Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Besson’s arms and legs were trembling with fatigue. He leaned back against the stone bastion and closed his eyes. For a while he remained thus, quite motionless, breathing regularly. He may have fallen asleep. Then, abruptly, he was roused from his torpid state by the sound of footsteps. There came a heavy crackling noise from the bushes: he could hear it quite distinctly. The footsteps advanced slowly, dislodging small pebbles, breaking dry twigs, bending damp ones, squelching over the sand. They stopped for a few seconds, so that the muted rumble of falling water could be heard once more; then, with some hesitation, they began again, on tip-toe, shoes squeaking, the ground beneath them crackling like so much straw.

Besson sat up uneasily and peered this way and that through the darkness. But whichever way he turned, left, right, behind, in front of him, visibility remained nil. It was impossible to tell where the footsteps were coming from. Sometimes they seemed almost on top of Besson, and he could hear the sound of breathing quite clearly. Sometimes, though, they reached him blurred by distance, and it was hard to be sure whether they were footsteps or ordinary river noises. Besson held his breath to listen the better. But he could no longer detect anything: the silence and the roar of water were so intense that all other noises faded before them, as though overlaid by the long wail of a train-whistle, screaming through the night.

Soon, however, the number of noises began to increase. There was the faint dragging sound produced by some sort of soft creature as it crept over the ground, scuffing grains of sand aside with its mandibles. Tiny popping reports could be heard on all sides, like seed-pods bursting. Pebbles were suddenly dislodged, setting off small inexplicable avalanches. Now and then, right beside Besson’s ear, there would come the precise abrasive scratching noise of some rodent, the silken rustle of a spider scuttling by. Bats were abroad too, swooping and fluttering just overhead like wisps of burning paper. Winged creatures of some sort — with black shiny bodies, almost certainly — went buzzing past, a few yards above the ground. Worms wriggled through topsoil, snakes uncoiled in the grass. In front of Besson, advancing like an army to the attack, came every variety of parasite: fleas, ticks, lice, bugs, hopping from pebble to pebble, blind, but guided by the smell of blood, prickly-bodied, velvety feelers groping for flesh, suckers and probosces already stirring in anticipation on those microscopic heads. And like some gigantic moth with the death’s-head pattern on its back, a vampire bat now began to fly around, in wide circles, fluttering its hairless wings with a soft, near-inaudible sound that was, nevertheless, full of horror and menace.

Besson stiffened, eyes wide open, ready to defend himself. By now tiny feet had begun to alight on him momentarily, and he could feel wings — lighter than the breath of air from a fan — brush across his face. Insects were beginning to crawl up his legs, searching between the hairs for a good spot to gorge themselves. Little pricking points jabbed at his forehead, his cheeks, even underneath his clothes, making him shudder at the contact. The eggs were laid in his bloodstream, and the tainted fluid spread beneath the skin, raising swellings at each point of contact. This, called for preventive action. Besson rubbed his hand across his face, ran his fingers through his hair, slapped at his trouser-legs and scratched himself wherever he could reach — under the armpits, on the stomach, at the back of the neck. But it was useless: the more he scratched himself, the more numerous his invisible assailants became. By now every noise had assumed tangible form: they descended on him en masse , whining and humming, covering him from head to foot with the whirr of their wing-cases, busy crunching jaws, hoarse breathing. They stung, tickled, licked, punctured. They slipped their darts into the warm white tender flesh and sucked the fresh blood which only such night-time victims yield.

The sound of footsteps grew closer, more threatening: now they were moving round the caisson against which Besson leant, pressing heavily on the damp earth. Besson could hear feet crunching over shingle, one behind the other, and brittle twigs snapping like bones. There was no mistaking the sound. The animal must have sensed that a man was there by the bridge: it prowled with slow deliberation, gradually cornering its victim. Besson tried to picture the black silhouette now only a few yards away from him, back arched, watching him with phosphorescent eyes. It was a wolf, perhaps, or some wild beast with pricked-up ears and quivering nostrils. His jaws would be salivating, and his throat alive with tiny suppressed growls that he emitted, despite himself, out of sheer greed. Cruelty was a natural element on this lithe shadowy beast, and his slack chops doubtless revealed rows of well-aligned teeth, all knife-hard and knife-sharp. The footsteps advanced, circled round, again and again, unwearyingly, till Besson’s head was whirling. Hatred had closed its ring about him: someone had decided that he must die. Heart pounding, his whole body sweating despite the icy air, Besson stepped out in pursuit of this noisy trail-blazer. For a few seconds the crackling noises stopped again. The darkness became more terrifying: Besson braced himself for the assault, expecting to be pinned down, as in a straightjacket, by some dark, violent creature, all teeth and claws. But nothing happened. Then the danger seemed to lose its intensity in the darkness, carrying back years and years of life, melting its obstructive hazard of agony and crime into a huge and distant cloud. Besson half convinced himself he was out of the wood.

But he was wrong. Suddenly the footsteps began again, over the pebbles, and Besson realized it was a man walking. A heavy, awkward, still-invisible shadow, weaving along beside the river on two uncertain legs. The crunch of his feet on the shingle sounded louder as he passed under the arch of the bridge. Like a giant, and wrapped in soot-black rags, the man lurched forward at random over hillocks and holes, tripping over tin cans, shattering mouldy old crates to pieces, twisting his ankles on rotten branches, crunching through carpets of dead leaves, skidding on silt and shingle, floundering in mud-holes — and keeping this up, yard after yard, in the exact direction of the caisson where Besson was sitting. He moved blindly, like a tank, face thrust forward, mouth open, breathing with difficulty. His wheezing, panting efforts were all too audible now, and so were the flapping and rubbing noises his various garments made. The atmosphere was filled with his strong, gamey smell, the smell of a man with unwashed feet and pocketfuls of stubbed-out old dog-ends, a nauseating mixed aroma of stale wine-dregs and perspiration. A dark black shape, slinking through the shadows like a deeper shadow himself, frizzy hair blowing in the wind, he still kept coming on, and on. His eyes gleamed snow-bright in his smoke-grimed face, and his teeth were bared in a glinting lopsided grin. Here he came, hands outstretched, without knife or gun or anything capable of piercing a man’s lungs, skewering his throat. Here he came, neither from in front nor from behind, but from all sides at once, with that curious bearing which suggested a victim hell-bent on revenge, feeling his way gently during lulls in the invisible wind, pushing his halo of fear before him. He was not a person one could forget. He dragged his feet forward over the uneven ground, an innocent stripped of his crimes, offering the fat of his belly and the gristle in his face to any unknown pigsticker’s spear. He had no real strength, and his dim silhouette remained nameless. Yet he was approaching, making straight for Besson, without pity, almost with indifference. In the night of nothingness, here in this godforsaken corner of the world, he was still trying . His will held. He did his best. He was still blazing a noisy trail in pursuit of his ignoble purpose; he had not been sufficiently chastised. The whip had humiliated him in vain. Though his neck had been clipped by the iron collar, and passers-by had spat in his nameless face, it had all gone for nothing. He refused to understand. He still had to go on putting one foot in front of the other, even though this led him, slowly, step by step, to further punishment. Sins and vices were not enough for him, the cold grey desert of the day had not taught him all he needed to know. His water-swollen feet and varicose legs had not yet had their full ration of pain. Still he came on. He was very close now, and Besson could almost feel the regular waft of his breath against his, Besson’s, face. He loomed horribly out of the dark abyss behind the bridge, still moving straight for his target as though along some cold, taut wire, like a tramcar on its rails, with all lights extinguished. As Besson listened to the crunching sound of his footsteps, each individual tread seemed to last longer and longer, as though the foot were about a yard long. Every two seconds or so there came the noise of shingle and pebbles being crushed down, an alarming crrrk, crrrrk, crrrrk that went right through Besson’s head. The sky, the surface of the river, the bridges, the twinkling lights of the town floating buoyantly in mid-air — all were subsumed in this vast human silhouette, its black garments outspread like the wings of an albratross.