J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

On one side a cream-painted door opened into the bathroom. It was a small room lined with white tiles and contained: a bath (white); a washbasin (white); a wardrobe with a mirror (white); a towel-rail (white); towels (white); a point for an electric razor (220 volts); a W.C. (white); a toilet-roll (pink); a stool (white); a ventilation-shaft (dirty); and a smell (turpentine) that came from a shiny disc in a little plastic cage attached to the wall.

Chancelade spent a little while taking possession of the premises. While Mina lay on the bed with her shoes on reading the paper, he made a tour of the room, putting out a cigarette in the ashtray on the table, opening drawers, looking at himself in the glass, going out on the balcony, switching the lights on and off, fiddling with the knobs of the air-conditioner, pulling both sets of curtains, turning on the radio, going into the bathroom, using the w.c., pulling the chain, washing his hands and face in the basin, drying himself on a clean towel, combing his hair, reading the notice tacked on to the door of the room, and so on.

Outside it was the end of the afternoon or the beginning of the evening. The sun was still quite high above the horizon and it was very close. Inside the room with the curtains drawn you sensed that there was still a good deal of light left, hard white light that wanted to force its way into the room. You could hear the sound of car-engines too; the road passed just behind the hotel. Then Chancelade would walk over to the bed and sit down beside Mina. He’d take her hand and speak. Mina would go on reading the paper, and from time to time lift her head and look at him. She answered what he said too, or else asked him questions. They were merely trivial conversations, not the sort you find in books. Words that just came and went, without order or logic, snatches of ideas, exclamations, stammerings, grunts. At any moment, on the bed, or standing in the room, or sitting on the floor of the balcony, or in the bath up to the neck in water. There were movements too, gestures, shrugs, shivers, caresses, scratchings, rubbings of the eyes, yawns, coughs, laughs, the swallowing of saliva. If you tried to remember one particular moment, say when Chancelade talked about his mother, sitting on the edge of the bed, or when Mina told the story of the seagull she found once in the forest, you could have written it in the form of a dialogue, complete with time and place:

10.10 p.m.

Mina lies on the bed, her head on Chancelade’s chest.

Chancelade lies on the bed, his left hand on Mina’s shoulder, his right holding a lighted cigarette,

An ashtray on the bed.

Three lighted lamps about the room.

A mosquito.

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, very nice.’

‘No noise.’

‘No, not much.’

‘Hotels are usually very noisy.’

‘Yes, but this is an expensive one.’

‘There are usually people quarrelling, or drunk, and cars, and—’

‘Yes, you can’t hear anything here.’

‘Do you think there is any noise?’

‘It must be soundproofed.’

‘Yes, otherwise someone would have banged on our wall.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Do you know, this is the first time I’ve ever liked being in a hotel.’

‘What I usually dislike about hotels is the idea that there might be hidden microphones.’

‘Yes, behind the pictures or in the lamps.’

‘Yes, I always feel someone’s listening to what I say.’

‘There wouldn’t be much point.’

‘What, in listening to what people say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, but it bothers me all the same.’

‘I—’

‘And you might be a murderer, or a spy, mightn’t you?’

‘No, what frightens me are those other things.’

‘What things?’

‘You know, those little holes in the wall.’

‘Oh, yes, like spy-holes.’

‘Yes, or television cameras hidden in the lights.’

‘Yes, that’s really—’

‘And transparent mirrors, with people on the other side watching you.’

‘Don’t even talk about it.’

‘Do you know what I’d do if I owned a hotel? I’d have two or three rooms fitted up like that and I’d watch through the mirrors and the holes in the walls.’

‘You’d soon get fed up with it.’

‘No, it’d be very interesting.’

‘The naked women, you mean?’

‘Yes, that, and watching people moving about, walking, sleeping, living. Very interesting.’

‘I hope the chap who owns this hotel isn’t like you.’

‘Look, you could have one hole over the bed and another by the window.’

‘And one in the bathroom.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You could make it pay, in any case, by charging people to watch.’

‘Wouldn’t you enjoy it?’

‘Yes, perhaps, but it’d get to be disagreeable in the end.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Because … because people are so ugly when they think no one can see them.’

‘Yes, but that’s what’s interesting.’

‘No, what I’d really enjoy would be hearing what people said.’

‘Yes, through microphones.’

‘Yes, or like the chap who built that prison, in Syracuse.’

‘In the shape of an ear?’

‘Yes, the hotel could be built in the shape of an ear and I’d be in the middle.’

‘Yes, but you’d hear everything at once.’

‘Not necessarily, you could have a system of … er …’

‘And you think that would be interesting?’

‘I don’t know, yes, I think so.’

‘You’d hear husbands and wives quarrelling.’

‘Yes, and crimes being planned, and secrets, that sort of thing. Ordinarily people never say anything, so like that …’

‘Yes, it’d seem queer meeting them afterwards down in the restaurant.’

‘And I’d learn such a lot.’

‘Of course it would really be best to be invisible.’

‘The trouble with that is it could be dangerous. People can’t see you, so they walk all over you and poke their cigarettes in your eye!’

‘Ha ha!’

‘I read a story once about a chap who invented a machine to make people invisible, something to do with directing light rays.’

‘You directed them somewhere else?’

‘No, that wasn’t it, it was like with sound waves. You know if you speed up sound waves you produce a noise so high it’s inaudible, well, it was the same thing here, you speeded up the light, no, you slowed it down, or, no, I forget.’

‘But isn’t the speed of light always the same?’

‘Yes, no, but what he — He said it was like a propeller turning, when it turns very fast you can’t see it.’

‘So you have to turn very fast to be invisible?’

‘Ha ha, no … No, I can’t remember.’

‘Another thing I’d have liked to do is go backwards in time.’

‘Oh yes, I used to think I’d like that too.’

‘To spend a while among the Romans, say, or go and see Buddha.’

‘Yes, that’d be fun.’

‘What would you choose?’

‘I don’t know, I think I’d have liked to live in 1863.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘I don’t know, I’d have gone to America, and there’d have been the Civil War and the Gold Rush, and so on …’

‘Yes, it must have been fun then.’

‘In 1863 there were still Indians all over the West, Sioux, Apaches, Navajos, and they still owned the land.’

‘Yes, it must have been very interesting.’

‘Or else I’d have liked to live 500 million years ago — you know, at the time of the brontosauruses and ceratosauruses and pterodactyls.’

‘And mammoths.’

‘No, I think the mammoths came later, after the mastodons. No, at the time I meant there must just have been amphibians and reptiles, and seas and lakes and swamps everywhere.’