Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

‘If you see a place, tell me,’ she said.

‘Look, there—’

She braked, then drove on.

‘That won’t do, it’s the entrance to a garage.’

Besson relaxed against the upholstery. The engine purred steadily, now and then increasing in volume. The windscreen-wipers moved to and fro together, and at every jolt the seats creaked under them.

‘How’s the car going?’ Besson asked. ‘All right?’

‘Not too badly,’ said Josette. ‘Not now I’ve had the valves reground.’

‘What sort of speed can you get out of it?’

‘Well, you know me, I’m a bit scared of driving fast. But when I’m on a good straight road I step it up.’

‘How much do you do?’

‘Oh, it depends—’

‘No, I mean, what’s the most you’ve ever done?’

‘I don’t know — eighty, eighty-five, something like that.’ She turned and looked at Besson. ‘You’re pale, you know,’ she said. ‘You — well, frankly, you look tired out. You haven’t a job now, though, have you?’

‘No,’ Besson said. ‘I’m doing nothing just now.’

A traffic-light shone red ahead of them. The car drew to a halt at the crossing, and a crowd of shadowy figures hurried across. The seconds passed insistently. It was as though the cessation of movement had suddenly revealed their existence, concentrated now on the circular red light, unwinking, like an eye. The girl sat beside him, hands resting on the wheel, not saying a word. Besson watched her, saw her face react, become gently drawn into the scene outside. With her contained, withdrawn body, her made-up eyelids, the pins and ribbons supporting her hair, she was palpably present, there , prepared to fight and to win. Besson made an effort to shake off the torpor that was stealing over him, to make conversation.

He said: ‘I saw an accident just now, while I was waiting for you outside the Prisunic. A bus ran into the back of a car.’

‘Was it serious?’

‘Yes — well, not too bad, actually. The car had its boot smashed in, but the bus wasn’t damaged. I don’t quite know how it happened — I suppose the driver of the car braked a bit too sharply, and the other chap didn’t have time to react. Unless the car backed into the bus, of course. Anyway, they started slanging each other in the middle of the street, and a crowd gathered. But the police didn’t even bother to come and see what was going on.’

The light changed to amber, then to green. The girl’s arms moved, her hands busied themselves with shifting gear, turning the black ring of the wheel, flipping down the indicator-lever. The idling engine roared into life, and the car moved forward, as though on rails. Far off in the night, above the roof-tops, came a flash of lightning, white tinged with pink, momentarily revealing heavy-piled clouds. While Josette talked, Besson kept his ear cocked for the inevitable sound of thunder. But whether because of the distance, or the rain, he heard nothing.

‘… or never. Do you understand, François? It’s true, you know you’ve been different for some time now. I can’t really understand why. I’d like to have a serious talk about the whole situation — don’t you think we should?’

Besson stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray beside the dashboard.

‘If you like,’ he said. ‘But you’re wrong when you say I’ve changed. It’s not me that’s changed, it’s the things around me. I honestly think—’ He broke off, then said: ‘Look, we can’t have this kind of discussion while we’re driving round town.’

‘I know,’ Josette said. ‘I’m looking for somewhere to park. I’ve got to go to the post-office and send off a money-order first, anyway. After that, if you like, we can go and park somewhere quiet, out of town. Up on the hill, for instance.’

‘All right.’

Finally she pulled up in a space reserved for taxis. As she was backing her bumper hit the front of another car.

‘I’m only going to leave it here a minute,’ she said. ‘Just long enough to send this money-order. You coming, or staying here?’

‘I might as well come,’ Besson said.

‘All right then, close the window your side.’

They got out of the car. It was hard to tear oneself away from that imitation-leather seat, especially when it was so cold outside. Besson thrust his hands into his pockets, and the two of them walked off together.

The post-office was warm, well-lit, and crowded. Besson sat on a bench and watched Josette while she queued. Behind the counters a number of girls in sky-blue uniform were writing or telephoning. In the main hall there was an interminable ebb and flow of feet over the flagged floor, men’s, women’s, walking, standing, coming in, going out. The walls were painted a dirty white, and shone with the bright glow from the electric light bulbs. This was a temple dedicated to work, where time was, as it were, abolished through total mechanization, divided into infinite particles by the rattle of typewriters and dull thud of franking-stamps.

Alone in one corner, an old woman, accompanied by her dog, stood facing the wall, searching through a directory for some name or other. The dog, a long-haired bitch, had its head down and was sniffing at a grey patch on the floor. Besson felt an impulse to follow their example. He moved slowly across to the wall-desk, and with back bent and nose deep in the pages of the massive volume, he spelt out these magical and fortuitously juxtaposed names:

Sébestien

Séchard

Sechardi

Ségur

Senon

Sepia

Setton-Prince

Shave

Simon

Simon

Simon

Simonetti

There was certainly no lack of names: they packed every page from top to bottom, and behind them, behind these curt, spiky rows of letters, lurked human beings, full of movement and death, young or old faces, lives as self-contained as so many glass balls. They existed, they lived here on earth, they had names and surnames and addresses, jobs which they performed conscientiously or with indifference, wives, children, friends. No doubts, no self-correction. Hermetic and impenetrable, they remained the people who one cannot know and dare not laugh at. These thick, worn volumes, with their dog-eared pages, each blackened by the touch of innumerable sweaty fingers, served as a kind of bible for them the living. This was their stern and factual saga, the tale of their adventures reduced to one simple sign, a sort of small cross made with a ball-point pen that marked them out as something hard and inflexible amid the muddy flux of existence. If one were to read them all like that, name after name, without emotion or hatred, one would possess them all, incapsulated within oneself, possess the very core and essence of their lives, make them close neighbours. They would no longer be able to get away from you, perpetually escape to their unknown hide-outs.

‘Looking up something?’ Josette asked. Besson raised his head.

‘Yes — no — that is, I was just looking.’

They walked out of the post-office together.

‘Did you send your money-order?’ Besson enquired.

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Have you anything else to do?’

She opened the car door. ‘No,’ she said.

Inside the air was warm and sluggish. The closed windows muffled any noise from the street. They could hear rain pattering on the roof overhead.

The car climbed steadily towards the top of the hill, headlights full on, negotiating hairpin bends and passing through shadowy stretches of woodland. From time to time houses showed up by the roadside, great black masses pierced by a single yellow window. The hill was a vast outcrop of rock and trees, a deeper black than the night. It dominated the town, rearing up beyond the flatness of sea and plain in all the might of its great arched ridge, so full and solid that it might bave heen a living creature. Riddled with wells, a bristling mass of shrub and undergrowth, it loomed up through the night like some gigantic stray animal, with its steep scree-covered slopes, its patches of waste ground, its scored, deep-cut water-channels, bare and arid, rain streaming softly down its flanks, dust-particles frittering away, quivering on its foundations. Here one climbed towards stillness, past streets winding or stepped, all lights out now, a slow ascent to that flat summit — not a tree, not even a ruined house — whence all other sounds had been banished by the wind, skirting invisible obstacles fissures, abandoned tracks, masses of rock half broken away from the soil but still hanging at a crazy angle; passing deep pools of water, compact bubbles of darkness, the rain dancing on their surface like bullets. More private property, barbed-wire fences, but nothing behind them save faint fluttering mystery, a kind of cloud, wisps of drifting mist. Crumbling chateaux, hidden cathedrals, floating towers. Then the road came out on the cliffs above the sea, and the bright red point of a lighthouse beacon became visible, drilling at regular intervals through the flux of the elements. Everything seemed to hinge around this light, according to its own metallic rhythm, as though each wink of that red beam, glimpsed through the curtains of rain and darkness, advanced the march of time, of knowledge, promised days of intense sunlight, a hard bare landscape stripped back to the bone by brightness and heat. The hill was rising still, its road stretching away ribbon-like between knolls and hollows. There were straggling bushes with a dense, rounded mass of foliage, pressed down now by sheer weight of water, and weird stunted plants with wide-spaced branches. Ruined walls, boundary-fences, and sometimes other blurred shapes which belonged to no recognizable order of things, but simply sprang up out of the darkness in a casual fashion that was both graceful and somehow alarming. Phantoms propped against each other, not people, not houses, but small dingy figures, decrepit possessions, stake-fences, skeletons planted in the earth and undulating fluidly as one glimpsed them going by, perhaps animated from within by some mysterious respiratory movement.