The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Every point in this landscape was worth stopping for. Each little patch of mud and bushy undergrowth was worth one’s building a hut there, and staying for at least a day and a night. Here one could make vast and endless journeys, in stages of fifty yards or so, travelling from one stone to another, from tree to a well, from a ruined cottage to a thyme-bush. One could set off on one’s adventures through the hills, living off the land, picking brambleberries in the tangled thorn-bushes and wild strawberries from the arbutus trees, gathering windfall black olives. Here was a vast continent, scored by rivers a few inches long, with torrid deserts and sheer mountains and forests of knife-edged grass, through which there scuttled lithe and monstrous creatures all bristling with paws and antennae and mandibles. No doubt about it, the earth was limitless. There was no end to the process of exploration and reclamation and conquest. Every inch of these territories was guarded by vigilant creatures ready to fight for their own. They had authorized men to hack paths and roads here and there through the area. They had ceded them plots of land on which to build their houses and towns. But all the rest was well and truly theirs, and woe betide anyone who tried to take it from them. They would raise their savage armies, by the million, indeed by the billion, and commence hostilities on their own account. Night and day they would keep up the assault, wave after invincible wave, swarming over the houses, nibbling, destroying, endless winged battalions that darkened the sky from one horizon to the other, their minuscule bodies eclipsing the light of the sun. You could try anything you liked on them, fire, insecticides, bombing, it would all prove useless. They were sure to win in the end. They’d appear from every corner, marching over corpses, putting out fires, swimming across oceans, devouring, gnawing, stripping back to the bone. At all costs you had to avoid provoking them. At all costs you had to avoid arousing their anger.

  Besson lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky. He could feel the densely-packed stems pricking his skin through his clothes. There were certain small protruding stones, too, shaped—or so it felt—like pyramids, which pressed hard against his body. Lying there close to the ground he could hear everything distinctly: all the strange and myriad noises of life vibrated in his ears, yet each remained clear-cut, individual, standing up like a separate twig in the brushwood. The rattle and whirr of insects, seed-pods bursting in the sunlight, the displacement of stones and sand, little crumbling and crackling noises—there were millions of such sounds, no one could ever count them all, however hard he listened. Existence was located here, at ground level: a mist, a kind of warm, milky cloud in constant motion.

  Soon Besson found himself stretched out on the grass like a dozing giant who has been tied up, while asleep, by an army of little dwarfs. These Lilliputian creatures had driven pegs into the ground and then attached his hair to them with lengths of spider’s thread. His clothes had been sewn down, his hands and feet were covered with a fine-meshed, almost invisible network of creepers. That was it, he had been made one with the grass he lay on, they had taken him by surprise, he was a prisoner of the stubble and brushwood. Above him the sky stretched, pale and unfathomable, so vast that it was as though it did not really exist. Far up in the empyraean light swarmed and dazzled, streaming out on the sun’s right hand.

  Little by little, Besson realized his position. He was pegged out as an offering on some high plateau, spreadeagled over the naked dome of the world in preparation for an incomprehensible sacrifice. Even from the depths of that tenderly pellucid sky the threat of death could materialize. There was no sure protection, nothing to cover him. Man’s flesh was frail, a touch could shiver his bones, he was exposed to endless unknown dangers. Stars, dead planets, meteorites—at any moment one of these could slam through the violet barrier of the atmosphere into the earth’s crust, digging a crater anything up to four hundred miles in diameter. Between him, Besson, and the freezing vertiginous nothingness of outer space, where suns exploded instantaneously, like bombs, what protection was there save this curtain of tulle, this scanty phosphorescent veil, this thin and all-too-penetrable envelope which did not even conceal him from view? A cold and comet-like frisson seemed to flash down from the clouds, entering Besson’s body by way of his navel. In broad daylight—despite the sun and the scent of pollen and these semi-reassuring noises—the cold breath of eternity spread through Besson’s guts as he lay there on the ground.

  Some time later a white bird began to wheel around, far overhead: Besson watched its movements, the tight circles it described in the boundless air, with scarcely a flicker of his own eyes. The bird did not really use its wings at all, simply spread them wide and sailed down in a long planing glide, banking on air-currents, turning incessantly, round and round, so far up in the sky that its movements seemed reduced to immobility. It revolved about an invisible axis right over Besson’s head, constantly turning back on itself, following its previous track, dipping, rising, pivoting in the calm and silent void. Sometimes—whether on account of an air-pocket, or because it felt its balance in some way disturbed—it would flap its great soft wings, for a moment or two; but then it would set course once more, gliding, banking, turning, as though coming down an invisible staircase with no apparent bottom to it. Besson watched the bird with passionate absorption: he felt that its flight should go on for ever. From where he lay, on his patch of grass, he could not make out any details of the creature’s body: he could not isolate its head or its talons or the brown patches (if there were any) on its feathers. It could have been anything—seagull, sparrow-hawk, falcon, buzzard. Or an eagle, perhaps, an eagle that had flown down from the nearby mountains, and was now using those cruel eyes to spy out the victim on which it would shortly drop like a stone. It was impossible to tell which it was.

  The bird continued to circle round, with a kind of stubborn violence. But all one could see of it was the cross formed by its body and outspread wings, poised aloft while the earth turned slowly under it. A sign indeed, a living emblem hung in that white abyss of sky, its progress stiffly majestic, rigid with hatred. The bird was the only image of activity throughout this whole enormous void: it was monarch of all it surveyed. As far as the eye could reach, on every side, nothing else existed. It hung there, supported by the density of the atmosphere, as one might imagine death—opening and shutting its snow-white calyx, or gathering its strength in preparation for the struggle against mankind. Its light, buoyant body exulted with joy, faint breezes ruffled its white plumage, and the light played over it from all sides, rendered it diaphanous, a mere drop of glass and vapour with blurring, crumbling outlines. It was flying, it would go on flying for ever. It belonged to the range of gaseous matter, and without the slightest doubt would never be able to return to earth. It would have to go on circling in the upper air, describing one circle after another, until the moment came when it reached exhaustion-point and gently evaporated into nothingness. It no longer breathed, it was in all likelihood no longer alive—or else had entered upon eternal life: volplaning, glittering in the azure void, forthright, concealing nothing, casting its terrible cruciform shadow on the ground, three yards from wing-tip to wing-tip, gliding in blank and solitary splendour, nothing now but the living, breathing spirit of flight, unable to give up. Intoxicated by its own perfect circles, hunger and fear all forgotten, having quit the world’s heights and crevasses centuries since. Lost, dumb, a sacrifice to the horizontal infinite; airborne. Airborne.

  When Besson could no longer see the bird, he got up and made his way back down the path. At the foot of the hills lay the sea, under a blanket of mist. The sun had almost reached its zenith, and the wind had fallen. The chill in the air slowly turned to heat, drying off the rocks and forming dust in every cranny. Cars came tearing full pelt along the highway; the roar of their engines set Besson’s teeth on edge.

  He set off along the shoulder of the road again, till he reached a clump of houses. The cars slowed down here, because of traffic lights. A little way off the highway Besson saw a square, with old
men sitting on benches. In the middle of the square a jet-hose was spitting over a patch of green lawn, and pigeons swarmed everywhere. The sidewalks were also occupied by dogs, and cats with raw scabs on their backs, and sparrows. The houses were ugly and decrepit, with barred shutters. At a pinch, he thought, one could live here, too: marry, and have children, and call them names like André or Mireille. Twice a week the town hall was turned into a cinema: there were the posters on the walls—The Plainsman, The Crook who Defied Scotland Yard. The tobacconist’s name was Giugi; the doctor was called Bonnard, and the local lady of easy virtue Marie de Cavalous. From time to time there was a robbery, or some other crime. The village idiot was the deputy mayor’s illegitimate son. None of this mattered very much.

  Everyone stared at Besson as he went by. He stopped at a bar and ordered a glass of lemonade over the counter, staring with great concentration at the yellow plastic surfaces and the chromium plating on the coffee-machine. At the far end of the room a juke-box started up: a raucous woman’s voice, supported by chorus and rhythm group, singing a mutedly vibrant number that went:

  C’est bien la plus la

  C’est bien la plus la

  C’est bien la plus belle

  Celle qu’on appelle la

  Celle qu’on appelle la

  Celle qu’on appelle la belle

  La belle Isabelle

  Besson drank his lemonade and paid for it. Then he stayed for a moment with his elbows on the counter, staring out at the street. Flies were busily sipping at the spilt water on the tables. Down the far end of the bar someone sneezed twice, and blew his nose.

  Besson walked on out of the village. He had hardly seen anyone there.

  Half a mile or so further on he went over a level-crossing and took a road that led down to the beach. The whole site was dotted with huts, shut up now, where they sold ice-cream, and peanuts during the summer. There were one or two notice-boards, too, which said things like CAMPING SITE or THIS WAY TO THE SEA or ALTITUDE ZERO or FIESTA BEACH. Besson stopped for a moment to look at the beach, and the headlands that enclosed it on either side of the horizon. The long stretch of shingle was deserted; incoming tides had forced it up into a high ridge. To the left, some way off, there was a concrete jetty, with groups of anglers dotted along it. To the right, in the distance again, there was what looked like a sewage dump. It was in this direction that Besson now proceeded, stumbling along over the warm shingle, breathing in the tangy smell of the sea. Everything had become white, grey, or pink, except the sea, which was so blue it hurt one’s eyes to look at it. Occasional patches of crude oil glistened in the sunlight, and along the tide-mark, small heaps of vitreous blubber, lay a number of stranded jellyfish.

  When Besson had got almost as far as the sewage dump, he sat down on the shingle for a breather. It was now decidedly hot, so hot that he had to remove his coat and shirt. He leaned back on his elbows, watching the waves roll gently in. Time dragged, and the second-hand of the watch on Besson’s wrist moved forward in a series of tiny jerks, on and on. Eventually this irritated him so much that he unstrapped the watch, laid it on a flat stone, and then hammered it into tiny fragments with a sharp flint. Bits of spring and fragments of broken glass were scattered over the beach. He examined them with interest.

  There was no longer a cloud in sight; they had all been absorbed into the azure expanse of the sky—all, that is, except the long white trail left by a jet aircraft flying at about 40,000 feet, though this too soon melted away. The bird had flown away, and there were no people around any more. Nothing remained except the sun, now at its zenith, beating down on land and sea as though through a burning-glass.

  The last time he heard signs of human activity was when these two children passed close by him, talking in loud voices. The little boy was called Robert, and the little girl’s name was Blanche.They strolled along slowly, stopping every two or three yards to discuss something. Without sitting up so that he could see them, Besson lay and listened to their conversation.

  ‘Blanche! Blanche!’ Robert called out. ‘Come and look here!’

  ‘Found a monk?’ Blanche enquired.

  ‘No. Come and see.’

  ‘It’s a candlestick,’ Blanche said.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not bad. That’s one more you’ve got. What’s your total now?’

  ‘Three,’ Robert said.

  ‘I’ve got two candlesticks and about ten monks,’ said Blanche.

  ‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘but one of them’s no good: it hasn’t got a stripe.’

  ‘It has got a stripe! You can’t see it very well, but it’s got one.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Robert said, ‘I’ve got a candlestick with something written on it.’

  ‘What sort of thing? Show me.’

  ‘Wait a tick—it says Farge, or Farga, something like that.’

  ‘Here, let me see,’ Blanche said, and then, after a pause: ‘It’s Forge. That’s what’s written on it. Forge.’

  ‘No it isn’t, that’s an A there, not an O. It’s Farga.’

  ‘Going to let me have it?’

  ‘I found it, didn’t I? Down there in the rubbish-dump.’

  ‘If you give it me, I’ll swop you half my monks.’

  ‘Nothing doing. You can pick up monks anywhere.’

  ‘Even one with three stripes?’

  ‘If you want my candlestick, it’s because it’s worth more.’

  ‘Oh keep your silly candlestick, then. Anyway, I’ve got two already.’

  ‘Yes, but they haven’t got anything written on them.’

  ‘I don’t care. Anyway, Farga doesn’t mean anything. Hey, look, over there—another monk.’

  ‘That’s just what I was telling you, you can find monks anywhere.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t.’

  ‘Monks are just pebbles, anyway.’

  ‘Well, so are candlesticks.’

  ‘That’s not true. Candlesticks are more like cement.’

  ‘Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Anyway I prefer candlesticks. At least they’re useful for something. Come on, let’s have a look further on—’

  The voices dwindled and faded. Silence closed in again, there was nothing but heat and brightness. Besson gradually began to perspire.

  This moment had been a long time coming. Besson had been waiting for it for years, perhaps for centuries. Today the curtain of rain and cloud had suddenly been torn apart, to reveal the sky in all its nakedness, the blinding circle of the sun. The agonizing beauty of this hard landscape, all rough and stippled with crosshatching, was so intense now as to be quite unbearable. The light had become a bright and burning abyss into which one had to plunge head first. The town, the highways, the noisy airfields, the blocked-out pattern of fields and woodland, the steep mountainsides, animals watchful or sleeping, women and children—all had led here, to the place and moment chosen by the gods for the expiatory sacrifice to be accomplished. Every line had been traced so as to converge on this one point, this beach of grey pebbles, this particular day and hour. He could not escape. He could not go back: time had stopped for this event, there was no possibility of either advance or retreat. It was there, and now. The things had to happen. Like a sequence of events the action of which progresses by its own impetus towards its first and final crux, so Besson’s life (as he was well aware) had been orientated towards this. As though to avoid the moment of reckoning, he tried, briefly, to conjure up old memories. Faded snapshots flashed through his mind. Here was a picture of a child leaning against an iron balustrade, in a village the name of which had vanished beyond recall. Here was the seated figure of a mother, her hair braided up round her head, with a tiny bald grimacing doll held in the crook of her right arm. Other shapes and figures, absurd figments of his imagination, flickered across the blood-red screen of his closed eyelids: wolves with pointed ears, runaway horses, monsters wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He was shut in the spider-haunted cupboard,
the gleaming texture of a porcelain flower-bowl held and mesmerized him through the drowsy evening, while the voices went on talking, talking, in the flat exhausted accents of those who have nothing to say. He was back in the shut rooms of his childhood dreams, that fearful, hermetically sealed chamber in which the walls were at once so close and so remote.

  Then there was that submarine abyss, the plummeting dive down, down, past a rampart high as a twenty-storey building, into the depths, down to squid-haunted grottoes and thick waving carpets of seaweed. The black hole expanded, became a volcano’s maw, a cavern, the heart of a glowing cathedral of embers, where the bloated, half-eaten corpse went tumbling down, over and over, to the bottom.

  Minutes passed. Hours passed. Days, years passed. All elements mingled and merged, interlocking, fused in an automatic sequence Nothing was left now save the immense misery of having survived. Nothing—not a single pattern, not one word written on actual solid paper—could palliate that fact. The days resembled a knife, a knife with a keen blade. Maps and dictionaries were appalling, because they could never be complete: there was always some elusive factor omitted. The tiny palpitating animal fled through the undergrowth, leaving no trace behind, not even a scent; yet everything had been enclosed within a smooth-walled sphere, without any opening, crazily reflecting each object back towards its centre.