Jean-Marie Le Clézio: The Flood

This, or something like it, was what must be taking place now at this point on earth, this complex sub-section of the world. It seemed to be decomposing like an animal’s cadaver, to all outward appearances intact still, but in reality decaying throughout, tortured and gnawed in all its parts. The walls of houses, the surfaces of the streets, the outlines of apartment blocks, the very air and the noises carried on it — all these, when seen from a distance, had a solid quality about them, reminiscent of bronze or marble; and yet the mere proximity of conscious awareness had a somehow stiffening effect on them, so that they revealed the existence of their own internal rottenness. Under one’s scrutiny they swarmed and faded, vanishing darkly behind a veil of clouds and mist. Confusion blurred previously clear outlines, overlaid the colours of down and hair, separated out previously pure elements, broke up the logical order of things, denied the evidence of the senses. Everything was shifting and reverberating simultaneously. There was a sound like the sea, a rumbling stillness, a universal thunderous roar. Mopeds sprouted feathers, men and women were spotted with peacock-eyes, skies took on checkerboard patterns. Hitherto indeterminate colorations formed into patterns of black and white, then regrouped themselves according to their two basic and contrasting characteristics, light against dark. The expression of form was reduced to a schematic minimum — straight line, spiral, angle. Sounds, smells, silhouettes, all hived off into their separate groups, teamed up afresh. Slowly and quietly a kind of vast, meticulous fresco was coming into being, an unchecked, passionless advance by sappers from one redoubt to the next. Anyone overtaken by the freeze-up very quickly cracked and broke apart; his hot and cold elements sloughed off around his feet like a cast skin, and almost at once his naked body could be seen rising from the confusion, sharp and thin as a knife-blade, and setting its mark on the rest of the process, with a series of distorted movements and nervous twitchings that verged on caricature. Then it would take on the semblance of a statue or an engraving; a few bold strokes and there it was, burning like a torch above the world, a world at long last restored to pristine clarity, to the realm of abstract ideas, indescribable in its vividness and beauty, a species of intellectual hell.

Flight was out of the question: each object and being was caught by surprise, in mid-flight. There was an instant when chaos began, a day on which light began to fade and the outlines of every feature were scribbled, as though in charcoal, on a surface more virgin than paper and harder than any stone. All was enmity and watchfulness; the circle closed little by little, it was as though great ramparts were there, growing thicker, moving closer to one another. The universe was being transformed into a room, its windows opened on to other windows. Men’s eyes fabricated a kind of impenetrable barbed-wire entanglement. What had previously been free and variable was now locked in a mad immutable pattern. Objects were replaced by sharp, angular figures, trees were transformed into Turkish scimitars, houses into sharp mountain ridges, flowers to jagged, bristling peaks. The four corners of the horizon swung in towards one another, tilting up vertically. It was like being cut off in a fortress, with the drawbridges going up on every side. It was now that the banked up clouds appeared on the scene, now that the first skirmishing movement towards shadow and darkness began. Cut off from the horizon in every direction, the town now writhed round on itself like some mortally stricken rhinoceros. The wind had turned to stone; though it blew still, there was no movement in it. It had become a monument erected to the memory of movement, and its downward-dragging gravity held a dead weight of millions of tons. In one quarter of this shattered town the forces of cold and silence had established themselves. A two-dimensional boulevard, its chaotic movement frozen into stillness, hung poised in mid-flow. Bare trees renewed the sap in their branches for all eternity. Adjacent blocks of flats gaped vacantly into the void, not yet in ruins, but no longer habitable. The windows that opened from those wan walls still grouped themselves in a regular pattern, but their character had changed; now they were nightmare freaks of fancy, a spectacle as sinister and mechanistic as the windows of a train moving past in a station. They hinted at a phenomenon as disturbing as it was powerful; they were dream-figments of an exhausted brain, which had somehow contrived to by-pass the pitfalls of stupor and oblivion: monotonous, blackened, repetitive features of this burnt-out landscape, ubiquitous and eternal.

There was no further relationship between them save in the context of these endlessly forming vertical or horizontal brick courses. All that had been done at other times and in other places was still contained in them. It was there , automatically, undeniably, on the façade of this apartment block; it offered a totality of vision, built up from the cumulative sum of various experiences, various likely inferences, which was self-perpetuating and progressively narrowing down its field. From town to town, from porch to porch, from tree to Cadillac, to railings, back-alleys, streets, corners, finally arriving at this vast white regular plane surface, this wall with its twelve storeys, 198 windows, eighteen doors; with its bustling corridors, its elevators (movements downwards, upwards, sideways), its diagonals, zigzags, lozenges, crosses, and the rest of it. This was where the trail had led to, this many-sounding wall (broken murmur of the rising tide, trains whistling in tunnels, tapping of feet on stone steps, hum of traffic, police car sirens, squeal of tyres, whining jet aircraft). It was there, amongst other places, that the great noisy hall, a kind of ghost-stadium, had come into being: a hall in which the loudspeaker, like a collective mouth, had carved out its particular niche.

Later the façade itself had collapsed. The elements of existence had, if that was possible, contracted still further: the world was shrinking in on itself, like a pool of spilt and evaporating petrol, that seems to move upwards towards some point in the sky as its total area diminishes. It had retreated from the outer edges of the building, withdrawn its frontiers until they comprised only a few rows of windows. For a while it had been contained between the eighth and second horizontal rows, and the tenth and the third vertical ones. Then it had retreated still further, slipping along the wall, tearing loose fragments of light and sound as it went. Now it had reached the last window on the third floor, window number thirty-nine. It was here that life had chosen to maintain itself, an intense and blindingly bright life, a star that concentrated within itself all the hundreds and hundreds of square yards which made up the town. On this square of violet-tinted glass the world had formed a sheer, outjutting mountain, endlessly toppling, collapsing, reforming, marking time, gleaming in rainbow iridescence. Here time still moved on, perhaps, in a film-strip of memories, unleashing its rough blows against the glass, fighting its profound and mysterious battle. It was the core of what used to be termed relativity, colours without colour, nameless names, inaudible sounds, transparent and volatile odours. Window number thirty-nine had stripped bare an entire world, leaving its inhabitants dead or naked, uncovering the harsh peaks and reefs, the bones of existence, all around it. Elsewhere all was blanched white: skeleton squares and streets, the fossil remains of men and dogs lay abandoned here and there beneath the scorching sun of awareness. They aged gently, powdered over with dust and sand, like so many huge shells cast up by the sea. Window number thirty-nine in the block — blacker and more concentrated than a child’s eye — drew them irresistibly to itself, sparked off their powder-trails of desire. Parched hair-lines converged on its centre like so many luminous rays. The rain drummed down on these bony relics with a soft, caressing hiss; and between each separate drop of water, each sonorous explosion, there sprang up a spinning vortex of wind which redirected the centrifugal elements towards the centre of the window-pane. The earth’s scales were hard and insensitive, like those on a fish’s sides. Torpor swam in the air; the great cavern of silence extended its vaulted roof still further. Like a loudspeaker in reverse, the window’s gullet swallowed up the sum of all noises in the town, and left nothing but tragic calm behind. No one could look steadily at it without flinching: it was a second sun, black and mournful, spreading out its rays of darkness. Within its globe matter fused, boiled, endlessly bubbling over and through itself. Ice had formed at the heart of the volcano’s turbulence: the tension on the glass was so strong that the whole earth seemed to tremble because of it, and the slightest thing, one felt, might trigger off the explosion.