War Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by J.M.G. Le Clézio

  Title Page

  War has Broken . . .

  The Girl Called . . .

  You know what . . .

  Each Succeeding Day . . .

  How Eagerly People . . .

  Each Day, the . . .

  The Moment that . . .

  The War Continues . . .

  The Terrible Noises . . .

  Ten Thousand Years . . .

  Occasionally the War . . .

  What Formula Could . . .

  Then Across the . . .

  At Night, Airport . . .

  The Girl Called . . .

  Bea B. Listens . . .

  From that Moment . . .

  From that Moment . . .

  The Girl Who . . .

  Copyright

  About the Book

  War – in the mind of the fragile Bea B., in the infinite icy landscape she journeys through, in Vietnam, in 10,000 years of human history. The war of the title is not merely a war of arms but a generalised state of violence permeating every atom of Le Clézio’s creation. Bea B. searches for clues for the origin of the evil. Under her searching gaze the most everyday objects – advertisements, cars, light bulbs – reveal extraordinary dimensions, as the earth trembles on the brink of cataclysmic explosion.

  About the Author

  J.M.G. Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2008. He was born in Nice, France, in 1940 to a French mother and her first-cousin, a Mauritian doctor of French origin who, being born in Mauritius when the island was under British rule, held a British passport. However, the family was completely Francophone. Jean-Marie Le Clézio has travelled extensively and is articulate in English and Spanish, but his true homeland is very much the French language. He spends his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), and Albuquerque New Mexico. He has published more than 40 books since he won the Renaudot Prize in 1963, age 23, with Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation), and his works have been translated around the world into 36 languages.

  OTHER WORKS BY J.M.G. LE CLÉZIO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

  The Interrogation

  Fever

  The Flood

  Terra Amata

  The Book of Flights

  The Giants

  The Mexican Dream, or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations

  The Prospector

  Onitsha

  The Round & Other Cold Hard Facts

  Wandering Star

  War

  J.M.G. Le Clézio

  Translated from the French by

  Simon Watson Taylor

  WAR HAS BROKEN out. Where or how, nobody knows any longer. But the fact remains. By now it is behind each person’s head, its mouth agape and panting. War of crimes and insults, of hate-filled eyes, of thoughts exploding from skulls. It is there, reared up over the world, casting its network of electric wires over the earth’s surface. Each second, as it rolls on, it uproots all things in its path, reduces them to dust. It strikes indiscriminately with its bristling array of hooks, claws, beaks. Nobody will survive unscathed. Nobody will be spared. That is what war is: the eye of truth.

  During daytime it strikes with the light. And when night falls it exerts the tidal force of its darkness, its coldness, its silence.

  The war is all set to last ten thousand years, to last longer than the history of mankind. There can be no escape, no compromise. In the face of war, our eyes are downcast, our bodies offered as targets for its bullets. The sharp sword seeks out breasts and hearts, even bellies, to pry and gouge. The sand is thirsty for blood. The harsh mountains are longing to open up chasms beneath the feet of voyagers. The highways desire the ceaseless mutilation and death of those who travel them. The sea feels the need to throttle and choke. And in space there is the terrible determination to tighten the vice of emptiness around the stars, to smother the shimmerings of matter.

  The war has whipped up its all-destructive wind. Burning gas pumps out of silencers, carbon monoxide spreads through the lungs and arteries. Mouths open wide, exhaling grey-blue smoke rings that drift up to the ceiling. Lips part, releasing strings of words, mortal words that inspire fear. That is what it is: the wind of war.

  Flashes of neon burst out around the girl’s face, threatening to pierce her skin, to scorch her gentle features, to frizzle her long mane of hair.

  The harsh rays of light stream endlessly from the electric lamp. Inside the glass bulb the incandescent filament shines brightly. That is war’s game, the pitiless eye illuminating dazzlingly the surfaces of the room, fixing the image on the opaque film-strip.

  Like the short flame that spurts briefly from a revolver’s barrel, like the explosion of a bomb, like a stream of napalm flowing through a city’s streets. Crumble and fall, white buildings, churches, towers! You no longer have the right to remain upright. Woman wearing that well-known mask, drop down, drop! You no longer have the right to face the unknown. The war’s aim is that people should lower their heads and crawl through the mud and the tangled wires that cover the ground. Woman, your naked body is no longer an object of exultation. From now on it is destined for blows, for humiliating glances, for wounds that will bare life’s innermost recesses.

  Like a star’s flame burning in the night simply to register the unspannable millions of miles: the gaze sparkling between the upper and lower lids. Like a drop of water, or of blood: the consciousness of this girl whose name means nothing and comprises nothing. There is no more solitude, no more haughty refusal: the pulsing war has annihilated them, effortlessly, with a single stroke of its light. How could one be alone while surrounded by this chaos? How could one say no, or even write down the letters

  NO

  when everything around one and within one is constantly saying yes?

  So all this happened off-stage, in the third person. There was no longer any place for the I. With all witnesses in flight, there remained only the actors themselves. Eyes, legs, nipples no longer went by twos. Skulls were no longer filled with tender images, with tales, with reasonings. Great masses of numerals turned the sky dark, rained down, ploughed into the ground. Words no longer meant the same thing twice running, they no longer remembered each other. Perhaps people went on writing letters, perhaps . . . Hunched over their sheets of paper, poets went on spinning their simple odysseys. Perhaps . . . The stuffy air of cafés still vibrated to a few songs, the sound of a guitar, a woman’s voice pronouncing words of love. Yes, yes, perhaps, perhaps . . . But it was of no importance, meant nothing. These were merely sounds among a host of others, sounds emitted by the great vibration-creating machine. No, what needed to be told now, on that very day, was the truth of the crowd. There were no longer souls, no longer feelings shaped like islands. Thought no longer applied itself to its minuscule linear pattern. There was no longer any single entity.

  So it all happens together. It all advances like an army of rats, with a single face, and breaches the ramparts. Like a floodtide with countless fulcrums, rising, rolling, pounding to bits. All the names. All the muscles. All life’s fingers pressing, groping, forming their path. Who shall speak about the masses? Who is the man who will finally understand the route taken by the crowd? He is himself that path.

  That is how the war started, probably, though by now it is too late to know precisely. It is spreading across the grey plain. It fills space. Sickness that ruptures membranes and sets the lymph flowing. It has chosen places inhabited by man. It has burst the dykes. It has touched the earth with the tip of its cone of pain, a single nerve among millions of nerves. It has sought out the body of one girl from among the millions of other girls. But of course war has always been war and exists outside thought. It
is everywhere. In the night’s dreams, in the sun’s gradual setting, in love, in hatred, in vengeance. It has only just started.

  It is not an accident. It is not an event. It is war.

  It is inscribed on papered walls, within flowers, across rose-windows. It is engraved on the surface of glass and water, in the match’s flame, in each grain of sand.

  War that does not want to win, that has no need to win. It is no longer a question of man’s squabbles or incursions, his Danzig corridors or 17th parallels. Those things happened very quickly, and those who died did not die fighting but by chance, because a bullet had traced a trajectory that passed through their chest or lung. There had been no connection between the eye that had conceived death and the steel tip that had inflicted it.

  But the war I am telling you about ignores nothing, it is dead from one end to the other.

  The heavy machine-gun, the Mauser, the crossbow, the blowpipe, the axe were basically tender because they were blind. They were only weapons. But the destruction I am telling you about has eyes. Its weapon is total, its crime unending.

  War that is capable of beauty. Radiating the glow of flames or a marine sunset. Moving like a cat. Its hair seaweed. War that is alive, truth, future! Why has the world suddenly been obliged to reveal its secrets?

  It is beyond the imagination of a girl. Were it within the imagination of a girl, there would be no problem. Her imagination would be prised up, wrenched out like a bad tooth, and everything would be normal again. Were it to happen within the eyes of a girl, her fate would be, of course, to have her eyes plucked out and replaced by two grapes. No, no-one’s eyes are involved. It is beyond eyes, beyond imagination. It is not an aching nerve. It is beyond nerves. Be what you like, say what you like: but do not think that anything will change. Close your eyes, write little one-word poems, take photos of women’s breasts, caress smiling lips. But do not start thinking that anything is going to be at peace.

  How to express that? To express it absolutely, there would have to be explosions and lacerations, there would have to be words come from outer space at the speed of light, words which would obliterate everything in their path, words like streams of molten lava, words which would whistle through the air and gouge great seething craters in the earth’s surface.

  One must, one absolutely must get out of oneself. And one must plunge so deep into oneself that one no longer recognizes anything, that everything becomes freshly invented.

  It has arrived slowly, then, and settled over the earth. A flight of circles, for example, and the rings have floated down to the ground, one after the other. Somewhere in space there is a great snake winding itself around its prey, its silent body ceaselessly casting its coils. Each time a fresh piece of flesh appears, the great snake makes a knot around it and squeezes.

  No, no, it is not that. A snake does not have that much strength. The battles that are waged for life are simple affairs. This is more clandestine, there are no faces or bodies. It is within things that the circles come into being. Everything generates circles. They swim around specks of dust, move apart, make matter tremble. Never-ending agitation that destroys every quality of permanence, of ecstatic immobility. Will-power is not external. Danger is not strange or foreign. It is fear that sets the world vibrating, that blurs images. Nothing is safe here any longer. Quickly, then, amass great blocks of stone and raise your granite monuments. Or it will be too late. Fear has no need of rocks and mountains. That is why men have erected so many pyramids and cathedrals, in their centuries-old struggle to prevent the liquefaction of the universe.

  Dying is nothing. But to become water . . . Then, as the water divides and retracts its membranes, to become gas. That explains the fear. The deserts of sand and bitumen are the last islands of consciousness among so many rivers.

  Above the city, the clouds are about to burst. Nobody wants to disappear. After being born, one day, and seeing the sun, and conceiving the idea of dryness, nobody can ever have enough deserts and caverns in which to hide.

  In the mouth, tongue wrestles with saliva. Words are a matter of teeth and hard palate and taut lips. Glands release the flow of saliva, through which words proceed to bubble. Sometimes one of these soldiers falls to his knees, lungs pierced. Then the flow of saliva that mounts in the throat and trickles from the mouth turns red. Instead of the expected shout of ‘Help! Rescue me! Come, come quickly!’ all that can be heard is a drowning gurgle, something like ‘Arrl arroull! Oooooorrl! Ohoooooorrl!’

  The sun’s civilizations are doomed. They could not last. All the blocks of stone, the temples and the stairways, together, could not dam the encroaching waters. Stone is fragile, the harbinger of dust. Mountains are not higher than the clouds. Eyes are not stars, they are lamps flickering out. Thought does not move straight ahead, like light. Thought is a stream of saliva.

  The solitude that used to reign, the kind that hurled you into the depths of space, that walled you up in its silence – the rapture of a body floating in muteness – no longer compels belief. When everything has become language, it is because all hope of understanding is dead. To be alone was to try to understand. But to be there with all the others, in the great whirlpool, swept along by the torrent that eats away the shores as it gathers speed, is not to understand. It is, fatally, to be the object of the great panic.

  All the:

  ‘I am’

  ‘I want’

  ‘I . . . I love’

  ‘I, I, myself, to me, my, mine, me, I, I, I!’

  and all the old memories, the photographs full of shadows and mystery, the sketches on scraps of paper, the poems about the I confronting the pageant of the sea, about the I confronting the beauty of birds, about the I sitting beside the woman busy listening to the beat of her heart, and about the I confronting Death: lies, blinkered lies! All a ruse to avoid seeing the war arrive, to forget the swelling thunder of the mob’s boots, to pretend to be no longer there when THEY arrive!

  The world has forgotten nothing. It takes its revenge, hastening up, for the massacre, from the depths of time. With a single stroke it will put an end to all the old dreams, all the anthems. It will cut short the refrain as it cuts the throat, it will spill thought and blood together.

  It blows out its smoke rings, and the darkness increases.

  What is the point of crying out? Bawl your lungs out, sob away: the world simply transforms your laments into noises, noises that will all clatter, groan, crackle, rattle, rumble, warble, scream, gurgle, whistle, sing and drum together. Listen, listen to the great music! You will never get away. To be alone. To be the only one. To be he who is, indefinitely. That was true peace. But today the soul has escaped through the gaping skull, diffusing itself across the heavens, vanishing over the ocean. Through habit, or through sheer cowardice, these odds and ends, these stammerings, these kinds of signature still survive. This is mine. That is yours, hers. Sometimes, those who have already been sucked into the common pit still imagine that they own things: mouths desiring to possess, eyes all set to conquer, footprints with which to measure the world. How to forget all that? Is there not a single crumb that bears your name? Is there not a dream, a breath of air, a gleam of light that belongs to you?

  All belongs to everyone. Nothing to anyone. All is no-one. O human gaze, rediscover power! Conquer once again! The world is eternally the same. Each time a drop of water forms under the spout of a tap, it means that one can wrench something away from the nameless mass. Each time a life is born, it means that a house has been built and that the rats will oust the occupants.

  An army on the march, trampling the fields, destroying bridges, pillaging, raping, smashing. Invisible army, devoid of thought, devoid of actions!

  Where does this enemy come from? Can it be possible that it springs from the mind, solely from the mind, to wreak its havoc? Can it be possible that man harbours such hatred for men, that the tree harbours such hatred for trees? Everything is designed for destruction and execration. Tenderness, security are
wholly absent: there is only this ferocious army with eyes that blur the sight and make the body teeter in space. No interplay, no contest: just the need to win, day after day.

  Evil is born at last. It had been talked about for so long that people were beginning to have doubts about it. Until this moment evil had been unimportant, it had its heroes and its judges. It had its frontiers. Its first appearance on the earth had been almost fortuitous, a storm-like explosion accompanied by condensation, concentration, thunder and lightning. Peace came close behind it. Today, at last, man knows evil. It is no longer the result of a conjunction of circumstances, it is no longer a mood. It is IMMENSELY EXTERNAL.

  The evil – the war – is to have imagined the external. Then, having imagined it, to have opened the doors of the internal. The delicate substance has leaked out, to be absorbed by the dense ocean. Fear began its reign on the day that this girl blurted out, jokingly perhaps, or simply because it had suddenly become the truth:

  ‘I am nothing’

  followed by some declarations of freedom:

  ‘I want nothing’

  ‘I won’t have children’

  ‘I no longer believe’

  ‘You don’t exist’

  The world had failed to crumble, as she had expected it to do. Everything had remained intact. Vehicles had continued to move along the tarred roads, people had stayed on their feet, aeroplanes had gone on flying. The terrible thing was that something had disappeared, had withdrawn from the core of all beings. It was invisible, no-one knew what exactly: just something. There was a hollow, now, at the core of each object, a cavity with a very narrow orifice but an interior vaster than a grotto, rather like a woman’s belly.

  It is within these cavities that the war takes shape. Each object is a huge uterus, within the still vaster uterus of the world.

  All these bellies give birth. War, this war, is precisely that: the act of procreation.