Terra Amata

IN A REGION THAT RESEMBLED HELL

One day Chancelade went through a region that resembled hell. He was sitting in a blue car driven by his wife. The windows were open because it was very hot, and there was some kind of queer electric guitar music on the radio. Every so often a man’s voice would interrupt the music to announce the next disc, ‘Manuella’, ‘Tallahassee Baby Blues’, ‘Wow’, ‘I want to Die Tonight’, or something like that, but the music was always the same. The guitar ground out its metallic sounds, sometimes voluble and swooping up and down with nervous rapidity, sometimes sharp and choleric with roughly struck chords intermingled with long sweet discordant notes that burst forth then united in strident whirrs. The rhythm was echoed heavily in the background, and you could also hear the ‘dum dum dum te-dum dum’ of the double-bass. It was a strange kind of music, sad and sweet at the same time, which reverberated round inside the car like some organic sound; yes, it was just as if there was a heart inside this carapace of metal and plastic, a heart and mechanical lungs, and as if the whole world were inhabited by steel robots.

The blue car drove on by itself along the road, and Chancelade looked at the sea and listened to the strange and powerful music of the electric guitar. He smoked another cigarette without saying anything, the prisoner of the metal machine bowling along, and of the music, and of the fierce reflections of the sun on the sea and the fronts of the houses.

At one point Mina turned to him and said:

‘What’s the matter?’

At another:

‘What a scorcher, eh?’

‘Don’t you feel hot too?’

‘The traffic! We shall never get to town before two.’

But Chancelade didn’t hear. He just continued to lie back on the cushions gazing avidly at the world rushing by. There were lots of people on either side of the road, and even on the sea. People went to and fro beneath the flood of white light dressed in loud shirts or bathing suits, their red skins glistening with sweat. You caught a brief flash of their eyes embedded in their flesh, little black eyes, probably cruel. Some of the women wore strange dark glasses with white frames shaped like butterflies, and looked at the car with dazed smiles. Others had hair dyed red that blazed in the sun. And everything was in motion, passing slowly by the car as if on a conveyor belt.

Inside the metal cubicle the music sounded louder now. Perhaps the young woman had just turned up the knob lightly as she drove. Or perhaps they were nearer now to the transmitter, with its tower radiating concentric circles of the sound of the guitar. The rhythm drummed out powerfully, like pistol shots hitting an iron plate; and each beat was a pulse-beat driving a wave of blood through the metal coachwork and along the chromium and through the fibres of the plastic cushions. The sound mingled with the light and exploded regularly in the body of the car, and each explosion pierced Chancelade with a separate pain.

It was strange to be alive here, in this blue box advancing along the road; it was a sort of prison radiant with heat and sound, drawn mysteriously along by some blind force and gliding helplessly along its rails towards its unknown destiny. Chancelade, his elbow on the car-door, hunched in the imitation leather seat, was gradually seized with paralysis. At one point he tried to raise his cigarette to his lips and inhale the smoke; but he couldn’t; his fingers opened and the cigarette fell out of the window and twirled away in the air-stream. Chancelade had the idea of lighting another, but as soon as the idea occurred to him he forgot. The fanatical rhythm of the electronic music engulfed him and bound him to his seat.

Suddenly the car came to a halt. There’d been an accident somewhere along the road and the flood of cars drew to a standstill. They were drawn up in three lanes, and you could see hundreds, thousands of roofs sparkling in the sun. They were all colours, blue, red, black, grey, white, green, fawn, yellow; there was even a gold one shimmering like the back of a beetle. The light struck down on all these domes and rebounded in great shafts of crystal. Around the motionless caravan the heat too rose upwards trembling, and an acrid smell of overheated radiators spread out a few inches above the ground. From time to time there was a gust of wind but that only made things worse: it brought with it the nauseating smell of the sea, a strong musty mixture of urine, sweat and stagnant water.

Through this sort of dream Chancelade heard Mina’s voice saying something like:

‘What a jam, eh? And the heat! We’ll be here all night at this rate’, etc.

But the underground rhythm of the music carried the words away as soon as they appeared.

And gradually the landscape was tranformed. It didn’t really change; but everything began to shine more harshly, more violently, as if the damp softness of the air had been removed. It was as if for days a terrible wind had been blowing, a furnace discharging desert sand that grain by grain weathered the world to the bone, leaving nothing to be seen but bare angles, points, edges and spikes. The ground was dry now, burned by the light, and nothing grew up between the pebbles but thick weeds with long sharp prickles.

The crowd continued to walk along the pavement, echoing the ponderous rhythm. With every crack of the whip its flesh seemed to flinch and start at the biting thongs. But were they really men? For the faces were all the same, and the bodies always alike. Perhaps it was the same men and women just going round and round to mock Chancelade: pretending to move forward but always going back to where they were, darting at the window of the car their bright sharp eyes. Chancelade tried to look away, but it was no use: everywhere the light glared in livid slashes, sparkling on the roofs of the cars, rebounding from the windows, darting like a dagger from the lenses of dark glasses, jutting from the roofs of concrete and the walls with their overcrowded balconies. Both the light and the noise from outside penetrated the car and mingled instantly with the electric music. Everywhere there was the same fury of faces, the same shrieking voices, smells of gas and hot oil, and desperate movement. To the left arose the huge white walls of blocks of flats. In the middle the tide of cars buzzed in its burning cloud. On the right the beach with its sharp pebbles was seething with noisy men and women, and beyond it rose the other wall of the sea, blue, solid and covered with sharp little wrinkles.

All the colours throbbed in time to the music, as if they were suspended phosphorescent in the void. There was no longer anything calm or insignificant. The bare sky was of an incomparable blankness, the sea atrociously blue. There was nothing on every side but blows in the face, punches delivered by red dresses, dazzling shirts, red or yellow hair, brown faces, gold teeth, glittering wrist-watches, shoes, black and white swimsuits, scarlet shoulders, green or mauve glasses, flowers, cars, children, dogs, motorcycles, pebbles, patches of melting tar. The torrid colours collided, stuck together, spread in soft waves. The burning colours hurtled towards you like bullets. They were all there, foaming together like bubbles or else like steel blades, hovering, menacing, ready to disembowel you.

Nor could you escape from all the names spread out everywhere; on signs swinging in the breeze, written in letters of fire, gashed with great brush-strokes, the senseless words exploded like grenades, and the pieces penetrated your brain. They were also knives, these words, razor-blades eager to carve your skin and make your blood flow. Their dumb cries, more terrible even than the cries of men, arose on every side at once. No matter where you looked it was impossible to avoid them. Strange, beautiful, violent, they lay there like traps, and just as you looked at them they disappeared. To left, to right, before, behind, above, below. On the walls of service stations, over bars, in the gardens, on the beach, and even in the sky, on the long stream trailing behind the aeroplane:

CASTROL

CASTROL

CASTROL

Hot Dogs Hot Dogs Hot Dogs

SOLEX

air way in way out camping site outboard motors

kingsize beach plot orangina

tripe-shop restaurant

bleupunkt

gold

SATAM

Chancelade read all these words inside his throat; he couldn’t stop. He sang them and yelled them without respite, KELVINATOR, disappearing into each other, REMINGTON, swallowed up by the syllables, HONDA, exhausted, incapable of forgetting, SALEM, incapable of shutting his eyes or extinguishing his voice.

This was the real curse of this place, the infernal power that was taking possession of his mind and body in order to reduce him to slavery. The world had suddenly turned over to show its hidden face, and nothing was any longer comprehensible. As the words exploded the landscape gradually fell to pieces, showering the motionless car with the debris of human bodies and artefacts of civilization. But this destruction, instead of making the spectacle more endurable, only rendered it still more harsh and impenetrable. Men and women clustered on the edge of the pavement, their empty eyes masked by dark glasses, their gaping mouths uttering incoherent sounds.

A fat woman came up to the car door and pointed at Chancelade; then she began to speak, and Chancelade listened in terror to the grunts and stammers and gurgles that came out of her mouth. He heard her say:

‘Argl, gaur haurgl, baarh heu-heugogl meug eth at-t-teu argl …’

She burst out laughing, and all round her Chancelade saw children, men, and other women laughing loudly and showing their gold teeth. He looked at them eagerly, fascinated, unable to turn away. When the fat woman had gone he saw a man who limped, an expectant mother with varicose veins, a group of boys, a girl with a broad beam and bare feet and breasts that jiggled as she walked, an old man covered with grey whiskers, a woman in a bikini, two women with untidy hair, another girl in a black swimsuit, a woman with pimples on her shoulders and legs, three soldiers, and a man carrying a transistor. He looked at them without understanding, trapped inside a clear nightmare. He saw all those eyes embedded in the soft flesh, the misshapen noses, the cheeks, the smooth or rough hair, the veined hands dangling from the arms, the shoulders, the fleshy backs, the pot bellies, the breasts, the sweating rumps, the crooked or skinny or swollen legs. He smelt the matching odours, heard the grunts and gurgles of the familiar voices. The colours sparkled in the light, and sky and sea were become as hard as sheets of linoleum.

So it was here, the centre of the furnace, the crater, the heart of the ant-hill. Sweat began to trickle gently from Chancelade’s face, arm-pits and back. He felt that he was gliding into the landscape of madness, in time with the electric music. Soon he would be one of them, an insect among insects; the crowd would close around him like a mouth and digest him greedily. He would slip along the undulating corridors like a piece of food, gradually losing his flesh, his muscles and his mind. Multiform folly would engulf and press in on him from all sides, sucking up his substance, drinking up drop by drop the liquid of his personality. And suddenly he would disappear in the human sea, he would vanish, swallowed up, unconscious, and no one would ever know that he’d been there.

Chancelade gazed with longing through the window at the moving crowd. Somewhere deep in his body, in his belly, in his genitals, in the network of his nerves, he felt the call of the void urging him to mingle himself in what he saw. It was like a funnel drawing him outwards, towards the landscape with its dense colours, towards a world as thick and hot as a succulent steak. The rays of the sun were tentacles tugging at him gently and without pity. The noises stretched out gluey filaments that clung to his skin. The movement turned on its own axis, drilling outwards its endless spiral, and you could only follow, follow. You had to tear yourself off the imitation leather cushions, open the door of the car, and leap right out, abandoning the seething prison of the blue car, with a woman’s voice crying vaguely in the distance, though you didn’t even listen:

‘What on earth are you doing? What are you doing? …’

With quickened heartbeats Chancelade began to walk through the midst of the crowd, along by the sea. He went back along the line of stationary cars, gulping in the smell of petrol and oil and staring at the starry reflections of the coachwork till his eyes were full of tears. The sun was right in his eyes, and he went along through the mist of light hardly seeing where he was going. He was moving fast. His feet thudded on the ground and rebounded as if on a thick carpet. His arms swung at his sides, his hands clenched and unclenched, his lungs breathed in and out, and sweat ran in little streams down his back and down his cheeks.

In front and around him the crowd opened then joined together again; bodies jostled against him, massive masculine bodies, the warm bodies of women in swimsuits, the light bodies of children or girls. There were waves of vulgar and delightful smells: frying, sun-tan lotion, perfume, sweat. Never had there been so many remarkable things, so much richness and life. Ugliness was everywhere, glowing sumptuous ugliness in blazing colours that never dimmed. On the left an absolutely flat sea shone an unwavering blue. There had never been such a blue anywhere. The sky shone too, colourless, mercurial, teeming with a million tiny specks. Underfoot the ground echoed, cracked and buckled, and the heat clung to your clothes and skin like a sheet. Inside Chancelade’s skull now there was no more echo; nothing but a bottomless hole, an insatiable void devouring all it could, drinking in all it could as if for the first and last time.

And perhaps it was the last time. He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices. He’d been travelling all his life in order to arrive here, in hell, to burn with all the others in this hideous yet delectable furnace; yes, it was undoubtedly hell, but it was unimaginably interesting. It was solid life, life compact, thick as syrup, dense, bitter, sweet, nauseating, narcotic, the strange whirlwind that swept up all in its path. Resistance was vain. The crowd broke over you like a wave and you were carried away in its febrile dance. Now you were shouting the words that were written in the middle of the yellow stars: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, or ‘D.D.T.! D.D.T.!’, or ‘Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!’ The whites of everyone’s eyes glared with madness between darkened lids, and all breaths panted in unison, strewing the air with a low raucous hum. Car hooters blared ceaselessly, there were grotesque yells of laughter, and cries, and the music of the electric guitar reverberated from all the transistors: and it was a calm harmonious concert that stirred your inside and made you tremble.

All this had been prepared to crush and conquer you. There was no mildness anywhere, no hiding-place of gentle shadow. Everywhere there were stars of noise and heat and light, in the trees, in the grey pebbles, in people’s faces, in the folds of upholstery and clothes, in the middle of the earth and the centre of the sea. These darts were set everywhere, charged with their sudden poison, ready to pierce the skin. Chancelade advanced into their midst, proffered perhaps as their prey, making no attempt to defend himself. He melted into the folds of the crowd, he crumbled away piecemeal in the sun, he mingled continually with the downward flood of dirty water. Soon perhaps he would reach the meeting-point, zero, and disappear without more ado. He would vanish like a splash drunk up by the sand, merged into the huge ocean of men and things, there on that square of anonymous earth, lost in the eternal plenitude. He would be forgotten. He wouldn’t be dead, but he would cease to be the only living being in the world. He would be no more than a tiny seed in the silo, sifting down with all the other grains, closed in on all sides, with nothing left that bore any resemblance to hope, or freedom, or sorrow. He would never be mentioned again. He wouldn’t even be allowed his insupportable soul; nothing more would be expected of him. He would just be there, between a bit of yellow plastic and a woman in a blue and white swimsuit, with somewhere or other the blind sun, a scrap of blue sky, a block of flats with a hundred windows all exactly the same, and of course the flat sea with its trivial little wrinkles. One name among the rest, one name in the forest of names, and a toneless voice would read out mechanically:

Zisman

Calane Henri

Apaydin

Cadopi

Queru Marie-José

Benezit

Bavastro

Lesueur

Garibaldi

Camous

Gonigres

Malivoire-Filhol de Camas

Vandamme

Uhl Josette

Eliaou Elizabeth

Marie Angst

Pyée Mireille

Almaleh Klod-Korin

Amigo Martine

Chancelade

Michel Tschann

Dol

Gomez

Faureze

Colette Frau

Ansorg

Blua Michèle

Carassas

That was after all how you ought to live. With a number, a blood-group, finger-prints, a mastication coefficient, one eye with 8/10ths vision and the other with 5/10ths. You were entered on your card and the card was put in a special drawer among a lot of others. Then no one had to be himself any more, and everywhere there reigned the great peace of ordered disorder.

There were so many men here, so many women, and children, and cars, and dogs, and houses, and roads, and street-lights, and stones, and trees. So much dust. So many colours and movements It was impossible not to feel intoxicated at the spectacle of all this abundance. You were one of them! You were in the midst of them! You were them! Chancelade became one with the baking earth, the blank sky, the damp air, the thick smells. He was embodied in the thousands of milling bodies, he had all these faces, all these eyes, all these bellies, all these backs, all these legs. He walked with all these feet and revolved his thousand arms like spokes. He looked, was looked at, looked at himself with all these seeing eyes, an infinity of mirrors transparent or opaque moving in all directions. It was exhausting, but it was remarkable: there was no end to breathing in through all these chests, feeling with all these skins, hearing the general murmur with all these ears. There was no end to suffering and enjoying with all these lives at once different and the same, and with one’s own as well! You were overcome with happiness and despair at thinking with these thousands of brains, speaking with these millions of words all issuing from the throat at once and gushing forth into the air, intermingled, indistinguishable, incomprehensible, and yet so splendidly in harmony.

It was the unique noise arising from the earth, the full growl from all the houses and all the streets, ascending like a dark cloud to throw the huge shadow of the human monster upon the screen of the void. What were they saying? What did they want? What did they see? What were they looking for? They were saying nothing, they wanted nothing, they saw nothing, and they were looking for nothing. But the hot and stormy murmur continued to rise above towns, fields, beaches, valleys, even above deserts, unchanging, unvarying, so vast and so brutal that no one could understand it. All the languages rumbled away in time with one another, all the engines muttered in the middle of their hot smelly halo, all the transistors blared the electric music of organs, violins and guitars.

And Chancelade was caught up in all this expanse. As he passed along the kerb he would say, for example:

‘Hey there!’

or

‘Tchakkk!’

And the sound rose straight up to join the dense cloud over the earth. He would stretch out his hand to tap the ash off his cigarette into a litter-box, and his gesture was lost in an immensity of similar gestures. He looked for a few seconds at a girl with red hair walking along the beach in her swimsuit, and somewhere in the grey eternity peopled with girls there was the image of that white body advancing on its long legs, wearing a pink bikini and with the wind blowing through her red hair.

Yes, somewhere there was this kind of total consciousness that belonged to no particular person and that instead of reflecting things was the things themselves: the world in the process of living, continually, without collisions, without deaths, year after year, century after century, never born, never ending. Somewhere or everywhere, there was this brain that thought. There were these nerves that vibrated. This tongue that tasted, these eyes that saw, these ears that heard, this nose that smelled. There was this language that told its interminable story. And, magnificently, what it told was happening at that very instant on the earth and in the universe.

This world was too alive, you couldn’t conquer it. This space had too much space, this time had too many seconds, days, weeks, millenia. So there was nothing more you could do to try to understand it. You couldn’t any longer meet the terrifying glance of the absolute. You had to become an insect again, swarm on the overcrowded plateau, wave your arms, wave your legs about. You had to hurl yourself with all your strength into the vortex, and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, and give birth, like that, without peace, without mercy; play the cruel insatiable game of the insect world because there was really nothing else to do. One day you were there. Another day you were dead. But that didn’t matter at all in this moving ocean, it wasn’t even tragic. It was slightly ridiculous, rather moving, a twist of the lips, a furtive tear drying on the eyelid. And the giant strength of the world went on bearing down, dragging, turning the wheel. A blind force, without utterance, without desire. The calm and terrible power that is scattered through the glands, through fire, through the tremors of minute particles.

When Chancelade had become this almost invisible speck on the landscape, he stopped walking through the midst of the whirling crowd. He went and sat on the beach, in the sun. He sat right near the water, between a dark girl lying face down on the pebbles and reading a paper, and a group of men, women, children and dogs gathered round a red parasol.

Leaning on one elbow he watched the surface of the sea scintillating in the sun. He steeped himself in the colour blue, in the sound of the waves scraping regularly at the stones, and in the musty odour wafted by each breath of hot air. Every so often people would get up and hobble across the stony beach to enter the sea. And on the ochre skin of the girl reading there were little round drops that dried in the sun.

After a little while a big four-engined jet flew across the sky above the beach. Its thunder covered the landscape like a storm of rain as the strange machine advanced, shining in the sun. Chancelade watched it, that powerful metal machine moving forward slowly like a star in the centre of its eyrie of noise, and thought that its appearance there might really be lasting for years. It glided painfully through the layers of the air, unreal, distant, annihilating every second the few millimetres traversed, fixed in an image continually renewed, a long silver cylinder with outspread wings which the dazzling light shone through like glass. The shriek of the jets pressed down upon the surface of the sea, perhaps causing invisible waves, and it was like some fabulous sign, a comet or a falling star, appearing to men to warn them of approaching catastrophe.

When the plane disappeared on the other side of the bay, probably to land on the airfield, Chancelade looked at the sky; and for a few seconds he could still see the phosphorescent wake, like the track of a snail, that marked its path. Then the white waves merged together and the sky closed up again, swallowing up in its wilderness the last echoes of the din that had reigned there so long.

Then Chancelade went, too. He walked a little way along the beach, stepping over the bodies stretched out on the dusty pebbles. He looked at the multicoloured skins, the black, red, blue, mauve, green and white swimsuits. He gazed at all those navels in the middle of all those bellies. He breathed in briefly again the disagreeable bitter smell of sweat and sun-tan lotion. He walked among all those bodies stretched out in the cruel sunlight as if they were corpses. But they weren’t really corpses. Everywhere, all round him, life burst forth — grotesque, parodic, full of parrot-like cries. At the same time as the smells of sweat and sewers there arose from the baking earth a vague and terrifying trembling, a murmur, a feverish shudder, a cramp, a din, a mad agitation, a tetanic contraction! All these hearts beat ponderously, and the sound echoed through the earth. The blood was hidden, the swift, thick, hot blood! In those gourds of skin there on the beach there were gallons of blood; if you’d smashed them one after the other they’d have gushed out on to the sloping stones and soon poured in red streams down to the sea. After a few days, or weeks, the sun would look down on a great crimson expanse, and the sky itself would be pink.

Chancelade walked for a long time through the crowded streets. He went past rainbow-windowed shops where the goods on display calmly gave off their vulgar attractive odours. He passed café terraces with brightly coloured tables, where women drank fruit juice and ate ices. He went through veritable clouds of noise, and the deep murmur of juke-boxes clung to his skin. He caught snatches from open mouths, like:

‘Hey there, you coming?’

‘But I tell you …’

‘The heat!’

‘Ciao!’

‘Ciao!’

He crossed the road between the bonnets of stationary cars, inhaling the smell of burning. He watched the red traffic lights change to green, and the intermittent ones being intermittent. He looked up at the white houses, and on the balconies covered with dingy flowers he saw people looking down. He stopped at an ice-cream stall for a glass of lemonade and spoke to a girl who was drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola through a straw. She must have been about thirteen or fourteen, and was rather plump, with a brown skin and a two-piece turquoise swimsuit.

‘Is it nice?’ said Chancelade.

‘What, this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not bad.’

‘I prefer lemonade.’

‘Lemonade makes you thirsty.’

‘Yes, but I don’t like that stuff.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘It tastes — it tastes of liquorice.’

The girl laughed, and waddled over on her short legs. Chancelade got out his cigarettes.

‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes.’

Chancelade lit the cigarette and she puffed at it rapidly without inhaling.

‘Are you on holiday here?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Chancelade.

‘So am I. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘Hm-hm.’

‘I’m staying at the camping site. You know, just beyond the main road. The Azure.’

‘Original name,’ said Chancelade.

She laughed again, sipped at her drink, then puffed at her cigarette.

‘Mm.’

‘Is it nice there?’

‘Mm, it’s all right.’

She put the bottle of Coca-Cola down and wiped her mouth with her hand.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Over there …’

‘What are you, German?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘It’s obvious.’

‘Really?’

‘And there are lots of Germans here.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Janine. What’s yours?’

‘Karl.’

‘Are you camping too?’

‘No, I’m staying in a hotel, down that way.’

After that Chancelade went on walking along by the beach. He met thousands of other men, women and children. It was the end of the afternoon now, and the neon lights were beginning to come on everywhere, over bars, in shop-windows, on top of concrete turrets.

Gradually night descended over everything, and darkness covered the roofs of the houses, the cars, the trees, the stones on the beach. It was a hot thick darkness trembling with noise, shot through with red and white flashes. Car lights went on, scarlet stars behind the two white patches in front. Reflections flashed in all the windows, and here and there light and shadow alternated indefatigably.

Chancelade continued to walk by the sea in the midst of this darkness. He had emerged now from the tumult, but the intoxication of it still lingered. Somewhere on this bit of earth was the seething crucible of hell, like the crater of a volcano belching incandescent lava. You couldn’t forget it. Even fleeing alone along the road, with cars whizzing past at sixty miles an hour in the darkness, you couldn’t escape the kind of painful blister that swelled the world. In the dense shadow, or rising up at the entrances of motels, restaurants and service-stations, pale forms stood and watched you pass. From the ground arose the groans and rhythmic beats of guitar music, and it was as if you were walking on a living, suffering skin that trembled at each step and was suffused with blood. The trees stood up vertical like bristles, and in every hollow lay pools of water or sweat. The earth was the recumbent body of a giant, over which you were walking for ever. He was not asleep. He never slept. With all his skin, with all its immense cells, the giant watched the fleas walking over his body, and did nothing.

After about half an hour Chancelade began to feel tired. He left the main road and went along a path of pebbles that led to the sea. Then he lay down on the black beach not far from an open-air dance-hall from which the music came in snatches. He listened for a moment to the unceasing rhythm, a metronomic tak-tak, tak-tak, and to the sound of the sea, of the cars, and of his heart. He smoked a last cigarette and put it out on a flat stone. Then he shut his eyes and went to sleep.