Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Beneath the flat glass surface stretched the pin-table’s tiny world: alleys with red light-bulbs under which was written, in English, ‘Score 10 when red light is on’; mushrooms of every variety and colour — yellow, red, red and pastel green; little spring-mounted white gates, made of metal, that opened and sprang back. Lower down, amid other yellow and green objects, there was a small enclosure with a white wheel, marked off in numbers, at its centre. Two blue lights glowed in front of the wheel, and between them ran a curious line of figures, something like this:

500

400

300

200

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

Lower still, the playing-surface of the table ran down to a funnel, with little articulated claws curving back from either side of its mouth. This was the point at which the ball dropped out of sight. After being hurled so fiercely into the midst of all these quivering obstacles, after blipping off the red bumpers, zigzagging from side to side, circling and bouncing downwards a dozen, perhaps a hundred times, then shooting all the way back to the top again, in a flash, when it closed the electric contact and set off all those spasmodic rattling and ringing noises, those machine-gun-like reports, while up on the indicator, beside the bikini-girl’s face, the crazy figures flashed on and off so fast you hardly had time to see them, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 321, 331, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 355, 356, 357, 358, 458, 468, 469; after hurtling down against the revolving wheel like a bullet, and being tossed about for a moment or two in incoherent mechanical motion; after a desperate struggle against the fate that lay in wait for it in every trap-gate and knob, it finally had no option but to roll into this black hole, cross the threshold of death, sink into the belly of the machine, all aglint with points of reflected light, drop home to its rest, an echoing retreat permeated by a most curious smell, as though something had been scorched there.

When Besson had finished playing, he left the bar and walked on down the street for a little. People in cars were laughing and talking, very much absorbed in their own affairs. A woman and a young girl had stopped outside the window of a shoe-shop. They were standing arm in arm, and Besson could hear the sound of their high-pitched voices. Somewhere, hidden behind the clouds, an aircraft was droning over the town. The sound of its four engines seemed, disquietingly, to come from all sides at once. There were puddles of dirty water in the road, and the cars’ tyres left visible tracks after passing through them. Besson stopped at the edge of the pavement and waited for a trolley-bus.

When the vehicle appeared, he signalled it with his hand, then clambered up the iron steps and stood holding one of the leather straps. When he had bought his ticket he made his way to the front of the bus and found a seat beside a large fat woman. Either on account of the rain, or the time of day, the bus was crowded. Most of the passengers were elderly, unattractive women, with sagging faces and pouches under their eyes. Their bodies gave off a rank smell, garlicky and goatish, except for two or three men, who smelt more of stale tobacco. Besson let himself go with the jolting of the vehicle, listening to the smooth continuous roar of the motor, and the squeegeeing sound made by the double windscreen-wipers. He looked at the back of the driver, whose shoulders were pulling his coat out of shape. It was very warm. Almost enough to make one fall asleep. Besson thought how pleasant it would be to have a trolley-bus of one’s own and drive it around the streets of the town like this. From time to time, when he felt like it, he might pull up at the kerbside and let people get aboard. He wouldn’t have the time to get bored, he thought. He wouldn’t talk to anyone, but he’d be able to feel it when his human cargo was shaken up over the bumpy bits, and that would suffice him.

At a certain moment a young man made his way up the aisle and sat down facing Besson. He was a tallish person, extremely thin, with long hanging arms and a rounded back. As he moved he uttered little incoherent cries, and his monkey-like face, with its protruding ears and flat nose, was constantly twitching. His whole feeble frame seemed convulsed by a variety of tics, and a sickening smell exuded gently all around him.

He sat like this for a moment; then his head turned towards Besson, and his crazy, deep-sunk eyes gleamed strangely. Besson stared uncomprehendingly at the hideous, grimacing face opposite him; but very soon fear began to stir in him, an ignoble fear, set up by those pin-hard, accusatory eyes. And then recollection dawned in his mind: as though brought back from a forgotten time hundreds of centuries ago, that flat and imbecile mask glued itself to his own features, took the mould and impression of them with the viscous fidelity of a latex squeeze. Through the eyesockets pierced in this crazy face Besson himself now looked out at the world. Through those wide nostrils, enlarged by constant nose-picking, he began to draw his own breath. Through that mouth, through the skin that was encrusted with sweat and filth so that garments clung to it like mummy-bands; through that fuzzy, nit-infested hair, that bowed and broken skeleton of a body, those senile, trembling limbs, those thighs stained with patches of dried urine — through all these things Besson began to live again. He had found him at last. This doltish, repugnant caricature was his brother. Aboard this stifling, smooth-running trolley-bus, here on these worn imitation leather seats, he had met the person he had tried in vain to forget. His brother, his beloved brother, born of the same mother as himself, now sitting in front of him looking like some crazy ape, haloed with stinking squalor, the prisoner of his own stupid, shrunken body, racked by tics and miserable pains. In a burst of tender compassion Besson leaned forward to say something to the young man. But at this the creature turned pale, his eyes bulged, his whole face — apart from the rictus round the mouth, which nothing could efface — became distorted with terror. Then, uttering a strange shrill cry, he leapt to his feet and ran clumsily down the aisle to the rear of the bus. Besson had to get out at the next stop. As he walked through the chilly streets he had plenty of leisure to think up the excuses he would make for the people who had been expecting him all day.

François Besson has a date with Josette — The accident — Josette does her best to explain — In the post office — They drive up to the top of the hill — The voyeur

ON the third day, François Besson had a date with this woman called Josette, at six o’clock, on the corner by the Prisunic. He got there a little early, and waited standing by the kerbside, smoking a cigarette. It was just dark, and the street-lamps were shining out, sharp and clear-cut points of light. The crowd were still swarming inexhaustibly down the street: not one day’s respite, not an hour’s rest. Even on Sundays and public holidays, they were still there, out in the street, moving to and fro, idling, ogling, picking up and purchasing goods. In the evening they went to the cinema, came out of cafés, banged car doors. In the morning they went to work, queued in pork-butchers’ shops, or stood gossiping on doorsteps. No, they never rested, never stopped moving.

But only a few yards above the ground it was utterly deserted. The houses reared their tall silent façades, and there was nothing in the air save empty solitude. The trolley-bus wires crossed and recrossed continually, but nothing happened . The walls, the branches of the trees, the cowls of the street-lamps, roof-tops interspersed with garrets — it was all so still and quiet that no one could have deduced what a crawling ant-hill existed down below. The same thing applied underground. Beneath that carapace of tarred asphalt, hammered by marching feet, worn away by tyres, the desert began again: an immense, pitch-black, softly opaque desert, with every ten years or so a gravelly rattle — stopped almost before it had begun — as a mass of fine, close-packed scree shifted its position, after which things returned to that state of boundless mineral inactivity which represented the world’s true dominion.