Terra Amata Read online

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Terra Amata

  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

  Terra Amata

  Translated from the French by Barbara Bray

  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

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

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Editions Gallimard 1967

  First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1969

  Published in Penguin Classics 2008

  Copyright © J. M. G. Le Clézio 1967

  Translation copyright © Barbara Bray, 1969

  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: 978-0-14-192841-8

  Contents

  Prologue

  ON THE EARTH BY CHANCE

  I WAS BORN

  A LIVING MAN

  I GREW UP

  INSIDE THE DRAWING

  THE DAYS WENT BY

  AND THE NIGHTS

  I PLAYED ALL THOSE GAMES

  LOVED

  HAPPY

  ALL THESE LANGUAGES I SPOKE

  GESTICULATING

  SAYING INCOMPREHENSIBLE WORDS

  OR ASKING INDISCREET QUESTIONS

  IN A REGION THAT RESEMBLED HELL

  I PEOPLED THE EARTH

  TO CONQUER THE SILENCE

  TO TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH

  I LIVED IN THE IMMENSITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  I RAN AWAY

  THEN I GREW OLD

  I DIED

  AND WAS BURIED

  EPILOGUE

  Prologue

  You’ve opened the book at this page. You’ve turned over two or three pages, glancing idly at the title, the name of the author, the publisher, and perhaps you’ve looked for the phrase in quotation marks that’s nearly always to be found at the beginning of novels because it looks well and the author covers himself to a certain extent by referring to someone more important than he is. In this case the phrase might have been: ‘I am one of you, a grain, one of you … Shining … Vibrating … Burning …’ I was in the Bibliothèque Nationale one day and a woman of about fifty with a rabbit’s-fur hat on came up to the table where I was sitting, held her hand out shyly, and said, ‘I’ m Maria Michal-owicz … Perhaps … These poems …’ They were very good poems, and if I’d quoted anything at all I’d have been glad to quote a line from one of them.

  But to continue: you’ve opened the book. You bought it in a bookshop, or someone gave it to you as a present, perhaps a birthday present. Why this book rather than another? There are so many novels in the bookshops, so many love-stories, detective-stories, adventures, thrillers. There are so many intriguing titles, so many books that are all the rage, with pictures and conversation and psychology on every page. Sometimes they have such lovely titles—A Scent of Pines, Dum-dum Symphony, Say it with Prunes! The Praying Mantis—such lovely titles, and the names of strange, mysterious cities: Manila, Hongkong, Arequipa, Tokyo, Reykjavik, Vladivostock, and so on. And such beautiful dust-jackets: a pretty girl without any clothes on holding a revolver, or stretching out her arms to embrace you. There are so many interesting books, so much crime and violence and exoticism and eroticism. So why this book? But of course there’s always art, literature, the books you can leave lying about on your bedside table and not be ashamed of; there’s always culture. All that’s too complicated to talk about, and too dangerous as well, perhaps … Anyway, there you are with this book open in front of you, about twelve inches from your face. You’ve already flicked through the pages, glancing at a line here and there to see what it’s all about, or in the hope of finding a spicy bit. Then you probably decided to read it; that’s what people generally do with books. You made yourself as comfortable as possible and opened it. If you bought it at a railway station along with two or three newspapers, you probably gave a thought while you were choosing it to the people who’d be sitting opposite you in the compartment. It’s a shield you hold in front of you to ward off the gossip and curiosity of your neighbours. The jolting of the train makes the lines jump up and down, so it’s difficult to read. The monotonous sound of the wheels on the rails gradually penetrates and anaesthetizes you. You won’t get far. Soon you’ll shut your eyes and try to go to sleep. Or you’ll lay the book aside for your magazine, and re-read the story in pictures of the latest plane crash, or about a war in some country somewhere with an unpronounceable name. But perhaps you’re not on a train. Perhaps you’re in the passenger-lounge of an airport and have got to wait there all night for a connection. You bought the book at a kiosk and then went and sat down on the cushions of an excessively deep armchair. You’ve lit a cigarette and begun to read, while the maddening voice of the automatic girl echoes all over the airport: ‘Flight SAS 612 for Frankfurt, immediate boarding gate number 19. Vol SAS 612 pour Franc-fort, départ immédiat porte numéro 19’. Everything sparkles in the bald light falling relentlessly from the flat ceilings and reflected back from plastic, glass and metal surfaces. The hours are long and empty; unreal. Here the book is no longer just a shield. It’s also a weapon, a revolver with which you could shoot at all these spotless windows, all these bustling, distant silhouettes.

  But perhaps you aren’t travelling. In that case you’re just sitting at home in your chair with a glass of something in your hand and your slippers on. You read without haste, just skipping one or two lines occasionally, rarely a whole page. You picked up two or three books at once, selecting this one at the last minute because it happened to be on top. Unless you’re on your bed. Lots of people like to read lying down. The only thing is if you stay too long in one position, leaning on your right elbow, say, you soon get cramp. But you can read in any position, even kneeling down or standing on one foot. There’s no compulsory attitude for cultivating
the mind.

  Or you can read on the beach. You put on dark glasses because of the sun and stretch out face downwards on the sand or the pebbles. When it gets too hot you go into the sea for a dip. In that way you can start reading again without realizing you’ve read that part before, which is never a bad thing when it comes to literature. The book is there, like an object in the midst of life, no more readable and no more lasting than everything else around you. A woman in a bikini walks by; you look at her. Then you turn back to the written word, and it’s as if the woman in the bikini had really walked right through the story. You have the word ‘table’, or ‘mirror’, but it might just as well have been ‘cloud’ or ‘tanker’. It’s precisely that which is interesting in a book—that which is noted in an infinite variety of ways in the one possible way. But what does it matter when and where you read these lines? What does it matter why you’re reading, even? It is this reason or that, and it might have been anything. Chance with its million cog-wheels never ceases its wearying grind. What does it matter that there was one to write and another to read? In the last resort, in the very last resort, they are one and the same, and they’ve always known it.

  ON THE EARTH BY CHANCE

  I’ll begin by saying what kind of a landscape it was. It was a stretch of earth and dry rubble, with a few mountains, a few hills, and, on the other side, the great plateau of the sea. An undistinguished sort of country, but so to speak eternal, where thousands of men and women had been born and then had died, where lizards had slept in their holes, and insects had hummed, and thick-leaved plants and dusty shrubs had sent down their roots, one after the other, calmly, without changing anything. It was a countryside without a name, old like the skin of an old woman, dilated by the day, chilled by the night, washed by the rains, worn by the wind, split by the frost, nibbled at by the sea, furrowed by the streams, dug, sown, ploughed, eaten, trodden down century after century; now and then an earthquake had swept over it thrusting up new peaks, opening new gulfs. But it was as if nothing had happened. The fossil shells remained imprisoned, useless, in their dusty matrices.

  I’d also like to talk straight away about the sun. Above the hard crust of the earth you can see it seething away like some strange motionless whirlpool. Now, round and livid, it’s in position for about 2.30 in the afternoon, and there’s nothing else but it. Concealed, swollen and distended, behind pale layers of air, it is a burning, staring eye. It understands nothing. It judges nothing. No, it is simply fixed and hard, ceasingly sending out its concentric rings to the earth, while the red mercury column climbs towards 30. Heat comes from and out of it, spreading over the four corners of the sky, and this energy fills everything to the brim like a sandstorm: hard, hard, ramming each of its grains into every available hollow, wearing away, scraping, galling. Today the sun is so heavy and its gaze so painful that it’s as if it too had been given a name, a name for ever, written down in books, graven on steles of stone, slashed into the leaves of the bald aloes which eternally dry up the eternal scar.

  SUN

  Now you can talk to him, call him by his name, mumble the incomprehensible litanies. You can meet his gaze too, until your eyes begin to burn and veil themselves with tears. You can take a pair of those thick-lensed glasses and let the pewter-coloured globe glide down their dull screen. The white star floats in the evening sky. It hangs alone in the middle of the heavens like an electric light bulb. Or like a single nickel coin shining on a black table.

  Now is the moment to look straight at him from the floating plateau of the earth, and call upon him. So as not to forget him, give him the name of some man or beast. Kax—he shall be called Kax. Kax looks down on the earth. Kax warms the trunks of the trees. Kax reduces the little lumps of mud to powder.

  A lens held over the earth, which makes everything visible. Held over the infinitesimal spark of light hidden in the mass of dust and ashes, the little white spark from which comes life and from which, perhaps in a few seconds, will spring the first paper-burning flame.

  The light pours down, the brightness whirls and vibrates unwearyingly. For Kax is not kind. He is a pitiless monster that seeks to destroy the world. He throws his invisible darts, he gnaws and scrapes imperceptibly at everything within reach, and every evening when he disappears below the horizon you hear a great sigh of peace over all the earth.

  Down below on the earth is the army of insects. There are insects of every colour, some black as jet, some blue, some grey, some yellow, some red and gold, some red and green, some purple, some iridescent. They perch on every green leaf, preening their legs and wings. Some are motionless, like drops of blood. Others walk and walk without stopping, clutching on to the fine hairs of the grasses with their little crooked legs. Others hover with throbbing abdomen. Yet others swim in puddles. You could never finish counting them. You could never finish killing them one by one.

  Every so often a butterfly darts about madly through the warm air. Behind the great blocks of mossy stone the worms stuff their pale bellies. Or a centipede swiftly unwinds and with its thousand feet digs itself a hole to hide in. This is the world of the dung-beetles, scorpions and termites. Bulging eye, quivering feeler, hard cold black body that creeps between the grains of earth.

  And each one has its name. Like so many little men they each have their magic identity. There’s one mosquito that’s called Sepia, and another Darius, and another Ananda. There’s the blowfly Truming. The cockroach Bryant. The caterpillar Alex. The flea Maria. The grasshopper Smythe, and the grasshopper Eole. There’s the bed-bug Marcelle. The tick Galapago. The mason-wasp Giordano. The black spider Sanka. The butterfly Dorian, the moth Kazan. There’s Anya the ladybird, Knock the praying mantis, Furious the fish and Go the cockchafer.

  They are all there. Each one with its name, its tiny solemn life, its eggs, its larvae, the things it eats, its excrement. Each with its lurking danger of death, making the heart tremble deep within the hermetic carapace. Each with its hole, its familiar paths, its places for hunting or love, its flowers, its pebble mountains. You must be there with them at the right moment, and call them softly, mysteriously, by their names.

  But there are also the plants, and the other animals. Azor the dog, Pussy the cat, Coco the parrot. And every blade of grass, its special name written in every fibre, that yields beneath the weight of the wind. Manuel, Kalar, Gélo, Silicoe, Amadeus, Prixt, Tony, Gaur, Terence, Gilbert the olive-tree, Anatole the cactus. Jeremy the cork-oak, Waterman the bamboo. Each blade of grass sticking up out of the ground like a hair and leading its own silent life. Each of these trees, each of these flowers, each of these stones or ponds, must be given a name so as not to be forgotten. This round stone shall be called Sib-Song, this sharp one Moroboc. That crow just flying by is Pliny. That horse with a galled back is Goiran. That bit of broken bottle is Roland. It reflects light from the sky Han, caught between the branches of the cherry-tree Otho and Gregory, the dusty boulder. The seagull Antar hovers over Maa the sea, between the wave Solange and the wave Simone.

  And when you’d given everything, each animal and each plant, a name, you’d never be alone again. All over this huge landscape beaten down on endlessly by the sun, these names are linked with one another by fine, almost invisible threads. They contain every story, every adventure. Countless. Ceaseless. Millions of little dramas, billions of little tragi-comedies, thrillers, corridas, tournaments, wars, processions, in which every twig and pebble has its part. Yes, it’s here one ought to sit down, on a rock in the middle of the earth, or lie down on the hard grass, and write the whole history of the world. You could start on the first page of a big black exercise-book, and write in capital letters:

  HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  It would contain all the miniature epics, all the combats and massacres and exoduses. Chapter CXXII, for example, would tell of the destruction of Tsin, city of the ants, and of the long march to the mound where they were to build their new town.

  Chapter DXCIV would have the adventure of Nathan
the crab. It would set down how Nathan, washed ashore in a storm with three broken legs, crawled under the cruel sun to the pool of Banatovoro, there to reign as absolute lord until he was four years old, when he was crushed to death by a falling rock.

  Chapter CMXCIX would give a biography of Fueco, the salamander without a tail.

  Chapter MDCCII would treat of the fight to the death between the two tarantulas, Brux and Géochs, for Waïon the female.

  And Chapter MMMCCCXLVI would relate how a thunderbolt fell one summer night on the oak-tree Zaba, and split it in two, and how the fire spread all over the mountain, burning thousands of trees and animals to death in a few hours.

  Here, as everywhere else, lots of things happened. On this portion of earth once inhabited, then deserted, the sun struck down with all its strength. The rocks wore gently away, imperceptibly dropping their sweat of sand and gravel. The plants grew peacefully, their little identical leaves all stretching out towards the light. And in the earth the hairy roots sought without moving for the crystals, drank the water, and dissolved the salts. It was like a pot of flowers, but very large, a sort of Japanese garden in which everything stays where it is. Here the aloes. There the blue-painted stream and the pond made from a piece of mirror. Yonder the twisted rock, elaborate as a piece of coral. Near the rock the grove of Aaron’s rod, and close by a few clumps of grass, a dwarf cactus, and a plant that smells of mint. A bed of geraniums. By the looking-glass lake, a temple the size of a match-box, and a toll-gate. Some pink flamingoes perch on their long thin legs. And just by the bank, facing the unknown, a man in a conical hat carries a streamer on which is written:

  There’s no escaping this country. No escaping these names, these labels everything bears in being itself. It is also a prison, but light and without walls, where all that happens has a secret meaning that enchains you. Try as you may to run away, to hide in dark caves or dim bushes, it’s useless. You can’t escape. You can’t ever get away. You’re continually overcome by blows dealt you from all directions at once by beauty—great, cruel, delightful beauty. Towns, the houses of men, beaches, cars, the sunken lanes that wind among the hills, and the swirls of noisy torrents—you can hide in none of them. Beauty always finds you and comes gently, pitilessly, to drag you out and plunge you once more into the living vortex. She has claws and fangs and a calm imperious voice, and she hurts you, hurts you at the same time as she helps you. Beauty.