The Book of Flights Read online

  Everything formed a drawing, a handwriting, a sign. Odours sent out their luminous signals from the top of their towers, or from where they lay buried in their secret grottoes. Hogan drew his rubber sole lightly along the ground, and at once the eddies widened their floating circles. He lit a cigarette with the white flame of a lighter, and for just a moment, at the top of his hand, this thing resembling a volcano spouted fire and lava into the sky. Each movement he made had become dangerous because it immediately unleashed a sequence of phenomena and catastrophes. He walked alongside the wall, and the concrete crackled with sparks underfoot. He brought his right hand up to his face, and on thousands of glazed panels positioned in the air a kind of dazzling S could be seen swelling its curves. He looked into the face of a young woman, and her unbearably clear eyes sent out two sharp beams which stabbed him like blades. He expelled the air from his lungs through the nostrils, a simple breath that promptly began to burn with pale smoke spirals. Nothing more was possible. Nothing more came into being, then forgot its own existence. Everywhere there was this gigantic sheet of blank paper, or this field of snow, on which the traces of fear formed a deposit. Everything had its paw, its closefisted imprint, its hoofmarks. Wrinkles, marks, stains, white wounds with lips that did not close.

  One could not even think any longer. Hogan thought: ORANGE FRUIT WATER CALM SLEEP, and instantly a writing appeared in front of his eyes, inscribing in glowing outlines two concentric circles, a rain of downstrokes, a dash ending in a hook, and a grillwork that covered sky and earth. IDIOT ENOUGH ENOUGH: a flash of lightning with sharp angles, and a sun in the process of exploding slowly. DEPART CLOSE THE EYES LET’S BE OFF YES: and a host of windows opened in space, shining from all their bubble-flawed panes.

  Thinking was dangerous. Walking was dangerous. Talking, breathing, touching were dangerous. From all sides, the bursts of brilliance hurled themselves into the attack, the signs with their arms full of lightning sprang up before the eyes. The immense blank page was stretched above the world like a snare, waiting for the moment when everything would be truly erased. Men, women, children, animals and trees all stirred behind these transparent skins, and the sun sent down the raking fire of all its hard, white heat. Everything was like that, there was probably nothing to be done about it. And sooner or later, presumably, one would have become just like the others, a true light signal at the corner of a crossroads, a slightly flickering lamp, hint of a star with a fraying twinkle, a star that is a prisoner of its design. One would no longer be able to say no, or close one’s eyes as one went away. One would exist as a fanatical insect, all alone right in the midst of the others, and one would say, yes, yes, I love you, all the time.

  Then Hogan planted himself firmly on his two feet, and tried with all his might to bend his shadow upward in the direction of the sun.

  Nothing easier than pouring a little water from a bottle into a glass. Go on, try it. You’ll see.

  I INVITE YOU to take part in the reality entertainment. Come and see the permanent exhibition of adventures retailing the gossip that makes up the world’s history. There they are. They work. They come and go for days, hours, seconds, centuries on end. They move. They possess words, gestures, books and photographs. They act upon the imperceptibly changing surface of the earth. They add, multiply. They are themselves. They are ready. There is nothing to analyse. Everywhere. Always. They are the millions of centipedes scurrying around the old overturned garbage bin. The spermatozoa, bacteria, neutrons and ions. They quiver, and this long-drawn-out shudder, this vibration, this painful fever is beyond life or death, beyond words or belief, it is fascination.

  I would like to be able to write to you, as though in a letter, all that I am living through. I would like so much to be able to make you understand why I have no choice but to go away one day, without a word to anyone, without explanation. It is an action that has become necessary, and when the moment has come (I cannot say where, or when, or why) I will carry it out, just like that, simply, keeping quiet about it. Heroes are mutes, it is true, and genuinely important acts take on the appearance of the phrases carved on tombstones.

  So I would like to send you a postcard, to try to tell you about all that. On the back of the card there would be a panchromatic photograph, coated with a layer of varnish, and signed MOREAU. The photo would depict a little girl clad in rags, her skin the colour of copper, staring at you with scared eyes ringed by black lashes and eyebrows. The pupils of her eyes would be dilated, carrying a luminous reflection in their centre, and that would mean that her look was alive, for eternity perhaps.

  The little girl with budding breasts would be holding her body in a clumsy pose, her head and shoulders turned in the opposite direction to her hips, and that would mean that she was ready to take flight, to disappear into nothingness.

  She would bring her right hand up to her mouth, with a gesture that might have been intended to be mutinous and a bit perverse but had remained scared, a defensive gesture. As for the left hand, it would be dangling by the side of her body, at the end of a naked arm, the skin deep brown. A tinplate bracelet would have slipped down around her wrist. And the hand, with its long dirty fingers, would be closed over the coin she had been given so that the photo could be taken.

  She would have been thus, appearing suddenly out of space one day, then forgotten, and all that would have remained of her would have been this fragile image, this prow-like figure sailing in the face of the unknown, affronting dangers, braving the spray that would break over her.

  She would have been thus, magically multiplied in thousands of copies, stuck into the wire clips of revolving stands outside souvenir shops. Starved face, eyes circled with black, dirty locks of hair hanging loose, no thoughts knitting her brow, no throb at her temples, no prickle at the nape of her neck, red mouth half open and constantly gnawing the curled index finger of the right hand. And then shoulders motionless, body covered by torn fabric, all drained of blood and water. Paper body, paper skin, fibrous flesh tinted by chemical colouring matters. It was she and she alone who had to be found again one day, had to be taken away, setting off with her, then, along the roads that lead endlessly from falsehood toward truth.

  Signed:

  Walking Stick

  MEN AND WOMEN, now. There are lots of them, of various sorts and ages, in the town’s streets. They are born one day without being aware of the fact, and from that day onward they have never stopped fleeing. If one follows them as they wander around, or if one watches them through keyholes, one can see them in the process of living. Then in the evening, if one enters the post office, one can open the old dusty book and read their names slowly, all the names they have: Jacques ALLASINA. Gilbert POULAIN. Claude CHABREDIER. Florence CLAMOUSSE. Frank WIMMERS. Roland PEYETAVIN. Patricia KOBER. Milan KIK. Gérard DELPIECCHIA. Alain AGOSTINI. Walter GIORDANO. Jérôme GERASSE. Mohamed KATSAR. Alexandre PETRIKOUSKY. Yvette BOAS. Anne REBAODO. Patrick GODON. Apollonie LE BOUCHER. Monique JUNG. Genia VINCENZI. Laure AMARATO. All their names are beautiful and clear, it is fascinating to read them on the directory’s much-pawed pages.

  One could equally well be called HOGAN, and be a man of white race, dolichocephalic, with fair hair and round eyes. Born in Langson (Vietnam) about twenty-nine or thirty years ago. Living in a country called France, speaking, thinking, dreaming, desiring in a language called French. And that was important: if one had been called Kamol, born in Chanthaburi, or else Jésus Torre, born in Sotolito, one would have had other words, other ideas, other dreams.

  One was there, inside the square traced in the muddy ground, together with the shrubs and boulders. One had eaten so much from this soil, drunk so much from these rivers. One had grown up in the middle of this jungle, one had sweated, urinated, defecated in this dust. The drains had run under the skin like veins, the grass had trembled like a tuft of hair. The sky had been there, all the time, and it was a familiar sky dappled with little wispy clouds. At night there had been many stars, and a moon that was somet
imes round, sometimes hollowed out. One had performed these countless acts without thinking twice about them. One day, one had seen a fire burning in the middle of a field, on this very portion of the earth, that same day of that same year, under just such a grey cloud, twisting these twigs and gnawing this bit of rotten wood.

  Another day, one had seen a young woman passing in the street, keeping to the sidewalk. She was holding a yellow plastic handbag in her right hand. And one had thought that she was the only woman in the world, as she advanced, placing one foot firmly in front of the other, moving her long naked legs, making her hips sway under the pink woollen dress, carrying before her her two breasts encased in the black nylon brassière. She was walking in a very straight line up the deserted street, and one had said:

  ‘Miss, I wanted, I wanted to ask you something, if you don’t mind, forgive me for accosting you like this, but I wanted to tell you, I.’

  Lighting a cigarette, in the noisy café, and sniffing the pleasant odour emanating from the pink woollen body:

  ‘You know, you are very beautiful, yes, it’s true, you are beautiful. What’s your name? Mine’s Hogan, I was born in Langson (Vietnam), do you know where that is? It’s on the Chinese border. Shall we have another coffee? Listen, honey do – you mind if I call you honey? – there’s a good movie at the Gaumont, Shock Corridor, I’ve already seen it twice. How about it, huh?’

  And it would have needed very little, an insignificant shift to the right, a few different syllables in the name, and, instead of saying that, one would have said:

  ‘You filthy slut! Do you think I’m not on to your tricks? You, you did it on purpose, I got wise to you months ago, you’re trying to kid me. Do you think I’m not on to that cigarette-pack stunt of yours? Do you think I didn’t see what was going on? Slut, crummy bitch, and stop walking, will you, listen to me while I’m talking to you, don’t, don’t pretend you can’t hear me!’

  And one would have made a gesture with the arm, and at the end of the arm the hand would be gripping the handle of a sharp knife, and the cold blade would have penetrated the young woman’s left breast at a slight angle and she would have said:

  ‘Hah!’

  – just once and died.

  It was a particular day in this century, in a street of a town, on this earth, under the sky, in the air, with the light that infused everything through and through. It was about noon, with man’s constructions all around. It was raining, it was fine, the wind was blowing, not very far from there the sea was producing waves, black or blue vehicles were speeding along the highway bordered with plane trees whose trunks were painted white. Inside the concrete casemates, the transistors were playing music, the television sets were crammed with jerky images. In the movie house called OCEAN, at one end of the dark hall, there was a white blur on which one could see a man lying on a bed beside a naked woman with loose, flowing hair, and he was stroking the same shoulder over and over again. Their voices could be heard coming out of the wall, raucous, cavernous, sibilant. They were saying trite things,

  YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, YOU KNOW YOU

  I’M SCARED SIMON

  YOU’RE SCARED

  YES YES

  YOU’RE SCARED OF ME

  NO IT’S NOT THAT I MEAN FOR ALONG TIME NOW I’VE WELL WHEN I FIRST SAW YOU I DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD TURN OUT LIKE THIS ONE DAY AND THEN YOU’RE GOING AWAY AND IT WILL BE LIKE NOTHING HAD HAPPENED YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

  and a little farther away, at the back of the huge darkened hall, a woman was counting coins in her hand, examining them one by one in the glimmer of a pocket flashlight.

  The street was full of names, everywhere. They glittered above doors, on transparent shop windows, they blazed at the back of gloomy rooms, they flashed on and off again in a never-ending sequence, they were exhibited, hanging from pasteboard placards, engraved into tinplate, painted in blood-red, stuck on to walls, on to slabs of sidewalk. Sometimes, an airplane passed across the sky, trailing a thin thread of white smoke that was supposed to be saying ‘Rodeo’ or ‘Solex’. One could talk to these names, one could read each of these signs and answer them. It was a strange dialogue, as though with ghosts. One said, for example:

  ‘Caltex?’

  And the answer came immediately, in a bellow:

  ‘Toledo! Toledo!’

  ‘Minolta? Yashica Topcon?’

  ‘Kelvinator.’

  ‘Alcoa?’

  ‘Breeze. Mars. Flaminaire.’

  ‘Martini & Rossi Imported Vermouth.’

  ‘M.G.’

  ‘Schweppes! Indian Tonic!’

  ‘Bar du Soleil. Snacks. Ices.’

  ‘Eva?’

  ‘100. 10,000. 100,000.’

  ‘Pan Am.’

  ‘Birley Green Spot. Mekong. Dino. Alitalia. Miami. Cook’s. Ronson. Luna Park.’

  ‘Rank Xerox! Xerox! Xerox!’

  ‘CALOR . . .’

  Words, everywhere, words which men had written and which had since got rid of their authors. Cries, lonely appeals, interminable incantations travelling aimlessly along the earth’s surface. So it was, today, at this hour, with this sky, this sun, these clouds. Red, or black, or white, or blue letters were affixed to the premises, they were the signatures of space and time. Impossible to wrench anything off, steal anything. They were there, and repeated stolidly, it’s mine, it’s mine and you can’t take it, just try to take it and you’ll see, try to put down your name, to move in here, to take over from me. Just try! And you’ll see . . .

  But no one tried. People moved in all directions over the street’s level surface. They were not thinking about words.

  It was the same thing with cars, for example. People climbed effortlessly inside the gleaming coachwork, sat down on the red upholstery, turned the ignition key, pressed their left foot down on a pedal, and pushed the lever upward. And the car moved off gently with a trembling glide, and there was no one sitting at a café terrace to look at the tyres and say:

  ‘Why, when one comes to think of it, why does the wheel start turning like that?’

  At the most, there was someone, a youngish man with a thin face and flaxen hair, reading a paper with a ballpoint pen in his right hand. Coming up behind him, it was possible to read over his shoulder:

  DURING THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

  There were many other things around the place. There was a young woman with a very white face, heavy eyes shining within their dark haloes, body squeezed into a white dress, legs planted firmly on the concrete ground. She was saying nothing, doing nothing. Between two fingers of her left hand, an American filter-tipped cigarette was smouldering. She was standing in front of the entrance to a bar, and from time to time she took a puff while looking across the street. Behind her, inside the bar, the sound of some piece of music vibrated mechanically. As she blinked, her gaze slid to the left. Her legs shifted slightly, bringing her body forward, then back again. She was there nonstop, like a statue of iron and silk, exhaling her perfume, breathing, her heart beating, her muscles tense, brassière fastened by a bakelite clasp pressed against the flesh of her back, her lungs filled with tobacco smoke, sweating a little under the armpits and along the loins, listening. Thoughts of a kind passed behind the eyes, fugitive images, words, mysterious impulses.

  LEON MARTINE phoned yesterday evening BASTARD bastard leave sooner get the hell out 2000 red car well well I know him AV yesterday why 2000 2500 or 3000 and Kilimanjaro rendezvous and buy ham take it easy Victor Mondolini ah that’s the coiffeur she must be 35 more perhaps no and at the Pam Pam all this lot all these things to cope with this whole parade.

  But she was not the only one. Everyone thought, everyone had ideas, longings, words, and that whole lot stayed hidden inside their skulls, their bowels, even their clothes, and one could never read everything that had been written.