Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

On the way he bought an illustrated comic for the little boy. He got there in time for lunch. The girl didn’t ask too many questions and when the meal was over, she let Besson lie down on the bed and have a siesta. He spent the rest of the day reading the little boy the story in the comic. It was all about a cowboy called Texas Jack, who was such a dead shot with a revolver that he could knock nails into a plank from ten paces. His enemy was a man called Hobbes, who owned several ranches, and had raised a posse of gunmen to settle Texas Jack’s hash. He had even hired the services of an Indian half-breed called Rattlesnake, whose speciality was throwing little knives poisoned with rattler’s venom. During the night Rattlesnake got into the house where Texas Jack was sleeping, but he mistook the bedroom and was on the point of killing another cowboy. Texas Jack caught him just before he could throw his knives. Rattlesnake had left them lying on a table, blade turned towards him. Texas Jack fired: the bullet struck one of the knives on the handle, and sent it flying straight at Rattlesnake’s throat. The Indian died instantly. Then there was a shooting-match with Hobbes’s posse, and finally the villain himself was taken prisoner and handed over to the sheriff.

For the following week, the comic announced another episode in the adventures of Texas Jack: this one was called ‘Death in Gold Nugget Valley.’

The storm — The wind — François Besson and Marthe talk together — What might have been the beginning of love — A walk through a hurricane — The sea — How to become immortal — The pattern of a lightning-flash

ON the eighth day a storm blew up over the town. The wind had come from the east. After travelling across the sea all night, it reached the houses and the riverside early that morning. It burst furiously on all these stone and concrete canyons, smashing against the façades of buildings, bending the trees, driving down on the ground in whirling eddies of dust, whipping up the breakers so that they surged high along the line of the groins. Invisible ramparts of air were set in violent motion, with a long sinister wailing sound that filled the chimney flues. Clouds stretched out across the sky, shredded into wisps, acquired long off-white tails reaching from one horizon to the other. Doors began to creak softly; and on each closed shutter or pane of glass there was a feeling of pressure , as though some gigantic panting beast were out there on the other side, pushing and grinding at it with vicious tentacles. All along those worn, crumbling walls, loose bits of stucco tore free and plunged groundwards into the street, falling very fast, leaving a thin trail of dust behind them. Scraps of paper, leaves from the plane-trees, odd bits of material would go spinning into the air, as high as the upper storeys of the surrounding houses then fall back, then whirl aloft once more, as though they had suddenly gone mad. Various objects were blown off roofs and balconies. Sudden whirling columns of air formed at street intersections, weird raging maelstroms that — revolving round a still point at their base — hollowed out deep craters in the lifeless dust. At the very centre of these inverted vortices was a point of concentrated nothingness, which moved with great precision, thrusting its single upturned eye down over the surface of the earth. Through the wind’s steady whistling the whole town resounded with a series of cracks and bangs and underground rumblings. When the storm was right over the town, the wind began to launch its assault on the houses. Regularly, several times a minute, an airy avalanche would roar down against walls and windows, in an effort to penetrate, to breach the defences. It did not last long, but each time it happened — after a second or so of lowering silence — it felt as though every vertical object were shuddering and cracking up. Even the thickest walls, great blocks of ferro-concrete, roofs, colonnades and all, would quiver in unison under this violent onslaught. Gaping holes, swollen with liquid gas, opened their mouths wide. The corridors of the streets, every gap and crack, yawned open for a brief moment, while there surged into them, torrent upon torrent, this bestial thing that had come from so far to be their conqueror. From time to time, between one squall and the next, a flight of pigeons would take off and vanish in the mazy back-streets, fleeing the invisible enemy, searching desperately for any hiding-place — under the guttering, beside a balcony, in the lee of some thick bushy tree, where these lethal attacks could no longer find them. People, too, were trying to escape. They were running along the pavement, sodden clothes plastered to their bodies, hair all anyhow, eyes red from the dust that had blown into them. They would take shelter for a moment in doorways, wait till the gust died down, and then stagger on their way, struggling clumsily against the heavy pressure of the atmosphere. Slowly, far above them, a jet aircraft forced its way through the wind. Women’s skirts lifted like wings, giving fleeting glimpses of pale, lardy thighs.

For more than an hour Besson stayed in the room, listening, while the storm rose to its climax. He saw the sky clear, close in, and then lighten again, enough to let the sun’s rays struggle through. He heard the wind smash against the walls like a battering-ram, again and again, the whining, slamming rumpus of its impact. Outside even the daylight now seemed unsure of itself: it wavered intermittently, sometimes becoming so dim and overcast that one felt the flame had finally gone out altogether. But then it would pick up again, suddenly blaze out more brightly than before, flooding walls and pavements with sheets of light against which the shadows stood out black and intense.

It was comfortable up there in the room; one felt truly sheltered and protected, it might have been a ship’s cabin. The air was tranquil here, nothing stirred, no fear of stifling. The flies were all asleep, upside-down, clustering on the light-bulb or hanging from the tulle curtains.

Besson stretched out on the bed. In the kitchen the redheaded girl was busy ironing, a green apron tied round her waist. Occasionally she, too, cocked an ear at the noise the wind was making against the windows. Finally she turned on her transistor radio, and the flat was flooded with music — a cinema organ recital that floated in the air, nasal, monotonous, vulgar, sometimes rising in a run of excruciating trills, then falling back, a blurred mess of sound, only to repeat the pattern once more: endless wearisome reiterations, a kind of recurrent stutter that swathed you from head to foot, paralysed not only your movements but also your speech, your very though-processes, and finally toppled you into a kind of shallow black hole, quite helpless.

Besson heard the music right through to the end. When it stopped there was the sound of a woman’s voice, talking fast and volubly, but the radio was too far away for Besson to make out what she was saying. When the voice ceased, there was silence for four or five seconds, broken only by the crackle of static. Then came more music, but swing this time, and a woman singing to its accompaniment. The song had a slow, muted tempo, occasionally rising to a harsh crescendo, sometimes lingering softly on one word, sustaining the note. Besson tried to catch what the singer was saying, but the most he picked up were single words or mere broken syllables: ‘… me …’, ‘… I … flowers … ow ers … ’, ‘… told me …’, ‘… you knew …’, ‘… me … or people …’ ‘…ated …’, ‘… fi-i-ire …’

The song ended with a most curious sound, a sort of low-pitched throaty buzz that vibrated in the air for a long time, together with the accompaniment, and then stopped, abruptly. There followed another three or four seconds of crackling silence, and then the same voice as before began to speak again, very fast, telling an incomprehensible story in its unknown tongue. What it actually said was more or less as follows: ‘Listen, ladies, don’t worry about wind and rain and seasonal inclemencies of that sort, you can tame them, yes, you can make them your best friends, the most reliable aids to your beauty, if you just know how to get the better of them, these furious elements will freshen up your complexion, put a bright sparkle in your eye, fill you with joie de vivre , but if on the other hand you don’t take them seriously you’ll wish you had afterwards, they’ll dry up your skin and ruin your delicate complexion and give you premature wrinkles, in fact they’ll treat you as enemies, they’ll be absolutely pitiless, so get the better of this severe cold and wind and rain, ladies, learn to preserve your beauty just as you preserve your health and happiness, and to achieve this, make a rule of using Pollen Face Cream every morning, Pollen, exclusively manufactured by Boyer-Vidal, which will keep the proper quota of moisture in your skin all day, Pollen, the face cream for every occasion! Good shopping, ladies!’