Terra Amata

AND WAS BURIED

Under the inescapable sun the landscape is still the same. Nothing has changed, almost nothing. There have merely been a few landslides here and there, a few scratches, a few avalanches. What was flat expanse is still flat, the mountains still stand wearing out their hard summits against the steel of the sky. Below, the sea is still the same, curved, heavy, opaque, rolling its tiny waves one after the other. There are clouds, either smooth or ragged, from one end of the horizon to the other. All the trees stand motionless in the red earth, like silent lamp-posts with living leaves.

Everything is very quiet now; very rested. All seems purity and order; it’s as if there had never been anyone to destroy, or to hope. Words have re-entered into things and mingled with them. Nothing says anything. Nothing has a name, nothing has a cry. Or else each particle of matter has become its own cry, its own appeal launched with all the still strength of its mere presence. These cries are buried everywhere, and none is lost. They are nails, knives, rivets driven into space, and their meaning is plain, for no one needs to understand any more. Their words are short, concise, they don’t overflow any more, they can’t try to annex anything. What they say remains hidden, a secret inside a greater secret, an even cry with no more beginning or end, no more joy or pain, no more love or hate, but only the self, living and present: Tree! Beetle! Crystal! Bird! Bird! Flint! Metal! Water! Dust! Thus they speak, all together, with their dumb flesh and impenetrable scales.

Nothing is necessary any more. But neither is anything unnecessary. The world is fulfilled, the world is perfect. On the huge map on the invisible wall every object has been reproduced life-size. You can wander for ever in the maze of lines, dotted and continuous; you can enter between the round cross-sections of the trees or the concentric contours of the hills. You can write down bearings, altitudes, distances, depths. You are never lost. You are always somewhere. You can walk for days and days, with the feet of foxes or of wild cats. You can swoop along aerial corridors on the wings of gulls or of eagles. You can dig a hole in a dry mound or a damp, with the claws of moles. Or crawl over hot stones with the bodies of vipers. You can go among the grasses vibrating your cockchafer’s wings; feel misty space with your snail’s horns; even float in pale water in a halo of luminous threads, and be named jellyfish. There was always matter before, beneath and around you. There were always walls of gentleness and violence, ceilings of smells, floors of noise and heat, incidents of colour. The room is everywhere, yes, everywhere. Nothing has been left behind, nothing lost.

You are with all the men and all the women too. In the hollows in the earth, on the shores of the seas, across all the little trickling streams, there are all these beautiful cities. Timbuktu, Nineveh, Byzantium. Memphis, Lexington, Los Angeles. Addis Ababa. Zoppot, Tallin, Mukkula. You are there somewhere, now, through all times, through all ages. Inside the lamp-posts, for instance, or in the sharp angle of the pavement. You echo dully beneath the millions of footsteps, you tremble under all those wheels with their tyres marked with x’s and z’s. You stand at the deafening crossroads with your three lights going regularly on and off: red, orange, green, red, orange, green, red, orange, green, red, orange … You walk along all these streets with the same names, you live in all these boxes with square windows, lowered blinds, buzzing air-conditioners, and walls painted fawn and grey and blue. Caught in the china wash-basins, ensconced in the sprinklers of showers, shut in the ballcocks of cisterns. What else is there? Where, how, why? What is it? The cities are eternal, they will never end. They too speak their total language, and what they say is the truth. Their signals of stone and concrete are installed on the ground, they seek no more conquests. Floor! Gutter! Road! Pavement! Roof! Car! Aerial! Tar! Traffic-light! Car-park! Garden! Factory! The cries of cigarette-ends on the pavement, the cries of rusty ashbins, of lumps of paint, of glowing windows. Hard cries, armed cries, cries put together like blocks of cement. They don’t rise up to the sky, they don’t creep along the sloping ground; they remain intact, the terrible cries of ageless matter.

And every human body also carries you along with it, for a moment or for life. You are there in the right lens of this girl’s dark glasses, full of moving reflections. You are in that blue-and-red-striped silk tie, and the stiff collar of that nylon shirt. You are in the fastener of the black brassière, the hairpin, the 777th square of the tartan dress. The bodies carry you within them like an invisible child. You are in that mole under the blonde woman’s left breast, in the iris of the old man’s eye, in the chapped thumb of the woman on her way home from the shops. Sometimes you are in the wart on the little boy’s knee, in a hunchback’s hump, in a goitre, or in the black lump of the woman who’s going to die of cancer.

Human society seethes and swarms, perhaps for ever; the cities are also rooms, with thousands of walls, ceilings, and linoleum-covered floors. There is nothing else but this lump of matter, without thought, without acts, without words. It is hell and heaven joined together in the same place, and you can’t inhabit one without inhabiting the other. Passions frozen, passions set out on placards and posters, for nobody to see and judge. So you must suffer, then, and love, love until death, and even after. You must have your name written up with all the other names and offer it in the enormous perpetual market. True, all these names are also the names of all the men and all the women. Their infinite identity is written there, along with many other things. They are called Bar, Beach Restaurant, Drugstore, Tobacconist, Rialto Cinema, Ricord’s Wineshop, Rhônelec, Pax Cinema, Butcher’s, Philips, Interflora, Barclays Bank, Forum Cinema, H. Thomas, Dental Surgeon, Casino, B.P., Mercedes, Toyota, Evinrude. Telephone. Station. Airport. George’s Hair Salon. Waterman. Pepsi-Cola. Whisky. Cinzano. Kodak. Motorway. Krung Thong. Chesterfield. Perugina. Caution, icy surface! Danger, lorry exit. Silence, hospital. All the voices speak at once, with their neon letters, their hooters and sirens, their blood-red paint. But what they say is beyond comprehension, and beyond despair; it is simply evident. Pure evidence. Compact matter, deaf, dumb, from which nothing can be taken away and which therefore nothing can destroy. Death has disappeared from this realm. Or rather, it is still there, but neither more terrible nor more absolute than the movement of the ants over the earth, or the crater of the ant-lion.

It has taken a long time to enter into the game. It has taken all those tiny chances during century after century. But now the thing is done. You can’t forget the world any more. You’ll just go forward gently, or perhaps faster than the speed of light, across the issueless design.

Quiet, now. Peace, now. War that will last a long time, murders infinite. There are all names, all shapes. The world is true from one horizon to the other. In the depths of the black sky the void is full, the stars are near. The sun burns, then goes out. Balls of fire pursue their unknown courses, explosions explode, births are born, deaths die. Everything that happens happens in that very instant, without a millionth of a second’s delay. There is nothing figurative anywhere, because everything is self-sufficient. There is no imagination. Nothing is isolated, and nothing communicates.

In the neat little garden with unreal bounds the crouching plants live unstirring. The dwarf cactuses have their spines ready, but it’s for a war that nobody will win. In the mirror-lake surrounded with green sand, the tin bird still stands on one leg, and its truth will not emerge from its image.

Perhaps it’s there that one ought to look for it. Perhaps one ought to slip inside the little tin man with the Chinese hat, so as one day to be able to write, if that’s what one ought to write, on the streamer of paper that he holds out in front of him: