The Flood

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Besson lay stretched out on the pebbles—they had begun to hurt him—and watched the stormy future approach him. Here, too, it was possible to forget what was going to happen in a few mintues. In a few hours, days, years. Old age would descend, one of these days, bringing its shameful peace. Features would wither, muscles lose their strength. Yet none of this mattered. Death would come like any other visitant, falling from roof or sky without warning. In the street, in a group of loafers. In some stinking bed, against a beslobbered pillow. In a wrecked car. Half way up a staircase, so that the silly lifeless body rolled down to the bottom again, bumping from tread to tread, skull knocking like a hollow calabash. Forty years old. Fifty-five. Sixty-eight. Seventy-seven, seventy-nine, eighty-one, eighty-four, ninety-two, a hundred and four, a hundred and five, a hundred and six. Which of these figures would turn out to be the right one? Which would be the fatal day? 22nd August 1999, or 4th May 1983? Or 13th December 2002? Or perhaps 1st April 2014? Which day would it be? And what time of day? Noon? Two in the afternoon? Nine-thirty p.m.? Or in the small hours of the morning, after an exhausting and nightmare-ridden sleep? What would give out first? Heart? Kidneys? Liver? Lungs? Spine? But none of this had very much importance. For the years, the years would continue to unfold in their serried ranks, no more distinguishable from one another than buffaloes at a watering-hole, and the years would become centuries, and the centuries would follow one another in turn, like great striations of marble. In the remote future, far beyond this place, this moment, time would still be thrusting out its branches, a growing tree. Languages would decline, arts gutter into oblivion. Ideas would glide smoothly on, small boats borne by the stream, never reaching any destination. There would be no end, just as there had been no beginning: simply night falling over the world’s achievements, veiling them in light shadow. The invisible record would turn on its own axis, swiftly at the periphery, almost stationary towards the centre. And eternity would be there, not hidden but omnipresent; not an external pall, but permeating the inner heart of things, at the centre of time’s central point.

  Then, when Besson recognized this great beauty; when he understood that all had been in vain, and that the moment could not be sustained; when he acknowledged his defeat, and saw the proclamation of his destiny; when, at last, he turned his violence against himself: then he opened his eyes wide and stared at the sun. The blinding brightness entered his eyeballs and exploded there; the sudden pain was almost unbearable, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Besson turned his head away for a moment, trying to find some object that could stop him slipping away from the world: his eyes scanned the beach avidly, trying to find something, anything, that instant—a wasp, a wandering ant, a gnat. But there was nothing, nothing but shingle and pebbles with a vast bluish hole in the middle that shifted as he looked at it. Then his hand closed on a small pebble shaped like a snail, and picked it up. Besson lay back on the beach, and still clutching the little pebble, opened his eyes and looked into the sun again. This time he did not shut them.

  Light pierced his skull as though he had never seen light before, a burning and lava-like flood, a cleansing influx that permeated the furthest recesses of his skull. A blank, white, monotonous sound invaded his body little by little and floated it off the ground. The ground receded, opened to form his unfathomable tomb, and the air parted asunder. This was the moment, now. Stiffening his will to the uttermost, Besson pitted his staring eyes against the sun, against fire and earth and water, never flinching, against men and beasts, against stones, against the air, against the vast and planet-swarming emptiness of outer space. He stood there in defiance of them all, racked by pain and loathing, and offered them the delicate shield of his twin eyes, from which the tears now flowed ceaselessly. These two globes, with their delicate irises and dark translucent pupils, he now surrendered to the world. To the sun’s savage brightness he exposed the dark and secret surface of his retinas, so that by burning the memory of vengeance might be preserved, and never perish. Then, at last, he began a soft and agonized whimpering, the hoarse unhappy cry of a gibbon, screaming without rhyme or reason at the onset of darkness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Society at large—In a train—A little boy smokes his first cigarette—The tourist bus—Mothers—The end of Anna’s story—Echo of a suicide

  ON the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth days, and all the days that followed, there was no more day: only one black unbroken night, that went on for ever. The town was rid of its incubus now, and inside the houses, with their warm electric radiators, people went on living just as they had always done. Angèle Basman, for instance, a woman of forty-two, was busy deep-frying potatoes in boiling oil, a red-flowered apron round her waist, tiny drops of hot fat spitting out of the pan on to her bare arms as she stood over the gas-stove. Or Michou, a tabby cat, who was fast asleep in the sunny part of some suburban back garden, while the fleas tracked through his thick fur, looking for the best place to bite him. Or the thin young girl with washed-out complexion and cropped black hair, who was wrapping a handful of bleeding lights up in newspaper—having previously smeared her sheets with it to stop her mother realizing she was pregnant.

  On one clear pane of glass a tiny gnat was visible: it might have been walking across the blue-grey sky. It advanced very slowly, millimetre by millimetre, on several gossamer-fine pairs of legs. Its body had a greenish tinge about it.

  The newspapers carried their usual news items, with banner headlines for earthquakes and revolutions, somewhat smaller cross-heads for crimes passionnels, and so on down to ordinary close-set type for such things as car accidents, thefts from parked vehicles, or the exploits of bums and down-and-outs.

  In various discreet corners the beggars were plying their trade. Old women were scattering crumbs for the pigeons on their window-sills, and in the restaurants couples were eating sauerkraut. Wherever you went there was the same faint odour of garlic and grease and rusty metal, the gurgle of stopped-up sinks. A man was sitting in his car at an intersection, waiting for the red light to turn green, and picking his nose. Drunks were taking nips from their bottles of wine, and fat women were licking at chocolate ices.

  Some people were reading novels in the dim light of their shuttered rooms, stories all more or less written according to the same formula as this sample: ‘Once more my mouth tasted the joys of her soft, burning skin, and we rolled over on the quiet sand, muscles rigid with desire. When my hand, in the course of a wandering caress, found the zip of her swimsuit, down her back, she tried to struggle for a moment. But the satiny material parted, like a flower tremulously opening in the warm sunlight, to reveal the agonizing delights of her nakedness. But only for a brief instant did I feel her bare breasts soft and caressing against my chest, explore the roundness of her buttocks, feel her still childish stomach and long slender legs melting into mine; only for a brief instant did I savour that rare sensation of a body still freshly damp in patches from the sea, and tanned for long hours by the sun. For suddenly, supple and elusive, she slipped from my grasp and ran with a defiant air, still half-naked to the sun and wind. From a long way off came the faint hoot of the ferry-boat. With an enchanting lack of modesty she ran on, paying no attention to her unzipped swimsuit. The sun suddenly touched the horizon, turned blood-red, and flooded sea and beach with the glow of its magnificent demise … She came back towards me, hair flying, a grenadine tinge colouring her pointed breasts and the curve of her belly. “Half past five!” she called out furiously….’

  Others were painting gaudy pictures, in which the dominant colours were shocking pink and madder. Others again spent all afternoon playing the flute, or listening to jazz records. Any insect society has its organization. Throughout the town at this moment everything was perfectly flat, or perfectly square, or, at a pinch, perfectly round. On the doors of public toilets and bar-room W.C.’s penknives had carved obscene words and incised pornographic figures; but these words and figures possessed a dignity almost amounting to vi
rtuousness. On two identical notices, printed in red letters, appeared the words GENTLEMEN and LADIES. A train moved slowly along the coast from one stop to the next, twenty black carriages drawn by a steam locomotive belching smoke downwind. As it rattled along the track it emitted, with monotonous regularity, a deep wooooooooooooo! which shook the ground underfoot. It would plunge into tunnels, emerge again, steam round long curves, brake, whistle, labour up gradients and rattle down them the other side, trigger off signals and level-crossing alarm-bells. It wheels drummed along regularly over the rail-junctures, producing a cadenced clack-clack, clack-clack which formed its basic rhythm. Valves opened and shut, steam blew off. Occasionally the train passed over a set of points, and the rhythm of the wheels became confused, made noises like coughing and sneezing and spitting. In each compartment, with its worn felt seats, people sat smoking, chatting, eating, drinking, or just staring at one another, while the ground fled back beneath them. Their conversations were always the same:

  ‘What time do we get there?’

  ‘I’m not sure—if we’re not running late, we ought to be in about eight o’clock.’

  ‘They always run late.’

  ‘Did you see how long we were held up last time?’

  ‘Well, a train had been derailed further down the line.’

  ‘That’s no excuse.’

  ‘After all, we’ve paid for our tickets …’

  ‘Let me tell you, madam, when my son came out of the army, do you know what time he got home? At midnight, madam—midnight!’

  ‘Just like my sister-in-law—she was on her way home from Italy—’

  ‘And the time when our kid had the mumps—’

  ‘What can you expect, eh? What can you expect….’

  A little boy stood leaning against the wall in a quiet back street, smoking his first cigarette. He had taken it from a brand-new packet with red and white stripes, labelled WINSTON. Then he put it in his mouth. He struck a match and lit it. Now he was inhaling the acrid, sweetish aroma of the smoke, and salivating.

  Two young women in bikinis were strolling round the edge of a swimming-pool that smelt of disinfectant. The one on the right was a tall brunette; her costume had a pattern of small green and white squares. The one on the left was thinner, and wore a white bikini, all covered with little pearl shells. Both had on sunglasses with large circular lenses, and the white radiance blazed down on them like a searchlight’s beam.

  Everywhere civilization was established, and had set up its notices: no parking, no entry, no billsticking, private property.

  In the middle of the countryside lay a large ham-shaped rock, quite motionless. The plane-trees grew imperceptibly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, simply thrusting back clods and granules of earth, stretching up their branchy fingers to the bright sky above them. This was the way it was.

  A coachful of tourists spent some time threading its way through the streets of the town. Then it set off across the hills, and each time it stopped all the passengers turned their heads as one man to left, or right, in obedience to a voice which announced, in several languages:

  ‘You can see on your right the ruins of an aqueduct built by the Romans. Lens aperture, f.1.5.’

  ‘Vous apercevez sur votre droite les ruines de l’aqueduc construit par les Romains. Ouverture de l’objectif: 1.5.’

  ‘Rechts können Sie die Ruinen der von den Römern gebauten Wasserleitung sehen. Offnung des Objektifs: 1.5’.

  ‘U ziet nu op uw recht de ruinen van de romeinse waterleiding. Opening van de lens: 1.5.’

  ‘U kan regts die ruiëne van die Waterleiding sien, wat deur die Romeins gebou was. Opening van die lens: 1.5.’

  The construction team was still busily at work on their site in the middle of the river bed. Another month or two, and the bridge would be finished. The blind man sat on the beat he had bought and sold newspapers, listening to music from his transistor radio. Every night the voyeur prowled through the thickets up on the hill and every evening, at the same time, the woman whose face was so white that it might have been made of plaster would enter the church and sit staring straight in front of her, at a point just above the closed tabernacle.

  Josette was driving through the streets in her new car, looking for somewhere to park. A young red-headed girl, accompanied by a small red-headed boy, could often be seen walking along the pavement. But these were not the only solitary women in town: there were many others, blonde, brunette, light brown, dyed or rinsed, grey and black. Each went her own separate way to her private domain, in a green or a blue dress, or sometimes in check pants, equipped with stockings and bra and briefs, or nylon tights; suffering from toothache, or migraine, or diarrhoea, constipation or a cold in the head; depressed or cheerful, jealous, in love; real people. Real people.

  In the dining-room of a flat half-way up the dilapidated apartment block, a man sat smoking and reading the paper. A women was there too, darning socks. Her heavy face was weighed down by fatigue. Light and shadow flitted across it like puffs of air. She was there, a massive maternal presence, whose belly had opened and closed again, queening it all unawares over the world, at once triumphant and humble. There was nothing in her; yet she was immovable, solid as a marble statue, a weathered, polished block of quarried stone, and in her water and fire came together, in her, there in the folds of her inmost parts, the hollow seeds of past and future were already concealed. The tree, the green tree with its upthrusting, bursting shoots grew perennially from her belly. But of this she remained unaware.

  It was for her, or against her, that everything had been created. Blood, bone, nails and hair, all belonged to her. Outrage her, fling her down and kill her, she would still emerge victorious. She would look up at you with those heavy, liquid eyes, and go on giving birth to you, without hate, without respite. Even in defeat her face would still wear an expression of victory, and her body would contain all the strength of a conqueror.

  When those three drunks fought at night outside a bar, it was for her. They threw clumsy punches at each other, and rolled on the ground, and one of them lost his shoe. The other two stopped fighting, went down on hands and knees, recovered the shoe, and carefully put it back on its owner’s bare foot. It was for her, too, that the sadist of Fontainebleau attacked his victims; for her that cars skidded off the highway and piled up in fields.

  Century after century, women had given birth in joy and travail. Céline had borne Marguerite, Marguerite had borne Jeanne, Jeanne had borne Eléonore, Eléonore had borne Thérèse, Thérèse had borne Eugénie, Eugénie had borne Cécile, Cécile had borne Alice, Alice had borne Catherine, Catherine had borne Laura, Laura had borne Simone, Simone had borne Pauline, Pauline had borne Julie, Julie had borne Yvette, Yvette had borne Monique, Monique had borne Gabrielle, Gabrielle had borne Claudia, Claudia had borne Gioia.

  In the deserted room the voice rose from the tape-recorder through the darkness. It spoke for the yellow walls with flashes of light playing over them, for the bed with red blankets, for the curtainless windows, for the empty ash-trays, for the moths asleep under the coverlets, for each thing in its place, including the creature like a bundle of old rags feeling its way blindly round the room. It said:

  I’m going to record on the other side of the spool. I want you to know—Well, perhaps it’s not all that important, after all. But I did want to tell you everything that I said that first time, ten days ago, was untrue. Honestly. I was lying the whole time. But I didn’t know I was lying, and that’s the reason—that’s the reason I spoke to you the way I did. Afterwards I realized the truth. Oh, I didn’t play the tape back—I hadn’t the courage to listen to my own words, all I’d said about me and Paul and the rest of it, because if I had I’d never have summoned up enough courage to send it to you afterwards. It was just remembering what I’d said. I mean, when I told you all that stuff, it was all fairy stories, just plain lies. Well, obviously, everything I said to you, the facts I mean, was true enough—but it was al
l wrong to tell you. It was stupid, I—I thought one could talk to people in a straightforward way, tell them what one thought, or believed one thought. That’s why I lied to you. I talked on and on, holding the microphone and watching the spools of tape unwind, and it was all pure drivel. An alibi, that’s what it was, a way of hiding the truth from myself no less than from others. Just the same as when I was typing a story, just like it was when I did that thing on Albert the snail or the old woman with an obsession about her trolleybus. Now I know—I know what it was fundamentally in aid of: lying, concealing the truth, oh, everything—You know, it’s an awful thing, not talking. It’s an awful thing never lying, too. That’s what I’d have liked to learn how to do. I don’t know if I’ll manage it. I’m going to try and carry it right through to the end, but it won’t be easy. In any case, when you’ve heard the spool through, please do one thing for me: wipe off what I’ve recorded. Don’t preserve any of it, not one word. Leave nothing but silence in its place. Do you understand? The thing is, I’m always being tempted to wander off from the point—anecdotes. Really, you know, there’s only one thing I have to tell you. I—I don’t know how to begin, though, because it’s really very simple, and it’s not easy to explain something simple without—well, without talking a lot of rubbish, and dressing it up and putting frills on it.

  One thing that will make it easier for me is that I’m going to die. It’s true. It’s only a question of moments now. I’ve got very little time left. That tube of pink sleeping-pills belonging to my mother—well, I’ve taken the lot. I’ve still got the glass in my hand, I had to drink nearly a quart of water to get them all down. I’m beginning to have feelings of nausea already, and my head’s spinning. I must act quickly now. I want to tell you everything I left out last time. I don’t know where to begin, though. In a few moments everything will be over. I shall be dead. I hope it won’t hurt. Anyway I know now this isn’t just make-believe. What I’m experiencing is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I don’t run any risk of, well, of making a fuss about nothing. Not this time. I know what I’m doing is cowardly, but the thing is I couldn’t stand being alone any longer. Loneliness is a horrible thing, you know—that, and knowing you’re past all self-deception. Oh, words used to deceive me all right, well and truly, but that’s finished now. Or will be in a moment or two. Words, words, an endless unnecessary stream of them, all the stuff they teach you and you dish up again thinking it’s your own. And knowing you’re not alone, too. That’s the trouble. No longer being sure what’s part of you and what isn’t, can you understand that? Do what you like, play it flippant, try the couldn’t-care-less line, it’s no good, you’re always screwed in the end. There’s always someone who fixes you—so many people around, everywhere, nothing but people the world over, and things that hurt you, words that raise your hopes only to dash them down more abjectly, and all those emotions—it makes you dizzy thinking how many emotions there are around; love, the sort of love you get in picture magazines, and friendship, hatred, jealousy, rancour, pity, compassion, faith, pride, all that jazz, on and on, never any end to it. And each individual has his own special emotion, and my the trouble he takes over it, waters it like a tender seedling, listens to its complaints, nurses its crises, makes a full-time job of it. I mean, you’ve got to, after all, we’re not animals, are we? Oh, it’s too ridiculous for words. You know, when it comes to the crunch I’m sorry to be shot of all this nonsense. Oh, there were some things I really liked, that’s true. Pity. But as for the rest—! Surely it wasn’t worth all the effort of being born and growing up and struggling through illnesses and going to school—all that just to enjoy a succession of fine delicate emotions? When you’re young, you fall in love. That lands you with problems, right? You fight to make someone else love you. You want to get married, but your parents are against it. You have crises. Crises. Jealousy, too. It’s all so complicated, such a tangle—I mean, civilization’s brought problems to a fine art too, hasn’t it? Well, in the end everything sorts itself out and you get married. Fine. Then there are children, and the problems of education. My son wets his bed at night, doctor, what should I do about it? Or my daughter now, she’s three and a half, she’s a little madam, won’t let anyone order her around. I don’t want to damage her psyche or give her a trauma. What’s the answer? Oh yes, every age-group has its own problems. There’s the midday demon, the menopause, the stepmother’s role. And then old age. Old people are wise, that’s well known. They’ve got their heads screwed on all right, they have their memories, they can’t be really vicious. It’s funny, just so funny …