J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

She burst out laughing, and all round her Chancelade saw children, men, and other women laughing loudly and showing their gold teeth. He looked at them eagerly, fascinated, unable to turn away. When the fat woman had gone he saw a man who limped, an expectant mother with varicose veins, a group of boys, a girl with a broad beam and bare feet and breasts that jiggled as she walked, an old man covered with grey whiskers, a woman in a bikini, two women with untidy hair, another girl in a black swimsuit, a woman with pimples on her shoulders and legs, three soldiers, and a man carrying a transistor. He looked at them without understanding, trapped inside a clear nightmare. He saw all those eyes embedded in the soft flesh, the misshapen noses, the cheeks, the smooth or rough hair, the veined hands dangling from the arms, the shoulders, the fleshy backs, the pot bellies, the breasts, the sweating rumps, the crooked or skinny or swollen legs. He smelt the matching odours, heard the grunts and gurgles of the familiar voices. The colours sparkled in the light, and sky and sea were become as hard as sheets of linoleum.

So it was here, the centre of the furnace, the crater, the heart of the ant-hill. Sweat began to trickle gently from Chancelade’s face, arm-pits and back. He felt that he was gliding into the landscape of madness, in time with the electric music. Soon he would be one of them, an insect among insects; the crowd would close around him like a mouth and digest him greedily. He would slip along the undulating corridors like a piece of food, gradually losing his flesh, his muscles and his mind. Multiform folly would engulf and press in on him from all sides, sucking up his substance, drinking up drop by drop the liquid of his personality. And suddenly he would disappear in the human sea, he would vanish, swallowed up, unconscious, and no one would ever know that he’d been there.

Chancelade gazed with longing through the window at the moving crowd. Somewhere deep in his body, in his belly, in his genitals, in the network of his nerves, he felt the call of the void urging him to mingle himself in what he saw. It was like a funnel drawing him outwards, towards the landscape with its dense colours, towards a world as thick and hot as a succulent steak. The rays of the sun were tentacles tugging at him gently and without pity. The noises stretched out gluey filaments that clung to his skin. The movement turned on its own axis, drilling outwards its endless spiral, and you could only follow, follow. You had to tear yourself off the imitation leather cushions, open the door of the car, and leap right out, abandoning the seething prison of the blue car, with a woman’s voice crying vaguely in the distance, though you didn’t even listen:

‘What on earth are you doing? What are you doing? …’

With quickened heartbeats Chancelade began to walk through the midst of the crowd, along by the sea. He went back along the line of stationary cars, gulping in the smell of petrol and oil and staring at the starry reflections of the coachwork till his eyes were full of tears. The sun was right in his eyes, and he went along through the mist of light hardly seeing where he was going. He was moving fast. His feet thudded on the ground and rebounded as if on a thick carpet. His arms swung at his sides, his hands clenched and unclenched, his lungs breathed in and out, and sweat ran in little streams down his back and down his cheeks.

In front and around him the crowd opened then joined together again; bodies jostled against him, massive masculine bodies, the warm bodies of women in swimsuits, the light bodies of children or girls. There were waves of vulgar and delightful smells: frying, sun-tan lotion, perfume, sweat. Never had there been so many remarkable things, so much richness and life. Ugliness was everywhere, glowing sumptuous ugliness in blazing colours that never dimmed. On the left an absolutely flat sea shone an unwavering blue. There had never been such a blue anywhere. The sky shone too, colourless, mercurial, teeming with a million tiny specks. Underfoot the ground echoed, cracked and buckled, and the heat clung to your clothes and skin like a sheet. Inside Chancelade’s skull now there was no more echo; nothing but a bottomless hole, an insatiable void devouring all it could, drinking in all it could as if for the first and last time.

And perhaps it was the last time. He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices. He’d been travelling all his life in order to arrive here, in hell, to burn with all the others in this hideous yet delectable furnace; yes, it was undoubtedly hell, but it was unimaginably interesting. It was solid life, life compact, thick as syrup, dense, bitter, sweet, nauseating, narcotic, the strange whirlwind that swept up all in its path. Resistance was vain. The crowd broke over you like a wave and you were carried away in its febrile dance. Now you were shouting the words that were written in the middle of the yellow stars: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, or ‘D.D.T.! D.D.T.!’, or ‘Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!’ The whites of everyone’s eyes glared with madness between darkened lids, and all breaths panted in unison, strewing the air with a low raucous hum. Car hooters blared ceaselessly, there were grotesque yells of laughter, and cries, and the music of the electric guitar reverberated from all the transistors: and it was a calm harmonious concert that stirred your inside and made you tremble.

All this had been prepared to crush and conquer you. There was no mildness anywhere, no hiding-place of gentle shadow. Everywhere there were stars of noise and heat and light, in the trees, in the grey pebbles, in people’s faces, in the folds of upholstery and clothes, in the middle of the earth and the centre of the sea. These darts were set everywhere, charged with their sudden poison, ready to pierce the skin. Chancelade advanced into their midst, proffered perhaps as their prey, making no attempt to defend himself. He melted into the folds of the crowd, he crumbled away piecemeal in the sun, he mingled continually with the downward flood of dirty water. Soon perhaps he would reach the meeting-point, zero, and disappear without more ado. He would vanish like a splash drunk up by the sand, merged into the huge ocean of men and things, there on that square of anonymous earth, lost in the eternal plenitude. He would be forgotten. He wouldn’t be dead, but he would cease to be the only living being in the world. He would be no more than a tiny seed in the silo, sifting down with all the other grains, closed in on all sides, with nothing left that bore any resemblance to hope, or freedom, or sorrow. He would never be mentioned again. He wouldn’t even be allowed his insupportable soul; nothing more would be expected of him. He would just be there, between a bit of yellow plastic and a woman in a blue and white swimsuit, with somewhere or other the blind sun, a scrap of blue sky, a block of flats with a hundred windows all exactly the same, and of course the flat sea with its trivial little wrinkles. One name among the rest, one name in the forest of names, and a toneless voice would read out mechanically:

Zisman

Calane Henri

Apaydin

Cadopi

Queru Marie-José

Benezit

Bavastro

Lesueur

Garibaldi

Camous

Gonigres

Malivoire-Filhol de Camas

Vandamme

Uhl Josette

Eliaou Elizabeth

Marie Angst

Pyée Mireille

Almaleh Klod-Korin

Amigo Martine

Chancelade

Michel Tschann

Dol

Gomez

Faureze

Colette Frau

Ansorg

Blua Michèle

Carassas

That was after all how you ought to live. With a number, a blood-group, finger-prints, a mastication coefficient, one eye with 8/10ths vision and the other with 5/10ths. You were entered on your card and the card was put in a special drawer among a lot of others. Then no one had to be himself any more, and everywhere there reigned the great peace of ordered disorder.