The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Eyes wide open, Besson gazed at the area dominated by the sun: it was like an abyss, a silent maelstrom sunk into the heavens. Everything, absolutely everything moved centripetally towards it: even the mind, with its caravans of thoughts and ideas, was irresistibly attracted by this dazzling focal point. To struggle against it was out of the question: you had no time to put up any defence, before you knew what had happened you were its slave. Down, down you went, deaf to all sounds, quite helpless, caught on the earth’s lift-platform, sinking to some unknown destination, while behind its screen of scarlet clouds that colourless sphere mounted royally towards the zenith.

  Little by little, as the sun gradually detached itself from the barrier of the horizon, each large patch of red was reabsorbed, gave place to the ordinary light of day. Blues became permanent, orange and yellow elements darkened, and one by one the sparks of reflected light went out till they were all gone. Finally, these colour-changes more or less came to a halt, except for the brief occasional appearance of violet and purple streaks drifting over the sea, or when some cloud parted asunder and a great cone of yellow light gleamed through the torn gap, its base picking out a chain of mountains, its whole length laced with rainbow spume and a scribble of slanting rain.

  By now there were plenty of people hurrying along the pavement behind Besson. The town was waking up. Men’s footsteps clacked noisily past, then faded in the distance. There was a muted hum of car-engines, and seagulls swooped overhead, with their shrill yap-yap-yap. At one point all the street-lamps were suddenly extinguished but this made no difference to the general picture. The rows of blue star-points went out, one after the other, till the entire town was visible, solid, opaque, an integral part of the day now beginning.

  Besson lit a cigarette at this point, and then set off through the back streets, away from the sea. In a leisurely fashion he began to make his way up towards the centre of town again. In one corner by a shop he came on an automatic vending machine. He put in a coin, pressed a button, and got a small waxed-paper cup full of scalding coffee, which he drank in two or three mouthfuls.

  Further on, he passed a big covered-in square, where the market was held. Besson walked in down the nearest alley, and let himself drift with the general movement of the crowd. On either side were stalls laden with crates of fruit and vegetables, and at each a big fat woman, greasy hair tied up under a headscarf, bawling her wares at the top of her voice. Despite the early hour, the place was a hive of activity. People kept elbowing each other aside, shoving through the crowd, shouting interruptions. From every corner of the market came the stallkeepers’ unremitting sales-talk, and the tinkle of coins being dropped into tin mugs. Bare, fat, heavily muscled arms plunged into the crates, shovelling up runner beans, potatoes, endives, tomatoes, peppers. Oranges sat each in their little nest of crumpled paper, apples tumbled down on top of one another, their green skins often marked with big rotten bruises. Over everything there hung a faint yet rich odour of earth, leaves, pulp, juice. About a yard and a half off the ground every smell, whether from vegetables or fruit, merged into one indistinguishable whole, a composite smell that permeated the entire place. Through all this movement and bustle Besson advanced like an automaton. Several times fat women stallkeepers, standing behind their piles of merchandise, hailed him in high screeching tones, like so many squawking chickens: ‘Lovely potatoes, lovely potatoes, this way, this way …’ ‘Come on, mister, try the runners, fresh this morning …’ ‘Fine apples, specially picked, beautiful apples, fresh every one of ’em, two hundred the kilo, lovely fresh apples …’ ‘Come on now, walk up, walk up, walk up….’

  Down the alleys between the stalls the crowd ebbed and flowed, wandered in all directions, trampling over old cabbage leaves and scraps of newspaper. Old men with string bags stood examining the vegetables or counting through the wads of filthy notes in their wallets. Women went to and fro dragging children after them by one hand, or stopped, stooping down, to cram their purchases into their shopping-bags. A pregnant girl in a flowered maternity smock wandered slowly along the row of stalls: she had dirty frizzed-out hair that the wind perpetually blew forward into her face. A little further on was a group of men in berets, sitting on upturned empty crates, smoking and gossiping. From time to time, in some corner of the alley, a mangy mongrel could be seen licking its paws. Large numbers of ragged old down-and-outs, backs bent, went round picking up the rotten vegetables that had been thrown out of the crates, and greedily stuffing them into their gunny-sacks. There was one very ancient and very dignified-looking little man, with a slightly nervous air, who tittuped along in front of the stalls, from time to time snatching a potato or pear with a quick, clumsy gesture, and instantly popping it away into his sack. When he saw Besson watching him, he turned his head away, more nervous than ever, and began to stare up at the roof of the market with a kind of terrified and angry determination. He remained in this pose for several seconds, not budging an inch, and then resumed his peregrination past the stalls, with a comic air of would-be unconcern.

  Besson walked from one end of the covered market to the other. After he was out in the street again—and despite the fresh air and busy traffic—the sickening smell of early vegetables and fruit pursued him for a long way.

  Later, much later, when the whole town was awake, Besson walked round to his parents’ house. On the way he met someone he had known previously, when he was working at the private school. They stopped and chatted for a moment on the kerb. Besson would have liked to continue the conversation for much longer, since this he found an admirable way of passing the time; but the other person was apparently in a hurry, and after exchanging a few banalities they parted.

  A little further on, while crossing a square, Besson caught sight of the river. It was quite a large river, that ran in a straight line through the centre of the town, passing beneath a series of bridges and esplanades. The closer he got to the riverside quais, the louder grew that dull monotonous roar he could hear, with increased volume and more deeply resonant note. It was like haze made audible: what in fact produced it was water rasping over wide-spreading the shingle bottom. A vivid sound, this, alive with gurgles and ripples and a booming undertone which hinted at reserves of power; a sound that mingled with the general hubbub in the streets and flowed down unceasingly toward the sea. Besson was intrigued by the noise; he walked over to the railing and took a good look at the river.

  He saw a single unbroken stretch of water, flowing between rampart-like banks. On both sides, to left and right, there was a kind of stony embankment, overgrown with weeds and bushes. Such was the course the water followed in its long journey from the hinterland, bearing with it the cargo of driftwood and silt it had eroded from various mountain-sides en route. In the centre of the channel the river flowed deep, and was a beautiful dark blue, scored lengthwise with fine ripple-marks: it moved swiftly, with a soft, muted roar, and one got the impression that this was all the river there was, this bankless stream flowing down to its outfall, this heavy, swollen, full-blown effluence. Hardly an eddy to be seen. Only this lane of water gliding past, level and unbroken, except where the bridge-caissons divided its flow each ringed with a small collar of foam.

  On either side of this central current the river was a dirty greenish colour, seething over pebble-ridges and round fallen tree-trunks. Beyond lay the shore, reduced to a narrow line of shingle on the right-hand side of the river, but spreading out to form a wide ripple-marked expanse on the left. Further off still, above the quais, were rows of houses, with leprous, peeling walls and loose ends of string dangling from their balconies. Below the houses several sewer-mouths were visible, round black holes slowly dripping their contents on to the river-bed. Between these piles of waste-matter, where rats and mongrels were always nosing around, the water lay in stagnant puddles, the sky reflected from its surface.

  Besson scrutinized every detail of this scene with the greatest care. His eye travelled right along the line the river took through the
town, on to the valley which, century after century, it had slowly hollowed in that hard, mountainous landscape. He noted all the colours floating on the surface of the water, each tiny cats-paw of wind, every tuft of grass being carried down, slowly or at speed, by the current; the various mounds of shingle, the gravel strand with its border of sticky yellow foam, the shell-craters hollowed out by successive flood-tides, and now filled with rainwater. He listened to the sound the waters made as they plunged through the hollow bowl of the valley: a powerful, solemn note, a deep and colossal organ-boom. He also heard the rhythmic chuckling of its eddies and whirlpools, the curious hissing note, pchchchchch, produced by hundreds of small cascades falling one on the other. He travelled over this cold, deserted no-man’s-land, with its myriad reflections, as though the balustrade on which he was leaning had been the bridge of a ship. He scrutinized every cranny, each damp black hole, each hollow with its layer of rotting detritus, the piles of polished pebbles, dulled under their layers of dust. He could smell the depressing acrid-smoke odour given off by long-dead fires, and his nostrils also picked up the powerful, subtle, carrion stench (it might have been wafted from the decaying corpse of a giant lizard) which the sewerage outflow spread abroad. The wind was blowing in the same direction as the natural flow of the river, and vanished somewhere out to sea. Here all movement was a retreat, a flight from the point of source, a continual downstream progress where all individual elements merged in a loud, abrasive, roaring confluence that sounded, weirdly, like some squadron for ever at the gallop.

  He ought to stop here for a while too, he thought, build himself a hut of damp driftwood, with an old packing-case to sit on, and just wait until he was left all by himself with only the running water for company. Here, in this desert at the very heart of the town, surrounded by invisible men leaning over the various bridges, he would pass all his time just watching the river, learning to love it, till he felt its presence in every movement he made, however slight, as though it were some living creature.

  Higher upstream, near the outskirts of the town, there stood on the river-bed a crane, two or three tractors, some bulldozers, and a cement-mixing machine. Besson could even make out the shapes of various men by the water’s edge, all busily occupied. He turned to a loafer who was leaning on the balustrade close by him, and said: ‘What’s going on down there?’

  The man removed a damp cigarette-end from his mouth and said: ‘It’s the bridge. They’re building the bridge.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Besson said. ‘Many thanks.’

  The man put the cigarette-end back in his mouth.

  By now it was not far off midday, and Besson set off once more in the direction of his parents’ house. When he rang the bell it was his father who answered the door. Besson had to explain his actions, and this involved a certain amount of lying: he said he was going to stay with friends for a few days, and had come to collect his things. He got out a blue canvas beach-bag, and packed it with his electric razor, his toothbrush, a raincoat, a clean shirt, and two or three other unimportant objects. This done, he said goodbye to his father, and walked out into the street again. His mother was out shopping in the neighbourhood, but he did not wait for her. Instead he made a bee-line for the redheaded woman’s apartment.

  On the way he bought an illustrated comic for the little boy. He got there in time for lunch. The girl didn’t ask too many questions and when the meal was over, she let Besson lie down on the bed and have a siesta. He spent the rest of the day reading the little boy the story in the comic. It was all about a cowboy called Texas Jack, who was such a dead shot with a revolver that he could knock nails into a plank from ten paces. His enemy was a man called Hobbes, who owned several ranches, and had raised a posse of gunmen to settle Texas Jack’s hash. He had even hired the services of an Indian half-breed called Rattlesnake, whose speciality was throwing little knives poisoned with rattler’s venom. During the night Rattlesnake got into the house where Texas Jack was sleeping, but he mistook the bedroom and was on the point of killing another cowboy. Texas Jack caught him just before he could throw his knives. Rattlesnake had left them lying on a table, blade turned towards him. Texas Jack fired: the bullet struck one of the knives on the handle, and sent it flying straight at Rattlesnake’s throat. The Indian died instantly. Then there was a shooting-match with Hobbes’s posse, and finally the villain himself was taken prisoner and handed over to the sheriff.

  For the following week, the comic announced another episode in the adventures of Texas Jack: this one was called ‘Death in Gold Nugget Valley.’

  Chapter Eight

  The storm—The wind—François Besson and Marthe talk together—What might have been the beginning of love—A walk through a hurricane—The sea—How to become immortal—The pattern of a lightning-flash

  ON the eighth day a storm blew up over the town. The wind had come from the east. After travelling across the sea all night, it reached the houses and the riverside early that morning. It burst furiously on all these stone and concrete canyons, smashing against the façades of buildings, bending the trees, driving down on the ground in whirling eddies of dust, whipping up the breakers so that they surged high along the line of the groins. Invisible ramparts of air were set in violent motion, with a long sinister wailing sound that filled the chimney flues. Clouds stretched out across the sky, shredded into wisps, acquired long off-white tails reaching from one horizon to the other. Doors began to creak softly; and on each closed shutter or pane of glass there was a feeling of pressure, as though some gigantic panting beast were out there on the other side, pushing and grinding at it with vicious tentacles. All along those worn, crumbling walls, loose bits of stucco tore free and plunged groundwards into the street, falling very fast, leaving a thin trail of dust behind them. Scraps of paper, leaves from the plane-trees, odd bits of material would go spinning into the air, as high as the upper storeys of the surrounding houses then fall back, then whirl aloft once more, as though they had suddenly gone mad. Various objects were blown off roofs and balconies. Sudden whirling columns of air formed at street intersections, weird raging maelstroms that—revolving round a still point at their base—hollowed out deep craters in the lifeless dust. At the very centre of these inverted vortices was a point of concentrated nothingness, which moved with great precision, thrusting its single upturned eye down over the surface of the earth. Through the wind’s steady whistling the whole town resounded with a series of cracks and bangs and underground rumblings. When the storm was right over the town, the wind began to launch its assault on the houses. Regularly, several times a minute, an airy avalanche would roar down against walls and windows, in an effort to penetrate, to breach the defences. It did not last long, but each time it happened—after a second or so of lowering silence—it felt as though every vertical object were shuddering and cracking up. Even the thickest walls, great blocks of ferro-concrete, roofs, colonnades and all, would quiver in unison under this violent onslaught. Gaping holes, swollen with liquid gas, opened their mouths wide. The corridors of the streets, every gap and crack, yawned open for a brief moment, while there surged into them, torrent upon torrent, this bestial thing that had come from so far to be their conqueror. From time to time, between one squall and the next, a flight of pigeons would take off and vanish in the mazy back-streets, fleeing the invisible enemy, searching desperately for any hiding-place—under the guttering, beside a balcony, in the lee of some thick bushy tree, where these lethal attacks could no longer find them. People, too, were trying to escape. They were running along the pavement, sodden clothes plastered to their bodies, hair all anyhow, eyes red from the dust that had blown into them. They would take shelter for a moment in doorways, wait till the gust died down, and then stagger on their way, struggling clumsily against the heavy pressure of the atmosphere. Slowly, far above them, a jet aircraft forced its way through the wind. Women’s skirts lifted like wings, giving fleeting glimpses of pale, lardy thighs.

  For more than an hour Besson sta
yed in the room, listening, while the storm rose to its climax. He saw the sky clear, close in, and then lighten again, enough to let the sun’s rays struggle through. He heard the wind smash against the walls like a battering-ram, again and again, the whining, slamming rumpus of its impact. Outside even the daylight now seemed unsure of itself: it wavered intermittently, sometimes becoming so dim and overcast that one felt the flame had finally gone out altogether. But then it would pick up again, suddenly blaze out more brightly than before, flooding walls and pavements with sheets of light against which the shadows stood out black and intense.

  It was comfortable up there in the room; one felt truly sheltered and protected, it might have been a ship’s cabin. The air was tranquil here, nothing stirred, no fear of stifling. The flies were all asleep, upside-down, clustering on the light-bulb or hanging from the tulle curtains.

  Besson stretched out on the bed. In the kitchen the redheaded girl was busy ironing, a green apron tied round her waist. Occasionally she, too, cocked an ear at the noise the wind was making against the windows. Finally she turned on her transistor radio, and the flat was flooded with music—a cinema organ recital that floated in the air, nasal, monotonous, vulgar, sometimes rising in a run of excruciating trills, then falling back, a blurred mess of sound, only to repeat the pattern once more: endless wearisome reiterations, a kind of recurrent stutter that swathed you from head to foot, paralysed not only your movements but also your speech, your very though-processes, and finally toppled you into a kind of shallow black hole, quite helpless.