‘But there isn’t anyone.’
‘Can’t you see them?’
‘No …’
‘Everything—everything’s so far away now.’
‘But you remember that?’
‘What, the thunderbolt that fell on the mountain?’
‘Yes, and the, the rock that toppled over. Like a bees’ nest.’
‘Yes …’
‘The rain makes a funny noise falling.’
‘Yes, on the corrugated iron roof, and—’
‘And a funny smell too, in the concrete huts.’
‘At Abakaliki, yes, I remember.’
‘And the ant-hills burst open when you hit them with a stick.’
‘Yes, and the red ants bite your legs …’
‘There are pools in the rocks.’
‘Yes, at Belle Croûte Bay …’
‘And the wind blows.’
‘At Highlands, yes, I remember …’
‘Well, I’ve come to say goodbye.’
‘Already?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time is your train?’
‘Half past six.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s going to be a hot day.’
‘What month is it? August? September?’
‘Right, I must go now.’
‘And what year? What year is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t remember anything any more, and yet—and yet, it’s there just at the back of my mind.’
‘What?’
‘Those trees, those—mimosas, acacias.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And the black empty forest, with the road that—’
‘It takes such a long time, all that.’
‘Yes, it’s never-ending.’
‘Thousands of days in the sun, and nights, and …’
‘I didn’t think it could ever end.’
‘It doesn’t. Perhaps it’s only beginning.’
‘Perhaps you have to count, to stop it ending?’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine …’
‘Right, well …’
‘I shan’t be able to. I—I get mixed up.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It’s quiet now.’
‘Yes, you can’t hear anything any more.’
‘And there’s no one here.’
‘It makes you want to sleep for years.’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, I must go.’
‘Perhaps we’ll see each other again?’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Right, goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘So long.’
‘Goodbye.’
And now the boy Chancelade was quite alone. All around him had disappeared. The brutal faces had melted into the shadow, and the shape of the child who was like him had slipped softly away into the mist. The room had vanished too: the walls had suddenly disappeared, and the ceiling had melted away among the molecules of the empty sky. Chancelade was alone in the centre of a huge plain, lying on a gently floating bed. The horizons had drawn back, the sky had hollowed its grey gulf even deeper, and the earth was only a heaving paste of sand and water.
Rubber earth, sea of moving particles, liquid trees and stones and air! Everything is gradually retiring, like an indrawn breath. And the blood is removed drop by drop from the exhausted body, each pulsation taking away instead of giving a flush of warmth.
Now is the moment of departure, yes, now.
The vile trap has been put there on the table by the hand of men, and the terrible yet indifferent tragedy is in progress. For flies, for example:
A cake that is irresistibly attractive to
FLIES …
and FATAL!
As a magnet attracts steel and a candle moths, so FLY CAKE irresistibly attracts flies. And it rids you of them once and for all! This new American discovery will kill every fly in the house in the space of a few seconds.
A MASSACRE!
Yes, it’s true: no fly can escape, for every one is irresistibly drawn to FLY CAKE, and FLY CAKE kills flies on contact.
Why a cake?
Everyone knows that you can’t catch flies with vinegar.
American chemists therefore concluded that the best way was to offer them something they liked; i.e. something sweet.
That is why FLY CAKE is prepared as a real treat for flies. It is made of ingredients that give off a scent perceptible to flies alone. As soon as they smell it they rush towards it. But they are rushing to their death.
As soon as they alight on FLY CAKE flies roll over on their backs, and in five seconds they are dead.
What has happened?
What has happened is that as soon as their feet touch FLY CAKE flies are paralysed. The poison in this product directly attacks their nervous system. The advantages of this method are obvious. First of all death is almost instantaneous. And above all the flies don’t go away and die somewhere else; they expire on FLY CAKE itself! But FLY CAKE has other virtues too. It never wears out. Thanks to carefully researched stabilizing elements, the product retains 100 per cent effectiveness as long as the smallest fragment of it remains. So FLY CAKE can last for months and kill thousands of flies.
FLY CAKE gives astonishing results: thousands of victims in only a few minutes. Once in place it ensures continuous slaughter day after day without the slightest further attention.
Murder! Murder everywhere! All over the world, in broad daylight, in the terrible light of the sun, murders are committed. Flies take five seconds to die; five times the length of eternity. Everywhere knives are sharpened and razors ready to cut throats. Spines crack, bones break, flesh is sundered by vice-like jaws. Warm blood flows down the throat, the reeking blood of death. Guns spit out their bullets, which go straight into the panting body instead of the shoulder. The wounded ox falls bellowing to its knees. The horse rears as the gun goes off in its ear! The fish suffocates on the rotting planks of the hold, its open mouth still trying to eject the hook that tore away half its jaw. The snail eats the poison and goes stiff. The weapons of destruction are everywhere, in peaceful hands. But they will kill. They will make a hole in the skin and root out the marrow of life. The white stalls have been set up, the hooks are ready to exhibit the murder. The hatchet will split the ribs, the sharp knife slit up the rosy lungs. They are there on all sides, menacing, mechanical, mallets, iron bars, garottes, sacks, harpoons, banderillas, saws, daggers. Buckets of boiling oil, pots of boiling water where shrimps will writhe an instant before being fixed in a red cramp with bulging eyes and shrivelled legs. Green poisons, white poisons. Traps that suddenly clamp down on the neck of the little mouse-grey creature, strangling lakes, drowning pits. There is a sweet scent of lavender in the air, but the perfume is one that’s deadly. Bright-coloured ribbons hang from the ceiling, and on them hundreds of insects are trapped by the legs and die of hunger and exhaustion. Car wheels on the roads seek eagerly after dogs, and sharp stones cut off the heads of toads. Three children keep turning an octopus over and over on a slab of stone in the sun; and on the oozing star of flesh the organs stifle and death begins to shine like a pearl.
Sordid violence is everywhere displayed. Everywhere there are hard-nailed hands strangling and mutilating. Eyes look on avidly at the icy yet burning spectacle; the world is nothing but food. Murder approaches unhurriedly along the road of round links that leads towards us. It’s nearly here. It’s here. The pale plate for the sacrifice waits on the white table with silver knives and glasses of cut crystal. Then someone throws on to it the square of meat with its dead cells slightly oozing blood. Eat up. But this time, this last time, to your helpless horror, it’s yourself you are served with. It’s you that’s going to be eaten!
For countless years, devouring years, day after day he committed all these murders. Hour by hour he burned, uprooted, sliced, crushed,
drowned, raped. He drank the blood, he ate the body of others. Now he must pay the price. He must slowly fall into the pit where the mandibles wait. Earth and air cry out, water and fire call for their revenge. The dread game will go on, but he will be playing no longer. He will be divided up, and the blind worm will have this part, and the roots of the briar that. There’s nothing more to be said now. Chancelade has left the world of picture postcards and red-headed matches. He’s away. He has been extracted. Who was it who thought something? Who was it that said a few words? Who wrote ‘I love you’ on a cigarette paper and then smoked it? Who picked a flower and put it in a glass of water? Who ate a vanilla ice on September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour? Who believed in God? Who studied art? Who lived the 946,900000th second of his life as if it must be the unique and only and sempiternal one? Who drew a horse, a pear, a naked woman lying on her back, who wrote about stones and waste land and women as if that was all you had to do to become immortal? Who fought in a war? Who had children, grandchildren? Who posed for photographs, smiling slightly, unafraid of the grimacing countenance shining faintly through the negative? Who did all that, eh? Who?
But that’s enough of inventing. There is no Chancelade, there never was any Chancelade. All there ever was was me, writing these words and knowing they hid nothing. As the black scribble advances over the white page like manifold footprints, the only truth that motivated it escapes and is lost. And in the seething mass of untruth there appears the other truth, the one that covers everything, digests everything, celebrates everything, a sort of darkness.
The world is coming to an end, it is on its deathbed. Suddenly on the surface of the earth the great dome of light has exploded like a volcano. A colourless vortex has risen upwards, spreading a black cloud that gives off flashes of fire. The giant flame stood there a moment, as if it would never disappear. Then the rampart of the air fell away, rending all in its path. Time seemed to draw suddenly back, engulfing countless ages. A scorching wind passed over the earth, throwing shadows on the creeping desert. The circle grew larger and larger. And that was the last crime of my life, the greatest and most terrible of all. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t do anything. I was just there in the dazzling circle that spread out over the earth, the circle of my intelligence and my hatred. It was the last of my wars, the one I didn’t wage alone, the one that everyone waged with me. That day, some where, in some book or other, an anonymous voice relates the history of that war. And it is my voice, mine:
Ionic radiations are released during the explosion in various ways, including neutrons, gamma and beta rays. A small part of the explosion causes the rapid radiation of neutrons, which have a high penetrating power but lose their energy at once on passing through matter. More important is the gamma radiation, which also has high powers of penetration. Beta rays do not travel more than a few yards. When a nuclear explosion takes place in the air the products of the fission or fusion are dispersed and contamination takes place by fall-out. Surface or submarine explosions are more dangerous because of direct exposure and inhaling.
Symptoms: The principal effect of radiation is a cellular attack leading to necrosis of the tissues. Erythron and lymphoid tissues and the nuclei of growing cells are the most vulnerable. Haemorrhage may be produced as a result of vascular disturbance, thrombocytopenia, and perhaps the presence of an anticoagulant in the blood. Temporary or permanent sterility is frequent. Little is known about the carcinogenic or genetic effects of ionic radiation. Contamination by radioactive dust can cause cancer, and isotopes lodged in the bones remain active for a long period. An increased incidence of hereditary defects is to be feared in future generations.
In case of thermo-nuclear war, losses can be divided into four groups according to their seriousness. But the clinical picture must also take into account burns and wounds caused by the explosion:
Group 1. After exposure to intense radiation, nausea, vomiting, and shock appear in a few hours. There is increasing loss of weight, fever, diarrhoea, and death from toxaemia in two weeks.
Group 2. In the case of less severe exposure the symptoms take three weeks to appear. Loss of hair, aplastic anaemia, pneumonia, gastro-enteritis, and death at the end of six weeks.
Group 3. In those who survive the 6th week the anaemia becomes chronic and many die of pneumonia, enteritis, and other forms of secondary infection.
Group 4. In benign cases leucopenia, diarrhoea and loss of hair may be the only irregularities.
The dazzling halo has filled the whole sky, which now rises pear-shaped. A face appears in the patch of incandescent light, a mild sad face with indistinguishable features. The snow-white face has taken the place of the sun, and smiles down mysteriously on the world. Everything goes towards it, automatically attracted and absorbed by that powerless plenitude. The last gleam of light has set forth its round mirror. On it, in it, vision can at last submerge itself, and with it liberty. The world is coming to an end in this ball of fire. Beyond, there is nothing. After this futile moment in which one rather unimportant person is undone, it is the end of the universe made visible; the fated end of ages and ages of civilization, of hope, literature, love and faith.
The great sphere shines dully at the other end of infinity. This too had to happen. It was written. It was written in the very heart of the long adventure of men, this threat of dissociation and chaos. Already we are thousands of miles away. We have fled this place, this time, and we look out of the darkness of space at what is going on down there, far away, at the other end of the dark room. All wars have become one. For a second they all burn and pound together, then like a flare of straw die down, and night may begin again.
In the room full of dense shadow the projector has suddenly been switched on, and absolute light flows towards you in a spiral. Here is the last crime, the last anger of time with its trembling hour- and minute-hands. The moth, caught in the merciless beam, has begun its dance of death. It flies blindly towards the centre of the world that calls it. It goes towards the blazing hole, to force the door that separates it from eternity. The fire utters its continuous strident cry, which nobody can resist. It orders you to hurry, to rush to the gaping mouth, to melt into its laugh, to be crushed and burned so that nothing is left but that devouring furnace. Like the moth, like Chancelade, like him, you and I; all men return to the fire that conceived them. In the white light is the secret. In each nucleus of each atom is the secret that explodes and liberates. There are suns innumerable. There are nothing but volcanoes everywhere. It is towards them, towards all of them that the last consciousness turns its eyes. While in the distance but also near at hand there floats vaguely the powerless face whose soft sad smile means nothing; while seas evaporate, rocks flow in long gleaming rivers, and the universe explodes in a single but infinite conflagration; the spirit, free at last, no longer anything, plunges into matter, burns with it, performs strange arabesques with it, becomes a particle of light, an anonymous speck of real light. Total is the last word. Vanished, accepted. Dead, dead. Born into boundless life, into a life that is no longer inner nor outer, but at last, and for ever I hope, itself.
On the earth by chance
I was born
a living man
I grew up
inside the drawing
the days went by
and the nights
I played all those games
loved
happy
I spoke all those languages
gesticulating
saying incomprehensible words
or asking indiscreet questions
in a region that resembled hell
I peopled the earth
to conquer the silence
to tell the whole truth
I lived in the immensity of consciousness
I ran away
then I grew old
I died
and was buried
AND WAS BURIED
Under the inescapable sun the landscape is still the same. Nothing has changed, almost nothing. There have merely been a few landslides here and there, a few scratches, a few avalanches. What was flat expanse is still flat, the mountains still stand wearing out their hard summits against the steel of the sky. Below, the sea is still the same, curved, heavy, opaque, rolling its tiny waves one after the other. There are clouds, either smooth or ragged, from one end of the horizon to the other. All the trees stand motionless in the red earth, like silent lamp-posts with living leaves.
Everything is very quiet now; very rested. All seems purity and order; it’s as if there had never been anyone to destroy, or to hope. Words have re-entered into things and mingled with them. Nothing says anything. Nothing has a name, nothing has a cry. Or else each particle of matter has become its own cry, its own appeal launched with all the still strength of its mere presence. These cries are buried everywhere, and none is lost. They are nails, knives, rivets driven into space, and their meaning is plain, for no one needs to understand any more. Their words are short, concise, they don’t overflow any more, they can’t try to annex anything. What they say remains hidden, a secret inside a greater secret, an even cry with no more beginning or end, no more joy or pain, no more love or hate, but only the self, living and present: Tree! Beetle! Crystal! Bird! Bird! Flint! Metal! Water! Dust! Thus they speak, all together, with their dumb flesh and impenetrable scales.
Nothing is necessary any more. But neither is anything unnecessary. The world is fulfilled, the world is perfect. On the huge map on the invisible wall every object has been reproduced life-size. You can wander for ever in the maze of lines, dotted and continuous; you can enter between the round cross-sections of the trees or the concentric contours of the hills. You can write down bearings, altitudes, distances, depths. You are never lost. You are always somewhere. You can walk for days and days, with the feet of foxes or of wild cats. You can swoop along aerial corridors on the wings of gulls or of eagles. You can dig a hole in a dry mound or a damp, with the claws of moles. Or crawl over hot stones with the bodies of vipers. You can go among the grasses vibrating your cockchafer’s wings; feel misty space with your snail’s horns; even float in pale water in a halo of luminous threads, and be named jellyfish. There was always matter before, beneath and around you. There were always walls of gentleness and violence, ceilings of smells, floors of noise and heat, incidents of colour. The room is everywhere, yes, everywhere. Nothing has been left behind, nothing lost.
Terra Amata Page 20
