War Page 13

  ‘It’s true that, over there, they are fighting.’

  And one could indeed hear in the distance the dull rumbling of the whole war. It reached the centre of the esplanade under the black sky: engine noises, cries, appeals, the belly-rumbles of television sets, sighs, the whirring of cog-wheels, the gurgling of drains, the squeaking of randy mattresses, the zigzagging of neon signs, scraps of the conversation of bargaining prostitutes, slaps, theatrical rejoinders, the sounds of pinball machines and cash-registers ringing up numbers, prayers, manifestos, clarinets playing Chippyin’, string-basses playing Wednesday night prayer meeting, drums beating out Little T, electric organs playing I’m gonna move to the outskirts of town, harpsichords playing Buxtehude’s Preludes & Fugues, bagpipes wailing Lochaber no more!, and the terrible gravel voices hovering over the microphone in the semi-darkness, screeching so loudly that the heart began pounding furiously in the chest and the hands grew clammy and sweaty, voices repeating: I love you! I love you!

  * * *

  1Translation: ‘What is it that sees but does not grab? What is it that grabs but does not eat? What is it that eats but does not get a beating? What is it that gets a beating but does not yell? What is it that yells but does not weep? — Little black boy steals mango. So the eyes that saw were not the eyes of the one that grabbed. So the hand that grabbed was not the hand of the one that ate. So the mouth that ate was not the mouth of the one that got a beating. So the backside that got a beating was not the backside of the one that yelled. So the mouth that yelled was not the mouth of the one that wept.’

  . . . A living organism, in order to slow down its plunge towards the thermodynamic equilibrium of death, subsists on negative entropy in such a way that it seems to be attracting a current of negative entropy towards itself so as to balance the increasing amount of entropy that it produces during its life. . . . – (entropy) = k log (1/D).

  Erwin Schroedinger.

  WHAT FORMULA COULD possibly bring sleep, when there is so much beauty, alive, on the move, everywhere? To the east, to the west, to the north, to the south, the city stretches out, sparkling. The light from the sky is white, the air hangs motionless, the earth is a circular plateau. The girl called Bea B. is making her way through streets towards the spot where Monsieur X is waiting for her. She walks quickly in the sunshine, like a dancer on tiptoe, and the light flows about her, giving a radiance to each hair of her head. When she passes by the window of a big store, she sees her slim supple body moving forwards with its white garments floating in the wind. When she walks in the sunshine she knows that her shadow is reaching out behind her on the pavement. When she walks in the shade, her face becomes clouded by a light dust, as though she were floating through cobwebs, one after another. She says nothing. She walks along the street, alone, swinging her arms by the side of her hips, treading an invisible pathway with rubber-sandalled feet. Her eyes cannot be seen. They are hidden behind heavy sunglasses, two big discs of black plastic that ring her face. Reflections glide over the polaroid glass, stretching thin at the sides of the lenses, elongated rectangular bubbles that continually take shape, then burst.

  The cars’ bodies are rounded mirrors, and the girl’s own body swims slowly alongside the Buicks’ black wings, the lorries’ doors, the Citroëns’ bonnets, the Mercedes-Benzes’ hubcaps.

  As the girl walks along the street she recognizes, in passing, all the familiar signs, all the inscriptions, all the old refrains: scraps of crumpled paper, old fag-ends, pages torn from newspapers, revealing for a split second the headlines

  SENSATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS FULL PHOTO COVERAGE

  empty matchboxes, animal turds, human gobs, pebbles, hairpins, bus tickets. She recognizes the pigeons, the dogs, the flies. She recognizes the people, too, the men with their moustaches and spectacles, the women with their candy-pink skirts and their imitation-crocodile handbags. She passes through them like a kind of car with sealed shell and shining paintwork. She glides between their bodies, darting, hurrying, skipping round obstacles, constantly on the move.

  The hard ground is drenched by the light from the sky, the white light. The buildings’ high walls display their faces filled with windows and balconies. The whole world breathes in and out. Little clouds of invisible steam curl from mouths and nostrils. In the depths of bodies there exists a mysterious gland known as the thymus.

  Thoughts, too, come and go. Hertzian waves speed through the air and bounce off sheet-metal panels. Then they infiltrate into antennas, and flow down into things like black boxes, where loudspeakers begin to vibrate. These are thoughts, spoken words. They fly fast. They dance. They say:

  Today, today, weather fine, cloudless, limpid air, sun, light breeze from the west, beautiful sea, tension scarcely rising, heart beating at 96 pulsations per minute, traffic conditions along all main arteries fluid, fatal accidents 8 minor accidents 34

  exact time 16 hours 8 minutes 27 seconds stop

  The girl floats through the cloud of mosquitoes bred by thought, through the shoals of millions of quivering fish, and she too is a thought, a quick rational thought, a thought that says:

  ‘I am me, I am Bea B., I know the way’

  ‘I am the sun, yes, I am alone and I shine, the sun’

  She is there wherever things are astir, wherever there are bursts of light and noise. She makes her way past great crossroads full of winking lights and car bonnets, she strolls along streets lined with plate-glass windows, mirrors, slabs of imitation marble. She follows a bald man whose pate is shining in the sun. When he crosses over, she crosses over. When he turns left, then right, she turns left, then right. When he stops at the edge of the pavement to light a cigarette, she also stops and lights a cigarette.

  Sometimes there are vast perspectives, and she watches the boulevard shoot straight to the horizon, plunge to the centre of the earth. She walks on the left-hand pavement, because it is the sunny side of the road, and tries to think what she will do when she reaches the end of the boulevard. Over there, in the far distance, a cloud of mist and dust is floating and dancing like the smoke from a conflagration.

  So much beauty violence life. So many things, everywhere, that kill words. She hears all the cries spurting from the walls and the ground, she sees all the drops of liquid glistening in the light, all the clouds of gold dust and powdered mica. There are white mountains so high that the air crystallizes as it settles on them, sending out icy networks of bristling threads. There are lines so beautiful that the nature of the design they ceaselessly trace will always remain a mystery. And there are words so long, so extraordinary that they go right through the mind like bullets, opening gaping wounds that bleed.

  Whirlwinds hover over the ground, seeking in all directions with their mouths, twisting themselves round legs. Either the black tar is flat, so flat that a marble thrown by a child’s hand would roll for two hundred years without stopping; or else it undulates beneath the feet, billowing forward in great vertical waves, liquid cliffs that will one day, somewhere, come thundering down.

  The girl stays calm amid this chaos. She glides her lithe body between rugged surfaces, steers clear of crevasses and abysses. When the pavement’s cement harbours a pile of gravel, or an open drain, or a banana peel, she knows what to do about it: she skips lightly over the obstacle, never twisting or breaking her fragile ankles. When a distant window throws out a beam of light so white that it could reduce the whole world to dust, she turns her beautiful matt-complexioned face towards it and shatters it with a single blow from the blueish lenses of her sunglasses. When the roar of an engine approaches in an explosion that rips the air brutally apart, she is not frightened and does not run away: she simply lets the noise envelop her, and her half-open mouth expels the noise in the form of a sigh,

  ‘aaaah . . .’

  The girl journeys for a long while, like that, through the beauty of the city. From time to time she passes vast public buildings, stone towers three hundred feet high, towers of glass and concrete a thousand fe
et high, black steel pylons more than three thousand feet high. She walks through big department stores that are like ant-hills, through sites full of abandoned vehicles. She strolls by the side of muddy rivers in which barges are floating, she crosses over arched bridges. She is far away, untired, with her silent engine and the soft cushions of her tyres. She propels her hermetically-sealed shell bordered by glass windows, and the wind whistles in the ventilators. Everything is present, absolutely real. There is nothing invented. One could never invent anything. The streets’ corridors are inexhaustible, impossible to know them all by heart even if one spent centuries walking along them all from end to end.

  The girl had never dreamed of so much beauty. It was like entering a vast hall entirely lined with mirrors, or like looking through a magnifying glass at a postcard representing

  The causeway of the Passage du Gois (Vendée) at night-time

  Natural colours

  but this time one was really there.

  Somewhere in the city, right now, there is someone waiting. No-one knows who exactly, but someone. He is waiting behind the cement walls, in the waiting-halls of railway stations, in service stations with bright red petrol pumps. The girl walks towards him. As she threads her way through the dense crowd that throngs the streets, she knows that she is expected. Every screech of a brake, every blast on a horn means just that: ‘Come quickly, come, I’m waiting for you.’

  She goes round in circles, in the city, looking for its centre, and each time that she loops the loop she knows that she is a little closer. The city is also circling upon itself, a little like a wheel, a little like a propeller. There must surely be a centre somewhere, and that is what has to be found.

  The city is designed like an 8, the one truly infinite sign. Bea B. no longer possesses an age, a past, anything at all. She no longer possesses a home. She lives everywhere simultaneously, everywhere where there are walls and roofs and windows and stretches of black roadway. As she moves on, she studies all the openings, the skylights, the doors and the fanlights. She had never in her life imagined that there could be so many windows. They are so beautiful and calm, incised there in the great expanses of white wall. They are so deep that people will feel an insatiable urge to go on plunging through them. There are so many of them, and they are so motionless, that they could cover the infinity of space. Are there not more windows than stars? Are there not more windows than there are seconds in the life of the tree at Tula? The girl goes by in the street below, and she goes by each window. These eyes do not pass judgment; they are simply open, breathing the girl’s form like a mouth breathes air: uncomprehendingly. Is that not extraordinary, calm, beyond imagination?

  The air is transparent, neither too warm nor too cold. The air rests upon the earth, and the girl cannot see it with her eyes. But she sees it with her whole body, her skin, her nostrils, her lips. She drinks it in, with little sips, as she walks across town. Breathing is a quite astonishing business. With her mouth half open, the girl inhales a little air, and her chest swells; then she retains it for a moment, somewhere deep inside her, distilling it gently; finally, she exhales it through her mouth, and that makes a little invisible cloud impregnated with all the secret odours that are inside her body.

  Occasionally, she passes a lorry halted at a red light, and inhales the acrid fumes from the exhaust, and that is like a tranquil drunkenness, the odour of death, perhaps, bubbling in the bloodstream. The girl breathes in and out as she walks, and that too is a way of thinking of something. She fills herself up from the air’s great reservoir, now with her lips, now with her two whistling nostrils. Her skin breathes, too, the skin of her face, the delicate skin of her hands, the white skin of her belly concealed by clothes. She swims amid the white air, amid the light. At one and the same time she is a quivering engine consuming petrol drop by drop, and a kind of tree spreading leafy branches. The air is vast. She can see it, above the rooftops, stretching out its pale ceiling on which the clouds are painted. From time to time, a jet plane swoops through the air, very high in the sky, leaving a grey trail behind it. Or else it is a helicopter. Or a bird.

  Maybe Monsieur X is hidden in the air, diffused throughout it. Bea B. advances through his body, inhales his blood. But she does not know that, yet. No doubt that is what life involves: being drunk with air. (Each time one inhales, one gets a little drunker.)

  Bea B. walks up the endless boulevard, looking at all the magical things. On her way, she passes hordes of magical men and women who talk, gesticulate, smoke cigarettes and lick cones of magical ice-cream. She is only just embarking upon the story, the one that is told in a low voice, the meaningless story. The story that gets scribbled down on the pages of an exercise-book with a black pencil:

  ‘Once upon a time, during the present century, in a town, upon this earth, there was a little girl called Bea B. She lived alone, she had a grandmother and a brother, and every day she met a lot of people. In the same town there was a little boy called Monsieur X. They went riding together on a mighty 500 cc BMW motorbike.’

  In those days the whole city was reeling drunk. The crowd went lurching and staggering down the streets, the cars hurtled along the motorways, and the great white buildings pitched and rolled.

  But in those days the girl was unafraid. She walked quickly along the pavement, striking the ground with her feet, breathing through her mouth. She received back these millions of blows, they entered her body, sent sparks from her nails, teeth, hair and eyes. The electricity surged through her limbs, the radio messages penetrated her ears.

  Never had there been so much movement, so much beauty. The world had no desire to sleep, to die. Its energy burst forth from all sides simultaneously, in the sky and in the straight-limbed trees, as well as in the blocks of concrete and along the iron poles. The buildings’ enormous cubes, all seething with life and noise, had settled their bulk upon the earth. The girl passed by their outside walls and heard all the human voices murmuring, talking, yelling, shouting, roaring like bulls. All these voices spoke of money, politics, love, goodness knows what. It was like the vast sigh of a prostrate woman, a breath that rasps the throat for months on end. None of all this could ever come to a halt. So much strength and toughness could never topple. The world was infinitely understandable, vast, open, full of things to eat, things to touch, things to love or hate, things!

  It was never possible to say that there was NOTHING. The girl turned the corner round a ten-storey building, and there ahead of her was yet another street, yet another building. Each time that she put one foot in front of the other, she precisely filled the outline that awaited her. Above, below, in front, behind, to the left, to the right, there were THINGS!

  That was not dream. It was not falsehood, or poetry. There was no little notebook with a blue imitation-leather cover on which was written in gilt letters ‘EZEJOT’ DIARY, no novels with beautiful nostalgic titles, no letters ending up

  I kiss you tenderly on the lips

  Eternally your devoted

  Henri

  No, it was a peopled vastness shaken by convulsions, whining, pounding away. The crowd’s convoys ascended, descended. Study the ant and you will know mankind. The streets poured forth their streams of wheeled machines, the sky darkened under its mantle of flies, bats, Boeings.

  There were words, but they were no longer the words of poetry. They were no longer words such as: sinews, ponds, downpour, lucerne, forests, rustle, lair, fur, shrew, ret, wool, gravid, sprout, compost-heap. These were brand-new words, words that exploded violently, that struck mighty blows, that uttered exclamations, that insulted, slashed, stabbed ceaselessly. The girl read them as she went along. All these words. Advertisement-words. The words STOP – BUS – JUNIOR – NO – PARKING. The words

  Building-words. Words as huge as mountains and as small as fag-ends. She read the words written on lavatory walls, the words engraved in the pavement’s fresh cement. She saw that the manhole covers were embossed with the words

  NATIO
NAL GAS AND ELECTRICITY GENERATING BOARD

  She watched them flashing on and off at the summits of great scaffoldings, or else erecting the triumphal arches of their soaring letters throughout the city. Everything was in writing, but one had to know how to read. There were names of heroes, such as

  All these words that covered cigarette packets, matchboxes, postage stamps, vehicle side-panels, café doors, the buttons of leather jackets, wrist-watches, the tabs of zip-fasteners and the clasps of brassières. All these words that shimmered, motionless, like beetles or shell-fish. The girl went all the way along the boulevard, reading out in a low voice the things that were written all around her, things that she would never forget. And the words too became drunk, shot their rays into space, lit up like stars, made noises, breathed.

  The girl sat down in a café and drank a warm liquid from a white cup; she sipped the milky coffee through a straw and watched the plastic tube grow brown.

  Or she smoked a Kent cigarette while watching the passers-by through her dark glasses.

  She took an airmail letter out of her air-hostess’s bag, and read it slowly to herself:

  Earth, one day in spring.

  I have carried sadness with me since the day I was conceived. Perhaps you and I were born at the same moment. For twenty years now, the light has been seeking me out. I myself, hidden in a pale ray, am a dim and feeble light. I live. I cling to you desperately, because you resemble the image of a living creature that I recognize as being a unique species of great value to the world. I want nothing and I want everything, and my everything harbours a mysterious force that sends me soaring up like a kite. Like a kite, I hunt the sun of which I am so fond. I am fond of the darkness, too.