Terra Amata

LOVED

Spending three days and nights shut up in a hotel room with Mina without sleeping or eating. You were capable of doing that for no particular reason, just for the pleasure of being free and able to keep writing, on pieces of hotel paper headed

ATLANTIC PALACE

600 rooms — Air-conditioned

Private beach

I’m alive I’m alive.

Chancelade had chosen it because it was a luxury hotel, with a lift, a garden, a beach, terraces, and an enormous reception hall with shops and a hairdresser’s. In was one of those magnificent hotels with stupid flashy names like ‘Oriental’, ‘Vistamare Palace’, ‘Château Fleuri’ or ‘Majestic Palace’. That’s to say it had soft music, bars with concealed lighting, red plush, uniformed bellhops, imitation crystal chandeliers, mirrors, mosaics, black leather armchairs, and American, Japanese, German and Brazilian tourists in weird get-ups and talking every language under the sun.

Chancelade had gone into the reception hall with Mina and said to the man at the desk:

‘I’d like a room.’

The man had consulted a chart, held out a yellow slip, and said quite simply:

‘Room 312. Would you mind filling in this, please?’

On the card Chancelade had written:

Surname: BURNS

Christian names: Charles

Occupation: Student.

Nationality: Guatemalan

Date and place of birth: August 6, 1939, Champerico (Guatemala)

It was a beautiful brand-new room with dark red walls, black armchairs, a metal table, a metal wardrobe, and a double bed with a dark blue spread. There were also white radiators, an air-conditioner, a blue carpet, and a big window with net curtains as well as two other pairs, one blue and one black. Outside the window was a balcony with a view of the sea and a few pots of geraniums. Lamps with white or red cloth shades were scattered about the room. And on the wall over the bed there was an imitation antique engraving of a horseman surrounded by a pack of hounds. On the table to the right of the bed was a white telephone without a dial and a pottery ashtray.

On one side a cream-painted door opened into the bathroom. It was a small room lined with white tiles and contained: a bath (white); a washbasin (white); a wardrobe with a mirror (white); a towel-rail (white); towels (white); a point for an electric razor (220 volts); a W.C. (white); a toilet-roll (pink); a stool (white); a ventilation-shaft (dirty); and a smell (turpentine) that came from a shiny disc in a little plastic cage attached to the wall.

Chancelade spent a little while taking possession of the premises. While Mina lay on the bed with her shoes on reading the paper, he made a tour of the room, putting out a cigarette in the ashtray on the table, opening drawers, looking at himself in the glass, going out on the balcony, switching the lights on and off, fiddling with the knobs of the air-conditioner, pulling both sets of curtains, turning on the radio, going into the bathroom, using the w.c., pulling the chain, washing his hands and face in the basin, drying himself on a clean towel, combing his hair, reading the notice tacked on to the door of the room, and so on.

Outside it was the end of the afternoon or the beginning of the evening. The sun was still quite high above the horizon and it was very close. Inside the room with the curtains drawn you sensed that there was still a good deal of light left, hard white light that wanted to force its way into the room. You could hear the sound of car-engines too; the road passed just behind the hotel. Then Chancelade would walk over to the bed and sit down beside Mina. He’d take her hand and speak. Mina would go on reading the paper, and from time to time lift her head and look at him. She answered what he said too, or else asked him questions. They were merely trivial conversations, not the sort you find in books. Words that just came and went, without order or logic, snatches of ideas, exclamations, stammerings, grunts. At any moment, on the bed, or standing in the room, or sitting on the floor of the balcony, or in the bath up to the neck in water. There were movements too, gestures, shrugs, shivers, caresses, scratchings, rubbings of the eyes, yawns, coughs, laughs, the swallowing of saliva. If you tried to remember one particular moment, say when Chancelade talked about his mother, sitting on the edge of the bed, or when Mina told the story of the seagull she found once in the forest, you could have written it in the form of a dialogue, complete with time and place:

10.10 p.m.

Mina lies on the bed, her head on Chancelade’s chest.

Chancelade lies on the bed, his left hand on Mina’s shoulder, his right holding a lighted cigarette,

An ashtray on the bed.

Three lighted lamps about the room.

A mosquito.

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, very nice.’

‘No noise.’

‘No, not much.’

‘Hotels are usually very noisy.’

‘Yes, but this is an expensive one.’

‘There are usually people quarrelling, or drunk, and cars, and—’

‘Yes, you can’t hear anything here.’

‘Do you think there is any noise?’

‘It must be soundproofed.’

‘Yes, otherwise someone would have banged on our wall.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Do you know, this is the first time I’ve ever liked being in a hotel.’

‘What I usually dislike about hotels is the idea that there might be hidden microphones.’

‘Yes, behind the pictures or in the lamps.’

‘Yes, I always feel someone’s listening to what I say.’

‘There wouldn’t be much point.’

‘What, in listening to what people say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, but it bothers me all the same.’

‘I—’

‘And you might be a murderer, or a spy, mightn’t you?’

‘No, what frightens me are those other things.’

‘What things?’

‘You know, those little holes in the wall.’

‘Oh, yes, like spy-holes.’

‘Yes, or television cameras hidden in the lights.’

‘Yes, that’s really—’

‘And transparent mirrors, with people on the other side watching you.’

‘Don’t even talk about it.’

‘Do you know what I’d do if I owned a hotel? I’d have two or three rooms fitted up like that and I’d watch through the mirrors and the holes in the walls.’

‘You’d soon get fed up with it.’

‘No, it’d be very interesting.’

‘The naked women, you mean?’

‘Yes, that, and watching people moving about, walking, sleeping, living. Very interesting.’

‘I hope the chap who owns this hotel isn’t like you.’

‘Look, you could have one hole over the bed and another by the window.’

‘And one in the bathroom.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You could make it pay, in any case, by charging people to watch.’

‘Wouldn’t you enjoy it?’

‘Yes, perhaps, but it’d get to be disagreeable in the end.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Because … because people are so ugly when they think no one can see them.’

‘Yes, but that’s what’s interesting.’

‘No, what I’d really enjoy would be hearing what people said.’

‘Yes, through microphones.’

‘Yes, or like the chap who built that prison, in Syracuse.’

‘In the shape of an ear?’

‘Yes, the hotel could be built in the shape of an ear and I’d be in the middle.’

‘Yes, but you’d hear everything at once.’

‘Not necessarily, you could have a system of … er …’

‘And you think that would be interesting?’

‘I don’t know, yes, I think so.’

‘You’d hear husbands and wives quarrelling.’

‘Yes, and crimes being planned, and secrets, that sort of thing. Ordinarily people never say anything, so like that …’

‘Yes, it’d seem queer meeting them afterwards down in the restaurant.’

‘And I’d learn such a lot.’

‘Of course it would really be best to be invisible.’

‘The trouble with that is it could be dangerous. People can’t see you, so they walk all over you and poke their cigarettes in your eye!’

‘Ha ha!’

‘I read a story once about a chap who invented a machine to make people invisible, something to do with directing light rays.’

‘You directed them somewhere else?’

‘No, that wasn’t it, it was like with sound waves. You know if you speed up sound waves you produce a noise so high it’s inaudible, well, it was the same thing here, you speeded up the light, no, you slowed it down, or, no, I forget.’

‘But isn’t the speed of light always the same?’

‘Yes, no, but what he — He said it was like a propeller turning, when it turns very fast you can’t see it.’

‘So you have to turn very fast to be invisible?’

‘Ha ha, no … No, I can’t remember.’

‘Another thing I’d have liked to do is go backwards in time.’

‘Oh yes, I used to think I’d like that too.’

‘To spend a while among the Romans, say, or go and see Buddha.’

‘Yes, that’d be fun.’

‘What would you choose?’

‘I don’t know, I think I’d have liked to live in 1863.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘I don’t know, I’d have gone to America, and there’d have been the Civil War and the Gold Rush, and so on …’

‘Yes, it must have been fun then.’

‘In 1863 there were still Indians all over the West, Sioux, Apaches, Navajos, and they still owned the land.’

‘Yes, it must have been very interesting.’

‘Or else I’d have liked to live 500 million years ago — you know, at the time of the brontosauruses and ceratosauruses and pterodactyls.’

‘And mammoths.’

‘No, I think the mammoths came later, after the mastodons. No, at the time I meant there must just have been amphibians and reptiles, and seas and lakes and swamps everywhere.’

‘And another thing that would be fun would be to live 50 million years from now.’

‘Yes, that would certainly be very strange.’

‘Do you think there’d still be human beings?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps people wouldn’t die any more then?’

‘The world would just be a single town—’

‘With other towns in space, on Mars, on Venus, everywhere.’

‘Yes. Difficult to imagine.’

‘Frightening.’

‘I read, I read in some book that every species lasts about the same time, about 300,000 years. That’s what happened with all the animals that are extinct. After 300,000 years a species dies naturally, of old age, as people do.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Yes, and I think the human race is estimated to have lived about 150,000 years so far. So if the theory’s correct that means man has got just as long to live again. And after that he’ll just gradually disappear, down to the last one.’

‘What will the last man be called? I’d love to know.’

‘It may be a woman …’

‘How awful for her … All alone in an empty world.’

‘Perhaps she wouldn’t even realize it. If all that’s true, you know, it means the human race has already reached its highest point. Henceforth it will just gradually decline. All that’s been invented will be forgotten, people won’t know how to write any more, fire and tools and language will all be forgotten. They won’t know how to walk on two legs any more, and then one fine day it will be all over.’

‘It’s awful to think of it.’

‘Not really. There may be other species, other forms of civilization.’

‘It’s still awful to imagine. All that trouble for nothing.’

‘Yes, but it’s only natural.’

‘Yes, but just the same it’s hard, terrible.’

‘After all, people don’t think about the men who were alive 2000 years ago or more …’

‘Yes, but they know that they were there.’

‘No, they don’t know. People judge everything in relation to, in relation to what they are themselves.’

‘But the—’

‘People don’t think now as they used to think before.’

‘Don’t you think so?’

‘No, I mean, they thought they possessed the truth and decided what should happen in the world and knew everything. And look where they are now.’

‘Yes, that’s terrible too.’

‘It’s true, you know, there must have been a chap, or a woman, in 722 B.C. say, who thought he knew a great deal, thought he knew the truth. It’s queer when you think of it. He spoke, he believed in God, he ate and drank, he was really alive. And now he’s gone, and there’s nothing left of him, perhaps not even a little piece of bone, or a tooth.’

‘Yes, and people who are alive are descended from him.’

‘What do you think he did?’

‘Hunted bears with a stone axe and let out horrible yells, rrrhaaoou rrhaaoou!’

‘Do you think he thought about us?’

‘Hardly likely!’

‘Yes, it’s depressing in a way to think about all that.’

‘One day my grandmother said something terrible that shocked me very much. She was eighty, and I was twelve or thirteen, something like that. And she said to me, “People don’t realize it, but a life is soon over.” That really upset me. It’s terrible.’

‘Yes, touching.’

‘It must be terrible to grow old.’

‘Yes, when everything is all over. You don’t know how much time you’ve got left, a day or a year.’

‘Fortunately most people don’t think about it.’

‘The worst must be — the thought that your life is ending.’

‘Eighty years seems such a long time, and yet to her it was nothing.’

‘When people think about eternal life what they’re really thinking of is youth.’

‘Yes, they wouldn’t want eternal life at eighty years old.’

‘It’s the active part of life they want to keep. They don’t see themselves living eternally with lumbago, or paralysed.’

‘Yes, it’s queer.’

‘Do you believe in it?’

‘What, eternal life?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, no, do you?’

‘No, neither do I.’

‘It depends, what I think is — I mean, I can’t believe that you can just die like that, in five minutes.’

‘How do you mean, in five minutes?’

‘Well, yes, there was someone there, and then five minutes later there’s nothing. That’s what I can’t believe.’

‘Why, because it’s humiliating?’

‘No, that’s not it, but — I just can’t believe it, that’s all.’

‘That a person can die in five minutes?’

‘Yes, not just die, but suddenly disappear just like that. A whole life, just like that, in five minutes.’

‘Perhaps it takes a whole lifetime to die.’

‘I–I knew a girl once, at school. We weren’t exactly friends, but we knew each other very well. Her name was Hélène and she was a year younger than me. She lived near me and we went to the beach together sometimes. I was sixteen then, and she was just fifteen. We didn’t talk much, but we knew each other quite well without it. And then she was very like me — tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. That was important to me because all the other girls were dark, with black eyes. Then one day I heard that she’d been drowned. I was stunned. She’d gone out in a boat and — and there was a storm and the boat overturned and three days later they found her. I couldn’t believe that she’d gone like that, so easily. Drowning’s such a terrible way to die, and I still saw her as she was when she sat next to me in class, and I remembered everything, her voice, her face, her hands. I — she was such a live person to me, and when I heard, when I read it in the papers, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t believe it was her …’

‘Hmm …’

‘And I did something very silly, do you know what I did, I rang up her home straight away and said, “Hallo, can I speak to Hélène Marchese, please?” It was the first time I’d ever telephoned her, and her mother said, in a strange voice, “You shouldn’t do things like that”, as if it were a practical joke, and I hung up quickly without saying who I was. But it upset me so much, I—’

‘Hmm …’

‘Yes, it’s very hard to believe, how you can be there one minute, and then suddenly it’s all over.’

‘I know someone who was killed in Algeria during the war. He was a pacifist, and I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was him. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing to happen to him. Apparently he was shot in the back of the neck with a machine-gun. Eleven bullets.’

‘Yes, it’s—’

‘Especially as he didn’t even know how to use a gun.’

‘I can’t believe it’s all over as easily as that.’

‘I’m afraid it may be.’

‘In five minutes?’

‘Yes, five minutes. And all that about eternal life and resurrection and Karma, etc., I’m afraid all that’s just illusions, dreams.’

‘Yes, it seems rather childish, I know, but—’

‘Have you ever thought about all the millions, billions of people who are dead, wiped out, swallowed up, just like that, and no one has the least idea that they ever existed?’

‘Mmm, yes, it’s true, it’s ter—’

‘And yet they did exist, and had children and wives and — and ideas, thoughts, and there’s nothing of it left.’

‘Yes … And yet I still can’t — I still can’t believe that that girl, Hélène, that she was drowned, and that as she was choking in the water all her life was being wiped out, all her soul and personality and—’

‘But I’m afraid that’s how it is.’

‘Do you — You don’t believe in God, then?’

‘I don’t know, I — it depends.’

‘How?’

‘Well, at certain moments I believe and at others I don’t.’

‘And you—’

‘I’m often afraid that’s just an illusion too, a prop, to give oneself hope.’

‘Yes, I think that sometimes too.’

‘And then sometimes I feel as if — as if it were an abyss, and I were in the process of understanding something very — very important, very strange. But anyhow, now I wonder if all that really matters very much.’

‘What, whether God exists?’

‘Yes, I mean, it’s all I think about, but I feel more and more that I shall never know, that it’s, er, what shall I say? A sort of inscrutable malediction.’

‘But you can’t forget about it.’

‘No, you can’t forget about it.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Gone half past ten.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘No — are you?’

‘No.’

‘If you are we can go out if you like.’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘Yes, please, later on.’

‘It’s funny …’

‘What?’

‘Being here like this, with you.’

‘In this room?’

‘Yes, no, what I mean is, when I saw you the other day on the beach, I didn’t think I’d be here, with you, talking about God and all the rest of it.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I don’t know, I–I wanted to get to know you, but you looked so, I don’t know, distant.’

‘I did?’

‘Hmm-hmm.’

‘I expect that was because of Ribert.’

‘Did he irritate you?’

‘Yes, he looked so proprietary, I couldn’t stand it.’

‘He’d be flattered if he knew that.’

‘Jealous, too.’

‘What does all that matter, I’m very happy.’

‘So am I.’

‘Yes, it’s funny.’

‘I feel as if I’d, as if I’d been with you for years.’

‘Yes, same here.’

‘And it’s nice, being here like this, in this hotel.’

‘Freer.’

‘Yes, and beautiful in a hideous sort of way, with the red walls and the — the carpets and the black armchairs.’

‘Like a cinema.’

‘Yes, and we’re making the film ourselves.’

‘Hmm.’

‘False and true at the same time.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Realist.’

‘Hmm.’

‘But it’s nice, not bad at all.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’re fighting against time.’

‘I’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘I haven’t forgotten, but it doesn’t matter any more, it’s like centuries and centuries.’

‘Century-seconds.’

‘360,000 years to every hour.’

‘That’s a long time …’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘Hmm.’

You could have gone on for hours and hours like that. From time to time Chancelade would stop talking and lie on Mina and caress her. Or sit on the edge of the bed and take a cigarette out of the blue packet on the bedside table. Mina would close her eyes. Mina would pick up a page of the paper and stare at it. The watch on Chancelade’s wrist ticked away imperceptibly, and the fine second-hand turned and turned on itself without ever stopping. The room was sealed, hermetically sealed, and the light-bulbs burned behind their shades with a fierce, unforgettable glare. Outside the night was oppressive, and mosquitoes lurked round the windows searching for blood. Being in the hotel room was like being inside a ship, at once free and a prisoner, travelling towards an unknown country. In a few months or a few hours the ship would arrive at Callao, or Singapore, or Tel-Aviv. And you’d have to come out of your dark hiding-place and confront the terrible sunlight beating up from the specks of mica in the dust.

Then, little by little, the vortex invaded the room, Nothing had changed, the steel and black leather furniture was still there and the red walls were still identical, hard, impassive and without a chink. Over the bed the engraving showed the same horseman among the pack of hounds, and the lamps now off, now on, now off again, had not stirred. And yet as the hours went by a sort of fury, or a sort of illness, settled in the corners, distorted the lines, dwelt inside the metals and the materials, saturated all the plaster and paper and glass and plastic. A hatred perhaps, or perhaps merely a great fatigue had made its way into the room. It had become a sort of bubble imprisoned in the surrounding liquid and ceaselessly trying to burst. The world around the room bore down with all its weight, searching for a crack through which to pour floods of noise and heat.

Chancelade lay on the bed as on a raft that drifted yet never moved. The floor had already melted, and waves of red mud lapped slowly along the walls and spread around the bed in noisome puddles. Mina slept, her head on the pillow and her hair over her face. She breathed in and out regularly, and Chancelade listened: it was a disturbing sound that threw him back on his solitude.

In order to put up a struggle he bent feverishly over the inert body. He breathed into the warm ear, bit the foreign flesh, he even spoke. But the body remained motionless, curled up, unconscious. Chancelade looked around him with eyes that burned with fatigue. He saw the black insects hovering in the air, and the swift white flashes that ran from wall to wall. Now the void, noisy and dangerous, had entered into the room. It could no longer be escaped or expelled. All you could do was watch it advance, spreading like a cloud along the walls, piling up on the ceiling, stretching out its transparent tentacles between the legs of the table, sitting in the armchairs, walking on the balcony among the pots of geraniums.

And finally they had come. Through every possible opening they had come, all the invisible men who now peopled the room. They came and went soundlessly over the blue carpet, they emerged from the walls like clusters of bees, they walked across the ceiling in long lazy caravans.

Then Chancelade sat up on the bed with his back against the wall. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five to three, but that didn’t mean much any more. Reckoning with some difficulty he made out that this was the third day, but that didn’t mean much now either. He reached out over Mina’s body for the packet of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and lit it with a match from the folder marked

ATLANTIC PALACE

600 rooms — Air-conditioned

Private Beach

Then he turned towards the window and studied the sort of vertigo that was invading the room. The phosphorescent mist, mixed with the grey smoke of the cigarette, began to palpitate in the middle of the air like a monstrous heart lit up by X-rays. The air became dense and warm like a lung, slowly enveloping everything hard in its billions of little trembling cells. The smells varied too, sometimes sharp and pervasive, sometimes mild and sweet, almost sugary. Nerve fibres ramified all over the walls of the room, and here and there strange pains appeared, shooting like electric currents. Chancelade had a pain in the steel cupboard, then in the lamp by the window, then in the left corner of the ceiling. He felt a pang at once secret and distant spurt like a spark in the bathroom. The floor began to suffer too, groaning and creaking under the load of invisible feet. The air itself stifled, the light itself was struck, and along the skirting-boards strange insects with sharp jaws gnawed atrociously at the wood’s tender flesh. The cigarette glowed like a sixth finger added to Chancelade’s hand, giving off an unbearable smell of burnt nail and skin. That was death then, perhaps, the inevitable slow collapse towards suffering matter, the great disease that eats away the world’s millions of living forces, the flow of pus, the terrible osmosis. Chancelade was being devoured alive by the monster without thought and without love, and soon he would be nothing but a room, a mere room with bloodstained walls, hard furniture, and a window of cold glass.

To try to still this vertigo, Chancelade sank down on the bed and closed his eyes. His right hand groped for Mina’s body, and clutched at it. But the vortex did not stop. Slowly, painfully, it took possession of the room, the bed, the two outstretched bodies. Chancelade was no longer the centre. He was only a particle going round in the maelstrom, swept along, jostled, drained of all resistance. His name disappeared. His consciousness disappeared. And soon he vanished into the void, lost somewhere in the midst of the rout, become a piece of wood, a used match, a crumpled old ball of paper rolling faster and faster towards the mouth of the gutter. And nothing else remained certain but this infinite series of boxes one inside the other: the bed in the room, the room in the hotel, the hotel in the town, the town in the country, the country in the world, the world in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, the galaxy in the total of galaxies, the total of galaxies in space, space in space, space in space, space in space. There were no more men, no more women, no more anything anywhere. Just perfect and magnificent extension, empty extension, without a word, without a thought, without a gesture that might make it possible to measure, or understand, or even guess.