Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

After this lengthy contemplation of the deep-shadowed objects before him, Besson went back to his bed. For a moment he gazed up at the ceiling, with the reflected glow from passing cars’ headlights moving across it; then he stretched out on top of the blankets and tried to sleep. But it was not so easy. In the first place, the shadows had begun to move. Then there was music somewhere, a tune which Besson, though he stiffened his resistance till it was rock-hard, still could not help humming under his breath. At first it was an easy, flexible theme that could be followed without any trouble. But soon the parts multiplied, the humming became a regular symphony orchestra, complete with trumpet, clavicord, oboe, flute, violin, cello, harp and cymbals.

When he was tired of sorting out the score and following its variously divergent threads of melody, Besson opened his eyes, sat up on the bed, and waited.

The room was still the same: a large cube with barely visible walls, a grey expanse of floor, closed and white-slatted shutters: a sealed-off, private place, and one that he knew by heart. Sounds from outside drifted up the face of the building and made their way in through the window: familiar, unimportant noises, easily identifiable during their leisurely passage — the whirr of car-tyres on wet macadam, the drone of engines, a motor-cycle put-putting down the street, slowly fading away in the distance. The tap of heels on the pavement, murmuring of voices. A tremendous thunder-clap. Rain-drops pattering on the shutters. All these sounds were pleasurable. One forgot everything — even the fact that one was alive.

The darkness was rich-textured, its black surface shot with bluish glints, grey half-tones, gleams of whiteness. The room was sealed, hermetically sealed, and he, Besson, was inside it. Neither hot nor cold. Time passed smoothly, second by second, impalpable, untouched by chaos.

It was like being in a small and cosy dream, a house of one’s own, bought and paid for, surrounded by a big silent garden. A piece of property at Lorgues, two acres of land, umbrella pines, the scent of lavender, with a sweet little stream flowing through it, a five-roomed farmhouse, a well, some cobbles. In fact it was even better than that, because one possessed nothing at all. No, it was enough to be oneself, alone in a closed room, without light, with the sound of rain-drops tapping against the slats of the shutters. Minutes and hours stretch out interminably, their slow passage is sheer delight: actions and thoughts form a sequence of harmonious moments, lucid, exquisitely clear, suspended in continuity. What a good thing, what a really good thing it is to have a room of one’s own!

With slow movements, François Besson lit another cigarette. The flame of the match, white at first, then yellow, pierced through the darkness in the room. The loose strands of tobacco at the tip of the cigarette writhed and glowed, the paper caught fire. It occurred to Besson that what he would really like was a room lined with mirrors, so as not to miss any detail of what he was about. The match suddenly went out, without his needing to blow it, and all that remained in the darkness was a red glowing hole, close to his face, which got a little deeper each time he inhaled.

After a while Besson got up and began to prowl round the room. He wandered from one piece of furniture to another, peered through the slits in the shutters. As it was cold, he slipped his coat on over his pyjama jacket. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed again. Here he remained for a moment, quite still, contemplating the square mass of the table.

It must have been about half past twelve or one in the morning, because the church clock nearby had only chimed once. Somewhere off in the middle of the town a fire-engine was tearing along, siren screaming. From time to time a rumble of thunder could be heard. But inside the room there was no danger: neither rain nor lightning-flashes could penetrate there, and all remained still. There was no breath of wind. Everything was tranquil and assured; each object had its appointed place, the disposition of surfaces remained constant. You could shut your eyes, and when you opened them again a moment later nothing would have changed.

The whole thing was just right. François Besson sat there inside his calm and minuscule pattern, as though encircled by a frame. It was a very fine pattern, traced with a pen on white paper, where everything was fixed for some sort of eternity; a genuine caricature, too, in which every object — each ashtray, each piece of furniture — had found its precise silhouette recorded. The dado on the wall, with its small scrawled design, ochre against a white ground, had been faithfully reproduced; so had the handle of the door, a green plastic knob, and the key-hole, its wards so cut that it would only take the right key. Then there were the bedclothes, a pair of slippers, two chairs with purple cushions; the double window with its greenish shutters; the map of Europe pinned to the wall, with all those strange names printed against capes and peninsulas: Mandal, Cuxhaven, Penmarc’h, Jamaja, Mechra el Hader, Tomaszów, Ape, Sasovo, Yecla. And at the centre of the pattern, squatting on the edge of his bed, was this caricature of a man, with scrawny limbs and high cheekbones and cropped hair, who sat quite still, staring into space. It gave one an urge to develop the pattern further: to colour it, for instance, or write something in one of those white balloons emerging from people’s mouths, such as ‘I wonder what I’m doing here’, or ‘It’s good to be indoors at home when the rain’s coming down like that outside’.

Besson got up and walked to the right-hand window, pressed his forehead against the cold glass, and looked around. The street was almost deserted. Rain was beating down on its surface, and that of the pavement on either side; a great pool of unwavering light spread round the foot of each street-lamp. All the shops had turned off their illuminated signs except one, where a line of neon still glowed at the bottom of the display-window. Cars sped past with a hiss of tyres. From time to time some stooping, shadowy figure, wrapped in a macintosh, could be seen hurrying along under the lee of the walls. The way the shutter-slats were aligned, Besson was unable to see the sky; but the odds were that it was near-black with perhaps a touch of pink, and the rain coming down from the middle of it, and from heaven knows where before that.

Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain-drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive , then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world he had designed. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a cautious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music. A series of deep pulsing vibrations arose from the heart of darkness, out of flatness and obscurity, and then through him, through his conscious body, they became movement, throbbing, powerful movement, measuring time. They mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there , eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earth’s crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street-lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations. The void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the substance of the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went on growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers, gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its pattern on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistible feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there , for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceive the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare, skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tunes that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch infinity; to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you, the actions you perform, the song of all that is , that’s triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephemeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent.