time might pass away, the years might clatter by with their noisy crowd of men and women. But here they would never enter, here they would never issue their orders and appeals. You were there, perhaps on the way to eternity, put inside a little box in unmoving space. The flies buzzed back and forth from wall to wall, continually repeating the same journey. Drops of water hissed in the cistern, and rust gradually accumulated on the old metal. What use was the sun? What use was the moon, trees, poppies? There was no longer any world, no longer any grotesque and noisy hell. There were only these walls so high and thick and covered in ochre paint, and this ceiling, this light-bulb, this red-brick floor that made your feet so cold. It was as if you had uttered a great cry inside yourself, yelled out your own name in the depths of your body, and it had suddenly been transformed into silence. Perhaps you would never speak again. You’d be silent for ever, sitting in this tiny room; you’d never make another sound to anyone.
When he got tired of this Chancelade stood up and went out, the cistern flushing loudly behind him.
I LIVED IN THE IMMENSITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
There are mirrors everywhere in the world. Great dazzling mirrors on the fronts of houses, mirrors inside rooms, on the windows, on the doors, on the pavements. The street-lights are covered with long vertical sheets of metal that sparkle all the time. Cars are so varnished and polished they disappear beneath their own reflections. The earth is a great cold mirror that shines with a strange grey and white gleam. The sea is a mirror, and the supple waves are bits of twisted glass shot through with crooked refractions. On the crystal trees the wind twirls millions of little round looking-glasses, and the sparkling rooftops are huge mercury-coloured sheets for ever deflecting the light. And over all is that infinite mirror curving above the shimmering planet, reflecting the strange spectacle; neither grey nor blue, it is a deep void where gleams of light continually come and go, and it retains in its indefectible prison the wild flickerings of entrapped life.
So Chancelade set out through the labyrinth covered with mirrors. He began to walk along the streets with their exhausting reflections, looking vaguely about him at the hundreds of identical images mutually repeating one another. The street was perfectly straight, encased between the huge glass panels of the buildings, and you couldn’t see the end of it. To left and right was an infinity of other streets all the same, long corridors of chill sunlight that led into one another and desperately mingled. The shopfronts sparkled with light, the windows, the hundreds of similar windows, shone fiercely, but you couldn’t see anything through them; you could only see the same thing always, black lines stretching towards the horizon, lines broken or engulfed by the opaque glass. And all along these lines, so many that it would have been impossible to count them, was a crowd of men like Chancelade, all walking, advancing towards one another, going this way and that, passing one another, fleeing from one another as far as the eye could see.
There was nothing left to get hold of. No opening anywhere. Not the smallest patch of dullness, not the smallest bit of stone or tar where the light would stop and rest. The light rebounded ceaselessly from one panel to another without ever penetrating, moving furiously through the lucid air, reversing a thousand times, starting off again, colliding, separating, coming together, whirling round in a sort of stationary angular maelstrom that couldn’t be dispersed. All was surface, hard slab, sharp metal, cold glass, impenetrable reflection.
Everywhere there were those pitiless eyes that reflected, rejected, destroyed you. Chancelade crossed first one street then another. He threaded his way between a row of cars, disgusting shiny monsters with windows raised and headlights shining, advancing slowly as over an ice-rink. He saw his own silhouette coming to meet him from the other side of the pavement, hands dangling, white shirt dazzling, pale face like a mask of glass with diamond eyes. Underfoot, too, he saw his body upside down, moving along with him like a white shadow. The heat reverberated like the light. It came and went all the time between the four walls of the glass prison, its waves crossing and recrossing, stopping then starting again but never finding anywhere where it might melt away. There was no more water in the world, no more cool or shade. The rivers were transformed into long ribbons of crystal, and the rain had dried on the pebbles leaving only a crust of mica and salt. There were no more hollows or caves; holes had become sharp spikes sticking up like darts, and incandescent light poured out of the windows of the houses; all openings had turned into volcanic craters, spewing out clouds of white-hot gas and tons of molten lava.
One day there had been a spark, and since then there had been no rest anywhere. Light was unleashed in the streets of the town, on the flat mirror of the sea, the earth and the sky. The ground had become a desert waste, a landscape of salt-pans and chalk shimmering in the transparent air. Chancelade looked at the sky and saw in the centre of the great white mirror, so deep that you could not say where it ended, the dazzling disc of the sun. And it was like a disc of glass, steady as a magnifying-glass, which reduced and then reflected the desperate efforts of the light. Everywhere, on the earth, on the windows, between the little glass beads on the trees and the crystal spears of the grass, there were other identical suns fiercely raging.
Chancelade had never seen anything so beautiful and so terrible. As far as the eye could see it was always the same annihilated landscape, hard, transparent, without reality. White light came from every direction at once, never ending, never dimming. The air throbbed furiously, and the reflections moved in gracious procession, like caravans of calm clouds. Human shapes rose up smoothly from the street, appearing, disappearing, sometimes even floating in the air. Stars shone on the shop-windows, or a sun would rise at a corner of the sidwalk and glide along an imaginary orbit. Sometimes, quite near Chancelade, human faces showed themselves, strange shining faces with phosphorescent eyes. And the pavement went on vanishing under his feet, a long carpet of crushed glass whose thousand depths were peopled by moving figures. Groups of women approached in dresses with countless facets. At the very instant that Chancelade caught sight of them they would disappear round a corner, mere pale reflections wiped out by the twist of a mirror. The words written on the walls disintegrated easily too, losing their letters one by one or mingling together till there was nothing of them left.
Chancelade went through the paths of the glass labyrinth, but he never got anywhere. It was always the same street ever renewed, showing new angles, new lines, new vistas. And his glance always came up against the same surfaces, to rebound indefinitely in the disorder of the light. He would turn his head to the right, for example, to look at a tree; but his glance would slip on the trunk, return, hit the windows of a car, set off upwards again and reach the sky, then come down once more to the pavement, bounce like a ball, bump into the wall of a block of flats, go off again, zigzag around, and cast about desperately but in vain; now interrupted, now restored, now thrown back again, it flew all over the place unable to rest and unable to spend itself. And everything came back to Chancelade. The town was a shining trap into which he advanced without knowing what he was doing, and its gates would never open and let him out. He was a prisoner for
life of his own vision, a slave of his own knowledge. Eyes were everywhere, not only the hostile eyes of others but also his own, with dilated pupils observing himself from all sides, the cold lenses of an indestructible camera whose only purpose was to film himself. There were mirrors on all sides, huge, tiny, broken, crushed, melted, or curved, and all reflected the man who passed before them, the millions of men all exactly alike who walked and walked and walked in all directions!
Nor did the mirrors reflect images of light and heat alone: from every corner of the town came also eternally repeated echoes of noises from another time. The hum of engines, shouts, hooters, the tapping of high heels, the squeaking of soles, the rustling of materials, the barking of dogs, the shriek of jets, sirens, telephones ringing, the deep murmur of music—all returned without respite, to mingle or merge or separate for unknown intervals. They were echoes, and echoes of echoes. There was nothing left that was true or real. These sounds had occurred in the past, long long ago, but none of them had been lost. On the contrary, they had been concentrated by their comings and goings in the hermetic cave of the world. They had been to the furthest depths of the sky, and recoiled with claps of thunder on to the sheet of glass. Thus with each journey they grew, their waves doubling back on themselves within their prison; one day perhaps they would grow too strong, and the universe would shiver to pieces like a crystal ball.
Chancelade tried in vain to escape from this hell of mirrors. He kept to the walls, stopped at a crossroads, went round a square, took ten different streets; but it wasn’t any use. Always, before him, beneath him and overhead were the impenetrable sheets of glass alive with meaningless reflections. He tried to hide behind a parked lorry, but the white metal shone fiercely and gave him back his own image in caricature. He went towards the sea, and was driven back by the horror of the great flat leaden expanse. Here too, in the curve of the bay, the sun shone thousands of times, on the edges of the waves, on the facets of the pebbles, on car-windows, on the walls of the houses along the front. A white plane crossed the mirror of the sky, and prepared to land on the other side of the town, giving off shining sparks. And in the distance Chancelade could see the mass of the hills and mountains, like huge jewels glowing through the torrid haze.
There was no hope. You couldn’t escape from yourself; the whole world’s business was to give you back your own image. It was an endless, pointless process, like a conflagration consumed in its own flames, and time was a mechanism that could no longer be halted. Nothing was simple any more; nothing happened at the proper time, magically, once and uniquely for all and then no more. All that happened here, under this sky, beside this sea, in this city of shimmering faces, happened millions of times elsewhere, under other skies, beside other seas, with other faces. It was as if some diabolical command had turned everything into a deathtrap. The cycles began over and over again without flagging, without ever forgetting. Flowers, the flight of wasps, the songs of birds, the soft sound of tyres on tarmac had ceased to be unique. They were all the others, and they wanted to destroy; and when they attacked, their furious strength was multiplied tenfold by the age of the world.
A man stood smoking a cigarette by a post with a yellow light at the top of it. And this transparent figure with its fixed gesture was there for ever, on all the pavements, by all the lamp-posts all with the same yellow light. In a corner by a glaring white wall an old woman squatted holding out bunches of flowers, and it was as if the whole population of the world was sitting there in rags, its wrinkled face and expressionless eyes and toothless mouth upturned, offering in its dirty gnarled hand a bunch of flowers without either colour or smell.
Or a woman with painted face, her dress steeped in crimson light, was standing by a door and smiled at you as you passed; and the smile suddenly opened her face, cleaving the shining eyes and distending the mouth like a wound. Then outside all the doors of all the houses of the town there appeared this same mask of glass and metal with strangely gleaming eyes; in every mirror was seen this ghost with flaming hair and steel body enclosed in scarlet silk; and this shape signed to you to follow her into her lair, to go with her into the reversed world where you could see infinity. The rough, cracked voice whispered endlessly into your ear the words that no longer had any meaning, the empty words inhabited by maddening echo:
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
‘Would you like to come with me?’
On the pavements the café terraces were all ready. The tables were set out, and on their shiny surfaces the glasses and bottles stood quietly, emitting their grey and white gleams. Bodies were sitting at the tables, their pale faces poked forward—so many more smooth mirrors without relief. There were no more noses or chins or cheeks or mouths or eyebrows. All that was left were the eyes, huge eyes that had swallowed up the rest of the face, wide, incomprehensible, like rows of identical windows. Chancelade walked by all these distended pupils, and in the depths of all these mirrors he saw his own image advancing, dim, violent, wavering along the cold path that the others had prepared for him.
A girl leaned against the wall waiting for a bus or a taxi or a man. But the light lit up her white face and her legs and hands and hair as if she were a statue. Chancelade walked by slowly and tried to catch her eye, to say something to her and try to escape, to find something to cling on to. But he could see nothing. The vague countenance shone faintly in the flood of white light, its two eyes without depth, its nose indistinguishable, its mouth closed and not breathing. She wasn’t in the street, she couldn’t be there on the pavement just a few inches away from Chancelade. She was on the other side of the mirror, lost in the sheet of yellow-speckled foil. Between her and Chancelade there was the misty thickness of the glass, and she looked at him, at once near and far away, out of her own inaccessible dream. She looked at him out of her dim eyes from behind a series of aquaria of muddy water that magnified her glance like lenses. Chancelade realized that he could never reach her; she was only a reflection, the reflection of a reflection, that had appeared on this white patch of wall by chance, the fleeting result of a series of refractions from one end of the earth to the other; she was unreal, without a body, without warmth, without breath or words or thoughts.
And all the rest of the world had become like her. Reality had drawn in its claws and hidden its whiskers and scales and prickles, and all that was left was this surface covered with floating images, shot through with inverse lightning; this negative in which the darkest shadows appeared like masses of snow and light resembled coal-dust. Cinders, clouds of sparkling dust and flakes of fire filled all the interstices of a space that had once been free. Chancelade walked in the midst of all this debris, painfully and slowly. He pushed aside the twigs. He went through bushes of luminous prickles, and each thorn clung to his skin and held him back. Sometimes the waves of noise and heat fell on him like breakers, and he felt himself being sucked back by the undertow. He wasn’t going anywhere now. The horizon was endless, the streets were endless. There were open squares, great salty lakes sparkling as far as the eye could see. Then straight avenues lined with the motionless skeletons of trees. The fronts of the buildings shrank back and parted, to reveal other frontages just the same, vast tall walls from which the heat rebounded. Corridors succeeded corridors, doors doors, streets streets, alleys alleys. Flights of stairs went up and down and up again. Every so often there would be a glimpse of the sea, a sheet of beaten aluminium on which the sky bore down. Gardens revealed their scintillating crypts, their caves with heavy stalactites of metal. Then more streets, house-fronts, bay-windows, balconies, terr
aces, open doors through which the sombre light rushed in. Groups of windows appeared now high up, now low down, now left, now right. Car roofs lit up one after the other, sending out spirals of pale coloured fire. The street-lights stood there in line, with the trees and the telegraph-poles and the shapes of men and women with bodies in armour. And always, over everything, the lid of the sky threw back the tons of light, opposing its own opaque and vertiginous mass in a dance that went to and fro and never ceased.
Chancelade walked in the midst of the storm of glass and crystal without ever getting anywhere. It was like crossing a huge cemetery full of marble tombs, or leafing slowly through an album that had nothing written on its thick white pages.
And all around him the crazy vision never stopped. It came and went, carrying his image thousands of miles then bringing it suddenly back; throwing it against walls, pavements, trees, anywhere that there was one of the merciless mirrors. There were as many Chancelades as there were specks of dust, pylons, roofs, manholes, men, women, children, dogs or birds. There were some on the bed of the sea, gliding over the black mud. There were some in the distant hills, engraved on the purple sharp-edged mountain faces. There were even some in the air, in the air you breathed, and this countless host entered your lungs through your throat and spread through the body like millions of living needles. There were the microbes too: the invisible seething mass, this race with identical cysts, flagella, and membranes greedy to devour and destroy. Trypanosomes, bacteria, viruses, staphylococci, bacilli and amoebas. All gathered together in infinite hosts, secreting their toxins and waging their eternal battles. Chancelade had been carried into them too by the mad shimmering; and cut up and minced into invisible fragments he returned to his own body to destroy it.
There was no possible end to this life. It was caught inside the furnace and consumed itself on the spot, in the heat and the light, each particle bearing within it the fire that devoured it.
Terra Amata Page 15
