Fever Read online

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Fever

  J. M. G. Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice and was educated at the University College of Nice and at Bristol and London universities. His knowledge of English enabled him to work closely with his translator on his debut novel, The Interrogation, which won the Prix Renaudot in 1963. Since then he has written over forty highly acclaimed books and has been translated into thirty-six languages. The Interrogation is published by Penguin and three of his early novels are now Penguin Modern Classics: The Flood, Terra Amata and Fever. Le Clézio divides his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), New Mexico and Mauritius. In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO

  Fever

  Translated from the French by Daphne Woodward

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published as La Fièvre by Editions Gallimard 1965

  First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1967

  Published in Penguin Classics 2008

  Copyright © J. M. G. Le Clézio 1965

  Translation copyright © Daphne Woodward, 1966

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192840-1

  Contents

  INTRODUCTORY LETTER

  1 FEVER

  2 THE DAY THAT BEAUMONT BECAME ACQUAINTED WITH HIS PAIN

  3 IT SEEMS TO ME THE BOAT IS HEADING FOR THE ISLAND

  4 BACKWARDS

  5 THE WALKING MAN

  6 MARTIN

  7 THE WORLD IS ALIVE

  8 THEN I SHALL BE ABLE TO FIND PEACE AND SLUMBER

  9 A DAY OF OLD AGE

  Introduction

  Nice, October 23, 1964

  IF you really want to know, I’d rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing’s done now, of course, and I can’t alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither to right nor left. One must put up with all the little nips one gets from life and try not to let them hurt too much. Life is full of madnesses. They’re only little everyday madnesses, but they’re terrible if you look at them closely.

  I don’t much believe in lofty sentiments. In their place I see an army of insects or ants, nibbling in all directions. Sometimes these tiny black arrows join together, and men lose their mental balance. For a few minutes, a few hours, chaos and hazard reign supreme. Fever, pain, fatigue, the onset of sleep are passions as strong and hopeless as love, torture, hate or death. At other times the mind assailed by sensations succumbs in a kind of material ecstasy. The sight of truth is more dazzling than an arc lamp.

  We live in a very fragile world. We have to take care what we set eyes on, we have to beware of everything we hear, of everything that touches us.

  These nine tales of little madness are fiction; and yet they are not invented. Their subject-matter is drawn from familiar experience. Every day we lose our heads because of a slight emperature, a toothache, a passing dizziness. We get angry. We enjoy. We are drunk. It doesn’t last long, but it’s enough. Our skins, our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, store up millions of sensations every day and not one of them is forgotten. That’s the danger. We’re absolute volcanoes.

  I gave up long ago saying everything I thought (sometimes I even wonder whether there really is such a thing as a thought); I fell back on writing it all out in prose. Poetry, novels and short stories are singular antiques by which hardly anyone is deceived any longer. What’s the use of turning out poems or stories? All that remains now is writing, writing by itself, groping its way with words, searching and describing, meticulously, in depth, hanging on, hammering out reality, rejecting compromise. It is difficult to produce art by trying to produce science. I wish I could have another century or two, so to speak, to find out.

  Very respectfully yours,

  J. M. G. Le Clézio.

  1. Fever

  To put it in a nutshell, Roch was rather the type with projecting shoulder-blades; not particularly tall, he had a skeleton that could be seen everywhere under his skin, especially at chest-level, where his ribs described a series of semicircles. This general air of caricature was accentuated by pointed shoulders, elbows and knees, by a few muscles that looked like sinews, and above all by a long, starveling face, with a beaky nose, deep-set eyes and hollow cheeks. And yet he wasn’t ugly, he might even pass for handsome, in spite of his singular emaciation. When he walked, Roch would swing his arms awkwardly, out of time with his legs, whose rhythm was consequently disrupted. He never laughed, beyond a faint smile which was always on his lips, as though there were some joke he couldn’t manage to forget. He spoke really very little, so one could say nothing certain about that. He didn’t drink, and from time to time he smoked an American cigarette. No one really knew him, not even his wife, Elisabeth, and he seemed to have no friends. He worked every afternoon and every evening in an information bureau, for the Transtourisme travel company. That left his mornings free, and he took advantage of the fact in different ways, according to the season. In winter, by sleeping late, in summer by going to the beach.

  This was the time of year when Roch was going for a bathe every morning; on this particular day, as usual, he came out of his house, on the edge of the town, took his bicycle and set off towards the sea. He pedalled for a long time in the blazing sun, following the coast. Then, when he came to a certain bend in the main road, near the headland, he stopped and got off his bike. He fixed the safety-chain round the rim of the front wheel, jumped over the parapet and rushed down the stony, brambly hillside to the water’s edge. Getting to the bottom, he turned left, past a line of sharp rocks. A few yards further on there was a sort of little creek, where refuse was floating. That’s where he bathed, very quickly; to dry himself he lay down on a flat stone, in the bright sunshine. It was still early morning, and as far as Roch could see, if he had taken the trouble to look, there was nobody in sight.

  The sun was scorching, and the tiny drops that were clinging to his skin, all round his face, evaporated quickly. They left behind a series of minute haloes of dry salt, which made his skin feel tight. It hurt, too; it was like having one’s naked
body delivered to the ants and feeling thousands of mandibles biting frantically at one’s raw flesh.

  Roch got up and took another dip. When he came out of the water he noticed the wind had risen. It was an east wind, rather chilly for the time of year, blowing in sudden bursts. Roch stretched out, half-lying, on his stone slab, and lit a cigarette; the wind blew his lighter out three times running. He smoked like this, while the one cigarette lasted, and then lay down again on his back and closed his eyes. Red and purple bubbles began dancing on the screen of his eyelids. They swam in all directions, with a curious way of skidding to the left; sometimes they came together and agglomerated to form vague shapes; a horse’s head, Africa, moths, bunches of flowers, octopuses, volcanoes, a death’s head.

  When he had had enough of all that, Roch got up, dressed, and went back to the road. Just as he was straddling his bicycle the midday siren sounded in the distance, above the town. Confused vapours were rising along the horizon, close to the mountains, and the sun was white behind a thin curtain of mist.

  Roch began pedalling along the road. Cars passed him from time to time, with a very soft sound. The heat was total, invincible. It had made the air compact, and Roch was constantly having to push his way through what seemed like a succession of sticky, smothering cloths coming in the opposite direction. Then he rode along a boulevard lined with plane-trees, turned right, went up a hill, turned left, rode past half a dozen crossroads, two with red lights, turned to the right again, down a lane running through waste plots, and stopped in front of his own house.

  He clipped the safety-chain on his front wheel, propped the bicycle against the wall of the building, and walked upstairs. On the fourth floor he stopped outside the right-hand door, rang the bell and waited. After a few seconds a sound was heard through the keyhole; a young woman with long black hair appeared on the threshold.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, come in.’

  Roch followed her into the flat. He shut the front door carefully, put the keys of his bicycle-chain on a table in the hall as he went by, and continued into the kitchen. This was a fairly large room with a north aspect, taken up by a white wooden table. The shutters were closed, and in the dusk one could see the blue flame of the gas-ring where something was cooking in a big pot. The young woman wore a nylon overall, unbuttoned. Roch passed in front of her and went to the sink to wash his hands. While he was splashing his face to get rid of the salt, the young woman said:

  ‘Was the sea nice?’

  ‘Very nice,’ Roch grunted, ‘you ought to have come along.’

  ‘In this heat …’

  Roch dried his hands and face on the dish-cloth. Then he went back to the hall to look for the newspapers. ‘Where’s the paper?’ he called, without turning his head.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Where have you put the paper?’ he asked again.

  ‘In the bedroom,’ said the woman; ‘on the bed, in the bedroom. There’s a letter for you.’

  Roch went into the bedroom; on the unmade bed lay the newspaper and a letter. Roch returned to the kitchen, sat down on a stool, put the paper on the table beside a plate, and opened the envelope with the tip of a knife.

  ‘Lunch ready soon?’ he asked as he unfolded the letter.

  ‘Five minutes,’ said his wife; ‘are you hungry?’

  ‘Hm …’

  ‘The potatoes will be cooked in five minutes.’

  Roch began to read the letter. It was written in a small, neat hand, with a fountain-pen, on squared paper.

  My dear Roch, dear Elisabeth,

  Just a line from Italy, where I’m in the midst of my tour. I’ve been to Milan and Bologna, and today I’ve reached Florence. I enclose a postcard bought in Florence, by the way. It’s very hot here, but that only makes the landscape more beautiful. I’ve been into all the historic buildings and all the art galleries, and seen practically everything there is to see here. It’s very beautiful. I hope you’ll both have a chance to make the same trip one of these days, I think it’s well worth it. I wrote to Mummy the other day to give her my news. I hope her sciatica isn’t too painful. I hope everything’s all right at your end, and that you’re not too uncomfortable with the heat. The other day, at Milan, I ran into Emmanuel, who was there for a day or two with his wife. We talked a little about old times. He told me he was planning to look in on you at the end of his holiday, on the way back to Paris. It seems he’s working now for a refrigerator firm and gets a very good salary. That’s all the news. I get to Venice next Tuesday, and shall be there about a fortnight. I won’t give you my address, Roch dear, because I know you won’t write. See you soon,

  Love to you both,

  Antoinette

  Roch bent down from his stool, found the envelope and pulled out the picture postcard. It showed a sort of garden with grass everywhere, some red flowers, a cedar-tree, and on all sides, surrounding the grass, yellow pillars which formed an arcade. The shadow of the cedar-tree fell in regularly-spaced stripes on the ground under the arcade, and the corner of sky on the left-hand side of the photograph was coloured a gaudy blue. On the back of the card, above the space for correspondence, was printed:

  FIRENZE

  Museo S. Marco—Il Chiostro

  Musée de S. Marc—Le Cloître

  Museum of S. Marc—The Cloister

  Markus Museum—Der Kreuzgang

  When Roch had finished reading it all, he put the postcard and the letter on the table beside the envelope. Elisabeth took the potatoes out of the saucepan and put them on the plates; then she unfolded a piece of greasy paper, took out two slices of ham and laid one on each plate, next to the potatoes.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ she enquired.

  ‘Nobody—my sister,’ said Roch.

  ‘Why’s she writing?’

  ‘No special reason, she’s in Italy.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Nor did I—she’s in Milan or Venice or somewhere of that kind. Anyhow, you’ll see, she’s even sent a postcard.’

  And he pointed to the photograph with his knife. The young woman picked up the letter and the card, glanced through them and put them back on the table, beside her place.

  ‘She’s in Florence,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, Florence,’ said Roch.

  ‘It must be beautiful.’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Roch.

  Then she began to eat her potatoes. As for Roch, he had nearly finished already.

  After his yoghourt, Roch got up, took the newspaper, and went to lie down in the bedroom. The heat was very oppressive now; the sun was sliding gently down the closed shutters, and sounds were running through the atmosphere like bubbles. Everything was clammy—the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the sheets, the pages of the newspaper. Roch was sweating imperceptibly on his chest and down his back. He was bathed in a kind of damp film that stuck him to the mattress. He was nailed to the spot, not by sleep but by a state of vapid fatigue, a torpor in all his limbs. Laboriously he turned the big pages of the newspaper, and his eyes had difficulty in jumping from one line to the next; so he kept rereading the same sentence, the same phrase, the same word, without understanding, without unravelling the meaning, in desperation. All this news had come from the ends of the earth, leaping the barriers of ocean and mountain, for him, for him alone. And he couldn’t even take it in. He saw these words, representing portions of far-off lands, these distillations of bizarre, mysterious adventures, scraps of epic that men in the four corners of the earth left lying about on this sheet of newspaper, like riddles. But he would never be able to understand them. He would always remain as though imprisoned in a bath, lost in the middle of its ramparts of steam, isolated, hoodwinked, swaddled in this sultry afternoon, his fingers sticking to the newspaper and blackened with its ink, his ears full of the washing-up noises his wife was making on the other side of the wall.

  And yet outside him, beyond these walls, thousands of miles away, things had been happening, rare, absurd adventures o
f which the echoes reached him like the hum of an angry crowd. One crossed oceans and plains, villages huddled in the depths of valleys, one flew over craters, railway networks, high-tension cables, lakes the size of a gob of spittle; and one reached the scenes of history. Everything had been prepared, matured, and the facts were written on the earth as on the newspaper, square, fitted in among others, a painful, compassionate summary of other exploits and other massacres.

  At Gainsville (Georgia) a fight broke out between the white customers at a café and some Negroes who tried to enter a billiard saloon. Four young whites were arrested. One white man was injured by a blow from a bottle.

  But it is in Alabama, the segregationist stronghold of the Southern United States, that the Negroes’ efforts are causing the greatest number of clashes. Although at Birmingham things are going fairly well, the situation is very different at Bessemer, an industrial suburb, where five Negroes were attacked by white men armed with baseball bats when trying to get served in a cafeteria. At Selma, also in Alabama, where an integrationist campaign in favour of voting rights for Negroes is at present in progress, nine young Negroes have been arrested under various pretexts. INCIDENTS

  On Monday, fifty-five Negroes and six whites had been arrested in this town. At Tuscaloosa, four whites turned some Negroes out of a restaurant where they were trying to get served; but other Negroes met with no resistance in two other restaurants in the same town, and even managed to book a room in a ‘white’ hotel. At Atlanta a white segregationist was brought into Court because he had threatened some Negroes with a revolver when they tried to sit down in his restaurant.

  Violence was breaking out everywhere, fists were clenching and striking flesh at sensitive points. From broken noses, teeth knocked out, cut heads, blood was beginning to trickle gently, gently. Skin was being bruised by bludgeons, hair was matted by the sweat of fear, and the hearts in some breasts were beating wildly, thumping crazily. The throat contracts and the air can no longer get through; long, cold shudders run up the spine and the whole body seems to become soft, flaccid, boneless. The legs tremble, the arms have no strength any more, and inside the skull, where the blows reverberate, all ideas are dead, the machine for producing them is rotating fanatically, running on no load; the stories of crimes are terrible, for everything becomes meaningless. With teeth clenched and eyes extremely mobile, groups of men are going about the streets, carrying banners. Shreds of cloth hang in the windows, blank walls as high as mountains form the horizon. Everything has become a maze, everything has become suffering and bruises. The bodies, the millions of bodies lying in the mud, emaciated, in bloodstained puddles. And above them a virgin forest is growing, choking the earth and lacerating the flesh; a forest of living roots that plunges far into the depths of the soil, giving off its sickly odour of suffering all around it.