The Flood
Page 10
Besson strolled round the kiosk. Behind the second window there were foreign newspapers and one or two pornographic magazines. The third was devoted to children’s comics, mostly of the strip-cartoon variety. Besson stared at these little mannekins dressed up as cowboys. One of them, a great hulking fellow with a black scarf tied round his neck, had a white balloon issuing from his mouth which proclaimed: ‘Hey, kids, look—Apache tracks, still fresh! I’ll bet it’s Walking Stick and his band again! Let’s make tracks for Fort Elmer!’ The fourth window was crammed with a collection of miscellaneous periodicals, and had a hole in it. Through the hole Besson could just see the head of an old woman. She looked at him and said: ‘Yes? What d’you want?’
‘I—er—’ Besson stammered.
And bought a paper.
It was with a certain sense of regret that he left the kiosk, and walked on down the street, the paper under his arm. He passed a long row of shops, and saw that the crowd was still pressing close up against the display windows, just as before. Besson felt a kind of numb fatigue stealingover him. It was important not to meet other people’s eyes, and to ensure this meant walking either with one’s back bent, looking at the ground, or else very upright, eyes on the far horizon. But this couldn’t go on for ever.
The rain began to come down a little harder: it was getting cold. Traffic continued unabated. Walking like this, Besson was afraid he might reach the outskirts: after all, it was not all that big a town. If he just walked straight on for long enough the houses would begin to thin out, gardens would give way to waste lots, and the pavement would vanish altogether. Suddenly, without realizing it, one would be in the countryside, brushing through grass, losing one’s way on sharp, stony paths. To avoid the risk of reaching the town-limits, Besson decided to walk round and round the same block.
During each of his first three circuits he took shelter for a little under the awning of a radio repair shop to get himself warm. Occasionally he lit a cigarette and stopped to smoke it in some doorway or garage entrance. On his fifth time round he began to worry in case people recognized him. At this point he crossed the street and went into a café.
It was a large café, lined with mirrors. Customers, both men and women, filled nearly every table in the place. The air was loud with canned background music. Besson settled himself in a corner, near the door to the lavatories. Then he opened out his paper at the page which contained most printed matter, in order to avoid having to move more than was necessary. It was the small-ad page. He read:
WANTED: Young girl as family help. Maret, 34 Boulevard Lamartine.
ENGLISH FAMILY seeks maid general duties, knowledge cooking. Ring 381.541.
WANTED: Part-time pastrycook, apprentice pastrycook. Blés d’Or, Rue du Pontin.
WANTED: Mechanic qualified panel-beater/sprayer. Canavèse, Rochefort.
HOSPITAL CENTRE seeks laboratory assistants (male or female) to undertake night duty on roster system. Box 2126.
WANTED: Jobbing workers ferro-concrete erection. Box 800.
YOLANDE’S DOLLS LTD seeks needlewomen dressmakers dolls’ clothes. 4 Rue Gauthier.
The next ad was in English:
STENOGRAPHER WANTED 1–2 days week, knowledge English-French, for U.S. sales organization’s Monte Carlo office. Reply with photo, salary requirements, past positions held, date available for interviews and commencing work. Write Box 2581.
WANTED: General maid, fond of children, non-resident, meals found. Mme Tomasi, 1 Rue du Ray.
ROOM AND KITCHEN offered in villa, plus wages, to childless couple in return normal hours housework, husband req’d spend hour or two weekly gardening. Bourgoin, 20 Avenue des Bosquets. Tel. 88.65.42.
And so on. When Besson had finished reading both pages of ads he raised his head and looked about him. The waiters were hurrying to and fro between the tables: it was a long room, and by some accident they had failed to notice Besson sitting there behind his paper. But at any moment now they might look and see that he had not ordered anything. They would march up to him with that inquisitorial air, and demand, loudly: ‘What’s yours, sir?’
In order to forestall such an occurrence, Besson got up, collected an empty glass from a neighbouring table, and put it in front of him. But he did not go on reading his paper. Instead he let it slide gently to the floor, and put his feet on it.
The glass was a tall one, and still streaked with the remains of some foaming, yellowish liquid: beer, probably. A little ash had stuck to the rim. The man who had been drinking from it had probably gesticulated excitedly while still holding a cigarette. There the glass sat, on an expanse of canary-coloured formica, enthroned in solitary splendour, patched with its delicate lacing of foam. Besson stared intently at this transparent cylindrical object, and the patterns on it, lit by unwinking reflections from the neon strip-lighting. It was a glass like any other glass, no doubt, the hasty product of some factory which turned them out by the million, all identical. Yet to look at it was an intolerably moving experience. It was an object, a thing, nothing more, a superb and basic object which stood there on the table like a tower, unseeing, never grating on the senses, with no desire to find utterance in speech. It was so lovely and so tranquil that one would have liked it to stand there for all eternity, without anyone touching it, dirtying it, or breaking it. Men had no idea of what they were doing when they placed such objects on a bare table. It never occurred to them that they were setting beautiful deadly traps, ready to close on anyone who beheld them in all their dazzling presumption. They had no idea that for people such as François Besson, so desperately in need of immobility and silence, they and their transparent objects were, quite simply, flinging wide the gates of hell. But how could they have known it? People like them, with their nervous hands and voluble tongues and impatient twitching limbs, could never have let themselves become so hypnotized by the sight—at once soothing and terrible—of one empty glass standing in the middle of a yellow table.
More time passed. Besson continued to stare at the glass, without moving a muscle. At first he had decided to make a complete study of it, until he knew it by heart. Then he saw that the glass continually changed its shape. It became more elongated. It swelled out like a soap bubble, then shrank back to its former size. It sharpened to a point, it turned upside-down, or assumed the shape of a square. Besson realized that he would never be able to know it; he had to content himself with looking at it, seeing it afresh every moment, in a never-wearying progression. The yellow texture of the table. The yellow. The glass. The foam. Tiny bursting bubbles. Its shape at the top, and at the bottom. The reflection of the light on its right-hand side. A tiny mirror-image of the street on the left. Its vertical line. The polished, rounded rim. An endlessly turning circle—now, and now, over and over again. Top, bottom, middle. Right, left, up, down. The yellow surface of the table.
This was true reality: something inexhaustible, never-failing. No words or ideas, no sensation even, could fully express it. For the glass was there, it had escaped time and memory. It was action, action that caught the spectator’s eye, multiple and simultaneous action which passed endlessly into itself without ever emerging. Triumph. Triumph.
But to see it was not enough; one had to touch it as well. It was essential to run one’s fingers over that cold, slippery, cylindrical surface, to grasp it, touch it to every exposed part of oneself, if one really intended to know it. Besson’s hand inched forward hesitantly across the table. His fingers touched the transparent surface, but too late; the glass tilted, rolled, and then—for no very comprehensible reason—disappeared into space. There came a terrible crash. Besson did not look, but he knew the glass was broken. The knowledge caused him distress, but perhaps it was better this way: such beauty, such immensity had nearly turned his wits.
A man in a white jacket came across, looked on the ground, and said: ‘De profundis, eh?’
‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ Besson said, in a hoarsely protesting voice.
The m
an began to laugh. ‘Here, don’t look so cut up—these things will happen—’
Besson said: ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Nothing,’ the waiter said cheerfully. ‘Have this one on the house. I’ll just get a brush and dustpan and sweep the bits up. Broken glass can be dangerous.’
But Besson persisted, almost angrily: ‘Look, please, I want to pay for it. I really insist on paying for it—’
He put a few coins on the table, then went out without looking back. A little farther on, across the road, there was another café, with big open doors. Besson walked through them into the bar. It was a sort of white-walled corridor, fitted with strip-lighting. At the far end of it, lined up against the wall, were half a dozen illuminated pin-tables. Besson made towards them.
With some curiosity he studied these boxes, perched there on their tall legs, and the various signs written under each glass top. All the pin-tables were free except the end one, where a young boy, not more than ten or eleven, was busy playing. Beside him stood a man in his thirties, quite obviously his father, watching every move.
The boy played with a kind of obsessional frenzy, hands gripping the sides of the table or pushing the button to bring down the balls. There he sat, squarely balanced on his chair, mouth tight shut, frowning in concentration, a small, nervous, absorbed child, pulling the metal striker back each time as hard as he possibly could, watching every move of the ball as it blipped off the bumpers, totting up the figures as they flashed on the illuminated screen. Besson had never seen a pin-table player like him before. The balls pursued their labyrinthine course, blipping against one rubber bumper after another, shooting out with explosive violence. From time to time they rolled back down to the bottom of the table, whereupon the boy, with one neat, precise movement, would send them straight back to the top again. The man, who stood leaning over him on his right, watched all this in silence. The figures went up and up, multiplied rapidly. After the first shot the scoreboard indicated 1,300. A kind of sharp report resounded from inside the machine. The boy took no notice of it. He continued to play non-stop, never tiring, a serious, almost tragic expression on his face: fierce, stubborn, the implacable determination of a grown man. The total increased steadily: 1,600, 1,800, 2,000. Further sharp bangs could be heard from the machine’s innards, accompanied by various metallic clankings and rattlings. The boy’s forehead was finely pearled with sweat, and nervous shudders flickered along his legs in time with the electric motor. He grasped the table with his thin arms and shook it in all directions, or banged it with the flat of his hand. Face bent over the glass, he stared, fascinated, into the heart of this minuscule labyrinth, eyes following the ball’s erratic progress, calculating, working out the best route for it to follow, then sticking to it with fierce possessiveness.
Besson went a little closer. It seemed to him that the pin-table and the boy perched on his chair were a single entity, a strange and barbaric mechanism, something full of violence and noise and flashing lights. Heart pounding, he followed the little metal ball’s progress, noting the way it blipped off obstacles, spinning and turning, clacking against the trap-gates, with tiny flashes of blue electricity that ran right through his body, touched every nerve-centre. He flinched back. He had been wounded. The idea left him exultant.
When the last ball vanished into its hole, with a machine-gun-like rattle, the entire table lit up in a splendid variety of colours. The scoreboard indicated a total of 9,999.
The boy pulled himself away from the machine. He was very pale; his face was worn, almost elderly, and agleam with unhealthy sweat. The man helped him down from his chair and said: ‘Well done. That’s thirty-two goes you had.’
The boy wiped his hands on his shorts.
‘But I still missed it twice, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean, that second ball, I wanted to shift it over to the right and get it on target, because at that moment the score was 400 up. Well, that was all right, but then I calculated wrong, and it banged the bumper and came back straight down out of play—you saw it, didn’t you? I just couldn’t get it back. You must have seen. Straight bang through, right in the middle. I wanted to bounce it back, but I was afraid I might tilt the table too much—’
‘Yes, I know,’ the man said. ‘But you did pretty well on the last ball.’
‘Not too bad, I’ll give you that. Three times on the 100, and once on the 500.’
‘Well, you got the highest possible score, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but it took five balls to do it. What about the time I hit the jackpot in two?’
The boy walked off towards the door. The man caught him up and they left the café together. Besson glanced briefly at the doorway through which they had disappeared. He saw a narrow section of pale grey street, with fine rain needling down over it.
Then Besson turned his attention back to the machine. It still seemed to be quivering all over from the bangings and other movements it had endured. It was transparent, metallic, coloured like a jellyfish. On its upright panel various numbers were inscribed: 0–9 999–32. Between the figures was a woman in a bikini, her pink body lit up by the lights, dancing in the middle of a circus arena. To the right of her some uniformed men were cracking their whips at a group of lions. On her left there were two elephants in fancy-dress, a seal juggling a ball, and a trapeze artist swinging on his wire. Almost wherever one looked there was some sort of inscription in red letters—JOLLY BUMPER, CIRCUS GIRL, Score, BINGO, REPLAY, Archibald Swanson, Salem, Massachusetts, and GAME OVER (Tilt).
Beneath the flat glass surface stretched the pin-table’s tiny world: alleys with red light-bulbs under which was written, in English, ‘Score 10 when red light is on’; mushrooms of every variety and colour—yellow, red, red and pastel green; little spring-mounted white gates, made of metal, that opened and sprang back. Lower down, amid other yellow and green objects, there was a small enclosure with a white wheel, marked off in numbers, at its centre. Two blue lights glowed in front of the wheel, and between them ran a curious line of figures, something like this:
500
400
300
200
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Lower still, the playing-surface of the table ran down to a funnel, with little articulated claws curving back from either side of its mouth. This was the point at which the ball dropped out of sight. After being hurled so fiercely into the midst of all these quivering obstacles, after blipping off the red bumpers, zigzagging from side to side, circling and bouncing downwards a dozen, perhaps a hundred times, then shooting all the way back to the top again, in a flash, when it closed the electric contact and set off all those spasmodic rattling and ringing noises, those machine-gun-like reports, while up on the indicator, beside the bikini-girl’s face, the crazy figures flashed on and off so fast you hardly had time to see them, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 321, 331, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 355, 356, 357, 358, 458, 468, 469; after hurtling down against the revolving wheel like a bullet, and being tossed about for a moment or two in incoherent mechanical motion; after a desperate struggle against the fate that lay in wait for it in every trap-gate and knob, it finally had no option but to roll into this black hole, cross the threshold of death, sink into the belly of the machine, all aglint with points of reflected light, drop home to its rest, an echoing retreat permeated by a most curious smell, as though something had been scorched there.
When Besson had finished playing, he left the bar and walked on down the street for a little. People in cars were laughing and talking, very much absorbed in their own affairs. A woman and a young girl had stopped outside the window of a shoe-shop. They were standing arm in arm, and Besson could hear the sound of their high-pitched voices. Somewhere, hidden behind the clouds, an aircraft was droning over the town. The sound of its four engines seemed, disquietingly, to
come from all sides at once. There were puddles of dirty water in the road, and the cars’ tyres left visible tracks after passing through them. Besson stopped at the edge of the pavement and waited for a trolley-bus.
When the vehicle appeared, he signalled it with his hand, then clambered up the iron steps and stood holding one of the leather straps. When he had bought his ticket he made his way to the front of the bus and found a seat beside a large fat woman. Either on account of the rain, or the time of day, the bus was crowded. Most of the passengers were elderly, unattractive women, with sagging faces and pouches under their eyes. Their bodies gave off a rank smell, garlicky and goatish, except for two or three men, who smelt more of stale tobacco. Besson let himself go with the jolting of the vehicle, listening to the smooth continuous roar of the motor, and the squeegeeing sound made by the double windscreen-wipers. He looked at the back of the driver, whose shoulders were pulling his coat out of shape. It was very warm. Almost enough to make one fall asleep. Besson thought how pleasant it would be to have a trolley-bus of one’s own and drive it around the streets of the town like this. From time to time, when he felt like it, he might pull up at the kerbside and let people get aboard. He wouldn’t have the time to get bored, he thought. He wouldn’t talk to anyone, but he’d be able to feel it when his human cargo was shaken up over the bumpy bits, and that would suffice him.
At a certain moment a young man made his way up the aisle and sat down facing Besson. He was a tallish person, extremely thin, with long hanging arms and a rounded back. As he moved he uttered little incoherent cries, and his monkey-like face, with its protruding ears and flat nose, was constantly twitching. His whole feeble frame seemed convulsed by a variety of tics, and a sickening smell exuded gently all around him.