War Read online

  And in the center of a cluster of ten thousand stars, whose light tore to shreds the feebly encircling darkness, there circled the huge Imperial planet, Trantor.

  But it was more than a planet; it was the living pulse beat of an Empire of twenty million stellar systems. It had only one function, administration; one purpose, government; and one manufactured product, law.

  The entire world was one functional distortion. There was no living object on its surface but man, his pets, and his parasites. No blade of grass or fragment of uncovered soil could be found outside the hundred square miles of the Imperial Palace. No water outside the Palace grounds existed but in the vast underground cisterns that held the water supply of a world.

  The lustrous, indestructible, incorruptible metal that was the unbroken surface of the planet was the foundation of the huge metal structures that mazed the planet. They were structures connected by causeways; laced by corridors; cubbyholed by offices; basemented by the huge retail centers that covered square miles; penthoused by the glittering amusement world that sparkled into life each night.

  One could walk around the world of Trantor and never leave that one conglomerate building, nor see the city.

  Isaac Asimov.

  HOW EAGERLY PEOPLE wait for the earth to disappear beneath the cities, so that it will never again be possible to talk about trees or plants or bushes! May it come soon, the layer of tar or cement that will cover every surface! No more mountains and lakes, no more beaches, no more water, no more rivers, nothing any more! Just cement and tar everywhere, plus prestressed concrete. Since the war which is shattering the ancient dreams is advancing rapidly, would it not be better to have done with them all without delay?

  Forests, rivers, grasslands, grottoes, valleys: all are towns, now! Vertical posts, covered drains, esplanades, cellars, streets. Each day, something is torn away. On the surface of the earth, deep in man’s heart. Enough suffering! Let nature change its name: let it now carry a street name, a number, the symbol of a brand-new block. As for those who baulk, those who close their eyes, and those who photograph a blade of grass trembling in the breeze: may they all be crushed by the steamrollers, may they vanish pulverized into the snout of the pounding machine!

  One day, around noon, somewhere in the vast city, the girl, Bea B., takes up a position near the crossroads and gazes at the intersection as though it were a sunset at sea, or an ice-floe, or a field of wheat with crows wheeling overhead, or something like that.

  Her heart beating very fast, she leans against the wall, in the sunshine, and tries to understand what a crossroads really is. She tries to see it, beyond fear, with a look that is neither piercing nor evasive. She follows the swirling lines with her eyes, she studies the flat surfaces, she enumerates all the signs, she wants to conquer doubt. Deep inside her, a word waits to be spoken. She says, gruffly and throatily:

  ‘Crossroads . . . Crossroads . . .’

  It is incomparably more beautiful than the sea, incomparably vaster, with delirious depths, and flashes of light that dazzle the vision. There is so much movement, so much detail that the girl plunges down an abyss, falling for a long while before suddenly surfacing again. She is drowning. Now she is hovering in mid-air, suspended from a grey cloud. The sea is nothing. Nobody has ever seen it. The infinite in all its blackness, forests, deserts: none of these exist any longer. Everything is contained in this crossroads, the magic meeting-place of these four valleys that came from unknown parts and ended here, at this spot, in this cross-shaped forum.

  The struggle must surely have begun in this very place. All the disputes of this and other worlds have chosen this landscape, out of so many others, as their field of battle.

  There are so many things here that it is difficult to know where to begin. First of all, there is this roadway of black macadam, with its millions of tiny granules of stone embedded in the tar’s magma. A congealed mass, slightly convex towards the centre, stretching out endlessly along the four roads. It is a flow of lava, but a tranquil one that never seethes or bursts apart, a frozen river with countless branches, pressing its crust hard against the earth’s surface.

  The tyres of vehicles pass with a liquid sound over the black roadway. Sometimes the crust has given way beneath the weight of a lorry, or has melted in the heat of the summer sun, and then small blue-clad men have arrived with machines and filled in the hole. Here and there, patches are visible, greyish blotches on the tar, and the wheels of passing cars bump over them.

  The black roadway is new. It can never come to an end. The light from the sky cannot penetrate its dull sheen. The rain, when it rains, flows over it and runs down its slopes towards the gutters. The wind, when it blows, does not raise waves, but skims over the hard surface, grabbing dust-heaps and greasy papers, then rushes along the roadway, to be engulfed in the corridors of side-streets. In the centre of the crossroads there is an invisible point from which whirlwinds spring.

  Bea B. is studying the crossroads, trying to understand how the four rivers of macadam come together and in which direction they are rolling. But they are headed neither this way nor that way. They are headed in all directions at the same time, reaching the edge of the universe in a single second. The black solid mass, without speed, without passion, that provides the city’s primary element; the throbbing ground beyond which there is nothing. All comes to a halt here: imagination, hope, violence, all the war’s secrets.

  Bea B. retreats, leaning her back against the wall of the pharmacy. She gazes at the roadway with utter concentration, willing herself to enter it, to become a crossroads. She stretches her body out on the hard black surface, arms crossed on her chest, and cars and people’s feet pass over her.

  There are pavements, too. Imagine strips of grey cement, about one foot high, bordering the roadway: shorelines, as calm and flat as the river itself, following the contours of the houses. At the edge of the pavement the cement strip is kept in check by a sort of step of white stone. On the left-hand side of street number one, the pavement makes an angle, then sets off again in a straight line. But on the right-hand side, at the angle of street number one and street number two, the strip of pavement becomes rounded, and the stone step has been carved into an arc. Why should that be so? Has the current from the river of tar worn away the point of the angle, or is there some mysterious factor, in the wall of the house, or in the nature of things in general, that has required the equilibrium of asymmetry?

  Bea B. looks down at the area of pavement beneath her feet. Like the rest, it remains motionless, a grey and white surface protruding above the black roadway. This is the haven of pedestrians and dogs. This is where children arrive, panting, after having run, hopping all the way, across the street’s dark ocean. The pavement is inscribed with a series of geometrical designs: squares traced in the cement with a ruler. Squares for skipping from one to the other, while walking along. Squares to drive one crazy in trying to count them. Squares to prevent crêpe soles from skidding on rainy days. Squares to let people know that this is human territory, adorned with tattoos. Because of the squares drawn on the pavement, the roadway’s black stream is a place of ill omen where death and the unknown and the inhuman prowl.

  Everything is so simple, at this crossroads, that one must never think: how might this be otherwise?

  Bea B. studies all the signs installed along the pavement. These objects in the landscape, motionless as trees or rocks, are no-parking signs. They stand upright at each side of the crossroads, their grey metal tubes topped by discs painted blue and red. And here and there, along the ground, are the grilles of drains, rectangles of black cast iron where for years waste matter has accumulated. In their centres, a rosette of moulded metal spells out the letters S.E.V.

  Bea B. notices a curious kind of island in the middle of the crossroads, a long rectangle of cement floating upon the black roadway. At each end, the island is terminated by a stone-bordered circle that serves as base for a luminous winking turret. Above the turret on the l
eft a signpost says: THE HARBOUR.

  Bea B. is not engaged in thought. She has no time to think. All her time is occupied in seeing everything connected with the crossroads, all these lines, all these volumes, all these colours. She looks at them as though for the last time. As though, after her, after them, nothing could ever exist there any more. A rapturous joy has taken shape under the eyes of the crossroads, a joy that animates it now. Everything – the black roadway, the walls of the houses, the movements of the vehicles, the vertical posts, the winking lights – is extremely pure and violent and simple. So, no need any longer to think, to question empty space. The gaze encounters things, hard stratifications.

  How to put it? It was something like the explosion that occurs when a fireball suddenly splits open and spurts rays of calcined debris. An immobilized explosion, one without beginning or end. It was not destructive. It had no origin. It was there, in the city, with its four barbed arms and its restless nucleus: a star, a star.

  If the world really has a centre, a navel, then this must be it. If the universe is really in the process of being perpetually born, then this must be the egg. Here is the aerolite’s point of impact as it plunges into the field of dust. Here is the sort of festering boil that the lava throws up in the plain and that is named Paricutin.

  Bea B. watches the explosion, her back resting against the white wall of the pharmacy. She is not afraid any longer. The armies may come, but she will not be crushed beneath their murderous boots. The crossroads stretches out, huge and peaceful, just like a river that has ceased to flow. No waves break. One does not see walls crack and crumble under the mud’s pressure. One does not see the sky speed away, ploughing its terrible wake of empty space.

  One sees only things that are transfixed by sunlight, their shadows marked in black upon the ground: iron posts, women’s legs, car wheels. One day, perhaps, the girl called Bea B. will have penetrated the war so deeply that it will be like the eye of a cyclone: a deep silent calm that bears down upon the earth, setting barometer needles fluttering.

  Up and down the pavements that line the crossroads, things are happening: a man enters a bar, brushing past the machine that dispenses soft ice-cream just outside. He vanishes into the blue shadows. A woman and her child follow the lines of the pavement as far as the angle, then turn into the other street.

  There are broad yellow stripes stretching across the road. Little flocks of pedestrians cross over, while the cars come to a halt on either side of the yellow stripes. An old man steps down from the pavement, in front of the pharmacy. He looks to the left and to the right, then walks in the centre of the yellow stripes. When he reaches the refuge with its two winking bollards, he raises his right foot and steps onto the little island. Then he again looks to the left and to the right, and steps down onto the road once more. First he moves hurriedly, then slows down. He raises his right leg, as before, and steps onto the opposite pavement. He stops there, a moment, peering vaguely to the right, then disappears behind the angle of the house.

  All sorts of things are happening. Bea B. watches it all go on, from her vantage point in front of the pharmacy. Men in boiler-suits clambering down from a big lorry. Children shrieking as they chase each other. A fat woman, carrying a bag, who looks up at the house-tops, tilting her head right back, and calls out in a piercing voice:

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  Next to the bar, the wall displays a series of wordings: BUTCHER / BANK / MACCARI & FRANCO. Between the butcher’s shop and the bar there is a door. A young woman suddenly appears. She looks straight ahead. Her face is pale, framed by long brown hair. She is wearing a coat of black plastic material. Standing on the doorstep, she looks straight ahead. After a while, a white car arrives, driven by a young man. The young woman crosses the pavement and climbs into the car. The white car moves off, disappears from sight.

  A man dressed in black lights a cigarette with a match.

  A red-haired dog starts barking.

  Bea B. looks at the crossroads with her eyes wide open. The light is so harsh and so white that the girl is obliged to put on her dark glasses. Minutes do not count, neither do hours. Names, words are of no consequence. There is no sense of place. It is like facing a glacier, or a high mountain with sheer ridges.

  And then, slowly, menace descends. It is fatigue, no doubt, or else mysterious fear that has taken hold like a sickness.

  Imperceptible ripples appear on the convex black roadway. Above the buildings, the sky clouds over. The broad yellow stripes painted on the tar begin to sparkle. The iron posts planted in the ground send out stars of bewilderment and grief. The manhole covers, the squares on the pavement, all the scars, the excrements, the old dried-up gobs, the fag-ends have multiplied. For centuries, now, people have been scattering these leavings over the ground; for centuries, now, the dust has been falling. The four roads’ summons is a wind that stabs the midriff, a gasping wind.

  Bea B. looks at the crossroads with eyes hidden behind dark glasses. But she does not see the crossroads. She sees the future, displayed there, in a flash, on the tar surface, painted on the plastered walls, moulded into the slabs of cast iron. The future has arrived in one stroke, swallowing up all the other landscapes on earth. It has swallowed up vast beaches facing the sea, deserts, grey cliffs, plains of wheat and corn. All these have vanished. The four rivers of tar have flowed from one end of the world to the other, and have then become petrified. The iron poles’ roots reach down to the centre of the earth, to the nucleus of molten metal which nothing can abate. Engines race crazily, hidden under the bonnets of cars. Trams plunge ahead, sending out showers of fat sparks.

  Who has won the war? But it is something other than war. It is more long-drawn-out and more terrible, it is an uninterrupted movement that no-one has been able to understand. The fact that the girl is facing the explosion, on one particular day, at noon, her eyes concealed behind dark glasses, means that she is in the process of understanding. Something has swept through the universe. But there are no real cities, merely tiny cell-like compartments for these insects. Who is concerning himself with the towns and cities? That is another matter. It is in the mind of Bea B., and at the same time it is beyond time and space. It is a story of life and death, a love story; and, too, it is a stupid story, a fable for caterpillars and goldfish.

  Bea B. is looking at the crossroads, so near to her, yet so alien, because it is also her own face. She knows that it is here, in the abstract design of these walls and pavements, that the secret of her consciousness is dissembled. If, some day, she should come to understand the reason for the existence of these no-parking signs, these squares traced in the cemented ground, these angles, these yellow stripes painted on the macadam’s black river, then perhaps she would finally understand who she is, down to the last of her cells.

  When she had had a good look at the crossroads, Bea B. went away. But she told herself that she ought to go back there often, to do a little sightseeing whenever, wherever four roads converge.

  Laugh, but weep at the same time. If you cannot weep through your eyes, weep through your mouth. If even that is impossible, then urinate; but I give warning that at this point a liquid of some kind is necessary . . .

  Lautréamont.

  EACH DAY, THE girl fought against fear. It was an invisible battle: waged within her own being, against outside forces. She had allies fighting alongside her. There was one who lived in the sky and who looked so like the sun that they called him Mr Sun. And there was one who had the form of a cloud, a white and grey ball floating very high in the air. That one was Mr Cumulus, or Mr Cumulo-Nimbus. They were not people to whom it was easy to talk, in fact there was a certain air of haughtiness about them. But when she raised her eyes she could see them there, in their familiar positions, and she knew that she was not alone. It was odd, having all these friends in the air, on the water and under the ground. When the girl went out she found them almost everywhere, and that made her less afraid.

  There were other, more sec
ret friends that she alone was acquainted with. The figure four, for example. She had never mentioned it to anyone. Nobody suspected that Four was her friend. It was a peaceful numeral that surely had no purpose. Bea B. had been thinking about this numeral for a long time now. As soon as she had found out that it existed she had realized that it was her own numeral, and that it would remain engraved in her memory. She had no desire to divide it or multiply it, like people do. She accepted it for what it was. When she came across it by chance she felt almost joyful. She turned the pages of a book and gazed at the number written on the white page

  4

  or else she wrote it in the pages of the blue notebook: Four.

  It performed no services for her. It was content to be there, in sums such as 4034, 44, 74104. In addresses such as 4 rue des Oliviers, in telephone numbers such as 88 12 24, in packs of cards, in the names of kings, on the leaves of calendars, 4 April 1944, for instance. It lived inside words, too, formed fours, on all fours, foursquare, quatrain, crossroads. In its honour people wrote four-line poems, such as:

  El dia 23 de julio

  Hablo con los mas presentes

  Fue tomado Zacatecas

  Por las tropas de Insurgentes

  But there were many other letters that traced their outlines upon the plaque of silence. Letters which sprang from the ground like clouds of insects. Bea B. saw them flying around her, in the evenings, in the night’s black air, or else at noon, in a haze of dust. Great care was needed to avoid the risk of suffocation. Bea B. took a big sheet of white paper and on it she wrote what she saw: