J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

‘Hey there, you coming?’

‘But I tell you …’

‘The heat!’

‘Ciao!’

‘Ciao!’

He crossed the road between the bonnets of stationary cars, inhaling the smell of burning. He watched the red traffic lights change to green, and the intermittent ones being intermittent. He looked up at the white houses, and on the balconies covered with dingy flowers he saw people looking down. He stopped at an ice-cream stall for a glass of lemonade and spoke to a girl who was drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola through a straw. She must have been about thirteen or fourteen, and was rather plump, with a brown skin and a two-piece turquoise swimsuit.

‘Is it nice?’ said Chancelade.

‘What, this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not bad.’

‘I prefer lemonade.’

‘Lemonade makes you thirsty.’

‘Yes, but I don’t like that stuff.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘It tastes — it tastes of liquorice.’

The girl laughed, and waddled over on her short legs. Chancelade got out his cigarettes.

‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes.’

Chancelade lit the cigarette and she puffed at it rapidly without inhaling.

‘Are you on holiday here?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Chancelade.

‘So am I. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘Hm-hm.’

‘I’m staying at the camping site. You know, just beyond the main road. The Azure.’

‘Original name,’ said Chancelade.

She laughed again, sipped at her drink, then puffed at her cigarette.

‘Mm.’

‘Is it nice there?’

‘Mm, it’s all right.’

She put the bottle of Coca-Cola down and wiped her mouth with her hand.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Over there …’

‘What are you, German?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘It’s obvious.’

‘Really?’

‘And there are lots of Germans here.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Janine. What’s yours?’

‘Karl.’

‘Are you camping too?’

‘No, I’m staying in a hotel, down that way.’

After that Chancelade went on walking along by the beach. He met thousands of other men, women and children. It was the end of the afternoon now, and the neon lights were beginning to come on everywhere, over bars, in shop-windows, on top of concrete turrets.

Gradually night descended over everything, and darkness covered the roofs of the houses, the cars, the trees, the stones on the beach. It was a hot thick darkness trembling with noise, shot through with red and white flashes. Car lights went on, scarlet stars behind the two white patches in front. Reflections flashed in all the windows, and here and there light and shadow alternated indefatigably.

Chancelade continued to walk by the sea in the midst of this darkness. He had emerged now from the tumult, but the intoxication of it still lingered. Somewhere on this bit of earth was the seething crucible of hell, like the crater of a volcano belching incandescent lava. You couldn’t forget it. Even fleeing alone along the road, with cars whizzing past at sixty miles an hour in the darkness, you couldn’t escape the kind of painful blister that swelled the world. In the dense shadow, or rising up at the entrances of motels, restaurants and service-stations, pale forms stood and watched you pass. From the ground arose the groans and rhythmic beats of guitar music, and it was as if you were walking on a living, suffering skin that trembled at each step and was suffused with blood. The trees stood up vertical like bristles, and in every hollow lay pools of water or sweat. The earth was the recumbent body of a giant, over which you were walking for ever. He was not asleep. He never slept. With all his skin, with all its immense cells, the giant watched the fleas walking over his body, and did nothing.

After about half an hour Chancelade began to feel tired. He left the main road and went along a path of pebbles that led to the sea. Then he lay down on the black beach not far from an open-air dance-hall from which the music came in snatches. He listened for a moment to the unceasing rhythm, a metronomic tak-tak, tak-tak, and to the sound of the sea, of the cars, and of his heart. He smoked a last cigarette and put it out on a flat stone. Then he shut his eyes and went to sleep.

Another thing you could do was have a son. For months Mina would walk through the streets, and there would be this mushroom hidden in the folds of her swollen belly. And one fine day at about four o’clock in the morning she would start to have pains. Then the child would be born, and you’d give it a name. If it was a boy you’d call it Emmanuel, and if it was a girl you’d call it Cuné-gonde.

The years would go by very quickly, without your noticing, while you watched the child grow. It would be rather like sitting in a dark room staring at a flower unfolding. The skull would gradually form, the shape of the nose, the outline of the lips, the chin, the cheekbones, the eyebrows, and eyelashes. The hair would grow, fair with a few streaks of brown. And between the eyelids there would be those two grey-green spheres that would get more and more blue, grow more and more alive. The body would grow too. The limbs would become longer and imperceptibly thinner, the shoulders more muscular, the bones heavier. So life would take possession more surely every second, and it would be fascinating to watch. Moving, too, sometimes. There would be the woman talking to the child, not thinking that here was a piece of her flesh, a stump almost. With her head slightly tilted, her mouth smiling, her hair hanging down on her right shoulder, she would listen to this human being, possess him, hold him under her sway as if he were no more than an article bought at the shop on the corner.

Or there would be the first cries, in the cradle, like peevish incomprehensible words:

‘Aaaa … aaaa … Heu, heu, heu … Aaaa … Aaaa …’

The outstretched hands try to catch hold of the light, noises, images. The mouth wants to suck, the belly to swell, the lungs to cram themselves with air; the whole body already wants to live, eagerly, as if there was not a second to lose. At twenty-four months you’re already old; you’ve been alive two years. And it may even be that death is already there, deep in the dim look, or in the urine spreading over the mattress, or in the red wrinkles of the hands with their fluted nails.

But meanwhile there was this miniature man launched into life, abandoned, a prisoner of the world. He already had a name, a sex, a religion, ideas, and what might be called thoughts. He ate, slept, dreamed from time to time. There were millions of children like him in the world, born of a mother and father and methodically growing up. Black children with shining eyes, fair children, ginger children, dark children. Hungry children sitting on the ground with bloated bellies, their eyes haggard with want. Overfed children with fat legs and fat hands and rolls of fat on their backs. Children dying, children going to the cinema, children playing with plastic revolvers. The dwarf people were everywhere. They spoke their own language, performed their own rites, learned, hated, were afraid. There were Germans, Swedes, Americans, Poles. Finns, Hindus, gipsies, Chinese. Nahuatlacos, Goahuitlecs, Hokans, Maribichocoas. Navajos. Payas, Xicaques, Lencas, Xincas. Lacandons, Mams, Chujes, Jacaltecs, Motozintlecs, Ixils, Aguacatecs, Cakchiquels, Uspan-tecs, Pokonchis. Mosquitoes. In villages of dried mud, in arid squares where the sun beat down, they played with dogs and old tyres. They were everywhere, little swift-eyed men and dwarf women with narrow hips and flat chests. They weren’t gentle or peaceful; they watched eagerly for the moment of death in order to take their place among men. Without knowing it they slowly murdered that other absurd race of grown-ups and hustled their withered and mutilated bodies away into the dark.