Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Down the alleys between the stalls the crowd ebbed and flowed, wandered in all directions, trampling over old cabbage leaves and scraps of newspaper. Old men with string bags stood examining the vegetables or counting through the wads of filthy notes in their wallets. Women went to and fro dragging children after them by one hand, or stopped, stooping down, to cram their purchases into their shopping-bags. A pregnant girl in a flowered maternity smock wandered slowly along the row of stalls: she had dirty frizzed-out hair that the wind perpetually blew forward into her face. A little further on was a group of men in berets, sitting on upturned empty crates, smoking and gossiping. From time to time, in some corner of the alley, a mangy mongrel could be seen licking its paws. Large numbers of ragged old down-and-outs, backs bent, went round picking up the rotten vegetables that had been thrown out of the crates, and greedily stuffing them into their gunny-sacks. There was one very ancient and very dignified-looking little man, with a slightly nervous air, who tittuped along in front of the stalls, from time to time snatching a potato or pear with a quick, clumsy gesture, and instantly popping it away into his sack. When he saw Besson watching him, he turned his head away, more nervous than ever, and began to stare up at the roof of the market with a kind of terrified and angry determination. He remained in this pose for several seconds, not budging an inch, and then resumed his peregrination past the stalls, with a comic air of would-be unconcern.

Besson walked from one end of the covered market to the other. After he was out in the street again — and despite the fresh air and busy traffic — the sickening smell of early vegetables and fruit pursued him for a long way.

Later, much later, when the whole town was awake, Besson walked round to his parents’ house. On the way he met someone he had known previously, when he was working at the private school. They stopped and chatted for a moment on the kerb. Besson would have liked to continue the conversation for much longer, since this he found an admirable way of passing the time; but the other person was apparently in a hurry, and after exchanging a few banalities they parted.

A little further on, while crossing a square, Besson caught sight of the river. It was quite a large river, that ran in a straight line through the centre of the town, passing beneath a series of bridges and esplanades. The closer he got to the riverside quais , the louder grew that dull monotonous roar he could hear, with increased volume and more deeply resonant note. It was like haze made audible: what in fact produced it was water rasping over wide-spreading the shingle bottom. A vivid sound, this, alive with gurgles and ripples and a booming undertone which hinted at reserves of power; a sound that mingled with the general hubbub in the streets and flowed down unceasingly toward the sea. Besson was intrigued by the noise; he walked over to the railing and took a good look at the river.

He saw a single unbroken stretch of water, flowing between rampart-like banks. On both sides, to left and right, there was a kind of stony embankment, overgrown with weeds and bushes. Such was the course the water followed in its long journey from the hinterland, bearing with it the cargo of driftwood and silt it had eroded from various mountain-sides en route . In the centre of the channel the river flowed deep, and was a beautiful dark blue, scored lengthwise with fine ripple-marks: it moved swiftly, with a soft, muted roar, and one got the impression that this was all the river there was, this bankless stream flowing down to its outfall, this heavy, swollen, full-blown effluence. Hardly an eddy to be seen. Only this lane of water gliding past, level and unbroken, except where the bridge-caissons divided its flow each ringed with a small collar of foam.

On either side of this central current the river was a dirty greenish colour, seething over pebble-ridges and round fallen tree-trunks. Beyond lay the shore, reduced to a narrow line of shingle on the right-hand side of the river, but spreading out to form a wide ripple-marked expanse on the left. Further off still, above the quais , were rows of houses, with leprous, peeling walls and loose ends of string dangling from their balconies. Below the houses several sewer-mouths were visible, round black holes slowly dripping their contents on to the river-bed. Between these piles of waste-matter, where rats and mongrels were always nosing around, the water lay in stagnant puddles, the sky reflected from its surface.

Besson scrutinized every detail of this scene with the greatest care. His eye travelled right along the line the river took through the town, on to the valley which, century after century, it had slowly hollowed in that hard, mountainous landscape. He noted all the colours floating on the surface of the water, each tiny cats-paw of wind, every tuft of grass being carried down, slowly or at speed, by the current; the various mounds of shingle, the gravel strand with its border of sticky yellow foam, the shell-craters hollowed out by successive flood-tides, and now filled with rainwater. He listened to the sound the waters made as they plunged through the hollow bowl of the valley: a powerful, solemn note, a deep and colossal organ-boom. He also heard the rhythmic chuckling of its eddies and whirlpools, the curious hissing note, pchchchchch , produced by hundreds of small cascades falling one on the other. He travelled over this cold, deserted no-man’s-land, with its myriad reflections, as though the balustrade on which he was leaning had been the bridge of a ship. He scrutinized every cranny, each damp black hole, each hollow with its layer of rotting detritus, the piles of polished pebbles, dulled under their layers of dust. He could smell the depressing acrid-smoke odour given off by long-dead fires, and his nostrils also picked up the powerful, subtle, carrion stench (it might have been wafted from the decaying corpse of a giant lizard) which the sewerage outflow spread abroad. The wind was blowing in the same direction as the natural flow of the river, and vanished somewhere out to sea. Here all movement was a retreat, a flight from the point of source, a continual downstream progress where all individual elements merged in a loud, abrasive, roaring confluence that sounded, weirdly, like some squadron for ever at the gallop.

He ought to stop here for a while too, he thought, build himself a hut of damp driftwood, with an old packing-case to sit on, and just wait until he was left all by himself with only the running water for company. Here, in this desert at the very heart of the town, surrounded by invisible men leaning over the various bridges, he would pass all his time just watching the river, learning to love it, till he felt its presence in every movement he made, however slight, as though it were some living creature.

Higher upstream, near the outskirts of the town, there stood on the river-bed a crane, two or three tractors, some bulldozers, and a cement-mixing machine. Besson could even make out the shapes of various men by the water’s edge, all busily occupied. He turned to a loafer who was leaning on the balustrade close by him, and said: ‘What’s going on down there?’

The man removed a damp cigarette-end from his mouth and said: ‘It’s the bridge. They’re building the bridge.’

‘Oh yes?’ Besson said. ‘Many thanks.’

The man put the cigarette-end back in his mouth.

By now it was not far off midday, and Besson set off once more in the direction of his parents’ house. When he rang the bell it was his father who answered the door. Besson had to explain his actions, and this involved a certain amount of lying: he said he was going to stay with friends for a few days, and had come to collect his things. He got out a blue canvas beach-bag, and packed it with his electric razor, his toothbrush, a raincoat, a clean shirt, and two or three other unimportant objects. This done, he said goodbye to his father, and walked out into the street again. His mother was out shopping in the neighbourhood, but he did not wait for her. Instead he made a bee-line for the redheaded woman’s apartment.