Terra Amata

TO CONQUER THE SILENCE

Then, when you’d played all those games for years without number; when you’d walked through all the streets of the town until you knew them by heart; when you’d eaten all those dishes, drunk all those drinks, smoked all those cigarettes, known all those women; when you’d written down all the names of all the people who’d lived at the same time as you, with their jobs, their ideas, and their passport photographs:

DIEFOLD Jeanne: salesgirl in Prisunic. Brown eyes.

STOJEBA: mechanic.

GUERNICCI: laywer (smokes a pipe).

GANGOLPHE Michel: owner of the Azure bar. Has spots.

ORTAL Yves: friend.

GUEVARA Lise: student. One day in the street she said: ‘The only thing I’d have liked to do is kill my mother. I don’t give a curse about all the rest.’

CARAVEL Manuelle: pretty girl.

BERMON Phillippe: typical bore.

BUIGUES Clairette: left-wing intellectual, frustrated, wears glasses.

BENCIVENGO: plays the guitar.

BESSIS Joseph: philosophy teacher.

DUPEUBLE: childhood friend, antipathetic.

SIMON: childhood friend, sympathetic.

OTTO Hélène: blonde, fond of games. Has modelled for Vogue.

SOULODRE Henri-Paul: dentist.

LAMAS: Insurance.

KADYSS: Funny name.

HUC Marie-Claude: Funny name.

SANTAMARINA Alain: owes me 500 francs.

VEROLA August: neighbour. 80 years old. Always says: ‘There’ve been two great men in human history: Jesus Christ and Napoleon.’

VALAUDE Maurice: friend (lends me his car sometimes).

ANDELFINGER: no comment.

AZAR Gabrielle: she wrote a good poem.

LAVRADOUR Chantal: must give back the records she lent me.

BEDAYAM Myriam: always smiling.

D’ANGELI Anne-Marie: neuropath (failure neurosis, desertion neurosis).

FRANCE: friend.

PAGEL: enemy.

there wasn’t anything much left to do. You could stay shut up in a room lying on a bed beside a woman’s body, Mina’s for example. After you’d talked for a bit, or read the paper, or drunk a glass of pineapple juice, you bent over her and slowly caressed her, thinking of the millions of years past and the millions of years to come.

It was amazing, a woman’s body. On the white sheets the whiter skin, almost transparent, as if there were a light inside. The hair was scattered over the pillow, now dark, now fair, now dark again. The head rested in a hollow, motionless, almost dead, and inside that head was a living soul that drove back the darkness, like that, without effort, from its invisible diadem. From between the parted lips the breath came softly, regularly, without a sound. The nostrils fluttered. In the neck, and at its base, the blood beat lightly, showing the rhythm of the heart.

Chancelade brought his face near Mina’s, until it was so close he couldn’t see any more. Then he slipped his own body over this motionless one and felt every part of his own skin melt into this other skin not his. It was like entering a bath, and the dense mass of hot water swung back and forth. Soon the whole room, and the bed, were caught up in this slow and powerful movement; the white ceiling, the walls, the door, the windows, the furniture all grew and diminished in time with it, and the noise of his breathing rasped his throat as it mounted higher and higher. Chancelade couldn’t see anything any more. He couldn’t hear anything or feel anything; he was caught up in a deep swinging movement that shook the whole world. A strange tempest blew through the room, digging sudden inexplicable gulfs, then as suddenly filling them up again with a swift invisible tide.

There was no more thought. There was no more action or time or place. Perhaps the world itself had disappeared, even, just suddenly disappeared leaving a painful wound behind in the darkness of space. All that was left was this whirling movement that surrounded Chancelade and Mina; and they too were being slowly absorbed by this silent vortex, which was drinking up their flesh, tearing out their hair, melting their bones and their nails. A sort of heatless heat, a calm too great and too precise, was thrusting them into the anonymous mud and drowning them. Chancelade, suffocating, tried to lift his head, but was at once overcome again by fatigue and fell back once more into the tumult.

He tried to think, too, for a few seconds. Through the fog he tried to compose a long sentence that might do duty as a thought. Something like:

‘I’d like a cheese and tomato sandwich.’

But it was no use. The sentence too fell into the bath, and the liquid mass swung it too backwards and forwards, dissolving it word by word.

Chancelade made several more attempts. He said:

‘I’d like a cup of black coffee with sugar.’

‘The ChanChan civilization was wiped out by that of the Incas at the battle of Paramonga in 1400.’

‘Cigarettes burn at 300 degrees Centigrade.’

But it was never any good. Silence had established itself in the room and devoured every sound. Words just entered the nebulous white mass and disappeared before they had time to leave a trace.

So Chancelade gave up the struggle. His mind completely empty, he threw himself into the continuous movement of the room, the bed, his own body and that of Mina. He let himself go, he even positively acted. He moved his hands, his back, his legs, his head, in the prescribed fashion. He let his breath rasp in and out of his throat and nostrils without restraint. He sweated.

And all this too he did as if for the last time, or the first. In the distance, in the nocturnal depths of times forgotten, there was a sort of pale mirror reflecting the grotesque and agile image of an entwined couple. It was taking place this year, here, with the body of this woman, and yet it was taking place eternally, or almost. It was a rite, an energetic and absurd act commanded from without, but impossible to destroy. In his right hand Chancelade held a swathe of hair damp with sweat, and it was all happening in this room, on this bed, at this moment, with this hand, this hair, this sweat and no other. He breathed, moved, his lips tasted the fine soft trembling skin. There couldn’t be anything but this instant, either in the future or in the past. All mirrors were broken, all books burnt, all signs effaced, leaving at last a paper indelibly white.

It was the moment in which you were inscribed totally, body and soul, on the slab of colourless marble; engraved and gashed with scissors, by your own hand, on the oily walls of the cave. Once upon a time there lived in this country a man called Chancelade and a woman called Mina. Once upon a time there was this life, this room and this bed, these windows, this door, this bedside table with a yellow lamp, a tube of aspirin, and a gold wrist-watch that said ten to five.

That was how things had been: shut up in an impregnable fortress, imprisoned in that blue sky, those clouds, that red earth, that line of spray at the edge of the sea. Chancelade had touched that hand, looked into those eyes that looked back at him. He had pronounced those trivial sacred words, those fragile words that scattered at once into the air. He’d said thirst, biscuit, shampoo, woman. He’d panted. He’d been out of his mind for a few seconds while somewhere in the room, miles away or perhaps only inches, that low moan of pleasure and pain had arisen and spread over the trembling walls. And the moan was repeated millions of times all over the earth, as if there was nothing anywhere but one great woman with fevered skin, wide eyes, distended veins and pounding heart.

For a few seconds everything in the world was woman. Chancelade saw the long lands floating on the water, whiter than mother-of-pearl. He saw America and Africa with bodies magnificently tensed. He entered the leaves of women-trees, women-grasses, women-algae. Everywhere you could see voracious curves, incestuous wells, long rivers with devouring currents. The light trembled in the air like gossamer hair. The strange silent figure danced inside every flame, and in the deepest hollows of the sea-bed slept the wide-hipped grey silhouette. Even all sounds were soft and grave, as if rounded red lips had given every one of them passage.

For a moment Chancelade managed to struggle against the cool white tide that slowly rolled his body over and over; then he gave in and became a woman, the same invicible woman who possessed the earth from the dazzling centre of her body, and who was no more either thought or word, but simply a sign of life eternally deployed throughout the universe.