War Read online

  Perhaps so far the war is simply within myself. Perhaps there is nothing of the sort abroad in the world, and the forces I am telling you about have never existed. I am surrounded by so many voices, so much noise, that it is difficult to understand.

  The other day I saw an extraordinary landscape in which each detail, each outline was crystal clear. Black rocks, and others that were red, yellow, green, white. A little farther on, there was the sea with all its rippling waves. It is true that when I looked at all this I could see no signs of war. The scene was very far away from my dreams, at the other end of the earth, full of an immense mute peace. Nothing was happening in this place; I mean, nothing menacing or destructive. Perhaps it was a vision of the world from the far side of war, and that is why there were no signs to be seen. The storm had passed, sweeping over these smooth surfaces without finding anything to destroy. I have seen many other such things; and I would like you to see them too, as though through a dog’s eyes, not hoping or expecting anything.

  And I have watched the girl as she stands there, waiting for the bus. Her eyes are calm, scarcely flickering between the rows of lashes. In front of her, in the street, the roaring floodtide of cars and lorries. But she scarcely notices it, as her eyes gaze into the far distance, straining to glimpse the greenish dome that is rolling towards her, bearing in front of it, in the centre of a yellow bubble, the figure 9.

  There are these flashes of peace and silence amid the clouds. Every ten seconds, without a sound, they light up the whole sky with strange patterns that are very soft and very white. These lightning flashes are within me, passing through me in quick succession, like the coldness within heat, or like the heat that lies at the heart of coldness. It must be due to them that there is war but no massacre. They appease violence, because they travel in the same direction.

  Once and for all, here are the things I like:

  trees

  plants

  pebbles

  women’s hair

  the eyes of animals

  the noise of rain on tin roofs

  the winking lights on cars

  Tonala pottery

  cold-water taps

  night sounds

  summer lightning

  plain cigarettes

  the pyramid of Palenque

  oranges

  spiders

  towers

  the Menez Horn

  girls waiting for buses

  deserts

  electric light bulbs

  the . . .

  These are my own lightning flashes stabbing the night now. But I know that they bear with them the whole weight of violence and money and hatred. And that is why I no longer desire to read poems that speak of these lights, poems that neglect the world in favour of a woman, a bird, a seed.

  The other day, too, I saw these three little Arab children playing in the dust. They were shouting as they played. Since it was morning, I said ‘Sbah el kheir’ to them as I passed by. They stopped and looked at me but did not answer. Then I went away.

  Another day, I saw the squashed corpse of a dog on the road, and a pack of starving dogs devouring it.

  I have seen a letter that had this written on its pages:

  ‘There is something I remember, though I don’t know whether I can bring the image of it to life. It was in some town or other, where I happened to be, and I was in this house of assignation. One could go upstairs and come down again without being seen. The façade, the inside walls, the staircases, the doors were all grey. An anonymous house. On every floor of this huge building, in every room, were people making love. Passports were taken away in the front parlour, and returned on leaving. In each room, the same music, the same drinks. To get out of the place one had to walk along an endless corridor that led into a windowless courtyard. The door opened and closed again unaided. An elephant’s trunk. The sense of despair that permeated this house, representing such total flight and abandonment by so many men and women, continues to haunt me to this day.’

  It is all this, you understand, all this put together. All these things appearing in an endless stream, happening constantly, smothering me. Not just myself, but the others too. It is all this that goes to make up war; life is breaking loose, demolishing walls. Beauty, gentleness, suffering, passionate love, pity, hatred, indifference: there are too many feelings. They bounce from wall to wall, trying to find a way out, a window, a drain, any kind of hole. They proliferate by cellular division. Great waves, great shudders, swamps of fever and doubt. Permanent eruption flowing from all its craters, the boiling lava spreading its successive folds wider and wider. All these words, cries, appeals, ‘I love you!’ ‘I want!’ ‘Down with!’ ‘Long live!’ ‘Drink!’ ‘I think!’ ‘Eat!’ ‘I believe!’ ‘I am!’ ‘Buy!’ ‘Smoke!’ ‘Invest!’ ‘I dream of!’ ‘It’s mine!’ ‘Kill!’ ‘Kill!’ ‘Kill!’, all these explosions that shake the air, these stars of flame, these actions that rip and grind and saw, these continual creations such as newness, progress, money. I cannot hold out any longer. No-one will be able to hold out. No-one will escape unscathed. The movements, the noises, the lights. Food rams itself down the throat, exquisite flavours burn and gnaw. Winged outlines glide overhead, and in the factories the machines create forms of ever greater beauty, a hundred of such forms each second. The slaves work night and day to bury the world, ideas are objects made of glass or steel, ideas are black telephones, ideas are liars. On all sides, words are hammering and bursting, words seeking to destroy themselves, words that enter the ears and drive men mad.

  Hear me out. Perhaps the war is only within myself, perhaps it is just a feeling among so many others, a vile feeling itching to hurl its grenades among arms and legs. Perhaps my words are merely further accursed noises, a few tins of preserved food on the immense counter. You put them into your nylon basket and then you go to cash-desk no. 3 to pay for them, and the little calculating machine gives a little hiccup and spits out a scrap of paper on which is written:

  War 12

  The world is absurd 06

  Everything is beautiful 10

  One day we will all be free 24

  Malediction of Monsieur X 04

  Total 56

  Perhaps people die so that the earth shall not crumble beneath the weight of feet. Perhaps it is ordained that sooner or later everything must finish by becoming desert.

  & yet, even if all this is only within myself, by the same token it is also within the others. I have seen all these signs around me, and I have understood that what had to be said, here, contained more than my own thought, more than the words of my own language. I was unable to see what needed to be seen, because I lacked a million eyes. If you too should see these signs, all these signs, prepare to wreak death and destruction, for only fire can halt fire. Accelerate the machines for inventing things, until they break down. Race your motorbikes and cars until they explode on the roads. Launch your giant words, fashion drums to compete against the thunder. When the stores finally burst apart and pour forth rivers of nourishment; when the blood finally flows over the linoleum flooring; when all the lies finally fuse together and become truth; when violence finally appears upon the scene, and many other things besides, and men are killed, not by truncheons or sub-machine-guns any longer, but by the walls of their own houses, or die bombarded by the rays from their television screens: then, true peace might come. Not the peace that marks an interval between two wars, nor the masked peace of the assassin and predator at work, but the peace of the sleek landscape over which the war has passed. I have spoken.’

  Standing there, on that day of scorching heat and dazzling whiteness, listening to the sound, far off on the distant horizon, of the skins of the atmosphere descending again upon the insatiable city.

  I am listening to what you say, Monsieur X, and I think perhaps you are right. I listen to what you say as though it were myself speaking, because it is only when the words being uttered come, not from the others any longer, but from oneself that on
e really thinks it is the truth: the truth, not just a story. You know, before, when you were still there, and I could lift the telephone receiver and speak to you, it was the same thing: I was telephoning myself.

  You were in the depths of my being, so much so that I no longer needed to indulge in idle chatter. A few words sufficed. Now, you no longer exist. There is no Monsieur X, any more. Monsieur X died a few days ago. He was felled in his own room, quite senselessly, by a stray bullet. The newspapers never mentioned it. No-one knew about it. A bullet came through the window and struck him in the back. He crumpled dead to the floor, without ever knowing what had happened. Later, they found his body sprawled on the ground, so they retrieved his papers, including his military identification card with a photo on it, and sent them to his mother. It was a ridiculous photo: an unsmiling face staring stolidly ahead, cropped hair, two creases on either side of the mouth. It was nothing at all. Nothing at all had happened.

  All the words. There are no more left. The letters one writes on sheets of notepaper, with a ballpoint pen, slipping the sheets inside an airmail envelope, sticking stamps on it, then inserting it in the slot of a letter-box. None of that was of any real importance. It was like the phrases one writes on the pages of a little blue notebook entitled:

  the phrases that always say the same thing in different ways. Today, it goes like this:

  The cold weather has returned. I really like the cold.

  Yesterday the bottle of milk in my room froze

  solid. It seems a long time now since I’ve had

  a job. Almost run out of money. This morning met

  Danièle, she says it’s all fixed with

  Douski, I simply have to phone him. On the whole,

  it wouldn’t be too bad working in his

  advertising agency. Slogans are quite fun.

  Maybe I’ll phone him later on today.

  It’s raining. I really like the rain. No news

  of Monsieur X. Yesterday afternoon, cinema:

  Mizoguchi’s Chikamatsu Monogatari.

  All this is happening very fast, and I am finding it impossible to distinguish any longer between the things that have really happened to me and the things that happened just next to me. You know, I used to think that one knew what one was doing. When I was little, I believed you simply built yourself up, little by little, until one fine day there you were, you had found yourself. I believed everything had a name. Love, adventure, faith, art, music. So all you had to do was find out the name, and you had won. And not so very long ago I used to believe that some things were profound and others were not. Now, that’s all over.

  Monsieur X, I wish you were still there, I would so much like to speak to you. Sometimes I am surrounded by so much silence that I can hardly bear it. But that is how you wanted it. One day, you told me what needed to be done, and then you left me on my own. No doubt you had a reason for doing so. All prophets have their reasons. They don’t like their orders to be questioned. They pierce the night for an instant with their searchlight’s incandescent beam, and in that flash one sees the thousand years of a landscape. Then they extinguish the light and go away. So I don’t know how to manage any longer. I try to remember what I have seen. But it is difficult, very difficult.

  You knew all the time what was bound to happen. I imagine that the bullet that hurtled through the window and lodged in your back didn’t really catch you unawares. You told me about it yourself, you remember, one day, when I was on the telephone. I can even repeat the exact conversation. I was speaking very low, into the microphone hidden inside the bakelite capsule, and your answering voice was coming through the bakelite capsule at the other end of the receiver, with an odd nasal twang:

  Why?

  Because it’s obvious.

  You’re too self-confident.

  Listen, there’s no sense in arguing, diatribes don’t amuse me any longer.

  What’s more, it’s all stuff that you’ve read in books.

  There are no more books. Books and all the rest amount to the same thing.

  Or you saw it all in the cinema. In Black God, White Devil, for example. At some point there is this character who says – Antonio das Mortes, I think, anyhow he says: I have been at war since I was born.

  That’s true, but I can no longer distinguish between what he says in the film and what I say outside the film.

  Do you dream?

  Everybody dreams.

  But dreaming is something that concerns yourself alone.

  That’s not true. I dream with everybody else. What do you think a dream is?

  A kind of delirium.

  Everybody is delirious. Listen, nothing is gratuitous. I rave, I dream, I analyse, I understand, all those things are done with other people. Never alone.

  I am very alone.

  No, you are not alone. You are with me, with everybody else.

  But I’m frightened.

  Your personal adjustment problems are of no interest. It is what belongs to everybody that is interesting.

  You’re just an unfeeling brute at heart.

  No, that’s not true. I feel a great deal of compassion for you. But if I took an interest in no-one but yourself, that’s to say, if I took an interest in no-one but myself, what would be the good? You see, I know only too well that I don’t have very much time left. When I am no longer there I want you to carry on. Don’t forget that. Don’t slip back, now, into your egocentric little existence.

  What should I do?

  You must go on looking, as though I were still there. Even if it is difficult, even if your eyes ache with tiredness.

  And if, if I see nothing?

  You will see everything that is there, you are bound to see it all. Even if you stayed shut up in your room for seventy years, you would see the war in action. Good-bye for now.

  Good-bye.

  After that, there was a click, and there was nothing more to be heard in the bakelite capsule except the kind of warning siren that goes: wiiii, wiiii, wiiii.

  That was the last time you spoke to me on the telephone. After that, I never again lifted the black hand-microphone from its cradle. Everything I know, I owe to you, Monsieur X. You have taught me how not to be alone any longer. Now, I know how to look. In fact that’s all I do: look, look. I wander through the city, looking all the time. I have seen many road accidents, many men and women, much crime and love. Before, I didn’t know what it was all about. I lived inside the machine, I bought the baited traps, I closed my eyes and opened them again whenever I was told to do so. I walked under the shadow of the huge concrete buildings without knowing what they represented. I read the papers without knowing where their words and photos came from. I lived like a buzzing fly. I was always glued to all the lumps of sugar, with the other flies. It is you who did all that; and I don’t even know you. I don’t even know your name, Monsieur X. You didn’t like being watched. You hid yourself at the back of cafés, or in the rooms of cheap hotels. At night you took out your mighty BMW 500 cc bike. You never spoke to people. When you had something to say you lifted the telephone receiver, and then your voice sounded exactly like all the thousands of other voices; it came from the world of anonymity, reaching me purely by chance. Isn’t that extraordinary? You had concealed a microphone in my throat, and when your voice spoke it was I myself who spoke. From time to time you left a message on the floor of the bus, or slipped one between the pages of a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. I would be turning the pages and suddenly I would see what you had written, with a felt-tip pen, in big letters:

  HUNGER IS TERRIBLE FOR ALL CREATURES

  CAMEL + WHALE = FOR LIFE

  HURRAH FOR BASKETBALL

  You engraved your messages in the pavement’s wet cement. You daubed your letters in red paint across the white façades of public buildings. Or else you drew your little designs of crosses, circles and dots on restaurant tables. I used to pass that way, and when I saw them my heart missed a beat, because then I knew you were sti
ll alive somewhere or other.

  I have listened to everything you have said, I have read all these messages. Now I know the action to be taken. It is a question of walking into the very heart of the war, without being afraid. I wanted to get away, I wanted to find countries that were at peace. I wanted to get away to some beach fringing the sea, and burrow under the sand-clogged pebbles. I wanted to look at the sea until I was lost in the middle of it. That was a lot of nonsense. There is no escape from this particular war; its little secret signs are to be found everywhere, even deep inside sea-shells. There is no finding that final door that leads into the peaceful little garden. Things once known remain in the memory. The cities are swollen blisters on the earth’s surface, full of heat, noise, movement. They call out. I need to go there. I need to be everywhere at once, in the streets, in the armour-plated strongrooms, in the middle of the supermarkets and department stores, at the back of bars, making my way along the lanes of car parks.

  Yesterday I too saw a sign. It was strange. I was walking down the centre of the esplanade, between the lines of stationary vehicles. I looked at the parking spaces, marked out in yellow paint along the ground, and all their numbers, 29, 32, 35, 38, 41. Occasionally I switched from one line of cars to another, as I passed by all these tightly sealed metal bodies. There was no-one in any of the cars. The place was completely deserted, immense, solitary, exactly like a windswept cliff at the edge of the sea. The city was far away, enveloping the car parks with its noise. I was confused, because I could see that nothing was happening here, that there was nothing but the silence of the graveyard. I tried reading the licence plates, so as to understand. But they had nothing to say. The engines were cold under their bonnets; the windscreen wipers had not been used for a thousand years and were welded to the glass by dust. It was terrible, you know, to be lost like that in the middle of these great clumps of inert carcases; I could hear my heart thumping in my chest, once more, and the noise of my heels rapping against the asphalt. I walked along faster and faster, between the lines of cars, not looking where I went. And then all of a sudden I saw it: an obscene drawing that spread its white chalk outlines along the asphalt surface between two cars. I just stood there, looking at it. It was a really extraordinary drawing, I assure you, such a beautiful drawing that I shall never forget it. It shone there, on the ground, traced in great strokes that were dazzlingly white. It was so simple and so pure that I didn’t at first realize what it represented. There was this series of curved lines that fitted into each other cleanly and unhesitatingly. Like a message in shorthand, with just a few lines to say a whole lot of things. The longer I looked at it, the clearer it became. It was perfect, as beautiful as anything to be seen in the world’s museums. It sounds silly, saying it now, but I looked at it without a thought in my mind, just with the strange sort of emotion one would feel when listening to some very beautiful piece of music wafting out of the night. I think that at that moment there was nothing on the whole face of the earth but that drawing; I mean, it shone in the centre of the car park like a star or a fire thorn. It wasn’t talkative. It wasn’t trying to destroy the world or colonize islands. It wasn’t trying to prove anything, it was absolutely without intelligence. The person who had made this hasty sketch there, some schoolboy, perhaps, just out of class, can have had no idea of the masterpiece that he was creating. He had scrawled his sweeping strokes in chalk, furtively, between the great congealed slabs of cars, and then scurried off. The drawing was like the sun, spreading the rays of its rudimentary arms and legs across the ground. At the top, two semicircles with a dot in the centre of each one. Lower down, another dot, barely visible. Then, between the two curves of the wide thighs, a sex like an open eye, and a vertical phallus pressing against it. No face, no soul, no feeling, nothing, only this symbol of action, this diagram that captured the whole of life. The white drawing traced its curves and dots over a surface of several yards, just like a map. It had simply come from the other end of time, something thousands of centuries old, instinctive, quick, absolutely true. Its gesture was depicted on the ground’s tarred surface, with a piece of chalk that had led its white trail across the fine grit. And it was the first and last gesture. The drawing was brand-new. It had no age, no setting, no race. Lacking face and hands and feet, it easily carried all the forgotten names. Nothing but a body, not even that, a movement. It was called Venus, Astarte, Gaia. And then, Hel, Sekhet, Uadjit, Bastet, Ta-Ret, Isis, Aphrodite, Kamadeva, Adu-woman, lyoba, Anahita, Macha, Artemis, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Atargatis, Belit, Ilat, Ariadne, Anadyomedë, Shalako-Mana, Ka Atu Ccilla, Muna-Aclla, Chipauaccihuatl. These were that woman’s names, and there were many more besides. That is to say that this obscene drawing contained all manner of things, mysterious simple things that kept fear at bay. You see, as I looked at it I began thinking that that is how writing and picture-making were born. They were not made for analysing, or yearning, but for making a gesture in the middle of this grey expanse, for making a stand against immobility. It was good, discovering a drawing like that, by chance, on the tarred ground. It was like when you see a face you know in the middle of a crowd, a face wearing dark glasses. The obscene drawing stretched its curves and strokes out over the ground, among the tiny bits of gravel embedded in the solid tar. It spread its firm curves apart, it flexed its muscles. At a single stroke it destroyed all the centuries of lies and oblivion. It swept through all the massed hordes of feelings, killing them like flies. Because it was not like glue, because it never clung to you with ideas or phrases. The horizontal structure of fecundity: a different world from that of cinema posters, and photos in erotic magazines. Just a sign that said what had to be said, without flourishes: here I am, I exist, I want something out of life.