J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

To try to still this vertigo, Chancelade sank down on the bed and closed his eyes. His right hand groped for Mina’s body, and clutched at it. But the vortex did not stop. Slowly, painfully, it took possession of the room, the bed, the two outstretched bodies. Chancelade was no longer the centre. He was only a particle going round in the maelstrom, swept along, jostled, drained of all resistance. His name disappeared. His consciousness disappeared. And soon he vanished into the void, lost somewhere in the midst of the rout, become a piece of wood, a used match, a crumpled old ball of paper rolling faster and faster towards the mouth of the gutter. And nothing else remained certain but this infinite series of boxes one inside the other: the bed in the room, the room in the hotel, the hotel in the town, the town in the country, the country in the world, the world in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, the galaxy in the total of galaxies, the total of galaxies in space, space in space, space in space, space in space. There were no more men, no more women, no more anything anywhere. Just perfect and magnificent extension, empty extension, without a word, without a thought, without a gesture that might make it possible to measure, or understand, or even guess.

How were you to say you were happy, at that moment, on that part of the earth, with that woman, with yourself, and with everything else? It wasn’t easy to say, and yet you had to say it. You had to forget the fatal issue, pain, decay, the minute but effective assaults of time. You had to forget the void, the being abandoned, the being alone, and live out your own adventure with joy. Nothing counted any more but this explosion of life, an explosion beautiful and unique. Out of the long night, opaque, insensible, there issued now this ball of fire more luminous than a million suns, shut up inside the body and blazing there. The glare is harsh, it hurts, it flays, but the pain is also the greatest of pleasures: it is the power of life. There were so many things to believe, so many things to love, hate, touch, drink, look at, feel, understand, listen to, judge, suffer, hope. There was so much fear, so much evil, gentleness, noise or cold. From farthest time or space this wealth had come to Chancelade, a man among men, an inhabitant of this planet, and had changed him into a bomb. Everything was there, present, palpable. It called for more than words, it called for shouting, for howling at other people at the top of your voice in the street. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood, but that’s what you ought to have done: open your mouth and yell as loud as you could at three o’clock in the afternoon with the veins standing out on your neck and temples bursting:

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRH!

Then run like mad through the stone streets, leaping over cars, skipping up to the roofs and jumping from building to building, bashing your fist through shop windows, like that, without ever stopping. Run across the burning country, through fields of maize or beetroots, pull up grass and swim in icy streams. Those are the things you ought to have done, with anger and with joy, with all the strength of your muscles and with your will steeled like a weapon to break down the walls of silence. Seize a stonebreaker’s hammer, for instance, and smash the pieces of rock with terrible blows. The sharp fragments fly, the sparks burst forth, and a sort of bitter-sweet smoke smelling of sweat spreads through the air, pleasant to breathe.

There are all the things that can’t be said in words because they’re too lovely, too clear, because they’re self-evident and seem to have always been. There’s the transparency of the air, the fluidity of water, the heat of the mid-day sun, the blindness of the night. There are the stars, sparkling in the furthest depths of space. The pale moon slipping behind the clouds. The bats skimming the earth, then darting up and swooping through the darkness. There are the cries of birds in the morning in the trees. The movement of goldfishes’ fins. The screams of parrots. The exhausting sound of the sea, the sound of raindrops, the thunder echoing through mountain caves. There’s the earth drying in the sun, and the marks of tyres in the mud. There’s this woman’s body, white and peaceful, or burning with fever and desire. There are eye-lashes, eye-brows, nails. The pores of the skin. The pattern of the flowered dress, the lipstick, the dirty comb. There’s the transistor radio, gleaming white and gold, with its long chromium antenna. There are the dark glasses. But it’s inexhaustible, and you can never see everything.

So you must plunge, like Chancelade, into the glittering chaos, and give yourself up to the sounds, the colours, the smells, the millions of simultaneous and perfect sensations. Perfect earth, beloved earth, abhorred earth, earth where nothing is lacking, where there is nothing to be desired. A new abyss, an ant-hill that swallows you up in a few seconds, but with what delightful torture! You can also just sleep quietly, or sing the sad and silly little songs of childhood. You can recite over and over again in a funny little twang:

Hallo, Billy boy, had your dinner?

Yes indeed, ma’am, I had a pie.

What was in it?

A nice fat linnet.

One two three

And out goes he.

Aide la belle s’en est à sa fin alede

A A KOTKI DWA

SZARE, BURE OBYDWA

PRZYSZLY DO NAS NOCOWAĆ

MAŁY CHANCELADE PIASTOWAĆ

Ajakaa Hiljaa Sillalla

In a thousand years, in ten thousand years, will there even be anyone alive who’ll remember you existed? Perhaps in a museum, deep in some strange building of concrete and glass, there’ll be a skull with empty sockets, eaten away by time, worn, broken, with a sort of jaw stuck with rotten teeth. In the glass case, beside the skull, there’ll be a few mysterious objects unearthed by the archaeologists: a rusty lighter, two or three dim coins, a telephone disc, an earth-blackened ball-point pen, and, set out like some object of magic, a pair of dark glasses with gilt frames and one lens broken. There’ll be an entry in the catalogue corresponding to the number in the glass case, say B 10078:

Maldec skull and jawbone found 6/19 666 at Saatac . (Carbon 14 dating: 15,000/18,000)

Maldec man is a Caucasoid of the last post-Ice Age, belonging to the advanced civilization of Northern Europe and America. This exhibit may be compared with the skulls from Combe Capelle, Mladeč, Zlatý Kůň, Rothekopf, etc. But Maldec man seems to have been a direct descendant of the higher neolithic races. Tall in stature (6 feet 1 inch), Maldec man seems to have had a graceful skeleton and a cranial capacity of 1,800 cubic centimetres (just below the present average). He belonged in fact to a very advanced culture in which machines already occupied an important place. Maldec man is often considered to have been contemporary with the atomic era, though no proof of this has been adduced. He left numerous buildings, and had attained a very high artistic level. Various objects found near the skull were probably ritual objects, Maldec man having a highly developed religious sense.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to racial or religious differences. The civilization of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.