Terra Amata

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  ‘It’s funny, you know—It’s very funny … I, I’d never have believed that one day …’

  The young woman looked at him in surprise.

  ‘What’s funny?’ she said.

  But the boy Chancelade went on without taking any notice. Perhaps he’d even gone deaf.

  ‘Today, here, on this seat … At the 16 bus-stop. It all happened so fast, you see, so fast … I can’t remember the details, it happened so fast … I was born just the other day … Yes, just the other day … And today it’s almost all over. In one night, it happened in one night … While I was asleep, all—all those years went by without my noticing. Today I wake up, and it’s all over … Nearly over … Don’t you think that’s funny? Don’t you? It’s like, like a dream, a nightmare, I don’t know … I’ve forgotten—I’ve forgotten how it began. But now—Now I know it’s true. Sitting here on this seat with the buses coming up every five minutes. All that, all that in one night!’

  The young woman tried to say something nice, something like, come now, you’re still in excellent health, you don’t look at all old, very well preserved in fact, and so on. But the boy Chancelade wasn’t listening. He spoke again:

  ‘It was only yesterday, or the day before. I was talking to a woman like you, yes … She was just like you, it might even have been you … She was there, and so was I. It’s funny to think that all that, all that can have disappeared in a single night. And yet nothing has changed … I can recognize everything. But it’s so far away now. So old. I can’t understand that. I—’

  He swallowed his saliva with difficulty. The words were now beginning to come back to him; but it was too late.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Chancelade.

  ‘Me? Twenty-two,’ said the young woman.

  ‘Twenty-two … Forty-two, sixty-two, eighty-two, what’s the difference? Yesterday I was twenty-two. I sat here on this seat waiting for the bus. To go to the cinema or go and buy some writing-paper in a department store. And I didn’t think it would be like that, so quick. They call it—They call that a life. A life! It didn’t even last an hour! Just the time between two buses … It’s really—’

  ‘But just the same you—’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t do anything! It all went by so fast. I was there, and now I’m here, with so many things still to do … I might have—I don’t know, gone to Vladivostock for instance, or got to know women, or work, or learned dozens of things. Sanskrit. Biology, cosmography, botany, archaeology. I might have had hundreds of children, gone into politics, lived in India or Peru. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have time. It all went by so quickly, that life, it’s hard to believe … It’s as if I’d been asleep, or dreaming. I was born only the other day …’

  The boy Chancelade saw that the young woman was looking at him with her bright eyes. He tried to smile, but because of his toothless mouth could only produce an ugly grimace.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, and his voice began to quaver; ‘listen—I’m going to tell you while there’s still time … Live every second, don’t waste any of it. You’ll never have anything else, you’ll never—’ He hesitated a little: ‘You’ll never have another chance … Do everything … Don’t waste a minute, not even a second, hurry up, wake up … Tomorrow—tomorrow it’ll be you sitting here on this seat … It’s terrible, I—you …’

  Chancelade’s voice broke, and at that moment the bus drew in along the pavement. The young woman jumped up and got in without a backward glance. Out of his dim eyes the boy Chancelade saw the green-painted mass clicking regularly. Then the bus drove off in a cloud of smoke, and nothing was left in the streets or the sky or anywhere but the kind of dizzying weakness wheeling round like a vulture in ever-decreasing circles. When the abyss finally closed and the bird dropped like a stone, there’d be no more noise, or words, or grotesque movements; only the featureless face and ageless unwrinkled skin of the world as it is.

  I DIED

  Dead, now. Peaceful as poison in the body of the snake. Violent as the knife in the killer’s hand, burning as love in the skin of a man who possesses a woman. It came one night, in the early morning, and for the last time the little boy called Chancelade was alone. His pale face was turned to the ceiling, and his body arched under the sweat-soaked sheets; his breath whistled through his open mouth. The chill of infinity mounted slowly through the legs, wiping out the living cells one by one. The heart struggled. The tongue fell, a dumb choking mass, into the throat. The ceiling of fog began its slow descent, to crush and grind and cover up for ever and ever. The walls drew in inch by inch, moved by the pitiless mechanism. The dark room had become the size of a ship’s cabin, then of a cupboard, then of a wardrobe, a suitcase, a match-box. Now it is only a tiny hole in the hard rock, a minute hollow not big enough for a fly to live in. And yet for Chancelade it’s huge, big as the waiting lounge of an airport, and the walls are so far away and the ceilings so high that it’s hardly a room at all any more but the world in which one lies lost, floating deserted and hopeless in the cold void, alone, abominably alone.

  In the temple of moving walls the body of the boy Chancelade is dying. There is too much space, or not enough. There is too much air, and time, and light, and the solitude is stifling. What you ought to do, now is the time, what you ought to do is stretch out your arms and try to stop the walls. And take your tongue out of your throat and shout as loud as you can, for those who are not there: ‘Help! Help! I need you! Help!’

  The white ceiling has become a mirror too. The last mirror before unconsciousness; and what the little boy sees in it is horrible. He sees a face that is very old and very white, with a mouth like a dead fish, dim eyes, and cheeks already darkened by patches of shadow. The face is his own, and he grimaces with pain and rage. Vain mouth, foolish eyes, hollow cheeks dark and unshaven, tousled hair. Forehead white with stupor and streaming with big drops of icy sweat. The ceiling is gently dying, shaken by ridiculous twitches that spread across the white paint in strange concentric waves.

  In the middle of the ceiling hangs a black flex with the skull of an electric light bulb at the end of it. A head decapitated, then hung.

  The horror of white sheets clinging to the skin, of the pillow slowly engulfing the head like a quicksand. The furniture is dying too. You can hear the sinister creaking as cold paralysis creeps over it. The table splits, the chair is consumed where it stands. Carpets and curtains unravel, undo all the weavers’ work. Everywhere dust falls, and little rivulets of chalky powder run along the cracks of the tiles and disappear into the sea of the floor. Enough! All this must be halted. The damage must be mended, the bits of wood and glass stuck together, the holes stopped up. That’s enough, I tell you! The joke’s gone on long enough, put on the lights again. There’s been enough drama, we’ve been frightened quite enough. Now let everything go back to what it was before, sun, clear air, peace, sea, strength, beauty. Isn’t everything eternal? Isn’t everything normal, quite normal? Who started this grotesque farce? The walls are there, the ceiling’s there, the chairs and tables aren’t dying. There isn’t any face on the white ceiling, there isn’t any skull hanging where the light bulb ought to be. I’m here. I insist. I have my body, my eyes, my mouth, my mind and its thoughts. So that’s enough of this ridiculous comedy! Am I not eternal? I was never born, I’ve always been here, always, always. Birth and death are only fables. As far back as I can remember I’ve always been here. Wasn’t I here in 1952, when it was so hot the asphalt stuck to the soles of your shoes? And in 1943, when there was some sort of war, didn’t I watch the tracer bullets shooting through the sky? And in 1960, when it snowed on the road to London, or 1964, when there was the earthquake in Naples. I was there, I was there all the time. And it was me in 1834 too, crossing the Rocky Mountains westwards and shooting at Jim Rattlesnake’s gang. It was I who crossed the Beresina, who was called Marco Polo, Eric Bloodaxe, or Hui-tsang who died of thirst in the huge Gobi Desert. I took part in the Anabasis, the exoduses, the migrations to the Wes
t. It was I who populated Asia, Africa, America. I was there all the time, every day, with the sun and the rain and the wind and the ice and the fire. I was in the dense jungle, and the stretches of white sand. On the mountain-tops, and on the misty lakes. I was everywhere, always. So why is this dust falling down from the walls, why are there these eyeless faces on the ceiling and the windows, why is there this creeping silence, and these sheets, this sweat, this abyss? Let me tell you I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid.

  My intelligence must be immortal. My eyes have pierced to the heart of the world like a shaft of steel. And all these objects and other bodies and landscapes and trees and animals have been connected with me from the first by the substance of knowledge. They can’t betray me. They can’t abandon me. I have entered into the trunks of the palm-trees and lived in the sweet mounting sap. I have been right inside the shells of insects and felt the faint vibrations of the engine that moves their legs and wings. I have been in the bellies of cows and in the very flesh of whales and octopuses. Yes, I have lived in all those masses of organs, red muscles, fragrant genitals and silky pelts. And I’ve been in the centre of the rocks, caught between narrow layers of flint and granite. I have lived numberless years inside great mountains, hidden under tons of stone and old earth. I have had the bodies of rivers and clouds and air; I have been in stopped-up wells, I have been thrown back by obstacles, I have flown round jagged peaks and over marshy plains. I’ve been seen everywhere, heard everywhere. I’ve been used, given every name and every age. So why have the gates of life been closed on me now, why have these walls been put up?

  All I’ve known, and all I’ve failed to understand, all is far away now, leaving nothing but the atrocious void. It’s as if my eyes had been suddenly torn out and the secret links that bound me to the universe broken as the bloody spheres rolled somewhere outside my body, their retinas registering nothing. The sweet fluid has ceased to come and go, the blood of vision flows no more, and I have begun to float, icy and attached to nothing, in huge empty space. The world has shrivelled up, and objects roam about lost and aimless, like fleshless stumps from which life has receded.

  So that’s what has happened now to the little boy who was called Chancelade. It was coming for a long time. It was written up everywhere, all around him, on the white skin of women and in the flesh of fruit. It was written inside him too, in the skeleton’s creaking bones, in hair, nails and teeth. The great withdrawal had begun in the very first instant, and the whole of life had only been a series of random gesticulations to slow it down.

  The pit had gradually deepened in the too-soft pillows. Cold had penetrated the folds in the sheets, the blankets, the mattress, and gradually enfolded the thin body, making it shudder. Chancelade was still breathing, lying on his back with his mouth open. The raucous sounds filled the room, now quick, now faint and far apart. On the bedside table, among all the medicine bottles and tubes, the clock went on ticking regularly, as if to show what had to be done. On the white dial the hands showed something like six o’clock in the morning. When the hand was on five, you’d been born. When it was on seven, you’d be dead. That was the truth about time, truth itself in the form of a clock with a little steel knob that you turned from left to right every so often to wind it up.

  Outside, cars let out sudden growls as they started up. A bus made a sneezing noise as it braked, and there were strange incomprehensible cries. Somewhere in the east the sun was rising behind a twelve-storey building, and the grey and pink light spread over the pavements as usual. It was today, or yesterday. Or perhaps tomorrow. It was here, or there, or farther away still. It was true or false, beautiful or ugly, peaceful or violent. It was infinity, or the gummed square inch of a postage stamp.

  The boy Chancelade has started to play the last game of all. In the soiled bed, on the collapsing mattress, he has arranged his body for the last little adventure. He is playing against himself, with his own body, skin and mind. The game is quite simple: you have to lose as slowly as possible, suffering as little as possible. You lose a toe, then another, then another. An ankle, a finger. A word. An image. The trifles disappear one after the other into the dark hole. All that you put down you lose. All that you win you abandon at once to the dark river that strips and laves so carefully, and washes everything away.

  It isn’t a new game; in fact, it’s the last episode in a game that began a long time ago, so long ago that no one remembers. Every cigarette that was lit, every word that was spoken, every act performed was a move in the game, and one didn’t know it. It was a mistake to think that there was no enemy; the enemy was there from the very beginning, lurking in the depths of mirrors. He had your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your nose, your chest, your legs, your fingerprints. He had your thoughts and spoke your language, but every word of yours that he echoed automatically cancelled out its original. Your enemy was you, you.

  Consciousness had killed consciousness. Sight had turned on itself and gone blind; your light struck against the opacity of the world, rebounded, and annihilated you. Intelligence was also stupidity. Creation was destruction. The light of day contained impenetrable darkness. In every reason there was frenzy. In every word the approach of silence.

  They’ve come. They’re gathered in the room, around the bed on which the body now scarcely stirs. The boy suddenly saw them all standing there round him like a wall. He knows their faces but he can’t give them a name. Who is this man with the thin unmoving face and sunken eyes? Who is this black-haired woman holding a handkerchief to her nose? And that other woman with swollen eyelids? That girl in white? Who is this man with thick glasses who takes hold of Chancelade’s wrist? What are all these people called, and what are they doing here? Chancelade tries to slide to the bottom of the bed and disappear through the pillows and the mattress, sink through the floor; but in vain. With horror he sees the crowd slowly growing in the grey room and looking at him. What do they want? What are they looking for? There are faces everywhere, familiar faces become unrecognizable. The harsh light of the new day throws dark shadows on their cheeks and noses and eye-sockets. Under the heavy lids the eyes shine feverishly, like balls of steel. Chancelade is on show. His body, stretched out on the bright white bed, is exposed to curiosity and disgust. Faces are bent towards him, fingers stretched : he is the cynosure, a sort of wax-faced hollow mummy in which everyone tries to see the signs of a brotherhood betrayed. For they have abandoned him. They have denied him. No one wants anything more to do with him, he must be forgotten, forgotten. The last metamorphosis has taken place, in this closed room, in the soft and weak half-light.

  And the eyes in the faces round the bed have formed the final mirror, the great sheet of tarnished foil that separates off the world of the living. There beyond the glass they are afraid of nothing. They can watch the old snakeskin writhe in the dust, the grey rag that no longer has a name or a shape. They have all come to perform the rite of exile. Father, mother, wife, friends, mistresses, children, doctors and lawyers. They have emerged from the darkness where they were hiding, and now they keep thrusting, thrusting him away.

  Chancelade has slipped back even farther. He has opened his mouth wide, and he shrieks out his curse at the same time as the whistling death-rattle. He cries out, he tries to cry out, but the words cannot get past the opening of his throat. He says, looking at all the marked faces round the bed :

  ‘What are they doing here? Go away! Go away! I don’t need all these people round me. Tell them to go away, leave me alone. Go away! Go away!’

  But no one listens. The ghosts will all stay there till the end. The woman with black hair will lean over to the man and whisper :

  ‘It’s awful—awful—I can’t bear it …’

  ‘He ought to be given an injection of caffein, but …’

  ‘Tell Emmanuel to go away, he oughtn’t to—’

  The strange whirlpool has begun. Chancelade looks at the walls going round. He starts to laugh, choking, as the faces of the byst
anders keep going past. At one point he says:

  ‘Hallo? I’m speaking direct to my bladder. Hallo, are you there?’

  And he laughs louder, and chokes more. The doctor draws back, saying: ‘… delirious …’

  After hours and hours of black and white dizziness, Chancelade sees the face of the little boy approaching the bed. He’s about eleven, with short fair hair and two staring blue-grey eyes that look at him strangely. From the midst of his dream Chancelade sees the little boy who resembles himself, and talks to him softly, stammering a little.

  ‘What, what’s your name?’

  ‘I, it …’

  ‘So you came?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t—I can’t remember.’

  ‘Yes, you do, it’s easy, it was when you got lost in the forest at Turini, don’t you remember?’

  ‘Oh yes, there was a, there was a winding road.’

  ‘And trees everywhere …’

  ‘And dark, it was dark, wasn’t it? And it rained a little.’

  ‘And you started to run as fast as you could, and call out.’

  ‘I—I was frightened …’

  ‘You thought there were wolves behind every tree.’

  ‘Yes, I kept on running and calling out.’

  ‘There, there were people watching you go by.’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was doing, I …’

  ‘You kept running till your legs hurt …’

  ‘And I was calling out … calling out all the time …’

  ‘That’s right … I remember quite clearly …’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘You know that too, don’t you?’

  ‘I—I’m ill.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And all these people, why are there all these people?’

  ‘Where? I can’t see anyone.’

  ‘Yes, there, all round me. Tell them to go away.’