The Flood
Page 14
‘All day long. I very seldom make a mistake.’
He flipped the ash off his cigarette on to the pavement.
‘I listen all day long,’ he said. ‘That’s how I find things out. Look, I bet I can tell you all about yourself, just from your voice.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s right, just by listening to you talk. I can tell you how old you are. Twenty-six, I’d say. Well?’
‘Twenty-seven,’ said Besson.
‘Fair enough, twenty-seven. You’re tall and thin, and you’ve got black hair.’
‘Absolutely right.’
‘You don’t do any kind of manual labour, that’s for sure. Yet you have a loud voice. You must be a lawyer or a teacher, something like that. Am I wrong?’
‘I’m a student,’ Besson said. ‘But you’re right, I have been a teacher.’
‘You see? It’s easy. I listen to people talking, and work out what they’re like just for the fun of it.’
Besson glanced at a group of people approaching them on the pavement.
‘I can go a bit further, too,’ the blind man said. ‘You’re not married, are you? If you were, you wouldn’t waste your time chatting me up like this.’
‘Quite true,’ Besson said.
The man began to laugh. ‘I enjoy trying to work out what people are like,’ he said. ‘It’s all there in the voice. They don’t know how much their voices give them away.’
‘You’re a philosopher,’ Besson said.
At this the blind man gave another laugh. ‘Me? Well, I don’t know, maybe you’re right. I haven’t read any of those old books, though—’
‘It isn’t worth while reading them, you know,’ Besson said.
‘I’d have liked to have an education. But my parents couldn’t afford it. I had to go out to work as soon as I could.’
‘Education isn’t worth all that much.’
The man pondered this for a moment. ‘You shouldn’t say that. It’s not true, you know—education is worth something. It’s good to acquire knowledge. I wish I could have done it.’
‘What would you like to have known?’
‘Oh, everything. The lot. How to write well, and figure, and think properly. That’s what I’d have liked. But the thing I really wanted was to be a doctor. Understand how to heal people, find out all about drugs, know all the diseases. That’s what I’d have found really interesting. Doctors are good people. Well, not all of them, I know that, but some of them are really decent. When I had my operations, the doctor who looked after me explained the whole business. Of course, I didn’t understand some bits of it. But it interested me just the same. And the doctor saw I was interested, that’s why he told me all about it.’
‘You remind me of someone,’ Besson said.
‘Oh yes?’ said the blind man, ‘and who might that be?’
‘A man who lived a long time ago. He was rather like you.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing, really. He was a philosopher. He lived in a barrel and listened to what was going on around him.’
‘Was he a writer?’
‘No, not even that. He just sat there all day in his barrel, and learnt a whole heap of things. He lived at Corinth, in Greece, a long time ago. He spent his time observing life, and he didn’t give a damn for anything or anybody. He went around barefoot, and slept where he felt like it, in doorways, or even in his barrel. One day he saw a child drinking from cupped hands at a fountain. He said to himself: “The child’s right. He’s taught me I’ve still got something which serves no useful purpose.” So then he broke his bowl.’
‘He must have been a queer sort of fellow,’ said the blind man. ‘Surely he was a bit cracked, though?’
‘Yes, and another time he heard a philosopher saying that man was an animal with two feet and no feathers. So he took a chicken, and plucked all its feathers, and threw it down in front of the philosopher, saying: “Look, there’s your man for you!” ’
‘Bravo,’ said the blind man. ‘That’s the sort of stuff to give ’em. But I bet the other man didn’t appreciate the joke.’
‘I must say I’d be surprised if he had.’ Besson stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. ‘I have to be going now,’ he added.
The blind man flicked his butt-end into the road. ‘Come back one of these days,’ he said. ‘You can tell me more about this character who lived in a barrel. It sounds as though it might be amusing.’
‘I’ll be back,’ Besson promised. ‘See you.’
‘Goodbye, then,’ the man said.
‘Goodbye,’ said Besson.
Besson emerged from the doorway and took a few steps down the pavement. Then he turned back for a moment and gazed at the hunched-up figure sitting there in the shadows, with the pile of newspapers and the tin can full of coins beside him. He sat quite motionless, hands thrust in the pockets of his lumberjacket. Beneath the blue rainproof cap the face with its pointless lines was in repose, and reflections glinted from those large, opaque, impenetrable glasses. It was true, of course: this was the way he had to live, squatting on a section of pavement that was his unquestioned property, a section of property that he had bought. People might pass to and fro all day long, but he remained at home, in his own place. He had nothing to fear from the hubbub around him, or from people staring at him. His quest was over. He could settle down in his little retreat, his private, well-protected hiding-place; and there, quite unhurriedly, he would begin to play that lengthy game which can only be observed inside one’s own head.
Chapter Five
Besson at work—The games—What one sees from a window—The story of Black Oradi—How François Besson triumphed over gravity
ON the fifth day, Besson remained in his room. He sat at his table, not thinking of anything, having previously hung a placard from the outer doorhandle on which he had written, with a red ball-point pen: WORKING PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. Then he began to examine his surroundings, in front of him and on either side. It was about three in the afternoon. Through the curtainless windows he could see the house opposite, a dirty grey building with its own lace-curtained windows, and a segment of dull, neutral-coloured sky, in which not a single bird could be seen.
The light came straight into the room, without making any shadows. Besides the drumming of the rain, various other odd noises were audible: whimperings, dull thuds, creaks, whirrs, whistles. Men’s voices, the screams of children. Bottles rattling in crates. Heavy bangs above the ceiling or under the floor. Scraping and shuddering noises of unidentifiable origin, a pebble rattling down noisily in some area, windows vibrating as a truck passed by. Susurrus of tyres. Water gurgling down the gutter, the pistol-shot banging of front doors, a self-starter coughing into life. All this was normal, absolutely normal, a rich and confused medley of sound ebbing and flowing like a pendulum. Time passed softly and easily with these noises to help it. It was rather like being asleep.
Nothing in particular happened. Out of the street or secluded behind closed doors the little sounds continued, never suggesting anything but the existence of life—life in miniature, tittuping along, nibbling at the edges of things, consumed by a vague itch yet unable to let go properly.
Above Besson’s head the ceiling stretched motionless, a sure fixed point, and in the cube of bright air below it an unlit electric light bulb hung on its cord. The walls of the room were just there, they took no action. They were quite content to be walls, good solid walls and nothing more. Yet there could be little doubt that a constant process of attrition was at work on them, crumbling away their substance, sending out clouds of white dust from them. Damp got under the yellow wallpaper and quietly worked it loose from its paste, millimetre by millimetre. Everything looked so strong and permanent, yet it was a virtual certainty that in two or three hundred years there would be no surviving trace of this room. There would just be an old hollow ruin, looking as though it had been eaten away by cancer, in the middle of a thorny, overgrown waste lo
t.
But for the present the room was peaceful enough, with hardly anything happening in it. Besson sat there for a while, elbows resting on the table. He carefully scrutinized each separate object, down to the last sheet of scribbled manuscript. He took in the penknife, its blade still open, and the box containing 50 drawing-pins, and the bottoms of paper cups, and the keys, and the empty inkwell. Periodicals lay about everywhere, with crumpled pages and minus their covers. A schematic swan swimming on a matchbox. Besson read everything, in an unhurried, almost hypnotic manner. Everything he looked at was strange, all the words printed on the white pages seemed full of trickery and illusion. On the left-hand corner of the table, beside a stub-crowded ashtray, a dictionary lay open at page 383. Besson began to read the catch-words, softly at first, then progressively louder and louder:
Helium
Helix
Hellene
Hellenic
Helleniser
Hellenism
Hellenist
Helminth
Helvetian (m. or f.)
Helvetian (adj.)
Hem!
Hemacyte
Hematite
Hematocele
Hematopoeisis
Hematosis
After this he leant forward and picked up a paper. He unfolded it slowly, found the Amusement Page, and then spread it out on the table. The big sheet of newsprint left smudges on his fingers. It was covered with a number of strange drawings, with captions written underneath them. Here, enclosed in their black frames, were men wearing white tunics, armed with spears and shields, or inscrutable women, draped in décolleté robes, their faces heavily made-up and their long tresses studded with outsize jewels. At the top of the page, above the drawings, was written:
The Empress of the Desert: Zenobia of Palmyra
There were other strip-cartoons running across the same page, showing bald men in space-suits shooting other men with death-ray guns. Underneath these, again, was a group of men and women standing in a sun-lounge, with lots of big windows. Two of them had white clouds billowing from their mouths, with the following legends written on them:
‘That’s great, Steve. You take Thompson in the Bentley. Sir Bernard and I will stay here and wait for instructions from the boss.’
‘O.K. We’ll go as far as Stevenage on the main road. That’s forty miles from here. By the way, what about the man watching the house?’
At the bottom of the page there were also various games and riddles and one or two jokes, this kind of thing:
‘I’m a real paragon,’ a man wrote in his private diary. ‘I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t go to the theatre or the cinema, and I’m unswervingly faithful to my wife. I never so much as look at another woman. I go to bed every evening at eight o’clock, and get up and go to work at dawn. Every Sunday I attend church. But it’s all going to be very different once I get out of jail….’
When Besson had finished looking at all the pictures, and had read every caption, he took out his ball-point pen and did the crossword. He studied the clues for a moment, then began filling in the empty squares. Three across was ‘Signifies proximity’; Besson wrote ‘Here’. ‘Close pair’ produced ‘Tights’. ‘All the clues there if you follow them’ suggested ‘Thriller’. Ten across was ‘Spy with the field variety?’: Besson filled in ‘Glasses’. ‘Mutual absorption’ turned out to be ‘Osmosis’. Thirteen across, ‘Roussel had them all dancing right through his party’, defeated him.1 ‘La Fontaine made one for the nymphs of Vaux’—‘Elegy’. He turned from Across to Down. ‘Completely effaced’ must be ‘Erased’, while ‘Accustomed to a new way of life’ was ‘Acclimatized’. Four down, ‘bare horror’, produced ‘Stark’, but ‘Scarcely more than skin and bone’ he left blank. ‘Saurians from tropical America’ were ‘Iguanas’. Thirteen down, ‘Arab water-hole’, was ‘Oasis’. ‘A hundred down here in Paris produces Roman dual’: Besson wrote ‘ii’. Nine down, ‘Money’s the surest one’, turned out to be ‘Investment’. ‘Sometimes broken in conversation’ was ‘Thread’.
Besson passed a good half-hour in this way. Then he got up and walked across to the right-hand window. It was a large window, taller than it was wide, with eight panes of glass mounted in a brown wooden framework. The fourth pane up was cracked from top to bottom. The sixth vibrated very faintly. Besson looked out through the third at the houses and street, the passing scene before him. Through the fine drizzle tiny figures, old and young, men and women, were hurrying to and fro. Cars slid to a stop at the cross-roads, changed gear, moved off again. From time to time someone would sound his horn, a sharp and generally brief blaring note which produced no echo. It was a familiar and superficially peaceful scene. Yet all the same there was something disturbing about it. To be high up in this apartment block offered security of a kind, but not for ever. The tide of activity gradually surrounded you, cut you off without your noticing it. Its clamorous, eddying flow constantly wore away the walls of the building, rubbing off fragments of plaster, tiny bits of stone, loose flakes of ochre-coloured paint. These men skulking along the sidewalks were not as inoffensive as they looked. Their lowered heads concealed murderous thoughts, and it would take very little—a revolution, for instance, a simple upsurge of mob fury—to bring them out. They would advance like a horde of voracious ants, and gather in crowds under the windows, shouting and waving their fists, screaming for blood. They would surge up every stairway, break down all the doors, and strike without mercy, again and again, great razorish slashes, till finally each head fell free from its body, the neck one red and gaping wound, the life-blood ebbing away.
Best not to think about such things, best to see no further than the surface appearance of reality, to play with it continually like a set of knuckle-bones. Obstinately Besson set himself to count the cars passing by outside. He took a sheet of paper and a ball-point pen. A few minutes later he had produced the following list:
Citroën
14
Fiat
9
Renault
51
Alfa-Romeo
1
Dauphine
29
Volkswagen
1
4 CV
12
Ford
1
R4, R8
10
Porsche
1
Peugeot (403, 404)
25
Dodge Dart
I
Panhard
5
Volvo
1
Simca
6
Unidentified makes
3
People still crowded along the sidewalks behind one another. From his high eyrie François Besson watched them attentively, forehead pressed to the window. He saw young women dressed in red and black macintoshes, some bare-headed, others wearing scarves or hats. There were men in their forties, smoking as they walked. There were old men, and soldiers in uniform, and middle-aged women with children, or dogs, who dithered a long time on the edge of the pavement before crossing the road. Besson saw groups of little girls on their way to or from school, satchels slung over their shoulders, always jostling each other and squealing. He saw a man in a dark grey overcoat who stared at all the women passing by. He saw dawdlers and hurriers, cripples, polio cases, one-legged men on crutches. Some walked with a brisk, decisive step, others slouched; one or two turned their toes in. He saw them all, tiny manikins stretched out in insect-like columns, tight-packed, wedged against one another, timid, ridiculous, anonymous creatures—it made one feel sick to look at them. These were the people who owned the town, who had jobs and professions, who thought a little, who spent all their time swarming through this labyrinthine gallery-ridden termite-hill of theirs. Life here belonged to them. They had taken possession of this territory and become its exclusive occupants. None of them ever gave up. None of them ever renounced his shadowy status as a living creature, none of them ever simply stepped out of his
clothes and his skin, and quietly melted away on the tarred asphalt. Such an idea never occurred to them. They were strong, incorruptible. Amazingly strong.
With a twinge of regret Besson sensed that from now on he would not be able to look at them all that often. He opened the window, and took a deep breath of cold, rain-damp air. For a little longer he continued to watch the wet street below, with its endless stream of mauve and green cars (more figures for his list) and all the women in loud raincoats, heels tapping a frenzied tattoo along the pavement. Then he drew the shutters to, and carefully closed them. He walked back to the middle of the darkened room, hesitated a moment, then went over to the door, pressed the light-switch, and watched brightness instantly spring out from the bulb.
The light hung directly above the table. Besson stood facing it for a moment; then he sat down in the chair and stared at the litter of papers spread out in front of him. The sheet of newspaper he had been looking at now lay close to one corner of the table: Besson gently dropped it on the floor. The entire working surface was cluttered up with scribbled sheets of manuscript, letters half-sticking out of their envelopes. Everything was in a chaotic muddle, but the muddle possessed a small confused life of its own, that kept whispering endless confidences in one’s ear. It made one want to send messages everywhere, all over the world, postcards with ‘kind regards’ written in the space reserved for correspondence—just ‘kind regards’, nothing more. It made one want to write stories, odd and trivial stories with the names of places or people, and dialogue, and inverted commas and exclamation-marks and question-marks and dashes. It made one want to doodle little patterns on a scratch-pad, crosses and spirals and circles. Or to play soldiers, sketching a mountain range at the bottom of the page, and putting in rows of little men with guns—white heads on the left, black on the right. A flag and a colour-bearer in each camp, too, that was essential. Then you made them shoot at each other, by tracing a long black line from the muzzle of the gun, which would curve over and down into the enemy’s camp. One for the whites and one for the blacks. After that you counted up the corpses to decide which side had won.