Chapter One
François Besson—François Besson listens to the tape-recorder in his room—The beginning of Anna’s story—Paul’s departure—Advice from Besson’s mother—The vendetta
THIS is the story of François Besson. One might have begun it somewhat earlier, after his meeting with Josette, for instance, or when he had given up his teaching job in the private school, and had come back to live with his parents, in the old dilapidated house near the centre of town. But granted one embarked on it at this later point, then François Besson was lying sprawled out on his bed, amid a disordered tangle of sheets and blankets, towards the end of winter, and, for the moment, not smoking. His eyes were shut. He was no longer asleep, but remained in the same position, fists clenched. The light from the street outside struck the wall of the building opposite; its reflection shone into Besson’s room, and stayed there. The yellow-bright chinks between the shutters showed occasional patches of paint.
Besson lay in a bath of colour. When it reached his face, the yellow shaded off into various tones of bistre; it was round his nostrils that he took on the most cadaverous appearance. The light distorted his naturally youthful features, sharpening the jawline, obliterating tones of red and brown, wrinkling the skin around the eyes. Colour, real colour, remained outside, beyond the closed shutters. What stalked the interior of the room was more a species of very soft and subtle reflection, much like the shadow cast on the ceiling by an electric light bulb.
When Besson got up and moved across the room, with measured steps, feet bare and both hands thrust into the pockets of his pyjama jacket, shoulders a little bent, it was like a cloud passing over the moon, or whatever else—street-lamps, headlights, the sky—might be producing that yellow illumination outside. Suddenly he came to himself, forced his eyelids apart and un-gummed his lips. There were dark rings under his eyes, he breathed noisily, and one of his ears was redder than the other, because of the way he had been lying on his pillow for the past hour.
He walked. He set down his bare feet on the cold tiled floor, one after the other, toes crimping as he did so. He only stopped when his nether belly bumped into the table. Then he abruptly tugged open one of its side drawers, and began to search through it, still in semi-darkness. The drawer was crammed with a variety of objects—dirty handkerchiefs, unwashed socks, notebooks, sunglasses with cracked lenses, razor-blades, a toy pistol, ink-soaked sticks of chalk, postcards, boxes of Italian matches, a packet of miniature cigars labelled ‘La Neuva Habana’, an assortment of wastepaper and scraps of cardboard, an Air France application form for a post as steward on one of the international lines, a fragment of mirror, an English-French French-English dictionary, the bottom of a Stiegl glass, a magnet, a snapshot of himself taken in a snow-covered London street, a roll of adhesive tape together with a pair of blunt-nosed scissors, passport, cufflinks, a watchstrap with no watch, a key-ring with no keys on it, a toothbrush-tube minus its toothbrush. He did no more than fumble through this detritus, with his right hand, using his left to keep the bottom of the drawer steady. Then he must have become aware of the discomfort of his position: he abandoned the bureau for a moment and went to fetch the one and only chair, a metal one, which stood at the far side of the room. He cleared off the heap of clothes littering it, and brought it slowly across, feet dragging, stubbing his rubbery toes on the tiles.
Walking thus on bare crimped feet, in a kind of uneasy glide, held up by the chair’s noiseless bumping over every crack between the tiles, Besson found the going progressively more difficult, with sudden swoops and twists of the body, like some boxer filmed in slow-motion. At every metallic bang on the floor he felt a kind of electric shock surge up his spinal column, through the marrow, dilating each vertebra as it went, spreading little clusters of thread-like matter through both sides of his body. This matter moved in a series of spasms up to his neck, where it formed a vast imbedded knot, a starved and avid glandular growth, round which the electric current spun in a vortex, rotating ever faster, crushing cartilage walls, desperately seeking some way out, fighting to resist invasion by other shock-waves; then hardened, petrified to a point at which it was no more than a kind of hoarse, intensely shrill cry at the bottom of an echoing, shadow-filled cavern, and at last exploded, one final red-and-white set-piece, a kind of floral illumination. Then, without warning, it would disappear, until the next time the chair struck a tile-edge. But meanwhile something else was happening: the last remaining electricity-charged fibres, doubtless in a final flare-up of energy, instead of disintegrating were transformed into fissures, which radiated out from the base of the neck over the entire length of the skull, thus capping Besson’s head as though with a hand, an insidious, hurtful hand, each time thrusting its bony fingers a little deeper into bone, flesh and meninges. Besson stopped; he waited there for a few moments, trying to erase the memory from his mind.
As one way of accomplishing this end he began to whistle softly between his teeth. Then he resumed his tangential advance, a consciously preoccupied expression showing on his face. He sat down at the table, placed the drawer on his knees, and began to ransack it once more. But almost at once he stopped, and returned the drawer to its place.
Outside, in the street below, some car was sounding its horn furiously. Besson looked at his watch, which lay on the table beside him, and then at the spirit-lamp for heating coffee, with its little tin saucepan on top. He put out his hand, almost touched the stand of the lamp, changed his mind, and instead picked up a coffee-spoon with his fingertips, planting it upright in the middle of the empty cup, and morosely stirring the mixture of coffee and glued-up sugar. Next he took the ashtray (a proprietory brand) and emptied it into the cup. He pushed the coffee-spoon round until ashes, cigarette-ends, sugar, coffee and matchsticks formed a kind of unified compost.
The sound of the horn interrupted him. He got up, opened a shutter, and looked down. He saw wet pavements, as though it had been raining, and a large number of stationary cars. The air was cold, and the sounds came from some distance off—the other side of the town, probably. It was like being shut at the bottom of an elbow-shaped cave, vaguely conscious, in the distance, of this white, confused mass of sound, light, scent and movement, Besson took it all in for a moment; then, very naturally, (insofar as having one forearm placed on the windowsill, his head resting against the open shutter, and his body bent forward in such a way as to throw weight on the pectoral muscles impelled him to take some sort of action), he settled into the pose; he also took a cigarette from the breast-pocket of his pyjama jacket, a box of matches from one side-pocket, and lit up.
When he had finished smoking, he stubbed his cigarette out against the window-sash and flipped it into the street. He remained there a moment longer, staring at the small black mark burnt into the wood, like a tiny extinguished brazier; then he quit his post, closed shutters and window once more, and returned to the middle of the room.
This time he made for a kind of commode, or chest of drawers, which stood in the left-hand corner of the room. On top of this commode stood a tape-recorder. Besson switched it on.
He waited without doing anything further until the greenish control light flickered on, shedding the faintest suspicion of brightness amid the yellowish gloom which had hitherto dominated the place. Then Besson pressed a button, and the spools of the tape-recorder began to revolve at top speed, clattering as they did so. Besson kept one eye on the revolution-counter, spelling out the figures as they flicked past: 145, 140, 135, 130, 125, 120,115, 110, 105, and so on. When the dial of the counter showed 45, he pressed another button, and the spools stopped. Then he switched over to ‘Playback’, hesitated a moment, and jabbed his finger down on the starter. Almost instantly the sound of a woman’s voice, a young girl’s voice pitched to something like F sharp, filled the room. With one swift movement he lay down on the bed and began to listen. At first there was a very soft hissing noise, like the resonances of some long and barely pronouncable word, such as parallelopip
ed or Ishikawa Goyemon, a sighing note shaped to an H or a J. Then for several seconds there was purring silence again, pullulating with words and gestures. Finally the green light at the far side of the room shivered; someone began to speak and breathe, mouth held close to the microphone, in a most fresh, delicate voice, a living, pulsing body encircling the warm machine. Though her words were barely audible, they seemed to quiver with power. They were murmured, breathed out with a husky catch in the throat, but vastly magnified by the loud-speaker. Now each syllable was a shout, consonants crashed against one another, the least indrawing of breath became a fearful death-rattle. A sort of spurious fury permeated every corner of the room, settling on the furniture and the odds and ends, gathering in each stratum of shadowy air.
…’cause I had no idea what to do. I tried writing to him, sent him a letter for Christmas. He’d written me once, a postcard from Coventry, without his name on it or anything. He’d even disguised his handwriting. That was silly of him, he knew very well it couldn’t be from anyone else. Even supposing, even supposing he didn’t think of that on the spur of the moment, when he printed the letters in capitals and the rest of it, all the same he can’t have helped realizing the truth when it came to signing the thing. It was a view of Coventry Cathedral, you know, something like that anyhow, and he’d sketched in a cowboy on top of the photograph, taking pot-shots at the passers-by with a revolver, and on the other side of the card he’d written, in English, Wish you were here. And he’d signed it with an imaginary name—scratched it out afterwards, but you could still read it, he couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper job of an erasure, and anyway he did it on purpose so that I’d try to decipher it. I looked through a magnifying-glass, and there under the ink-scratches was written John Wallon, or John Warren, something like that. It was so silly. If I—
Besson jumped off the bed and stopped the tape-recorder. Then he went through the whole rigmarole over again, except that this time he checked the spool when the dial showed 15. He pressed the button, and turned his head a fraction to one side, as though someone were on the point of entering the room. At the same moment, his eyes concentrated on a particular part of the wall, at the far end of the room. The tape played through in an uneasy silence, with tiny murmurs and whirring sounds from the motor, and the tense, quick note of his breathing. Something oppressive and conspicuous had dropped in on the scene, some single object as solid as a meteorite. The night was stifling, it must be like a tight band round people’s temples. The penetrating sound of the girl’s voice seemed held back in time for ten or a dozen minutes; and yet the genuine quality of this voice, the echo-presumptive of those preceding remarks, had already filled the whole place, was vibrating in every corner of it, spiralling out towards the kitchen door and the hall, exploring keyholes, sometimes comprehensible, sometimes not, disruptive of all ties, inimical to real life.
It was rather like making the attempt to catch a fragment of wind, entice it through an open window and shut it up in some bare, cube-like room. Or, more closely, like constructing a small cardboard box, lined with mirrors, in order to imprison a ray of light: the lid once shut, the ray of light would go on reflecting ad infinitum from one side of the box to the other. After catching it you would keep it a long time, a year, maybe, or even more, and then one evening, one particular evening, when it was dark, you would carry the little box into your room, and there, very gently, you would open it. And you would see the ray of light dart out, piercing through the night like a star, before it vanished into the black veils of darkness, oblivion’s pitchy chiffon.
François Besson went back to the bed. First he sat upright on it, keeping his eyes fixed on the traditional point some 22 cms to the left of the map of Europe pinned to the wall; then he let himself slump back, not even supporting himself on his elbows. His head missed the pillow by a good foot and a half, but he paid no attention. He stretched out his legs on the mattress, and avoided looking at the ceiling. Since he had to look at something, he preferred it to be an object which brought to mind the long hours he had spent on his feet during the past few days. He scrutinized his jacket, now suspended on a coat-hanger from the handle of the right-hand window. The winking neon-sign outside, by pure accident, suddenly began (having chosen an absurd reflection-point) to adorn the end of his nose, the cleft in his chin, and the tips of his eyelashes, at regular intervals, with little red patches. Every wink changed the colour-tone of the room by something like the ten-millionth of a degree. Then the girl’s voice began again, a hint of a tremor in it, like a guttering match:
François—my dear François. You’re going to find all this very silly. It’s just the way I felt like talking to you today, I don’t know why. How it came about I’ve no idea, but suddenly I began thinking of you. I was getting bored all alone in my room, and it was raining outside, and I had this attack of ’flu, oh you know—Good, you’re there at last, h’m? Then yesterday I ran into Lina, and she talked about you. Not directly, oh no, she just happened to bring the subject up in some other connection. She didn’t even remember your name, she told me: didn’t you ever see her again? That big thin gawky girl who was trying to make a career as an actress, remember? And then she went straight on to something else, so that I didn’t have time to think about you then. It was this morning, just as I was getting up, that I began to. I remembered I hadn’t even answered your letter, the one you sent two months ago. No, I hadn’t forgotten, but every time I meant to reply some snag came up, a visitor, something or other, and I put it off till later. Anyway, I had really made up my mind to get in touch with you, today, or a bit later. I tried to write a letter, but it wasn’t any good. The more I thought about the idea, the more difficult I found it. You know, generally letters are no bother to me at all, I mean, I just take a sheet of paper and the thing dictates itself as I write. But with you it was different. I read your letter through again, twice, do you realize? And the more I looked at it, the more it—the more it scared me. Really paralysed me, in fact. I mean, it was so well written, and so sincere too, and there was I with absolutely nothing to say. I know it’s absolutely ridiculous, but I just didn’t dare try to produce something in the same class. That’s the truth, I swear it, really it is. There was nothing so extraordinary about your letter, nothing all that literary, I mean, but it just, I don’t know, it just struck me as difficult. I didn’t even feel like trying to compete with it. In a way it was something that had to remain unique, like a compliment, do you see what I mean? I just couldn’t reply, if I had the whole thing would have been spoilt. I thought—well, for a moment I thought the best way out was to send you a very short little note, on a visiting-card, saying something like ‘Thank you for your letter’. I’m sure you’d have understood that. Or else I might have sent you a telegram, or come round to see you at your place. Or just done nothing at all. Nothing at all. Because, in the last resort, it was the kind of letter that doesn’t need a reply. I believe—But I was afraid you might be cross, and then I had an idea. Why, I told myself, I could tape my reply, and send you the spool. That way you can hear my actual voice. Besides, I can talk as I feel, I don’t need to make up any fine phrases, it doesn’t matter. I really do get the feeling that you’re going to listen, that I’m free to say what I like. So I went round to Lina and asked her to lend me her tape-recorder and a clean spool. I didn’t tell her why I wanted them. She agreed. Oh, there’s just one thing—when you’ve finished with the spool, she’d like it back. Just send it through the post, her address is 12 Rue de Copernic. That’s all.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, so I’ve got an excuse for saying I hope all goes well with you. There’s a whole heap of news I could tell you about me and the rest of us—but I’m not all that anxious to hold forth to you on that particular topic. Well, anyway, I’m still very much the same—going to psychology lectures, and working now and then. I’ve been doing some painting recently, too. I find it absorbing, but heaven knows if my stuff’s any good. For several da
ys now I’ve been having a red phase. You simply have no idea what an extraordinary colour red is. I never realized till I started using it. I cover vast canvases with red and nothing else. Now I find myself noticing every red object, and you know, there’s an awful lot of them around. I’ve begun collecting them, too. Anything, so long as it’s red. I’ve got bits of material and cardboard boxes and scraps of paper, oh yes and cigarette packets, those Craven A ones, you know. I even keep bits of cotton-wool with blood on them, but the trouble about that is that the blood turns black when it dries. Remember the letters we used to write each other in the old days? Funny the way we invented excuses to send a letter, anything would do. And then we’d post them, very seriously, going home from school, and read them privately in our bedrooms. It was a fine idea for public holidays, or New Year’s Day or Easter, or celebrations like 21st September and 5th July. If we wanted to correspond at other times we had to find some special reason. I used to look in the calendar to see which saint’s day it was, and then write: My dear François, I’m sending you this note today with all my good wishes on the feast of St. Thingummy or St. Whatsit. I even remember there were occasions on which no saints appeared in the calendar, and then I’d send you good wishes for the Immaculate Conception, or the feast of Christ the King. Remember? But that’s all over and done with now. I can’t use dodges like that any more. Even with you. Even if I could be certain you’d understand. Even if I was sure you wouldn’t tell me I was trying to play arty poetic tricks with past memories. Anyway, my position nowadays is very simple on that score—I just can’t write any more, not a word. It’s—it’s a kind of illness. The mere sight of a blank white sheet of paper’s enough to depress me half out of my mind. Frankly, it beats me how anyone still manages to go in for writing—novels, poetry, that kind of kick. Because in the last resort it’s quite useless. Pure dumb egotism. Plus the urge to expose yourself, let other people gobble you up. Anyway it’s so exhausting. Honestly, I just don’t get it. I tell you, I can understand people writing letters and postcards better than I can someone settling down to a novel. It serves no purpose, there isn’t any truth in it. I mean, you don’t make any discoveries or isolate any area of knowledge, you just wallow in illusion. To my way of thinking, it’s like an animal manufacturing its own parasites, a shellfish that creates its own seaweed and attaches the stuff, personally, to its carapace. Art. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve had it. I just don’t believe in it any more. You know, when I told Marc Morgenstein that the other day, he just laughed at me. He said it was all nonsense—I wrote far too well, he liked my stuff, and I was crazy to take myself seriously on such a subject. He also told me that art’s never existed anyway, people talking about it is the only thing that counts. According to him, anything can be reduced to conversation. He also said that when someone had written a piece like ‘Imitation Leather’—you know, the story of the housewife who gets an obsessional thing about her trolley-bus—well, that proved they had something to say. And when one’s got something to say, sooner or later one always manages to say it. I told him that made no difference—everyone in the world had something to say. But he didn’t get it. All the same, I really believe it’s true. I do want to say things, yes, but not in the way I did before. I get the feeling one can express them equally well by—by doing almost anything, going round to the baker’s for bread, or having a chat with the concierge. Obviously I don’t talk about this to the others. You’re no longer in favour. But I don’t think it matters. What’s the point of being regarded as a person of intelligence? One can get along very well on one’s own, don’t you agree? What’s really needed, I feel, is the ability to detach oneself, stand aside. Anyway as far as I’m concerned it’s the end of the road. I can’t stomach lies and poetry any longer.
The Flood Page 6
