Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

A little while later François Besson found himself out in the street again, all alone in the midst of the hurricane. Fighting against the wind all the way, he went down through the town, street after street, till he reached the sea. The pavements were more or less deserted, and those few people he did meet looked like ghostly silhouettes: they could be seen struggling across the road at an intersection, or hugging the wall as they advanced, harrassed and wind-tossed fugitives, their clothes blown every which way, scarcely able to breathe. A litter of plaster and bits of wood and loose scraps of corrugated iron sheeting testified to the route the hurricane had taken. Besson followed this trail, leaning now forwards, now backwards, hair standing on end, raincoat flattened against his legs, the wind whipping round overhead. But he no longer took any heed of his surroundings: the shop-windows and mirrors, far from becoming dimmer, more opaque, had taken on an extra dimension of brightness, so much so, indeed, that it was as though reality were contained in them. No more stopping to contemplate the images, whether beautiful or hideous, that they presented: anyone who did so would be struck motionless, frozen, maybe turned into a pillar of salt.

One had to keep alert, too. All over town objects came raining down out of the sky: there was danger everywhere. People were liable to get hit on the head by tiles, or chimney-pots, or even by shutters that had been wrenched off their hinges. Besson kept close in against the wall, hands thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, collar turned up around his neck. The cars passing him in the road were travelling at reduced speed: some had their headlights switched on, others were using their windscreen-wipers. Café doors were shut, and many shop blinds had been ripped to ribbons. Whole newspapers went looping along the streets; ‘No Entry’ signs rattled themselves loose from their brackets. Refuse went skittering along beside the gutter, across muddy puddles, took off for some unknown destination.

It had not required much to sow the seeds of panic in the town. There had been a sudden, but quite peaceful, displacement of air. That was all. Just a little air in motion. But this air was hard and solid. It slammed into houses with the speed of an express train. It blew in violent gusts along the tarred surface of the roads, made skylights tremble, shook window-panes loose.

With considerable effort Besson made his way towards the sea-front. It was from this direction that the storm was coming. Already he could hear a low malevolent roar, a confusion of sounds that blended with the sheets of spray now being flung up behind the last row of houses, and spreading across the sky over the roof-tops like a great invisible curtain. Besson walked through one square in which the trees would bend over, cracking and splitting, then suddenly whip upright again with a great rustle of leaves. At one intersection he passed there was a crazy spiral of dust whirling round. A little further on, he reached the street which gave directly on to the front, and the wind took him slap in the face, like the wind of a big gun being fired. Besson stopped in astonishment, and felt a sort of ghostly hand thrusting his head back, trying to push its fingers into his mouth and nostrils. In order to recover his breath, he was forced to turn his back on the wind for a few seconds; this done, he set off down the narrow corridor-like street once more. At the further end of it, like a mirage, hung the pink and black cloud-patterns of the sky, veiled now by flying spindrift. He tacked from one sidewalk to the other, always moving slantwise, his right hand protecting his eyes. He travelled the hundred yards which separated him from the front without once looking up, his eyes fixed on his feet as they stumbled over the ground. At last he reached the end of the street, and the panoramic spectacle of the sea stood revealed before him.

The impact was total and instantaneous. As the wind slammed against his body, forcing him backwards, he saw the whole of that vast heaving expanse, mile upon mile of it, heard the continuous howling of the storm. From the mist-enshrouded horizon waves came rolling in one behind the other, surging, dipping, flecked with white crests that the wind scythed away as they moved, roaring on till they reached the high bastion of the promenade, then soaring up for the last time, up, up, hanging there briefly as though frozen, so that you could see the great hollow underside of the comber, gunmetal grey, glinting with wisps of straw, then falling in one swift movement, with a bang like a lid being slammed home. Each breaker began to rise far out in the bay, and came closer, closer, its muted thunder shaking the earth’s foundations as it moved, till it reached that point of the shore where Besson now stood: then the spray would rise vertically into the sky like a geyser, there would be that noise like a giant casserole being shut, and the spray would form a grey, powdery column that the air blew apart into shreds driving it towards the houses, fanning it out into quicksilver branches, dwindling now, stems, slivers, blades of grass, glittering yet lustreless strands of hair, threads of silver and silk that melted in the gusty air and, as they whipped along, let fall a few big, dirty drops of moisture, which evaporated as soon as they hit the ground.

After each wave broke, Besson’s hair and skin and clothes were drenched with spindrift. Tiny globules of spray were blown into his mouth as he breathed, so that he tasted salt and smelt the pungent odour of iodine. For a moment he remained like this, buffeted by the wind, taking an occasional step forward or back, struggling to maintain his balance. The town seemed quite dead. Black clouds scudded over it, heavy, charged with electricity, now and then emitting a great flash of pale sheet-lightning, which sent shadows and colours dancing across the storm-tossed front, as though a great conflagration had broken out on the further horizon.

The promenade was completely deserted. No cars ventured along the road because of the waves bursting over it. The shutters in the houses were closed and barred.

Sometimes a wave would rise up higher than the rest, and it looked as though the swollen waters were trying to regain possession of their ancient domain. Pebbles were scooped up from the beach and sent flying across the pavements or against the foot of the wall. One of them, about the size of an egg, came rolling in front of Besson. He stooped and picked it up, and tried to throw it back into that heaving mountainous mass of water, but the wind caught it in mid-flight and flung it back again. A sudden panic swept over Besson. He wondered whether he ought not get away from there, beat a retreat inland, seek refuge on some mountaintop. But he was determined to see more of what was going on. He struggled down to the shore, and painfully made his way along it, stumbling through puddles of dirty sea-water, drenched with bursts of spray, twisting his ankles on stones. At the far end of the beach there was a causeway, protected by breakwaters. Besson made his way towards it.

In order to get on to the causeway, he had to climb over a barricade with a notice that read: OUT OF BOUNDS: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The causeway ran a long way out into the sea. At its far end there stood a lighthouse, and a flagpole with a red flag flying from it. Panting from the wind, which took his breath away, sodden by bursts of spray, Besson began to walk along the causeway, clinging to the iron handrail. Here the sea was divided into two parts. On the right the great waves came piling in on top of one another, burst against the foot of the wall; on the left lay the harbour entrance. The water here was black, its surface churned up by long eddies that spread out like oil-slicks.