Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Higher still the hill was hollowed out towards its summit like the crater of a volcano. The road ran its lonely course ringed in by a circle of rocks, through strata of chilly air. The darkness was total — not a glimmer of light anywhere, not even a solitary street-lamp from which to take one’s bearings. The ground was invisible, it merged with the shadows, and the trees seemed to float above it. Besson found himself plunging into this empty blackness on foot, half paralysed by fear, struggling forward through the mud, not able to recognize anything, eyes searching the void, feet clumsily sliding on loose shale, frightened stiff by the darkness and the power it contained. Onward now across the vast shifting plateau, searching for the right path, walking into gusts of icy wind blown from the uttermost ends of the world, whistling razor-sharp over the hillside. Down now among silo-like rock-formations, endless wells with no walls, no bottom, no entrance. Down, down, falling maybe. The rain seemed to bounce back off the ground, shoot vertically skywards. Or perhaps everything was gone — no more sky, no more rocks, no more hill, nothing. Nothing but this vast fluid emptiness, this impalpable void, in which sombre patches of colour continued to spread and multiply.

Then, suddenly, as though seen from a parapet, the whole city appeared below, a shimmering carpet of light, so far below that it was as though it no longer had any real existence. There it lay, vivid and resplendent, a pool of brightness rippling on the earth’s surface, with its myriad windows, its pin-bright street-lamps and twinkle of crawling headlights, all exposed in the cold and the stillness; exquisite, remote, a vision so magnified and transmuted that one felt one had never seen anything remotely comparable to it.

Behind Besson a voice suddenly called: ‘François! François! Where are you?’ And a moment later: ‘Hi, François! Fran-çois !’

It was a strange feeling of apprehension which made Besson turn back. His clothes sodden through, he made his way — more by luck than judgment — to the point in the middle of the hollow where the car had stopped. He saw the dumpy lines of its bodywork, and the girl still sitting inside it. He was aware of himself moving forward towards the centre of the basin, and with a stab of delight he saw that it was no longer black but white all over, with the radiant whiteness of hoar-frost, a dazzling landscape of snow and marble where silence grew and spread with the wind. He got back into the car.

‘Where were you?’ Josette asked. ‘What were you doing?’

‘Nothing — over there,’ Besson muttered. ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’

When she started the engine the headlights came on, and the two converging shafts of yellow light picked out the shadowy figure of a man crouching beside a bush. Two peeping-tom eyes glinted for a brief moment, and then the man made off across country. Besson, watching him go, felt how much he, too, would have loved to be free just then, able to observe other people when they came up here to make love, secretly, in this milky nocturnal landscape.

François Besson watches the sleeping woman — He sketches the map of her body — The noise — A chained mongrel in a garden prowls round in the rain — Conversation with the blind paper-seller — In which we are concerned with a person who lived in a barrel

ON the fourth day François Besson awoke fairly early. He found himself lying in a double bed, with a comfortable box-mattress and brand-new sheets. The pillow, where his head was not actually resting on it, felt cold, and the whole place gave off a damp and disagreeable atmosphere, heavy with the smell of stale breathing. Through the slats of the shutters a pale half-light filtered into the room. The ceiling above the bed was flat, almost colourless, and there was no electric light cord. It looked as though there was no one else apart from himself in this room: nothing but a pale ceiling suspended in space, a vast and plain-like expanse stretching further than the eye could reach.

Then, suddenly, in the cold grey depths of the room, Besson heard a noise approaching: a slow, soft, powerful sound, that sprang from nowhere, travelling from the furthest bounds of silence beyond sleep, a rasping, saw-like note, light, regular, unemphatic, seemingly produced by some mechanical task that called for great persistence and effort. Besson listened carefully, and almost at once identified it as the breathing of a woman — Josette — who was stretched out in bed beside him. The deep, even note rose and faded peacefully in the still air: Besson lay and listened to it without turning his head.

It began with a tiny, almost inaudible whistling sound, which gradually swelled to a crescendo, growing rougher as it did so, then dwindled away once more: there followed a kind of raucous gasp, and the sound repeated itself (no doubt in the opposite direction), tenuous at first, then rising, a solemn droning descant, to dwindle and sink once more, this time into complete silence. For a fraction of a second silence would reign in the room, and reach up to blanket the greenish surface of the ceiling. Then the sound would repeat itself as before, powerful and inescapable, with a hoarse, musical edge to it that penetrated every last square inch of air in the dimly-lit apartment.

For some time Besson simply listened to the sound without doing anything. Then he set himself to breathe in the same cadence rhythm, imitating every detail with perfect accuracy. It was not an easy task. Sometimes the noise stopped abruptly, for no apparent reason. When the rhythmic sequence began again, it was prefaced by a long, unhappy sigh. There were occasions, too, when the noise mysteriously quickened its tempo, so that it turned into a kind of panting. It interspersed with shrill and broken little cries that emerged all blurred and unrecognizable, and were quite impossible to imitate.

Other sounds likewise reached the room, a slow, monotonous procession that drifted in through the slatted shutters and rose up until they plastered themselves against the wide and dismal surface of the ceiling. Hooting of car-horns, vehicles back-firing, the clatter of iron shutters being raised somewhere along the street. A faint, mournful, sibilance, impossible to pin down, compounded of tyres on wet asphalt, water pouring from gutters, the hiss of air-brakes. All this went on more or less non-stop, without a break, merging with the repetitive rhythm of Josette’s breathing, the fresh damp air, the grey light outside. Easy enough to stay like this for a long while, ears and senses alert, without moving or thinking. So François Besson continued to lie in bed, eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling above him.

At length he turned on his side and scrutinized the horizontal outline of the sleeping girl. She was entirely hidden under the bed-clothes, and nothing could be seen of her apart from a tangle of black hair on the pillow. Strands of it had straggled loose, and lay there quite motionless, like so much sodden seaweed.

Besson sat up in bed. The alarm-clock on the bedside table beside Josette told him it was a quarter to eight. The noises outside in the street suddenly intensified. Cars began to tear past in a kind of frenzy, and there came the unmistakable sound of someone sweeping the sidewalk. Besson reached over Josette’s recumbent body and took a packet of cigarettes from the bedside table. He found a box of matches in the drawer. With tidy, careful movements he lit a cigarette and began to smoke. Then he realized he had no ashtray. He leaned across to the bedside table again, but this time drew a blank: after which he settled back where he had previously been, and made no further attempt to move. Smoke and cold air plumed out of his nostrils simultaneously. The smoke drifted gently ceilingwards, forming two thin columns, each of a different colour. That which came directly from the cigarette spiralled up in fluctuating bluish rings: that which emerged from his mouth or nostrils spread like a patch of dull grey fog. Besson watched the two columns of smoke for a moment. About a yard short of the ceiling they dissolved in the air of their own accord, without it being possible to determine exactly how this vanishing trick was brought about.