The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Each time the ashtray was full Besson emptied it out on the floor. Then he patiently began to fill it again, burning sheet after sheet of paper. In order to economize on matches, he watched for the moment when the fire was about to go out, and then presented the guttering flame with a fresh victim.

  Soon the air was thick with stinking, acrid fumes that left Besson’s throat sore. Tiny fragments floated up to the ceiling and then eddied down again, settling on his hair and hands and clothes. But Besson did not open the window. Bent over the ashtray (which was conveniently placed on the floor) he feverishly gathered fresh piles of paper as fuel for the red and yellow flames. The glass walls of the ashtray were now covered with a kind of orange glue, where the fire touched them, and round the rim blue tongues of heat flickered from tiny piles of soot.

  Sweat was beginning to run down Besson’s face and off his hands; the fire blazed up, sank, blazed up again, sank once more; the baking hot air scorched his eyeballs, the smoke deposited its stinging cinders in his throat. Now and then a spurt of flame came up and burnt his fingers, but it was as though he felt nothing. He went on fuelling his bonfire, reducing all the papers in his room to malodorous ashes. There was nothing worth saving, nothing worth reading. Every item belonged in this crazy holocaust, in the popping, crackling, flaring eddies of red-hot flame, shot through with spurts of green, in the warmth and light and fanaticism of those greedy tongues of fire dancing over the floor. Besson no longer even bothered to empty the ashtray now; papers rolled blazing across the room, setting fire to others as they went. Besson threw on whole packets at a time, and the fire grew in size, sending up a high corona of flame. The smoke thickened into a sticky black consistency, rose in a single column that only began to spread out somewhere near the ceiling. Unable now to make out anything in this dim fog except the outline of the burning mass, Besson began to throw papers and books into the heart of the flames. Novels, dictionaries, travel-books, philosophical treatises—all vanished into that living gullet, which consumed them instantly.

  By the time that Besson’s parents—alerted by the unmistakable crackling roar of the fire—came rushing into his room, flames were already licking over the bedclothes and up the wallpaper. There were shouts of alarm, footsteps hurrying across the floor. At this point Besson picked up his beach-bag and went, without one backward glance. In order to shake off the effects of that blinding heat, though, he had to sit down for a bit on a park bench, and smoke a cigarette.

  When evening came, François Besson strolled through the canyon-like streets of the town. He saw men and women walking along the pavement, in couples, and gangs of children playing war games. Everyone was busy, they all had a warm, comfortable lodging to bury themselves in for the night. In each cell of those vast apartment blocks some heavy-bosomed housewife would be preparing the evening meal, and the brightly-lit kitchens would be redolent of leek-and-potato soup, fish-fries, apple fritters, a peaceful domestic aroma. People smiled as they passed one another: sometimes they called out a greeting, and when they talked it was in very loud voices. But none of this was for Besson. He walked on in silence, and passers-by either stared very hard at him, eyes narrowed, or else gave him a furtive glance and looked away again. Workmen and builders’ labourers stood about in the bars, drinking glasses of beer, eyes fixed on the television set quacking away in its corner. From somewhere a long way off came the faint sound of church bells ringing. Shop-windows began to light up, one after the other, and the neon signs embarked on their endless, endlessly repeated, flashing messages. Above one travel agency words flickered along a broad strip dotted with electric light bulbs. Besson read: STOP PRESS NEWS PLANE CRASH AT TEL-AVIV EIGHTEEN DEAD. A little further on he saw some pigeons perched on the letters of a neon-sign, just under the roof-guttering, waddling about and warming their feet. Beyond them he came on an old man leaning against the wall, playing ‘Mon ami Pierrot’ on a tin whistle, with an upturned hat at his feet. Behind the glass of a display case there were photographs of babies and small kneeling girls. Their mouths gaped open in fixed smiles, their eyes shone as though wax-polished. Everywhere men had left their mark: house-doors, window-sills, sidewalk, sky and trees, dogs’ backs, rusty iron street-signs—all bore their names and addresses. Nowhere could one get away from them. These vertical mountains, all honeycombed with rectangular holes, were full of spying eyes, mouths that gossiped when they weren’t eating, well-washed skin, well-combed hair, bitten fingernails, bodies swathed in wool or nylon. No other landscape had ever existed remotely like this one: such a limited area had never contained so many impenetrable cavities, so many defiles and moraines. No mountain could be as high as these buildings, no valley as deep and narrow as the streets outside them. Some fearful force had carved out these contours, it had taken a hideous and incomparable explosion of violence to erect these monuments, drain the soil, level out the rough places, crush the rocks, plan, dig, manipulate the elements, organize space, and make the little streams run meekly obedient to the will of authority. The houses had their roots dug deep into the rock, and clung to this conquered territory with a kind of ferocious hatred.

  Besson walked humbly through these streets in which he had no part, moving aside to let the victors have free passage—the round-shouldered women, the crop-haired children, the men on their way home from work. When he wanted to cross the street he waited until there was a gap in the traffic, no more rubber tyres hissing past. He ducked his head and hunched himself defensively against the assaults of lights and noises and frantic scrambling movement. Lights winked on and off everywhere, at the summits of steel pylons, in the streets, out at sea: red and yellow points riveted into place, then wiped out, replaced by others. It was like being shut under a gigantic lid, made of lead and resting firmly on the ground, a lid that pressed down with its whole weight on one’s skin and eardrums and diaphragm and neck. The cold air had become a kind of liquid substance; people were mostly staying indoors now. Very soon Besson had to stop through sheer fatigue. It was completely dark now, and indeed time for dinner. With the money he had left Besson decided to go and eat in the self-service restaurant.

  Sitting at a black table with smears of sauce on it, opposite a fat and ugly old woman whose small mean eyes watched his every move, Besson did his best to swallow some food. On his tray he had collected the following: a plate of sliced tomatoes with chopped parsley on them, an egg mayonnaise, a dish containing one portion of roast chicken (leg) and fried potatoes, a glass of water, a yoghourt, three sachets of granulated sugar, a hunk of stale bread, knife, fork, soup-spoon, coffee-spoon, a thin paper napkin with Bon Appétit! or some such legend inscribed on it, and a piece of paper which read:

  ROYAL SELF-SERVICE RESTAURANT

  80

  120

  550

  80

  15

  20

  = = 865

  Besson tried to swallow the tomatoes and cut up the chicken. But the food was hostile, it slid about on the plate, refused to be chewed or swallowed. Water dribbled over his chin when he drank, as though some joker had drilled a hole in the glass. The egg slipped about in its mayonnaise, and the chicken wouldn’t keep still either. It was all somehow quite repulsive—ill-cooked flesh, dead roots, a taste of earth, perhaps even of excrement. Besson attempted to chew this stuff. He swallowed lumps of dry meat and slices of egg-white that smelt of sulphur. He dribbled, struggled, messed up his hands and clothes, dropped first his knife then his spoon. Eating, it seemed, was impossible. And on top of everything else there was the old woman, taking in every detail of his defeat with an ironic eye. Besson abandoned solid food and set about the yoghourt. But this turned out very little better. He managed to get the little spoon to his mouth, but the viscous substance acquired a life of its own: it tried to get away from him, it ran under his tongue, slipped past the barrier of the uvula, came back down his nasal passages. Bent over the pot of yoghourt, in a mere simulacrum of the nutritional process, Besson felt as though he were a small
child again. The hard stare of the old woman and the inscrutable faces of other diners scattered through the restaurant all showed him his own reflection, as clearly as so many mirrors: a tenuous, cloudy object, curled up on itself, a phantom, or a foetus still covered with glaireous matter, something that scarcely belonged to the human species.

  So there it was, the group rejected him spontaneously, like any freak. Having robbed him of his most intimate thoughts and actions, they were now about to strip him of his body, too, and condemn him to the void. This was the message to be read on the sneering faces around him, the thick hands so competent at dismembering roast chicken, the mouths with their rows of sharp teeth that could chew, salivate, reduce to pulp, the coiled and deep-hidden organs that wanted to transform everything into scarlet blood, its regular pulsing flow pricking out under the skin like millions of tiny needles.

  What he had to do now was to fight back, with all his strength: get out of this glittering morgue, to begin with, plunge right into the frozen depths of darkness and seek help there. Walk along the deserted boulevards under a mist of rain, in the grey light of the street-lamps; drink water from a public fountain, gaze up avidly at the invisible sky; then, after smoking a cigarette, stretch out on a bench under the most thickly-leafed tree in some public square, and wait. Then fall asleep, extinguish at one stroke all the lights that burnt in the chamber of one’s imagination—if need be smash the hot bulb hanging like a drop of fire at the end of its plaited cord—and plunge, tremulous with hope, into the heart of solitude, the solitude of the unknown.

  Stretched out on his bench, head against unyielding wood, eyes wide open, Besson gazed up at the darkness. The branches of a laurel-tree spread their complex architecture over him, hung motionless in the cold air. Everything was dim, sombre. Sounds from the neighbouring streets had an odd muffled quality, that enveloped them like a shadow. There were no insects, no spiders even: the world had the kind of still, fixed quality one might expect inside a marble mausoleum. The night’s vast presence loomed above the earth, a vaulted and windowless dome. Its whole weight bore down on these minuscule creatures called men who set themselves up against it, yet it did not crush them. This gigantic floating roofage, more opaque than the sea itself, seemed to comprehend, even to love them. It too, no doubt, possessed a rhythm: not the rhythm of breathing, or heart-beats, but a heavy pendular swing that came and went in silence, permeated with non-presence, vibrant with vacancy, eternal and majestic music that only the infinite could have produced. All stars and planets, suns and nebulae were contained in it; the galaxies nestled in its bosom and were rocked to its measure. Delicate and ethereal, yet full of latent violence, the black dome embraced them all, revolved smoothly on its own axis, for ever turning, turning. This sphere of water without water, so ductile and glacial in motion, advancing and then—its thousands of silver-bellied fishes all atwinkle—retreating little by little upon itself, was prayer, was thought, was life itself. Shadow falling on shadow, a veil of blackness for ever spread and for ever opening, an intermittent umbrella, only vanishing in order to deploy new schemes and offshoots, a smooth dark cloud arching across the universe, for ever drawing up into itself, through a chill vortex, the substance of happiness and unhappiness; alert, uncluttered, watchful, drawing men one by one into the peace of its womb; night, the Great Mother.

  Chapter Ten

  François Besson experiences hunger, thirst, and loneliness—The smell of bread—The woman kneeling in the church—François Besson submits himself to God—His confession—The organs—How Besson learnt the beggar’s trade—The terrible look of the old woman who wished she could die

  ON the tenth day, François Besson experienced hunger, thirst, and loneliness. The town was now a crazy maelstrom of hubbub and movement: he was jostled, banged to and fro like a ball, all but crushed to death. Four times he just missed being run down by cars and the walls of the houses leaned in towards him, as though about to collapse in a mountain of white dust and cockroaches. Every time he passed an old corner or alley-way, he would sidle into it and squat there for a while. But the feet continued their endless progress up and down the pavement, beating out a retreat on its surface. They were everywhere, like moving columns, or rather pistons, tapping the ground in regular time, rowing time, the paths they followed bristling with dangers and obstructions. The soles of their shoes resounded on the hard flat ground, and the staccato noise thus produced—first the dull thud of the heel stamping down, then the creak and scrape as the foot flattened out—could be heard far away down the street, growing louder, louder, till it was like a military march-past. The din would reach Besson, dislodge him from his place of concealment, march over his stomach, and then dwindle until it was lost in silence—an even more menacing effect. Footsteps, footsteps, nothing but footsteps, from left to right, from right to left, in one unceasing flow.

  There were the cars, too, like great carnivores on the prowl: each one had a man in it, and bad luck to anyone who got in their way. A monstrous indifference had spread over the world, a sort of coldness that penetrated solid objects, that had permeated tree-trunks and car wheels and the pattern of the paving-stones that was painted over paint-work, mixed in with concrete, melted into spectacle-frames, riveted in steel girders.

  On the big hoardings, where the posters were wrinkling now from a mixture of paste and rain, was a line of red-cheeked women, displaying cruel-looking rows of teeth, smiling with pale and cannibal mouths, while their dark eyes, capped by moustache-like sets of eyelashes, resembled so many giant hairy-legged spiders. Another advertisement showed a naked woman standing, half in shadow, beside a refrigerator, and the exaggerated curves of her body had a strangely obscene quality, as though she were a female of some quite different species in disguise.

  At the back of one opalescent shop window were several wax dummies, frozen in all-too-human postures: Besson stopped and stared at these paralysed bodies, the crossed legs with their generous display of thigh, the hands that possessed such long, tapering fingers, the bosoms straining at the dresses that covered them, the bald heads masked by nylon wigs of various colours—blonde, auburn, raven, rose-pink. He felt a sudden desire to live with these imitation women as though they were the only real ones. He wanted to lie down on the white pebbles of those artificial ‘beaches’ at the back of shop windows, and stretch out under the blazing ‘sunlight’ of an arc-lamp. Here he could build himself a hut, amid the unstirring, luxuriant pot-plants, and abandon himself to these bright, shimmering colours, in a quiet, peaceful, prefabricated universe where silence was symbolized by a Veronese-green cloth of some plastic material, this closed-in cube redolent of such pervasive odours as those of moth-balls and powerful cheap scent. Perhaps he would choose a woman, too: say the one with green eyes and long blonde hair, who sat there, slightly askew, on a collapsible metal chair, smoking a dead cigarette, the black material of her draped dress revealing small patches of bare flesh, that ranged in colour from ochre to pale pink. Or perhaps the one who lay stretched out face downwards in the middle of the paper lawn, exposing her skin (already tanned the colour of milk chocolate) to the arc-lamp’s rays. Then there was the red-haired girl, who stood there, frozen in mid-step, smiling gently, her two dark-blue eyes, fringed with thick black lashes, staring out through the window. He would have liked them all. He would have spent hours caressing these tall, clean-limbed, elegant creatures, sliding their dresses off those rounded shoulders very carefully so as not to disarrange their wigs, or knock off a hand or foot. That’s what I’d like to do, he thought.

  But outside, under that leaden sky, there was no chance of peace or relaxation. An army of legs continued to advance down the sidewalk, and the human bodies above them gave off odd flashes of brightness, fierce metallic reflections. Each individual had his armour. Hands glinted as they swung at the extremity of each arm; eyes shone with snow-white scleras, teeth sparkled, noses glowed, hair gleamed greasily, belt-buckles gave off little slivers of light. It was as though the s
un had really come down on earth, or else had suddenly melted, behind that curtain of cotton-wool clouds, infusing the rain-drops with a shower of tinfoil and gold. The frozen air was as still and tangible as a sheet of plate-glass.

  Towards midday Besson felt the first pangs of hunger. He had eaten nothing since the previous evening, and had spent his last remaining coins on a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. All around him a faint smell of cooking filtered out through the closed windows of the houses he passed. People were having lunch now. Whether at home or in a restaurant, everyone was sitting down to a heaped plateful of food, was working through slices of savoury meat, potatoes, salad, spoonfuls of spinach purée. Food was slipping smoothly down countless oesophagi, a succession of saliva-lubricated little balls. Blood went surging round the stomach, jaws champed steadily.