Terra Amata

I LIVED IN THE IMMENSITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

There are mirrors everywhere in the world. Great dazzling mirrors on the fronts of houses, mirrors inside rooms, on the windows, on the doors, on the pavements. The street-lights are covered with long vertical sheets of metal that sparkle all the time. Cars are so varnished and polished they disappear beneath their own reflections. The earth is a great cold mirror that shines with a strange grey and white gleam. The sea is a mirror, and the supple waves are bits of twisted glass shot through with crooked refractions. On the crystal trees the wind twirls millions of little round looking-glasses, and the sparkling rooftops are huge mercury-coloured sheets for ever deflecting the light. And over all is that infinite mirror curving above the shimmering planet, reflecting the strange spectacle; neither grey nor blue, it is a deep void where gleams of light continually come and go, and it retains in its indefectible prison the wild flickerings of entrapped life.

So Chancelade set out through the labyrinth covered with mirrors. He began to walk along the streets with their exhausting reflections, looking vaguely about him at the hundreds of identical images mutually repeating one another. The street was perfectly straight, encased between the huge glass panels of the buildings, and you couldn’t see the end of it. To left and right was an infinity of other streets all the same, long corridors of chill sunlight that led into one another and desperately mingled. The shopfronts sparkled with light, the windows, the hundreds of similar windows, shone fiercely, but you couldn’t see anything through them; you could only see the same thing always, black lines stretching towards the horizon, lines broken or engulfed by the opaque glass. And all along these lines, so many that it would have been impossible to count them, was a crowd of men like Chancelade, all walking, advancing towards one another, going this way and that, passing one another, fleeing from one another as far as the eye could see.

There was nothing left to get hold of. No opening anywhere. Not the smallest patch of dullness, not the smallest bit of stone or tar where the light would stop and rest. The light rebounded ceaselessly from one panel to another without ever penetrating, moving furiously through the lucid air, reversing a thousand times, starting off again, colliding, separating, coming together, whirling round in a sort of stationary angular maelstrom that couldn’t be dispersed. All was surface, hard slab, sharp metal, cold glass, impenetrable reflection.

Everywhere there were those pitiless eyes that reflected, rejected, destroyed you. Chancelade crossed first one street then another. He threaded his way between a row of cars, disgusting shiny monsters with windows raised and headlights shining, advancing slowly as over an ice-rink. He saw his own silhouette coming to meet him from the other side of the pavement, hands dangling, white shirt dazzling, pale face like a mask of glass with diamond eyes. Underfoot, too, he saw his body upside down, moving along with him like a white shadow. The heat reverberated like the light. It came and went all the time between the four walls of the glass prison, its waves crossing and recrossing, stopping then starting again but never finding anywhere where it might melt away. There was no more water in the world, no more cool or shade. The rivers were transformed into long ribbons of crystal, and the rain had dried on the pebbles leaving only a crust of mica and salt. There were no more hollows or caves; holes had become sharp spikes sticking up like darts, and incandescent light poured out of the windows of the houses; all openings had turned into volcanic craters, spewing out clouds of white-hot gas and tons of molten lava.

One day there had been a spark, and since then there had been no rest anywhere. Light was unleashed in the streets of the town, on the flat mirror of the sea, the earth and the sky. The ground had become a desert waste, a landscape of salt-pans and chalk shimmering in the transparent air. Chancelade looked at the sky and saw in the centre of the great white mirror, so deep that you could not say where it ended, the dazzling disc of the sun. And it was like a disc of glass, steady as a magnifying-glass, which reduced and then reflected the desperate efforts of the light. Everywhere, on the earth, on the windows, between the little glass beads on the trees and the crystal spears of the grass, there were other identical suns fiercely raging.

Chancelade had never seen anything so beautiful and so terrible. As far as the eye could see it was always the same annihilated landscape, hard, transparent, without reality. White light came from every direction at once, never ending, never dimming. The air throbbed furiously, and the reflections moved in gracious procession, like caravans of calm clouds. Human shapes rose up smoothly from the street, appearing, disappearing, sometimes even floating in the air. Stars shone on the shop-windows, or a sun would rise at a corner of the sidwalk and glide along an imaginary orbit. Sometimes, quite near Chancelade, human faces showed themselves, strange shining faces with phosphorescent eyes. And the pavement went on vanishing under his feet, a long carpet of crushed glass whose thousand depths were peopled by moving figures. Groups of women approached in dresses with countless facets. At the very instant that Chancelade caught sight of them they would disappear round a corner, mere pale reflections wiped out by the twist of a mirror. The words written on the walls disintegrated easily too, losing their letters one by one or mingling together till there was nothing of them left.

Chancelade went through the paths of the glass labyrinth, but he never got anywhere. It was always the same street ever renewed, showing new angles, new lines, new vistas. And his glance always came up against the same surfaces, to rebound indefinitely in the disorder of the light. He would turn his head to the right, for example, to look at a tree; but his glance would slip on the trunk, return, hit the windows of a car, set off upwards again and reach the sky, then come down once more to the pavement, bounce like a ball, bump into the wall of a block of flats, go off again, zigzag around, and cast about desperately but in vain; now interrupted, now restored, now thrown back again, it flew all over the place unable to rest and unable to spend itself. And everything came back to Chancelade. The town was a shining trap into which he advanced without knowing what he was doing, and its gates would never open and let him out. He was a prisoner for life of his own vision, a slave of his own knowledge. Eyes were everywhere, not only the hostile eyes of others but also his own, with dilated pupils observing himself from all sides, the cold lenses of an indestructible camera whose only purpose was to film himself. There were mirrors on all sides, huge, tiny, broken, crushed, melted, or curved, and all reflected the man who passed before them, the millions of men all exactly alike who walked and walked and walked in all directions!

Nor did the mirrors reflect images of light and heat alone: from every corner of the town came also eternally repeated echoes of noises from another time. The hum of engines, shouts, hooters, the tapping of high heels, the squeaking of soles, the rustling of materials, the barking of dogs, the shriek of jets, sirens, telephones ringing, the deep murmur of music — all returned without respite, to mingle or merge or separate for unknown intervals. They were echoes, and echoes of echoes. There was nothing left that was true or real. These sounds had occurred in the past, long long ago, but none of them had been lost. On the contrary, they had been concentrated by their comings and goings in the hermetic cave of the world. They had been to the furthest depths of the sky, and recoiled with claps of thunder on to the sheet of glass. Thus with each journey they grew, their waves doubling back on themselves within their prison; one day perhaps they would grow too strong, and the universe would shiver to pieces like a crystal ball.

Chancelade tried in vain to escape from this hell of mirrors. He kept to the walls, stopped at a crossroads, went round a square, took ten different streets; but it wasn’t any use. Always, before him, beneath him and overhead were the impenetrable sheets of glass alive with meaningless reflections. He tried to hide behind a parked lorry, but the white metal shone fiercely and gave him back his own image in caricature. He went towards the sea, and was driven back by the horror of the great flat leaden expanse. Here too, in the curve of the bay, the sun shone thousands of times, on the edges of the waves, on the facets of the pebbles, on car-windows, on the walls of the houses along the front. A white plane crossed the mirror of the sky, and prepared to land on the other side of the town, giving off shining sparks. And in the distance Chancelade could see the mass of the hills and mountains, like huge jewels glowing through the torrid haze.

There was no hope. You couldn’t escape from yourself; the whole world’s business was to give you back your own image. It was an endless, pointless process, like a conflagration consumed in its own flames, and time was a mechanism that could no longer be halted. Nothing was simple any more; nothing happened at the proper time, magically, once and uniquely for all and then no more. All that happened here, under this sky, beside this sea, in this city of shimmering faces, happened millions of times elsewhere, under other skies, beside other seas, with other faces. It was as if some diabolical command had turned everything into a deathtrap. The cycles began over and over again without flagging, without ever forgetting. Flowers, the flight of wasps, the songs of birds, the soft sound of tyres on tarmac had ceased to be unique. They were all the others, and they wanted to destroy; and when they attacked, their furious strength was multiplied tenfold by the age of the world.

A man stood smoking a cigarette by a post with a yellow light at the top of it. And this transparent figure with its fixed gesture was there for ever, on all the pavements, by all the lamp-posts all with the same yellow light. In a corner by a glaring white wall an old woman squatted holding out bunches of flowers, and it was as if the whole population of the world was sitting there in rags, its wrinkled face and expressionless eyes and toothless mouth upturned, offering in its dirty gnarled hand a bunch of flowers without either colour or smell.

Or a woman with painted face, her dress steeped in crimson light, was standing by a door and smiled at you as you passed; and the smile suddenly opened her face, cleaving the shining eyes and distending the mouth like a wound. Then outside all the doors of all the houses of the town there appeared this same mask of glass and metal with strangely gleaming eyes; in every mirror was seen this ghost with flaming hair and steel body enclosed in scarlet silk; and this shape signed to you to follow her into her lair, to go with her into the reversed world where you could see infinity. The rough, cracked voice whispered endlessly into your ear the words that no longer had any meaning, the empty words inhabited by maddening echo:

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Would you like to come with me?’

On the pavements the café terraces were all ready. The tables were set out, and on their shiny surfaces the glasses and bottles stood quietly, emitting their grey and white gleams. Bodies were sitting at the tables, their pale faces poked forward — so many more smooth mirrors without relief. There were no more noses or chins or cheeks or mouths or eyebrows. All that was left were the eyes, huge eyes that had swallowed up the rest of the face, wide, incomprehensible, like rows of identical windows. Chancelade walked by all these distended pupils, and in the depths of all these mirrors he saw his own image advancing, dim, violent, wavering along the cold path that the others had prepared for him.

A girl leaned against the wall waiting for a bus or a taxi or a man. But the light lit up her white face and her legs and hands and hair as if she were a statue. Chancelade walked by slowly and tried to catch her eye, to say something to her and try to escape, to find something to cling on to. But he could see nothing. The vague countenance shone faintly in the flood of white light, its two eyes without depth, its nose indistinguishable, its mouth closed and not breathing. She wasn’t in the street, she couldn’t be there on the pavement just a few inches away from Chancelade. She was on the other side of the mirror, lost in the sheet of yellow-speckled foil. Between her and Chancelade there was the misty thickness of the glass, and she looked at him, at once near and far away, out of her own inaccessible dream. She looked at him out of her dim eyes from behind a series of aquaria of muddy water that magnified her glance like lenses. Chancelade realized that he could never reach her; she was only a reflection, the reflection of a reflection, that had appeared on this white patch of wall by chance, the fleeting result of a series of refractions from one end of the earth to the other; she was unreal, without a body, without warmth, without breath or words or thoughts.

And all the rest of the world had become like her. Reality had drawn in its claws and hidden its whiskers and scales and prickles, and all that was left was this surface covered with floating images, shot through with inverse lightning; this negative in which the darkest shadows appeared like masses of snow and light resembled coal-dust. Cinders, clouds of sparkling dust and flakes of fire filled all the interstices of a space that had once been free. Chancelade walked in the midst of all this debris, painfully and slowly. He pushed aside the twigs. He went through bushes of luminous prickles, and each thorn clung to his skin and held him back. Sometimes the waves of noise and heat fell on him like breakers, and he felt himself being sucked back by the undertow. He wasn’t going anywhere now. The horizon was endless, the streets were endless. There were open squares, great salty lakes sparkling as far as the eye could see. Then straight avenues lined with the motionless skeletons of trees. The fronts of the buildings shrank back and parted, to reveal other frontages just the same, vast tall walls from which the heat rebounded. Corridors succeeded corridors, doors doors, streets streets, alleys alleys. Flights of stairs went up and down and up again. Every so often there would be a glimpse of the sea, a sheet of beaten aluminium on which the sky bore down. Gardens revealed their scintillating crypts, their caves with heavy stalactites of metal. Then more streets, house-fronts, bay-windows, balconies, terraces, open doors through which the sombre light rushed in. Groups of windows appeared now high up, now low down, now left, now right. Car roofs lit up one after the other, sending out spirals of pale coloured fire. The street-lights stood there in line, with the trees and the telegraph-poles and the shapes of men and women with bodies in armour. And always, over everything, the lid of the sky threw back the tons of light, opposing its own opaque and vertiginous mass in a dance that went to and fro and never ceased.

Chancelade walked in the midst of the storm of glass and crystal without ever getting anywhere. It was like crossing a huge cemetery full of marble tombs, or leafing slowly through an album that had nothing written on its thick white pages.

And all around him the crazy vision never stopped. It came and went, carrying his image thousands of miles then bringing it suddenly back; throwing it against walls, pavements, trees, anywhere that there was one of the merciless mirrors. There were as many Chancelades as there were specks of dust, pylons, roofs, manholes, men, women, children, dogs or birds. There were some on the bed of the sea, gliding over the black mud. There were some in the distant hills, engraved on the purple sharp-edged mountain faces. There were even some in the air, in the air you breathed, and this countless host entered your lungs through your throat and spread through the body like millions of living needles. There were the microbes too: the invisible seething mass, this race with identical cysts, flagella, and membranes greedy to devour and destroy. Trypanosomes, bacteria, viruses, staphylococci, bacilli and amoebas. All gathered together in infinite hosts, secreting their toxins and waging their eternal battles. Chancelade had been carried into them too by the mad shimmering; and cut up and minced into invisible fragments he returned to his own body to destroy it.

There was no possible end to this life. It was caught inside the furnace and consumed itself on the spot, in the heat and the light, each particle bearing within it the fire that devoured it.

And so Chancelade walked through the town. He went everywhere, along the glass sidewalks, between the walls of houses, under the leaden sky, beside the steel sea and the diamond hills. There was no more fatigue, and no more rest. Only hate, a sort of hate that was also love and desire. Each step he took over the hard earth was counted, weighed, divided. Each gesture was recorded; each breath went straight to the depths of the world, then spread and was lost. Each thought that flashed through his mind shone out over all the earth, sending down roots in the windows of houses, clinging to roofs, trees, clouds charged with electricity. Television aerials thought at the same time as he, and so did the waves and the traffic-lights and the mountain gullies. Words sprang up out of the earth like will-o’-the-wisps, silent words that vanished before they could be read. Now they had replaced the images of matter; the world was no longer dumb or stupid. It spoke with its myriads of mouths, antennae, legs, wing-cases, pistils and stamens. Its voice and consciousness rose continually in the air, and Chancelade was only one sound in that voice, a feeble, distant sound drowned by all the rest. Intelligence shone everywhere, terrible, insensible. The power of a superior language weighed down on Chancelade, heavier than fifty atmospheres, and crushed him. In the precisely moving street the coachwork of the cars threw off their gleams of thought, and the boiling engines purred their accurate words. The walls rose with their invulnerable facades, the iron and concrete lamp-posts stood solid, pure and invariable in their strange unhoping will. The windows were cold and beautiful, and each of their words could kill. The transparent shapes of men moved over them, and it was a language above reason. The invisible air thought. The smooth sky thought, and the rivers, and the trees with their dusty leaves, and the dogs, the rocks, the algae, the broken bottles. And in the centre of the great sparkling dome was one unique thought, more violent than the others, pressing its cone of passion down upon the earth. Chancelade was lost. He hadn’t disappeared, but he was buried in the town itself, like a place in the left-hand corner of a big brightly-coloured tapestry. The dark green shadow on the fretted edge of a rose leaf, for example, or the white gleam in the black pupil of a bird of paradise. One little place in the web, one single point in the huge tapestry depicting the world.

He walked about interminably in the midst of all these thoughts. He went to the right, to the left, to the right again. He walked for hours, minutes, seconds.

He went into a café where the walls and ceiling were covered with mirrors, and drank a glass of beer. And it was a thought. He went out to the cloakroom, and that was a thought too. At a nearby table a young woman with black hair lit a cigarette with a match; the red flame burned alone at the tip of the little stick of white wood, and its thought was a wavering speck in the grey chaos of the smoke. The yellow linoleum lay over the floor under the table, a flat language on which walked the dull thuds of the words of men. The reason of the walls with their dirty mirrors, and of the transparent ceiling, talked without a pause. Chancelade sat for a moment, listening to the sort of conversation going on endlessly in the room:

‘Flat …’

‘Up, up, up’

‘Forward, back, forward, back …’

‘Cigarette’

‘Ceiling’

‘Floor’

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …’

‘Flow, float, slide …’

‘Black coffee?’

‘STAR!’

‘The blue straw breaks in the empty glass’

‘Here’

‘Six twenty-three and forty seconds, ping!’

‘Round, curved, and spiral’

‘Pool of chocolate, granulated sugar, and …’

‘Dog! Cat! Mouse! Snake!’

‘Michel? Ready?’

‘Disinfectant’

‘Juice’

‘Sun, eh? Moon, eh?’

Then he left. As darkness fell slowly over the mirrors of the town, Chancelade was in turn: standing in front of a shop-window looking at a grey and black reflection that looked back at him. Sitting on a bench, with the rows of cars and the confusion of human legs like a painful river tearing bits of earth from the mountainside. Walking beside a girl in the street, and what they said was already too far away to be understood. Standing on the waterfront by the deep waters of the port; on the surface dark and calm as a cistern, red and white lights were already beginning to appear. With his head turned towards the hills, just in time to see the red disc disappearing beyond the horizon. Chancelade was also at the cinema; he looked through the dark auditorium at the sort of pearly mirror with ghosts dancing and shouting. But that was a subterranean thought, and the world was built around it as on a distant planet; you didn’t know where you were any more — in the caves of the Métro, in hell, or somewhere else.

When night has come down over the town the mirrors are turned back to front, the light and the heat no longer vibrate, the sky and the sea are extinguished, and all the roads are overtaken by slowness. But it is worse than it was before.

In the high-walled labyrinth the neon lights flash on and off without a pause, incomprehensible appeals indefatigably repeated. Black darkness has glided down over the great sheets of glass, opening up terrible depths. Everything has disappeared, almost, and yet everything is still there. You are on the bottom of the sea, in the folds of the icy ocean that presses down and paralyses. These mountains are submerged mountains, riven by sudden abysses whose slopes are clad in dark weeds. On the muddy floor that trembles slowly to and fro, long files of creatures crawl, covered with warts and tentacles. Reflections still reverberate even under water, but so slowly that you can see them approaching through the opaque space, sweeping aside as they come thousands of little moving mirrors that give forth a brief damp slimy gleam. There are trails of bubbles, bloodstained trails that move towards an unknown object and disappear in the darkness. Here noises move with difficulty, surrounded by a sort of halo; they shine as they radiate like stars; each explosion lights its own star. You can no longer see clearly; vision is veiled by a funereal eyelid, and from behind this dusky membrane, lowered like a blind, it seeps out imperceptibly, a light cloud of blood hovering round a wound. Everywhere are heard the tremulous thuds of a life ice-cold and silent and murky; it’s as if danger lurked somewhere, hidden among the steep black cliffs riddled with yellow holes, in the invisible sea-bed, in the air, the sea or the clouds. Everything is unknown. You have to guess and watch all the time, in fear, with cold sweat dampening brow and nape.

The mirrors dazzle no longer; they have become transparent, and on the other side a diabolical world seethes with its great black whirlpools. The mirrors are windows now through which evil will enter, fragile windows that will break from one moment to the next and let in the floods of foul revenge. Everywhere there are these giant aquaria full of sleeping congers and morays with bloodshot eyes, these glass cages in which pythons and vipers coil as in a dream. The nightmare of darkness possesses the town, and every object, every concrete corner, every streetlight vibrates dully with the threat of death. The walls will give. The pavement will open up. The invisible sky draws gradually nearer, bringing down inch by inch its mass of mud and water.

The people are terrible too; they change shape as they pass through the pools of white or blue or pink light, they make exaggerated gestures and their shadows keep deserting them and coming back to them. Some walk along close to the walls, their wan faces peering forward, and instead of eyes they have dark glasses with thick lenses which give off reflections like spikes of steel. The women tap the ground with their sharp heels as they walk, in a rhythm that makes you tremble and follow them. Chancelade is standing still, and a woman arrives at the end of the street and keeps changing colour; first she is blue, then green, then grey, then red, then white. She disappears for a moment in a lane of shadow, and when she appears again she is the colour of blood. She comes nearer, a dull scarlet that seems to be painted on her body and clothes and hair. Chancelade sees the features growing larger on her red face: the closed mouth, the nose, the eyes with their specks of pupils, the forehead, the cheeks, the eyebrows, the quivering hair. The red is in her, entered into her body like a thought. It is her thought become visible, so that she has no need of words or signs. Chancelade watches the red woman approach, and is afraid. Then at the last moment, just as he is about to turn red too, she changes colour as suddenly as if someone had pressed a switch; she turns grey, and is gone.

This is what night is. Ink-stains spreading over damp paper, flowing, contracting, streaming, drawing up the ever-changing map of the prison from which there is no escape. Sparks darting higher and thither from one hiding-place to another, black streaks, dust, viscous mud: and here again, red lights like falling stars that get farther and farther away and never disappear.

Chancelade walked alone through the submerged city, touching nothing. It was too far away now, much too far away. Too cold. Rejected.

Then he went into the big building with twenty-nine floors. He went through the glass door and along the corridor full of clear mirrors. Electric light bulbs shone in the ceilings, hidden inside pale globes. He walked without making any noise to the metal door of the lift. He saw the glass button with its strange winking red light. When he pressed it a green arrow lit up and there was a faint sound inside the walls. The sound grew louder every second. At last the metal door opened and Chancelade entered the steel-coloured cubicle. The door closed. Chancelade pressed the top button, which was marked 29. The cubicle immediately began to rise. You could see nothing. It went on rising. The steel-coloured walls vibrated calmly. The white light that came from the ceiling also vibrated on the walls. The cubicle still rose. Every three seconds there was a kind of sharp click and a green number lit up over the door: 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. The cubicle pursued its vertical way without effort, with only that click from outside, followed immediately by a faint sigh. This too was incomprehensible; a movement away from nothing and going nowhere. The floor rose, the steel walls rose, the ceiling with its pale light rose. The clicks followed one after the other, and so did the little sighs. You were in the belly of the whale perhaps, or in a capsule travelling towards nothingness. You had stopped falling. You were retracing the course of time, and the stifled years were reappearing one by one with a click like the sound of a telescope being shut up. 21. 22. 23. Why should it ever end? The tower had no roof. It disappeared into the ether, unravelling gently into the impossible infinite. The world was a cubicle with steel walls, closed in, hermetic, full of signs and arrows, with a luminous glass ceiling. The world rose along its cables, for no reason, just for the sake of rising, in order to continue its magic journey towards a non-existent summit.

When the lift stopped Chancelade stood by the open door for a few seconds without moving. Then he got out and went to find the staircase leading up to the roof. He went up the concrete stairs one by one, listening to the echo of his footsteps. At the top of the staircase there was a door. Chancelade turned the handle and the door opened on to the night.

The wind was blowing fiercely over the concrete roofs. Chancelade did up the neck of his shirt and went forward gingerly over the slippery surface. The roof stretched around him absolutely flat, scarcely gleaming in the darkness, and everywhere you could see ventilation shafts and television aerials. Gusts of warm air heavy with human odours came out of the openings; but they were whirled away as soon as the icy wind rushed howling hollowly among the chimneys. Chancelade tried to walk into the wind, but he grew breathless and had to stop. He turned the other way and let himself be driven towards the edge of the roof, using his legs as brakes. When he got near the edge he caught hold of a chimney with one hand and looked around him. As in a dream he saw the town stretching away as far as the eye could reach, crushed against the earth at a dizzy distance, dark and empty. It was still night, and yet, seen from this height, everything was pure and sharp in its still outline. The black houses, the straight streets, the fixed specks of light, the glimmerings of the cars — everything was there below, gathered together, intact. The grey ocean had withdrawn and the relief of the earth could be seen, grey, black, purple, magnificently put together. Farther away was the inky curved mass of the sea, and further still the rolling hills and jutting mountains.

Chancelade took another step forward, without letting go of the chimney. While the wind threw itself against his body to blow him down, he looked towards the foot of the building; and the sort of black well immediately rose towards him, with its shriek of terror and hatred: the lighted street and the cars, the hundreds of lighted windows, the soundless movement of the crowd. The void grew harder, aiming an invisible shaft at him that pierced his belly, his glands, his groin, and even his brain. He stood petrified for a moment, then leapt back and drew away shivering from the precipice.

The wind was still howling among the chimneys. Chancelade noticed that he was cold. He looked round for somewhere to shelter, but the roof was flat and there was nothing but the concrete tubes of the ventilation shafts and the bristling television aerials. Then he went to the centre of the roof and lay down full length facing the sky. He stayed there for a long time, listening to the sound of the wind and looking at the black sky and the hard bright stars.

Here, in the terrible cold that swept the roof, the glass dome looked perfectly smooth. It stretched there still and cold, thousands of miles away, like a huge drop of ink on the nib of a fountain-pen. There was no light. There was no speed. The white specks of the stars were fixed in the dense block, frozen eyes that did not see. It was the wilderness or something like it. Nothing, either in or around, nothing offered to the view, nothing seen. The efforts of the light, the rumbling sounds, the chaotic movements, all were lost in the deep well. There were no legs or fins or suckers; only this hollow belly into which everything had disappeared, in which everything was digested. This flat hollow, this infinity suddenly drawn back, this shop-window out of all possible reach. Slowly, eternally, all vain things ascended towards the sky, and the shafts they raised were gradually dissolved. The world’s reflections were swallowed up by darkness — the thoughts of horses and men, the cries of parrots, wars, cycles, sufferings, joys, and deaths. The sky thirsted for life and light. It sucked up relentlessly the savours of the earth, menacing, weakening it with all its strength. All lines led towards it, seeking a meeting-point in its space. But it was always elsewhere.

Scraps of matter floated and glided in the void. Suns exploded, stars contracted, archipelagos of planets whirled round upon themselves and disappeared. Bits of diamond were heaped together in some corner of a vast room with movable walls. Specks thrown into the silence hurtled along at thousands of miles a second. Clouds of gas transparent or opaque hung motionless, yet wisps streamed towards the earth with the speed of light. There was no more chaos or order. Only gulfs, gulfs opening on gulfs, hollows, abysses, unfathomable rifts, gullies, pits, and endless couloirs; and darkness kept flowing endlessly, cramming and ever spewing clouds of vapour into the swelling glass vase. You couldn’t read any more; you could neither hope for anything any more, nor despair. Nor hate. Nor love. Nor curse. Nor try to do anything. You couldn’t make little marks on paper any more and look at them with satisfaction, thinking that the surface of the empty mirror reflected the dazzling face of a man with a gentle smile and a brow covered with blood. The sun itself had been confounded. It could no longer blind you. Its place in the sky had been taken by this kind of hollow, this screw digging ever deeper, and the movement that bored this terrible hole was the movement of the mind dying. On top of the 29-storey building, Chancelade realized that he was going to start ascending again. But this time it was not inside the steel-walled cubicle. The whole earth had now become a lift, gliding on invisible cables up through the strata of the dark sky.

The ceiling kept receding before Chancelade’s eyes. The higher the earth rose, exposing the plateau of concrete and light with the living body outstretched, the more distant, hard and inaccessible became the polished marble dome. Chancelade fixed his gaze on a certain point in the sky, among half a dozen bright stars. He tried to drill a hole through the heavy mass, to try to see something, to understand, to mingle. In vain. The eye blunted itself on the dull armour, without even leaving a scratch. Then Chancelade began to speak, first under his breath, then louder. He uttered the words at random, between clenched teeth, in the direction of the giant drop of ink overhead. He said:

‘I’m going to speak now. I’m going to speak. I’ve waited long enough. You don’t want to listen to me, but I don’t care. Perhaps you don’t understand. Perhaps I’m not talking loud enough. Perhaps I ought to talk with bombs, to make you understand. Or with a machine-gun. If I had a stone I’d have thrown it in your face as hard as I could, do you hear, but I — There aren’t any stones here. I haven’t got anything. That’s why I’m talking to you like this from this roof. I’ve always thought that’s what one ought to do one day: go up on the roof of a very high house, and talk, without lowering one’s eyes. Afterwards I may jump off. Or I may not. I don’t know yet. But I’ve always thought I ought to speak like this, one night, lying on a roof thirty floors up. That’s why I’m here. If I don’t jump off I know what I shall do. I’ll buy a big pot of white paint and write shit everywhere, on the walls, on the road, on the, in the middle of the airport. In letters as high as a house. I’ve waited long enough. I’ve — All I’ve done. All I’ve looked at, listened to, learned. Yes, I want to know once for all now. It’s difficult to talk like this, looking up into this sort of sky, with the stars not moving and the wind whistling in the ventilation shafts. It’s rather ridiculous. Fortunately there’s no one here. Only the television aerials and the chimneys. Not even a bird. If there’d been any kind of animal here, a cat, a rat, a cockroach, anything, I’d have talked to it. Because it’s so ridiculous. But there’s nothing but those things, those ventilation shafts and aerials. In a minute, before I go, I’ll tear them down. Some people will be watching a cowboy film, or a woman singing, and all of a sudden they won’t see anything any more, and all because of me! If I had some dynamite I’d stick it everywhere, in all the chimneys, and light the fuses. Perhaps you’d hear something then … Yes, for a long time you haven’t said anything. For a long time no one’s seen anything around here. The sun dancing in the sky, for example, or a crossing of the Red Sea, or a burning bush. Show us something. Make an effort. No one will know. Make a triangle appear in the sky. Please. Or strike me down with a thunderbolt. Kill me with it. What have you got to lose? It’s so easy. Just a flash of lightning here on my forehead, and that would be it. What are you waiting for? Eh? It’s so easy.’

Chancelade gazed at the surface of the black sky. But there was nothing new, not even an aeroplane or a falling star, and the cold wind still howled inside the ventilation shafts. But Chancelade didn’t shut his eyes. He went on:

‘Who are you? Who are you, eh, what’s your name? Have you even got a name? I have, all men have, so has this house, I saw it as I came in, Residence of the Sun, Vistaréo, something like that, and all these stars have names. So why haven’t you got one? I’ve got an idea, I’m going to call you something, anything, and then you can’t disappear into the void of things that haven’t got a name. I’ll give you a very ordinary name, slightly ridiculous, the name of a baker or a jeweller. Loubet. Jacques Loubet. What do you say about that, eh? Jacques Loubet, profession: infinite and eternal … There, that means something. Before, I didn’t know how to address those what-do-you-call-thems, you know, prayers. I used to think it was daft just talking into thin air, just pretending to talk to someone. God — that doesn’t mean anything. Nobody here’s called that. Jacques Loubet, now, that’s a very good-sounding name. It could belong to a general, or the chairman and managing director of a big firm that makes soap, or vegetable oil. Vote for Jacques Loubet. Monsieur Jacques Loubet, chairman and managing director of the Loubet Salad Oil Company, limited capital twelve million francs. You could put photographs in the papers showing a woman pouring oil into a salad and grinning from ear to ear. Why did you hide yourself all this time? Now I know where you are. In the advertisements for toothpaste, menthol cigarettes, grape juice, typewriters. That’s it. You dictate orders to your secretaries, smoking a cigar, and everyone listens with his head respectfully bent. You buy. You sell, speculate, buy theatres that are named after you and hotels with your initials, J.L. No one knew you were still living on in the world like that. People thought you’d abandoned them. But it wasn’t so, was it, it wasn’t so. You were called Loubet, or Coca-Cola, or Hilton. And you lived amongst men though they didn’t suspect it. Everywhere anyone went they saw your name up on posters, ashtrays, along the sides of the roads, on moth-eaten old houses, or on the backs of air-tickets. And that meant you were there, looking at what the world was doing. Hi! Jacques Loubet! Can you hear me? I’m talking to you, lying on the roof on the top of this house, which certainly must belong to you. Was all that leading to this? I mean, was it really worth it, all those — all those exoduses and crimes and wars and temples and tablets of the Law and angers and exterminations? Was it worth it? Look at where I am now, if you like, if you can. Just look once on this roof. You’ll see a sort of insect grimacing and talking to itself. Look everywhere in this town, look at all these men and women doing nothing special, nothing extraordinary. Was it worth it? Personally I think the play is over and the curtain’s about to fall. It wasn’t much of a play, was it, and the last act was very weak. We’ve seen a bit of everything on the stage, the first moments of chaos, the childishness, the sacrifices, the great pretentious declamations; the adult tricks, the wars, deceit, lies, vanity; then doting old age, the last twitches of muscles trying to cling to life, and despair and anguish because truth is approaching like a runaway horse. And now here at last is the moment when everything has to end. It’s time, everyone wasn’t beginning to get a bit tired. But just the same it’s not easy; no, it hurts. The throat has to be slit, the trap-door opened. It’s going to be painful, Jacques Loubet, very painful. But it’s all over, isn’t it? There’s nothing more to do now. So I’

It was the moment, just the moment to do it. On this hard concrete surface, with its little bits of gravel that penetrated through your clothes into the skin of your back, and the bare sky with its frozen stars, and the cold, and the solitude, the invisible gulf hollowed out before your eyes, the glass that was at once near and far, and the sort of silence. It was the moment to yell as loud as you could anything that came out through your mouth.

‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’ or

‘There’s nothing, nothing! There’s nothing, you’re alone, there never has been anything and there never will be!’

And the words went on coming out of his mouth, and his nose, and his eyes, spreading out into the darkness. It was as if no one was really talking any more, or as if a countless crowd all huddled together were mumbling indistinguishable phrases. Chancelade was still there, lying on his back on the top of the skyscraper staring at a scrap of the dark metal vault. But what he was saying was no longer audible. What he was saying came from everywhere at once, from hotel bedrooms with creaking springs, shining streets, bars, cinemas, garages. From stationary or moving cars, boats, planes, trains. From cupboards where junkies hide their drugs, from the handbags of prostitutes crammed with greasy notes, or the rusty roofs of shanty-towns. It was in the rasping breath of the horse being dragged towards the knacker’s hammer. It was said with the voice of the man on the hospital bed, shivering with fever and exhaustion; in the voice of Georges Doulens or Philippe Cordier. With the voice of that young woman in red with the tired face and eyes hidden behind dark glasses that reflected the passing headlights. Help! Help! cried the hoarse voice, the voice of fear. Fire, murder, help, help! I’m falling, help me! I’m slipping, help me! I’m burning, give me some water, telephone the police, quick, no, open the windows, throw me a rope, a lifebelt, hold out a stick! Isn’t there anyone there? Where have they gone, where has everyone gone? Why are there only mirrors all round me? Break them, smash them! What am I doing here on this lighthouse in the middle of the sea? A little while ago there was a town, and noises, women, and children, you could see their hands and shoulders. Why is everyone wearing a mask? Tear them off! Let me see your faces, take off your glasses, your false noses, your false teeth, your artificial kidneys, your wooden legs! I want to see someone like myself! I want to see someone who isn’t me! All I can see are roads disappearing in the distance, horrible streets, and houses like clouds. Everyone mocks and grimaces. Mirrors, echoes. I don’t want to see this book any more; close it. Hide the pages. Take away the quotation marks. My thought is written down in the world, my thought is a knife. Tear all these pages up and burn them. Burn all those exoduses and kings and geneses. Make a heap of all the trigonometry books and travel books and history books and Greek grammars. Give me a chance to breathe. Throw all those poems down the lavatory, stop doing those tragedies over and over again, I want to hear real words. Fools! You, there, swine, with all your illnesses! Hunchbacks, drunks, air-swallowers! I’m going to catch all of them, all the illnesses that eat you away and kill you! Basedow’s disease, Albers-Schönberg’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, anal pruritus, narcolepsy, abortive fever! California and Chagas and Filatow-Dukes’ and Katayama disease! Austin-Flint’s murmur. Cushing’s syndrome, craw-craw, and parenchymatous goitre. Koraskoff’s psychosis, Ludwig’s angina, Woillez’ and Morvan’s and Nayukayami’s diseases. Shingles and xerophthalmia. Bell’s paralysis, Pel-Ebstein’s pyrexia, Pautrier’s micro-abscess, Reiter’s syndrome, St. Vitus’ dance, the Rumpel-Leede symptom, Friedrich’s ataxia, and Sheehan-Simmonds’ disease. Von Jaksch’s disease. Skoda’s rattle, the Levi-Loraine syndrome, and the Da Costa, Gradenigo and Weber syndromes. Bockhardt’s impetigo. Oh yes, and I know what I’m going to have: the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, and I’m going to walk along the streets kicking my legs about and shrieking out volleys of curses every ten seconds. And yes, I’ll repeat everything I hear. I’ll hear people say, ‘Hallo, nice day,’ and I’ll go on yelling for hours, ‘Hallo, nice day, hallo, nice day, hallo, nice d—’

That’s what the world is like. A sort of skin covered with tics, a face ceaselessly grimacing and twitching. Nerves, nerves everywhere. It tries to pull itself together. It cries, but the tears fall with indifference, like sweat. It smiles, and its teeth shine in its mouth without any joy. That’s where we’ve got to. That’s what I am. A caricature. A drawing. A photograph. A tapestry that I shall never see the end of. That’s enough! Let’s stop! Leave me alone! I can’t bear the sight of these wreaths any more, these circlets, and hearts and curls and zigzags, all these magnificent and hideous things they’ve made out of my skin. I don’t want them to sew with my hair any more, or patch with my skin, or use my bones as whalebone and my eyes as pearls! But what’s the good? The game still goes on, in front, behind, above, below. There are shouts. Colours are painted on, shadows are made across them, electric light bulbs send out rays. Everyone everywhere is talking at once. There’s the slightly damp voice of a woman talking to her Siamese cat. There’s the voice of a woman talking to her child in a room. There are orders, supplications, words of love, of jealousy, swear words, last words. But nobody hears anything any more. Out there in the sky, in the darkness, on the earth and on the sea, and on the windswept roof of the skyscraper with the chimneys howling, there’s nothing else but that. All the cries and all that hymn, for no one. Trees full of twittering birds, plains with barking dogs, airports full of loudspeakers! No one listens and quietly takes it to heart. What a marvellous solitude. A black desert, a white desert. A deep and immense desert of glass, that’s what I live in. There I am, and my life is my real revenge. I’ll never forget what’s been done to me. All these mirrors — I made them myself, to remind me always, so that nothing escapes me. I’ve set traps everywhere like that, and what I catch I keep. Is it I who think the world, or the world that thinks me? I don’t care which it is, now. I’m here, they’re there, to infinity if you like. And what I’ve written I’ve scored with a knife, and inscribed in matter with an axe. I’ve left my signs everywhere, scratches, graffiti, excrement, dandruff, bits of match and cigarette ends. If anyone follows the trail he’ll certainly come to me, on this roof. And if nobody comes, it doesn’t matter, I’ll wait. And if, one day, or in a minute from now, I jump off the roof, it won’t really be to die, nor even to squash myself on the pavement like a fig. It will be to go on talking, to say once for all that the difference between the roof and the ground is nothing extraordinary, nothing miraculous, just the cold air rushing into my nostrils, and the sound of the interminable seconds inside my heart. There. What I really ought to have done instead of talking was make a life-size model of the earth and launch it into space. Or have children by a female hyena. Or write a very long sentence adding one word every day. Then people would be able to read the sentence and know what it was like to be me. What do you think about that? Eh?