Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

The houses now stand packed close against one another. Their roofs form a continuous, compact surface of red and brown, open to dust and rain: a new sort of regular-patterned floor that calls for a certain crazy extravagance in the user.

Trucks pass down the streets, wheels close to the sidewalk; the sky, heavy with clouds, tilts square to the vertical. The horizon is hemmed in by those volcano-like mountains, with vapour rising on their flanks. In some secret den or underground cave there must be men held prisoner, stifling from confinement. The sidewalk throws up people who have been buried alive, bodies steeped in bituminous deposits, which the worms refuse to eat. Everything has a suffocating air of impenetrability. Down there a hundred children are jostling each other in the dust of a gymnasium.

These were the things one could see, at that moment in time, if one climbed the hill where the cemetery stood. At the top of the gardens there was a landmark-indicator, together with a marble slab on which were inscribed the main references to the area, such as couplets by Byron or Lamartine. This, then, was the moment to lean over the balustrade, and listen to the sound of the artificial waterfall, and look at everything with an avid intensity, as though one were condemned to die immediately afterwards, or at the very least to go blind.

When you got down to it, there could have been no worse setting for love than this town; yet before love could be achieved, there had to be knowledge and understanding, one had to acclimatize oneself to this empty void, this sad mockery of freedom.

If only it were possible, one ought to be left to oneself again, among the stones and trees, the names, the shop-windows, the traffic; among the great close-packed crowd of men and women, among the shouts and smells and passionate emotions. Prepared long since, matured in antechambers charged with thunder and lightning, where the tension had swiftly become more shattering than the face of a god revealed, the atmospheric drama was now gathering to its climax. Now clouds were bursting in their dozens, the sky streamed with water like a plate-glass window. Burning perfumes gathered in clusters, began to revolve about each other like constellations; people caught at the storm’s centre hurriedly took shelter in doorways, anxious to avoid being left out in the open. Earth and buildings alike took on a bluish tinge, perilously liable to attract lightning and the plastic elements of water. And the same storm, dry, intangible, began to gather in men’s hearts; buildings, to all appearances intact, were collapsing internally of their own accord; every drop that fell from the sky took a small fragment of reality with it briefly tapping out a rhythmic pattern, a vague suggestion of something — conscious awareness, perhaps — before dissolving into nothingness. Very soon these palatial buildings and columns would vanish, leaving nothing but white ruined shells. But what was appalling, unbearable even, was that this process of destruction never reached completion: it went on continually, in every direction, over and over again, but never succeeded in exhausting the resistance of matter. The houses were nothing any longer, yet they still existed; movements, colours, desires — none of them had any further meaning, yet movements, colours and desires continued as before. Men were brute beasts of the void, mindless and bloodless, set in their ways — yet they still existed . You could walk down every street, even out into the stony, rain-rich countryside beyond, and nowhere would you discover true solitude, the fulfilment of that haunting passion for the absolute. Nowhere would you find complete silence.

Everywhere you went, you were bound to come up against existence, walls of solidity and life that drove you back like some echo of the birth-agony. It was all a trick with mirrors, reflection upon reflection, as intense as they were pointless. There was nothing in the world that could absorb and destroy you, return you to the indifferent blank expanse of the void; nothing that could be penetrated by the rapier of your frenzy. Wherever your footsteps carried you, the world was a kind of travelling circus, presenting you with a special vision: each object was self-contained, adaptable, and meticulously ringed round with a thin black wiry line. Reality, truth, the power of nature: vast-stretching deathless concepts against which the keen light of understanding and communication bruise themselves for ever. In this organized chaos there was no chance of escape. Four streets converging on a square where the clock in the clock-tower said six o’clock now held this inner reality for ever, stamped with its seal: hundreds of square yards of asphalt and concrete and plaster, rain beading its surface like sweat, right-angled corners on the pavement, gleaming rivulets down the gutters, scars left by winter frost and summer heat, cracks, the chalk marks of old hopscotch games, names, names, names: Salvetti, Geoffret, Milani, Apostello, Caterer, Chez Georges, Chinaware, Port Pharmaceutical Store, Astoria, Dental Surgeon, S.E.V.E., La Trappe de Staouëli, Lanfranchi, Caltex Tyres; Chevrolet 418 DU 02, winter banana, Motta ice-cream, Simon, 84.06.06. Empty spaces that darkness absorbs without effort, long streets lined with plane-trees at regular intervals, their branches bare and leafless, each planted in the pavement and growing up through a sunshaped iron grating. Fountains, concrete and stucco buildings, balconies overgrown with creepers; roofs bristling with aerials, or tilted over as though the sky leaned down more heavily on one side of them, barred windows, shutters open or closed, plywood doors, spy-holes, culverts and gutters. At one point in this rectangular pattern, a little way up on the left, stand two parallelopipeds, an exception to the general rule: it is just a trick of perspective, or are they really like that, two bluish blocks apparently joined at the top and forming a sort of triumphal arch? In fact they are the walls of the XVth Army Corps Barracks, St. Anne’s Hospital, and Police Headquarters. These walls are pierced with heavily-barred windows, which look out over the sidewalks, respectively, of the Rue Durante, the Rue Gilli, and the Rue Carnot.

At midday, during the rain, there is a man standing behind each of these windows, hands clutching the bars, staring out into space. You can see about a dozen of them in all, half-hidden by the shadowy background of their cells, tirelessly scrutinizing the bright and grimy world which they cannot reach. At first they are possessed by a violent desire to break through the metal barricade, free themselves in a flash — this, surely, is what freedom means—, embrace this patch of road in all its stunning brightness, so light in comparison with the gloom of their cells it seems the sun must be shining on it. Then the urge fritters away; they seem to retreat before a still stronger barrier, something like a thick sheet of glass, unseen and unexpected, doubtless the phenomenon they call ‘reason’; and their eyes relax into stillness again, gaze for days on end at the vision of freshness and brightness outside, never moving, so that in the end their overflowing love makes them cleave to it till they reach the point of oblivion.

In this state of counterfeit reality, this amalgam of atmospheres, equipped with this precise and clearly-outlined relief-map, one still would be hard put to it, at this moment, to tell whether it was raining still or a blazingly sunny day. The moment has been reached when the rectangle becomes progressively more blurred and undulating: other smaller rectangles exist within it, each enfolding its own adventure, human or vegetable. All that remain now are the edges, as though neatly cut out from the soft velvet shadows. At last, with the neat finality of a tunnel unfolding around a car in motion, the patch of white light opens its window on the infinite.