The Book of Flights Read online

  ‘Ha! The carpet!’

  ‘The leopard skin!’

  ‘Oh! The calabash . . .’

  ‘Oh! Ah! The big stuffed lizard! Oh!’

  Flowered walls, painted walls, ramparts of wool and plastic, tons of heaped bricks . . . All to conquer man, to impose frontiers on him, to suffocate him. To strap him into that terrible armour whose sharp spikes face inward. Grey, grey everywhere, grey of the whites, grey of the blazing reds, grey of the tails of birds of paradise!

  Who wanted sarcophagi? Who invented pyramids in order to thrust man into the amorphous earth? Not me, I swear it wasn’t me. I was born in my cell, and that’s where I’ve spent my life. The day I decided to smash the paper wall I found out what it was concealing: my nails splintered on the stone.

  And you, windows, once again. And you, windows. Snares of beauty placed upon the walls, shams, illusions; an artist of genius, a great liar, has painted them on the concrete surfaces. From the other side of the glass barrier I see rustling trees, drops of water, rays of light. I do not feel them, but I see them, clear, limpid, weightless, as though they existed only for me. I see them, so close that it would be enough to stretch out the fingers of the hand to tear away leaves, liquid drops, sparkling shafts of dust. I see them. I count the pointed blades of grass, the fibres, the grains. I see them through a magnifying glass. I see them. And they forget me.

  Unbreakable snare. Outstretched snare. In their cold metal frames, the great panes of glass are immutable. It is forbidden to be in the world. It is forbidden to enter the outside world. They forget me. The delicate sounds, the colours, the odours of the earth, the little piles of trash have left me.

  Windowpanes against which the birds kill themselves. Glass, sublimation of powdered rock, sand through which lightning has passed. Baked rock held rigid in its empty order.

  Windowpane which swings gently on its hinges as it wards off the air. Above, below, to the right, to the left; these words apply to my home. Outside, under the sky, they are not valid. These words are the invention of the vile speculator who guesses my movements and my thoughts. He is pushing me farther and farther back. I can no longer escape. I cannot, I cannot: wish, lie, say, strike, extract my lungs from my body, float, fly, travel millions of roads, live in the sky, or at the top of a very high mountain.

  I cannot even shut myself in. The house is too big for me. Even with the doors closed, the shutters barred, the bolts shot, the blinds pulled down, the portières pulled across, the heavy brocade curtains drawn, I still have too much space left, too much emptiness, too much of everything. The labyrinths lead towards the back, and my trouble is that my head is too big to go through the last door but one.

  SELF-CRITICISM

  WHY GO ON like this? It really does seem a bit ridiculous. The weather is beautiful outside, today, right now, a breeze is blowing, there are clouds in the sky, waves on the sea, leaves on the trees. I can hear street noises, the clatterings, the rumblings, all the voices calling out. No one ever calls out my name. Yet how I would love just that: a woman’s shrill voice suddenly yelling my name under my window, and I would lean out and talk to her, yelling back at the top of my voice. But there is never any noise on my behalf, not even one feeble toot on a horn, and that is why I am writing this novel.

  I have already written thousands of words on the large, 8½ × 11 in., sheets of white paper. I squeeze the words in tightly, pressing very hard on the ballpoint pen, and holding the paper slightly askew. On each sheet I write an average of 76 or 77 lines. At about 16 words a line, that makes 1,216 words a page. Why go on like this? It’s pointless, and of no interest to anyone. Literature, in the last analysis, must be something like the ultimate possibility that presents itself of playing a game, the final chance for flight.

  Since there is no choice but to hide behind words, to forget oneself behind names, the Hogans, the Caravellos, the Primas, the Khans, since there is no choice but to leave this trail behind one as one goes, all means are equally valid. All books are true. It’s only a question of understanding what they are trying to say. I could have begun this in countless different ways, I could have changed each single word in each sentence, I could quite simply have made a drawing on a scrap of paper, or written down just one word, in red ink:

  CIGARETTE

  All the same, that would have been the same thing. I could have done nothing and stayed silent. I could have contemplated the slow sprouting of a dried bean in an earth-filled jam jar. I could have brushed my teeth and spat. It would have been the same thing. That really does seem extraordinary. Since the fragrant toothbrush contains the novel, the poem, the phrase that is already waiting, trembling, teetering on the brink of the mind, ready to pop out at any moment; since the scribbling ballpoint pen contains the novel: why should the book not contain it, too, then? And why shouldn’t the book, also contain the glass of water, the toothbrush, the postage stamp and the ballpoint pen?

  THIS IS HOW he decided to flee. He left home one morning and walked across town until he got to a big square dotted with trees. The square, he saw, was full of people, men, women and children. The sun was already quite high in the sky, and the buses’ metal surfaces reflected the light harshly.

  In the square itself, there was constant movement up and down the sidewalk. Buses moved off, engines snarling, horns sounding a brief fanfare. Other buses drew up, their brakes hissing as they came to a stop. They were enormous machines, painted white and blue, with rows of windows, shiny chrome exterior fittings, headlamps and big fat tyres engraved with zigzags.

  When one of these buses stopped, the crowd of men, women and children surged up to the door and they began to clamber in. The podgy faces strained upward, eyes anxious, mouths shouting. Cries blended together:

  ‘Hey! Hey! This way!’

  ‘Antoine!’

  ‘The suitcase! Down there!’

  ‘Sylvia! Sylvia!’

  ‘Quick! Hurry up!’

  ‘Huh! Oof! Are you coming?’

  and gestures, too, windmilling arms, stamping feet.

  The bus into which he had climbed had a long rectangular body made of tinplate, tinted windowpanes, and green upholstery. He had taken a seat near the back, his canvas bag tucked between his legs, and had waited. On the other side of the window the square was flooded with white light, the trees were stirring. The idling engine gave out a regular tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac.

  A little later, the bus began to move. There was the muffled noise of something knocking under the floor, and the engine’s tac-tac went faster and faster. Now it was a continuous rumbling that rattled the bodywork and the windows.

  Outside, the square began to move slowly forward, making the people still standing on the sidewalk pass in procession. The faces loomed up quite close to the windows, white smudges in which one scarcely had time to make out the eyes. Then the square revolved, displaying its trees, a newspaper kiosk, a street, houses with unlit windows.

  Just now, the town was falling back at an ever-increasing speed. The rampart of houses was sliding away, taking with it its rows of openings, its cafés, its shops. He tried to read the inscriptions on the shop windows, but it was impossible. The sun’s white light glared, vanished, then glared again, making one screw up one’s eyes all the time. Sometimes a bump in the road lifted the bus’s wheels and all the heads jerked up. The walls were still filing past. At one spot, a white billboard carried big red letters spelling out

  ICA

  but a patch of darkness was covering the rest, so he never found out what the message was about.

  The engine grumbled. The engine sent its rapid waves along the tinplate, and it was as though the wind were blowing on a puddle. The tiny ripples spread over the sheets of metal, advanced upon the windows, crept along the steel rails and lost themselves in the tyres. From there, they proceeded to flow along the roadway, brushing the asphalt imperceptibly, reaching the apartment blocks and even entering men’s bodies. A young woman with black hair, walking along the s
ide of the road, did not escape. When the bus passed close to her, roaring as it went by, she was promptly captured at the heart of this vibrating spider’s web, and her hair turned quite grey.

  The town was disappearing. House after house, it was falling away towards the rear, stacking up a great jumble of beige walls, dark windows, restaurants, squares, churches, shells of vehicles, arms and legs of men. Already, down there, far behind, they no longer existed. They had fallen into a deep pit, had accumulated in the town’s vast sewer, alongside old rusty food-cans, threadbare tyres, rotting packing-cases, vegetable peelings, apple cores, crusts of bread, crushed oil-drums, cartons gnawed by rats. Someone had removed the stopper from the bottom of the funnel, and all the liquid was draining away, being swallowed up. Only the bus remained motionless. Sometimes, because of an obstruction or a red light, the engine stopped grumbling, and on the other side of the window a white wall stood still. Then everything started going backward again, everything went on fleeing towards the misty cavern, far, very far away.

  It was strange to be here like this, a prisoner inside a sheet-metal cabin, detached from the earth, perhaps, headed for unknown places. They were passing countless streets, parks, newly built-up areas. Tunnels came rushing forward, clamped their black lids down, then opened up again at the far end with a first anticipatory streak of light.

  Hours passed in this way, days. Each shape he saw through the glass, each red-roofed house, was like a year flowing backward. The engine went on grumbling and the tiny ripples covered the landscape with their millions of filaments.

  Now, to the right, he saw the sea.

  It appeared with brutal suddenness, between the gashes of trees and walls, a large and incomprehensibly hard slab of asphalt. Then the walls and trees closed in again, and all that remained, imprinted on the retina, was a sort of open white window that trembled as it receded.

  The bus continued to devour the moving ground, roaring with its engine as it did so. Sometimes the landscape exerted more pressure from the left, and all the passengers leaned towards the right. At other times the opposite happened. Seated facing the great sheet of glass across the front, the driver turned the steering wheel, changed gears, pushed down on the pedals with his feet; all that could be seen of him was his broad back, the nape of his neck, his head topped by a grubby cap, and a pair of hairy arms connecting him with the steering wheel. The mountains, houses and clumps of trees rushed straight at him, at a dizzy speed, but at the last moment they miraculously split apart, slid along the sides of the hull and finally vanished. The bus was something like a bubble made of steel and glass, rising interminably through forests of seaweed. One day, perhaps, it would reach the surface and burst in the face of the sun. A bubble that had emerged from the ooze at a depth of more than 26,000 feet and was making its way toward free air.

  They had been travelling for days and days. For months now they had been digging this tunnel through the earth. And always there were houses, beige walls, gardens, trees in the wind. Sometimes it was a little village that passed by, its concrete platform crowded with people. Their faces, almost brushing against the surface of the bus, wore fixed expressions that were no sooner seen than forgotten. A man wearing a beret, a fat woman with sunken eyes, a thin, grey-haired woman, a woman wearing glasses, a young boy smoking a cigarette, a policeman with his mouth open, but what he was saying was inaudible inside the bus. A series of snapshots fluttering back, carried away by the wind.

  In the sky, clouds built up, changed shape, becoming successively fish, snake, squirrel, woman’s breasts, castle, face of Christ, giant amoeba.

  They were motionless, immensely motionless. The thousands of possible gestures were leaking out of them at high speed, gestures that spurted out and spread themselves around the world, transformed into eddies whirling in opposite directions. The bus was the great central engine which actuated the world. Inside its tinplate shell, the machine grumbled without a stop, transmitting its energy to the cables and cogs. It was the engine that made the clouds sweep forward, that tugged the trees and hurled them towards the rear, that shook the mountains with little tremors. It was the engine that made the sea teeter in sudden glints, in the depths of the gaps torn in walls and fields.

  Inside the bus, they remained unaware of all this. They were all asleep, heads lolling against the seats’ headrests, mouths nudged open by the constant jolting. They were being carried at great speed toward other places, toward unknown places where they could once again lead motionless lives. They were dreaming of towns, perhaps, of mirror-like cities, of gardens and fountains. With private rooms presided over by a jabbering television set. With movie theatres, cars, churches. Carlin, for example, over there: tomorrow, his wife would be waiting for him. She would cover the table with the plastic cloth that had a design of red flowers. She would serve him a piece of boiled beef with potatoes. She would not forget the bottle of wine, or the grapes. Or take Raiberti, over there. When he arrived, he would go straight to the Hotel Terminus and have a shave. Then he would go to the office of the Société Franco, to complete arrangements for the delivery of the engine he had bought. Sitting in front of him, Monique Bréguet. Her friend Françoise was awaiting her at number 15b in the rue Papacino. A little farther up the bus, to the right: Mohamed Boudiaf, on his way to seek work in a shipyard. The little black case, at his feet, contained some clothes, a hunk of stale bread and some cheese, letters, a transistor radio, and, hidden in a pile of socks, his wallet containing his work permit, 250 francs, and a photo of his family taken in front of his house in Algeria. But none of this was particularly important, no, it was all common knowledge.

  As for him, he did not budge. He just sat there, in the green-upholstered lounge seat, his hands resting on the metal rail in front of him. He looked through the window, and the pupils of his eyes jerked with the effort of following the landscape’s movements. He stared eagerly at everything, as though he had never expected to see again these palm trees, these cypresses, these houses with shutters, these hills of red earth, these tufts of grass. He studied these patches of shade, these clearings, he tried to decipher these outspread signs. It was a book, it was an unfolded newspaper telling an interminable story. Of course, a choice had to be made; impossible to see everything. An eye had to be kept open for the appearance of unusual shapes, the rumpled landscape of telegraph poles, the sea’s dazzling flashes. Suddenly, the whitish block of a house loomed up from nowhere, and the eye was obliged to watch it arrive, sliding crazily along on its side, like a crab; it grew, it passed by, proffering its pitted face with distended holes through which it was possible to catch a brief glimpse of human forms lurking in the shadows, a table, a dog, a net curtain flapping in the breeze. He entered the unknown home, penetrated into the hollow house through its orifices. Then the gale carried it far away, and he was back in his seat again, sitting there, a prisoner of the metal hull. A tunnel appeared, swooped down on them like a locomotive. He was swallowed up inside the mountain, beating against the hard rock with all his strength. A vast plain opened up on the other side of the mountain, and he had to spread himself immediately over the whole expanse of ploughed fields. Then it was a service station that loomed up, a sort of white temple standing in the centre of a concrete arena. He saw it all rushing at him: the red letters inscribed on white flags, ESSO, ESSO, ESSO, the platforms, the glittering pumps, the open garages in which vehicles lay weltering in pools of oil. Some men in blue overalls were standing on the ramp, gazing stolidly at the road.

  They were truly in flight, hurrying away as though some catastrophe had just taken place nearby and was about to overwhelm the country. They did not know that. No one did. Men, women, trees, rocks, clouds, no one knew that. It would happen soon, in a few minutes perhaps. A flash of unbearably bright lightning would cross the sky, and the earth would be transformed into a volcano. An electric blur would cover the horizon, expanding, moving forward over the mountains and the sea. There would be no sound, just a silent blast that would
flatten everything, and a wave of heat that would melt the television aerials and dry up the rivers. Then everybody would be dead.

  The bus went still faster. Its metal plates creaked from the effort. It was shaken by all the obstacles that swooped down upon it. It went as fast as the sun hanging motionless in the sky. The tyres scorched over the rough surface, the roadway flowed away between the wheels like a waterfall.

  There were bridges, level crossings, tunnels, crossroads, wide bends when everything leaned to one side. There were steep downgrades, there were hills that tilted the roof upward and crushed the bodies against the green seat-backs. The engine’s grumbling continued endlessly, and at the front of the hull, facing the onrushing movement, the driver gripped the steering wheel with all his strength.

  Where were they going? What was going to appear, one day, at the far end of the road? What new town, what plain? What nameless river, what sea?

  He was there, motionless between these two movements, checked between these two doors, the one through which everything entered, and the other through which everything fled away. He raked the earth’s contours with his body, he rubbed himself against all the protuberances, sank into all the hollows. That’s what getting to know the world meant. Across each country men had constructed these channels of tar and cobbles to break up the forests and mountains. The bus crossed fields, rivers, hills. The road had no ending. Originating in the central point where the catastrophe had taken place, the road went straight ahead, splitting into two, doubling back on itself, climbing, dipping. It had been born one day, in the centre of the dazzling crater, and since that moment it had had no rest. Sometimes it struck against a steep mountain and had to start climbing in a series of hairpin bends. Then there was a pass, some snow around, grey clouds overhead, and it started crawling down the other side. At other times it plunged into great expanses of tall grasses, making a beeline for the horizon. During the day the puddle-flecked road shimmered in the heat. At night it spurted from the black depths, full of luminous signs that moved. The bus floated upon the road like a boat, carrying its cargo of sleeping humanity.