To be cursed by an old woman who wanted to die was something Besson could not stand for long. He got up, grabbed his beach-bag, and rushed off down the street without looking back.
Later, he went and had a meal at the Soupe Populaire. Here, in a bare room illuminated by the livid glow of strip neon lighting, the down-and-outs stood eating at a clean, sterilized counter. The menu had been pinned on the wall:
Soup
Boiled Beef and Carrots
Bread and Cheese
Fruit
Besson ate quickly, standing between an old man in a threadbare suit and a bearded tramp with a large wen on the back of his neck. Nobody said a word. Men and women bent over their plates, toothless jaws working rapidly. The ultra-white light gleamed on polished zinc and plastic, making the filth and ugliness of this human flotsam stand out all the more by comparison. A strange mixed odour of stew and disinfectant floated in the chilly, silent air. The bare room reeked of shame and embarrassment.
When he had finished eating, Besson left the canteen and walked through the night smoking a cigarette. It was his last packet. When that was gone he would have to pick up tab-ends from the pavement, or else smoke rolled-up newspaper, which has a foul, acrid, sugary stench while burning.
He climbed down some steps to the river-bed, near the caissons of the new bridge, and spent some little while hunting round for a snug corner where he could sleep, without being too much exposed to the icy wind that was set to blow steadily all night.
Chapter Eleven
The river flows along its channel through the heart of the town—François Besson does hard labour—The story of Siljelcoviva—Mass attack by nocturnal enemies—François Besson kills an unknown person—A walk through the dark tunnel under the town esplanade
ON the eleventh day, François Besson went down to the river bed and found himself a hiding-place from which he could watch the construction team at work on the bridge. The caissons had already been sunk in mid-stream, and now sprouted metal structures which a man was banging away at with a hammer, as hard as he could. Under the greenish-grey sky, and the continual rain—now a downpour, now a misty drizzle—the site looked rather like a gigantic shell-hole blown in the middle of the river-bed. A little further down, not far from the next bridge (where Besson had concealed himself) a bulldozer went juddering along, pushing up walls of stones in front of it to stop the water overflowing its channel. A multiplicity of sounds spread clear through the frosty air, accompanied by a whiff of rotting sewerage and heaps of old leaves: the river’s muted roar, a gravel-screech of shifting stones, the tapping hammer, the high snarl of labouring engines, men’s voices shouting insults at one another.
On either side of the river-bed—now divided in two by its temporary dam—the black mass of the town was visible, all its roofs agleam. A few curious bystanders had gathered on the quais, and were leaning over the balustrade to watch the free circus below. Further downstream there was a third bridge, with five arches, that ran right under the town: the swift-flowing stream disappeared into the three central black holes, leaving the outer two empty.
There was a great variety of colour, too; but all so low—laid on at ground level, as it were—that it was really better not to try and look at it. Such dirty, depressing colours, too, spreading slowly over one another, like spilt paint, mingling with the sounds and smells, shifting across the silt, drifting slowly over the water, dispersed and suspended in air, the better to force themselves past your defences and bend you to their will. Hideous yellows, the yellow of urine or dead skin. Pinks, creams, indeterminate greens and greys, all tracing their own paths and channels. The pebbles were hard, occasionally broken in two or ground into a mess of half-buried rubble. The arches of the bridge overhead were covered with moss, and all around lay an anonymous litter of tin cans, slowly turning into rust. The rain had penetrated everywhere, permeating every object, making things porous, soft, friable. A light yet sluggish mist rose silently from the ground, and seemed to follow the downstream flow of the river, a few yards above its surface. From all sides there came the gurgle of falling water, and every crack in the walls dripped continually. It was like being in an underground lavatory, where the constant passage of dirty, disinfectant-laden water produces all those blue encrusted cracks in the enamel. Endlessly scoured and washed, this surface, worn by the passage of liquids, new by dint of being old, slippery with layers of grease and soap, a non-stop exhibition of superfoaming detergent.
This was where one lived now, in the long channel down which life’s waste products flowed. Whether as tears, or sweat, or urine, water ran continually from the earth’s body, and passed away in the direction of that vast septic tank the sea: an essential process, part of the cycle of truth, along with the boiling, writhing movement of organic matter reacting against salt, clouds surging up the sky and letting their delicate pink and grey veils be blown down the corridors of the wind, and then the fall of million upon million separate droplets, returning to the earth once more, filling as many tiny expectant mouths to overflowing, bringing them refreshment, satisfaction. Such a process had its own rhythm, allied with that of day and night, but longer and more terrible: less independent, too, since water never ceased to pass in and out of this porous globe that was the world. Mud breathed damply, sewers poured down to their outflow, streams joined up, mountain rills ran till exhausted; and here, down the middle of its great triangular crevasse, the river flowed on, without interruption or obstacle, muttering day in day out with the same unchanging nasal voice, like an aircraft in the sky, pouring into its own fountain-basin the water which could never run dry, water everlasting, water softly turning its colourless magic wheel, coiled feminine body that would never cease from parturition.
To attain freedom would have needed whole centuries of dryness. Little by little the desert ought to replace earth’s liquid element. Raped oases, forests suddenly burnt up under a rain of napalm, mountains hardened by savage frosts and standing alone in the night, gleaming sheer through the darkness like dagger blades.
Then one would have had this bright peace, solitude and calm outstretched like a petrified corpse in the hot-and-cold air. Fine-grained sand would have blown across the sharp upper edges of the rocks; nothing would remain, in the way of vegetation, except sharp-spiked cactus and aloes.
Besson smoked a cigarette he had picked up at the foot of the wall. Lurking behind the bushes (which were stuffed full of old bits of paper) he watched the group of workmen go about their task. They were all young, most of them raggedly dressed Arabs. They went to and fro across the shingle carrying spades and buckets, for all the world as though they were going to make sand-pies. Beneath their hats or caps their faces were grim, bearded, thick with dust, They all had strongly marked lines at each corner of the mouth, and their eyes were very-deep-set. A little apart from them stood a big red-faced man in a leather jerkin, barking out sharp orders.
Besson hesitated for a moment. Then he picked up his beach-bag and walked across to the site. When he reached the working area the labourers glanced at him quickly and turned away again. The big red-faced man called out to him: ‘What d’you want, then?’
‘Have you got a job I could do?’ Besson asked.
The foreman looked him up and down for a moment.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if you know how to handle a shovel.’
‘Could I start in right away?’
The big man came closer, tugging a notebook out of his pocket.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘You got a work permit?’
‘No.’ said Besson.
‘What are you? Yugoslav? German?’
‘No.’
‘Italian, then?’
‘No,’ said Besson, ‘I’m French.’
The man removed a cigarette-stub from his mouth and ground it out under one heel.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s all right, then. What’s your name?’
‘Besson,’ said Besson.
The man took a pencil
and wrote the name down in his notebook. Then he checked the time by his gold wristwatch and wrote that down too. Then he jerked his thumb at a great heap of mixed sand and pebbles.
‘Go and get yourself a shovel, over there by the diggers. You can help separate out the sand. You’ve clocked in at half past ten. O.K. then, get cracking.’
So there on the river-bed Besson began to dig up the sand, rhythmically driving his shovel into the resistent mass, then lifting it over a kind of mechanical sieve. Through one narrow orifice the machine disgorged the sand it had taken in, while the pebbles and heavy gravel were channelled into another, rather larger one. Without exchanging a word, or even looking at one another, backs slightly stooped, the workmen went about their various tasks—pushing wheelbarrows across to the caissons, crunching over the shingle, mixing concrete, burrowing into the sandhills with rasping shovels, swarming up scaffolding, screwing bolts through iron bars. The foreman kept up a ceaseless flow of orders in that powerful voice of his, with hoarse shouts such as ‘Come on now, move yourself!’ or ‘You over there—you asleep or something?’ or ‘Faster, you lot! Faster than that!’
The site was a minuscule centre of action in the midst of the river, rather like a cluster of ants on a scrap of meat: here hope, and despair, and the individual will were all annihilated. Everything was clear-cut, translucent; everything had its measure and its appointed end. Time was the face of a chronometer, space a surveyor’s instrument.
Here in the centre of the town, surrounded by fluctuating noises and vague movements, here in this deserted ragion life was a tough business. All elements were hostile. The surface of the sandhills rasped and tore at your hands, gave you twisted ankles, made the back of your head ring with the noise of a hammer driving nails home one after another. This was the way you had to set about digging, with fury and hatred. Make sparks fly from pickaxe or shovel as you banged them against some buried rock. Trample down rotten branches, dead weeds, a tangled mess of detritus. Keep your eyes fixed on the stubbon soil, and conquer the sheer weight of inertia by one quick upwards jerk of your loins. Make the dust fly far and wide, fling it high int he air, scatter it on the wind, while the machine’s chattering mouth gobbles up gravel by the hundredweight, chews and disposes of it between those iron jaws. Earth and men merged indistinguishably, became the same substance, mere mud, a dead weight of mud dragging at your arms and peeling off shovel or mattock with a heavy squelching sound. It was the mud, now, which nursed ignoble schemes, planned acts of degradation, wet spreading mud, a lake of grey and malevolent shingle, sneering, provocative—or, sometimes weeping damply in the folds of its old and whorish skin. It had ideas, it was covered with words or symbols, penetrated by feelings. Men, women, children, animals too—dogs and their fleas, cats, birds, horses led to the slaughterhouse, lions imprisoned in their cages, mice with their necks broken by snap-back traps, flies caught on fly-papers, swatted mosquitoes, spiders and cockchafers, boiling lobsters, dumb fish dying with mouths agape and bolting eyes, red ants drowned in latrines, slaughtered eland and bison, tortoises, dodos, kiwis—all of them were there, now, in the sands and gravels, they had been resuscitated on the face of the earth. There was no end to the killing and maiming of them, pale insubstantial ghosts though they were: one cut them off from the world just like that, with shovel or mattock, a single thrust of arms and loins sent them into the steel maw which ground them to powder.
What had to be defeated, then, was the cruelty of horizontal surfaces. Shoulders hunched, Besson dug away at the sandhill as though bent on creating a new mountain. He would have liked to tilt up the earth’s surface and turn it into a towering, insurmountable rampart. The shovel moved to and fro almost of its own volition, and under his clothes sweat and dust mingled. The noise of the hole being dug sang in his ears, and suddenly he felt as though he was going to reach the centre of the world. Through this cavern, created by frenzy, look, the lava comes surging up, swells, blasts out into the air like some gigantic scarlet mushroom. Over the town and the nearby hills there falls a soft, unending rain of fire, soothing as glass, and with it returns that great silence which should never have left the world; life, thus abruptly cut short, has at last ceased to disfigure the high beauty of matter. All it needed was one workman on a river spit, armed with an old battered shovel, to release the soaring pyrotechnical splendours of truth.
François Besson worked all day. The gang was made up as follows:
Foreman: Candéla.
Mechanics: Miraulac, Zediaf, Douski.
Air-hammer operators: Panelli, Andréa, Wurth, Van Woow.
Welder: Karl Schultz.
Labourers: Abdul Karim, Mamadou Badia, Cimpeanu, Siljelcoviva, Ocijek, Sedov, Miroslav Kocejve, Oberti, Machan, Haddar, Guenès, Besson, Mohamed Amar, Omar Khelifa, Said Labri.
Bulldozer operators: Dietrich (absent), Lanfranchi.
Exhaustion came slowly: it seemed to rise from the ground and pass into one’s arms. Hour by hour the weight of dust accumulated on the toiling gang seemed heavier, and the men hacking away at their stony sandhills could no longer doubt that this time, at least, they would have to admit defeat. At half past twelve, without saying a word, they downed tools and gathered in the lee of the caissons to eat. Besson shared their meal: he got a hunk of bread and a slice of garlicky sausage, and drank two or three mouthfuls of red wine from the bottle they passed round. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his filthy hand and smoked a cigarette given him by Siljelcoviva, the Yugoslav. He cracked a few jokes, and joined with the others in making rude remarks about the foreman, who had gone off to have his lunch in a bar on the quai. The wind began to rise and one of the men got up and lit the brazier. He poured a little petrol on the charcoal, and put a match to it. The others gathered in a circle around the fire, and sat there smoking and rubbing their hands.
A black dog that looked as though it had the mange began to prowl round the group in quest of food. Sedov, Machan, and Schultz, the German, shied stones at it. The dog jumped out of the way, but refused to move on: it stood there, not budging an inch, just out of range of the stones, yellow eyes fixed on the men and their brazier.
Siljelcoviva, who was sitting beside Besson, began to tell Oberti the story of his life. He had decided to leave Yugoslavia when he was eighteen, and had crossed the Adriatic in a row-boat, together with a friend of his. They had set out from Korcula, and spent three days and nights at sea before reaching the coast of Italy. After that they had spent five years wandering around picking up work where they could. But money was hard to earn, so they had started stealing from cars. Then one evening when they were breaking into a villa near Rome the police arrived. Siljelcoviva had been keeping a look-out in the garden, and he managed to get away. But his friend had been caught. Siljelcoviva was forced to make tracks back up north, and succeeded in crossing the frontier over the mountains. He had no idea what had become of his friend. The friend’s name was Michael, and he was a bit older than Siljelcoviva. It stood to reason they were after him too, though. If he could find a way to do it, he’d get on a boat for America, and—
At this point the foreman came back, and work was resumed. The afternoon passed like the morning, so slowly that Besson felt he had been there for years. The day wore on little by little; the river continued to flow.
About six o’clock work stopped. The men stacked tools and went off to wash their hands in the river. Some of them combed their hair in little pocket mirrors, smoked a cigarette, chatted a bit. Then they filed past the foreman, each collecting some notes and two or three coins. The sky was overcast, and beyond the quais the lights of the town glittered through a fine mist. Soon the workmen trooped off, in groups of two or three, up the steps that led into town.
Now the old lifeless atmosphere settled back amid the debris of the construction site, and other sounds became aubidle once more: the peaceful gurgle of moving water, the distant roar of breakers on the ebbing tide. The air got chillier, shadows spread and thickened in every hollow.
Night odours began to stir abroad, the lingering smell of dead vegetation and humus.
Some while later, when night lay black on the river-bed, Besson went over and sat himself down by the half-finished bridge. He had a pile of shingle under him, and his back was propped against the cold stonework of the caisson. Then he stared straight ahead of him, trying to make out what was happening in the darkness. Humidity was coming down from the valley in waves, but it had no shape, and made no sound. The town floated, as though in air, like an illuminated Zeppelin, with vast and inky abysses taking shape everywhere below it. The river’s flow, too, was audible but invisible. Its moving mass advanced in poised and solitary power, at the heart of darkness, like an escalator held between the twin ramps of the quais. Pebble-ridges, bushes, bulldozers, old planking, sand-bars—all had vanished. Objects were successively captured by blackness, kept fading away. Besson tried to make them reappear by dint of imagination, but they never remained the same. Their ghost-shapes became subtly inflated and distorted, wavered as though through several layers of murky water. Pale handkerchiefs fluttered in the wind, then disappeared—where, no one could tell. Contorted silhouettes rose up, so near that it seemed possible to put out one’s hand and touch them, yet at the same time so distant that the mere sight of them turned one dizzy.
Besson’s arms and legs were trembling with fatigue. He leaned back against the stone bastion and closed his eyes. For a while he remained thus, quite motionless, breathing regularly. He may have fallen asleep. Then, abruptly, he was roused from his torpid state by the sound of footsteps. There came a heavy crackling noise from the bushes: he could hear it quite distinctly. The footsteps advanced slowly, dislodging small pebbles, breaking dry twigs, bending damp ones, squelching over the sand. They stopped for a few seconds, so that the muted rumble of falling water could be heard once more; then, with some hesitation, they began again, on tip-toe, shoes squeaking, the ground beneath them crackling like so much straw.
The Flood Page 25
