The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  You see, there’s too much going on in the world for me, I can’t take it, people doing all those things at once, that’s what gets me down. I’ve tried to contract out and just be a spectator. But it’s not possible. They come and search you out. You can hide where you like, it makes no difference, there’s always friends or relatives or somebody after you. They button-hole you and discuss things with you, they’re full of ideas and just bursting with good intentions. They smile a lot, on the street, in cafés, out of photographs in the papers. All right, I’ll admit it, some of them—well, I find them quite touching, they’re so nice, they roll up just like that, they haven’t a clue. And that touches me and hurts me and I need all my will power to resist them, to avoid getting sucked in. That’s what happened with him—Paul, I mean. That’s how he managed to pull a fast one on me. That’s what I wanted to tell you, too—Because I don’t feel at all well now. I’ve got this nausea, I think—I think I’m going to throw up. It’s so idiotic that one can’t die more easily. I wish I could obliterate myself without any effort, just like that, peaceful annihilation. Maybe I’d have done better to put a bullet through my head, but I didn’t happen to own a pistol. And with these pills there’s even a chance that—that I won’t die, after all. They ought to knock me out, and at the moment I feel anything but sleepy. There’s—there’s just this awful feeling of nausea. You know, my mother tried to commit suicide once, when she was a young girl. She threw herself into the river, but someone fished her out again. She had no idea why she did it, but in any case it wasn’t because she’d been jilted. Apparently she’d had a whitlow on her thumb, and had been in a depressed state after taking antibiotics. There are people who say that when you do something like that you’re temporarily insane. But seriously, François, I do assure you I’m not mad. You can’t conceive just how much I’m conscious of what I’m about. On my word of honour, I can see the whole thing very clearly, black and white, and in the most minute detail. It’s as though, well, as though my body had had enough of living, as though it was absolutely exhausted, and had to sleep. I’m living in a desert, that’s the long and short of it. There’s nothing whatsoever to hold me back. It’s weird, François—everything being such a desert, I mean. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like. You’re in a sort of bubble, and everyone’s deaf, they can’t hear you screaming, and your voice bounces back at you like a ball, like—it’s difficult for me to say this, François, but there ought to be a God…. When anyone’s reached this point, how can you expect them to turn back? You can’t turn the desert into—I mean, it would be mere illusion, and anyway you can’t go on deceiving yourself all that long. There’s no pleasure in anything any longer. I—I was right to take these pills, because I honestly believe I’ve come to the end of the road, whichever way you look at it. That was my basic motive. Maybe I should have just let myself starve to death. I’d given up, lost my belief in anything. So had my body, that I’m sure of. So—

  I don’t know if evening’s coming on, or if it’s the effect of the pills, but I feel everything’s getting dark. There’s a slight chill in my legs and hands, too. I don’t feel I want to throw up any more now. But I’m getting stomach cramps—ooh, they hurt like hell—What was I saying? Yes, well, it’s—that’s how it is, and I’m going to be able to rest now. When the pain stops. What I ought to have had, when you really get down to it, is some sort of deformity—a leg withered by polio, or a club-foot, or a hunched back, some very obvious defect, a constant source of suffering. That would have given me something to hang on to. I once knew a girl who had one leg shorter than the other. She used to walk by under our apartment every day. She had an awful limp. But there was something about her face and bearing—a sort of pride, can you understand that? I’d have liked to be the way she was. Maybe then I’d have had the same courage and will-power—I realize that now, when I’m feeling so frightful—a-ah-aah, oh God, yes, that’s what I needed. Blind! That’s what I ought to have been. Too late now. I’m passing the secret on to you. It might even have saved me. Weakness, disability. With a white stick. Seeing nothing, seeing nothing people would have moved aside to let me pass. There’d have been no need for me to say or do anything, just the struggle for survival. I’d have had, oh, big black glasses made out of plastic, and I’d have learnt to feel things out with my finger-tips. Warm colours, cold colours…. I’d have really listened, used my ears. The feel of blackness. Not seeing anything, ever again…. Blind! That’s it, tossed like a parcel into areas of movement, feeling my way. Armed with a stick. The victim’s weapon.—Too late now…. I’ve taken these pink pills…

  You know, I nearly passed out then. I felt—I felt it was coming. I had to shake myself awake. Nearly dark now…. I feel fine, just fine—oh, but there was still something I wanted to tell you…. Yes, that was it…. The most important thing of all…. Look, I’m going to hold this glass in my hand so you can tell when, when it happens. I’m going to hold on to it as long as I can…. So when—when the moment comes, and I fall asleep, the glass will fall…. Fall on the floor, and you’ll hear it…. And then you’ll know it’s all over. All right?

  Aa-a-aah, another cramp. God, this one’s going on and on —argggh, how it hurts…. Anyway, I’m sure this will be the best thing I’ve ever written … even if the ending isn’t all that brilliant.…

  It’s some consolation for all the meretricious rubbish I’ve churned out….

  Funny. If this is death, it wasn’t worth while making up all those … those philosophical systems…. You know, once before I thought I was going to die…. I was thirteen, something like that. And I—I fell down on the ground, I felt all the blood had drained out of my head, leaving it quite empty…. I was falling … falling … Oh, it was awful … People gathered round me….

  It’s as if … as if the Flood had happened … you understand? … and Noah was looking at those still waters.… He didn’t realize that … [long pause] The earth was so teeming, so full of myriad life … and the sky … And the light is so diaphanous, especially—especially towards evening … I can still see it, through the window.… Translucent.… One day I believe it’ll be possible to … lose oneself in it.… out there … How lovely it’d be … I think I’ve thrown up.… I felt something.… I can’t be … a very pretty sight.… Aa-aah.… There goes the glass.… Listen.…

  There was a sharp sound as the glass smashed, and then silence. Sound-waves distorted by electrical pulsations, the glass lying where it fell, scattered on the floor, tiny sharp-jagged fragments like claws, glittering in the gloom, bright, motionless, a granulation of salt-crystals.

  Beyond the dividing barrier of darkness now. Death may be close at hand, that foul rain of destruction which will cover every object with its fine ashy film. Has this area so much as a name now? Do these places so much as exist on the face of the earth? In this harsh and frozen expanse nothing is missing, not one angle, not the tiniest surface scratch. The hospital’s façade, the barrack walls, the high front of the S.P.A.D.A. building loom heavier, lean inwards; and within this closing vice, as though oblivious of their condition, their destiny, men and women alike are getting their lives over. Away and beyond, the negative geometry becomes more marked: white bridges arching across the highways, deserted asphalt squares. Low down on the walls, and so small that you have to stoop to see them, are a series of graffiti, proof that people have lived and loved here. The letters are spidery, scratched with something like a fingernail, a penknife maybe or the edge of a sharp stone. Along the coast the airfields stretch out, parallel to the sea, dead flat, with the same desert-like appearance. And across this whole great desolate expanse, amid the isolation and the enfolding sense of sleep, under rain or sun, by lamplight or day’s bright reflections, the cars come and go, passing one another, tracing their insect-like tracks, a hum and susurrus over the ground, then dwindling out of sight over the horizon towards other man-surveyed domains.

  Everything merges and deepens; sleep and torpor have their own sharp tex
ture, which produces its own reality.

  Now, at this moment, the abyss may be close. Rooms with yellow-painted walls harbour the smell of stale cigarette-smoke. Solitude closes in, a compact and indissoluble block, immobilizing arms, imprisoning torsos, pressing down on men’s guts and private parts. People are cast-iron statues, heavy, solid, dull, mute, frozen into a posute suggestive of anger. The storm continues to discharge its fury, the sky is like a sheet of iron, and lightning-flashes advance slowly across it like cracks in the metal. François Besson, seated in his coffin, has ceased to exist. Crouched in a corner, back resting against the bed, he nevertheless no longer exists. He has no name, no face. He has come to a stop. Nor does he survive as memory, since no object or artifact or visible shape exists except as itself: it is what it is, and no more, rooted in the bedrock of actuality. It can never be liquid, never melt and drift, bearing down with its fresh current feelings of happiness and pleasure. He is denied the unbounded pleasure of having lived—and quite by chance, because he finds himself shut in beside a window, facing the naked sky, because time itself has penetrated his room and traced every detail of it, in a caricature that can never be effaced.

  What it means is suffering, continual and progressive suffering, an increasingly precise revelation of the life and beauty that have eluded him. I am rooted like a tree on a vast mountain plateau, in the heat of summer, hemmed all about with rock, unable to move, unable to escape anything, fixed, wide open to every hazard, like a pylon in a severe electric storm. Everything around me is dead—rock and glacis, dry scrub, sunken watercourses, dead, all dead, yet they never loosen their grip on me, and I can do nothing but count the slow minutes, number the very stones, while the clouds drift on over me. In the high rock-face a waterfall has scored its vertical channel. Flies cluster and buzz on my eyelids. An occasional reddish insect flies past, with great effort, as though dragged down by its own weight. Even here, surrounded by all this open space—it seems positively to invite movement—I can still do nothing. I am still the prisoner of those who belong down there; this upland is gradually turning back into the concrete-and-girder platitude of which I form a part. Scaffolding. Parking lights, traffic lights. The surface of the pavement at two o’clock in the morning. The ever-louder creak and clatter of the night-time roadsweepers, advancing from road to road, dragging their sprinklers behind them. There’s no doubt about it, I’m a slave, reduced to mere dust. I can’t break free. Danger stalks the earth’s surface, you can feel its muted vibrations ripple through sewers and cellars. Danger, real danger. Hell is right under us, so close that you could knock a spyhole through to it. Hell is our memories, too, our sleepless memories, a little stiff and starchy, memories of the days when our eyes were opening—life as it used to be, tranquillity written across the lined pages of school exercise-books, sensitivity, egotism, happiness. Those pages are illegible today, yellow and spotted. It was as though one were fixed and static, stiff as a figurehead, while the strata of experience descended past one. The upward movement was illusory, the fiction of movement amid stillness; and one day, after long contemplation of these passing chimeras, it turned out that the universe was not the same, that the metamorphosis lay there, and not in you. It was the universe that had ordered this stratification of elements, these strange and transient smoke-patterns. Slow erosion has reduced you to a skeleton, yet you yourself have always remained in the same spot, you have never budged. You are still the same, this Besson-like person, now sitting in his room—third floor, on the right—back against the bed, eyes fixed on the slits in the closed shutters, perspiring in summer, torpid in winter. Yes, you are this freak, this pop-eyed clown, these grey features striped and haloed with light, these closed lips, this decayed tooth throbbing hotly in the jawbone. What you are is Besson + X, your body has been extended by a dimension you never imagined—the weight of a mahogany table, for example, or the burn you get from holding a match too long, or the smell of some particular scent, or the rough, powdery feel of a sheet of fine sandpaper.

  Just as you could never escape from the hell of your visible surroundings, just as you could never escape the tormenting presence of those countless million faces that hemmed you in on all sides, so likewise you will not be able to escape the revelation of your own existence. Your name will be inscribed on the wooden panels: BESSON. Your date will be set down at the foot of a memorandum: 22nd March 1963. Your life, your shrivelled-up existence, the life of a fusty, parchment-yellow creature now, plunging down the final slope of oblivion, will be known and recorded in detail. Your end will take on a cataclysmic magnitude; you will be devoured alive by your own powers, your energies will spend themselves on your own destruction. You are BESSON. You are alive. One day you will be a mere bundle of bones, dead meat, the pale gelatinous substance of a coffin-worm. One day you will lie on your back, as though on the beach, and become aware that the earth no longer supports your weight, that it’s opening slowly under the pressure of your body, deeper, deeper, till it becomes the cushion of foul air contained within a sepulchre. Thicknesses of black marble still stand between you and that day, but each passing second gnaws a little more from your protective ramparts. Now, till the hours of sunshine and clarity return, the rain still falls, the gentle drifting rain, all-imbibing, falling noiselessly on my face in the street, a few yards from the intersection, moistening my eyes, leaving my shirt heavy and sodden. It is just such peace and harmony that produce yet another hell: calm and tranquillity become remorse, grinding me down into powder. Water trickles through the excavations, and I know this water is bearing me away with it, bit by bit, is stripping me of my secrets.

  Behind the rampart of mist and ruin, I know, paradise lies concealed. But this paradise is one that needs must remain lost to us, since no road to its attainment exists. Such are harmony and beauty. Everything was swift, logical, well-defined. This was the time of that mystery that I bore within myself all unawares, and which bound all things together one with another. It was neither faith nor passion, but a delicate subtle joy, the perfect virtue of a shadow hermetically sealed in a box, cohesion in thought and deed, a reunited family about to sit down to table. And all this was irremediably destroyed by the acuteness of a pair of eyes, the agony of two retinas, the exacerbated functioning of nerves and cells.

  The landscape, the scenery, has passed beyond whiteness now to a dazzling radiance. Lines have become razor-edged, colours stick like glue. Each sound is magnified into a vast uproar, and silk-smooth coverlets suddenly harden, become great rough-surfaced blocks against which—as though after falling twelve storeys or so—the flesh smashes with squelching impact.

  Language has resumed its crazy ballet: words pass, join up, divide, streaking across the night like so many fireworks, without rhyme or reason, an endless, repetitive sequence, always tracing the same image. The mind of this man is exactly like a long sentence: you think, every moment, that you’re about to reach the end of it, yet you’re confronted by one extension after another, interminably, all linked up by connecting particles, prepositions, adverbs or whatever, while the movement and articulation of the sentence as a whole gets progressively faster and faster. There is an invisible hand engraving it on some imaginary wall, word by word, phrase by phrase, drawing it out with clause after modifying clause, each letter adding a fresh nuance to the whole, each syllable imperceptibly altering the overall tone, just as one can spoil a room’s colour-scheme by the slightest rearrangement of its contents—masking the orange-tinted surfaces, grouping a lot of shiny reds and blues in the corners, cluttering up the line of the skirting-boards with baroque pieces that are all glittering reflection and dark shadow—and so the sentence continues, swells to colossal dimensions, until it reaches that precise point—a tenth of a second will turn the scale—where the mind is no longer capable of grasping its meaning, whereupon the whole ill-balanced structure explodes into a thousand pieces, plunges down the void, tumbles into madness and night, the fierce, echoing vortex of the abyss.

&n
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