J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

There were so many men here, so many women, and children, and cars, and dogs, and houses, and roads, and street-lights, and stones, and trees. So much dust. So many colours and movements It was impossible not to feel intoxicated at the spectacle of all this abundance. You were one of them! You were in the midst of them! You were them! Chancelade became one with the baking earth, the blank sky, the damp air, the thick smells. He was embodied in the thousands of milling bodies, he had all these faces, all these eyes, all these bellies, all these backs, all these legs. He walked with all these feet and revolved his thousand arms like spokes. He looked, was looked at, looked at himself with all these seeing eyes, an infinity of mirrors transparent or opaque moving in all directions. It was exhausting, but it was remarkable: there was no end to breathing in through all these chests, feeling with all these skins, hearing the general murmur with all these ears. There was no end to suffering and enjoying with all these lives at once different and the same, and with one’s own as well! You were overcome with happiness and despair at thinking with these thousands of brains, speaking with these millions of words all issuing from the throat at once and gushing forth into the air, intermingled, indistinguishable, incomprehensible, and yet so splendidly in harmony.

It was the unique noise arising from the earth, the full growl from all the houses and all the streets, ascending like a dark cloud to throw the huge shadow of the human monster upon the screen of the void. What were they saying? What did they want? What did they see? What were they looking for? They were saying nothing, they wanted nothing, they saw nothing, and they were looking for nothing. But the hot and stormy murmur continued to rise above towns, fields, beaches, valleys, even above deserts, unchanging, unvarying, so vast and so brutal that no one could understand it. All the languages rumbled away in time with one another, all the engines muttered in the middle of their hot smelly halo, all the transistors blared the electric music of organs, violins and guitars.

And Chancelade was caught up in all this expanse. As he passed along the kerb he would say, for example:

‘Hey there!’

or

‘Tchakkk!’

And the sound rose straight up to join the dense cloud over the earth. He would stretch out his hand to tap the ash off his cigarette into a litter-box, and his gesture was lost in an immensity of similar gestures. He looked for a few seconds at a girl with red hair walking along the beach in her swimsuit, and somewhere in the grey eternity peopled with girls there was the image of that white body advancing on its long legs, wearing a pink bikini and with the wind blowing through her red hair.

Yes, somewhere there was this kind of total consciousness that belonged to no particular person and that instead of reflecting things was the things themselves: the world in the process of living, continually, without collisions, without deaths, year after year, century after century, never born, never ending. Somewhere or everywhere, there was this brain that thought. There were these nerves that vibrated. This tongue that tasted, these eyes that saw, these ears that heard, this nose that smelled. There was this language that told its interminable story. And, magnificently, what it told was happening at that very instant on the earth and in the universe.

This world was too alive, you couldn’t conquer it. This space had too much space, this time had too many seconds, days, weeks, millenia. So there was nothing more you could do to try to understand it. You couldn’t any longer meet the terrifying glance of the absolute. You had to become an insect again, swarm on the overcrowded plateau, wave your arms, wave your legs about. You had to hurl yourself with all your strength into the vortex, and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, and give birth, like that, without peace, without mercy; play the cruel insatiable game of the insect world because there was really nothing else to do. One day you were there. Another day you were dead. But that didn’t matter at all in this moving ocean, it wasn’t even tragic. It was slightly ridiculous, rather moving, a twist of the lips, a furtive tear drying on the eyelid. And the giant strength of the world went on bearing down, dragging, turning the wheel. A blind force, without utterance, without desire. The calm and terrible power that is scattered through the glands, through fire, through the tremors of minute particles.

When Chancelade had become this almost invisible speck on the landscape, he stopped walking through the midst of the whirling crowd. He went and sat on the beach, in the sun. He sat right near the water, between a dark girl lying face down on the pebbles and reading a paper, and a group of men, women, children and dogs gathered round a red parasol.

Leaning on one elbow he watched the surface of the sea scintillating in the sun. He steeped himself in the colour blue, in the sound of the waves scraping regularly at the stones, and in the musty odour wafted by each breath of hot air. Every so often people would get up and hobble across the stony beach to enter the sea. And on the ochre skin of the girl reading there were little round drops that dried in the sun.

After a little while a big four-engined jet flew across the sky above the beach. Its thunder covered the landscape like a storm of rain as the strange machine advanced, shining in the sun. Chancelade watched it, that powerful metal machine moving forward slowly like a star in the centre of its eyrie of noise, and thought that its appearance there might really be lasting for years. It glided painfully through the layers of the air, unreal, distant, annihilating every second the few millimetres traversed, fixed in an image continually renewed, a long silver cylinder with outspread wings which the dazzling light shone through like glass. The shriek of the jets pressed down upon the surface of the sea, perhaps causing invisible waves, and it was like some fabulous sign, a comet or a falling star, appearing to men to warn them of approaching catastrophe.

When the plane disappeared on the other side of the bay, probably to land on the airfield, Chancelade looked at the sky; and for a few seconds he could still see the phosphorescent wake, like the track of a snail, that marked its path. Then the white waves merged together and the sky closed up again, swallowing up in its wilderness the last echoes of the din that had reigned there so long.

Then Chancelade went, too. He walked a little way along the beach, stepping over the bodies stretched out on the dusty pebbles. He looked at the multicoloured skins, the black, red, blue, mauve, green and white swimsuits. He gazed at all those navels in the middle of all those bellies. He breathed in briefly again the disagreeable bitter smell of sweat and sun-tan lotion. He walked among all those bodies stretched out in the cruel sunlight as if they were corpses. But they weren’t really corpses. Everywhere, all round him, life burst forth — grotesque, parodic, full of parrot-like cries. At the same time as the smells of sweat and sewers there arose from the baking earth a vague and terrifying trembling, a murmur, a feverish shudder, a cramp, a din, a mad agitation, a tetanic contraction! All these hearts beat ponderously, and the sound echoed through the earth. The blood was hidden, the swift, thick, hot blood! In those gourds of skin there on the beach there were gallons of blood; if you’d smashed them one after the other they’d have gushed out on to the sloping stones and soon poured in red streams down to the sea. After a few days, or weeks, the sun would look down on a great crimson expanse, and the sky itself would be pink.

Chancelade walked for a long time through the crowded streets. He went past rainbow-windowed shops where the goods on display calmly gave off their vulgar attractive odours. He passed café terraces with brightly coloured tables, where women drank fruit juice and ate ices. He went through veritable clouds of noise, and the deep murmur of juke-boxes clung to his skin. He caught snatches from open mouths, like: