Besson still had a few minutes to spare before he left. He sat down and lit a cigarette, letting the little boy blow out the flame for him.
‘What’s your name?’ Besson asked.
The little red-haired boy made no reply.
‘Go on, what’s your name?’ Besson said again.
‘Lucas,’ said the little boy.
‘Lucas what?’
‘Lucas …’
‘And you live here, right?’
‘Yes …’
‘And how old are you?’
No answer.
‘You mean you’ve forgotten? You know how to count, anyway, don’t you? Go on, you know how to count, surely?’
The child wavered on his short podgy legs. He had a heavy head, with high forehead and a very bright pair of eyes under his red hair. His mouth was half-open, and two incisors were just visible, resting against the top of his lower lip. He was wearing a blue bathrobe, check trousers and floral-pattern slippers.
Besson bent down towards him and said: ‘Come on—try a bit of counting with me. One, two, three—’
‘Four—’
‘Five, six—’
‘Eight … eleven … fourteen—’
‘No, no! Six, seven, eight, nine … You go on from there.’
‘M’m…. Ten—’
‘Well done, that’s right—’
‘M’m…. Fourteen….’
‘No not, fourteen, you said that just now.’
‘Six….
‘No, not six…. Eleven, twelve, thirteen….’
‘Fourteen—’
‘What’s after that?’
‘I don’t know,’ the little red-haired boy said, and began to play with one of his cars again. Besson watched him crawling across the linoleum floor, and for a moment felt the urge to take him along too, have him as a companion wherever he went. He might even teach the kid something, just exactly what he wasn’t sure, but maybe, one day, he’d be able to teach him something really useful, like pilfering from shop-counters, or how to swim really fast. But it occurred to him that he’d soon have the police on his tail, with charges of child-abduction.
‘Why don’t you get in your little cars and drive them?’ Besson asked.
The child looked up and puzzled over this for a moment.
‘But they’re too small for me,’ he said. ‘Look—’
He held the toy car in front of his face.
‘Would you like a bigger car?’
‘I’d like a truck,’ the little boy said. ‘A big truck like that one.’
‘Where would you go in it?’
‘I’d take it to school. And I’d take Mama for drives round the garden in it.’
Besson flicked his cigarette-ash on the ground.
‘When you’re a big boy,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ said the little boy. ‘When I’m eight. But—but why aren’t I eight?’
‘Because you’re four and a half,’ Besson said.
‘When I’m asleep at night I see lots of things,’ the little boy said. ‘Wolves, whole forests full of wolves. And Indians.’
‘Do the Indians kill the wolves?’
‘No, they can’t, they’re not big enough. But when I’m grown up I’ll take a stick and I’ll kill the wolves, I’ll, I’ll poke my stick into their eyes, that’s what I’ll do. There was one wolf wanted to eat me, but I said to him, no, wolf, don’t eat me, because—because I’m going to kill you. And he got terrible cross, and caught hold of my throat. So I grabbed a knife and slit him up the middle, right into two halves.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Then the wolf locked me in a dark room, and kept me there.’
‘Were you afraid of the dark?’
‘Oh yes, I was afraid, and then when it was light I jumped out of the window.’
‘Ever seen the Big Bad Wolf?’
‘Oh, I see him sometimes at night—he’s got a big stick and he goes through the forest with all the foxes. But I run away and he can’t catch me.’
‘Why can’t he catch you?’
‘Because I met an ogre who put me up in the top of a tree. The Big Bad Wolf couldn’t climb the tree because the ogre was protecting me.’
‘Didn’t the ogre try and eat you?’
‘Oh no, he was a nice ogre. He never ate little children. He was a kind good ogre.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Big, ever so big, with black legs and white hands and face.’
‘What about his nose?’
‘White’.
‘And his hair?’
‘Blue. No, bluey-green.’
‘Bluey-green?’
‘Yes.’
‘And his eyes?’
‘Yellow.’
‘So he was a handsome ogre, eh?’
‘Yes, he was. And I went on running for ages and ages.’
‘And what did the Big Bad Wolf do?’
‘The Big Bad Wolf tried to catch me, so I took a big stone and smashed his head in.’
‘Suppose he’d eaten you?’
‘Then I’d have cut open his tummy and got out.’
‘And why doesn’t the chicken you eat cut open your tummy?’
‘Because he’s dead.’
‘And you’re not dead, eh?’
‘Course not.’
‘Well, suppose the Big Bad Wolf ate you, would you be dead then?’
‘Yes, but I can’t die yet, I’m too small, otherwise I’d grow up in a flash, just like that.’
‘And why aren’t you a chicken, do you suppose?’
‘Well, if I was a chicken, I’d run off and hide in the forest.’
Besson stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
‘At school,’ the boy went on, ‘there’s a little boy called Michel, and he’s got a dog called Paddy.’
‘What about it?’
‘When it’s dark, that dog, I mean, it looks just like a wolf.’
Besson said: ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’
‘When I was big I joined the army and got killed, twice.’
‘What about after you came to life again?’
‘I flew off in an aeroplane, very fast, and the plane went up in sky where you can’t see it, very high, ’normously high. I nearly fell out. After that I swam through the sea to an island.’
‘What was this island called?’
‘I don’t know. It didn’t have any name, that’s what.’
‘It didn’t have any name?’
‘Then I ate too much chocolate and got a tummy-ache and threw up.’
‘Do you know how to write?’
‘Oh yes, I can write—I know how to read, too.’
‘What sort of thing can you read?’
‘Well, the paper—’
‘What’s in the paper, then?’
‘Stories about animals—bear stories and giraffe stories and gazelle stories and dromedary stories and elephant stories—’
‘And duckbilled platypi?’
‘Yes …’
‘And hooded cassowaries?’
‘Yes…. And tigers and lions and panthers …’
‘Microbes, too?’
‘Yes, and lions and giraffes….’
‘And diplodoci and megatheria and labyrinthosauri….’
‘Yes, and tigers and lions—’
Besson sat looking at the child for a little after this, holding his gaze, absorbing and memorizing the soft lines of his face, the way his skull was ridged, those black eyes of his that possessed no depth of their own, simply reflected the external world. He studied his way of sitting and moving, which still had no real connection with that childish body, yet already displayed the mysterious consistency of action which characterizes any individual personality. At the end of this scrutiny Besson decided to go. He picked up the beach-bag, put on his raincoat, and said to the little red-haired boy: ‘Right, I’m off now. You be a good boy and play with your cars. When Mummy comes home tel
l her I’ve gone, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Got that?’
‘Yes,’ said the little boy.
Besson opened the door and walked down the stairs.
Outside the weather had more or less cleared up. The sky was still overcast, but the ground had dried, and a cold wind blew intermittently down the streets. Besson walked on, swinging his beach-bag, and keeping away from the main thoroughfares, where there were too many people. Without consciously intending to do so, he found himself making for the river.
Here the quais were lined with tumbledown shacks where the rag-and-bone men lived. Besson stopped at a snack-bar to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of lemonade. Beside him was a soldier, munching his way through two hunks of stale bread with sliced sausage between them. When he had finished his lemonade and sandwich, Besson paid and went over to the water’s edge, where he stood with his elbows resting on the balustrade. The river flowed swiftly past below him, in torrential and muddy spate; a smell of decaying vegetable matter rose from it. A little way upstream, the workers on the site were moving busily to and fro behind a rampart of stones. The cranes and bulldozers were not in use, and near the scaffolding Besson could see smoke rising from a brazier.
He strolled on up the quais until he came level with the building site. Then he stopped again and took a good look at what was going on. There were about a dozen workers, dressed in filthy old clothes, moving about over the pebble-ridges with shovels and buckets. Some were digging holes in the sand, others stood watching them and smoking. All this looked somewhat disorganized, and was probably quite useless; yet Besson found himself suddenly wanting to do as they did, to labour bent over a shovel, not understanding what he was doing, asking no questions, simply doing his share of the mysterious work which would end one day in a new ferro-concrete bridge. A few moments later a tramp trudged slowly across the site, dragging a sack stuffed full of old papers. No one paid the slightest attention to him, and he slouched on into the bushes, following the swollen line of the river round until he vanished behind a fence, perhaps into the mouth of a sewer outlet. It was an odd sort of desert world to find in the middle of this tough, overcrowded town; a kind of minuscule savannah which, after nightfall, became the hunting-ground of rats and stray dogs.
It was also a little frightening. It stood for depressing things like solitude, misery, or old age. The town, confronted with this frozen, refuse-strewn channel, and the muddy stream running through it, pressed in on it with the full weight of its disapproval, the concentrated violence of its window-studded walls. As he leaned on the balustrade Besson realized that he was exactly on the demarcation-line, the frontier. It cost him quite an effort to drag himself away and return to the centre of town.
Shortly afterwards, as he was crossing at an intersection, he noticed the crowd. He went over to find out what was happening, but at first could see nothing out of the ordinary. People had gathered along the sidewalk, all craning and staring in the same direction. It was only when he got right up to the thing they were looking at that he realized what was going on. Stretched out in the conduit beside the gutter lay a big yellow dog, obviously dying. It lay on its back with its head in the drainage course and its paws up in the air; it was panting away, open-mouthed, and so loudly that the painful rasp of each breath it drew was quite audible. Only a few yards away stood this group of men and women, quite still, just watching. Some others felt a certain ashamed embarrassment, and either stopped a good way further on, peering over their shoulders, or else lurked behind parked cars. Others again, who were driving past in their own vehicles, would slow down as they went by the spot where the dog lay dying. Besson took all this in very rapidly as he walked, shuddering, past the death-scene himself.
He saw the creature’s prostrate body, already very nearly the colour of bitumen, its stiffened paws still feebly quivering. He saw the long head, sunk in the filth of the gutter, and trying to breathe the sluggish air. There were no traces of blood on the dog’s lacklustre coat, but the effect was even more unpleasant: the skin hung slack and shapeless, like a half-empty sack. And in front of him stood these motionless, silent people. As he made his way to the edge of the pavement, Besson was suddenly hit by the ugly visual image this body presented, lying there sprawled on the ground, wrong side up, still choking for breath. Two glazed and mud-flecked eyes stared into empty space, and the curled tail hung down over the kerbside. Then from that gaping throat, which the air could no longer penetrate, there burst—mingled with dust and slobber—a faint, hoarse, plaintive cry that broke the silence hanging over the intersection. But this sound did not last long. The body continued to heave and pant, in the throes of the death agony now, and Besson moved swiftly away without turning back. He was not really moved, and yet for a long while afterwards, as he walked through the noise and bustle of the street, he could not forget one single detail of that tableau—the weirdly still body of the dying yellow dog, alone at his intersection, and the faces of the people watching.
For a few brief moments he even felt something resembling a tragic recollection of sickness and death: the clutching hand of the unknown, of grim inevitability. No, perhaps rather a sense of remorse and uneasiness, sprung from the hidden origins of his life, and now surging up inside him, spreading along the network of his veins, passing through nerves and muscles, an obscure pain, a kind of spasm, burning, refining, making each individual cell a watchful and malevolent eye. It was like some fatal epidemic, bringing stark terror, frantic hatred, pangs of conscience, and leading to a terrible, ineluctable dénouement: plague, nervous leprosy, l’ Ainhum, le Goundou, le Kala-Azar, or indeed rabies:
Under normal conditions rabies develops very fast, and the patient therefore will suffer certain psychological symptoms at an early stage of the disease. He tends to exhibit signs of anxiety and melancholia, and to be obsessed by strange premonitions. Sleep becomes impossible for him. Very soon areas of numbness and irritation, together with an itching sensation, develop locally around the wound, which appears soft and swollen. Sometimes the first symptom of which the patient complains is a strange feeling in the throat, coupled with a sense of constriction in the windpipe.
The mental symptoms can be merely hysterical, and in many cases the disease first manifests itself after some psychological shock. Instances arise in which fear or terror can be regarded as genuine symptoms of this complaint. But generally speaking the most frequent initial indication is a rise in temperature. These symptoms may last for several days before the disease declares its true nature, but normally they last between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. Hydrophobia, the main symptom, is dominant in a majority of cases: this is caused by intensely painful spasms which occur in the deglutitive [swallowing] and respiratory organs whenever the patient attempts to eat or drink.
The pain produced by these spasms is such that in all likelihood for sheer intensity it exceeds all other forms of human suffering. This is why the smell, sight, or even sound of water or other liquids will suffice to bring on a crisis. When an effort is made to imbibe even a tiny quantity of liquid, it is instantly rejected, with a violent spasm of the throat and larynx. One characteristic symptom is the hypersensitive state of the nervous cells to external stimulants. A draught or breeze can produce convulsions: the reflexes of the skin and tendons become exaggerated, and the respiratory spasms of the thoracic muscles do not respond to tracheotomy. Solid nourishment can more easily be absorbed than fluids.
Once the disease is past the incubatory period it progresses rapidly. In many cases there tend to be periods of apparent improvement, which might lead one to believe a cure to have taken place, or, alternatively, to doubt the original diagnosis. The patient’s mind is in most cases exceptionally lucid, and he will give intelligent answers to any questions he is asked; but then his voice becomes inaudible and his speech incomprehensible. Certain phases of hyper-excitement may reach the level of actual insanity. The patient will smash and destroy everything within reach, although attacks on living
persons are very rare. Sexual excitement, accompanied by priapism, is a common symptom. The voice becomes hoarse; the strange sounds produced during major spasms are what gave rise to the popular belief that ‘anyone with rabies barks like a dog’.
The spasms and convulsions become increasingly frequent, until the patient passes into a state of paralysis from which death results. The muscles that have been strained to the very limits of endurance now relax; the patient’s features lose that rictus of ultimate agony and terror they previously wore, and become quite expressionless. There is usually an excessive secretion of saliva, which the patient is incapable of controlling. Finally, respiration becomes irregular and weak, and after a while stops altogether. Before death there is a rise in temperature. Sugar and acetone are normally found in the urine. When the patient passes into a state of paralysis, his pupils dilate….
Afterwards François Besson returned once more to his parents’ house. When he rang the bell they had just sat down at table. They talked for a moment over the plates of steaming food, and Besson said he had one or two more things to collect from his room.
The room itself, he found, had been carefully tidied since his departure. There was a new bedspread, with small red and green patterns running across it. The floor had been swept and polished, the ashtrays emptied and washed.
Besson placed the drawer of his table on the floor and began to burn the papers in it one by one. He held each of them by one end, lit a match beneath them, and dropped them into a large glass ashtray. In this way he burnt everything: it took him the best part of the afternoon. Poems, love-letters, end-of-the-affair letters, handbills, lecture-notes on geography and Latin, algebra problems, sketches of naked women, photographs, vaccination certificates, all the accumulated scribblings and confessions of many years. Not all the papers burnt in the same way. Some flared up and were gone in a flash, giving off a quick wave of heat as they did so. Others went on crackling for quite a time as the match-flame licked up at them; these ones burnt slowly, with a great deal of smoke. The fire crept up these white squares of flimsy, obliterating the handwriting, twisting up the lines of the sketches, bright red patches spreading, slowly guttering out in a black and acrid cloud. The pages torn from pornographic magazines were thick, glossy sheets, which never burnt through properly, so that an irregular bite, ringed with sooty foam, would appear in the middle of some lissom beauty’s body. To keep the flames alight you had to supply extra fuel underneath—say a handful of light, scented airmail letters. Sheets of onion-skin paper went black in a second, but on the fossil and all-too-fragile page thus produced you could still see little serpentine lines of lettering against the black cindered background. The flames devoured everything, without distinction or regret, wrinkling up fine parchment, melting glossy surfaces, volatilizing celluloid; and from the tiny brazier there rose a spiral of hot smoke, in which thoughts and acts were reduced to mere ephemeral grey particles floating on the air.
The Flood Page 21
