The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Chapter Six

  Meeting with the redheaded woman—Besson tells her fortune—Brief discussion with a child of four and a half called Lucas—A respectable man—How François Besson and the redheaded woman found themselves lying on the linoleum floor of the kitchen—Another night

  ON the sixth day François Besson met the redheaded woman. She was a tall girl, five foot eight or thereabouts, pale-complexioned, and her great brown eyes had dark smudges under them. Her figure, and the absence of lines on her face, suggested an age somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, though she could have been younger—or, indeed, older. She was sitting in the bar where Besson had gone to have a beer, staring into space, doing nothing. When Besson sat down next to her she gave him one quick glance and looked away again. Besson lit a cigarette and began to talk to her. She answered him easily and calmly, just as though they had been sharing a compartment on a train journey. Besson offered her a cigarette: she took it with her left hand, and two silver bracelets jangled together on her arm as she did so. She smoked in an unhurried fashion, occasionally flicking her ash over the edge of the table, since the ashtray (an advertising handout) was stuffed with sugar-lump wrapping-papers. It also contained a long drinking-straw made out of pink plastic, bent into three and bearing traces of lipstick at one end. There was an endless stream of people in and out of the bar, all talking, laughing, downing their drinks. The waiters shouted their orders right across the room—‘One pint of draught beer!’ ‘Two espressos and a plate of ham!’

  The chair opposite Besson and the redheaded woman was occupied by an old lady wrapped up in a woollen shawl, who sat there knitting busily. Besson felt pleased at having found someone like the redheaded woman to talk to in this bar. It filled him with confidence, he was the equal of all these other people around him. He was no longer on his own, he had become the hero of an adventure. At last something was going to happen, though exactly what he had no idea. But just how this encounter would turn out did not matter: the point was that it had a future, of one sort or another. One might endeavour to predict it, sitting there over one’s beer, playing with the underside of the paper cup, casting a curious eye over one’s fellow-customers—but an hour later the whole thing was quite liable to be over. The redheaded woman would get up, smile, shake hands, and say: ‘That was nice. Goodbye for now. See you some time.’ Or maybe they would leave the bar together, and he would walk her as far as her bus-stop. One could even try to guess her name. Maybe it was Catherine. Catherine Roussel. Or Irene Kendall. Or Vera Inson. Age: twenty-eight. Occupation: laboratory assistant. Born in Casablanca, Morocco. Mother’s first name: Eléonore.

  Besson said: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Marthe,’ said the redheaded woman.

  ‘Marthe what?’

  ‘Marthe Janin.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ she told him.

  Besson watched a man and woman pass by their table. Then he went on with his interrogation.

  ‘Profession?’

  ‘Come again?’ Martha said.

  ‘I mean, do you have a job?’

  ‘Oh, I see. No, I don’t have a job. Why are you asking me all these questions?’

  ‘No particular reason. Where were you born?’

  ‘Here,’ the woman said. ‘What are you up to? Want to tell my fortune?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Besson said. The hardest question still remained to be asked. He preferred to prepare the ground for it in advance.

  ‘Do you live with your parents?’

  ‘No,’ said Marthe, and quickly added: ‘Just with my son.’

  Instantly Besson backed his hunch on the boy’s first name: it would be Patrick.

  ‘What’s he called?’ he asked.

  ‘Who, my son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucas.’

  Besson stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. Finally he said: ‘And what about your mother?’

  She stared at him in surprise.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, what’s she called?’

  ‘Do you really need to know that?’ she said.

  ‘It’s essential if I’m going to tell your fortune,’ Besson said.

  She grinned. ‘My mother’s dead,’ she told him. ‘But she had the same name as me, Marthe. There.’

  Besson relaxed for a moment. He sat staring into his glass of beer without saying anything. The woman touched his arm.

  ‘Well? I’m waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘My fortune, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already?’

  ‘Ah yes, your fortune,’ Besson said. ‘I’ll tell you it now. You’re a very delicate person. You suffer from rheumatism and asthma. But this also implies great sensitivity. You’re afraid of hurting people, and you hate tactlessness in others. You prefer summer to winter, and your favourite landscape has a lot of water and woodland in it. You’re very nervy. When you were a child you must have had a bad fall from the top of a staircase. Your favourite colour is burnt topaz. You often have dreams about horses, and you write up a private diary every night. Be on your guard—you run quite a risk of dying by the hand of a murderer.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Marthe. ‘You’ve certainly got a vivid imagination. But you’re wrong about one thing: my favourite colour’s verdigris.’

  ‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ Besson said, and took a good pull at his beer. The young woman’s cigarette joined Besson’s in the brimming ashtray. Paper began to smoulder, giving off an acrid smell. She coughed, and poured a few drops of coffee into the ashtray to douse the fire before it got going.

  ‘My turn now,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Paul,’ said Besson. ‘Paul Thisse.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  ‘Do you have a job?’

  ‘Not at present, no. I’m a student.’

  ‘Do you live by yourself?’

  ‘That depends,’ Besson said. ‘At the moment I’m living with my parents.’

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘My father’s called Georges, and my mother Gioia. She’s Italian.’

  ‘Have you any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  She reflected for a moment.

  ‘All right, then,’ she said finally. ‘You’re intelligent, and rather timid. You’re inclined to be nervy too, I should say. You find it hard to make up your mind, and you don’t like people laughing at you. You had a very happy childhood, but now you’re scared of turning out a failure. You’re afraid of death, too. No, wait, I haven’t finished. The woman in your life will be called Thérèse. You’ll marry her and have lots of children. But before that happens you’ll pass through some great ordeal which will cause you much suffering. You will have an accident. You’ll be very ill. But fortunately everything will turn out all right in the end. There. Will that do you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Besson said. ‘But you haven’t told me my favourite colour.’

  ‘The colour of the sun,’ said the redheaded woman.

  They went on talking like this for over an hour. All the time people kept entering and leaving the café, and the old lady in her woollen shawl never once stopped knitting. From time to time someone would put a coin in the jukebox, and the room would be flooded with music—loud, monotonous, coarse-rhythmed.

  Besson asked the redheaded woman endless questions about herself and her family. He found out that she was not married. Her son was four and a half. She had been ill a few months ago. She wrote poetry. She had taken the examination for a librarian’s diploma, and was waiting for the results. When she had saved enough money, she was going to buy a small car, probably a Fiat. Her father was in business in Paris. She had few friends, and very seldom came out to the café. Besson told her things about himself, too. He said he had nearly got married several months before, but that in the end it just hadn’t worked out. He was in the process of breakin
g off with his fiancée. One day soon he would write her a letter, or maybe call her up on the phone, and tell her what he really felt about her. He had taught history and geography in a private school, but had given this job up some while back. He had no real idea what he was going to do now.

  The young woman listened to all this with great composure, her eyes fixed on the polished nails of her right hand. Besson noticed that she wore a heavy gold ring on her ring-finger, with the initials J.S. engraved on it. This was probably the name of her son’s father, Besson thought. Jacques Salles. Or Jean Servat. Unless it happened to be Jerome Sanguinetti.

  They smoked another cigarette together. Then the girl got up and went across to the toilet. Besson watched her move over the floor of the bar, holding herself very erect, hips swivelling a little under her beige jersey dress. By the time she got back Besson had paid both bills. They left the café and walked off together through the fine drizzle. After they had gone a few yards the young woman turned to Besson and began to say goodbye.

  With some embarrassment Besson said: ‘I haven’t anything much to do right now—maybe I could walk a bit further with you?’

  She hesitated. ‘The thing is, I have to go and fetch my son from his nursery school.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Besson said. ‘I’d like to meet your son.’

  They moved off again together, side by side, one couple in a multitude of men and women threading their way through the streets of the town, past endless rows of shops. Fine rain drizzled down on to their faces out of a black sky, and the drops were instantly absorbed by their skin, without trickling. They fell on their hair and foreheads and noses, sometimes even dropping through their parted lips. This rain was soft and cold, all of a piece with the wind and air and odours all around them. Cars swished by in the roadway, spattering their legs as they passed. Besson suddenly felt as though he were on a boat, or walking along a beach. With quiet persistence the falling water went about its tack of dissolution. Everything gleamed damply. Even the lights were misty and humid: the naked bulbs that contained each spark of electricity looked like grotesque globes of moisture.

  The redheaded woman walked on beside Besson, wrapped in her blue raincoat, legs and hips moving briskly. Her leather handbag swung from curled fingers; she advanced as though she had a motor hidden somewhere inside her body. Her face looked straight ahead down the pavement, eyes very much alert, though half-hidden by drooping eyelids and lashes, mouth open to breathe, a regular palpitation fluttering her throat. Lower down the movement became clearly visible: her shoulders followed the rhythmic swing of her arms, her backbone oscillated to and fro, while from time to time her torso would bend either forwards, or—with an abrupt, twisting gesture—to the left or the right. The overall impression was of a powerful, smooth-running machine, working at full pressure. From its birth onwards this body had been taught the gestures and rhythms of life. These clumsy arms and crazy legs, these heavy hips—all had been permeated by some mysterious and subtle substance which now controlled them. From a mere mass of flesh and bone there had been created a woman.

  Besson walked beside her, not saying a word; yet already it was as though he had been caught in the wash of some big steamer. Without even knowing it, she had taken him in tow. It was she who elbowed through the crowd, and followed a safe course down the middle of the pavement. Yet perhaps, at the deepest level, she was aware of it. It must be stamped all over her body, on every square inch of bare skin, on the moon of each separate fingernail. She was the dividing-line between life and death, a kind of figurehead that bore the distinguishing mark of humankind blazoned plainly across it. Her impassive and wellnigh immobile features, set like a mask above those thrusting shoulders, proclaimed to the anonymous, obscure and hostile mass of townsfolk that she was blazing a trail for humanity. Without either fear or hatred, simply in the awareness of her own unquestioned rights, she asserted her claim to a place among the rest; and they understood this instantly, making way for her as she approached, opening a small postern gate in their defensive ramparts to let this one small congeneric atom slip through. Sheltered by the mere proximity of the redheaded woman, François Besson advanced without fear. Eyes might stare at him now if they chose: they would not penetrate beyond the surface. The human territory he was traversing had become his domain also. He could take shelter and sleep in the houses, or drink with easy nonchalance in the cafés. He could book himself a room in any hotel. He could walk through the public squares or stare at the goods in shop windows, just as he pleased. It was a wonderful feeling not to be alone any longer.

  When they reached the door of the nursery school, Besson let the girl go in alone. At this point he was so buoyed up by her presence that he found himself able to stand there motionless on the kerb, smoking a cigarette and watching the passers-by.

  After a few minutes the redheaded woman returned, leading a redheaded little boy by the hand. When the child saw Besson, he scowled. Marthe pushed him forward. ‘He’s a bit shy,’ she said. ‘Say hullo to the gentleman, Lucas.’

  Besson bent solemnly down and shook hands with the little boy. His small hand felt cold and crinkly, like a monkey’s paw.

  Then all three of them set off the way they had come, Marthe holding Lucas’s hand and Besson walking beside them. They made their way through a good many streets, at an easy, unhurried pace. The girl talked to her son and Besson in turn. At one point the little redheaded boy said he wanted a chocolate ice, and Besson bought ices for all of them. They walked on, licking their ices as they went, making occasional little jokes. It was all very peaceful and harmless; it could have gone on like this for days, even weeks. It was like strolling down a long warm beach towards the sea, with a fresh breeze blowing in your face; or, again, like wandering round a fair, without a thought in one’s head, gazing at the shooting galleries and the merry-go-rounds, inhaling the resinous odour of pralines and toffee-apples. A little further on they met a group of little girls and boys, and Lucas stopped to stare at them. Besson heard what the children were saying: it was an argument to decide, yes or no, whether there were any Indians in this part of the world. At another point the girl decided to go into a shop and buy herself a girdle. She left the little boy with Besson and vanished, saying: ‘Won’t be a second—’

  After a moment Besson followed her into the shop, bringing the child with him, and watched her look through an assortment of elastic girdles. He released the little boy’s hand to light a cigarette: when he finished, the child’s hand crept back into his, quite naturally, as a matter of course.

  Besson looked at him and said: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Lucas’, said the little boy.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Four and a half.’

  ‘And where do you live?’

  Silence.

  ‘Come on, tell me where you live—’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know where your house is?’

  ‘Over there….’

  ‘Or that one there, maybe?’

  But the child turned his gaze somewhere else, and that was the end of the conversation.

  When the girl had bought her girdle, they set off along the sidewalk again: but this time the little redhaired boy held Besson’s hand.

  Later, about nine or ten o’clock, after dinner, when Lucas was asleep in his own room, Besson and Marthe still sat talking in the kitchen. Here, more or less, is what they said to one another.

  ‘He takes after you,’ Besson said.

  ‘Lucas? He’s got my hair, yes. But in every other way he’s the image of his father.’

  ‘Doesn’t he ever ask where he is?’

  ‘Where who is? His father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, I told him his father was dead. That way he doesn’t ask any questions.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Him? Oh, he’s a lawyer. Pretty well-known locally, too.’ She began to shred the cigarette she was holding,
rolling it between the thumb and index finger of her left hand.

  ‘I’m not sorry I broke up,’ she said. ‘Not even for Lucas’s sake.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh—he was a really seductive type, you know, everything a woman could want. All the same, he was just a plain stinker. I never had the guts to cut loose from him, though. In the end he ditched me. Bit of luck, I suppose.’

  ‘He—he ditched you when you became—when you had your child?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, not then. It happened about a year ago. Oh, he used to go out with every woman he met. He’d set me up in a bedsitter with—with Lucas. He used to come and visit me every evening. But I never saw him during the day. And yet he was really fond of his son. Used to play with him, all that sort of thing. Brought him toys. Which didn’t stop him being a plain bastard. Money, that was the only thing that mattered as far as he was concerned, money, money. He wanted to make more and more, all the time. He lashed it all out, too. To make people admire him. He liked being admired, it gave him a kick. Trouble was, I didn’t admire him enough, to his way of thinking. I didn’t flatter him. That’s what he couldn’t take about me, I reckon.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get married?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Was it he who didn’t want to?’

  ‘Oh, at the beginning he was all for it. But that didn’t tell me anything. He wanted to marry me because of the kid. There mustn’t be any scandal. Besides, he’d have liked to get Lucas to himself—his son, you know, to do what he liked with. Then after a while we got used to not being married. It wouldn’t have made any difference as far as I was concerned.’

  Besson said: ‘Basically, he sounds the jealous sort to me.’

  ‘Yes, maybe. But I’m still not sorry it ended.’

  ‘Are you so sure?’

  She did not answer. Besson began to fiddle with his coffee-spoon, twisting it round on the green oilcloth.

  ‘Everything he did, he did for his son,’ Marthe said. ‘He wouldn’t lift his little finger to help me. But his son was another matter. Besides—It’s a bit embarrassing to admit it, but—well, he’s still supporting me. Every month, ever since we broke up, he’s sent me a money-order. So I can bring up his son. Funny, isn’t it?’