War Read online

  Destruction is near. This is how things will come to pass.

  First of all, there will be signs in the sky and on the earth. Great silent aeroplanes will slice through the clouds and crash into the ground with their 137 passengers. Green gleams zigzagging above the horizon will illuminate the trees like searchlights. The sun will shine in isolation in the centre of the ether, like a naked bulb dangling from its cord. And circles of light will swim around it for hours on end, and all surfaces of iron or glass will start to sparkle. The sun will dazzle the eyes, burn the skin, frizzle the hair, dry up rivers and seas. There will be many other portents in the sky as well, mushroom-shaped clouds, lightning flashes tracing their patterns of rigid colourless fissures over the city, flights of gulls, flocks of vultures, swarms of gnats. When you see these things, know that the time is near.

  The sea will churn up its waves, and the swollen rivers’ muddy waters will overflow their banks. This, Hewandam has proclaimed.

  There will be other signs. Over the surface of the earth, the slab-like roofs will bristle with antennas, and the air will resound with the continual passage through it of mysterious waves. Images and sounds will dart tirelessly between the four invisible walls, like flights of bats. Above the cities, as far as the eye can see, immense reddish haloes will appear, and sparkle night and day, while clouds of gas inflate their fluorescent domes.

  There will be other, far stranger, signs: in the dark streets you will see great red letters light up like lightning flashes as they wink on and off above doors and shop windows. The words will advance in file, then erase themselves, then reappear once more. Terrible insane words casting their hooks wildly, words which will say such things as

  SHLAK! SLURP! KWIK! BOOPS!

  PFFTSHSHGONG! RÔÔÔÔ!

  and you will know fear. For no-one escapes these words.

  But there will be yet more signs. Along the avenues that stretch from one end of the earth to the other, there will be lines of stationary black cars, burning their fuel away with deep throbbing sounds; the traffic-jams will last for years on end. The engines will suffocate in the hot air, the motor-horns will rend the sky, together, with their piercing shrieks! Terrible reflections will be seen on the cars’ shiny panels, and tyre marks will streak the roadway’s tarred surface. Behind each vehicle, a black silencer will spew forth its asphyxiating gas: thousands and thousands of twisting tubes suspended beneath the rear bumper, intermittently belching out blueish clouds that the wind will be powerless to dispel.

  Remember these signs well, for, in truth, when you see them appear you will know that the end is near, and that the war has started.

  That is not all. I see the statue of Moloch-Baal, and his belly is a fiery furnace. Goyayota is not dead, and Hinupoto is on the prowl everywhere, claiming his bowlful of female blood. Their signs originated in the depths of history, together with murder and insanity. All the long-forgotten voices will return, one day.

  I hear the cries of Cuauhtemoc and Condorcanqui. I hear an anonymous song that goes something like this: ‘I was conceived during a night of torment . . . The wind and the rain were my cradle . . . Nobody takes pity on my misery . . . Accursed be my birth. Accursed, myself.’ I hear many other songs, other refrains. They make so much noise around me that I no longer know who I am. I want peace, I want to be alone. But it has become impossible. What is to be must be. The mountains must collide, and the crowd’s hollowed eddies must swirl around the doors of all the cut-price stores. I shall do my utmost to destroy all these riches, all this beauty, for they are like a treacherous swamp. I want to rediscover the face I used to own, rediscover silence, forget the directions indicated interminably by the great yellow arrows by the sides of roads. Let those who understand, rally to me, let them smash the hoardings on which the names of war are written. Let them smash the shop windows, let them liberate all that pent-up energy, before it is too late. But it is already too late, and the forces have begun to liberate themselves unaided!

  Therefore look closely: the signs are there. They have appeared. The ditches alongside highways are littered with inert carcases leaking water and oil, their windows shattered. And these shells house incongruous white shapes like statues carved from ice, frozen in grotesque postures. In the white upturned faces the eyes have stopped working, are wedged between the eyelids’ shields. The tiny cubes of fragmented glass scattered along the black tar of the roadway are gathered up to fashion strings of beads.

  I know that the war has started. I am among those who realize this fact, and that is why I am afraid to walk the streets. There are so many signs everywhere. How to ignore them? How to avert the eyes, how to set one foot in front of the other? Every hour of every day, I read in the newspapers about how the battles are progressing. The blurred photos show faces that are staring directly at me; hovering on the other side of the screen of tear-gas, they call for help and wave their arms around. They are nameless. They are nothing. Their acts do not count. What counts is the endless procession of their faces, one after another, each trying to convince or dominate. The sentences display their words in heavy type, filling the pages of newspapers. Meaningless sentences, but in huge quantities, armies of them, dizzy litanies. AMERICA. ‘Is there no room left in the world for.’ SOS. The countdown has begun. Is dead. The revolutionary forces. Terrible accident. Da Nang. Taos. To be sure, one will bear constantly in mind that the one precept, in the matter of truth, is to eschew systematic negation even in the presence of facts that have every semblance of being intractable. It will be recalled that, as Geo has observed so succinctly.

  The signs are present. They are legion. This morning I saw a blind man tapping his way along. The other day I saw a fairy pass by in the street; she was silvery-haired, wore a pink cloak, and was briskly wheeling a child’s pram in which a little beige dog was sitting upright. Then she was gone. I have seen hatred blaze in the eyes of a motorist who believed that someone else had stolen his parking space. I have seen the city walls reaching almost to the heavens, unyielding walls built to last a thousand years. In all the shops and stores, hands are reaching out towards the gaudy containers. I have heard the telephone’s strident jangling, and a mouth cry hullo! into the black bakelite capsule. All this has a meaning of some kind, it is all held together by wire and string and other bonds. It all moves according to a fixed order, and that order is: destroy! Every ten seconds a new machine gleaming with polished chrome appears on the scene. Novelty destroys: it swells up into the air, between the walls, like cigarette smoke. Every ten seconds a new idea is born, struggling, trying to fill space like a gas. There can be no more waiting. People are no longer content to wait. Movement devours itself, movement consumes its own inventions. Woe to all that moves! For all the meshed speeds are accelerating towards each other, and the moment of impact cannot be far off.

  There will be many other signs, for those who have the wit to read them. They will appear every day, every hour, even. They will be written on clock dials and on the pages of telephone directories. Little barbed signs, little ciphers, to mark out a flare-path for the war. There will be frenzied hours, followed by hours of exhaustion. There will be explosions of such sudden and fearful violence that it will be like the moment when an earthquake erupts and buildings evaporate. There will be plaques, yet heavier and more menacing plaques, commemorating peace, and the desert will seem to cover the world. Listen to me: what will you do now that everything around you is turning into a sign?

  There will be exquisitely beautiful, utterly desirable women, giant women standing naked against the walls, and the rivers of sperm will never rise high enough to cover them. Alien women with metallic bodies and white hair and long slim legs sheathed in fishnet stockings. If you should see such a woman, know that the time is near.

  For these women there will be new abodes, new machines. Their glittering eyes impart a red glow to the piles of gold and food. The earth will clothe itself in all the fabrics, some of them soft and smooth, some of them rainbow-hued,
some that look like leather, others made of chemicals. The ground will be a carpet of yielding furs, fountains of limpid water will flow, the night will blossom with red and blue stripes in zebra patterns. These women will arrive in armies, bearing grotesque and frightening names like Ronixa and Eve and Bothrops atrox and Natrix natrix. They will attempt to save the world, making a rampart of their transparent bodies. Their breasts will be shields, their warm, navel-adorned bellies will be armour plating. Their slender hands, adorned with nails that are painted pink or mother-of-pearl or gold, will try to keep fear at bay by tearing and strangling. Their lips will utter words in a thin lilting voice, snatches of words to sing. There will be no ideas or feelings present in these warm waves that will ripple gently towards the enemy, only goodness. But the enemy has no ears, he is incapable of hearing your women’s voices.

  They will have eyes, too, not eyes for looking or comparing, but speckled stones that will radiate light; their calm fires may scorch your inner being, or else they may permeate you gently with their symmetrical, fresh, powerful fountainheads. They will no longer be machines that see, or keyholes, or revolver barrels, but your own eyes, exiled from their sockets and staring at you. When you see these women close to you, when you pass them in the street, when they suddenly appear on the cinema screen, you will feel even more forsaken, for you will know at once that they are the final rampart, and that war lies just ahead.

  Blood will flow. But these strange women love blood so much that they wash their lithe bodies in these red rivers. They will take the barbarous riches in their hands, they will wrap bright cloths around themselves, they will sprinkle gold-dust on their hair. There can never be enough water and milk and perfumed oil to bathe their arms and thighs. They are there, they are already there. They have come to conquer the world, immense women as tall as buildings, as vast as railway stations, their eyes as brilliant as the sun, as deep as the ocean. I watch their slow arrival, as they walk down the avenues with great supple strides that shake the earth. Their hair floats in the air, blends with the air’s molecules, forces its way down my throat and chokes me. Their breasts are hard like metal spheres, their sexes smoulder like volcanoes. Sweetness sends out its acrid cloud, perfumes strike down. Beauty comes like a liquid wall, overflowing, smashing its way through. No-one at all has any inkling how this force was born. It is a force that burns slowly, like a phosphorus bomb, or else spreads out in a sheet of flame, like napalm. The forces of beauty are more terrible than crime, because no-one is capable of resisting their hypnotic gaze. Perhaps this is a long-contemplated vengeance; or perhaps all the desires that the centuries have accumulated, all the fits of passion, are reversing their outward course and re-entering men’s bodies. There is too much thought. There are too many palpitations, too many tremors. Too much noise is rolling through the sky. The swollen cities are exploding. There is too much sweetness, terrible sweetness. Perfumes turn into poisons, caresses tear the skin away, delights that have suffused the flesh a million times suddenly rend it with pain, and one can hear the scream well up in the throat.

  There is too much consciousness: that is what I wanted to say to you. Showers of arrows, hails of bullets spurt from eyes, eyes watching from every corner, bent upon destruction. They know too much. The eyes have vanquished the gods, have raked the depths of space, and now their gaze is returning from the long voyage, fiercer and emptier than before. Listen to me: let those who have eyes, pluck them out! Let them hasten to snap the thread of their gaze, for their gaze no longer belongs to them. But it is too late, far too late. The gaze has returned and begun its perforations. In the depths of space and within the earth’s confines it has found nothing but huge mirrors. It has shattered against impenetrable surfaces, it has dispersed in ten thousand directions. Faster than light, it leaps from one mirror to the next, and each ray is like a metal splinter from an exploding shell. And I am not alone. I am soaring aloft with the others, fast, very fast, striking out and stabbing at random.

  War is when a whole world is gripped by violence. It is when there is no longer any silence or repose. It is when the towns are perpetually ablaze; when the machines open and close their valves inexorably. War is 12,000 revolutions per minute, 65 feet per second, multiplied 30,000 times, Mach 2, G6, 2000 ASA, separated, hashed, cut into tiny pieces, crushed by piezo-forces of 106, star at 12,000º, stress produced by 10,000 blind megajoules, suns of 100,000,000 blind phots, magnetic fields of 800,000 incomprehensible gauss, chasms, chasms splitting the world in every direction. Millions of men, women, children, rats. They move in unison; I see their cohorts advancing up the streets, I hear the shrill small cries rising from their throats. Where to go? The world is a raging Sahara, black with long palisades. Where to sleep? Soon there will be only a single language, only a single thought. I feel the fringes of the whirlwind passing close to me, as the spinning wind draws me towards its vortex. Nothing can withstand whirlwinds. When you see the wind appear you will know that the moment has come, that there is nothing more to be done. The moment when everything will be violent, when everything will be absolutely alive. This is the way it is. Nothing can withstand total life.

  Soon, the cities will explode. In a flash they will consume whole centuries of energy and thought. A great cloud shaped like a jelly-fish will spread slowly in the sky, while a reddish glow lights up the horizon. So do not imagine that it will be a sunset like all the others. We are inside the tall furnaces, and the incandescent heat rises slowly, degree by degree. The light widens its beam, discharges its flux through an unseen breach, demolishes the ramparts, flattens the armoured doors. On childish faces the dark glasses melt instantaneously, and the boiling cellulose encrusts the empty eye-sockets. The colours of things are charred, and soon there will be nothing left but two rival vastnesses of black and white. Photographs should never have been invented. Now they are taking their revenge, and it is the whole world that is becoming flat, smooth, rigid in its absurd posture. On women’s bodies the clothes have stuck to the skin, nylon and silk fused with the living cells. The redness of their hair is that of flames. The asphyxiating odours of lavender and jasmine have seeped through the pores. The round-flanked cars have set their violence in motion; they are speeding along the endless motorways, seeking to kill, for that is their sole motivation. Long sharp knives have sprouted from their wings, and their black tyres are like the jaws of the sharks around Port Jackson.

  In the stores, the merchandise is exploding. All the brand-new, gleaming, sumptuous objects are bursting through the great windows, cascading into the street. The hard-edged tins of foodstuff are splitting skulls, the bottles are gashing throats with their jagged ends. The crowd is milling around the streets, drunk from looting, drunk with food. The banks are burning like barns, mountains of twenty-dollar bills are heaped up in the courtyards, and men are drenching them with petrol and setting a match to them. Tons of documents have been dragged up from the cellars and are carpeting the streets with their old torn leaves. The books, all the books, are being hurled into great glowing furnaces, and the chimneys belch out columns of black smoke night and day. All the words produced by useless thought, printed in little black characters on numbered pages. The bibles, the novels, the dictionaries, the cook-books, the history manuals, the atlases, the philosophical treatises, the manifestos, the propaganda speeches. the long interminable poems that spoke of the colour of the sky, the colour of the sea, the colour of the green eyes of a woman called Rosalind Lind. You have written these books, you have sought to immobilize your thoughts on the white pages of books; and see how these words are smothering you and choking you. They descend upon you like swarms of flies, and they devour your lips and eyes. You had wanted to remain ignorant of the hatred of those who starved to death for nothing, you had simply wanted to build empires of thought, great iron towers balanced miraculously upon the ground, without paying heed to what was lurking in the shadows. The armies of servants are in revolt. They are streaming through the city, razing buildings as they go.


  There is so much money everywhere. The merchants have hoarded their treasures for centuries on end. They have bought and sold everything: lands, flocks, forests, women, children. Over their counters, inside the cement blockhouses, they have sold everything in existence, everything that lives. They have sold wars, and soldiers’ corpses, they have sold passions, desires, dreams. They have conquered their vast domains, they have built their concrete strongholds, they have invented cities and underground tunnels. They have sold the searing bomb and the healing bandage. It is they who have pronounced the malediction; it has never ceased filtering from their fortresses. They have sold language itself, they have made words out of letters as tall as mountains, they have covered the earth with paper and ink, to dominate, to conquer. And behold the malediction is rounding upon them, for their strength is ebbing away. The great white department stores stand in fragile isolation among the plains of car parks. Just a little dynamite at the base of their four columns, and they would soon be reduced to dust. A single spark in their warehouses, a match thrown into their fuel-tanks, and they would soon be burned to a cinder. Let those who have matches, come. Matches are good for more than kindling the tips of cigarettes.

  In the streets, and along the deserted esplanades, sinister black buses are prowling. From time to time, mean-faced men pour out of these buses and fan out through the streets. They wear black metal helmets with chin-guards, goggles, gas-masks. They are encased in belted leather jackets. Their black uniforms shine in the light. Their fists grip long truncheons of weighted rubber. They carry sub-machine-guns and automatic pistols. They advance in serried ranks, shields raised, and their boots trample the bodies that their truncheons have felled. Occasionally they dart onto the roadway among the burning vehicles, and hit out. But it is as though they were hitting out at empty space, as though they were trying to shatter water with their clubs. When you see these armies appear in the streets, you will know that the great stores and office buildings have begun to tremble on their bases. You will know that all the words have begun their ravaging re-entry into human heads, and that all the riches have begun exploding. When you peer from a high balcony and see a group of black-clad men set up a machine-gun post and fire into the crowd, you will know that the war I am telling you about has just begun. When you see helicopters swooping over the city to pick up the bodies of the victims, you will no longer be able to say: joy, sweetness, light, beauty; only: war, war.