Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

It was through all this that Besson set out to walk. He passed down two or three avenues lined with bare, leafless trees. He negotiated squares and crossings, streets and alleys. He waited when the lights were red. He skirted roundabouts, back-tracked out of blind alleys, and avoided stretches of dug-up pavement where men were toiling with picks and pneumatic drills. He slapped the flat of his hand against two or three No Entry signs. He bumped into obstacles, right in the middle of the street. From time to time, when he was crossing the street, he would deliberately slow down in order to make cars brake.

When he reached the town centre, he put his hands in his pockets and gazed around him. The air was very fresh, the fine mist was still mizzling down, but taken all in all it was pleasant not to be able to see the sun. All that was visible of it was a pale disc, behind banks of grey moving clouds, no brighter than the moon.

The place gave the impression of being a strategic focal point: buses and cars came streaming in from every direction, and the pavements were crowded. People passed to and fro ceaselessly, as though it had always been like this since the beginning of time. There was not so much as a pocket of silence anywhere.

The dustbins were still standing there in the gutter, crammed to overflowing with tin cans, potato peelings, and apple cores, awaiting the arrival of the big, clattering garbage truck responsible for emptying them. A whole day’s life had accumulated in these heaps of refuse: people had bought, eaten, sucked, chewed, and, finally, thrown out.

Already there were men and women walking along loaded down with bags of vegetables and parcels of meat. These were making ready for the following day’s garbage — crumpled-up balls of grey paper, the leafy part of leeks, date-stones, stale and blood-patched bones. The dustbins would always be there. At about the same time every evening, people would furtively carry down their stinking bucketfuls, and empty them in one quick, unregretful movement. In this way life was consumed, day after day, without any fuss or difficulty. Fragments of fatty edible matter would flow through the pipes, and tons, mountains of excrement would return to the earth once more.

Outside the shops women in aprons were sluicing down the sidewalk with buckets of soapy water, and sweeping it off with brooms. In one butcher’s shop whole young calves were hanging from hooks, all the blood drained out of them, split clean down from chine to rump. The sawdust beneath them was slightly spotted with red, but hardly enough to matter. In box-like refrigerated display-cases dead chickens and rabbits lay lined up, side by side. As he passed by Besson noticed their strangely protruding eyes, and the ridiculous way the stumps of their severed paws stuck up into the air. Inside the shop, with its white tiles, and the legend FAMILY BUTCHER prominently displayed, women were jostling one another to get a better view. Plump hands lifted up hunks of meat, prodding and pinching. Greedy eyes, voracious mouths, dilated nostrils, all hung calculatingly over raw flesh. Behind the counter stood a ruddy-faced man armed with a cleaver, engaged in an unending process of chopping, slicing, and general mutilation. His movements were quick and precise, and he took no notice of the bone-splinters that flew up into his face.

Farther on, there was the smell of hot bread, wafting in waves from an open doorway: that heavy, doughy odour that went straight to one’s head, evoking long-forgotten memories. Yellowish smell, rounded smell, faintly burnt, fresh and warm towards the centre, soft, pliable, full of richness: crackling and crisp outside, yet something that melted on the tongue, and gently spread through every tactile fibre in the body. Bread. Hot bread, feathery-light, still coated all over with a fine layer of dust that tasted like uncooked flour.

On the edge of the pavement, outside an empty shop, there stood a group of large brick-red flower-pots with geraniums growing in them. Besson stopped to look at them for a moment. He studied every detail of these unremarkable plants, standing up so straight and stiff in the pebbly earth with which their pots were filled. He observed their flat, somewhat star-shaped leaves, and the rain-drops that lay lightly on them. A faint breath of wind stirred, and the stems quivered, almost imperceptibly. Each geranium stood bolt upright in its pot, held fast by the tenacious soil packed round it.

On one or two of the leaves, that seemed older than the rest, there were marks resembling old healed-over scars, hinting at damage in the past. Despite the drops of water that trickled continuously over the leaves, gathering round the flowers, dropping one by one down the steps to the black humus below, the geraniums nevertheless retained a dry, almost dusty appearance. There was no insect life in the pots, not a single snail nibbling away at a stalk. In each of these tiny potted deserts there was nothing but the geranium itself, nothing but this pale green skeletal shape, with stiff, spiky branches, fixed in its vertical position, expecting nothing: alive but motionless, the grimy surface of each tiny warped leaf turned up towards the light and air and water. It occurred to Besson that he, too, could have very well lived in a flower-pot, feet deep-rooted in the soil, its grainy texture close around him, his body reaching up, still and silent, into the air. Well, perhaps not, after all, it might not be all that enjoyable: really he was lucky to possess two legs and the ability to use them whenever he felt like it.

Away on the horizon, through a gap between two window-studded blocks, stretched the equally immobile mass of the mountains. Suddenly it struck him how lucky he was not to be a mountain, either. Curious. Clouds passing slowly overhead. Arching one’s huge rough back, all covered with thickets and ravines, encircling the town. Even a house, when you began to think about it, offered some sort of existence, lapped in peace, the majestic peace of reinforced concrete, calmly watching the ebb and flow of life around one, with an occasional odd tickling sensation as the lift ascended its shaft.

All this was curious, amusing. The thought made him uneasy.

A bald man wrapped up in a black overcoat was coming towards Besson. As he advanced, he turned his head a little to one side and spat in the gutter. It was as though he had spat in Besson’s face.

By now the pavement was a mass of violent activity. Besson felt himself caught in a vortex of legs and faces, chaotic movements, bent backs, hands clasping objects. Bodies continually brushed against him, touching his clothes and stirring up tiny little puffs of air. Pallid faces, eyes staring, loomed up over him, then swerved aside at the last moment. There were men standing outside shop doorways, staring into space. Others, esconed in their cars, let their gaze wander through the closed windows. Children threaded their way between the groups of passers-by, screaming and shouting. Horsy women with large busts standing awkwardly outside greengrocers’ shops. A nasal sing-song of voices from the counters of the chain-stores. Even as high as the sixth floor, a number of shadowy figures could be seen hanging over balconies in a menacing way, as though to keep watch on the streets below.

Besson let himself go with the movement of the crowd, empty of all desire, conscious of nothing in himself save the mysterious pattern imposed by all these faces and bodies: walking, walking, sometimes close to the walls, sometimes on the edge of the pavement, dodging landaus, skirting round groups of people, walking, walking, ascending a kind of stark spiral staircase that almost certainly led nowhere.

Time passed: nothing changed. One could go on for years in this way, without doing anything. Without ever having anything to do. Without talking or thinking, just walking on, eyes taking it all in, ears cocked, nose alert, skin exposed to every fluctuation of heat and cold, while a sequence of insignificant events announced themselves by means of small discomforts, fleeting sensations, anonymous sounds. There was no limit on the time one could spend thus, an entire lifetime, perhaps, swallowed up amid this debris, wandering through the jungle for an eternity stretching from birth to death. It was easy: one just had to let oneself drift with it.