Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

What he had to do now was to fight back, with all his strength: get out of this glittering morgue, to begin with, plunge right into the frozen depths of darkness and seek help there. Walk along the deserted boulevards under a mist of rain, in the grey light of the street-lamps; drink water from a public fountain, gaze up avidly at the invisible sky; then, after smoking a cigarette, stretch out on a bench under the most thickly-leafed tree in some public square, and wait. Then fall asleep, extinguish at one stroke all the lights that burnt in the chamber of one’s imagination — if need be smash the hot bulb hanging like a drop of fire at the end of its plaited cord — and plunge, tremulous with hope, into the heart of solitude, the solitude of the unknown.

Stretched out on his bench, head against unyielding wood, eyes wide open, Besson gazed up at the darkness. The branches of a laurel-tree spread their complex architecture over him, hung motionless in the cold air. Everything was dim, sombre. Sounds from the neighbouring streets had an odd muffled quality, that enveloped them like a shadow. There were no insects, no spiders even: the world had the kind of still, fixed quality one might expect inside a marble mausoleum. The night’s vast presence loomed above the earth, a vaulted and windowless dome. Its whole weight bore down on these minuscule creatures called men who set themselves up against it, yet it did not crush them. This gigantic floating roofage, more opaque than the sea itself, seemed to comprehend, even to love them. It too, no doubt, possessed a rhythm: not the rhythm of breathing, or heart-beats, but a heavy pendular swing that came and went in silence, permeated with non-presence, vibrant with vacancy, eternal and majestic music that only the infinite could have produced. All stars and planets, suns and nebulae were contained in it; the galaxies nestled in its bosom and were rocked to its measure. Delicate and ethereal, yet full of latent violence, the black dome embraced them all, revolved smoothly on its own axis, for ever turning, turning. This sphere of water without water, so ductile and glacial in motion, advancing and then — its thousands of silver-bellied fishes all atwinkle — retreating little by little upon itself, was prayer, was thought, was life itself. Shadow falling on shadow, a veil of blackness for ever spread and for ever opening, an intermittent umbrella, only vanishing in order to deploy new schemes and offshoots, a smooth dark cloud arching across the universe, for ever drawing up into itself, through a chill vortex, the substance of happiness and unhappiness; alert, uncluttered, watchful, drawing men one by one into the peace of its womb; night, the Great Mother.

François Besson experiences hunger, thirst, and loneliness — The smell of bread — The woman kneeling in the church — François Besson submits himself to God — His confession — The organs — How Besson learnt the beggar’s trade — The terrible look of the old woman who wished she could die

ON the tenth day, François Besson experienced hunger, thirst, and loneliness. The town was now a crazy maelstrom of hubbub and movement: he was jostled, banged to and fro like a ball, all but crushed to death. Four times he just missed being run down by cars and the walls of the houses leaned in towards him, as though about to collapse in a mountain of white dust and cockroaches. Every time he passed an old corner or alley-way, he would sidle into it and squat there for a while. But the feet continued their endless progress up and down the pavement, beating out a retreat on its surface. They were everywhere, like moving columns, or rather pistons, tapping the ground in regular time, rowing time, the paths they followed bristling with dangers and obstructions. The soles of their shoes resounded on the hard flat ground, and the staccato noise thus produced — first the dull thud of the heel stamping down, then the creak and scrape as the foot flattened out — could be heard far away down the street, growing louder, louder, till it was like a military march-past. The din would reach Besson, dislodge him from his place of concealment, march over his stomach, and then dwindle until it was lost in silence — an even more menacing effect. Footsteps, footsteps, nothing but footsteps, from left to right, from right to left, in one unceasing flow.

There were the cars, too, like great carnivores on the prowl: each one had a man in it, and bad luck to anyone who got in their way. A monstrous indifference had spread over the world, a sort of coldness that penetrated solid objects, that had permeated tree-trunks and car wheels and the pattern of the paving-stones that was painted over paint-work, mixed in with concrete, melted into spectacle-frames, riveted in steel girders.

On the big hoardings, where the posters were wrinkling now from a mixture of paste and rain, was a line of red-cheeked women, displaying cruel-looking rows of teeth, smiling with pale and cannibal mouths, while their dark eyes, capped by moustache-like sets of eyelashes, resembled so many giant hairy-legged spiders. Another advertisement showed a naked woman standing, half in shadow, beside a refrigerator, and the exaggerated curves of her body had a strangely obscene quality, as though she were a female of some quite different species in disguise.

At the back of one opalescent shop window were several wax dummies, frozen in all-too-human postures: Besson stopped and stared at these paralysed bodies, the crossed legs with their generous display of thigh, the hands that possessed such long, tapering fingers, the bosoms straining at the dresses that covered them, the bald heads masked by nylon wigs of various colours — blonde, auburn, raven, rose-pink. He felt a sudden desire to live with these imitation women as though they were the only real ones. He wanted to lie down on the white pebbles of those artificial ‘beaches’ at the back of shop windows, and stretch out under the blazing ‘sunlight’ of an arc-lamp. Here he could build himself a hut, amid the unstirring, luxuriant pot-plants, and abandon himself to these bright, shimmering colours, in a quiet, peaceful, prefabricated universe where silence was symbolized by a Veronese-green cloth of some plastic material, this closed-in cube redolent of such pervasive odours as those of moth-balls and powerful cheap scent. Perhaps he would choose a woman, too: say the one with green eyes and long blonde hair, who sat there, slightly askew, on a collapsible metal chair, smoking a dead cigarette, the black material of her draped dress revealing small patches of bare flesh, that ranged in colour from ochre to pale pink. Or perhaps the one who lay stretched out face downwards in the middle of the paper lawn, exposing her skin (already tanned the colour of milk chocolate) to the arc-lamp’s rays. Then there was the red-haired girl, who stood there, frozen in mid-step, smiling gently, her two dark-blue eyes, fringed with thick black lashes, staring out through the window. He would have liked them all. He would have spent hours caressing these tall, clean-limbed, elegant creatures, sliding their dresses off those rounded shoulders very carefully so as not to disarrange their wigs, or knock off a hand or foot. That’s what I’d like to do, he thought.

But outside, under that leaden sky, there was no chance of peace or relaxation. An army of legs continued to advance down the sidewalk, and the human bodies above them gave off odd flashes of brightness, fierce metallic reflections. Each individual had his armour. Hands glinted as they swung at the extremity of each arm; eyes shone with snow-white scleras, teeth sparkled, noses glowed, hair gleamed greasily, belt-buckles gave off little slivers of light. It was as though the sun had really come down on earth, or else had suddenly melted, behind that curtain of cotton-wool clouds, infusing the rain-drops with a shower of tinfoil and gold. The frozen air was as still and tangible as a sheet of plate-glass.