Jean-Marie Le Clézio: The Flood

All the cold of earth and sky, too, had met and coalesced here. It had erected its wall, and from this flat surface there proceeded sharp rays like splinters of ice, which pierced through flesh and melted in the very centre of the wounds they inflicted. A new sensation, somewhere between sound, smell and light, had thus been conjured up in the heart of matter; its birth had been helped on and influenced by this confused throbbing rhythm, its heart-beat followed a detectable pattern, it glittered and sparkled with all the appearance of life, and seemed to endure for all eternity. It was an odd mixture of toughness and friability, a dead period between two mysterious dangers, religion perhaps. It was an invisible yet familiar halo, a child-like wavy line, something soft and out of a fairy-tale, like the aureoles worn by saints in holy pictures.

At the heart of this disintegration landscape still existed, a blend of memory and illusion. It bore traces of shadow, fragmentary exercises in relief, haloes the colour of which had faded after being washed clean a thousand times, over and over again. It was undulating, cracking up in all directions, a fleeting and unreal image dancing in a cone of light. First there was the street, just as it had always been, a perfect rectilinear figure, bare, frosty, shrunken. The steely hue of the macadam matching that of the sky. Trees tirelessly growing, dense and black against the snowy backdrop of the walls. Beneath the ground their roots stretched as far as their branches, continually exploring, digging between clods of earth, clutching at crumbling soil, seizing fragments of damp life still crawling with worms and decayed matter, letting them run through their fingers like the sea. Close to the fifteenth blackened plane-tree on the right-hand sidewalk steam was rising from a sewer-vent. The sound of empty cigarette packets being crumpled up mingled with that of footsteps crunching over the ground. A broken beer-bottle, lying beside the circular impression left by some ritually deposited dustbin, continued to rehearse every facet and variety of smashed-up ugliness in the world. At the centre of a smell approximating to that of butane, an aircraft inscribed its cross on the squared chart of the sky, making a thousand more, by implication, on each separate square, repeating the same game, for ever playing a winning gambit against itself.

Objects previously fleeting and transient were now caught photographically on the ground, against the walls, embedded, as it were, in any plane surface. An empty cigarette-packet, thrown down an hour and a half earlier, lay there on the tarred surface in the cold. Now it was no more than a bright blue patch, a sharply defined area in that vast expanse of brown, roughly rectangular, tending towards shapelessness at the corners, its outline finely sketched in as though with a pen. Any unevenness on it had become a shadow, and nothing more. One ran towards the centre, dividing the printed letters on the label; another towards the bottom left-hand corner; and another one, long and regular, lay striped across the right-hand side. No wind, however strong, could whisk this object away now, no rain could besmirch it, no brush could sweep it up and quickly dispose of it in some dustbin, already stuffed with old newspapers and orange-peel. Whatever anyone might do, whatever action might be taken by the old man in blue who would pass that way during the night, would make no difference. If this empty cigarette-packet were to be removed from its apparent position, it would instantaneously re-create itself, just as a playing-card, removed from the pack, reveals another one beneath it.

So it lay there, floating on that damp, ochre-coloured surface. Silence had invaded the world in a series of concentric circles. An ovoid sun shone back in an infinite series of reflections from the plate-glass: everything glittered, a bright whiteness of pain was all around. Something akin to an atonal musical theme — yet detached from its essential substance — scrawled itself in space like a line of writing, a public graffito endlessly repeating erotic or political catch-phrases. Some sharp, fine motif might well have created a pattern in this context. With the help of a brutal, emphatic rhythm, the concept could have advanced to the point of its own destruction, joining the general negation of colour and substance, mingling with the other sensations, moving forward and back in the pure, regular motion of water enclosed in a kettle, visible still by virtue of this seemingly logical succession of speed and inertia, poised now in equilibrium, tracing out a Byzantine-style decorative motif, sketching a helical pattern, a kind of spiral staircase for ever circling round the walls of a tower, replacing the visual image of darkness and light, concentrating more and more in intensity, yet at the same time expanding, merging with infinity, then coming into violent collision with the rampart of glass and polished steel, the mirror of crudeness and hate, till, stopping short with the final bar of the theme-tune, it planted itself in time like a fatal dagger-thrust, at one point and one only, in the criminal outrage of shattered tonality, with one sound uttered once and for ever, a cry quivering arrow-like at the very heart of the target. Distant horror had usurped the atmosphere. Objects recoiled centrifugally one from the other. Colours exploded like bombs and their fragments rose up in fine powdery clouds. Then they suddenly withdrew from the foreground, became thick curtains, swarms of birds or cicadas, and swiftly sank again in stormy tumult. Outlines broke up into hard, downward-leaning pothooks that flickered along the haze in endlessly repeated patterns. They had no more duration than a lightning-flash, but — like lightning — they burnt themselves permanently into the retina. Other substances, less easily identified, were exploding and volatilizing, a momentary flash, then gone: matter conceived of centrifugal and uncompoundable elements, of botched radiations, already destroyed, without essence or identity. An epoch too soon, or too late, metals came together in fusion. All the mute, colourless, non-material matter secreted by the human brain now floated free, purposeless jetsam.

So at the same time as the nexus of forces had gathered on window number thirty-nine, this mushroom-like growth was expanding over the empty cigarette packet. By now it was considerably more than an ordinary swelling; it had achieved something close to the configuration of a volcano, or the deadly folds and creases thrown up by an earthquake. Stealthily, possessed by the memory of that music and rhythm, of the colour blue, of various tastes and odours, tension had blown up an invisible balloon of air; and this heavy, swollen envelope was now encroaching on the centre of the macadam, oscillating over it like a giant bubble, quivering, turning purple, growling with fury. Then, abruptly, it burst, only to reform a little farther on, against the foot of a street-lamp, in the sky, on a balcony, at the top of some church steeple, over a streak of shadow, in the glint of a bicycle hub, at the heart of a chestnut-tree’s elusive scent, on the tip of an eyelid, in the belly of a pregnant woman — in any place where it could swell to bursting point, develop its egg, crush the inert flesh, sprawl over the mud, pollute clear colours, trouble the waters of the air, screw up any part of space, however infinitesimal, and blow up the blister which resembled that made by a red-hot iron.

It was as though the whole world had been laid out by way of public entertainment, with the elements dotted about in space like printer’s type. There were no more bicycles, no more old cigarette-packets, no more orange-peel. They all lay about en masse , just as though they had been tried, condemned, and executed: chill and melancholy objects, mere refuse now, immobilized by death.