Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Towards midday Besson felt the first pangs of hunger. He had eaten nothing since the previous evening, and had spent his last remaining coins on a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. All around him a faint smell of cooking filtered out through the closed windows of the houses he passed. People were having lunch now. Whether at home or in a restaurant, everyone was sitting down to a heaped plateful of food, was working through slices of savoury meat, potatoes, salad, spoonfuls of spinach purée. Food was slipping smoothly down countless oesophagi, a succession of saliva-lubricated little balls. Blood went surging round the stomach, jaws champed steadily.

After the earlier hubbub and bustle, from noon on the streets gradually began to empty. Life became more and more centred on the kitchen, with its clatter of cutlery and casseroles. There was a somnolent feeling in the air now, reminiscent of an afternoon siesta. Even the animals had vanished. They were either raiding the garbage-cans in people’s back yards, or else prowling around the family dinner-table, jaws wide open, eyes bright with anticipation.

Behind them they had left this grey deserted wilderness, over which the wind still blew fitfully. The streets seemed endless, the sidewalks were bare. The invisible tide had ebbed far out, uncovering a flat expanse of silt. People and things had withdrawn into themselves, to savour, each in their private retreat, the aroma of cooking food. Outside in the gardens, very stiff and upright in the black soil, the trees were feeding too. From the bottommost layers of humus they sucked up the soft elemental stuff of life and digested it. Phosphates dissolved slowly between their roots, and the sap, their life-blood, with the colour of milk and the taste of sugar, spread out and up till it reached the topmost branches.

Besson felt this torpor stealing over him, and tried to resist it for a moment. He stood quite still on the corner of an intersection, and tried to imagine himself giving a sumptuous banquet. He set out a dazzling table decorated with dishes of pheasants in aspic and poulet à l’estragon . Over their delectable flesh he poured golden wines and rich, thick sauces that spread out in iridescent splendour, like a peacock’s tail. He then destroyed the table and everything on it. But this was not enough. The streets and pavements around him were still deserted. Down those long, glabrous vistas, as though traced in the dust by a finger, or daubed with mud, the letters F O O D appeared, a depressing message that nothing could obliterate. As soon as people finished their meals, and the cats curled up beside the garbage-cans and fell asleep, this maleficent sign would vanish of itself. But for the moment it was still there. This was the time of day when people should not be out of doors; those who ventured into the streets would encounter the magic word, and then the winged shadow of that vast exodus would hover over them too, like a vulture.

Besson walked down one street in which the drains were up. The working-site was deserted except for a pile of shovels and pick-axes, and a yellow machine that smelt of oil and combustion, and was now cooling off in the sharp air.

Cars stood parked nose to tail along the kerb; their mock-leather seat-cushions still bore the impression of those who had been sitting in them. It was like night-time, except that even the ghosts were missing.

Outside a bakery, the smell of warm bread and cake brought Besson up short; it passed into his body with the breath he drew, and conjured up a veritable tide of saliva and digestive juices. When it reached his stomach, and stuck there, it became pure agony, turning, spreading, hardening into a sharp cross. Besson went over to the window and looked inside. The bread was there, long loaves packed upright in a big basket, their honey-coloured surface exposed for all to see, still hot from the oven, swag-bellied, dusted with flour, scarred and knobbly, that delicious and potent odour steaming gently off them. Inside the crust the bread was springy, delicate, soft, warm, permeated with millions of tiny bubbles. Its golden surface was so richly yellow that all the fire’s brightness, all the heat of the oven still seemed to live in it: it shone like the skin of a fruit. It lent itself to covetous urges by camouflaging the silken folds, crisp and melting at once, both crusty and feather-soft, of a slice from the cut loaf. It wafted the aroma of its bounty in waves to the four corners of the earth; its virginal, sculptured quality drew one gently towards it, and as gently mastered one. Besson felt himself melting, flowing imperceptibly into the heart of the loaf, as though the direction of the odour had been reversed to bring its victim back to its secret lair. He plunged head first into the middle of the warm capsule, swimming, gulping down great mouthfuls of the nourishment that none thought to deny him. He felt the thick, palpable smell of hunger, the taste of flour and yeast course through his limbs like molten stone. Now the odour filled the whole sky: the streets of the town, the roof-tops, clouds, tarred asphalt on the pavement, the bodywork of cars, all had become bread, rich full-bodied loaves, a fresh and foam-light mountain of crumb and crust, crust that one breaks with a sign of the cross over the laden table and its heavy baskets of fruit, bread that opens in whiteness and love to admit the light blessing from heaven, and yields to the holy spirit come down to dwell in it.

Besson stood there a long while lost in contemplation of the bread. After this he no longer felt any hunger or thirst. Round him the signs slowly dwindled and vanished. People began to emerge from their houses again, and cars drove away, accelerating fiercely. Pigeons came fluttering down on the sidewalk, and began to waddle round in circles, uttering short liquid cooing notes.

Some time later, well on in the afternoon, Besson came out on a large square surrounded by red-brick houses. There was a parking lot in the middle of the square and, large numbers of leafless plane-trees dotted about it. Besson crossed the road and made for the church. It was a high, rather ugly building, with a Greek-style portico supported by marble columns, above which was carved the inscription: MARIA SINE LABE CONCEPTA ORA PRO NOBIS. Towards the back of the building there rose a square bell-tower, with a clock at the top of it. The clock-face was white, and had Roman numerals round the dial. The short hand pointed to a spot just past the IV, while the long one was coming up for VI. When the long hand reached the VI there was a single dull chime from the tower; the note floated away over the roof-tops like a layer of fog. Two birds flew up and zigzagged away one behind the other. Besson heard this gong-stroke echoing faintly over the square for some time afterwards: the filaments of its metallic vibrations fixed themselves in his head like a souvenir.

The dial of the clock gleamed there high on the tower like a kind of moon. Eventually he tore his eyes away from it, walked up the front steps, pushed through an old brown swing door, and found himself inside the church.

The change in atmosphere was instantaneous. Throughout the vast and shadowy nave, empty now, and up in the deep, grotto-like vaulting silence reigned, the atmosphere had a dim grey profundity about it. Fine near-transparent clouds drifted slowly round the walls, dissolving into wisps, moving above the varnished pews, spreading across the stained-glass windows. Besson caught the terrifying smell of incense, and for a moment, because of something that stirred inside him, he thought his hunger had come back. But it was not hunger. There was no name one could put to the unfamiliar feeling of distress that surged to and fro between these dank walls, that set a bell tolling, on and on, echoing away deep into the earth, telling the beads for the dead, there was nothing about it that could be known or expressed. It was the fear induced by footsteps advancing over the hollow-echoing flagstones, it was the crushing weight of the vaulted roof overhead, pressing down with ton upon ton of stone, it was the power of everything obscure and ominous, of terror made into a dwelling-place. Shuddering, Besson advanced down the nave. On either side the rows of empty pews faded into semi-darkness. Great pillars soared up like tree-trunks, and lost themselves in the pearly white and foliated radiance of the vaulting. At the end of the nave, moving towards him as he moved towards it, was the pyramidal outline of the altar, glittering in candle-light.