War Read online

  All around, the soulless mass constructs its ramparts and builds its prisons. It raises its immense walls, its towers, its pyramids. Then it loses its way within this new labyrinth, and slowly the walls start closing in! The crazed mass lays out its highways from one end of the earth to the other, yet violent death overtakes it! The mass itself, with the flickering flame of a single match, has lit the raging fire that is consuming it. Beware! Danger! Danger . . . But I can say nothing, since I myself grew up with those same flames.

  My curse is that I am one when I need to be a million. My voice is senseless. What is one voice against an entire army? My body will be trampled underfoot. My gullet will be throttled. A single cry has no more importance than a single scale on the skin of a boa constrictor.

  I can see the hurricane of luxury and beauty bearing down. I am inside the temple, and the wind is carrying me away. I know only what is coming, what is already happening. I did not guess this, nor did I dream it. I did not hide at the back of a windowless shack to drink tonga. Quite the contrary: I lived out of doors, I opened my eyes to the light and I listened to all the noises. It became obvious. Already the air’s lower layers are drawing aside, a few seconds before the explosion. Already the colour of the sky is changing, and the thunder’s whitish ideograms are scattered far and wide. Something is coming now. Something has travelled in a streak through continents and centuries and is coming now. Something has run like a shiver over the skin of a thousand generations, and is coming now.

  The very ones who spoke to you of peace and gentleness were themselves at war, although fear kept the knowledge from them.

  Once the armies are locked in combat, the earth will explode. The deflagration will not be savage, and may even simply take place without anyone realizing it, very gently. Perhaps destruction will arrive like a fire that kindles slowly, twig by twig. Or like a steady flame from the sun, shooting up for millions of miles without flickering. And it will gnaw and rend mercilessly.

  I hate those who have confidence in their name. Madness is not an alien thing; hatred springs from within men, and they destroy each other without realizing. It is happening at this very moment. Look around you, watch the war in action. Listen to the war being waged along the highways, in the airports, in the immaculate buildings, in the underground passages, along the esplanades littered with thousands of abandoned vehicles, everywhere, in the city, over the sea of cement, over the plain of cement, on the mountains and in the sky of cement. War has glorious names of victories, resounding names like Super, Parking, Videostar, The Animals, Molybdenum, Steel, Zeiss, Chrysler, Flaminaire, Honda. It has names that are already murderers. Its iron and concrete workings are mausoleums, and its gigantic stores glowing redly with merchandise are fortified castles with raised drawbridges. I enter the great white hall, walk over the plastic flooring that the light strikes harshly, and look for the four pillars where I must place my four bombs. The rustle of silver as the water gushes into the baths and mosaic swimming-pools, the soft, limpid water lovelier than the air, purer than the air; yet the baths will drown the women who fall asleep in them, and the fountains will spurt blood into their basins. Gases pour from exhaust-tanks and float above the streets like a fog; lungs are corroded, soot-stained.

  There are too many things, I tell you, and the weary masses are close to exhaustion, There is too much richness, clarity, music; there are too many words, adjectives, adverbs, participles. There is too much movement.

  The colour red is intense and suffuses the sky from end to end. Even the shadows are red. How to survive, bathed always in this blood, when I would have been perfectly content with blue, or with green if necessary? Sharp sounds pierce the air like arrows, but they are far more deadly. Deep sounds continually shake the ground and split walls apart. In fortresses with countless windows, anonymous monsters devour paper and human flesh, monsters who are always demanding more paper, more identities. Each day, in the streets, words unfurl: new words, new crimes. Skulls are filled with images that multiply and grow more beautiful every second. Every second, movement devours speed. All around, girders rise from the building sites, weaving their iron towers foot by foot upwards. The cemeteries have tombs that look like railway carriages. The clouds have come so low, today, that the lightning-conductors are gashing their undersides. The night, traversed by millions of volts, is whiter than the day. Underground, the sewers ferry their stinking rivers towards the stinking sea. Mouths wolf down tons of cream and cheese, tons of meat, bread and tinned fruit. The tide of cattle flowing through the gates of the slaughterhouses never stops. Machines flatten the hills, explosions disembowel the mountains, sending their entrails of sand and clay gushing out. It is permanent war, the war of all epochs and all places. Why should it, how could it, ever stop, since the hands work to produce what the intestines destroy? How to halt the flow of words, how to squeeze them back once more into their mute matrices, when language itself is simply life and death?

  Yes, all the objects upon this earth that for centuries on end have been stretched, compressed, suffocated, imprisoned, are doomed to annihilation! For whole centuries the elixir of life was kept imprisoned within its curved wall of glass, and the glass itself was imprisoned by the light, and the light by its circles of air, and the air itself by the weight of the infinite that pressed down upon it like a hand.

  Men are waiting all around the white buildings, waiting in a circle around the mountains of gold and nourishment. Many children are waiting, too, watching with eyes dazzled by desire and hatred. By the edge of swimming-pools filled with clear blue water, dust-streaked men and women wait patiently for a chance to quench their thirst. Sugar, salt and oil sparkle from the depths of the great stores. Hunger and boredom send their waves surging through the crowds besieging the doors. But soon the polished plate-glass windows will shatter spontaneously, and the avalanche of riches will smother mouths and eyes. Beauty, when it has become ugly, is able to destroy itself spontaneously.

  So much opulence, so many crimes! A black gas has seeped inside the soul and eaten it away, the fatal gas that is the effluvium of charnel-houses and shanty-towns. You have been breathing it all the time, it had entered your bloodstream while you were still in your mother’s belly. Each sip of water, each scrap of food that you took was a little more poison in your body. When you opened your eyes for the first time you saw it immediately: the endless desert, the violence, the ravaged scar-marked skin. But in your determination to forget the sight, you have scattered your words in reckless profusion, and you have sought refuge at all costs: some deep grotto, a woman, a child, no matter what. But it was impossible. No-one gets away, just like that. One stays put, a machine like all one’s fellows, geared to kill and steal and smash.

  Hark now, I am speaking to you! I tell you that I have needed to close eyes that are deep within me, and cursed be those who constrained me to do so! What have I done? What gift of mine has helped to change the world? To save myself from ever entering the world, would I not have done better to kill the woman who was carrying me, by kicking her to death from within her belly? But this malediction of causeless couplings of people and events was already laid upon my forebears. There was nothing I could do about it. The war had started centuries ago, constructing its criminal temples and cities, building its walls from stone and bronze steeped in violence.

  In those times I did not yet exist, my mother was eternal and I roamed obscurely in the depths of jungles. I was submissive, and I waited, inhabited by a new athletic desire: that the blood-drenched corridor to life should open up. Heavy as lead, I awaited the world’s raging fires. I felt tinglings of hope stir in my knotted muscles, and it is ever since those days of herculean childhood that I have forged a straight path and lived life to the full.

  Then I saw a woman coming towards me, a woman so beautiful that it was as though life had never previously existed on this planet. She was walking alone along the cement-lined street, in the midst of the violence and chaos. She did not see me. She glide
d effortlessly over the ground, as though upon wheels, parting the air and the light as she went. The sun lit spangled reflections across her body, setting her hair and clothes on fire. She advanced in silence, encased in iron and nylon, striking the ground with her hard heels. Her long legs passed perpetually through space, and her transparent eyes looked straight through my own, like headlamps. One day, by chance, I saw this woman walking away into the distance. I saw that there was a magic force alive within her, as within all women, a force that I would never understand. This was her way of proclaiming nonchalantly that violence was beautiful, and that therefore a universal explosion was imminent. I was unable to follow her. I was unable to speak to her, or to the others. I was unable to kill her. Instead, a sudden shiver ran through me, a sort of fever. I sensed that this woman was the war’s figure-head, gliding safely through the scenes of battle while slaughter raged around her. Her water-repellent skin was moulded to her flesh like a breastplate, and her garments clung to her like a second skin. She was coasting aimlessly along, sparkling brightly, a beautiful new car with windows raised. Let him who knows her speak to her, let him rip her belly open and read her smoking entrails. She is called Bea B., or else Beauty Lane. She is also called Bothrops atrox. Let him who knows something about her, or about any other woman, speak now. Perhaps the war’s mechanism is still inside her body, perhaps it could be torn out. Speak! Speak! But no-one speaks. Each day, each year, I pass the glittering body of Bothrops atrox bound, no doubt, for the far end of the labyrinth to beget her foetuses of dynamite and guncotton. She must be stopped! Her skin must be stripped off, and air and water allowed to filter through her body. But the air is absent and the water is imprisoned within pipes and taps.

  Ku! Listen! You dwell in Alahiyi, o dreaded woman! There, in Alahiyi, you dwell, o white woman! No-one is ever lonely in your company. You are very beautiful. No-one is ever lonely in your company. You have shown me the way. I shall never again be sad. You have set me on the white path. You have set me down, there, in the middle of the earth. I shall stand upright on the earth. No-one is ever lonely in my company. I am very beautiful. You have placed me in the white house. I shall be inside it when it starts to move. No-one will ever be lonely in my company. In truth, I shall not be sad. Unhesitatingly, you have decided things for me.

  Listen, woman of steel, listen to me. Give your perfect engine a few moments’ rest, stay still for once. One word from you, a single word, and maybe the war would end. Give your orders. Then you will rise above the swirling eddies of flesh and bone, clad in your veil of light, and you will be queen.

  But her painted mouth never utters a word, and her eyes glint behind the lenses of her Polaroid glasses. Around her, the world is tensing its stomach muscles, voiding an endless stream of new things, unknown objects, from all its secret orifices. Heaps are mounting skywards, mountains of gold and beauty. Second by second, they proliferate upon the earth in all the gaudy splendour of their aluminium casings, their wrapping paper, their coloured buttons, their plastic-coated surfaces, their networks of wires. Machines, boxes, cylinders, reels, all made for her. The tons of new goods inside the stores and on display in their windows and show-cases. There is not enough flesh for them, there are not enough noses, mouths or eyes for them. There are not enough thoughts for all the words that swarm constantly in the air like clouds of buzzing insects. There are not enough roads for all the wheels.

  Ceaselessly, night and day, they are born: tinned pineapple, tinned ham, fruits, vegetables, perfumes in their little square bottles, Onyx, Tabac, Arpège, Old Leather, Chanel, Ma Griffe, liqueurs with their magical colours, Drambuie, Misty Islay, alcohols that are white, green, yellow, boxes of chocolates from Cadbury’s and Lindt and Bahlsen and Fry’s, white sugar in thousands of tiny crystals, tobacco packed in the thin tubes of cigarettes, Carmen, Philip Morris, Mekong, Alas, Newport, Camel, Gitanes, W, Peter Stuyvesant, Marcovitch, Craven A, Krung Thong, Pall Mall! All this wealth is spread out there in front of me, and their glitter dazzles my eyes! The thousands of little bottles containing iridescent liquids, the tubes full of pink or mauve lozenges that conceal microbe-killing agents; the thousands upon thousands of aerosol bombs and ballpoint pens and women’s stockings and fabrics and soap tablets and razor blades! All shining with their fierce power, with their beautiful vulgar colours: vast deserts of paper as white as salt, simmering oceans of perfumes, atmospheres reeking with poison for the mass slaughter of flies and mosquitoes! I walk through the labyrinth filled with facile mysterious objects. I pass through clouds of silver, I float upon waves of orange-flavoured liquids streaked by streams of tiny bubbles! All the objects are making their noise in unison, and I can hear their deep refrain pulsing with many varied rhythms. The world is offering its own blood for sale! In identical mineral-water bottles the ice-cold liquid is waiting, bulging against the metal capsule that grips with a scalloped rim. On the painted labels the living names are bulging, too: Pschitt, Schweppes, Coke, Fanta, Barilitos del Doctor Brown!

  The end is near. Let those who have ears, listen. Let those who have mouths, taste. Let those who have eyes, see. Let those who have skin and nerves lie prostrate and travel along the thousands of tiny paths.

  Depths beckon everywhere. Everywhere, bottomless chasms open up, doors yawn. There are more souls than there are grains of sand along the beach of the Great Black River. The warriors are like flies. They are like the bacillae inside a single drop of water, and there are oceans of drops. All is permeated by truth and life. Human knowledge is not so vast as the number of objects offered to its scrutiny; the number of words is vaster than language itself. Thought, limitless thought, stretches in all directions. The most secret dreams are marked out perfectly clearly, perfectly visibly. The mysteries are not inner mysteries, they do not hide in the depths of grottoes, they do not slip by, on the other side of windows, as shadows do. For all these things are happening on the surface, thrusting their myriad roots up towards the atmosphere, and reality has a million eyes!

  Those who wanted to explore the depths, those who looked backwards, those who longed to rip the masks off all the faces were out to conquer the heart, all of them. With their gimlets, they bored through the bony shells and ogled the magma. But what they now saw was terrifying: for at the bottom of the well, what was shining was still the surface.

  No more symbols. The jungle had written everything into the structure of its leaves. The snakes had written their whole history, of cold and sun and venom, on their glistening skins.

  I say to you also: there is nothing that is invented. The reservoir of substance is immense, frontierless, existing from all eternity. Objects create those that create them: then they kill them. There are so many people. So many things. Life has so many claws, hooks, nails, eyes, cog-wheels, camouflage. And there is no escaping from it all. The earth cannot carry this weight much longer; it has started to crumble, and the cities are crumbling with it. I can see roads exploding under the pressure of passing tyres; the steel walls of factories glow red like furnaces. Men choke in the perfume-saturated air, women asphyxiate themselves by clogging the pores of their skin with creams and lurid colour schemes. Intelligence is a wall rearing miles into the air, ready to strike. It is too late for anyone to throw himself in front of a moving railway engine and tackle it. The giant words written in thousand-foot-high letters batter away continuously. The roots tighten their grip around the blocks of stone and shatter them. There is so much light: white, harsh, bouncing off the ceilings, flooding from the floor and walls, pouring from the sky, the sea, the volcanoes. It devastates the ground methodically, slicing space with the strokes of its great scythe. The eyes that look at it are scorched, down to the retina, and the light penetrates the body to destroy individual thoughts. Let those who have dark glasses put them on, for the great fire that is kindling will rage ten thousand times more fiercely than the flame that leaps from a blowlamp; the light will be so intense that by contrast the day will seem like night. There will be so many riches
stockpiled in the shops that desire will no longer exist, and whole populations will die of hunger in the streets.

  There they all are, the accursed objects. Ranged along the length of the supermarkets’ corridors, come from the farthest outposts of the universe, all their names being proclaimed in unison:

  Substances! Substances! Glowing, soft, fragile, inflammable, just like smoke-clouds. Red, black, other intense colours. It is they who do the thinking, now. It is they who invent the histories and religions and sciences. They move, they entwine. Rhovyl chlorofibre, Polyamide, Rhodia 100% polyester, acetate, Gama, Skaï Kreon, ACSA acrylic fibre, Leacril, acrylic Dralon, synthetic polyurethane, textured Brinyl polyamide, Masulyne, Mérinovyl, Clévyl, Flanyl, Dropnyl polyamide 66, Terital, Tercryl, Viscose, Fibranne, Crylor, expanded Vinyl.

  Destruction is already near. It will soon strike. This is written in the centre of all crossroads where the crowd is to be found tightening its running knot. It is written on the lanes of motorways, as well, where ridiculous metallic insects dart along at 75 mph, and it is written on the wings of aeroplanes. It is painted on the tall buildings’ white façades, on the dusty panes of endless rows of windows, in the railway stations, the hospitals, the post offices. It is written; but noone wanted to read the message. Everywhere were signs that foretold the advent of war, but no-one wanted to heed the signs. Various noises, various kinds of music, walls of words and ideas all arrived at the speed of a galloping horse. Alarm sirens echoed through the empty air, the lights all changed to red, hoardings collapsed with a single thud, but the cars continued to speed along the roads, and the crowd continued to tighten the knots of its anguish.