J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

That’s what the world is like. A sort of skin covered with tics, a face ceaselessly grimacing and twitching. Nerves, nerves everywhere. It tries to pull itself together. It cries, but the tears fall with indifference, like sweat. It smiles, and its teeth shine in its mouth without any joy. That’s where we’ve got to. That’s what I am. A caricature. A drawing. A photograph. A tapestry that I shall never see the end of. That’s enough! Let’s stop! Leave me alone! I can’t bear the sight of these wreaths any more, these circlets, and hearts and curls and zigzags, all these magnificent and hideous things they’ve made out of my skin. I don’t want them to sew with my hair any more, or patch with my skin, or use my bones as whalebone and my eyes as pearls! But what’s the good? The game still goes on, in front, behind, above, below. There are shouts. Colours are painted on, shadows are made across them, electric light bulbs send out rays. Everyone everywhere is talking at once. There’s the slightly damp voice of a woman talking to her Siamese cat. There’s the voice of a woman talking to her child in a room. There are orders, supplications, words of love, of jealousy, swear words, last words. But nobody hears anything any more. Out there in the sky, in the darkness, on the earth and on the sea, and on the windswept roof of the skyscraper with the chimneys howling, there’s nothing else but that. All the cries and all that hymn, for no one. Trees full of twittering birds, plains with barking dogs, airports full of loudspeakers! No one listens and quietly takes it to heart. What a marvellous solitude. A black desert, a white desert. A deep and immense desert of glass, that’s what I live in. There I am, and my life is my real revenge. I’ll never forget what’s been done to me. All these mirrors — I made them myself, to remind me always, so that nothing escapes me. I’ve set traps everywhere like that, and what I catch I keep. Is it I who think the world, or the world that thinks me? I don’t care which it is, now. I’m here, they’re there, to infinity if you like. And what I’ve written I’ve scored with a knife, and inscribed in matter with an axe. I’ve left my signs everywhere, scratches, graffiti, excrement, dandruff, bits of match and cigarette ends. If anyone follows the trail he’ll certainly come to me, on this roof. And if nobody comes, it doesn’t matter, I’ll wait. And if, one day, or in a minute from now, I jump off the roof, it won’t really be to die, nor even to squash myself on the pavement like a fig. It will be to go on talking, to say once for all that the difference between the roof and the ground is nothing extraordinary, nothing miraculous, just the cold air rushing into my nostrils, and the sound of the interminable seconds inside my heart. There. What I really ought to have done instead of talking was make a life-size model of the earth and launch it into space. Or have children by a female hyena. Or write a very long sentence adding one word every day. Then people would be able to read the sentence and know what it was like to be me. What do you think about that? Eh?

The eternal flight began. It began one day by chance, in a room with fawn paper on the walls and no curtains, wooden furniture and a bare electric light bulb hanging from a black flex. And since then no one has stopped. Perhaps it’s liberation, or perhaps it’s fate. Things with their million aspects fly towards their unique image, worlds enter into each other one by one, sentences grow mute, and as material truth, which is but itself, defines itself, the sphere of time grows full. Unless all flies towards man alone.

Chancelade flees along infernal streets, or magic avenues. He ceaselessly descends staircases, dashes right into concrete caves, opens and shuts doors with glass doorknobs. Every so often, at the end of a corridor, there’s the face of a woman shining softly. But it’s only a reflection, and the flight continues. When day breaks he flees the dazzling light and its killing rays. When night falls he flees the dense darkness that insinuates its slime everywhere. No question of resting. No question of stopping and groaning. Everywhere the ways are open and the roads stretch out for you to rush along them. Chancelade can breathe: he’s running away. He looks down from a window: soon he’ll have to change and find another window, and then another. He’s lying by the soft body of a woman, but it’s always another time. Space demands something new, time consumes itself. Mustn’t stop. Mustn’t turn round to see what’s coming: it’s dangerous. As soon as you turned you’d be enveloped in the icy wind that turns you into a statue.

There are no more countries. Canton, Callao, Penang — how far away all that seems. Now there are only more and more streets. Chancelade walks more slowly and reads the names as he passes: rue Gallieni, rue Papon, rue Lascaris, rue Cassini, rue Rude. And then the avenues, boulevards, passages, alleys, and cul-de-sacs: avenue des Fleurs, boulevard Carnot, passage Ségurane, chemin de l’Abbaye. By the gardens there are overhanging branches of mimosa and brambles. Dogs bark. Uphill, down, and up again. It will never end, it can never end.

The terrible ways of flight have been traced on the crust of the earth. It is the ancient malediction surviving still, the sort of universal order vibrating inside life itself. It is inscribed in the centre of every object, like a long crack that grows and divides. In the beginning, right at the start, there was this explosion, or fear, and ever since the world has never stopped rushing vainly across the immensities of the unknown. The whole of space has become this charge. Time has become this flight. Every second, every day, every year that passes is an animal leap towards the horizon. The very movement itself is a flight annihilating all reason and all hope.

But nothing threatens Chancelade from behind. In fact it looks rather as if the dangers are in front of him. But that’s because the flight is vain, and because each gulf left behind only deepens the void that will ultimately be victorious. Death is already in the flight, its claws already driven into the flesh of its prey, and will never let go. The maddened animal can shake its head and rush all over the plain, but the jaw that has closed on it will still sink slowly farther and farther in, through fold after fold of flesh until it crushes the cervical vertebrae.

Chancelade knows he can’t escape. He has always known it. He also knows that his executioners have charming gentle names, the names of flowers and trees and drops of water. They are called Sun, Pigeon, Daddylonglegs, Mat, Cigarette, Geranium. They are called Mina too, and perhaps the weapon is hidden in the touching face surrounded by fair hair, in the dimple on the right of the mouth, inside the gold-sprinkled blue iris. Perhaps the murder is there, hidden in the calm breath that gently lifts the breasts, or in the pink-painted toenails. But he goes on running away, escaping as best he can, running along the infinite roads of language. He talks, thinks, tries to understand. But it’s only in order to escape. He says life interests him, that he’s fond of the stars, insects, and the secrets of the human body; but it isn’t true. What he really likes is to run away, scamper away like a rat, get away as quickly as possible from the place of unspeakable menace.

In the darkness the crickets cry furiously, and their tense cry is that of flight. The sea is flat, and brassy, wrinkled with thousands of identical waves. I’m like that. Clouds pass over the white sky as if you were looking at them through a window. I, Chancelade, am in each one of them. Rivers cross the walls of mountains, the fields are infinite, the horizon ever recedes. All the time I’m with them, farther, farther, keep going. Thought is a void driving into the void, you look straight in front of you and never find anything fixed to rest on. In short, I’m in among the hurtling planets, the balls of hot lava, fifty million degrees Centigrade, that rush away from one another in no matter what direction.