War Page 18

  The world has not always been there. But the moment that it was created, with all its streets and all its motorways, this big black limousine appeared and started to prowl around. This astonishing vehicle is very beautiful and very big, but no-one has ever been able to say what it looks like because it kills all those who approach it. All we know is that it is a very long black car, with no chrome at all. Its whole body is of a dull hue, even its windows are opaque, and no-one knows who is driving it. It prowls, day and night (preferably at night, when it can switch on its blinding white headlamps), along the deserted streets. It moves noiselessly, and those whom it encounters are later found squashed flat on the asphalt, with tyre marks stamped into the throat and sex, peculiar Z-shaped marks.

  And then, again:

  THE MYTH OF MONOPOL

  It is he who runs everything. He has armies of leather-jacketed cops patrolling the town, armies of cops who carry big rubber truncheons and keep fierce dogs on the leash. No-one knows precisely who MONOPOL is. He lives in fortress-palaces of a sort, by the side of the sea, or on the tops of mountains. He also lives in town centres, and he has huge glass and concrete structures built, and people are obliged to go there and buy. He has hordes of slaves, all dressed exactly alike and all thinking exactly alike; he has fleets of new ships and planes and cars that sparkle; he lives with a lot of very young and very beautiful women who have green eyes framed in black mascara, and long slim legs. No-one has ever seen MONOPOL, because he stays hidden behind his concrete walls, and then he is never in the same place twice. He simply spends his whole time putting up these palatial buildings, and handing out orders to his army of cops and slaves. He owns factories where millions of people work, but his riches never suffice. He loves gold and silver, hoarding it in great silent vaults guarded by his cops. He loves war, too, because his slaves kill each other with the guns he manufactures. And he loves power, because he is the only one who knows what he wants and how to get it. There are people who want to slay MONOPOL, and so they hurl grenades through his shop windows and under the wheels of his cars. But MONOPOL is invincible. He has many bodies, many lives. He is everywhere at once, behind the plate-glass mirrors, listening in to telephone conversations, on the other side of the television screens. He knows everything that is going on. Maybe, one day, MONOPOL will cease to exist. But not until every stone, every window-pane of his gigantic warehouses has been ground to dust. Not until the whole earth has burned fiercely for a year on end, so that everything is destroyed, down to the very roots.

  All such myths are there, around me. I listen to all these stories: those that the street gives birth to, with its shifting crowds and convoys of vehicles, and those that form in the sky as the Thunderbird streaks past with screeching jets. The myths inscribed on blank walls, with all their magic symbols, PSU, SFIO, PAN, PRI, PC, US=SS, LIBERATE PRAGUE, CADA ESTUDIANTE ES UN CHE. There are so many words reverberating everywhere, so many incomprehensible words, so many guttural cries. So many god-words and demon-words, on walls, on the pages of newspapers, carved into the doors of latrines. They do not seek to communicate. They say nothing. Their one aim is to leap upon me, bruise me, hammer at my head and throat. These are warmongering words, in a rage to conquer the world, flashing with a blueish gleam from the depths of plate-glass windows: BRANDT Chemical Co., WINSTON, SALEM, Frill, Airborne, UNITED FRUIT. They flash and wound with their sharp stings, they give fatal electric shocks. Monsieur X, I see all these pitiless weapons, everywhere, slicing through the air. Perhaps, one of these days, the words will strike me down. Perhaps they will stab me in the back while I am walking alongside a wall, perhaps they will rip through the back of my neck and smash my spine. Or perhaps they will confront me, and blind me with a single glaring light from their flash-gun. There are so many beautiful, dangerous things, Monsieur X, all determined to conquer. The world is streaked by the rays of all these objects, and all I can do is try to slip safely through the hail of bullets. It is no good my trying to understand them, to interpret their life, to tame them: they burn my hands, they are sometimes so hot that my eyes mist over as I look at them, and sometimes so cold that my thoughts freeze over and grind to a halt. Never has the forest contained so many splendid, malevolent things. Never have there been more terrifying tigers, more poisonous snakes, more pullulating insects. No tree has ever borne such a wealth of beautiful, succulent fruits: in their aluminium boxes they lie steeped in their own thick syrup, gorged with sugar and perfume. It is true, Monsieur X. There are millions of new stories that no-one has ever told, yet. Profound stories that whirl ostentatiously between the cities’ walls. Such true, such powerful, such speedy narratives that the mind succumbs before ever having understood. Stories about dark glasses, for example, or stories about leather belts. Stories about stainless steel knives, stories about wrist-watches, glasses, electric light bulbs, tanker-lorries, mirrors as vast as cliffs, transistors that speak for months without stopping. There are long-drawn-out stories that last for years and years, while the building sites raise their scaffoldings of planks, and the old cement walls fashion a fresh barrier. There are stories so rapid that one could tell a hundred thousand of them in a single second, sparks in the light switch’s sealed box, explosion inside the scorching breech, smashing of the nucleus in the cyclotron, typewriter key striking the letter K, bullet leaping from the pistol’s black barrel, clicking of the great electronic calculating machine as it multiplies the figure 17 632 411 722 006 181 by the figure 2 225 034 999 216 000 074 926 and produces the result 2 391 332 723 367 206 974 223 821 175 777 035 117 606. In the midst of all these, I am reduced almost to nothing. I try to hear the myths, but it seems fruitless. All these stories are talking at once, and I have only my brain to absorb it all. And yet, Monsieur X, I know that that is what has to be done in order to survive. I suspect, now, that I know what we all should do. It would be a great help to me if you would cooperate with me. What is needed, once and for all, is the preparation of a new bible, one that will speak of our new gods and our new calamities. A big blank book, you see, in which one would write everything down, just like that, simply by listening to all these stories whirling around us. One would write down the creation of the world, starting with a huge building site and the noise of pneumatic drills. There would be steamrollers lurching over the waste ground, and then the motor-pump sucking up the lake of mud. And then there would be the cranes turning this way and that in the wind, and the concrete-mixers revolving their great drums full of sand and cement. After that, one would write down the birth of plastics: the rivers of vinyl gliding slowly over the earth, the great sheets of dacron as immobile as ice-floes, and this whole intense glacial light, these cliffs of mica and bakelite, these jungles of cellulose.

  Another thing that should be told is how woman was born, emerging one day from her brand-new nylon sac, with sleek skin and hair and breasts and belly, then how she wrapped herself in her white plastic raincoat, and how she set off on her undulating journey between the stores’ opaque windows. One should repeat all these stirring glowing accounts that whirl around me all the time, these stories screamed by engines, exploded by jukeboxes, murmured by neon tubes. These stories destined to last for centuries. There is not much time left, by now, Monsieur X. Soon the eddies will be so strong that they will tear me away. Soon the light from all the lamps will scorch my eyes, and the moaning of the turbines will penetrate my head and make me speechless. There are not many days left, now. The words are aiming their bursts of machine-gun fire around me, and it is a miracle that I have not yet been riddled. One day, perhaps, I shall encounter the great black limousine that crushes those it finds, or else I shall cross the path of the Thunderbird, and its jets will reduce me to ashes. One day, perhaps, I shall vanish down an endless tunnel where streams of excrement flow. I think all the time of the lightning flash that will appear on the horizon, above the city, with its umbrella-shaped cloud and its millions of tongues of fire that will eat away flesh and nylon. I think, too, of the madness that
will erupt in an immense supermarket, and of the rivers of blood that will flow between the white counters. When I think of all that, I am afraid, and long to find the words that dissolve dreams.

  Good-bye.

  Bea B.

  P.S. Story of the silly cat.

  It was a very stupid cat.

  One day it fell asleep on the balustrade of the balcony.

  Then it woke up. While it was yawning and stretching its paws, it lost its balance, and fell from the third floor.

  Never saw anything stupider than the expression on that cat’s face as it started falling.

  To understand the acumen shown by so-called primitive peoples in observing and interpreting natural phenomena, it is not, therefore, necessary to assume that vanished faculties are being exercised, or that a supplementary sensibility is in play. The American Indian who detects a trail by means of imperceptible signs, the Australian who unhesitatingly identifies footprints left by some member of his group, proceed exactly as we do ourselves, when we are driving a car and judge at a glance, from a slight shift of the wheels’ direction, a fluctuation in the engine’s pitch, or even the apparent intention of a look, the right moment to overtake or avoid another vehicle.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss.

  When separate pains grip two parts of the body at the same time, the keener of the two dulls the other one.

  Hippocrates.

  THE GIRL CALLED Bea B. was poised at the edge of the great river of vehicles. It was exactly midday, in the centre of the city, and there was this immense boulevard stretching from one end of the earth to the other in an unbroken straight line, thrusting the buildings’ chalky cliffs aside, then squeezing them together again. The girl was not there simply by chance. For a long time now, she had wanted to make her way to this boulevard and stand there at the edge of the pavement, watching the river of vehicles flow by. Months ago she had started to hear the noise coming from the back of her room, the steady sound of the flowing river, a deep rumble that made the window-panes vibrate. It never stopped. Night and day she had listened to the distant rumbling, and tried to see where it came from. She had looked at all these flat roofs, all these walls, all these valleys of streets, but the noise came from farther away, as though it were issuing from an invisible cavern or even the very bowels of the earth. It was frightening. At night, if one looked in the direction of the noise one saw a sort of halo of rosy light hovering in the sky, and one imagined abominable things.

  That is why the girl was there, this midday, poised at the river’s edge. Standing on the pavement, beside the pole with its eternally winking yellow light, waiting. The sun was high in the sky, while on earth the shadows were very short. Bea B. was not alone: other people were waiting, wordlessly, on either side of her. Bea B. gave them a furtive glance and saw that they were ordinary folk such as one sees every day, matronly women carrying imitation-leather bags, and men wearing suits in various shades of anthracite. Some bespectacled, others not. From time to time a gap opened up in the flood of cars, a few seconds of empty space between the bumpers. Then the cluster of men and women charged onto the roadway and crossed over, swinging their arms energetically.

  Bea B. did not cross over. She remained standing on the edge of the pavement, waiting. Her right shoulder supported the strap of the red plastic bag that had TWA written on it in fat white letters. The girl waited, almost motionless, beside the iron pole. She saw the people stepping onto the opposite pavement, across the boulevard, and immediately the river began to flow again, with its rumbling of thunder.

  It was very hot. The sun was so high that it was scarcely visible, a white star vaguely lighting up the hazy sky. Below this star, upon the earth, the boulevard was the centre of the universe. Aeons of time ago, a cataclysm had opened up this valley amid the blocks of buildings, and now the river flowed, flowed without respite. The river of metal came swooping from both horizons at once, with two unswerving currents passing each other endlessly, one to the right, the other to the left. Bea B. tried to see the place where they originated at each extremity of the boulevard. But the air was shimmering and all that could be seen was a sort of grey cloud that looked like dust or ash and blended with the sky. Then she decided that it was impossible to know, that the double river had neither beginning nor end, and that it simply flowed like that, eternally, from one end of space to the other. Perhaps at each extremity the boulevard was swallowed up by a flaw, plunging to the very centre of the earth before gushing out again through another flaw. Or else perhaps there was a vast circular esplanade in the remote distance, a terminus around which the river swirled in a giant whirlpool before sending its waters racing back in the opposite direction.

  So the floodtide of cars flowed through the lunar valley, and the noise of their engines submerged everything. In front of the girl, the mass of metal and rubber swept forward rapidly, gliding over the black roadway with its thousands of wheels. It was a majestic, powerful movement that was taking place effortlessly alongside the pavement. Each car followed the one in front without stopping, casting a reflection of garish light as it passed, each car like a scale on the skin of a great snake. There were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, all identical, rushing along the valley, welded to each other by a tiny buffer of scorching air. The girl’s eyes jerked in their sockets as the cars passed, but her glance never lingered for more than a fraction of a second on each transient shape. There was no time. There were too many things to see, there was too much speed. She looked at the river as though she were a television camera, letting the luminous blobs flicker on the line-streaked screen. The wave of metal rolled on continuously, minute after minute, filling space with its steady motion, urging forward its flock of chrome fixtures and bonnets, parading its thousands of windscreens and glittering windows.

  It was like a train hurtling through an empty station, or like the dream in which one is falling, with eyes wide open, down the side of a grey building with a hundred million storeys. But this was even more terrible because it was happening in broad daylight, under the sun’s harsh glare, in the centre of the world. The people on either side of Bea B. had also stopped, and were staring vacantly as they watched the river go by. No-one here had anything left to say. Thought had soon been driven from the world by the movement of all the cars speeding along the boulevard. The noise had annihilated truth, and words. The uninterrupted power had annihilated will. The motion of the two opposing currents as they glided against each other had split the world in two, and it was no longer possible to speak of time or space. It was a vision from beyond life, total and brutal, a vision from within life.

  With a relentless roar the broad river sped simultaneously towards the opposite sides of the earth. It sped onwards in an absolutely straight line unbroken by whirlpools or rapids, with a single grand motion that swept straight through the landscape. Its steel body glided over the black ground, gradually wearing away the asphalt until it dispersed in the air as an impalpable dust. The engines raced, and the girl heard each one distinctly as it whizzed past, in the brief moment before the sound was swallowed up again in the general din. Sometimes the strident sound of brakes and horns or the grinding of changing gears unexpectedly filled the air. This composite noise flowed along with the river, a liquid sound like pebbles rumbling against each other, or like an invisible cataract. The noise never died down: it lasted hours, days, years, centuries. The noise pounded at the ears with all its weight, compressing the ear-drums like the depths of the ocean.

  The cars followed each other so quickly that there was no time to notice their colours. They glided in unison towards the horizon, towards the little cloud trembling at each extremity of the boulevard. The wheels all turned together, imprinting hard upon the tar the little zigzag patterns of their rubber tyres. They were waves of iron and glass, long undulating waves sparkling with lights, sweeping inexorably forwards . . .

  No-one could cross the river. Farther on, perhaps, there were great iron poles supporting a red lamp that
glowed from time to time; then the people had to leap onto the roadway, men wearing anthracite-coloured suits, and women swinging imitation-leather handbags from the pendulum of the right arm. They were bobbing up and down, perhaps, pumping their arms strenuously, in the gap that yawned briefly between the bonnets. But here nothing could halt the river’s flow. The windscreens swept onwards against the blasts of air, broad plates of curving glass with dormant windscreen wipers that reflected the rays of the sun. Bea B.’s eyes could just take in the lightning arrival of the headlamps and chrome-plated radiator grilles followed by the windows, metal panels and wheels. It was the same image projected repeatedly, endlessly, flashing past, taking shape and vanishing in almost the same moment. To the left and the right, the girl could see white walls rearing up, receding towards each horizon, and beneath them the torrent of cars coming and going. Sometimes great tankers drifted along among the moving mass, and she watched them loom out of the far distance like giant tree-trunks riding the floodtide. The river of steel ran along the cement-rimmed channel, its hard waves glinting in the sun, but it was not really a river: it was a flow of red-hot lava shimmering its way through the city while the earth quaked and rumbled. It was also a glacier on the move, bearing down its blocks of drift-ice and its tons of earth and boulders, grating ceaselessly against the tarry surface, hollowing out its valley through the mountains of buildings. Nothing could stop it. The sluice-gates had been opened, one day, at each end of the earth, and the raging flood was pounding the ground, wreaking havoc along its path. Slowly, as the years went by, the city would open up, the highway would become an esplanade, and the esplanade would become a desert. The rounded wings, the bumpers, the shatter-proof windscreens continued to forge ahead, chipping fragments off the pavement kerbs and flattening lamp-posts on their way. Sometimes, somewhere or other, the wall of a house would collapse in a cloud of dust, and the debris would be immediately swallowed up by the river. Or else a helicopter would suddenly appear overhead, buzz above the boulevard for a while, then vanish elsewhere.