J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

But Chancelade didn’t hear. He just continued to lie back on the cushions gazing avidly at the world rushing by. There were lots of people on either side of the road, and even on the sea. People went to and fro beneath the flood of white light dressed in loud shirts or bathing suits, their red skins glistening with sweat. You caught a brief flash of their eyes embedded in their flesh, little black eyes, probably cruel. Some of the women wore strange dark glasses with white frames shaped like butterflies, and looked at the car with dazed smiles. Others had hair dyed red that blazed in the sun. And everything was in motion, passing slowly by the car as if on a conveyor belt.

Inside the metal cubicle the music sounded louder now. Perhaps the young woman had just turned up the knob lightly as she drove. Or perhaps they were nearer now to the transmitter, with its tower radiating concentric circles of the sound of the guitar. The rhythm drummed out powerfully, like pistol shots hitting an iron plate; and each beat was a pulse-beat driving a wave of blood through the metal coachwork and along the chromium and through the fibres of the plastic cushions. The sound mingled with the light and exploded regularly in the body of the car, and each explosion pierced Chancelade with a separate pain.

It was strange to be alive here, in this blue box advancing along the road; it was a sort of prison radiant with heat and sound, drawn mysteriously along by some blind force and gliding helplessly along its rails towards its unknown destiny. Chancelade, his elbow on the car-door, hunched in the imitation leather seat, was gradually seized with paralysis. At one point he tried to raise his cigarette to his lips and inhale the smoke; but he couldn’t; his fingers opened and the cigarette fell out of the window and twirled away in the air-stream. Chancelade had the idea of lighting another, but as soon as the idea occurred to him he forgot. The fanatical rhythm of the electronic music engulfed him and bound him to his seat.

Suddenly the car came to a halt. There’d been an accident somewhere along the road and the flood of cars drew to a standstill. They were drawn up in three lanes, and you could see hundreds, thousands of roofs sparkling in the sun. They were all colours, blue, red, black, grey, white, green, fawn, yellow; there was even a gold one shimmering like the back of a beetle. The light struck down on all these domes and rebounded in great shafts of crystal. Around the motionless caravan the heat too rose upwards trembling, and an acrid smell of overheated radiators spread out a few inches above the ground. From time to time there was a gust of wind but that only made things worse: it brought with it the nauseating smell of the sea, a strong musty mixture of urine, sweat and stagnant water.

Through this sort of dream Chancelade heard Mina’s voice saying something like:

‘What a jam, eh? And the heat! We’ll be here all night at this rate’, etc.

But the underground rhythm of the music carried the words away as soon as they appeared.

And gradually the landscape was tranformed. It didn’t really change; but everything began to shine more harshly, more violently, as if the damp softness of the air had been removed. It was as if for days a terrible wind had been blowing, a furnace discharging desert sand that grain by grain weathered the world to the bone, leaving nothing to be seen but bare angles, points, edges and spikes. The ground was dry now, burned by the light, and nothing grew up between the pebbles but thick weeds with long sharp prickles.

The crowd continued to walk along the pavement, echoing the ponderous rhythm. With every crack of the whip its flesh seemed to flinch and start at the biting thongs. But were they really men? For the faces were all the same, and the bodies always alike. Perhaps it was the same men and women just going round and round to mock Chancelade: pretending to move forward but always going back to where they were, darting at the window of the car their bright sharp eyes. Chancelade tried to look away, but it was no use: everywhere the light glared in livid slashes, sparkling on the roofs of the cars, rebounding from the windows, darting like a dagger from the lenses of dark glasses, jutting from the roofs of concrete and the walls with their overcrowded balconies. Both the light and the noise from outside penetrated the car and mingled instantly with the electric music. Everywhere there was the same fury of faces, the same shrieking voices, smells of gas and hot oil, and desperate movement. To the left arose the huge white walls of blocks of flats. In the middle the tide of cars buzzed in its burning cloud. On the right the beach with its sharp pebbles was seething with noisy men and women, and beyond it rose the other wall of the sea, blue, solid and covered with sharp little wrinkles.

All the colours throbbed in time to the music, as if they were suspended phosphorescent in the void. There was no longer anything calm or insignificant. The bare sky was of an incomparable blankness, the sea atrociously blue. There was nothing on every side but blows in the face, punches delivered by red dresses, dazzling shirts, red or yellow hair, brown faces, gold teeth, glittering wrist-watches, shoes, black and white swimsuits, scarlet shoulders, green or mauve glasses, flowers, cars, children, dogs, motorcycles, pebbles, patches of melting tar. The torrid colours collided, stuck together, spread in soft waves. The burning colours hurtled towards you like bullets. They were all there, foaming together like bubbles or else like steel blades, hovering, menacing, ready to disembowel you.

Nor could you escape from all the names spread out everywhere; on signs swinging in the breeze, written in letters of fire, gashed with great brush-strokes, the senseless words exploded like grenades, and the pieces penetrated your brain. They were also knives, these words, razor-blades eager to carve your skin and make your blood flow. Their dumb cries, more terrible even than the cries of men, arose on every side at once. No matter where you looked it was impossible to avoid them. Strange, beautiful, violent, they lay there like traps, and just as you looked at them they disappeared. To left, to right, before, behind, above, below. On the walls of service stations, over bars, in the gardens, on the beach, and even in the sky, on the long stream trailing behind the aeroplane:

CASTROL

CASTROL

CASTROL

Hot Dogs Hot Dogs Hot Dogs

SOLEX

air way in way out camping site outboard motors

kingsize beach plot orangina

tripe-shop restaurant

bleupunkt

gold

SATAM

Chancelade read all these words inside his throat; he couldn’t stop. He sang them and yelled them without respite, KELVINATOR, disappearing into each other, REMINGTON, swallowed up by the syllables, HONDA, exhausted, incapable of forgetting, SALEM, incapable of shutting his eyes or extinguishing his voice.

This was the real curse of this place, the infernal power that was taking possession of his mind and body in order to reduce him to slavery. The world had suddenly turned over to show its hidden face, and nothing was any longer comprehensible. As the words exploded the landscape gradually fell to pieces, showering the motionless car with the debris of human bodies and artefacts of civilization. But this destruction, instead of making the spectacle more endurable, only rendered it still more harsh and impenetrable. Men and women clustered on the edge of the pavement, their empty eyes masked by dark glasses, their gaping mouths uttering incoherent sounds.

A fat woman came up to the car door and pointed at Chancelade; then she began to speak, and Chancelade listened in terror to the grunts and stammers and gurgles that came out of her mouth. He heard her say:

‘Argl, gaur haurgl, baarh heu-heugogl meug eth at-t-teu argl …’