The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  When he was about half-way to the lighthouse, he came upon a kind of shelter built as a protection against the wind. He stopped there a moment to rest and smoke a cigarette. But the packet had got damp, and the tobacco burnt badly; Besson needed at least fifteen matches to smoke one cigarette right through.

  Here in the shelter he had his back to the sea. He heard the noise of the storm behind him, but he himself was facing the town. In the distance, outside the harbour, he could dimly see the old crumbling houses, squared up against the wind, not budging, letting the gusts buffet their vertical façades. Grey, pink-tinged clouds of spume, whipping up off the waves, drifted across in front of their walls and gave them the appearance of retreating. But they did not retreat one inch. They stayed exactly where they were, closed in, four-square to the elements, a chiaroscuro of deep black and the palest grey, like a line of rocks that had tumbled down from the mountainside centuries before. The storm was moving down the valley now: trees bent groundwards, and now and then with a sharp crack, a branch would break. Fields of grass were flattened in every direction, and across the curving hills there was a motion as of some giant hand, stroking their surface to and fro in a kind of caress. Further still, right on the horizon, at the most distant point from the source of the storm, the mountains reared their violet-tinged bastion against the clouds. Sometimes there would be a flash of bluish light above one of the peaks, but no thunder was audible afterwards. The whole landscape was dim, pitch-dark, crazy, and the bowl of the wind had blotted out all other sounds.

  When he had finished looking at the pink-flushed sea-front and the rounded hills and the rampart of mountains behind them, Besson abandoned his shelter and began to advance along the causeway again. Progress became more and more difficult the further out into the sea one got. Worst of all, the handrail stopped before the lighthouse, and Besson was reduced to crawling along the causeway on all fours. At one point the water seemed to gather itself, the sea sank back, withdrew so far that the rocks on the sea-bottom, with their clustering limpets, were exposed to view. For a second or so there was nothing but this huge sinister well, this boiling vortex at the foot of the causeway. Then in a flash the hole filled up, and a great column of water soared shuddering into the air. When it began to topple above the sea-wall, Besson flung himself down flat and held his breath. The vast liquid mass came hissing down on him, with such force that it poured across into the harbour basin. As soon as the water had ebbed away again, Besson got up and began to run in the direction of the lighthouse. He reached it at last, and took shelter behind the tall stone bastion on which it stood.

  He remained there some minutes, an hour perhaps, in the midst of the hurricane, unconscious of the cold, not noticing that his clothes were soaked through with sea-water. All around him, to left and right, straight ahead, even under his feet, the wild spectacle continued. The waves mouthed and slapped against the jetty, with a drawn-out, clinging, wetly explosive sound. Clouds of spray rose and mingled in the air, daylight acquired rainbow tints. The long black headlands stretching out on either side seemed to cleave through the water like surfaced submarines. Warring gusts tore and ripped at each other, made strange thin noises like seagulls or crying children. On the horizon sea and sky blurred together in a welter of spray, cloud, and bright heaving hollows of water. Sometimes the sun appeared for a moment or two, suddenly exposed through some rent in the middle of the dense cloud-base, and yellow rays would slant down on the surface of the waves. At times, again, strange and baffling shadows (or what looked like shadows) formed under the swell, as though some vast creature were swimming along on the bottom. Harsh and incandescent blue patches, like streams of marine lava, would suddenly appear.

  The movement of these masses of water was constant and indefatigable. Under the transparent grey skin, with its endless rising and falling rhythm, heavy triangular shapes were in constant movement, leaving lines of bubbles, swift straight eddies, the occasional branching, fibrous vortex boiling round on its own axis. Above, the swooping, gusty air thrust down on this grey and opaque surface with the full force of its atmospheric pressure, carved out hollows, sculpted undulating valleys and mountain ridges and volcanoes and angry, belching sulphur-springs. It was like a dance in which everything joined, even the fish and the waving seaweed in the shadowy depths below, a dance that moved each mass of green and clouded slime, swung it softly but firmly to and fro with the rest. This music, mingled with the wind’s shrill whine, marked out a rhythm for the sea’s overall sequence of movements. First there came a deep, deep indrawing as of breath, when the water shrank back into itself, emptying the rock-pools, cascading and gurgling down, pouring back on its own substance. Then came the counter-wave, surging back against the sea-wall, trying to breach it, then in its panic-stricken flight creating a loud, choppy crest of water from the two liquid masses in opposition. After this there would be a brief silence while the sea grew still and collected its strength, followed by the muted roar of unleashed energy, the rush and hiss of moving water, a sort of tchchchchchchchch, steadily increasing in volume, a harsh, rasping note that echoed round the surging curve of the wave. Finally the sound made by this climatic discharge underwent a swift transformation, reverberating and swelling into a long, solemn roll of thunder, though by now the waves were so huge that even this remained almost inaudible. A vast chchchbrooooom!, a thunderous explosion made solid and palpable, a majestic circle, a rampart of stone and spray that rose slowly skywards and floated amid the wind, slowing down everything around it, checking time’s pendulum, making the world, for one brief moment, an abode of giants.

  Standing there behind the lighthouse, his eyes fixed on the sea. Besson felt himself possessed by this rhythm—the rhythm of eternity, or something very like it. His mind vanished utterly, was lost amid the dance of the waves: it was as though the wind had entered into him, blowing straight through the open windows of his body. Each fresh assault by the waves took shape simultaneously in the very depths of his being, making him stiffen, filling him with an agony of hatred. The violence of these great liquid masses, ton upon ton of water, possessed him completely, and as each wave broke a complementary explosion took place somewhere inside his chest, metamorphosing him into a kind of human bomb. When he was fully attuned to the rhythm of wind and sea, when he was one with it, standing four-square against the assaults of the elements, yet at the same time vibrating with their own exultation, like a rock, or some old black slimy ring-bolt, covered with wrack and barnacles, then he began to breathe. Slowly, surely, he breathed in harmony with them. His lungs filled with the same air as the wave imbibed, leaning on the cloud-swollen horizon, accumulating the same vast burden of violence and determination. His breast expanded magnificently to contain it all, stretched almost to bursting point, he was taller and broader than a mountain. Then the intake of breath ended, and for a moment the elemental forces hung poised in equilibrium. But at the mysterious signal from that whole wide expanse of sea, the unknown signal with so strong and regular a rhythm that he no longer even heard it, the sluice-gates opened and another great mass of water hurled itself at the obstacle in its way—at the town, too, and at those vast gawping crowds—while a sound like a great gong-stroke spread rippling out to the four corners of the horizon, a sun of sheer sound, its rays swimming far above the earth, creating universal panic, leaving all inconsequential objects scattered face downwards.

  Like some point of blind intensity, there was created, at the very heart of the uproar, a zone of calm and silence in which, for some few seconds, everything was destroyed, annihilated. But the curse never ran out, the cycle of respiration began all over again, just as before, without haste or exhaustion. Besson felt that in some way he was entering upon eternity. To avoid death was a simple matter: all one needed to do was to breathe in this special way, long slow powerful breaths that followed the rhythm of the sea.

  To join the waves in their struggle against the earth’s bastions, against scurrying, hurrying mankind, whose t
iny hearts always raced madly, like a shrewmouse’s.

  Soon one’s whole body would begin to follow this respiratory rhythm. The skin would turn cold and colourless, like water, and blood would pulse slowy through one’s veins, streaky, bubbling, saline, ebbing and flowing in the circulatory system according to the same soft rhythm, flux and reflux. Soon thoughts would no longer roam freely through one’s mind, but simply float there in situ, captive and unchanging, like sea-anemones, for ever digesting the minute scraps of matter around them: inexhaustible thoughts, without verbal form, bereft of desire, thoughts that all conveyed an identical message, though just what this was it was impossible to know for certain. ‘Light and shadow’, perhaps, or ‘singing singing’, or even ‘God’.

  Eyes would no longer see, nor ears hear; the skin would no longer react to cold or sunlight, nor the stomach be conscious of hunger. All that would exist would be the inner self, the inner self that contained the heaving sea, the wind in its courses, the scudding clouds; the inner self that was absorbed in its proper task of respiration. Every organ would breathe in unison—heart, intestines, private parts, brain, throat, even down to the cells of the skin and each individual granule of bone. The body would inflate itself and breathe out in time with the natural scene around it, endlessly, like some gigantic lung. Here was the secret of eternal life: respiration. Breathe, never stop breathing, breathe in harmony with the rest of creation, breathe in the sea, breathe in the heart of the living rock, in the nimbus of clouds, in the midst of that black void where the galaxies wheel through space. Breathe according to the rhythm of truth.

  The minutes passed, and at last the wind fell. The sky was now completely covered with thick cloud. Darkness was falling on the shadowy town, filling the streets through which Besson walked. Silence had returned, and the sidewalks were crowded once more. through brightly-lit shop windows various displays of goods caught the eye—fabrics, furniture, decorated pastries. Besson stopped a moment at a window behind which there stood two mechanical birds, done up in green and red plush respectively, both bobbing up and down, clacking their beaks, with much frenzied flappings of wings. Behind the birds was a girl in an armchair, smoking a cigarette and staring in front of her with vacant, heavily made-up eyes.

  A little further on, as he was passing a public park, Besson heard the leaves begin to rustle in the trees. A breath of wind stirred the branches, and the first drops of rain started to fall, plopping heavily on the asphalt. Then, high above the town, the black clouds suddenly exploded, and water came slamming down with a noise like a thunderclap. Besson ran across and took shelter in a doorway, and stood watching the avalanche descend. The rain fell at a very slight angle, in thick straight voluted lines, as though the sky were a vast colander.

  The gutters soon overflowed on to the sidewalks, washing away masses of dead leaves and bits of paper. Water from the roof-tops came crashing down through every drain-pipe. The whole town was built on a slope, and the water went streaming over concrete and asphalt and tiling as though drawn towards a great hole somewhere near the bottom. Moisture dripped from every object in sight: the impression it gave was not so much that it had dropped out of the sky, as that it was there already, embodied in all matter, and had been given some magic order to distil itself. It came bursting out of everything—leaves, posters on hoardings, cracks in the pavement, manhole covers, even from people’s skins. It was like sweat, the kind of sweat that comes streaming through every dilated pore when one’s running a high temperature; an endless flow, from the fountain gush to the slow trickle, drop by pearly drop, pitting all its soft and pliant strength against the hard element of stone, the air’s impenetrability.

  Above the line of trees in the park Besson could see the still dark sky. The roofs of the houses round the square stood out very pale against it, and the television aerials gleamed as though coated with silver paint.

  Sounds still existed, but they were no longer clear-cut: the downpour had cast a halo about them, they shone in a brief and murmurous aureole before being drowned and snuffed out. Besson breathed in the odour of damp earth through the covering layers of bitumen. He could also smell the current of fresh air coming down from the upper atmosphere, laden with ozone. He strained his ears to catch any echo, from behind the rampart-like rows of houses, of the river’s roar as it rose higher and higher, milk-coloured now, washing down clouds of earth and turf in its spate. He even opened his mouth to catch and taste the flavour of the rain.

  But, most striking of all, at this precise moment—without any visible hint of how the effect was produced, there came a bright triple crack in the expanse of jet-black cloud, stretching half-way across the sky, from zenith to horizon. Clear-cut, unmoving, as though traced with a crayon, a pattern of branching veins, this sudden phenomenon broke through the obscurity with such pure unwavering brightness, so intense and snow-white a degree of incandescence that it almost ceased to be light. It hung there, its three-timed fork branching down towards the earth, shattering the sky, carved upon the firmament, like some gigantic root, and at that moment nothing else existed: the sky and horizon, the surface of the town, seas and rivers—all vanished in an instant, shattered into a thousand fragments, were enveloped in darkness. Nothing remained but this vast and silent testament to the presence of electrical power, this divine and blinding emblem of whiteness, beauty, peace; the great unmoving design that had annihilated all else, in whose light years and centuries of effort and striving would find illumination, would be impregnated with violence, penetrated by happiness. Cold and incandescence here blended in a single flashlight crack, one scored line of brightness that had photographed the entire world.

  When this moment was over—a second that felt like infinity—the thunderclap followed. It rumbled, hesitated, then crashed down over Besson, making the very earth tremble. The rain now began to flow more freely, flooding the street with its beneficent tide: it was rather like the sensation of opening a door wide to let some fresh air into a firelit room—or warmth into a cold one.

  Chapter Nine

  François Besson runs away—Do Indians kill wolves?—The ogre—People watch the big yellow dog dying—Description of rabies—François Besson burns his papers—In the canyons of the town—A missed meal—The sphere of water without water

  ON the ninth day François Besson decided to leave Marthe’s house. There were several reasons for this:

  (1) He was getting fond of the girl.

  (2) He was tired.

  (3) He wanted to see what was going on elsewhere.

  (4) The bed was uncomfortable.

  (5) The girl had bad breath and sometimes smelt of perspiration.

  (6) Time was passing, and he had to act fast.

  In the morning he waited till Marthe had gone out to do the shopping, and then got his things together. The little boy, still in his dressing gown, was playing with some toy cars on the floor of the kitchen. After a while he got up and came over to Besson, who was just putting his razor into the beach-bag.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he said.

  ‘Out,’ Besson told him.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Besson.

  ‘What do you mean, nothing?’ the boy said. Then he went and fetched one of the toy cars, and began to push it round Besson’s feet, making broo-o-m-broom noises to simulate a car’s engine.

  Besson put the last of his belongings in the beach-bag. The little boy came back again and scrutinized him with black, unwavering eyes.

  ‘Where are you going to, then?’ he repeated.

  ‘Outside,’ said Besson.

  ‘Going for a walk?’

  ‘Yes,’ Besson said. He strapped on his wristwatch and went to comb his hair. When he returned to pick up his bag the little red-haired boy was carefully staging an accident between two of the cars.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Besson asked him.

  ‘This one’s a Peugeot,’ the boy explained, ‘and this other one here’s a Citroën. I
t’s going very fast, so the driver of the Peugeot doesn’t see it. Now watch what happens.’

  The little blue vehicle was travelling flat out across the kitchen floor; proportionately to its scaled-down size it must have been doing the equivalent of something like three hundred miles an hour. Then the other car appeared, coming in from the right. This one was bright red. It curved round the table-leg and cut right across the first car’s path. There was no time for anyone to brake: they crashed into each other with appalling violence, and both vehicles were hurled across the plastic-tiled floor, bouncing and somersaulting over and over, until at last they came to rest on their backs. If there had been any passengers on board they would have been killed on the spot. Next, the fire-engine came out of a corner at the other end of the kitchen. Zig-zagging over its imaginary highway, siren going full blast, it made flat out for the scene of the accident, stopping at each wrecked car to extinguish the fire before it could get under way. Then, after picking up the dead and wounded, it returned the way it had come, sounding its siren louder than ever. When it was back in its corner, two breakdown trucks drove across to the scene of the accident. When they got there they hooked up the two crashed cars by their bumpers and towed them away across the kitchen.