Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Besson stayed where he was for some time, listening to the voice from the little white-and-gold plastic box. If his watch was right, it was half past three; but the clock that stood on the refrigerator, in the kitchen, made the time nearer four o’clock.

A little later the redheaded girl came in, and they talked for a while.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve sort of got used to seeing — to seeing you around.’ She used the familiar tu , and the word came out with embarrassed hesitancy.

‘What do you mean, seeing me around?’ Besson asked.

‘Well, here. I mean to say, you’ve become a feature of the landscape, haven’t you?’

Besson tried to make a joke of it, but felt depressed despite himself.

‘That’s serious,’ he said.

The girl fumbled in her apron pocket and fished a cigarette out of a new packet.

‘Got any matches?’ she asked.

Besson offered her his box. As she took it, she grasped Besson’s hand at the same moment, then let it go again. Her hair was tousled, and its flaming red texture seemed to be reflected in her face. Even her eyes had a red glint about them, under the fine sweep of her gleaming lashes. She smoked her cigarette, watching Besson all the time.

‘You’re not in the least like him,’ she said. ‘He was always chattering, always on the move, couldn’t keep still for a second. Whereas you — well, honestly, I’ve never seen a more inert character.’

‘Oh, I can move, all right,’ Besson said.

‘You? Why, you spend all day stretched out on that bed.’

‘It isn’t true. I go out a lot. I take plenty of walks.’

‘You don’t do a job of work, though. You don’t want to—’

‘Oh, I’ve done that, too. When I was a teacher. Off I’d go to school, day in day out, and rattle off the same stuff to a classroom full of idiots—’

‘Did they rag you?’

‘No, not really. At first I made a real effort and kept them under control. Afterwards I let them do whatever they liked. They used to read the comics. Some of them even smoked — those at the back of the class, anyway — and drank bottles of Coca-Cola. But they didn’t make any noise. I told them one day. Do whatever you like, but I’m not having any noise. I had a book to read, you see. I told them, if I hear so much as a whisper, I’ll paste the stuffing out of you. That was about it. I spent my period reading, and when I heard the bell, I just got up and went.’

‘You weren’t a good teacher.’

‘I was, you know. My lessons were fine. I prepared them very carefully. But the kids just weren’t interested.’

‘Were they all like that?’

‘No, of course not. There were two or three — at first they used to stay and ask me questions, after class. But I soon sent them packing and, they got bored. In the end they got to be just like the others.’

‘And what—’

‘There was one who did interest me, though. A boy called David. He showed me his poems, once. He was an unhealthy kid, with a lot of lines on his face for his age. He really was different from the rest of them. He wrote the weirdest poems, all about the story of the Creation. There was a character in them called Elleüs, if I remember rightly. It was all very much in the mythical tradition, but not bad stuff by any means. I don’t know what became of him afterwards.’

‘What about the others? Did they just play along?’

‘Three-quarters of them, sure. But I didn’t bother. It was their look-out. Luckily, in the end, the Head got wind of what was going on. He dropped in on the class one day, unannounced. Some of the boys were smoking, and others reading their comics. He slaughtered the lot of them — and I got the sack, on the spot. That’s all there is to tell about it.’

The redheaded girl giggled. ‘I’d love to have been there,’ she said.

Outside the wind was blowing more fiercely than ever, howling down the street, wrenching loose everything in sight. In the middle of the room, on the bed, Besson and Marthe felt as though they were in a railway carriage, travelling at full speed, and drawn by an invisible engine.

The redheaded girl said: ‘That’s funny. Do you know, just about the same thing happened to me, too. I used to work in the Post Office, you know. I managed to get a job as a telephone operator. Just part-time, in the afternoon. While I was working I left Lucas in a children’s nursery. I did the job any old how, no kidding, just hit or miss. And no one noticed a bloody thing. I had to make up my own mind that I’d got to get out — if I hadn’t I’d be there still. But after it was finished I felt so damned depressed. Told myself I was a failure, that there wasn’t a single thing in life I was capable of doing, all that jazz.’

She paused, and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her forefinger.

‘Well, maybe in the last resort it’s not all that important anyway,’ she said.

‘Maybe not,’ said Besson.

She hesitated a moment, and then, her eyes on the ash-laden tip of her cigarette, added: ‘The really important thing is to be happy.’

When Besson made no answer to this, she said: ‘What about you? Are you happy?’

He tried to answer the question seriously.

‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I’m happy, yes. Sometimes not. But it isn’t all that important.’

‘Yes, it is important. Just when do you feel happy?’ She looked straight at him as she spoke.

‘I’m not sure,’ Besson said. ‘It all depends. One fellow I used to know said that if you wanted to be happy, all you needed was a system.’

‘A system?’

‘Yes, you know — religious faith, Marxism, anything you like so long as it’s got a system behind it.’

‘But being happy’s a simpler matter than that, surely?’

‘Or more complicated. Maybe it’s having a real grasp of what you’re about — I mean, you’re in a car, and you know you’re in a car.’ He too used the familiar tu .

She said nothing for a moment, as though digesting this idea — or perhaps as though she had not understood it.

‘But don’t you think it’s easy to know what you’re doing?’ she asked him. ‘Surely it’s easy?’

‘No,’ Besson said. ‘But sometimes it happens.’

Her great deep liquid eyes gazed at him as though they would penetrate to the very depths of his soul. Besson felt a wave of shame surge up within him. In a somewhat lower voice she went on: ‘When I’m happy I know about it all right. But I never manage to work out why. I’m never happy when I’m alone, though. You can see that, can’t you? Well, at this moment, for instance, But I can’t figure out the reason—’ She paused, then added, nervously: ‘Maybe, it’s well, because — because of you—’

‘You’re wrong,’ Besson said.

‘Maybe,’ Marthe conceded.

But it was too late: her white face moved forward towards him, and as it approached — like a tragic mask, pierced by these two dark and heavy-lashed eyes — he felt as though it were an abyss yawning dizzily before him, a void, an emptiness that he could never fill. He tried to forget the eyes, but the head with its mass of tumbled hair settled on his chest, and he had to put his hands behind it, round the nape of the neck. He could feel the warm skin that lay over the vertebrae, and a little lower down a mole or beauty-spot. Her hands were clutching the material of his shirt, on either side of his ribs, fingers crooked and dug in, as though to claw the flesh. And the regular sound of her all-too-human breathing filled his ears, forcing him to breathe too, to be alive, to show awareness.

Then she raised her head, bent it backwards, let the daylight illuminate it — the tremulous, breathing mouth, the fine-bridged nose, pale cheeks flushed with pink, each tiny line and wrinkle, every spot, the fine down along the jaw-line, the pores in her skin that were like thousands of minuscule windows through which the air came and went. Her great staring eyes blurred, became patches of brown mist, floated towards one another, suddenly merged in the middle of her forehead, forming a moist circle within the unfocused framework of the mask, a circle charged with violence and humiliation and hope. Furiously he plunged into it, no longer hearing the fragmentary words that reached him, calling him by name; plummeted down into the troubled waters of dissension and unhappiness, let them close above his head.