Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

What I want to say is, I get these weird ideas going through my head the whole time, about me, and Paul, or my father and mother. I can’t shake off the feeling that somehow I don’t exist in the way other people do. Or else I find myself wondering why I’m not Paul, why Paul is the one who’s stretching out his arm towards the ashtray. It’s just the same with my mother and father. I know it’s silly of me, but I can never isolate them as individuals, define them in relationship to myself. What I’m trying to say is, all I manage is the act, the external act, do you see what I mean? And that doesn’t, can’t, isolate anything, it just reflects back at me like a mirror. Paul was — Look, François, please, I’m not telling you all this just for the fun of it. I want you to understand why — why Paul going made such a difference to me. I think one of these days I really will take that overdose of Gardenal. And I wouldn’t want you to think I’d just done it for nothing but messy sentimental reasons. I — look, I think I must be having a kind of nervous breakdown. But there are always thousands of things like that, little hints and details that go over my head. It’s true, though, I’d hate you to think it was just maudlin self-pity. It’s a matter of general understanding, awareness, do you see? Well, anyway, I’d better finish my story. Paul stood over me like that for a moment, and then he began to leaf through my typescript. I can’t stand people going over my stuff when I’m there — I mean, reading a word or two at random on each page. Oh, now , obviously, I couldn’t care less, people can do what they like with my manuscripts, it’s all the same to me. They don’t mean anything to me any longer, they might as well be today’s newspaper. But at that particular moment it still really drove me crazy. I just sat there waiting till he was through. After a bit he must have got bored with turning pages over, because do you know what he did, he picked one out of all the pile at random, and began to read it aloud. When he did that —oh, you won’t understand, but it was at that moment I really saw what a bastard he was. I mean, he — it wasn’t just that he read it as though he didn’t give a damn about it, but on top of that, and this is what I found really awful, he read it so well , as though he understood every word, in a fine, serious voice, the works. Paul’s always had a beautiful speaking voice. He used to talk very loud, to make sure people noticed what a beautiful voice he had. The nerve of it, playing a dirty little trick like that on me —and with one of my own manuscripts! You know, he read so wonderfully, that was what got me. He didn’t give tuppence for the words, and still it was superb. It was, oh I can’t explain, like an apple with maggots inside it, do you see what I mean?

So there was Paul reading, and I wanted — oh, I don’t know what I wanted, not to cry, but to go really cold, suddenly, as though someone had removed an important, an essential part of my body. I watched his big heavy hands gripping the paper, heard that serious voice as it intoned my words, very relaxed, but with great power and life and individuality, while I — Oh hell, what does it matter, when he’d finished reading he walked out of the door and I haven’t seen him since. That isn’t quite the whole story, though. You remember he was alone in my room for a moment while I went out to get a glass of milk? Well, in the time it took me to open the fridge, get out a bottle, and have my drink, he managed to search the room and pocket the money I’d hidden in the wardrobe, under a pile of pullovers. There must have been about sixty notes there, and he took the lot. That’s why he put on such a performance when I came back — to distract my attention. That was really pretty steep, I thought. I suppose it’s how he paid his fare to England or wherever he went.

Afterwards I felt pretty mad because I had no idea what to do. I tried writing to him, sent him a letter for Christmas. He’d written me once, a postcard from Coventry, without his name on it or anything. He’d even disguised his handwriting. That was silly of him, he knew very well it couldn’t be from anyone else. Even supposing, even supposing he didn’t think of that on the spur of the moment, when he printed the letters in capitals and the rest of it, all the same he can’t have helped realizing the truth when it came to signing the thing. It was a view of Coventry Cathedral, you know, something like that anyhow, and he’d sketched in a cowboy on top of the photograph, taking pot-shots at the passers-by with a revolver, and on the other side of the card he’d written, in English, Wish you were here . And he’d signed it with an imaginary name — scratched it out afterwards, but you could still read it, he couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper job of an erasure, and anyway he did it on purpose so that I’d try to decipher it. I looked through a magnifying-glass, and there under the ink-scratches was written John Wallon, or John Warren, something like that. It was so silly . If I could ever — But it’s too late now.

There. I’ve told you. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. When I’m gone, try not to condemn me. I suppose everything I’ve said still comes under the heading of literature, really: a monologue doesn’t qualify as non-fiction, does it? But I’d like you, at least, to believe me, because of the rest of them, my father and mother, my friends, even Paul if somebody tells him about it one day, believe that I didn’t do it out of despair, or just for sloppy sentimental reasons, you know what I mean, but simply because there was nothing much else left for me to do. Tomorrow, if I have the courage, I shall take a glass and a carafe of water, and swallow all my mother’s little pink tablets. I’m stopping now because the tape’s just about finished. Au revoir , Anna Mathilde Passeron.

Besson got up and stopped the tape-recorder. Silence suddenly descended on the room again, mingling with the chiaroscuro, so palpable now that it was no longer distinguishable from the areas of shadow. Then it slipped and shifted, moving sideways with an indescribable pendulum-like motion. It penetrated even to Besson’s inner self, filling the secret recesses of his mind, stifling thought. Silence began to reverberate through his head and chest, with a sound not unlike the roar of a large cataract. He could feel its breathing, too, a gentle up and down motion. There was no room for anything else, neither sound nor colour: nothing but illimitable silence, here, in the night, amid this surrounding darkness: a silence that clung to every object, a horrible vast chill calm, clammy, tangible, that left you lying flat and helpless on the floor of an empty room, all alone, moving towards death.

For a long time Besson continued to stare at the motionless objects in front of him. He stood and scrutinized them with a gaze of fixed and burning intensity, which neither saw nor made any attempt to comprehend them. The words just spoken had entered his skull, and it was they that now swarmed in the silence. Like so much furniture, like a row of heavy, useless, ornamental vases, they had dragged on, vacant, floating, unattached; and now they were back in their own proper domain, that mute kingdom from which they would never re-emerge. From nothing they came, to nothing they returned. The world of insanity, the filthy sewer-flow of battering words, syllables chopped from distorted human lips, pointless and interminable chatter. And what, truly, was the object of it all, what was it after? To try and hook on somewhere, put out tentacles, infiltrate other people’s minds, though with all this they still never achieve personality. Accursed, accursed be the tongues of mankind! Had they never existed, had they not duped humanity century after century, how much happier would life on this earth have been!