Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

The light came straight into the room, without making any shadows. Besides the drumming of the rain, various other odd noises were audible: whimperings, dull thuds, creaks, whirrs, whistles. Men’s voices, the screams of children. Bottles rattling in crates. Heavy bangs above the ceiling or under the floor. Scraping and shuddering noises of unidentifiable origin, a pebble rattling down noisily in some area, windows vibrating as a truck passed by. Susurrus of tyres. Water gurgling down the gutter, the pistol-shot banging of front doors, a self-starter coughing into life. All this was normal, absolutely normal, a rich and confused medley of sound ebbing and flowing like a pendulum. Time passed softly and easily with these noises to help it. It was rather like being asleep.

Nothing in particular happened. Out of the street or secluded behind closed doors the little sounds continued, never suggesting anything but the existence of life — life in miniature, tittuping along, nibbling at the edges of things, consumed by a vague itch yet unable to let go properly.

Above Besson’s head the ceiling stretched motionless, a sure fixed point, and in the cube of bright air below it an unlit electric light bulb hung on its cord. The walls of the room were just there , they took no action. They were quite content to be walls, good solid walls and nothing more. Yet there could be little doubt that a constant process of attrition was at work on them, crumbling away their substance, sending out clouds of white dust from them. Damp got under the yellow wallpaper and quietly worked it loose from its paste, millimetre by millimetre. Everything looked so strong and permanent, yet it was a virtual certainty that in two or three hundred years there would be no surviving trace of this room. There would just be an old hollow ruin, looking as though it had been eaten away by cancer, in the middle of a thorny, overgrown waste lot.

But for the present the room was peaceful enough, with hardly anything happening in it. Besson sat there for a while, elbows resting on the table. He carefully scrutinized each separate object, down to the last sheet of scribbled manuscript. He took in the penknife, its blade still open, and the box containing 50 drawing-pins, and the bottoms of paper cups, and the keys, and the empty inkwell. Periodicals lay about everywhere, with crumpled pages and minus their covers. A schematic swan swimming on a matchbox. Besson read everything, in an unhurried, almost hypnotic manner. Everything he looked at was strange, all the words printed on the white pages seemed full of trickery and illusion. On the left-hand corner of the table, beside a stub-crowded ashtray, a dictionary lay open at page 383. Besson began to read the catch-words, softly at first, then progressively louder and louder:

Helium

Helix

Hellene

Hellenic

Helleniser

Hellenism

Hellenist

Helminth

Helvetian (m. or f.)

Helvetian (adj.)

Hem!

Hemacyte

Hematite

Hematocele

Hematopoeisis

Hematosis

After this he leant forward and picked up a paper. He unfolded it slowly, found the Amusement Page, and then spread it out on the table. The big sheet of newsprint left smudges on his fingers. It was covered with a number of strange drawings, with captions written underneath them. Here, enclosed in their black frames, were men wearing white tunics, armed with spears and shields, or inscrutable women, draped in décolleté robes, their faces heavily made-up and their long tresses studded with outsize jewels. At the top of the page, above the drawings, was written:

The Empress of the Desert: Zenobia of Palmyra

There were other strip-cartoons running across the same page, showing bald men in space-suits shooting other men with death-ray guns. Underneath these, again, was a group of men and women standing in a sun-lounge, with lots of big windows. Two of them had white clouds billowing from their mouths, with the following legends written on them:

‘That’s great, Steve. You take Thompson in the Bentley. Sir Bernard and I will stay here and wait for instructions from the boss.’

‘O.K. We’ll go as far as Stevenage on the main road. That’s forty miles from here. By the way, what about the man watching the house?’

At the bottom of the page there were also various games and riddles and one or two jokes, this kind of thing:

‘I’m a real paragon,’ a man wrote in his private diary. ‘I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t go to the theatre or the cinema, and I’m unswervingly faithful to my wife. I never so much as look at another woman. I go to bed every evening at eight o’clock, and get up and go to work at dawn. Every Sunday I attend church. But it’s all going to be very different once I get out of jail….’

When Besson had finished looking at all the pictures, and had read every caption, he took out his ball-point pen and did the crossword. He studied the clues for a moment, then began filling in the empty squares. Three across was ‘Signifies proximity’; Besson wrote ‘Here’. ‘Close pair’ produced ‘Tights’. ‘All the clues there if you follow them’ suggested ‘Thriller’. Ten across was ‘Spy with the field variety?’: Besson filled in ‘Glasses’. ‘Mutual absorption’ turned out to be ‘Osmosis’. Thirteen across, ‘Roussel had them all dancing right through his party’, defeated him. 1‘La Fontaine made one for the nymphs of Vaux’—‘Elegy’. He turned from Across to Down. ‘Completely effaced’ must be ‘Erased’, while ‘Accustomed to a new way of life’ was ‘Acclimatized’. Four down, ‘bare horror’, produced ‘Stark’, but ‘Scarcely more than skin and bone’ he left blank. ‘Saurians from tropical America’ were ‘Iguanas’. Thirteen down, ‘Arab water-hole’, was ‘Oasis’. ‘A hundred down here in Paris produces Roman dual’: Besson wrote ‘ii’. Nine down, ‘Money’s the surest one’, turned out to be ‘Investment’. ‘Sometimes broken in conversation’ was ‘Thread’.

Besson passed a good half-hour in this way. Then he got up and walked across to the right-hand window. It was a large window, taller than it was wide, with eight panes of glass mounted in a brown wooden framework. The fourth pane up was cracked from top to bottom. The sixth vibrated very faintly. Besson looked out through the third at the houses and street, the passing scene before him. Through the fine drizzle tiny figures, old and young, men and women, were hurrying to and fro. Cars slid to a stop at the cross-roads, changed gear, moved off again. From time to time someone would sound his horn, a sharp and generally brief blaring note which produced no echo. It was a familiar and superficially peaceful scene. Yet all the same there was something disturbing about it. To be high up in this apartment block offered security of a kind, but not for ever. The tide of activity gradually surrounded you, cut you off without your noticing it. Its clamorous, eddying flow constantly wore away the walls of the building, rubbing off fragments of plaster, tiny bits of stone, loose flakes of ochre-coloured paint. These men skulking along the sidewalks were not as inoffensive as they looked. Their lowered heads concealed murderous thoughts, and it would take very little — a revolution, for instance, a simple upsurge of mob fury — to bring them out. They would advance like a horde of voracious ants, and gather in crowds under the windows, shouting and waving their fists, screaming for blood. They would surge up every stairway, break down all the doors, and strike without mercy, again and again, great razorish slashes, till finally each head fell free from its body, the neck one red and gaping wound, the life-blood ebbing away.