War Read online

  But what are you seeking? I have found you, and nothing else matters any more.

  I want to find you again by closing my eyes. What shell encloses you, in this vast ocean, and in what seaweed is your name entwined?

  Woman beyond all bounds, why do I not know the colour of those eyes of yours that have laid the world’s heart bare?

  I wish my arms were long enough to encircle the twisted trunk of an olive-tree, or the statelier trunk of an oak.

  A yearning to roll with you on the warm sands, one day of a summer invented by ourselves. Candles . . . lit, extinguished. I am very fond of candles; torches, too.

  To wander through the night, holding hands from fear of the heartbeats that are audible. Fear, too, of the day when people crossing the street will find me lying on the ground, covered in blood! I have a crown to give you, whenever you would like it. I will crown you now, with paper and with words of praise, or make you queen for one night of tender caresses.

  I would like to talk to you for a long time, with my hands clasped in your own, talk to you gently and sadly, like now . . . Send me an answer, I beg.

  DON

  She screwed the letter up and put a match to it, in the ashtray inscribed

  The Beer from Alsace – Mutzig – Mutzig

  and meanwhile people continued to pass by.

  Later, the girl got up and walked across the big room with its mirror-walls, listening to the music, a low-pitched thundering of The Animals’ See see rider. She went up to a burly man wearing a black pullover, and asked him something. The burly man pointed silently towards the end of the bar, and the girl approached the door on which was written

  TOILETS

  TELEPHONE

  She pushed the door and found herself in a sort of dark corridor. At the end of the corridor there were three doors on which were written respectively

  GENTLEMEN LADIES TELEPHONE

  She opened the third door and entered a deal-lined booth, in which a naked bulb was burning. Then she inserted a token into the black machine, unhooked the receiver and dialled a number. Then she had a telephone conversation:

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing – and you?’

  ‘Nothing . . .’

  ‘You know, I saw you in the street, the other day.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes, I didn’t dare speak to you, you . . . you were walking so fast.’

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘You looked very preoccupied.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, three or four days ago.’

  ‘Have you seen anything of Henri?’

  ‘No, not lately.’

  ‘So what’s been happening to you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Are you working at something?’

  ‘No, not for the moment. I saw an advertisement the other day for a dentist’s assistant. You know, someone to open the door and so on, but I . . . frankly, the idea didn’t appeal to me.’

  ‘And your grandmother?’

  ‘She’s fine, thanks. She wrote me last week.’

  ‘Did you answer her letter?’

  ‘Yes, I sent her a postcard with the picture of an aeroplane on it.’

  ‘That’s nice . . .’

  ‘And how are things with you?’

  ‘Oh, pretty quiet.’

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Good . . .’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘You mean at this moment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In a café, in town.’

  ‘Many people there?’

  ‘Yes, quite a few.’

  ‘Had anything to drink?’

  ‘Yes, a white coffee.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘With a straw.’

  ‘With a straw?’

  ‘Yes, I like it that way.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘It’s funny, you know, I . . . I was thinking about reality, just a moment ago.’

  ‘About reality?’

  ‘Yes, I was thinking that maybe it is a good deal less important than people imagine.’

  ‘What, reality?’

  ‘No, things – I mean, seeing things. I was thinking that it was less important to see them than to hear them, for example, or to touch them.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Yes, well I think I do, yes.’

  ‘Do you say that because you are on the telephone?’

  ‘No, I was thinking – that perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible to be blind, that perhaps it would be far more terrible to be deaf, or anaesthetized. With silence following you wherever you go.’

  ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘You know, when you are in a dark room and suddenly you hear a cracking sound, you get a feeling of terrible reality, even the tiniest creak has that effect, whereas with a ray of light you don’t even see it.’

  ‘That’s particularly true of dogs, they are always listening and sniffing, but they hardly ever look at anything.’

  ‘Yes, my grandmother used to tell me that I was like a dog because I sniffed at the things that people gave me.’

  ‘You know, there’s a saying of Heraclitus that comes down to the same thing: if all things turned into fumes, we would learn to know them through our nostrils.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. I love all sorts of smells. The different smells that books have, for instance, and the smell of bread, the smell of earth, the smell of upholstery in new cars.’

  ‘The smell of wool.’

  ‘Yes, that’s pleasant. And touching things is pleasant, too.’

  ‘Yes, some things are bristly, some are cold.’

  ‘The things I like best are stones, glass, warm wood.’

  ‘Sand.’

  ‘Yes, when it’s very fine.’

  ‘And water is extraordinary stuff.’

  ‘There are things that are unpleasant to touch, too, like rough fabrics, blankets, velvet. And then imitation marble, which looks like stone but never gets cold.’

  ‘Things that make you sticky, too, like glue and jam and grease.’

  ‘Ah yes. I’m always washing my hands because of that.’

  ‘It’s pleasant, washing one’s hands. Perhaps it’s on account of the soap, because at first it feels sticky, and then it all washes away with the water.’

  ‘You know, I can never understand why people go to the cinema all the time. They should, oh I don’t know – they should sit in darkened rooms and instead of a film one could distribute odours and noises, and one could give them objects to touch. I’m sure that would be far more interesting. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Perhaps they couldn’t stand that sort of thing? It might drive them crazy?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, I think that when they left the place they would all write poems. Because there would have been visual effects, as well, you see, not sentimental stories like in all the films but lights bursting in their eyes, and curtains of smoke, and images flashing on for a hundredth of a second at a time, and words too, nothing but words being shouted or mumbled right into the microphone. I can’t understand why people always think that reality is basically what the eyes see. Anyone would think they have cameras instead of eyes, and boxes of colour-slides instead of brains.’

  ‘Yes, it’s funny.’

  ‘Right, well, I think that’s all I had to say to you today.’

  ‘You see, we kept it up for quite a bit.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Sure. I didn’t time it, but it must have lasted five or six minutes.’

  ‘Not longer?’

  ‘But that’s a lot, you know, on the telephone.’

  ‘What about the voice?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes, you’ve made a lot of progress since last time.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Of course, there are still too many pauses. On
the telephone, that’s quite out of the question, you know.’

  ‘But I have to stop and think occasionally, don’t I?’

  ‘Sure, but you’re supposed to go on saying something. That’s indispensable, otherwise the person on the line gets the idea that you’ve gone, which is annoying.’

  ‘OK, I’ll remember.’

  ‘And how about gestures? Do you make gestures?’

  ‘No, I can’t manage it. I’ve tried, but I simply can’t gesticulate in front of a machine.’

  ‘You’re wrong, you know, you should gesticulate. You should say, for instance, I’m going in that direction, and then point with your arm, to show where.’

  ‘But what’s the point, since you can’t see?’

  ‘No, you don’t understand! It’s the telephone. The telephone. It’s not just any old machine. It’s like television or radio or one’s own car. If you want to understand the meaning of ritual you have to believe in it. Otherwise, you remain an outsider. Do you follow me?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right – I really must try.’

  ‘It’s not just any old thing, the telephone. It’s a machine for, umm, making one’s confession. There you are shut up in a booth and you are speaking to everybody. Understand?’

  ‘You mean, when I’ve learned how to telephone with the right voice and gestures and so on, it won’t matter any longer whom I telephone?’

  ‘In the end, no, it won’t matter any longer.’

  ‘So, in other words, I could even telephone without having anyone to talk to?’

  ‘Yes, even by dialling numbers at random, then there is no-one on the line any longer, no telephone, nothing any longer. But that’s an ideal state of affairs, of course. I don’t even know whether anyone has ever achieved that yet.’

  ‘You’re quite sure that that’s the way to go about it?’

  ‘I think so, yes. You see, if you really want to not just win the war but exist within it all the time, knowing what’s going to happen, when it’s all going to break out, then you need to be aware of what you are doing. You have to have a total insight into machines, into all those gadgets, radios, telephones, cars, aeroplanes, cinemas, ballpoint pens, washing machines and radar screens.’

  ‘It’s terrible, I –’

  ‘And the only way is to understand what they are concealing, what it is that they have there in their innards.’

  ‘And you, what are you studying at the moment?’

  ‘Oh, I’m still working on small things. Yesterday afternoon it was a cigarette.’

  ‘What brand?’

  ‘Peter Stuyvesant. To help me, I substituted kef for half the tobacco in it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So what effect did it have?’

  ‘That wasn’t the point. I mean, it wasn’t for the sake of beautiful dreams or whatever. But kef cools one down, and then one can concentrate more easily. I smoked that cigarette right down to the filter, and the best thing of all was that in the end I forgot that I’d been smoking. Perhaps one day I’ll succeed in smoking without cigarettes.’

  ‘Well, it all sounds like a big joke –’

  ‘No, really it isn’t. At least, it’s not meant to be. I think it’s the only way of fighting against everything that is around us. You see, Bea B., there are too many things, there are too many things.’

  Then, since no more vocal sounds were coming out of the receiver, Bea B. started listening to the distant humming that vibrated against her ear. She listened for quite a while, breathing steadily in and out. She looked at the booth’s white wall a few inches away from her face, the thickly painted wooden wall. People had written many words on the white wall, with ballpoint pens, with fingernails, with the edges of coins. Words, numbers, letters, and the same kind of zigzag designs that electrons leave on the vastness of the photographic plate.

  Then she replaced the receiver on its hook, and the black machine made a whirring tinkling sound, and the thought came into her head that one day, perhaps, she would be able to telephone like that, from a booth, to the planet Saturn, or the centre of the earth, or her dead grandmother.

  Dear XX

  I am writing to ask you just one more thing. I don’t know how to put it, and probably there isn’t any answer, anyhow, at least not a definite answer. I don’t know how to ask you this. I could ask you WHO AM I? of course, as though we were playing some children’s game. Or I could describe one of my dreams to you and ask you to analyse it. But that would not be the truth. I could compose a poem like the one I did the other day on a piece of paper with a ballpoint pen:

  The infinitely flat earth, lake of mud, river, waveless sea, sky, sky of earth, blazing grasslands, road, grey asphalt road for cars to drive along.

  Rooted.

  Immovable.

  There is just a single cry.

  What does it say?

  It says

  I AM ALIVE

  I AM

  That’s what it says.

  Faced with the immensity of time, with lake of mud, river, sky, road, always the same cry and it is not easy to hear what it is saying.

  And it is not TO LIVE! TO LIVE! but perhaps

  TO LOVE! or TO DIE!

  From deep in the throat.

  Faced with indifference, pool of dead water amid impassive vegetation, cold body between the sheets refusing with closed mouth and eyes

  It hurls itself forward

  Smashing its way

  It is yet another cry

  It says:

  Slut! Filth! Trash!

  Disgrace!

  In the stifling black night, forests of sounds, vain dreams, world turned upside down preposterous shadow of the intelligible, mane growing inwards,

  hairs that have already invaded throat and belly,

  There is a light

  the tip of a cigarette

  the reflection from a storm-lantern

  the eye of a cat

  Straight rigid cry, hit, cat’s eye, gleam, droplet,

  point, hole, tower, stone, word, noise, taste, skin,

  being, being,

  tigers, tigers,

  ticks that I let loose upon you

  demons that are my sentence of extermination for me, for you, for all,

  to burst through the sky, the skin, indifference.

  Ho! Ho! Houa! Houa!

  Sometimes I put together poems like that, on scraps of paper, and then I burn them. It is curious, watching a poem burn. The flames spread quickly, and one can watch the paper twisting and the words becoming paler and paler and vanishing. When I do that, I lean over the piece of paper and smell the odour of smoke and heat. A burning poem releases a great deal of heat. And then I try to read the final word, you know, the word that one sees stirring last of all amid the flames. I have read morning, and notebook and America. Those are the words that I want to remember for a long time. I’m telling you all this because basically I don’t know the question I mean the real question that I want to ask you. I don’t know, either, whether there are answers to questions. Perhaps when one asks a question one is simply asserting something in reverse, and that’s what annoys me. WHY DO PEOPLE ALL WANT TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES? They are so intelligent, all of them, and there they are, trying to keep things together. They all want to do something. You see, they don’t want to disappear. They want to assert themselves. I wonder why? With all their sports cars and poems and music and love affairs. They would all like to conquer the world, persuade the others, convince them; so they juggle with words, or put blobs of colour on canvases, or devise objects. Children are like that. Old people are like that. What really makes me sick, though, is that I am like that too. They spend their whole time fighting each other, and then they say: I did this, or: I am far lovelier than you are. At school, the girls were all like that, wanting to show off everything they had, wanting to be noticed. When they had beautiful breasts they wore tight sweaters, and when they had beautiful eyes they put mascara on their lashes so
that everyone would see that they had beautiful eyes. When I was working at the paper, it was just the same. They all wanted to be noticed, you know, they treated themselves like detergent powder, trying to find the package design that suited them best. That’s how I let myself be taken in, little by little; at the beginning I wanted to do as they did, I thought that I too could find the right box for my detergent. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t stand – I just couldn’t stand people looking at me and judging me like that, on the basis of the box design. So then I began to lose my grip on things, and that was terrible because no-one wanted to help me, the people were all happy to have found someone inferior. But it was my own fault if I was miserable as a result, because that meant that fundamentally I hadn’t completely abandoned the idea of expressing myself and asserting myself.

  Basically, that’s what I wanted to ask you, whether you think it’s possible? Whether you think it’s possible to succeed in not expressing oneself at all? Perhaps, whatever one does, one is always seeking that one thing, to be ONESELF, to hurt other people, to dominate the world. Even when one says nothing, one is saying something. Even if one managed to write, if it were possible to write, like this: perhaps that would be just as violent a way as the others of saying AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, I EXIST, I THINK THAT, etc. You know that phrase of Descartes: ‘I wish to believe that no-one has existed before me.’ That’s what is so terrible, having to witness war, having to watch this whole farce, the individual fighting to impose himself on others, it’s enough to make one sick, one longs to disappear, to stop being anything at all, and then one becomes conscious that one is acting that way, with all one’s condemnations, because one wants to be different, and then everything goes rotten and it’s no longer possible to be lucid. This desire to assert oneself is such a painful process. When I see others making the effort, my heart bleeds for them. They would do anything, anything at all, just so that people will listen to them.

  I remember this fellow, a couple of years ago. His name was Pepe. He was a gipsy, and played the accordion in front of café terraces. He used to dress up like an Argentinian gaucho, and he wore ear-rings. He was very tiny, this fellow, a dwarf really, and he used to play this absolutely incredible music to these people drinking glasses of beer. He always played the same tune on his accordion, just three notes with a funny kind of rhythm like the noise of a train engine. I found that absolutely astounding, because it wasn’t really music so much as noise that he was producing from his accordion, a noise to say that he was there. And at the same time I felt very ashamed for him, because no-one was paying attention, and people were giving him money to go away and make his noise somewhere else. So now, you see, each time I think about art, about human suffering, about the need to assert oneself, or things like that, I think of Pepe busy playing his accordion in front of people who don’t give a shit. And then there are all those people who kick up such a fuss, who all want to talk at the same time, who want to invent brand-new things, who want to change the world. Perhaps the only way of changing the world would be to suppress adjectives, or else for people to give up trying to express themselves. But what I am saying is silly, because in fact I can’t see how that would be possible. Women ought to be beautiful naturally, and not seek to seduce and bewitch, and men ought not to seek to dominate any longer. You know, I look at couples in the street. It’s such an extraordinary pantomime, such a blatant provocation. People don’t like to be happy for its own sake, they get their happiness from destroying other people. Their eyes are as hard as steel, and the women want so much to be admired. There’s no way out. And everything is like that. You know, XX, I look at a book, for example, and I see something extraordinary, something that holds my head under water until I think I am going to drown. I am so, euh, it seems so sensational to me that people are capable of inventing things. That people can take a sheet of paper and write what they think, just like that, without being ashamed. The world is so beautiful, XX, so terrible, made up of so many things already, so much life, so much space, so much time. So what would make it possible to believe oneself capable of adding anything new to it? What would make it possible to stop looking at it and listening to it and start writing it? What would make it possible to forget the world just long enough to write a sentence, not even that, a word, a mere syllable. It’s as though one were sleeping with eyes wide open, I don’t know how to put it, as though one had forgotten that sun, sky, sea, noises and odours exist. Some people consider it naive for others to express themselves through a car, by driving it along the motorways at 120 miles an hour. But isn’t it just as naive to believe that one can assert oneself better by writing a poem or acting in a play? How I would love the war to stop, if only for an hour, so that I could get some rest. It would be so nice if the war stopped; one could go to the beach, for instance, sit down on the sand and look at the sea. One would listen to the sea. One would no longer need to repeat the tragedy’s gestures and words, one would no longer be part of the show. Or rather, for once one would be within one’s own vision, and then one would no longer fear or hate anything. And above all, if it were still necessary to express oneself one would do it with easy things, and all those forms of expression would be not for conquering but for becoming a part of a whole. With pebbles, for example, with piles of dust, with caresses, with little gurgles. It would no longer mean: To hell with you all! I am the only one! I love! I loathe! I love! No, it would mean that the beach slopes gently downwards to the sea, and that the waves have travelled all the way from the island of Zante, or Pariparit Kyun, or Corpus Christi bay. It would mean that the beach is a space-ship heading for the sun, or that my name is written somewhere in some book, the Anabasis, or the Chilam Balam, or Selfridges catalogue for 1955. Yes, I would really like the war to end, so that I could start studying birdsong and learn to recognize the trails of hares. There are so many things to do and to learn, here. Only, I can’t do anything, because of the noise and the eyes, because of the walls I have to keep building to save myself from being killed. Still, we can make an effort, if you like. We could start by forgetting about names and signatures. There are too many signatures everywhere. People spend their time signing everything everywhere. They sign walls, trees, pavements, horn blasts, cigarette smells. Every time they see something they whip out their ballpoint pen and sign it. Every time they have an idea, while they are sitting talking at the café, they pause for a moment and look at you with shining eyes, and they SIGN! Using a felt-tip pen, they write on the idea, in block letters: