Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Besson observed these men and women: and suddenly the truth of what he saw came home to him. These people had no jobs, no family problems, no professions, no names even. They never talked or made love or felt afraid. No, all they did was walk, wandering at random, not knowing where they were going, expressionless, eyes glazed. The entire town was populated by full-time walkers, every day of their lives idled away on these long, complicated, indecisive and utterly futile excursions.

At one street-corner a stern-faced man came out of a tobacconist’s shop with a newspaper in his hand. He began to read it as he walked, frowning, occasionally pausing to decipher some phrase more easily. It was a clever performance, but Besson was no longer to be taken in by such tricks. A careful scrutiny revealed what a put-up job the whole thing was. The man did not know how to read; he kept his eyes glued to the same spot in the middle of the page, all the time.

A little farther on, in a glass-walled telephone booth, another man was pretending to make a call. His face was flushed, he looked as though he were choking. His mouth opened and shut as though he were shouting insults at someone. He waved his fist. But as far as Besson was concerned, the man was wasting his time. Quite obviously he had put no money in the box — either that, or else he had dialled a non-existent number.

In one doorway a man with a moustache stood talking to a girl. He was very close to her, and as Besson passed, he took the girl’s hand and began to hold it as though it were a detached object. Besson perceived that they were talking, but the murmur of their voices merged into the general clamour, and he could not hear a word. In any case this did not matter, since they had nothing intelligible or necessary to say. They were there by pure chance, speaking words without hearing them, incapable of altering their lives. The days and nights would pass them by in a flash, without their noticing, without their having achieved anything. At a certain moment they would find themselves old. At another, they would be dead.

Besides, everything in sight was just as they were: the walls, the trees, the lined pavement stretching down the street; these houses and their occupants, these apartments with large white stifling rooms and tablefuls of food; the beds smelling of sweat, with their grubby pillows and greying sheets, countless hidden lairs that gave off the odour of humanity. Everything was permeated by a cumulative sense of exhaustion. Movements were reduced to a minimum. In the open spaces life crouched coiled back on itself, nursing its sickness and shame, the wearisome, implacable emptiness within it.

A group of pigeons scattered at Besson’s approach. Some fluttered into the roadway, others made as though to take wing, others again really did so. Their small yellow beady eyes turned briefly to observe the silhouette of the man advancing on them.

The sky was now a curious rusty colour. Rain continued to fall patchily, first in one place, then in another. The plane-trees in the squares stood encircled by their own fallen leaves. A few more days, one could easily suppose, and the smell of decay would be everywhere.

As time passed, and Besson walked on, the crowd in the streets became steadily denser. Now, wherever he looked, he could see nothing but legs, bosoms, faces, backsides. There were street-barrows everywhere, piled high with merchandise, and gimlet-eyed women lurking behind them. A constant flow of idlers streamed in and out of the shops. There were unending waves of fat faces, thin faces, long and snub noses, mouths gaping blubber-lipped or shut in a thin tight line; small glinting eyes, sunk in the slack flesh round the eyesockets like black nails. Bodies jostled, arms swung to and fro, hands dangled. Rib-cages rose and fell with an even, regular motion. Throats irritated by cigarette-smoke emitted every kind of grunt, rattle, and cough. The soles of countless shoes beat at the ground with angry persistence, as though bent on exterminating an army of insects. Hips collided tangentially, material rucked and creased across bellies, buttons laboured under a constant strain. The rain drizzled down unendingly on people’s faces, mingling with perspiration, thirstily settling in forehead wrinkles or the creases at the corner of the jaw. It soaked into women’s perms, trickling through a mass of scented curls, down the back of the neck, finally reaching the bottom of their dresses. It drummed delicately on open umbrellas and the hoods of macintoshes. It made crêpe soles stick to the tar in the road. Nothing escaped it. Everything was moving out and away, yet remained there , producing a sense of vertigo.

Men and women swarmed and struggled, never moving from the same spot, attacking, possessing. To be handed over to their mercies in this town was a thankless adventure.

But inside each skull, each little box with its casing of flesh and hair, life could not be denied. They were prisoners, everyone of them, a whole race of tiny invisible imps beginning to stir in their bonds.

It was the eyes that were responsible. They were all the same, damp glazed marbles, horribly mobile in their anchorage of skin and muscle. Black hard points, glinting two by two from all these faces, fixing on you like a polyp’s suckers, determined to penetrate, digest, expose. Even objects abandoned against walls — dustbins, bicycles, bits of packing-cases — possessed eyes, all turned permanently and insatiably on the passing show. The houses, each tall grey apartment block, acted as pitiless mirrors. In every direction, from every angle, it was the same silhouette they reflected: a feeble, clumsy figure, walking on purposelessly, unable to get away. Ah, let the day of the blind beasts come, let it come soon, the empire of the ants and moles and larvae! How restful, then, to burrow peacefully in the mire, knowing nothing, expecting to know nothing, through the sweet opaque darkness, calm, blissful, never-ending!

At the bottom of the street there stood a newspaper kiosk, its coloured shape rising bright amid the grey slabs of paving-stone and the moving tide of humanity. For Besson it appeared some sort of refuge. Feverishly he began to tack towards it through the busy crowd, taking care not to incur angry looks or get himself jostled as he proceeded. He could see the kiosk from some way off, with its conical roof and countless gaily-coloured notices in blue or yellow or red. These bright patches shone out above the heads of the crowd, yet there was nothing aggressive about them: they caught the eye like headlights, each sending out its appeal. Around them it was cold, with dampness in the air. They alone remained pure and dazzling, they irradiated the heat of the vanished sun, they were stars. To reach them was a lengthy business. Besson had to push his way past helpless old women, children, dogs. But this did not bother him. His eyes, raised a little above the heads of the crowd, saw nothing but this polychrome peak, this glowing tower with its ever-larger writings and medley of colours.

At last Besson got to the kiosk. He came close, put out a hand, touched it. In front of him, behind a window, large numbers of papers were pinned up on display: illustrated periodicals, magazines, photographic journals, weekly reviews. Look where he would, everything was written, painted, set down in print. Besson drank it all in, intoxicated, unable to take his eyes away, listening to the steady tramp of footsteps behind his back.

On the cover of one magazine there was a blonde woman, her smile revealing dazzlingly white teeth. Her lips were red, her eyes pale blue, the skin on her neck and shoulders as smooth as silk. She went on smiling like this, without seeing anyone, as though enclosed in some tiny cabin where the weather was always perfect. Beside her, similarly framed in a periodical, was another woman who wore an identical smile. Her hair was black this time, but her huge deep eyes had been tinted a most odd colour, green and violet together, and so transparent that it looked as though one could pass through her physically, like penetrating a smoke-screen and remain on the far side of her enclave, in a kind of paradise.