Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

For a few brief moments he even felt something resembling a tragic recollection of sickness and death: the clutching hand of the unknown, of grim inevitability. No, perhaps rather a sense of remorse and uneasiness, sprung from the hidden origins of his life, and now surging up inside him, spreading along the network of his veins, passing through nerves and muscles, an obscure pain, a kind of spasm, burning, refining, making each individual cell a watchful and malevolent eye. It was like some fatal epidemic, bringing stark terror, frantic hatred, pangs of conscience, and leading to a terrible, ineluctable dénouement: plague, nervous leprosy, l’ Ainhum, le Goundou, le Kala-Azar , or indeed rabies:

Under normal conditions rabies develops very fast, and the patient therefore will suffer certain psychological symptoms at an early stage of the disease. He tends to exhibit signs of anxiety and melancholia, and to be obsessed by strange premonitions. Sleep becomes impossible for him. Very soon areas of numbness and irritation, together with an itching sensation, develop locally around the wound, which appears soft and swollen. Sometimes the first symptom of which the patient complains is a strange feeling in the throat, coupled with a sense of constriction in the windpipe.

The mental symptoms can be merely hysterical, and in many cases the disease first manifests itself after some psychological shock. Instances arise in which fear or terror can be regarded as genuine symptoms of this complaint. But generally speaking the most frequent initial indication is a rise in temperature. These symptoms may last for several days before the disease declares its true nature, but normally they last between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. Hydrophobia, the main symptom, is dominant in a majority of cases: this is caused by intensely painful spasms which occur in the deglutitive [swallowing] and respiratory organs whenever the patient attempts to eat or drink.

The pain produced by these spasms is such that in all likelihood for sheer intensity it exceeds all other forms of human suffering. This is why the smell, sight, or even sound of water or other liquids will suffice to bring on a crisis. When an effort is made to imbibe even a tiny quantity of liquid, it is instantly rejected, with a violent spasm of the throat and larynx. One characteristic symptom is the hypersensitive state of the nervous cells to external stimulants. A draught or breeze can produce convulsions: the reflexes of the skin and tendons become exaggerated, and the respiratory spasms of the thoracic muscles do not respond to tracheotomy. Solid nourishment can more easily be absorbed than fluids.

Once the disease is past the incubatory period it progresses rapidly. In many cases there tend to be periods of apparent improvement, which might lead one to believe a cure to have taken place, or, alternatively, to doubt the original diagnosis. The patient’s mind is in most cases exceptionally lucid, and he will give intelligent answers to any questions he is asked; but then his voice becomes inaudible and his speech incomprehensible. Certain phases of hyper-excitement may reach the level of actual insanity. The patient will smash and destroy everything within reach, although attacks on living persons are very rare. Sexual excitement, accompanied by priapism, is a common symptom. The voice becomes hoarse; the strange sounds produced during major spasms are what gave rise to the popular belief that ‘anyone with rabies barks like a dog’.

The spasms and convulsions become increasingly frequent, until the patient passes into a state of paralysis from which death results. The muscles that have been strained to the very limits of endurance now relax; the patient’s features lose that rictus of ultimate agony and terror they previously wore, and become quite expressionless. There is usually an excessive secretion of saliva, which the patient is incapable of controlling. Finally, respiration becomes irregular and weak, and after a while stops altogether. Before death there is a rise in temperature. Sugar and acetone are normally found in the urine. When the patient passes into a state of paralysis, his pupils dilate….

Afterwards François Besson returned once more to his parents’ house. When he rang the bell they had just sat down at table. They talked for a moment over the plates of steaming food, and Besson said he had one or two more things to collect from his room.

The room itself, he found, had been carefully tidied since his departure. There was a new bedspread, with small red and green patterns running across it. The floor had been swept and polished, the ashtrays emptied and washed.

Besson placed the drawer of his table on the floor and began to burn the papers in it one by one. He held each of them by one end, lit a match beneath them, and dropped them into a large glass ashtray. In this way he burnt everything: it took him the best part of the afternoon. Poems, love-letters, end-of-the-affair letters, handbills, lecture-notes on geography and Latin, algebra problems, sketches of naked women, photographs, vaccination certificates, all the accumulated scribblings and confessions of many years. Not all the papers burnt in the same way. Some flared up and were gone in a flash, giving off a quick wave of heat as they did so. Others went on crackling for quite a time as the match-flame licked up at them; these ones burnt slowly, with a great deal of smoke. The fire crept up these white squares of flimsy, obliterating the handwriting, twisting up the lines of the sketches, bright red patches spreading, slowly guttering out in a black and acrid cloud. The pages torn from pornographic magazines were thick, glossy sheets, which never burnt through properly, so that an irregular bite, ringed with sooty foam, would appear in the middle of some lissom beauty’s body. To keep the flames alight you had to supply extra fuel underneath — say a handful of light, scented airmail letters. Sheets of onion-skin paper went black in a second, but on the fossil and all-too-fragile page thus produced you could still see little serpentine lines of lettering against the black cindered background. The flames devoured everything, without distinction or regret, wrinkling up fine parchment, melting glossy surfaces, volatilizing celluloid; and from the tiny brazier there rose a spiral of hot smoke, in which thoughts and acts were reduced to mere ephemeral grey particles floating on the air.

Each time the ashtray was full Besson emptied it out on the floor. Then he patiently began to fill it again, burning sheet after sheet of paper. In order to economize on matches, he watched for the moment when the fire was about to go out, and then presented the guttering flame with a fresh victim.

Soon the air was thick with stinking, acrid fumes that left Besson’s throat sore. Tiny fragments floated up to the ceiling and then eddied down again, settling on his hair and hands and clothes. But Besson did not open the window. Bent over the ashtray (which was conveniently placed on the floor) he feverishly gathered fresh piles of paper as fuel for the red and yellow flames. The glass walls of the ashtray were now covered with a kind of orange glue, where the fire touched them, and round the rim blue tongues of heat flickered from tiny piles of soot.

Sweat was beginning to run down Besson’s face and off his hands; the fire blazed up, sank, blazed up again, sank once more; the baking hot air scorched his eyeballs, the smoke deposited its stinging cinders in his throat. Now and then a spurt of flame came up and burnt his fingers, but it was as though he felt nothing. He went on fuelling his bonfire, reducing all the papers in his room to malodorous ashes. There was nothing worth saving, nothing worth reading. Every item belonged in this crazy holocaust, in the popping, crackling, flaring eddies of red-hot flame, shot through with spurts of green, in the warmth and light and fanaticism of those greedy tongues of fire dancing over the floor. Besson no longer even bothered to empty the ashtray now; papers rolled blazing across the room, setting fire to others as they went. Besson threw on whole packets at a time, and the fire grew in size, sending up a high corona of flame. The smoke thickened into a sticky black consistency, rose in a single column that only began to spread out somewhere near the ceiling. Unable now to make out anything in this dim fog except the outline of the burning mass, Besson began to throw papers and books into the heart of the flames. Novels, dictionaries, travel-books, philosophical treatises — all vanished into that living gullet, which consumed them instantly.