Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

The phantom aircraft seemed to remain over the square for an interminable period, shifting on from cloud to cloud with sluggish reluctance. Its thunderous racket blasted the whole district, formed an invisible cone which pressed down on every exposed surface, kept the whole maelstrom of sound shut in, as though a lid had been clapped over it. In the space of a few seconds the scene had changed from normality to nightmare, had become a vast, congested, frozen expanse, an area littered with steel or stone objects and quiveringly racked by this all-pervasive, agonizing din. Individual noises no longer existed, there was only a kind of solid vortex pressed continually against one’s ear-drums, forcing them inwards. People themselves seemed temporarily bereft of movement; they stood there in the street staring blindly at nothing, held captive by the blast of sound passing over them. The uproar was anchored to the earth’s central core, whirled round and round with its motion through space. It had permeated every reflection, each source of light. It had its own individual smell, you could touch it. It was a stony matrix that lay like a dead weight on your chest, made your heart palpitate. It hurt your eyes to watch the way it beat down in the light, a grey and white sound that exploded on the pavements and in the sky like some vast snowfield. Outlines and colours abruptly melted, ran, realigned themselves. Cars floated airborne above the asphalt, and the windows of every building were ablaze together. When the intensity of the noise rose to 135 decibels, or thereabouts, Besson felt as though he were about to vanish down some deep hole.

Slowly, with a vast effort, he managed to raise his hands as far as his ears, and held them there for a moment. The din tried to penetrate his very skin, humming and vibrating like a swarm of wasps. But when Besson at last removed his hands, the awful din had vanished, leaving only the normal abundance of sharp-edged, delicate, individual sounds. Colours had gone back to something very like normal, and people were beginning to move along the sidewalks once more. Cars moved off one behind the other, haloed with hot, shimmering exhaust fumes. The jet aircraft was no longer audible.

François Besson moved away from the vicinity of the square with one or two unimportant lesions in the cells of his nervous system. He was on the look-out for some narrow, shabby backstreet, and found himself hugging the wall as close as he could while he walked. He was a little jumpy at the moment, and the slightest unexpected noise — a motor-cycle back-firing round the corner, for instance — was liable to make his heart beat faster. Without making it obvious, he began to concentrate minutely on avoiding contact, keeping objects at arm’s length.

In this manner he walked back up towards the town centre, not paying overmuch attention to where he was going. Men hurried past him, wrapped up to the chin in damp overcoats. He met young women, old women, the occasional beauty, all their faces cruel and expressionless under the make-up they wore. He walked by electrical repair shops, bookshops, furniture stores, chemists and florists. He saw what looked like shell-holes in the pavement, and machines pumping out the drains. He passed stretches of wall with vast posters plastered all over them. One of these showed an orange the size of a car, cut in two, with a drop of juice forming on its yellow pulp, and a monstrously vast baby’s head, that must have covered several square yards, with its fat pink cheeks and bald skull and bubble nose, and two big black eyes shiny as metal balls, with the juicy inside of the orange reflected in them. Lower down, under the picture, there was written, in bold lettering: AN ORANGE IS WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD FOR GOOD HEALTH. The houses across the way were flanked by rows of tall wooden fences, now much dilapidated, and small gardens chock-a-block with mud and rubbish. Clumps of irises sprouted amid a litter of grey stones: water dripped down on leaves and old piled-up packing-cases.

Life had strictly limited horizons here: the rest of the world remained an unknown quantity. In one of these abandoned gardens, beneath blank, empty windows, a mongrel was going round and round on his chain, while the rain drizzled down on him. He no longer even bothered to bark. It occurred to Besson that he too might have shut himself up in the middle of some waste lot, beside an old wooden shack, and gone prowling round the same ancient slate-coloured prison, occasionally glancing at the pitch-black sky, with neither hopes nor expectations.

As he passed by a recessed doorway Besson noticed an old man sheltering under it, with a pile of newspapers beside him, and sitting very still. He was not all that old, in fact: perhaps sixty at the outside. But there was a broken, defeated look about his face and posture. He sat on a folding camp-stool, with the pile of papers close to him, waiting, waiting, his head leaning back against the door-jamb. People came and went on the pavement in front of him, but he never called out to them. He might have been deaf and dumb; he just sat there, huddled in a lumber-jacket, its collar turned up over his ears. He wore a sou’wester, and his eyes were hidden behind thick tinted glasses.

Besson paused to look closer at him, and realized that he was blind. Then he went across into the doorway and bought a paper. The blind man counted out his change competently enough, feeling the coins with his fingertips.

‘You can’t be very warm there,’ Besson said.

Without so much as a nod by way of greeting the man said: ‘It’s all right.’ He had a strong, somewhat nasal voice.

Besson said: ‘Filthy weather, isn’t it?’

‘It’s raining, all right,’ the man said. ‘We’ll have floods before it’s through.’

‘Think so?’

‘I don’t think, I know,’ the man told him. Then, gesturing with his hand, he added: ‘Besides, just listen. Hear that noise? It’s the flood building up.’

Besson strained both ears, without success.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ he said.

‘Try again. Listen carefully. There’s a sort of dull rumbling, down there, underground.’

‘With all these cars passing I can’t hear a thing.’

‘That’s because you aren’t used to it. But it does make a noise. It’s all the small water-channels in town rising. If they go on like that for another week, we’ll be flooded out.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I’m telling you. Here, shove your ear down against the pavement, you’ll hear it then.’

Besson knelt down and rested his head on the concrete surface. At once he caught the muffled, vibrating roar of the swollen water-channels. It was a most disturbing sound.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘There is a noise down there.’

‘It’s the beginning of the flood.’

For a moment neither of them said anything. Besson watched the man’s face. He had heavy, sanguine features, and an absolutely impassive expression. Not even his wrinkles stirred. Round his dark glasses, close to the eye-sockets, were several curious scars. They had a whitish, puffy appearance.

‘Have you — have you been doing this for long?’ Besson asked.

‘Doing what?’

‘Well I mean, selling papers.’

‘Oh, the papers. Four years and more now, yes.’

‘What did you do before that?’

‘Oh, I’ve had a go at everything. I’ve sold National Lottery tickets, and done odd jobs. But I prefer papers. They pay better, and you don’t need to keep shouting.’

‘Do a lot of people buy papers?’

‘Heavens, yes, indeed they do. But the Lottery, now, that’s something else again. There were days when it was all right, and others when I didn’t sell a single ticket.’

‘Just a matter of luck, h’m?’