J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

‘How?’

‘Well, at certain moments I believe and at others I don’t.’

‘And you—’

‘I’m often afraid that’s just an illusion too, a prop, to give oneself hope.’

‘Yes, I think that sometimes too.’

‘And then sometimes I feel as if — as if it were an abyss, and I were in the process of understanding something very — very important, very strange. But anyhow, now I wonder if all that really matters very much.’

‘What, whether God exists?’

‘Yes, I mean, it’s all I think about, but I feel more and more that I shall never know, that it’s, er, what shall I say? A sort of inscrutable malediction.’

‘But you can’t forget about it.’

‘No, you can’t forget about it.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Gone half past ten.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘No — are you?’

‘No.’

‘If you are we can go out if you like.’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘Yes, please, later on.’

‘It’s funny …’

‘What?’

‘Being here like this, with you.’

‘In this room?’

‘Yes, no, what I mean is, when I saw you the other day on the beach, I didn’t think I’d be here, with you, talking about God and all the rest of it.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I don’t know, I–I wanted to get to know you, but you looked so, I don’t know, distant.’

‘ I did?’

‘Hmm-hmm.’

‘I expect that was because of Ribert.’

‘Did he irritate you?’

‘Yes, he looked so proprietary, I couldn’t stand it.’

‘He’d be flattered if he knew that.’

‘Jealous, too.’

‘What does all that matter, I’m very happy.’

‘So am I.’

‘Yes, it’s funny.’

‘I feel as if I’d, as if I’d been with you for years.’

‘Yes, same here.’

‘And it’s nice, being here like this, in this hotel.’

‘Freer.’

‘Yes, and beautiful in a hideous sort of way, with the red walls and the — the carpets and the black armchairs.’

‘Like a cinema.’

‘Yes, and we’re making the film ourselves.’

‘Hmm.’

‘False and true at the same time.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Realist.’

‘Hmm.’

‘But it’s nice, not bad at all.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’re fighting against time.’

‘I’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘I haven’t forgotten, but it doesn’t matter any more, it’s like centuries and centuries.’

‘Century-seconds.’

‘360,000 years to every hour.’

‘That’s a long time …’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘Hmm.’

You could have gone on for hours and hours like that. From time to time Chancelade would stop talking and lie on Mina and caress her. Or sit on the edge of the bed and take a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table. Mina would close her eyes. Mina would pick up a page of the paper and stare at it. The watch on Chancelade’s wrist ticked away imperceptibly, and the fine second-hand turned and turned on itself without ever stopping. The room was sealed, hermetically sealed, and the light-bulbs burned behind their shades with a fierce, unforgettable glare. Outside the night was oppressive, and mosquitoes lurked round the windows searching for blood. Being in the hotel room was like being inside a ship, at once free and a prisoner, travelling towards an unknown country. In a few months or a few hours the ship would arrive at Callao, or Singapore, or Tel-Aviv. And you’d have to come out of your dark hiding-place and confront the terrible sunlight beating up from the specks of mica in the dust.

Then, little by little, the vortex invaded the room, Nothing had changed, the steel and black leather furniture was still there and the red walls were still identical, hard, impassive and without a chink. Over the bed the engraving showed the same horseman among the pack of hounds, and the lamps now off, now on, now off again, had not stirred. And yet as the hours went by a sort of fury, or a sort of illness, settled in the corners, distorted the lines, dwelt inside the metals and the materials, saturated all the plaster and paper and glass and plastic. A hatred perhaps, or perhaps merely a great fatigue had made its way into the room. It had become a sort of bubble imprisoned in the surrounding liquid and ceaselessly trying to burst. The world around the room bore down with all its weight, searching for a crack through which to pour floods of noise and heat.

Chancelade lay on the bed as on a raft that drifted yet never moved. The floor had already melted, and waves of red mud lapped slowly along the walls and spread around the bed in noisome puddles. Mina slept, her head on the pillow and her hair over her face. She breathed in and out regularly, and Chancelade listened: it was a disturbing sound that threw him back on his solitude.

In order to put up a struggle he bent feverishly over the inert body. He breathed into the warm ear, bit the foreign flesh, he even spoke. But the body remained motionless, curled up, unconscious. Chancelade looked around him with eyes that burned with fatigue. He saw the black insects hovering in the air, and the swift white flashes that ran from wall to wall. Now the void, noisy and dangerous, had entered into the room. It could no longer be escaped or expelled. All you could do was watch it advance, spreading like a cloud along the walls, piling up on the ceiling, stretching out its transparent tentacles between the legs of the table, sitting in the armchairs, walking on the balcony among the pots of geraniums.

And finally they had come. Through every possible opening they had come, all the invisible men who now peopled the room. They came and went soundlessly over the blue carpet, they emerged from the walls like clusters of bees, they walked across the ceiling in long lazy caravans.

Then Chancelade sat up on the bed with his back against the wall. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five to three, but that didn’t mean much any more. Reckoning with some difficulty he made out that this was the third day, but that didn’t mean much now either. He reached out over Mina’s body for the packet of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and lit it with a match from the folder marked

ATLANTIC PALACE

600 rooms — Air-conditioned

Private Beach

Then he turned towards the window and studied the sort of vertigo that was invading the room. The phosphorescent mist, mixed with the grey smoke of the cigarette, began to palpitate in the middle of the air like a monstrous heart lit up by X-rays. The air became dense and warm like a lung, slowly enveloping everything hard in its billions of little trembling cells. The smells varied too, sometimes sharp and pervasive, sometimes mild and sweet, almost sugary. Nerve fibres ramified all over the walls of the room, and here and there strange pains appeared, shooting like electric currents. Chancelade had a pain in the steel cupboard, then in the lamp by the window, then in the left corner of the ceiling. He felt a pang at once secret and distant spurt like a spark in the bathroom. The floor began to suffer too, groaning and creaking under the load of invisible feet. The air itself stifled, the light itself was struck, and along the skirting-boards strange insects with sharp jaws gnawed atrociously at the wood’s tender flesh. The cigarette glowed like a sixth finger added to Chancelade’s hand, giving off an unbearable smell of burnt nail and skin. That was death then, perhaps, the inevitable slow collapse towards suffering matter, the great disease that eats away the world’s millions of living forces, the flow of pus, the terrible osmosis. Chancelade was being devoured alive by the monster without thought and without love, and soon he would be nothing but a room, a mere room with bloodstained walls, hard furniture, and a window of cold glass.