Terra Amata

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  THEN I GREW OLD

  Old, now. The little boy who was called Chancelade was sitting in a wicker armchair in the kitchen. There was a table covered in crumpled newspapers in front of him, and nearby a television set, switched off. It had been hot for some days, months even; and all that heat and light had entered the kitchen, penetrating the yellow paint on the walls, thrusting into the tiled floor and the furniture, and slowly melting the oilcloth and sheets of plastic. Everything sweated: skin, ceiling, clothes, gruyère cheese, glasses. There was a sort of glue over everything, and you couldn’t move.

  And the boy didn’t move; he sat on his wicker armchair gripping the arms with his trembling hands, back bowed, legs tucked under the seat. His old, emaciated face had difficulty staying still on his shoulders. It kept threatening to fall on the floor, heavy as a ball of lead. His eyelids kept shutting too; they slipped down over the damp spheres of the eyes and it needed a lot of effort not to fall asleep. On the thin face, which wasn’t white any more, merely pale and yellowish, there was a curious permanent expression of anxiety, fatigue, and incipient sleep. Chancelade looked straight in front of him, but you couldn’t have said for certain what he was looking at. Perhaps at the pages of the paper on the table, or the grey television screen, or the wall with nothing on it.

  In spite of the light of all those hot months, all those bright and burning years, the kitchen was dark. What was white anywhere else, here was grey. What was red or blue was brown. And what was black was invisible. Outside there was a cobalt-blue sky and houses with red roofs. Trees, with masses of leaves and branches, faint smells, scents of sugar or pepper, rustlings, cries, sudden flashes. But they couldn’t get through the closed window, and even if they could enter the room they couldn’t be recognized any more. It was all so far away now it might never have existed. It was like a curtain of mist above the horizon, it was a blanket of clouds and vapour without movement and without relief.

  The boy called Chancelade was old: he’d lost his teeth and hair, his body had gradually emptied bit by bit. His bones were fragile as glass, and his muscles had no more strength in them. The cracks of a thousand wrinkles had appeared on his skin, advancing by little bounds all over his body, drawing their little signs, a sort of writing leaving its series of hooks and loops. You could read it everywhere, the x’s at the corners of the eyes, the y’s on either side of the mouth, the z’s round the navel and on the palms of the hands. The veins too had revealed their routes along the thin arms and the calves. They sprang out on each side of the neck and stood out on the temples, the skull, and round the eyes. They made crossroads on the backs of the hands, were vivid on the thighs in little blue patches. Or else they knotted themselves into hard blocks that formed bridges and tunnels, stiff black lumps on the ankles, legs and arms. There was nothing all over Chancelade’s body but these signs and scribbles and scars. Time had weathered that skin. The sun had withered, the light had yellowed, the rain had drenched and worn and chapped it. Clothes had rubbed against it. Cushions, the straw of chairs, mattresses had hardened it. Illness and suffering had tattooed it thus for endless years. If you’d had a microscope you could have read on that body all that had happened during more than eighty-one years. Here were marked wars, there love, passion. There again on the pale forehead was a little star which meant that you’d once believed in God, or that you’d had a soul. There was a little curved vein at the corner of the left eye that meant you’d read The Grapes of Wrath. That mark on the cheek was Dostoievsky; this wrinkle between the eyebrows The Battleship Potemkin. Everything, absolutely everything, was written on this body. Nothing had been forgotten, nothing had been suppressed. It was a notebook in which the invisible hand had written all the time that elapsed, the illnesses, the desires, the thoughts, the fears. One day long, long ago Chancelade had found a wounded seagull on the beach. It was dragging itself across the pebbles with a broken wing, and had been quite easy to catch. He’d taken it home and looked after it for two months. He’d given it a name: Maya. Every day he took it down to the sea in his hands, and it used to look at the water and cry sadly: ‘Khéeeoooh kek kek kek kek kek!’ It had a very white body with black tail and wing-tips, a red beak, red feet and grey eyes that were as hard and transparent as the surface of the sea. And then one day, when its wing was almost cured, a dog came into the garden and killed it. When Chancelade came there was nothing left but a heap of bloodstained feathers and earth, and he’d thrown it right out into the road, without crying, so that the dog could finish eating it. But the bird had remained, marked there on his body, a sort of asterisk carved in the skin of his brow, a strange sort of wrinkle shaped like a bird.

  Another time, also very long ago, Chancelade had upset a cup of coffee on the beach, at Acireale, or Calamayor. And the brown patch slowly absorbed by the sand was also marked on his body for ever; somewhere on the skin, or in a nerve.

  Everything was written down. Everything could be read on this skin as on the skin of the world. Wrinkles, weals, spots, excrescences: faults, deposits, volcanoes and mountains! These signs had been engraved one by one, and now on the body of the little boy become an old man there were sentences and pages and chapters telling the history, the only true history, the one a man writes with his life.

  Not a second was forgotten. Everything was there : the woman’s face lit up red on the dark staircase as she lit her cigarette. The whistle of tracer bullets. The broken tooth. The first kiss. The summer mosquitoes, the blue flies of winter. The moon on September 12,1951. Marriages, deaths, births. The sound of the pebble breaking. Lightning, snow, the doleful wail of the wind. Voices, voices for ever wandering in the distance, with everlasting echoes. A living novel, an epic with four limbs, armpits, hairy parts, and an expressive face. A poem born one day in the belly of a woman, which launched on his own had grown up into the greatest poem in existence. Perhaps that’s what one ought to do instead of trying to remember: learn to read life on living bodies. Keep all these mummies in huge refrigerated rooms, and come there every day and peacefully decipher every detail that’s written on them. Perhaps there’s no other art but that. Perhaps there’s no other language but that real, mysterious and beautiful script individual to each person, where nothing is omitted and nothing altered or distorted in the service of some artificial and futile beauty.

  It was good to have grown old like Chancelade. You were still the same, and yet you’d changed body and soul. And one day you found yourself there at journey’s end, sitting without moving in a creaking wicker chair in the kitchen. The noise and agitation had ceased, the fever had subsided. Violence and hatred had slowly withdrawn, and now in their place was silence.

  With difficulty Chancelade got out a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches; jerkily he selected a cigarette and put it in his mouth. Then his left hand, trembling, took hold of the matchbox, and the right hand tried to strike the little wooden stick, which broke. The hand hesitated a moment, then took another match; this time the orange-red flame spurted up. Chancelade raised it wavering to the cigarette and the tobacco caught alight and spread clouds of grey smoke.

  Chancelade went on smoking like that endlessly. Every so often the cigarette would go out and he’d have to grope for the box of matches in his coat pocket. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, or five o’clock, or six. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter any more. His gaze was fixed without moving on the wall, just over the table with the papers on it, a little to the left of the silent television set. He never looked at himself now; he was lost, buried in the yellow paint, tucked right inside the wood and plaster as if between sheets. From time to time a few words would come to his lips; they came from far away, they’d crossed such vast lands, they’d travelled so long; and when, trembling, they crossed his lips, they stopped at once, mingled with the rasping breath. They said snatches of sentences, and the silence that followed them said nothing.

  ‘It’s funny, I …’

  ‘I must, I must …’

  ‘
But what …’

  The words were not addressed to anyone any more. Men, women, little children, they were all dead, easily, just like that; Mina, Alfred, Jean, Étienne, Emmanuel. Servat, Manzoni, Filippi. Schwob. Nichols. Corelle. Ensin. Alata, Tallon, Jérôme Banyors, Vultureni, Roland. All of them had gone, all. The world had swallowed them up one by one. The sea had drowned them, the sand covered and the fire consumed them. Dogs, cats, rats and scorpions had disappeared too. There was nothing left but him, the little boy with the face of an old man who was called Chancelade. In the hot kitchen with the door and windows shut, life still beat on. It had become a tiny speck in the middle of the desert, the crater dug by an ant-lion for example. It still palpitated slightly, a gentle flicker of the eyelid. It shone, a pale spark almost imperceptible in the immense chaos of the dense night. You could hardly distinguish it from nothingness. As you drew near the wicker armchair you could hear the panting breathing, the gurgling of the intestines, the sound of the throat trying to swallow a little saliva. You could even stammer the name between your quivering lips: ‘Chchchan-cece-celllladdde …’ but it scarcely meant anything now. It had become a strange almost sad name from an old civilization, a name mutilated even before it was engraved in the leprous stone. This empty bubble still preserved life and its changing reflections. But in the closed room the light and violence of the world pressed in on all sides, and the thin partition had difficulty in resisting. Everything conspired to break this bubble at last. The table wished it, with its square legs. The yellow walls wished it. The luminous window and the dull television screen wished it. The crumpled newspapers, the red floor bore down, and so did the wicker chair, clenching its arms and hardening its back; the grey light and the heat had gripped Chancelade’s head in their vice, which turned and tightened slowly and inexorably. The struggle wasn’t over, but it was now without object. The little boy had surrendered long ago, but the battle continued out of habit, because the fly goes on trembling long after the terrible blow that crushed its abdomen.

  Then Chancelade began to move. First he stopped looking at the old yellow wall and turned his head towards the kitchen window. Through the dirty panes he could see the blue sky, the branch of a tree, and the pots of geraniums on the terrace. He gazed for a few moments at this unchanging fragment of the world. Then he gripped the arms of the chair and rose slowly to his feet, all his muscles trembling with the effort. At last he was standing up beside the table. He was wearing a pair of red slippers with blue heels, and his feet weighed down on the floor like two painful plinths. The little boy straightened his bent back and took a deep breath. But the air too trembled as it entered his lungs, and it was difficult to keep his balance. Chancelade peered about for his stick. It had fallen down a couple of yards from the table. For a moment he thought he’d have to call someone, his son, or his daughter-in-law, or even Daniel, the baby. But then he remembered they’d gone out for a drive after lunch and wouldn’t be back until the evening. He’d have to pick the stick up himself. He moved very slowly round the table, leaning on his right hand. Then he bent forward, and his body started to tremble even more. His glasses fell out of his coat pocket and broke on the floor. Chancelade had never imagined the ground was so far away. It was like seeing it from the top of a tower, a gleaming flat expanse of red brick, covered with little bobbles of dust like clouds. Ants hurried along the cracks between the tiles, stopping every time they came to a scrap of food. It was as if your legs had grown enormously long during the night, so that the earth was now at the bottom of an unfathomable abyss. Chancelade stretched out his left arm and groped for the stick. At last, after many attempts, his hand encountered the wood and picked it up. Then he stood up and leaned on it. A sort of thin sweat had broken out on his forehead and dampened his shirt. His legs were trembling with fatigue. He hesitated there for a few minutes, standing by the table leaning on his stick. Then he looked out of the window again and set off.

  When he reached the street he stopped again and looked about him in terror. The storm of movement and colour all descended on him at once, and he had to lean against a wall so as not to fall. As far as he could see there was nothing but a tide of violence and rage. The loud long waves swept slowly down on him, the undertow dragged at his legs, flashes of light rained down without a pause on his face. The crowd marched rhythmically along the pavement with heavy, crushing feet. In the road the cars hurtled by, devouring space with their rotating black tyres. An ambulance made its way along the middle of the street, the strident shriek of its siren issuing frenziedly from the painted metal body. It was there, everywhere, distended, tensed, stretched to breaking-point: life, still the same life with its furious flickerings, life leaping forward, pullulating, felling, breaking bones. Multiple torture, wheels laden with broken bodies, gibbets with strangled corpses, garottes, guillotines, axes, pincers, gouges, whips. Still the same ditch crawling with centipedes and snakes, and the heavy flail of the sky above. Still the light with its numberless knives. Still the white walls with windows in them, the thick tar, the stifling smell of petrol. The trees. The pale panes of glass tougher than steel. Mirrors with their eternal fires. Hooters, harsh cries, voices, words lost and found and lost and found, endlessly, without respite. Still that pain, or that pleasure, it was hard to remember which, that gnawed at the pit of the stomach and made the temples throb.

  The boy Chancelade went along the street step by step. He dragged his red slippers with their blue heels over the rough pavement, striking the echoing ground with the rubber end of his stick. On he went. His legs moved trembling back and forth and his body advanced bearing aloft the old wrinkled face with its grey eyes and hair. Men kept meeting or overtaking him; women glided along flaunting their hips, the sharp tap of their heels fading rapidly along the street.

  Chancelade went along close to the walls, not knowing where he was going. For a little while there had been certain instructions in his mind, words of some kind that indicated something. He’d seen them as if they were written up on white hoardings:

  CIGARETTES

  SWEETS

  PAPER

  COFFEE

  Then the words had disappeared and the streets no longer led anywhere. He stumbled along on his shaky legs, one step, another step, stick forward, one step, another step, stick forward, and so on. He could see the grey pavement unfolding slowly in front of him covered with signs and markings; here dogs had wet, there a child had thrown away a half-eaten ice-cream cone. All you had to do was follow these tangled tracks, walking slowly and carefully like this. You were bound to arrive somewhere. Bound to find someone, or something. Chancelade noted as he passed all the details on the ground that would help him not to get lost:

  Black patch.

  Dog’s dirt.

  Greasy paper.

  Cigarette-end.

  Cigarette-end.

  Screwed-up blue paper.

  Banana skin.

  Scratch.

  Feather.

  Man-hole.

  Piece of paper.

  Match.

  Cigarette-end.

  Cigarette-end.

  Cigarette-end.

  Spit.

  It was the unknown way that led across time like this, gently, gently. Men, women, dogs, cats, pigeons, cockroaches had without knowing it marked out their path on the earth. They had left tracks so that one day someone might chance to follow them to their lairs. They had left the signature of their lives as they passed, abandoning a little of themselves with every second. Their sweat had stained the ground, and their scales, bits of skin, hairs and waste products told that they were still alive, that they hadn’t stopped living.

  But the whole world had become unspeakably old. The boy Chancelade went on walking along by the walls, against the stream of the noisy tumultuous river; and everywhere there was this continual trembling. Beneath his red slippers with their blue heels the earth quivered as if it were about to open. The asphalt was damp and gave to the tread like sand. The walls of the ho
uses trembled, the windows were soft, the mirrors clouded. A deep weariness had invaded the whole town. In the street human shapes lurched about drunk with sleep. Cars drove of their own accord along the road, sleepwalkers advancing on nothingness. Chancelade stopped at an intersection, leaned on his flexible stick, and contemplated the spectacle of universal weakness. He saw the buildings swaying on their foundations, the ailing lights, the stutterings, the stumbles. Around, and within, everything had begun to totter. It was as if some strange disease had struck the whole town, a sort of sleepy sickness. A hypnotic sun shone in the middle of the sky, and as they fell on the earth its rays slowly paralysed things and bodies.

  Nothing was certain any more, nothing rebelled. The trees slept where they stood in their capsules of heat and silence. The street-lamps too were motionless, vanquished. In the dark corners by doorways the dust accumulated speck by speck. Everything was long, slow, and far away. Even the air, that used to be so light and pure, now hung over the earth laden with heavy odours like the breath of an old woman.

  Chancelade felt himself being overtaken by dizziness. He had to hold on to a wall so as not to fall. He leaned there for some time, gazing at the pavement. He listened to his heart beating faintly somewhere in his chest.

  Then he started walking along the wavering street again; at the end of it there was a little shelter with a seat where people waited for the bus. It took Chancelade half an hour to reach it; then he sat down on the seat. The world was inexpressibly old. It shook like a dotard, slobbered, wet its clothes, sweated, was losing its senses. But he, Chancelade, didn’t forget anything. He was more alive than any of them, the only man left on earth. Sitting on the bench he watched the buses drive up and off again one after the other, carrying their cargoes of invalids. At one point a young woman came and sat down beside him. Chancelade looked at the youthful body, the slender hands, the smooth face with its bright eyes. With effort, hearing his voice wavering as he spoke, he said: