War Page 25

  At the very moment when, like two pale eyes gazing at the world, she is engaged in reading the beautiful calm words that have been written down, this simple sentence that has cost so much blood, Monsieur X makes a final leap upwards from the depths of her body, impales her, and touches her heart. That is why the earth is in ruins and the girl is lying dead on her mattress, her head resting on the foam-rubber pillow. A little saliva is dribbling gently from the side of her mouth.

  I’m a poor lonesome cowboy.

  Daniel Biga.

  FROM THAT MOMENT onwards, there has not been much time left for dying. How can anyone die when everything is so alive?

  There are deserts. There are plains. There are mountains and rivers. There are unstirring beaches at the edge of the sea. There are places so silent that one might as well be travelling through the depths of space at eighteen thousand light-years per . . . There are places so filled with noise that even a train hurtling across an iron bridge would never be heard above the uproar. There are some places that are vast and inaccessible, others that are microscopic. There are searchlights that throw dazzling beams of light, there are blocks of black shadow, unreal colours, fabrics in which each fibre is different, magical books, foolish books, thoughts like termites that think furiously about themselves, explosive thoughts, numbing thoughts. There are women, so many women, beautiful emotionless women, women to love, women to sell, women carrying a child in their belly. There are men who talk and hold beliefs and have a job. Children who play, children who listen to all sorts of things. There is music, dancing. There are religions, systems, armies.

  This is war. There are monumental edifices of stone and cement, tall walls, stairways with identical steps trodden by countless feet. Identical steel girders, sheets of corrugated iron, slabs of wood, identical windows. There are voices, millions of voices. Hunched over a transistor radio, in the evenings, one can listen to all these voices talking, until one no longer understands what they are saying. Each voice speaks in its own language, each one shouts and talks in its own way, using the kinds of words and ideas that come naturally to it. There are many pains stabbing out in all directions, each treading its own path along its plantlike nerve. Monsieur X would like very much to experience these pains, but he no longer has the time or the means to do so. There are many dreams that flare up, then die down, behind people’s eyes. Dreams that have travelled far, and that have farther yet to go. And aircraft holds are crammed with letters that are travelling, too. Letters going from Helsinki to London, for example, and there is a bit of pasteboard that has LOVE XXX written on it. Letters going from Hamburg to Nevers, including one that runs something like this: dear Alice, just scribbling you a quick line to say hello, no time to write a proper letter at the moment, hope everything’s all right with you, I often think about you, when will you be in Oslo, I hope Jean and Daniel are all right, too, and how is Claude, do you like your new job, I’ll write you a proper letter in a few days time when I get to Göteborg, looking forward to hearing all your news, love, Nadia.

  There are rigid deserts swept by the wind. The light falls on esplanades that are like frozen lakes, the light streams downwards from the sun and touches the black roofs. Open valleys display the endless shimmering of their rivers, peaks flash across a sky filled with birds and flies. There are beaches of tar against which the sea breaks, waves of metal and glass interminably thundering in, retreating, sliding over each other. Sometimes the earth trembles, and a mysterious tide of lava can be sensed flowing somewhere beneath one’s feet. Buried deep in the earth, sewers spew their endless tons of excrement and urine, disgorging them somewhere far away, under the sea, or into the bottom of a lime-pit. There are secrets everywhere, extraordinary secrets, terrible secrets, hiding in holes and keeping watch with eyes like spiders’. Jaws, bellies, glands. Blood that bubbles, that pulses jerkily through the pipes. There are noises that go Clunk! or Skoink! though no-one will ever know what causes them. The mute façades are motionless, absolutely motionless. Two years later they have not budged an inch. Machines are digging up the roads, prising up slabs of tar and sending earth cascading into the air: can it really be earth beneath the surface? Along the cold impenetrable stretches of asphalt there are occasionally these openings gouged out by pneumatic drills, and then the flayed skin’s window reveals things that should have remained secret, all those cables and pipes and drains, intestines suddenly bared to view, bleeding, alive. Factories belch out columns of black smoke. In brilliantly-lit offices little men in lounge suits are talking, interrogating, breathing into telephones. There is no way of hearing what they are saying, however interesting their words might be. The stores are pyramids: the cohorts climb their steps, then climb down again. There is money. There are deserts of banknotes and cheques; caverns full of gold and platinum; fortified castles full of uranium, in front of which armed men and wolfhounds mount guard night and day. There are waves that travel across the nerves’ filaments, running through the invisible networks from one end of space to the other. I’m buying! I’m selling! The warehouse vaults are bulging with mountains of paper, reports dealing with reports, vouchers, documents duplicated in ten, a hundred, five hundred copies, printed on paper that is successively green, pink, yellow, red, grey.

  This is war. Nothing is going on, and all sorts of things are going on. Beauty is digging its bottomless wells of power and hatred and hunger and desire. The machines for passing judgment close their valves, slice, erode, decapitate. Who is dying? Nobody wants to die. There are roads that last for centuries, boulevards that stride straight ahead for miles.

  The girl will never die. She will disappear, that’s all. How can anyone die when everything is so in evidence? She will go and hide herself deep in a hole, without telling anyone. That is what she had always wanted to do; but it was not so easy, simply to vanish in the middle of the crowd as she walked along. And the crowd never dwindled.

  There are vast motionless vistas, infinite steppes to be galloped across on horseback. The wind comes from the sea, blowing its wall of icy air, uprooting trees, flattening everything in its path. The dry ground is furrowed by great fissures that time has hollowed out. These are the ravines through which streams of gold wind their way, the gorges through which a roaring of swollen tides echoes at intervals. All is dazzling: the windows, the sheets of mica, the sheets of iron, the tightly-sealed shells, the lenses of sunglasses. The girl can make out all the patterns and camouflages, and guess at all the networks of electric cables. She simply advances among the signs, turning round from time to time to send her own signs of life flashing from her little flat mirror, messages about what she sees. The mirror glitters in her hand, as it reflects the sun’s swift sparkle. She is not alone. No-one is alone when he sees these luminous signals.

  Occasionally she takes the little blue notebook out of her airline bag and, raising the cover that is inscribed with the title ‘EZEJOT’ DIARY in gold letters, she writes down what she has just learned: ‘It’s not easy to renounce God, all gods, but I’ve finally managed it. Now I feel free and full of strength. It’s a very interesting state to be in. I think it may be permanent.’

  There are rivers flowing between green banks, and tree-trunks riding down the rivers. There are muddy seas full of dead leaves and rotting oranges. Along the pavement the rain leaves puddles that take hours to evaporate. There are turquoise-blue pools, with chairs around them, and suntanned girls diving in head first and swimming rapidly, shaking out their long, drowned tresses.

  There are surfaces as smooth and pleasant as a wool carpet, or lino, or marble paving, or parquet flooring. It is possible to enter all these abodes, for a brief moment, by gliding lightly across these dance-floors. Then one’s feet whisk one away to other places, through all kinds of different houses.

  Even with the eyes closed one can recognize all these surfaces and chasms. One gropes forward, feeling along the walls: they are granulous and clammy, and rasp the fingers, or else smooth as ivory, solid, resonant, rais
ing their calm barriers. The paintwork is sometimes lukewarm to the touch, sometimes burning hot, sometimes fresh and tacky. One knows many things. One knows the meaning of all the curves and chromium fittings and sharp projections and tufts of hair; one knows all this with far more than one’s intelligence, one knows it from within, senses it with the brain that is within the brain.

  No need to make up adventures. No need to tell stories. The sun rises, then sets again over the same stretch of territory. The ants and whales each have their own frontier, dotted lines that zigzag across forests of grass and currents of plankton. The girl has set up her frontiers, has built towns and roads between the walls that surround her. Now she has gone to war.

  The girl walks through the city, without stopping. She is no longer able to stop. Night and day she plods onwards on her journey. She knows it now, in her heart of hearts: war has been declared. When there is a war going on somewhere, what is to be done? One can:

  a. Commit hara-kiri.

  b. Knit a green pullover with furious energy.

  c. Hide at the back of some cellar.

  d. Take photos.

  e. Go out into the street.

  Or else one can do all that at the same time, and it will still not affect the war one jot. The war is more important than oneself, than one’s feelings or one’s little phenomenological analyses. The girl has lost some of her fear by now. What had to happen has happened. She walks across all the deserts, along all the tracks and courses, between all the blocks of cement. She sees the accidents, the explosions, the words written on the walls, the signs on the roadway. She counts them as she passes, knowing that they all have a meaning. Clad in her white raincoat, she advances in the light. Her eyes are smarting from lack of sleep, her feet are bleeding inside her shoes. From time to time she crosses paths with Monsieur X, but he does not recognize her. She does not feel like speaking to him. What would be the point? She could stop, and then a few trivial words would follow, while a blazing fire raged just behind his eyes. She would say:

  Hullo how are you?

  All right . . .

  What’s new?

  Oh, nothing . . .

  Well, then . . . Good-bye.

  Good-bye.

  Good-bye.

  And that would mean: I love, I loathe, I would like to kill, make love, spit on people’s feet, grind my cigarette stub into someone’s eye, vomit, place three bombs behind the store’s three pillars. The girl no longer has time to stop. She no longer has time to contemplate the same tree or the same man for two hundred years, to find out how they live.

  She runs up the steps. She passes a lapping fountain. She crosses a few public squares. She avoids the cars travelling at sixty-five miles an hour. She listens to a jazz record, something by Coltrane or Art Blakey or Shelly Manne. She goes into a cinema, a café, a library. There are thousands of things: quick, quick. There are gestures, sighs, exclamations. There are !s and ?s and &s and + × i = § 1 $ Fr 367 [] % * /ºs.

  Everything is dancing, tottering, plunging, gliding, disintegrating. The movements are terrifying, endless. All the glands are sweating, the glands that govern digestion, growth, love, thought. The flesh is bathed with blood, the air closes its cocoon around the plains, the mountains, the oceans.

  The girl is walking very early in the morning. She sees cement-lined corridors through which a sort of grey mist drifts. Darkness is still clinging to the doors. The sealed windows are blurred with vapour. There are vehicles moving silently along the pavement. The girl catches sight of one, a big grey lorry being driven slowly over the paving stones. At intervals, men in blue jump down from the lorry and make a rush for the dustbins. They empty these into the back of the giant scoop, banging them down hard, then throw them back onto the pavement. The lorry rolls on, gently, and the girl follows it. She listens to the sound of the engine, and to the kind of groan emitted by the scoop when it opens and closes its jaws.

  She follows the grey lorry through the streets for a long time, then she climbs into a bus and travels to the other end of town, as far as a great stretch of wasteland permeated by an odd sense of absence, an odd black smoke. This is the place they call the Refuse Dump. She looks through the linked-wire fencing at the site where the lorries come, one after the other, to tip their loads of rubbish and garbage. In the centre of the wasteland there is a cement building, a sort of factory, with twin chimneys sending up thick columns of smoke. The acrid odour floats down to the ground again, spreading its noxious cloud. In front of the factory there is a mountainous heap of refuse waiting to be burned. The conical mountain seems to be soaring into the middle of the grey sky. It does not glitter, it is not beautiful. The cold air swirls around the congealed mass, while the lorries come and go, adding their fresh accretions to the base. The girl stands there, pressed against the wire-mesh, looking hard at this dark mountain. She stares with all her might. She is determined never to forget this. Her eyes take in each detail, each drab fold, each wedge of rinds, each slab of papers, each package of offal. She feels the dull stale odour enter her, as she listens to the sounds of the decomposition that is smouldering at the heart of the mountain. To one side of it, the factory is hard at work belching out its blackish clouds. Far behind her, at the end of the bare roadway, the city moves and vibrates. But there is no doubt that, here, it is the mountain that reigns supreme, the great drab pyramid made of thousands of dustbin loads. The girl looks at the heaped mass of refuse, her eyes and thoughts equally concentrated. And she knows that this must be where mountaineers come to make their dizzy climbs. Armed with ice-axes and ropes and spiked boots, they come here to make the ascent of the great mountain of excrements. Their boots will search for a foothold in the soft mass, their hands will sink into foul sludge. They will inch their way up, surrounded by the factory’s black exhalation, they will crawl up the glutinous slopes, on and on, to victory!

  The cities open and close the sluice-gates of their cemeteries, their innumerable cemeteries. Cemeteries of garbage, of dogs, of rats, cemeteries of cars.

  Another morning, somewhere else, the girl sees a field of battle. She suddenly sees it stretching out there, below the level of the road, for about a quarter of a mile. It is littered with the carcases of vehicles stacked on top of each other, mountains of rusting hulks waiting in silence. There is not a soul in sight. Upside down, the cars display what should never be revealed, the mysterious underneath, the axles, the sump, the exhaust. Their four wheels lift skywards, tattered remnants of tyres clinging to the rims. Their engines have been torn out. Everything is agape. The bonnets, the boots, the doors, the roofs are yawning black holes. All the fearful signs of mutilation. Here too, the girl thinks; here too. People ought to come here some time, no matter when, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a year from now, to collect their thoughts awhile. Those who say that there is no war, that the world has never been so peaceful, should be the first to come. The girl makes her way down the sloping verge, walks towards the linked-wire fence, and looks at the stacks of carcases mounting to the grey sky. She looks at each wheel, each chassis, each disembowelled radiator grille; studies the shattered headlamps, the ripped seats, the dented hubcaps, the smashed windows, the flayed tyres, and all the bumpers, speedometers, steering wheels, crank-cases. Seeing all this, she knows that war, the unknown war, is rumbling on all sides.

  In the marvellous cities fringing the sea, the office blocks and public buildings are all asparkle. There is so much whiteness and light that it is wisest to put on dark glasses before entering the shops or bars. But from time to time the walls divide, and through the gap the girl can glimpse the gloomy terrain over which the fighting has just raged, and the hidden piles of corpses. There are those who would have liked very much to make her forget that sight, those who would have liked to prevent her seeing it at all. The brightly illuminated shops were wearing seductive placards, big signs that purred gently: ‘Buy! Buy me! Stay young & beautiful for ever! It’s extra good! Buy me!’ Everywhere there were flashes of infra
-red or ultra-violet light that struck you full in the face just as you thought you might take a look. To muffle the sounds of war, they had invented thunderous music played on gongs and tomtoms, soft music, nerve-shattering music, rhythms that gripped you in their spell at the very moment when you thought you might hear the voice of Monsieur X yelling: help! Everything was smooth and soft. There were such delectable perfumes, such velvety carpets, such suave liqueurs, such mouth-watering delicacies, such limpid water flowing from the taps, that it was difficult to believe in hunger, and thirst, and cold, and ground knee-deep in mud or muck.