Flanders Road

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• Publisher: Alma Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780714548463
• eBook ISBN: 9780714549316
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three witnesses, involved with him during his lifetime in different capacities - a distant relative, an orderly and a jockey who had an affair with his wife - remember him and help the reader piece together the realities behind the man and his death.A groundbreaking work, for which Claude Simon devised a prose technique mimicking the mind's fluid thought processes, The Flanders Road is not only a masterpiece of stylistic innovation, but also a haunting portrayal - based on a real-life incident - of the chaos and savagery of war.

Two

Who could have given God the notion of creating male and female beings and making them couple? Here is man, and lo! He gives him woman. She has two teats and a little slit between her legs. Put a drop of human semen there, and a regular human body will come out; that poor little drop becomes flesh, blood, nerves, skin! Job said it in Chapter ten: “Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?” In all his works, God has something comical. If he had asked my opinion of human procreation, I would have advised him to stop at the lump of clay. And I would have told him to put the sun in the middle of the earth, like a lamp. That way, there would have been daylight all the time.

Martin Luther

And after a moment or so he recognized it: what was not a rough mass of dried mud but (the bony legs joined and bent back in an attitude of prayer, the carcass half-covered, absorbed by its matrix of clay – as if the earth had already begun digesting it – with, on the hard, crumbling crust, its aspect, its morphology of both insect and crustacean) a horse, or rather what had been a horse (whinnying, snorting in the green fields) and reverting now, or already reverted to the original earth without apparently having had to pass through the intermediate stage of putrefaction, that is, by a kind of transmutation or accelerated transubstantiation, as if the margin of time normally necessary for the passage from one kingdom to the other (from the animal to the mineral) had this time been crossed at once. “But,” he thought, “maybe it’s tomorrow already, maybe there’ve even been days and days we’ve spent here without my knowing it. And he still less. Because how can you say how long a man is dead since for him yesterday tomorrow and just now have definitely ceased to exist, that is to preoccupy him, that is to bother him…” Then he saw the flies. No longer the wide pool of clotted and shiny blood he had seen the first time, but a kind of dark swarm, thinking: “Already,” thinking: “But where do they all come from?” until he realized that there weren’t so many (not enough to cover the pool of blood) but that the blood had begun to dry, had darkened now, more brown than red (apparently this was the only change that had occurred since the first time he had seen it, so that, he thought, only a few hours could have passed, or perhaps only one, or perhaps not even that, and just then he noticed that the shadow cast by the corner of the brick wall along the road covered the hindquarters of the horse that had been in full sunlight, the shadow cast by the part of the wall parallel to the road constantly widening, thinking: “But then our shadows were on our right, so now the sun has crossed the axis of the road, so…” then no longer thinking, or rather no longer trying to calculate, merely thinking: “But what difference does that make? What difference can it make to him now where he is…”), the big blue-black flies crowding round the edge, the lips of what was more a hole, a crater than a wound, and where the gashed skin was beginning to look like paper, reminding him of those amputated or broken children’s toys that show the yawning cavernous insides of what had been only a simple shape surrounding emptiness, as if the flies and the worms having already finished their work, that is having eaten all there was to eat, including the bones and the skin, nothing was left (like the carapaces of those creatures despoiled of their flesh or those objects whose insides are eaten away by termites) except a fragile envelope of dried mud, no thicker than a layer of paint, neither more nor less empty, neither more nor less inconsistent than those bubbles rising to break at the surface of the mud with an indecent noise, releasing, as though ascending from unsoundable and visceral depths, a faint exhalation of rottenness.

Then he saw the man. That is, from high on his horse, the gesticulating shadow bursting out of a house, running crabwise towards them along the road; Georges remembering having first been struck by the shadow because, he said, it was stretched out flat, while Iglésia and he saw the man from above, foreshortened, so that he was still staring at the shadow (like an inkblot that slid along the road without leaving a trace, as though on an oilcloth or some vitrified matter) incomprehensibly waving its two claws while the voice reached him from another point, the movements and the voice apparently separated, dissociated, until he raised his head, discovered the face raised towards them, stamped with a kind of bewilderment, a furious and suppliant exaltation, Georges only then managing to understand what the voice was screaming (that is, what it had screamed, for it was already screaming something else, so that when he answered it was with a lag, as if what the other man was screaming took a moment to reach him, to penetrate the depths of his fatigue), hearing his own voice come out (or rather expelled with effort) hoarse, uneven and screaming too, as if they all had to shout to manage to make themselves heard although they were only a few yards (and then not even that) from each other and there was no other noise then save for a distant cannonade (because probably the man had begun screaming as soon as he had seen them, screaming while he ran down the front steps of the house, still screaming without realizing that it was less and less necessary the closer he came to them, his thinking that he had to scream probably explained too by the fact that he didn’t stop running, even when he stood motionless for a second beneath Georges, pointing at the place where the sniper was concealed, still running probably in his mind, not even realizing that he had stopped, so that it was probably impossible for him to express himself except by screaming, the way a man does when he’s running) and Georges screaming too then: “Nurses? No. Why nurses? Do we look like nurses? Do we have armban…” the furious dialogue exchanged at the top of their lungs on the sunny, empty road (except, on each side, that double streak of rubbish, of wrecks, as if some flood, some unleashed stream, inundating and immediately drying up, had passed along here, rejecting, leaving on its slopes these confused, filthy and motionless heaps – things, animals, dead men – quivering slightly in the layer of warm air that vibrated just above the ground in the May sunshine), between the cavalryman on his motionless horse and the man running, screaming again: “Bandages… You’ve got to… There are two men who’ve just been shot. You don’t have, you aren’t…” and Georges: “Bandages? Good God, where do you…” and the man beginning to turn round to start back towards the house, now slowing down, screaming again, in a kind of desperate rage: “Then what the hell are you doing there on your horses in the middle of the road Don’t you know they’re firing at anything that goes by?” and waving his arms again, turning round but still running, pointing at something, screaming: “There’s one over there, just behind the corner of that brick house!” and Georges: “Where?” and the man already moving, starting back, turning round, screaming furiously: “Good God… the brick house over there!” and Georges: “But they’re all brick,” and the man: “Damn fool!” and Georges: “But he didn’t shoot,” and the man (farther away now, running, his face turned towards them to answer, so that his whole body is twisted like a corkscrew, the head looking the opposite way from the direction he is running, his body – that is, the plane of his chest – in the axis of his trajectory and his hips (the plane of his hips) oblique in relation to the latter, so that he is running crosswise, again, rather like a crab, seeming to drag his feet after him clumsily, his legs threatening to get tangled at any moment, while his outspread arms continue to gesticulate) screaming: “Damn fool! He won’t shoot at you from over there. He’s waiting until you’re close and then he’ll shoot!” and Georges: “But where…” and the man over his shoulder: “Damn fool!” and Georges shouting: “But Good God where’s the front, where…” and the man stopping this time, puzzled for a second, outraged, standing there, his arms outstretched, scream­ing with rage now: “The front? Damn fool! The front?… There is no more front, you fool, there’s nothing left!” and Georges (his voice raised now because the other man has turned his back, started running again, and has almost reached the steps of the house he had come out of and would disappear into): “But what shall we do? What can we do? Where can we…” and the man: “Do what I did!” his arms falling, his wrists turned in so that his fingers pointing towards himself seem to invite the two cavalrymen to examine his clothes, screaming: “Get out of those! Get into civilian clothes! Look for some clothes in some house and lie low. Lie low!”, raising his arms again and suddenly lowering them towards them in the gesture of pushing them away, warding them off, cursing them, and disappearing inside the house, and now nothing again except Georges and Iglésia perched on their horses in the middle of the sunny road bordered here and there with houses and absolutely deserted except for the dead animals, the dead men, the enigmatic and motionless heaps in the distance, slowly beginning to rot in the sun, and Georges looking at the corner of the brick house, then the house where the man has just disappeared, then again the mysterious corner of the house, then hearing hoof beats behind him, turning back, Iglésia already trotting, the extra horse trotting beside him, the two horses turning down a side road, this time to the left, and Georges spurring his horse to a trot too, catching up with Iglésia, saying: “Where are you going?” and Iglésia, without looking at him, snorting, his expression still sulky, resentful: “To do what he said. Look for some clothes and lie low,” and Georges: “Lie low where? And then what?” and Iglésia not answering, and a moment later the horses tethered in an empty stable and Iglésia furiously knocking his rifle butt against the door until Georges merely turns the handle, the door opening by itself, and then walls, darkness around them, in other words an enclosed, finite space (not that they hadn’t learnt enough in a week to know the worth, the solidity of walls and the trust they could put in them, that is, about as much as a soap bubble – with this difference that once it bursts nothing is left of the soap bubble but the imperceptible droplets instead of an inextricable, greyish, dusty and deadly mass of bricks and beams: but it didn’t matter, that wasn’t it, the point was not to be outside now, to have four walls around them and a roof over their heads), and this: four urine-yellow rods of imitation bamboo, their bevelled ends sticking out beyond the corners of the mirror whose four sides framed a face he had never seen, wan, the features haggard, the eyes red-rimmed and the cheeks covered with an eight days’ beard, then he thought: “But that’s me,” standing there looking at that stranger’s face, frozen where he stood not by surprise or interest but merely by fatigue, leaning so to speak against his own image, standing stiff in his stiff clothes (remembering that scornful slang expression he had heard one day: “You’re only standing up because your pants are starched”), holding his rifle by the barrel, the butt on the floor, his arm dangling slightly, as though he were holding something he was dragging behind him, for instance a leash from which some practical joker had removed the dog, or the way a drunkard holds an empty bottle while he leans his forehead against a plate-glass window, hoping to find a little coolness, hearing Iglésia behind him opening the wardrobe and rummaging through it, throwing the men’s and women’s clothes on the floor, then his face vanished and the mirror with it, the rectangle in front of his eyes now that of the door framing an emaciated man with a yellow death’s head and a mole the size of a pea on his right cheek, near the corner of his mouth.

Later he would remember that exactly: the yellow skin and the mole he kept staring at, and then the stumps of teeth, yellow too, growing crosswise and irregularly in the mouth, that he saw when it opened, the cadaver-like figure saying: “Hey there!…” then putting out his hand, calmly shoving aside the rifle barrel aimed at his stomach, Georges’s eyes now following the fleshless hand, watching his rifle describe a half-circle, in other words lowering his eyes at the same moment that his arms felt the pressure transmitted to his own body by the weapon, discovering the latter then, with that same astonishment, that same blasé surprise he had felt discovering his unknown face a moment earlier in the mirror, trying unsuccessfully to remember how he had turned around, cocked and aimed the rifle, while now his muscles were contracted, trying to resist the push and to turn the barrel towards the man again, then suddenly no longer struggling, turning away, looking for the chair he knew he had seen a moment before and sitting down, the rifle butt again resting on the floor, his right hand holding it by the barrel again, not quite at the end, the way an old man sitting down holds a stick or a cane, that is, the rifle serving as a support, a prop, for the arm, the left forearm and hand lying flat on the left thigh, exactly like an old man, and not even feeling like laughing as he thought: “And that would have been my first dead man. And that would have been the first shot I fired in this war that was almost what it took to…” then too tired even to finish the sentence, to go on to the end, hearing as in a dream the cadaver and the jockey quarrelling now, the man shouting in front of the open wardrobe, the clothes thrown on the floor, saying: “And first of all who let you come in here anyway, who…” and the voice calm, low, not irritated, not aggressive, not even impatient, but merely full of that patient and inexhaustible faculty of astonishment Iglésia seemed to possess: “There’s a war on dad Don’t you read the papers?” – the man (the cadaver) not seeming to hear, picking up the clothes now and examining them one by one the way an old-clothes vendor would do in order to make a price for the lot, an estimate before throwing them one after the other onto the bed, still insulting them and calling them thieves, until he (Georges, and probably the cadaver too, for he suddenly stopped fuming, stood perfectly still, half bent over, a woman’s dress – or at least something soft, shapeless and limp that, compared to a man’s clothes, could not lie in any one direction, look like anything except on a woman’s body, even if it too were limp or shapeless – in his hand) heard the noise, the double and abrupt click in both directions of a breech locked, Iglésia now holding his own rifle aimed at the man’s chest, still saying in the same plaintive (and almost whining and bored rather than irritated, and resigned rather than threatening) voice: “And what if I shot you down? Would you call the police? I could kill you without making any more fuss than if you were a fly All I have to do is pull this trigger and we’ll have one more body around And with all that are out there rotting on the road already one more or less won’t make much difference you know,” the man motionless now, still holding the limp piece of cloth in his hands, saying: “All right boy All right We’re not going to,” Georges still sitting in his chair like an old man taking the sun on the bench of an old-age home, thinking “He’s perfectly capable of doing it,” but still not moving, not even finding the strength to open his mouth, merely thinking with dejection: “It’s still going to make a terrible noise,” preparing himself, stiffening in anticipation of the shot, the explosion, then hearing Iglésia’s plaintive voice saying: “All right stop whining We haven’t broken anything All we want are some clothes to wear.”

Then they (all three: the fleshless cadaver, Iglésia and Georges – they dressed now like farmhands, that is, vaguely uncomfortable, vaguely embarrassed, as if – abandoning their heavy carapace of cloth and leather – they felt almost naked, weightless in the weightless air) were outside again, floating in that kind of enormous emptiness, that cottony void surrounded on all sides by the sound or rather the somehow calm murmur of the battle, and then the three planes appeared, grey, low, fishlike and not very fast, flying parallel and horizontally with slight variations in altitude which made them waver, rise and sink imperceptibly in relation to each other, exactly like fish undulating in the current, strafing the road behind them (Iglésia, Georges and the cadaverous man motionless now but not trying to hide, standing in the lane the hedge up to their chests, staring, Georges thinking: “But there’s nothing left but corpses It’s silly they’re firing on They can’t expect to kill them twice”), the machine guns making a faint noise like sewing machines, absurd, without conviction, quite slow, not even as loud as the sound of a two-cylinder pump, like this: tap… tap… tap… tap… lost, absorbed, drowned in the enormous motionless countryside (from where they were nothing moved on the road), under the enormous motionless sky, then everything grew still again: the houses, the orchards, the hedges, the sunny fields, the woods that formed the horizon to the south, the calm sound of the cannon, a little stronger on the left, carried by the warm calm air, not very loud and not very insistent, merely there, patient, like workmen somewhere demolishing a house without hurrying, and nothing else.

And a little later, walls around them again, something enclosing in any case, and Georges sitting down obediently, his mouth, his tongue, his lips trying to say: “I’d rather eat something If you have something to eat I…” but not managing to, looking with impotent despair at the man with the cadaverous face talking to the woman standing beside their table, then the woman going away, coming back, setting down the glass in front of him and filling it (the glass a tiny reversed cone very wide above the thin stem) with something transparent and colourless like water but which he felt like spitting out when it was in his mouth, harsh, burning. Still he didn’t spit it out, swallowed it, as he docilely swallowed the contents – also colourless, transparent, harsh and burning – of the second glass she poured out, still trying (or rather struggling to try) to say that he would rather have a bite to eat but realizing with the same mute despair that such a thing (asking for something to eat) was completely beyond his strength, contenting himself, then, with listening (trying to listen) to what they were saying and emptying the little cones filled with the colourless and burning liquid, wondering if the flies had already begun to buzz round him as over the dead horse, thinking of the planes, thinking again: “But they couldn’t have killed him twice So?” until he realized that he was drunk, saying: “I don’t know what it was. I mean: I didn’t know where I was or when or what was happening if I was ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Flanders Road
• One
• Two
• Three