Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Like some point of blind intensity, there was created, at the very heart of the uproar, a zone of calm and silence in which, for some few seconds, everything was destroyed, annihilated. But the curse never ran out, the cycle of respiration began all over again, just as before, without haste or exhaustion. Besson felt that in some way he was entering upon eternity. To avoid death was a simple matter: all one needed to do was to breathe in this special way, long slow powerful breaths that followed the rhythm of the sea.

To join the waves in their struggle against the earth’s bastions, against scurrying, hurrying mankind, whose tiny hearts always raced madly, like a shrewmouse’s.

Soon one’s whole body would begin to follow this respiratory rhythm. The skin would turn cold and colourless, like water, and blood would pulse slowy through one’s veins, streaky, bubbling, saline, ebbing and flowing in the circulatory system according to the same soft rhythm, flux and reflux. Soon thoughts would no longer roam freely through one’s mind, but simply float there in situ , captive and unchanging, like sea-anemones, for ever digesting the minute scraps of matter around them: inexhaustible thoughts, without verbal form, bereft of desire, thoughts that all conveyed an identical message, though just what this was it was impossible to know for certain. ‘Light and shadow’, perhaps, or ‘singing singing’, or even ‘God’.

Eyes would no longer see, nor ears hear; the skin would no longer react to cold or sunlight, nor the stomach be conscious of hunger. All that would exist would be the inner self, the inner self that contained the heaving sea, the wind in its courses, the scudding clouds; the inner self that was absorbed in its proper task of respiration. Every organ would breathe in unison — heart, intestines, private parts, brain, throat, even down to the cells of the skin and each individual granule of bone. The body would inflate itself and breathe out in time with the natural scene around it, endlessly, like some gigantic lung. Here was the secret of eternal life: respiration. Breathe, never stop breathing, breathe in harmony with the rest of creation, breathe in the sea, breathe in the heart of the living rock, in the nimbus of clouds, in the midst of that black void where the galaxies wheel through space. Breathe according to the rhythm of truth .

The minutes passed, and at last the wind fell. The sky was now completely covered with thick cloud. Darkness was falling on the shadowy town, filling the streets through which Besson walked. Silence had returned, and the sidewalks were crowded once more. through brightly-lit shop windows various displays of goods caught the eye — fabrics, furniture, decorated pastries. Besson stopped a moment at a window behind which there stood two mechanical birds, done up in green and red plush respectively, both bobbing up and down, clacking their beaks, with much frenzied flappings of wings. Behind the birds was a girl in an armchair, smoking a cigarette and staring in front of her with vacant, heavily made-up eyes.

A little further on, as he was passing a public park, Besson heard the leaves begin to rustle in the trees. A breath of wind stirred the branches, and the first drops of rain started to fall, plopping heavily on the asphalt. Then, high above the town, the black clouds suddenly exploded, and water came slamming down with a noise like a thunderclap. Besson ran across and took shelter in a doorway, and stood watching the avalanche descend. The rain fell at a very slight angle, in thick straight voluted lines, as though the sky were a vast colander.

The gutters soon overflowed on to the sidewalks, washing away masses of dead leaves and bits of paper. Water from the roof-tops came crashing down through every drain-pipe. The whole town was built on a slope, and the water went streaming over concrete and asphalt and tiling as though drawn towards a great hole somewhere near the bottom. Moisture dripped from every object in sight: the impression it gave was not so much that it had dropped out of the sky, as that it was there already, embodied in all matter, and had been given some magic order to distil itself. It came bursting out of everything — leaves, posters on hoardings, cracks in the pavement, manhole covers, even from people’s skins. It was like sweat, the kind of sweat that comes streaming through every dilated pore when one’s running a high temperature; an endless flow, from the fountain gush to the slow trickle, drop by pearly drop, pitting all its soft and pliant strength against the hard element of stone, the air’s impenetrability.

Above the line of trees in the park Besson could see the still dark sky. The roofs of the houses round the square stood out very pale against it, and the television aerials gleamed as though coated with silver paint.

Sounds still existed, but they were no longer clear-cut: the downpour had cast a halo about them, they shone in a brief and murmurous aureole before being drowned and snuffed out. Besson breathed in the odour of damp earth through the covering layers of bitumen. He could also smell the current of fresh air coming down from the upper atmosphere, laden with ozone. He strained his ears to catch any echo, from behind the rampart-like rows of houses, of the river’s roar as it rose higher and higher, milk-coloured now, washing down clouds of earth and turf in its spate. He even opened his mouth to catch and taste the flavour of the rain.

But, most striking of all, at this precise moment — without any visible hint of how the effect was produced, there came a bright triple crack in the expanse of jet-black cloud, stretching half-way across the sky, from zenith to horizon. Clear-cut, unmoving, as though traced with a crayon, a pattern of branching veins, this sudden phenomenon broke through the obscurity with such pure unwavering brightness, so intense and snow-white a degree of incandescence that it almost ceased to be light. It hung there, its three-timed fork branching down towards the earth, shattering the sky, carved upon the firmament, like some gigantic root, and at that moment nothing else existed: the sky and horizon, the surface of the town, seas and rivers — all vanished in an instant, shattered into a thousand fragments, were enveloped in darkness. Nothing remained but this vast and silent testament to the presence of electrical power, this divine and blinding emblem of whiteness, beauty, peace; the great unmoving design that had annihilated all else, in whose light years and centuries of effort and striving would find illumination, would be impregnated with violence, penetrated by happiness. Cold and incandescence here blended in a single flashlight crack, one scored line of brightness that had photographed the entire world.

When this moment was over — a second that felt like infinity — the thunderclap followed. It rumbled, hesitated, then crashed down over Besson, making the very earth tremble. The rain now began to flow more freely, flooding the street with its beneficent tide: it was rather like the sensation of opening a door wide to let some fresh air into a firelit room — or warmth into a cold one.

François Besson runs away — Do Indians kill wolves? — The ogre — People watch the big yellow dog dying — Description of rabies — François Besson burns his papers — In the canyons of the town — A missed meal — The sphere of water without water

ON the ninth day François Besson decided to leave Marthe’s house. There were several reasons for this:

(1) He was getting fond of the girl.

(2) He was tired.

(3) He wanted to see what was going on elsewhere.