War Read online

  The world is born and man has no part in its birth. Surrounding man, surrounding the girl, the world is engaged in its great effort at parturition. The girl sees the spasms pass through the air and the earth. Some of them pass through her body like tremors. The world longs to materialize, drags itself painfully towards the exit, towards the light. A terrifying experience, surely, for the earthworm multitudes.

  To have spoken, one day. To have said many words, to have put one’s freedom into writing. And then, another day sees the arrival of the greater freedom, the freedom that had paid no attention to words, that had simply carried on its struggle for liberation: the child, as he is being born, will gulp down the whole sea of the placenta with a single lick of the tongue.

  The girl does not want this son. She wants to poison him before he is born. How could one want a son who is going to kill his mother?

  Consciousness no longer exists. The gaze has ceased journeying to and fro. Now it is no more than a desperate plunge towards the bottom of the well, towards the horizon’s limits. The world is curved, its boundary wall can never be located. To start off afresh, it would be necessary to encounter the wall’s final rampart, the one signifying that the mind had reached full circle. It is clear, now, that voyages are purposeless. What would be the point of recognizing the limit of intoxication, of discovering it, knowing it? Nothingness trickles away, flees. Emptiness does not even want to be known. Suddenly the chasm flattens out, the better to become unfathomable.

  Knowledge requires that things shall first have been encountered, yet has anyone encountered them? And self-knowledge requires that one should first have touched oneself like an object. Worlds – and this is what I wanted to say, above all – are beyond discovery.

  People are faceless from now on.

  Yet the girl I am telling you about had a face. This is more or less how it was: a mask of soft white skin, with a rosy flush on the cheeks, on the chin and on the wings of the nose. With a few dark blue veins at the level of the temples, with a few wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and on the forehead, with two or three pimples, and a hundred or so freckles.

  Profound face with slight elevations, face of stone polished by water, face that affronted time. She carried it before her, and the wind glanced off her prow, parted at each side of her nose, swirled past her cheeks.

  Her face was not a random affair. It was she who had fashioned it, with her hands, perhaps, or else with her thought. She had modelled it to summon light, to pass through rain, to soar among the air’s layers. In the centre of her face she had created this pyramid-shaped appendage pierced by two holes, so that the cold air might penetrate right inside her body, sucked along these hair-sprouting canals to be purified, warmed and humidified.

  Beneath the nose there was this hollow, this shallow little gutter along which mucus was able to run.

  Then the lips, the two purplish-blue bulges scored by little wrinkles, tiny cracks. Through this entrance the outer world flowed down the throat, bathed the cells, invaded, cleansed, spread its thousands of fingers. When the lips parted, revealing the buccal cavity with its secret odours, the world did not hesitate – it entered. It was for that purpose that the girl had opened up the doorway at the bottom of her face. This had been the first onslaught upon silence. The head had ceased to be a stone tumbling through the sea’s night. The current had entered, bringing with it voices and non-stop music.

  I wanted to speak about the eyes, too. The girl had imagined the world’s light, had dreamed of landscapes flaming in the sun, of deep nights, of beauty. Then she had traced flowers of two kinds on her face, two blue grottoes that were soon glowing and through which the shimmering light entered. Around these sparkling grottoes she had outlined the petals of the black, tarry eyelashes that blinked lightly to open and close the pupils’ holes. It was from these objects, alive in the face, that perception had emerged. It was they that had suddenly made the world immense.

  The eyes looked. The universe lay before the eyes. After the girl had finished tracing these two fabulous designs on her face she had realized that nothing would ever be the same again. That is why, each morning of her life, she had sat in front of a mirror and had re-enacted the ritual of creation of the eyes, with her little paint-brushes and her tubes of black paste.

  After that, the face had been given the finishing touches: just two other holes for hearing sounds, and millions of hairs planted in the skin of the skull to prevent the face from opening up and spilling its contents into the sky.

  And then the face dissolved. It lost its features one by one, quite simply. The nose ceased cleaving the wind, ceased resembling the jet plane’s muzzle of rounded metal off which reflections glance. The eyes melted, smearing the cheeks with mascara, and the eyebrows’ arches faded away. The mouth closed, first of all, and the lips knit together; scar-tissue covered the wound, and finally nothing remained but a scarcely visible mark, a sort of violet weal covered by transparent skin.

  Then, all the small signs of life vanished. The moles, the hairs of the body and the head, the dimples, the wrinkles, the flaps of the ears, the tendons and the veins.

  What has been demolished in this way, with sledge-hammer blows and charges of dynamite, is a building. The lofty, beautiful façade has crumbled, freeing clouds of dust and swarms of cockroaches. The windows remained, for a brief moment, blind, hovering in the sky, so open that they had become invisible. Then, in one last effort, they in turn fell, floating down to the ground like dead leaves, and this was the sign that there would never again be any place to dwell.

  Without warning, the immense explosion erupts in the deserted city where all the men and women are in hiding. A volcano opens its jaws in the centre of the port, spewing its column of colourless flames into the air. Paving stones soar upwards, then hurtle down again, smashing through the roofs of houses. Windows shatter. Floors ripple underfoot, ear-drums are burst by the suddenly liberated weight. And the noise arrives, flattening everything against the surface of the earth, the cyclone of noise that sweeps over the city like a giant shadow, making straight for the girl, threatening to engulf her, to grind her to dust.

  Where to hide? Where? Is there one place left, in the whole world, that the noise has not invaded? Is there a lake with transparent glacial waters, a lake as pure as a mirror, on a mountain top, a lake of silence into which one might plunge and wash oneself clean?

  A long deserted beach, burning hot under the sun, with waves breaking endlessly along the whole stretch of sand, and swarms of flies buzzing around the heaped seaweed?

  Is there an asphalt road, unconcerned with happenings on either side of it, that stretches straight ahead until it perforates the horizon with a single clean stroke, opening up in space a great gash through which perspective’s receding lines might at last escape?

  Is there – and this is the question, the real question – is there one girl, just one, whether she be called Bea or Eva or Djemia, who has not experienced the war? Just one who has not made war with her body, with her gentle face and moist eyes, with her mouth and teeth, with her hair? Just one who has been neither prey for the hunter, nor hunter herself? On all sides are watchful gazes, darts bristling from loop-holes. On all sides, breastplates, shields, scabbards, arrows, machine-gun barrels.

  With the din of massacre in her ears, she flees, running barefoot across the ruin-covered desert. Along the dusty ground, pitfalls open up frantically, making weird sucking noises. The girl avoids them by jumping, sliding, zigzagging, hopping on one foot. She runs towards a dome, a knoll of stony dirt that dominates the plain. She runs towards it because she knows it is her last chance. Just before reaching it she trips and falls. The pain is so terrible that she cannot even cry out. She thrashes around in the dust like a fear-crazed, panic-stricken bitch. Falling spreadeagled, she has scraped one forearm against a flint. Blood starts flowing from the wound and, with the blood, her life. Quickly, very quickly, the process of disintegration sets in. Her flesh, her bones, her thoug
hts melt on the desert’s flat slab. Death, delicious and horrible, comes to alleviate her pain, little by little. She becomes almost weightless. She floats. She is intoxicated.

  Or else, some other night – January 10th, for instance – she dreams that she is lying on her left side, on a bare mattress. In the room, the faceless form has arisen and moves slowly forward. She has not seen it, but she knows: the flashing knife-blade advances in the gloom, a streak of horizontal light amid all these shadowy shapes. After an eternity of time, the blade enters her back, exactly between the shoulder-blades, and makes straight for her heart. The knife point touches the heart, punctures it, rips it, splits it open like a tomato. And she feels the fiery liquid spread and seethe inside her body. The pleasure is so strong that she faints.

  Or again, May 12th. The girl dreams that she is hanging from a gibbet.

  August 19th. She falls.

  August 20th. She drowns herself in a water-tank.

  December 4th. Two great spotted dogs devour her.

  Come now! Do you really not understand? You never did encounter these monsters, these shrieks, these voices! This war of yours is a product of your imagination! The dreams are self-explanatory. These abominations surrounding you are phantoms, mere phantoms! The apparitions emerging from the sea are wisps of fog! Just relax, now. It will all fade away. Face up to these chimeras. Slay them with your unblinking stare. Nothing can withstand the sun. Dread, uproar: this whole frenzy comes solely from within. See how peaceful the world is. Nothing is wrong! The earth has never been more placid. Sunsets have never been tamer. As for your chasms and abysses: puddles, mole-tunnels!

  Where do you hear cries? There is nothing but silence, as usual, flat cold impenetrable silence. Where do you see eyes? Rest assured that there is nothing to be seen but a few glaucous orbs sunk between baggy lids. It is all within you, within you!

  Nothing to make a fuss about, that’s for sure. Cascades of sparks, fireworks! Mere mechanical displays, lasting a few minutes at most. Cars speeding along their tracks? But they are stopping, they are on the point of stopping! The sounds of words: a little buzzing for your ears! There is no cause for alarm. Never has the world been etched in clearer relief, never have the whites been more white, the blacks more black.

  There is nothing to run away from. Hiding-places? What for?

  You are losing consciousness? But you are no longer alone. You are slipping into the whirlwind that embraces everyone else in time and space. Madness leads to nothing. Men have never been more real, do you hear? Never.

  You would do better to study this girl, as you call her. Look: she is walking along the street, window shopping. She stops. She bites her forefinger. She sets off again. Her heels tip-tap. One, two, one, two! She skips over a step. She enters a big store. She is radiant among the neon lights. Her hair, sparkling like spun glass, frames her plaster-white face with its blackened features. Her eyes move. She has seen something on the display counter. She reaches forward, her hand opens, then closes again. Her fingers with the painted nails are holding a little notebook bound in blue imitation leather, on which is printed in gilt letters:

  ‘EZEJOT’ DIARY

  The girl opens her red mouth and speaks. She says:

  ‘Ah yes . . .’

  ‘Good . . .’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  ‘Euh thanks.’

  It’s not true. It’s not true. You are lying on purpose, so that people will believe your fabrications. You are alone, quite alone, conjuring up fantasies from deep within yourself, and hoping to spread them through the world. To justify yourself, you want to annihilate the difference between the internal and the external. You want to live as one dreams, and vice versa. But the world is not listening to you. It continues its regular motion, and with its powerful arm driven by a concealed piston it traces long geometric lines which efface all your scribblings.

  Within this girl, as you call her. It is there. Not only in the depths of her warm lithe body, not only on this transparent skin, these breasts, this belly, these legs, this face. But also in these sheaths of nylon and wool, these brassières, these suspender-belts, these court shoes, this white oilcloth raincoat. She is neither free nor under restraint, this human silhouette. No-one is making war, no-one is killing. There is only this strange yet intimate force at work.

  The girl you are talking about wants a child. It is inscribed in her body that she will have several: little men and little women who in their turn will want children. Bellies and children go together.

  All is within her. The girl I am telling you about does not possess just a single body and a single soul. She possesses thousands.

  Where it has been possible to establish the position of a mass of one milligram of silver to within 0.1 millimetres, the uncertainty concerning the speed of that mass necessarily exceeds a thousand millionth of a thousand millionth of a micron per hour.

  Werner Heisenberg.

  THE GIRL CALLED Bea B. had seen the city take shape around her head. That had not happened all at once, far from it. It had needed years, years with the kind of months and days that one counts on the fingers while studying the leaves of a calendar, or by marking a little cross every twenty-eight days.

  The first day, there had been this hotel room with yellow wallpaper and a blue curtain drawn across the window. That day, everything had emerged from the bed, from the sagging mattress and the white sheets. Emptiness had made off, half flying, half swimming; it had spread out through the cold air, it had run through the street, it had lifted the room up to the top of a kind of tower that soared above the sea of sounds and movements.

  By the eighth day, all sorts of roads had taken shape like the rays of a star, or like the spokes of a wheel. In the centre, at the hub, Bea B. was seated in a chair, listening to the sounds of water draining and flushing away along the walls.

  On the thirtieth day she had seen faces. At the side of the clusters of houses, a man with shining eyes and a vertical crease between the eyebrows.

  By the seventy-third day the frontiers had receded farther. Beyond the vista of roofs and terraces, following with her eyes the channels of one-way streets, she could see the looming shapes of great tree-shaded gardens, lawns, fountains, gravel paths. Tiny children ran, shouting, up and down the paths. Pigeons scratched and pecked. In a shady spot a steady stream of men filed in and out of a brick-walled urinal.

  The one hundred and second day brought a vast ring of outer boulevards; the following day an airfield, a grey desert over which aeroplanes crawled slowly.

  Etcetera. Using her head, the girl, Bea B., tunnelled a hole from the fifth-floor hotel room down into the ground, forcing coils of rubbish and assorted objects along it towards the open. Each day, the area expanded. Miles of roadway unfurled, sheets of asphalt, hoardings, walls. Each day, there were more windows, more pavement kerbs. The unknown crowd assumed habits, names: they called themselves Monsieur Cordier, Monsieur Gioffret, Madame Duez, Madame Lemploy, Monsieur José Martin, Madame et Monsieur André Vignaux, Elizabeth, Antoinette, Dick Flanders, Jo, Evelyne, Nicole Nolon.

  It was difficult, under the circumstances, to retain one’s identity. So at night-time the girl, Bea B., sat down on her chair, beside the bed, and looked at herself in the mirror set into the wardrobe door. She studied her hands resting on her knees, and the tin ring that little Johnnie had once presented to her, on the beach. She studied her knees with their two white kneecaps, then she studied her two naked feet with their splayed toes. She studied her face, with its two green-grey-blue eyes and the dark shadows beneath them. She studied her hair, strand by strand, distinguishing the hairs that were raven, brown, light chestnut, auburn, white.

  She made the following grimaces:

  Mouth turned up at the corners, incisors showing, one eyebrow raised, the other lowered.

  Eyes narrowed, directed downwards.

  Both eyebrows raised, with
three wrinkles running across the forehead, and two more above the eyes.

  Cheeks puffed out, nose turned up.

  Mouth wide open, and right at the back the uvula trembling.

  Then she got up and walked around the room, in front of the mirror. She went up to it, then backed away from it. She performed a striptease. She danced. She sang, out of key. She pretended to be Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa. And then Theda Bara in Cleopatra.

  Sometimes, too, she talked to herself in a gruff whisper. She said:

  ‘It’s true. Honestly, it’s absolutely true. When you said that to me, yesterday, I just didn’t know what to reply. You know, I always have the feeling of being out of things. I mean, everything that happens seems to be at a great distance from me, and I don’t really understand what people want from me. So I don’t know what to say. And then there’s this sort of feeling inside me that I can see something alive in people and yet I don’t trust that feeling. Well, that sort of thing. You know, when I left home three or four years ago I wasn’t like that. When I first came to live here I used to go out every evening, hanging around night-clubs till four in the morning, and so on, wanting to do the same as all the others. I used to see so many people. And I imagined that being a journalist was a serious business. So I really made an effort. There was this little gang of fellows and girls I went around with: we used to meet at some special café every evening. There was Jerome, Louis, Antoine, and then that fellow with the shaved skull – Pedro, I think his name was. And the others, Sophie, Roseline, Thérèse Balducci, Françoise. I got really involved in their scene. I thought it was all so important. I had no time to think. And then, little by little, everything changed. It happened gradually, without my realizing. I simply noticed that I was no longer listening to what the others were saying. When they got into discussions I lit a cigarette or just went away. And then I started writing my articles at the café, with a dictionary. Whenever I ran out of ideas I opened the dictionary and chose a word at random. Liver, for example. The first definition was viscus. So I wrote a piece about visceral behaviour. How people felt when they had a liver complaint. And the universality of the viscera. The hidden organs that govern life. The skin being the surface of the liver. Or else, python, for example. The obsession with pythons. People see pythons everywhere. Pythons wriggling everywhere, into beds, inside people’s clothing, into baths. Or again, Hiiumaa. The island of Hiiumaa. There are 15,000 inhabitants on the island of Hiiumaa. Which means that one has about one chance and a half in three hundred thousand of coming across a Hiiumaaian one day.’