Terra Amata

I PLAYED ALL THOSE GAMES

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn — you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

In the streets of the town a sort of ant-hill swarmed during the day and sparkled during the night. Each insect hurried without thinking towards its goal, following in the mysterious furrow traced by others. Each had his own life hermetically sealed up inside him, and desired nothing else. Each had his nest, his store of provisions, his eggs, his domestic rites. He had sketched out his own kingdom without realizing it, and it was always the same. Inside each shell, if you had looked, you would always have found the same things: a planet that resembled the earth, a bottle of wine or a glass of beer, a woman with dark hair or fair, a car, a refrigerator, a garden with a wire fence round it, a street, a cinema, two or three newspapers, and a packet of cigarettes, with or without tips. It was quite easy to be alive: all you had to do was be there, standing on the earth, breathing and staring vaguely at something. All the rest followed.

To be alive like Chancelade, all you had to do was go on playing all those games: dominoes, lotto, bridge, casino, truth, twenty questions, beggar-my-neighbour, gallows, drawing lots, draughts, ordinary roulette, blind man’s buff, tag, double or quits, Russian roulette. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else was really serious. You had to play and keep on playing with everything you saw, everything you touched, and with yourself. At forfeits, crossword puzzles, Go. At backgammon, hopscotch, crap, strip poker. At noughts and crosses, blow-football, poor Jenny, heads or tails, basketball, football, volleyball. Anything to stay alive:

You make a shape with some matches and say ‘Guess what it is’.

You drill a hole in the wall and see what’s going on next door.

You hold a piece of paper against your forehead and write your name backwards.

You smoke twenty cigarettes one after the other.

You eat 129 apricots.

You follow a woman in the street.

You kill flies with a piece of elastic.

You stick paper cockroaches on the wall.

You fly to Baghdad.

You drive on the left side of the road (or the right if it’s in England).

You go to the post-office and send yourself a telegram.

You go six days without sleeping.

You go five days without eating.

You go two days without drinking.

You go twenty-four hours without relieving yourself.

You go three minutes without breathing.

You go twenty seconds without thinking.

You light your cigarettes with travellers’ cheques.

You nurse a sick cat.

You write a novel.

You walk twenty-five miles.

You fire shots into the crowd.

You dangle a coin on a piece of string and make it tinkle, then watch people looking for it.

You throw bits of toilet-paper in the air when there are swallows about.

You play the saxophone.

You teach a chimpanzee to draw.

You improvise an election speech on a tape-recorder.

You watch an eclipse of the sun.

Everywhere there are people collecting things. There are the petrophiles who collect stones, the nicophiles who collect cigarette packets, the vitolphiles who collect cigar-bands. The tyrosemiophiles who collect cheese-labels. Some people collect postage-stamps, others coins, cups-and-balls, irons, lavatory chains, playing-cards, old cars, mats for beer-glasses, music-boxes, armour, picture postcards, Malay daggers, keys, typewriters, guns, cinema tickets, soda-water stoppers, door-knobs, comics, Hopi dolls, parking tickets, or matchboxes. There are the tubuniphiles who collect radiators, the azertyphiles who collect adding-machines, the gigantobibliophiles and the microbiblio-philes. There are the barbarologophiles who collect foreign languages, and the sanctusylvestrophiles who collect calendars. There are the transatlantonautophiles who collect ocean liners, the albinelephantophiles who collect white elephants, and the motoroscaphocadillacophiles who collect the engines of American cars adapted as outboard motors. There are the philopantophiles who collect collections. And there are also those who collect pencil-boxes, tea-pots, transistors, retractable ballpoint pens, guns with telescopic sights, forged banknotes, bath-towels advertising the Olympic Games, the autograph letters of George Washington, models of the Eiffel Tower in eighteen-carat gold, magic lanterns, lifts, false teeth, zip fasteners, IBM machines, Cambodian temples, Roman roads, obscene graffiti, Superior No. 2 drawing pins and albino cacti.

The games never end. Every second the wind shifts a blade of grass or the sea breaks on a crumbling rock and something in the world has changed. Everywhere, underfoot, overhead, to the left, to the right, in front, behind, the world seethes and swarms untiringly. Molecules move, microscopic particles jump nervously, waves come and go, meet, collide, part. There’s no peace anywhere. Nowhere any immobility or silence. Everywhere agitation, a kind of precise and mechanical madness. There’s no escaping the world, no thinking about something else instead. They’re ants, as I said, real ants imprisoned in their garden. Living inside their miniature world, dupers and dupes, without the power to withdraw, without the power to choose. They have words and signs for all the things around them, and a sort of thought to give them the illusion of being free. It’s really very funny. And not one of them can ever imagine what there is anywhere else, what extraordinary or sweet or terrible things there are just a few yards away. Not one of them will know what it is to be a jelly-fish for example, or an olive-tree with trembling leaves. Not one will have the least idea of what life is like on that grey planet only a few million light-years away. There on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edal-ecnahc.

But all that was impossible to imagine. It was as if there was nothing anywhere but silence, a dreadful cruel silence through which lightly floated bubbles of sound and life. There was really nothing to be hoped for outside that place, that time, that destiny. One would never penetrate the defences of the unknown, never get away from this old earth. Everything there was was there. You had to play and move about and think without stopping, with all your delirious and contradictory powers. You had to go on with the adventure once begun, without wanting to, torn to pieces by doing so. You had to give each thing its name, and sign each move and event with all the hatred and all the love you were capable of.

You had to advance into the plain in the dusk, following the tracks. Walk for hours and hours through tall grasses and mosquito-ridden swamps. Then, when you came upon the herd of elephants, you knelt down and shouted at the top of your voice the harsh war-cry, the prayer, the song of expiation addressed to the animal about to die.

‘Elephant Lafiaku, spirit of the bush, purse of silver, spirit with the arm between thine eyes, strength that uprootest trees, puller-up of bushes, son of the destroyers of the forest, spirit of the coconut-smasher, elephant who kneelest down in thine enormous mass, thou with thine indestructible defences, thou whose mouth smilest a terrible smile!

‘Foot that makest a path through the undergrowth, elephant, transformer of thorn thickets into open glades, thou who dost force a way for thyself! Ogòkú with a back like a drum, he who maketh a noise like a blacksmith when he greets you with the sound of his hammer óówú!

‘Illustrious elephant, bough born in Èpé! Elephant who lookest behind thee with difficulty, like someone with a stiff neck! Elephant with a cushion on thine head but no cargo! Elephant who dost balance a weight on thine enormous head! Elephant, the hunter sees thee and says, “I will now hunt no more: I must go pray to Ikaru!”

‘Elephant, the hunter sees thee and throws his arrows into the swamp, saying, “If the wire-seller is not dead, I shall have other arrows when I come to his house.” Elephant, we see thee and point at thee with all ten fingers outstretched in sign of consternation, and shout, “Yábà ń yábà!”

‘Kúdù, tall as two hundred hills, thou art a boatman! Whilst the elephant is alive women flee and withdraw their wombs. When the elephant is dead, I shall see my last year’s mistress, and her of the year before that. Elephant, for whom we dig a pit, but who art too clever to walk over it! After thy death thou dost change colour like the Sarcophrynium.

‘When Lojomon the elephant dies the butchers come and cut him up to sell, and those who are hungry come and eat him on the spot.

‘If an elephant passes a certain way but once that way becomes a road, and if his mother passes that way also, that road becomes a plain. The elephant has a head but no neck.

‘Elephant Laaye, enormous animal! Elephant La-n-dede, thy name is “Death, stand aside, I pray thee!” He who says he will slay the elephant, and the hunter who says “I shall bring down an elephant”, receive the elephant’s reply: “If thou knowest the fate of goats, leave me in peace. But if thou knowest it not, come near and I will teach thee.”

‘His eye-sockets are like ládugbós: his throat is like the vase orú. But if no one harms thee, thou dost no harm to any. The elephant has but one arm and yet he can tear up a palm-tree: if he had two he would rend the sky like a rag. Mother who dost cover thine infant like the night!

‘The elephant walks in anger and his body is huge. A man with a year-old charm had best leave following him, for the elephant fears not charms. Animal of the long defences, good angel of him who kneels on thine head! Elephant, who transformest all into dust!

‘When a herd of elephants is gathered together they are like a thick wall. Animal of the long tail! It is thou who dost smash the gourds one against the other! It is thou who art seen in the river washing the cooking-pots and the isáàsùn!’

And so the years went by one after the other. You were still alive, still breathing. Now and then, when you were sharpening a pencil or peeling an orange, the knife slipped and gashed your hand. But the cells sewed themselves together again, immediately, indefatigably, because the body didn’t yet want to die.

Lying fully dressed on his back on the bed, Chancelade took a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table and lit it with a match torn from the little green folder. He scraped the head of the match on the sulphur and applied the little orange flame to the end of the cigarette. He drew on it once or twice, watching the shreds of tobacco and the paper catch alight, then blew the match out and put it in the empty ashtray on the bedside table. It was made of blue metal with ALITALIA written on it. There was a little dip at each corner for resting a cigarette in. Chancelade smoked and looked at the ceiling. He’d breathe the smoke in through his mouth, keep it there for a few seconds, then form his lips into an O and let out a few blue rings. Then he’d swell his lungs and inhale the smoke that was left. Finally, sometimes through his mouth, sometimes through his nostrils, he would breathe out a thread of grey mist which at once mingled with the air of the room and vanished. This too was a fascinating game. You could have stayed like that for hours, doing nothing but breathe the grey smoke in and out and watch the ceiling. It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side of the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.