Jean-Marie Le Clézio: The Flood

They are dead, I know it, no question about that; they are dead because everything external to myself is dead; a faint aura in the semblance of a winding-sheet hangs about their silhouettes as they pass. I feel as though I were casually leafing through some vast periodical that had ceased publication, and that it was on its pages I saw these printed names and faded photographs, the headlines and dates and figures, the blunted rubrics. Buildings and images have now been replaced by a bare and silent cemetery, some ten thousand square yards in extent. I see future generations arriving here. I see funerals and memorial plaques. Today the world is finished. Nothing lives any more. Ecstasy and pain are mere geometrical expressions.

On my feet once more, pausing now in front of a wall, I let all movement stream on past me. I am a survivor from the maelstrom. The foreshortened column of the water-spout has left me here, in front of this wall. Death has not spared me. I too have been caught in the vortex, I have been flesh, colour, space, time. But now the effects of that encounter have receded far from me, revealing — like some dried-up marsh — a quite new composition, no longer dominated by fluctuating moods, anger or desire, but by hard certainties, granulated surfaces, aspects of immortality. The gloss left on a vase by the last lingering traces of dampness, mounds of fine sand that the waves have licked, rough-textured shells eaten away by salt: the sort of shells that murmur like the sea when you put them to your ear, you surely remember the noise they make, that gentle, muted, breathing sound, so close to the rhythm of a city that one’s inevitably reminded of the time one was caught in the midday rush-hour, right in the heart of the city, marooned on a traffic-island while cars surged past all around one. You feel that appalling swelling sensation spread through the arteries, flooding your guts like blood spurting through a perforated intestine, wringing your heart with agony; and you let yourself go with it, overwhelmed by the murmurous, humming flow, vanquished, blissful, to the point where your identity is gone, merged in the vortex, senses swooning away. Impossible not to yield, just a little, to despair; and the forces of memory always took advantage of this, subjecting us to those damned childhood sensations of ours, those we shall never recapture again, moments of quiet pleasure and idleness, hints and intimations of the future, the simple patterns we loved so well, warm, secret hiding-places, pockets of air in which the sun and rain mingled, retreats full of wonderful objects, red and gold, delicate creatures like sea-anemones and limpets, dumb, fragile organisms, liquid scents and sensations on the fingers, small white chunky stones, whole universes like a dictionary, you know, the things they call pools of water; and all this returns slowly, trying, in vain, to pierce the surface of the living being, and you know that the whirling vortex which seemed to spring out of nothing, from the void, was in fact ultimate mockery, the meaningless scream of monkey or parrot.

This was the fate meted out to each being, hanging over every object. One man lay sprawling in a wicker basket-chair, caught short in the middle of his own private affairs. His hands rested flat along his thighs, just above the knees, and his round back was pressed against the back of the chair. He was beginning to find breathing difficult; every three or four seconds he gave a harsh, rattling cough. He was in the process of dying there, imperceptibly, with no regrets, and quite alone. Outside, beyond the window, the sky was blue. But the concentric circles grew and multiplied; one by one, like so many vultures, they crossed the threshold of this room, where already the smell of death hung in the air.

It was the same along this snow-covered wintry boulevard, and, yes, round about that window, that focal-point of glass, and in the unknown hiding-places scattered through the countryside, middens and iced-over ponds and ash-pits: what still remained? What flame still glowed in the firebox of that stationary locomotive, what whistle went up from its steam-vent? What light shone inside the tinplate storm-lantern? Events were modulated to an infinite variety of frequencies, so that they eluded the eye and continued their business alone, in an unending round of self-induced growth and destruction. There was no longer a woman getting out of a red car at the crossroad and continuing her journey on foot, clumsily patting her hair into place with one hand as she passed a shop-window with the word ASPIRIN inscribed across it in large letters. Instead there was a movement of a soft, slim arm which imprinted itself for ever on the reflecting surface of the glass, and revealed the silhouette of a seeming statue, three bent fingers touching that electric mass of black hair. Facts were flights of stairs down invisible corridors.

Then, in a flash, peace returned to all these places, spreading over hard intractible matter as though guided by a conductor’s baton. It did not so much encircle the state of fixity as prolong it, overtracing and completing the outline of the pavement, the sharp, three-dimensional pattern of the cast-iron street-lamps, the circular bandstand in the middle of the public gardens. Other human beings, or animals, very calm and quiet, stood frozen into familiar postures, in their houses, outside doors, beside windows; hands resting on tables, gnawing a bone perhaps, or lips set to a glass. On them, on each and every one of them, fell the fine rain of ashes. They were dying peaceably behind celluloid posters. Their lustreless eyes had taken on a leaden tinge, their substance was draining away drop by drop.

What delicate design, drawn with a fine-pointed pen on the surface of coarse wrapping-paper, what exquisite music — its notes rising into the air like a flight of ravens — what rich savour, constantly generating itself by the catalysis of acids, the regular breakdown of fatty elements, theme and variations played out by alkaloids and carbohydrates, what piercing pain there , in the nether belly, would suffice to portray this luminous, rounded, frozen kingdom — this domain of which I formed part, in which I lost myself, floating in some strange fashion on my back, arms crossed, stretched out to my full extent in the middle of this supporting surface, silent and afraid, watching the gods move about their business? An expanse so wide it seemed like infinity, stretching widely to the sharp division of the horizon. An empty page with a line moving blindly over it, a springy motion, up a little, now to the left, still left, left, now right, cutting a pattern on life. Life. Superb, heroic, majestic, hammer-forged and childish, impossible to destroy. So pure and lovely, it looks as though one simple gesture would suffice to blot it out of view. I stretch on my back, and float; black veils and mourning drapes, hollow, cavernous, abyss-like surfaces pass slowly overhead, draw me towards sleep, volatilize my being by the pristine freshness of their ghostly premonitions. Now, perhaps, I am going to die: no more steel then, no more keen and cutting blades of light! But this world is terribly here . Everything overlaid with yellow and gold. Below me stretches this vast expanse of stone and stucco, this stark bird’s-eye view, a line on an aerial photograph, everything closed and dead — hospitals, mental homes, factories, power stations. The railway tracks are rusted up. But this process of decomposition, having corrupted every species and spared no object in the world, now finds that it may, after all, have achieved nothing. It is possible, in fact — not to go too closely into the matter — that nothing has changed in any way: sounds are as rich and complex as ever, trees still stand where they did, cottages still gleam with corrugated iron and formica flooring. Men and women looked just as smooth and healthy as they had always done. And yet something had happened. The threatening presence of some diluvian past hung everywhere in the air, a throat-catching memory. The smell of ill-buried corpses, perhaps, or the dry rottenness of fallen branches.