Trois villes saintes

Chancah, Tixacacal and Chun Pom are three ancient Aztec or Mayan cities celebrated by the young Le Clézio during his stay in Mexico in the 1970s. In his thirties, Le Clézio turned away from narratives of urban anguish, leaving the metropolis to explore elsewhere — and Mexico in particular. The book revolves around the dead gods of the Embera Indians, ecological concerns, dreamlike vision and the meditative path without which no life is possible. The white invaders saw, came and conquered, and drought settled in with the disappearance of the people. Yet for Le Clézio, the earthly places where civilizations were born cannot truly die: they wait for another people, or other circumstances, to allow their rebirth, interspersed with passages from ancient Indian texts drawn from the prophecies of the Chilam Balam.

Le Clézio, who delights in rolling the sonorities of foreign names or scattering them across the page, observes how “modern civilization” has sterilized or isolated these “first” peoples, preferring the fixed eternity of a golden age to the changes of modernity. Truth and freedom lie in the water that falls from the sky, irrigating the fields and forest as it does the throats of men. Consciousness neither waits nor demands: “It does not judge. What it asks, silently, proudly, is not vengeance, nor money. It is attuned to the desire of the gods, and it asks only this: bread and water.”

Trois villes saintes appeared in spring 1980, together with Désert. Two important publications that confirm protest and revolt as permanent elements of Le Clézio’s work, within an increasingly sweeping questioning of the Western world.