Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

ON the eleventh day, François Besson went down to the river bed and found himself a hiding-place from which he could watch the construction team at work on the bridge. The caissons had already been sunk in mid-stream, and now sprouted metal structures which a man was banging away at with a hammer, as hard as he could. Under the greenish-grey sky, and the continual rain — now a downpour, now a misty drizzle — the site looked rather like a gigantic shell-hole blown in the middle of the river-bed. A little further down, not far from the next bridge (where Besson had concealed himself) a bulldozer went juddering along, pushing up walls of stones in front of it to stop the water overflowing its channel. A multiplicity of sounds spread clear through the frosty air, accompanied by a whiff of rotting sewerage and heaps of old leaves: the river’s muted roar, a gravel-screech of shifting stones, the tapping hammer, the high snarl of labouring engines, men’s voices shouting insults at one another.

On either side of the river-bed — now divided in two by its temporary dam — the black mass of the town was visible, all its roofs agleam. A few curious bystanders had gathered on the quais , and were leaning over the balustrade to watch the free circus below. Further downstream there was a third bridge, with five arches, that ran right under the town: the swift-flowing stream disappeared into the three central black holes, leaving the outer two empty.

There was a great variety of colour, too; but all so low — laid on at ground level, as it were — that it was really better not to try and look at it. Such dirty, depressing colours, too, spreading slowly over one another, like spilt paint, mingling with the sounds and smells, shifting across the silt, drifting slowly over the water, dispersed and suspended in air, the better to force themselves past your defences and bend you to their will. Hideous yellows, the yellow of urine or dead skin. Pinks, creams, indeterminate greens and greys, all tracing their own paths and channels. The pebbles were hard, occasionally broken in two or ground into a mess of half-buried rubble. The arches of the bridge overhead were covered with moss, and all around lay an anonymous litter of tin cans, slowly turning into rust. The rain had penetrated everywhere, permeating every object, making things porous, soft, friable. A light yet sluggish mist rose silently from the ground, and seemed to follow the downstream flow of the river, a few yards above its surface. From all sides there came the gurgle of falling water, and every crack in the walls dripped continually. It was like being in an underground lavatory, where the constant passage of dirty, disinfectant-laden water produces all those blue encrusted cracks in the enamel. Endlessly scoured and washed, this surface, worn by the passage of liquids, new by dint of being old, slippery with layers of grease and soap, a non-stop exhibition of superfoaming detergent.

This was where one lived now, in the long channel down which life’s waste products flowed. Whether as tears, or sweat, or urine, water ran continually from the earth’s body, and passed away in the direction of that vast septic tank the sea: an essential process, part of the cycle of truth, along with the boiling, writhing movement of organic matter reacting against salt, clouds surging up the sky and letting their delicate pink and grey veils be blown down the corridors of the wind, and then the fall of million upon million separate droplets, returning to the earth once more, filling as many tiny expectant mouths to overflowing, bringing them refreshment, satisfaction. Such a process had its own rhythm, allied with that of day and night, but longer and more terrible: less independent, too, since water never ceased to pass in and out of this porous globe that was the world. Mud breathed damply, sewers poured down to their outflow, streams joined up, mountain rills ran till exhausted; and here, down the middle of its great triangular crevasse, the river flowed on, without interruption or obstacle, muttering day in day out with the same unchanging nasal voice, like an aircraft in the sky, pouring into its own fountain-basin the water which could never run dry, water everlasting, water softly turning its colourless magic wheel, coiled feminine body that would never cease from parturition.

To attain freedom would have needed whole centuries of dryness. Little by little the desert ought to replace earth’s liquid element. Raped oases, forests suddenly burnt up under a rain of napalm, mountains hardened by savage frosts and standing alone in the night, gleaming sheer through the darkness like dagger blades.

Then one would have had this bright peace, solitude and calm outstretched like a petrified corpse in the hot-and-cold air. Fine-grained sand would have blown across the sharp upper edges of the rocks; nothing would remain, in the way of vegetation, except sharp-spiked cactus and aloes.

Besson smoked a cigarette he had picked up at the foot of the wall. Lurking behind the bushes (which were stuffed full of old bits of paper) he watched the group of workmen go about their task. They were all young, most of them raggedly dressed Arabs. They went to and fro across the shingle carrying spades and buckets, for all the world as though they were going to make sand-pies. Beneath their hats or caps their faces were grim, bearded, thick with dust, They all had strongly marked lines at each corner of the mouth, and their eyes were very-deep-set. A little apart from them stood a big red-faced man in a leather jerkin, barking out sharp orders.

Besson hesitated for a moment. Then he picked up his beach-bag and walked across to the site. When he reached the working area the labourers glanced at him quickly and turned away again. The big red-faced man called out to him: ‘What d’you want, then?’

‘Have you got a job I could do?’ Besson asked.

The foreman looked him up and down for a moment.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if you know how to handle a shovel.’

‘Could I start in right away?’

The big man came closer, tugging a notebook out of his pocket.

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘You got a work permit?’

‘No.’ said Besson.

‘What are you? Yugoslav? German?’

‘No.’

‘Italian, then?’

‘No,’ said Besson, ‘I’m French.’

The man removed a cigarette-stub from his mouth and ground it out under one heel.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s all right, then. What’s your name?’

‘Besson,’ said Besson.

The man took a pencil and wrote the name down in his notebook. Then he checked the time by his gold wristwatch and wrote that down too. Then he jerked his thumb at a great heap of mixed sand and pebbles.

‘Go and get yourself a shovel, over there by the diggers. You can help separate out the sand. You’ve clocked in at half past ten. O.K. then, get cracking.’

So there on the river-bed Besson began to dig up the sand, rhythmically driving his shovel into the resistent mass, then lifting it over a kind of mechanical sieve. Through one narrow orifice the machine disgorged the sand it had taken in, while the pebbles and heavy gravel were channelled into another, rather larger one. Without exchanging a word, or even looking at one another, backs slightly stooped, the workmen went about their various tasks — pushing wheelbarrows across to the caissons, crunching over the shingle, mixing concrete, burrowing into the sandhills with rasping shovels, swarming up scaffolding, screwing bolts through iron bars. The foreman kept up a ceaseless flow of orders in that powerful voice of his, with hoarse shouts such as ‘Come on now, move yourself!’ or ‘You over there — you asleep or something?’ or ‘Faster, you lot! Faster than that!’

The site was a minuscule centre of action in the midst of the river, rather like a cluster of ants on a scrap of meat: here hope, and despair, and the individual will were all annihilated. Everything was clear-cut, translucent; everything had its measure and its appointed end. Time was the face of a chronometer, space a surveyor’s instrument.