Terra Amata

ALL THESE LANGUAGES I SPOKE

There were so many ways of saying such things without speaking. You could do a drawing, for example, a portrait of a woman, with two shadowy anxious eyes, fair hair down to her shoulders, a delicate nose, and a mouth with parted lips revealing very white teeth. You could write a letter, a long letter full of adjectives and adverbs in which, lying slightly, you tried to say what you think.

At the end you’d put:

‘Yours with love

C.’

Then you’d put the letter in an envelope, and the envelope in the letter-box, trying not to think that it might get lost or end up screwed into a ball in a dustbin.

Or you could go down to the sea-shore with an empty bottle and put a note in it with a message. Then you’d throw the bottle in the water and watch it drift along the coast.

It was all very simple really. All you had to do was leave messages anywhere and everywhere, under stones, fixed to trees, between the pages of the telephone directory or the Divine Comedy, and one day Mina would come and find them, one after the other, and understand.

Or you could take a knife and carve letters on the leaves of aloes or in the trunks of plane-trees. It was there all round you if you could only read. Inside the bells on dogs’ collars, inside sardine-tins. In Coca-Cola bottles, or on the backs of cinema tickets. One letter here, another there. You took the V from television, the O from florist’s, the Z from Cinzano. And you made up your message. There was nothing mysterious about it, or even hidden. If only you wanted to be able to read, the message appeared in the street, over the sky, or on the grassy earth. All the millions of different messages that all meant the same thing.

You could send a telegram something like

SO SAD PRETTY DRAUGHTBOARD OF

RASPBERRIES STOP SO SAD

MAHARADJAH OF RAGE STOP CHANCELADE

Or you could send a book, with the relevant words underlined. Or a message in code, putting i for o, t for b, k for z, u for i, and o for a. You could leave signs in the street — a knotted handkerchief, a broken match, a chicken-bone, two crossed cigarettes, an arrow chalked on the pavement. At the end of them all would be perhaps the treasure. Drinking water, or happiness.

It was quite easy, really, to talk to each other from a distance There were so many games, so many languages! There were marks on trees, heaps of stones, semaphore, shadows, ciphers, smoke signals, the highway code, fingerprints, seeds, shells, carrier pigeons, Quipu, coins, calendars, classified advertisements, rebuses, charades:

My First is a nut to crack.

My Second is a nut to crack.

My Whole is a heart to break.

But that’s not all. You can speak in gestures like the Nootka Indians; with wings like bees; by whistling like porpoises; by making faces like gibbons. You can feel with your fingers like the blind, or play the organ like musicians. The world is spread out all around, perfectly comprehensible. The wind makes a noise in the trees, the clouds mass on the horizon: that means it’s going to rain. The moon is yellow with a misty halo: that means that winter’s coming. The insects grate furiously, the frogs croak in the darkness: that means it’s summer. A few waves move over a perfectly flat sea: it means a ship is passing, or there’s a submarine earthquake somewhere. All that’s quite plain and evident. The world is intelligent, transparent and pure, and all you have to do is sink into it and disappear.

When night fell Chancelade went up to a hill overlooking the town. Then he turned towards the west and began to speak silently with his electric torch. He said:

Chancelade peered into the darkness, straining his eyes to the utmost. But in the house far away at the other side of the town the yellow light went on burning without interruption. So Chancelade put the electric torch in his pocket and went back down the slippery stairways that led to the town.