J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

Chancelade’s voice broke, and at that moment the bus drew in along the pavement. The young woman jumped up and got in without a backward glance. Out of his dim eyes the boy Chancelade saw the green-painted mass clicking regularly. Then the bus drove off in a cloud of smoke, and nothing was left in the streets or the sky or anywhere but the kind of dizzying weakness wheeling round like a vulture in ever-decreasing circles. When the abyss finally closed and the bird dropped like a stone, there’d be no more noise, or words, or grotesque movements; only the featureless face and ageless unwrinkled skin of the world as it is.

Dead, now. Peaceful as poison in the body of the snake. Violent as the knife in the killer’s hand, burning as love in the skin of a man who possesses a woman. It came one night, in the early morning, and for the last time the little boy called Chancelade was alone. His pale face was turned to the ceiling, and his body arched under the sweat-soaked sheets; his breath whistled through his open mouth. The chill of infinity mounted slowly through the legs, wiping out the living cells one by one. The heart struggled. The tongue fell, a dumb choking mass, into the throat. The ceiling of fog began its slow descent, to crush and grind and cover up for ever and ever. The walls drew in inch by inch, moved by the pitiless mechanism. The dark room had become the size of a ship’s cabin, then of a cupboard, then of a wardrobe, a suitcase, a match-box. Now it is only a tiny hole in the hard rock, a minute hollow not big enough for a fly to live in. And yet for Chancelade it’s huge, big as the waiting lounge of an airport, and the walls are so far away and the ceilings so high that it’s hardly a room at all any more but the world in which one lies lost, floating deserted and hopeless in the cold void, alone, abominably alone.

In the temple of moving walls the body of the boy Chancelade is dying. There is too much space, or not enough. There is too much air, and time, and light, and the solitude is stifling. What you ought to do, now is the time, what you ought to do is stretch out your arms and try to stop the walls. And take your tongue out of your throat and shout as loud as you can, for those who are not there: ‘Help! Help! I need you! Help!’

The white ceiling has become a mirror too. The last mirror before unconsciousness; and what the little boy sees in it is horrible. He sees a face that is very old and very white, with a mouth like a dead fish, dim eyes, and cheeks already darkened by patches of shadow. The face is his own, and he grimaces with pain and rage. Vain mouth, foolish eyes, hollow cheeks dark and unshaven, tousled hair. Forehead white with stupor and streaming with big drops of icy sweat. The ceiling is gently dying, shaken by ridiculous twitches that spread across the white paint in strange concentric waves.

In the middle of the ceiling hangs a black flex with the skull of an electric light bulb at the end of it. A head decapitated, then hung.

The horror of white sheets clinging to the skin, of the pillow slowly engulfing the head like a quicksand. The furniture is dying too. You can hear the sinister creaking as cold paralysis creeps over it. The table splits, the chair is consumed where it stands. Carpets and curtains unravel, undo all the weavers’ work. Everywhere dust falls, and little rivulets of chalky powder run along the cracks of the tiles and disappear into the sea of the floor. Enough! All this must be halted. The damage must be mended, the bits of wood and glass stuck together, the holes stopped up. That’s enough, I tell you! The joke’s gone on long enough, put on the lights again. There’s been enough drama, we’ve been frightened quite enough. Now let everything go back to what it was before, sun, clear air, peace, sea, strength, beauty. Isn’t everything eternal? Isn’t everything normal, quite normal? Who started this grotesque farce? The walls are there, the ceiling’s there, the chairs and tables aren’t dying. There isn’t any face on the white ceiling, there isn’t any skull hanging where the light bulb ought to be. I’m here. I insist. I have my body, my eyes, my mouth, my mind and its thoughts. So that’s enough of this ridiculous comedy! Am I not eternal? I was never born, I’ve always been here, always, always. Birth and death are only fables. As far back as I can remember I’ve always been here. Wasn’t I here in 1952, when it was so hot the asphalt stuck to the soles of your shoes? And in 1943, when there was some sort of war, didn’t I watch the tracer bullets shooting through the sky? And in 1960, when it snowed on the road to London, or 1964, when there was the earthquake in Naples. I was there, I was there all the time. And it was me in 1834 too, crossing the Rocky Mountains westwards and shooting at Jim Rattlesnake’s gang. It was I who crossed the Beresina, who was called Marco Polo, Eric Bloodaxe, or Hui-tsang who died of thirst in the huge Gobi Desert. I took part in the Anabasis, the exoduses, the migrations to the West. It was I who populated Asia, Africa, America. I was there all the time, every day, with the sun and the rain and the wind and the ice and the fire. I was in the dense jungle, and the stretches of white sand. On the mountain-tops, and on the misty lakes. I was everywhere, always. So why is this dust falling down from the walls, why are there these eyeless faces on the ceiling and the windows, why is there this creeping silence, and these sheets, this sweat, this abyss? Let me tell you I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid.

My intelligence must be immortal. My eyes have pierced to the heart of the world like a shaft of steel. And all these objects and other bodies and landscapes and trees and animals have been connected with me from the first by the substance of knowledge. They can’t betray me. They can’t abandon me. I have entered into the trunks of the palm-trees and lived in the sweet mounting sap. I have been right inside the shells of insects and felt the faint vibrations of the engine that moves their legs and wings. I have been in the bellies of cows and in the very flesh of whales and octopuses. Yes, I have lived in all those masses of organs, red muscles, fragrant genitals and silky pelts. And I’ve been in the centre of the rocks, caught between narrow layers of flint and granite. I have lived numberless years inside great mountains, hidden under tons of stone and old earth. I have had the bodies of rivers and clouds and air; I have been in stopped-up wells, I have been thrown back by obstacles, I have flown round jagged peaks and over marshy plains. I’ve been seen everywhere, heard everywhere. I’ve been used, given every name and every age. So why have the gates of life been closed on me now, why have these walls been put up?

All I’ve known, and all I’ve failed to understand, all is far away now, leaving nothing but the atrocious void. It’s as if my eyes had been suddenly torn out and the secret links that bound me to the universe broken as the bloody spheres rolled somewhere outside my body, their retinas registering nothing. The sweet fluid has ceased to come and go, the blood of vision flows no more, and I have begun to float, icy and attached to nothing, in huge empty space. The world has shrivelled up, and objects roam about lost and aimless, like fleshless stumps from which life has receded.

So that’s what has happened now to the little boy who was called Chancelade. It was coming for a long time. It was written up everywhere, all around him, on the white skin of women and in the flesh of fruit. It was written inside him too, in the skeleton’s creaking bones, in hair, nails and teeth. The great withdrawal had begun in the very first instant, and the whole of life had only been a series of random gesticulations to slow it down.