Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Here in the centre of the town, surrounded by fluctuating noises and vague movements, here in this deserted ragion life was a tough business. All elements were hostile. The surface of the sandhills rasped and tore at your hands, gave you twisted ankles, made the back of your head ring with the noise of a hammer driving nails home one after another. This was the way you had to set about digging, with fury and hatred. Make sparks fly from pickaxe or shovel as you banged them against some buried rock. Trample down rotten branches, dead weeds, a tangled mess of detritus. Keep your eyes fixed on the stubbon soil, and conquer the sheer weight of inertia by one quick upwards jerk of your loins. Make the dust fly far and wide, fling it high int he air, scatter it on the wind, while the machine’s chattering mouth gobbles up gravel by the hundredweight, chews and disposes of it between those iron jaws. Earth and men merged indistinguishably, became the same substance, mere mud, a dead weight of mud dragging at your arms and peeling off shovel or mattock with a heavy squelching sound. It was the mud, now, which nursed ignoble schemes, planned acts of degradation, wet spreading mud, a lake of grey and malevolent shingle, sneering, provocative — or, sometimes weeping damply in the folds of its old and whorish skin. It had ideas, it was covered with words or symbols, penetrated by feelings. Men, women, children, animals too — dogs and their fleas, cats, birds, horses led to the slaughterhouse, lions imprisoned in their cages, mice with their necks broken by snap-back traps, flies caught on fly-papers, swatted mosquitoes, spiders and cockchafers, boiling lobsters, dumb fish dying with mouths agape and bolting eyes, red ants drowned in latrines, slaughtered eland and bison, tortoises, dodos, kiwis — all of them were there, now, in the sands and gravels, they had been resuscitated on the face of the earth. There was no end to the killing and maiming of them, pale insubstantial ghosts though they were: one cut them off from the world just like that, with shovel or mattock, a single thrust of arms and loins sent them into the steel maw which ground them to powder.

What had to be defeated, then, was the cruelty of horizontal surfaces. Shoulders hunched, Besson dug away at the sandhill as though bent on creating a new mountain. He would have liked to tilt up the earth’s surface and turn it into a towering, insurmountable rampart. The shovel moved to and fro almost of its own volition, and under his clothes sweat and dust mingled. The noise of the hole being dug sang in his ears, and suddenly he felt as though he was going to reach the centre of the world. Through this cavern, created by frenzy, look, the lava comes surging up, swells, blasts out into the air like some gigantic scarlet mushroom. Over the town and the nearby hills there falls a soft, unending rain of fire, soothing as glass, and with it returns that great silence which should never have left the world; life, thus abruptly cut short, has at last ceased to disfigure the high beauty of matter. All it needed was one workman on a river spit, armed with an old battered shovel, to release the soaring pyrotechnical splendours of truth.

François Besson worked all day. The gang was made up as follows:

Foreman: Candéla.

Mechanics: Miraulac, Zediaf, Douski.

Air-hammer operators: Panelli, Andréa, Wurth, Van Woow.

Welder: Karl Schultz.

Labourers: Abdul Karim, Mamadou Badia, Cimpeanu, Siljelcoviva, Ocijek, Sedov, Miroslav Kocejve, Oberti, Machan, Haddar, Guenès, Besson, Mohamed Amar, Omar Khelifa, Said Labri.

Bulldozer operators: Dietrich (absent), Lanfranchi.

Exhaustion came slowly: it seemed to rise from the ground and pass into one’s arms. Hour by hour the weight of dust accumulated on the toiling gang seemed heavier, and the men hacking away at their stony sandhills could no longer doubt that this time, at least, they would have to admit defeat. At half past twelve, without saying a word, they downed tools and gathered in the lee of the caissons to eat. Besson shared their meal: he got a hunk of bread and a slice of garlicky sausage, and drank two or three mouthfuls of red wine from the bottle they passed round. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his filthy hand and smoked a cigarette given him by Siljelcoviva, the Yugoslav. He cracked a few jokes, and joined with the others in making rude remarks about the foreman, who had gone off to have his lunch in a bar on the quai . The wind began to rise and one of the men got up and lit the brazier. He poured a little petrol on the charcoal, and put a match to it. The others gathered in a circle around the fire, and sat there smoking and rubbing their hands.

A black dog that looked as though it had the mange began to prowl round the group in quest of food. Sedov, Machan, and Schultz, the German, shied stones at it. The dog jumped out of the way, but refused to move on: it stood there, not budging an inch, just out of range of the stones, yellow eyes fixed on the men and their brazier.

Siljelcoviva, who was sitting beside Besson, began to tell Oberti the story of his life. He had decided to leave Yugoslavia when he was eighteen, and had crossed the Adriatic in a row-boat, together with a friend of his. They had set out from Korcula, and spent three days and nights at sea before reaching the coast of Italy. After that they had spent five years wandering around picking up work where they could. But money was hard to earn, so they had started stealing from cars. Then one evening when they were breaking into a villa near Rome the police arrived. Siljelcoviva had been keeping a look-out in the garden, and he managed to get away. But his friend had been caught. Siljelcoviva was forced to make tracks back up north, and succeeded in crossing the frontier over the mountains. He had no idea what had become of his friend. The friend’s name was Michael, and he was a bit older than Siljelcoviva. It stood to reason they were after him too, though. If he could find a way to do it, he’d get on a boat for America, and—

At this point the foreman came back, and work was resumed. The afternoon passed like the morning, so slowly that Besson felt he had been there for years. The day wore on little by little; the river continued to flow.

About six o’clock work stopped. The men stacked tools and went off to wash their hands in the river. Some of them combed their hair in little pocket mirrors, smoked a cigarette, chatted a bit. Then they filed past the foreman, each collecting some notes and two or three coins. The sky was overcast, and beyond the quais the lights of the town glittered through a fine mist. Soon the workmen trooped off, in groups of two or three, up the steps that led into town.

Now the old lifeless atmosphere settled back amid the debris of the construction site, and other sounds became aubidle once more: the peaceful gurgle of moving water, the distant roar of breakers on the ebbing tide. The air got chillier, shadows spread and thickened in every hollow. Night odours began to stir abroad, the lingering smell of dead vegetation and humus.

Some while later, when night lay black on the river-bed, Besson went over and sat himself down by the half-finished bridge. He had a pile of shingle under him, and his back was propped against the cold stonework of the caisson. Then he stared straight ahead of him, trying to make out what was happening in the darkness. Humidity was coming down from the valley in waves, but it had no shape, and made no sound. The town floated, as though in air, like an illuminated Zeppelin, with vast and inky abysses taking shape everywhere below it. The river’s flow, too, was audible but invisible. Its moving mass advanced in poised and solitary power, at the heart of darkness, like an escalator held between the twin ramps of the quais . Pebble-ridges, bushes, bulldozers, old planking, sand-bars — all had vanished. Objects were successively captured by blackness, kept fading away. Besson tried to make them reappear by dint of imagination, but they never remained the same. Their ghost-shapes became subtly inflated and distorted, wavered as though through several layers of murky water. Pale handkerchiefs fluttered in the wind, then disappeared — where, no one could tell. Contorted silhouettes rose up, so near that it seemed possible to put out one’s hand and touch them, yet at the same time so distant that the mere sight of them turned one dizzy.