Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

‘Yes, but I can’t die yet, I’m too small, otherwise I’d grow up in a flash, just like that.’

‘And why aren’t you a chicken, do you suppose?’

‘Well, if I was a chicken, I’d run off and hide in the forest.’

Besson stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

‘At school,’ the boy went on, ‘there’s a little boy called Michel, and he’s got a dog called Paddy.’

‘What about it?’

‘When it’s dark, that dog, I mean, it looks just like a wolf.’

Besson said: ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’

‘When I was big I joined the army and got killed, twice.’

‘What about after you came to life again?’

‘I flew off in an aeroplane, very fast, and the plane went up in sky where you can’t see it, very high, ’ normously high. I nearly fell out. After that I swam through the sea to an island.’

‘What was this island called?’

‘ I don’t know. It didn’t have any name, that’s what.’

‘It didn’t have any name?’

‘Then I ate too much chocolate and got a tummy-ache and threw up.’

‘Do you know how to write?’

‘Oh yes, I can write — I know how to read, too.’

‘What sort of thing can you read?’

‘Well, the paper—’

‘What’s in the paper, then?’

‘Stories about animals — bear stories and giraffe stories and gazelle stories and dromedary stories and elephant stories—’

‘And duckbilled platypi?’

‘Yes …’

‘And hooded cassowaries?’

‘Yes…. And tigers and lions and panthers …’

‘Microbes, too?’

‘Yes, and lions and giraffes….’

‘And diplodoci and megatheria and labyrinthosauri….’

‘Yes, and tigers and lions—’

Besson sat looking at the child for a little after this, holding his gaze, absorbing and memorizing the soft lines of his face, the way his skull was ridged, those black eyes of his that possessed no depth of their own, simply reflected the external world. He studied his way of sitting and moving, which still had no real connection with that childish body, yet already displayed the mysterious consistency of action which characterizes any individual personality. At the end of this scrutiny Besson decided to go. He picked up the beach-bag, put on his raincoat, and said to the little red-haired boy: ‘Right, I’m off now. You be a good boy and play with your cars. When Mummy comes home tell her I’ve gone, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Got that?’

‘Yes,’ said the little boy.

Besson opened the door and walked down the stairs.

Outside the weather had more or less cleared up. The sky was still overcast, but the ground had dried, and a cold wind blew intermittently down the streets. Besson walked on, swinging his beach-bag, and keeping away from the main thoroughfares, where there were too many people. Without consciously intending to do so, he found himself making for the river.

Here the quais were lined with tumbledown shacks where the rag-and-bone men lived. Besson stopped at a snack-bar to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of lemonade. Beside him was a soldier, munching his way through two hunks of stale bread with sliced sausage between them. When he had finished his lemonade and sandwich, Besson paid and went over to the water’s edge, where he stood with his elbows resting on the balustrade. The river flowed swiftly past below him, in torrential and muddy spate; a smell of decaying vegetable matter rose from it. A little way upstream, the workers on the site were moving busily to and fro behind a rampart of stones. The cranes and bulldozers were not in use, and near the scaffolding Besson could see smoke rising from a brazier.

He strolled on up the quais until he came level with the building site. Then he stopped again and took a good look at what was going on. There were about a dozen workers, dressed in filthy old clothes, moving about over the pebble-ridges with shovels and buckets. Some were digging holes in the sand, others stood watching them and smoking. All this looked somewhat disorganized, and was probably quite useless; yet Besson found himself suddenly wanting to do as they did, to labour bent over a shovel, not understanding what he was doing, asking no questions, simply doing his share of the mysterious work which would end one day in a new ferro-concrete bridge. A few moments later a tramp trudged slowly across the site, dragging a sack stuffed full of old papers. No one paid the slightest attention to him, and he slouched on into the bushes, following the swollen line of the river round until he vanished behind a fence, perhaps into the mouth of a sewer outlet. It was an odd sort of desert world to find in the middle of this tough, overcrowded town; a kind of minuscule savannah which, after nightfall, became the hunting-ground of rats and stray dogs.

It was also a little frightening. It stood for depressing things like solitude, misery, or old age. The town, confronted with this frozen, refuse-strewn channel, and the muddy stream running through it, pressed in on it with the full weight of its disapproval, the concentrated violence of its window-studded walls. As he leaned on the balustrade Besson realized that he was exactly on the demarcation-line, the frontier. It cost him quite an effort to drag himself away and return to the centre of town.

Shortly afterwards, as he was crossing at an intersection, he noticed the crowd. He went over to find out what was happening, but at first could see nothing out of the ordinary. People had gathered along the sidewalk, all craning and staring in the same direction. It was only when he got right up to the thing they were looking at that he realized what was going on. Stretched out in the conduit beside the gutter lay a big yellow dog, obviously dying. It lay on its back with its head in the drainage course and its paws up in the air; it was panting away, open-mouthed, and so loudly that the painful rasp of each breath it drew was quite audible. Only a few yards away stood this group of men and women, quite still, just watching. Some others felt a certain ashamed embarrassment, and either stopped a good way further on, peering over their shoulders, or else lurked behind parked cars. Others again, who were driving past in their own vehicles, would slow down as they went by the spot where the dog lay dying. Besson took all this in very rapidly as he walked, shuddering, past the death-scene himself.

He saw the creature’s prostrate body, already very nearly the colour of bitumen, its stiffened paws still feebly quivering. He saw the long head, sunk in the filth of the gutter, and trying to breathe the sluggish air. There were no traces of blood on the dog’s lacklustre coat, but the effect was even more unpleasant: the skin hung slack and shapeless, like a half-empty sack. And in front of him stood these motionless, silent people. As he made his way to the edge of the pavement, Besson was suddenly hit by the ugly visual image this body presented, lying there sprawled on the ground, wrong side up, still choking for breath. Two glazed and mud-flecked eyes stared into empty space, and the curled tail hung down over the kerbside. Then from that gaping throat, which the air could no longer penetrate, there burst — mingled with dust and slobber — a faint, hoarse, plaintive cry that broke the silence hanging over the intersection. But this sound did not last long. The body continued to heave and pant, in the throes of the death agony now, and Besson moved swiftly away without turning back. He was not really moved, and yet for a long while afterwards, as he walked through the noise and bustle of the street, he could not forget one single detail of that tableau — the weirdly still body of the dying yellow dog, alone at his intersection, and the faces of the people watching.