Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

When he had finished shaving, Besson put his razor away in a red case, and put the case in the beach-bag. Then he washed his hands and sluiced his face with cold water and combed his hair. He also swallowed two or three mouthfuls of water, which smelt of disinfectant.

He hoped he might get out of the public toilets without paying, but when he drew level with the table the old woman looked up and stared at him over the top of her paper, and Besson was forced to put a coin in the bowl.

Outside, the streets of the town were bustling with life, and the sky was an unbroken blue. Besson counted the money which the foreman had given him, and walked off in the direction of the bus-station. He was going to take a little trip, he decided; he was going to get out of this hellish town, where the houses just sat and sat for ever on the tarred asphalt. Besides, he ran the risk of meeting people he had known — his parents, Marthe and the little red-haired boy, Josette, Bayard, Siljelcoviva, even the police, who were liable to slap a murder charge on him.

When he got to the station he found about a dozen buses there, standing by the kerbside, or manoeuvring slowly into their parking-space. People were waiting in queues, behind various rusty signboards set up at the top of poles. Most of these carried very curious combinations of words and figures, such as:

9 A PESSICART

LAS PLANAS

108 FABRON

10 12

6 ISOLA

ROQUESTERON

AEROPORT

SAVONA-GENOA

B 444

People elbowed their way through the waiting crowds. Old women sat on the benches with baskets on their knees, and children ran about in all directions, screaming shrilly. From time to time a bus would open its doors, and the crowd would surge in, pushing and jostling. The engine would start up under the mud-encrusted bonnet, and keep ticking over, its every vibration transmitted shudderingly to bodywork and windows. Crates and cases were being loaded on the roof-racks, and men in dark blue uniform, with stained caps pushed to the backs of their heads, stood smoking on the kerbside or shouting at each other. An Arab wandered round trying to sell carpets. A little man with a brown moustache and a tray of confectionery balanced on his head threaded his way through the crowd, singing:

‘It’s me who makes ’em and sells ’em, by golly,

But it’s my wife who blows all the lolly …’

Newspaper kiosks displayed their motley wares, klaxons sounded, petrol fumes rose in the air, trafficators winked on and off. This was the place of departure, the centre from which people fled the town. The routes to every different destination converged here in this dusty square, mile upon mile of baking or muddy asphalt winding its solitary way through the empty countryside. From here people took off for foreign towns, for unknown territories covered with sprouting jungles of olive and vine. They encountered deserts striped in red and green, great savannahs, hazy oases, gorges running through deep faults in the mountains. They were journeying towards hunger and thirst, and mystery, and fear. Each of them had dressed up for the occasion, and buckled the straps round his luggage, and packed a cold meal to take along — not forgetting a bottle of wine. Besson wandered among the groups at random, soaking himself in this atmosphere, this smell of departure. Little by little uneasiness began to creep up inside him, accompanied by something much resembling hope.

Finally he picked a bus, and joined the queue of passengers waiting to board it. Nothing happened for a few moments; then the doors creaked open, and people began to file inside. It was a splendid white coach, almost brand-new, with anti-glare windows and strips of chromium-plated steel that glinted in the sunlight. The engine was already running, vibrating rhythmically, so that everything which could be made to judder did so. Besson was among the last passengers aboard; he walked down the aisle, head bent, looking for somewhere to sit down. There was a vacant seat near the back, and he dropped into it without looking any further. Then he put his beach-bag between his knees, and sat there, waiting. Beside him, pressed against the window, was a young girl, conversing in gestures with her fiancé, who had stayed outside on the sidewalk. She was so close to the glass that her breath made semi-circles of condensation on it, and her eyes never left the man below, whose head barely came level with the window. She kept waving to him. Once or twice she stood up and put her mouth to some aperture at the top of the window. ‘Mind you write to me,’she called out. ‘Lots and lots!’ She even tried to get her arm through the gap so as to touch the man’s hand, but merely succeeded in skinning her knuckles. Then she sat down again and exhibited the scratch through the window, waving her left hand. The man outside lit a cigarette to keep himself in countenance. He was a skinny boy with a crew-cut and a brand-new blue suit.

A few seconds later the bus moved off, manoeuvring slowly out of the bus-station, sounding its horn to clear a path through the crowd. The passengers sank back in their pullman seats and clung to the metal hand-grips. Every jolt bounced their bodies up and down; the vibrations of the engine set their jaws and the fleshy parts of their arms quivering. They drove through the town with the main traffic stream. Up in front, on a higher seat than the rest, sat the driver, turning the wheel this way and that, thrusting his feet down on the pedals, shifting the gear-levers: you could hear the insulated growl of the engine responding to his directions. The cylinders fired smoothly in sequence, and every now and then there came the mysterious sound of compressed air escaping, rather like a sneeze. The lights at the crossroads changed to yellow, then to red. The bus braked to a standstill, and every head jerked backwards. These jolts and vibrations made the passengers look a little ridiculous. Bodies swayed slackly in their seats, passive victims now, manipulated in unison by each plunge or check of the wheels. A jay-walker crossed the road right in front of the bus, and everyone swayed, as though to underline the incident. All down the aisle conversation had broken out. Women wrapped up in thick woolly coats were talking about the weather — would it rain or clear up? One was discussing the ulcer on her leg. Men pointed out houses, or cars. A soldier was trying to make conversation with a plain young girl who said not a word back.

Gradually the bus worked its way out of town, taking a very, straight road that ran along the coast beside the sea. The wind blew strongly here: grass began to appear between houses, and trees became more frequent. The sun shone over the horizon, and the road was hard. Through the window Besson watched the landscape slip past, very fast in the foreground, then more slowly, till the distant scene appeared motionless, even perhaps shifting in the opposite direction. There were waste lots enclosed by wooden fences, with four or five wrecked cars inside them. There were mounds and hillocks and rows of bungalows, each with its watch-dog. There were brand-new white-painted apartment blocks, with endless empty balconies patterning their façades. There were gypsy caravans, and roofs bristling with television aerials, and telegraph poles, and washing-lines hung with women’s underwear. There were kitchen-gardens and clumps of rose-bushes or rhododendrons and sheds and rusty abandoned bicycles and parked trucks and cemeteries and blue-and-white filling stations. There was a high brick wall with the words U.S. GO HOME painted on it in white, and a grocer’s shop, and a café with several indistinct characters just emerging from it. There were more villas with shutters closed or open as the case might be, and children playing at cops and robbers. There was a church with a pointed steeple and a clock that had gone wrong and showed the time as twelve noon, or midnight. There was a naval dockyard and a general repair shop and a half-built apartment block beside the road, rising amid a curious scaffolding of planks and sticks. Two policemen who had parked their motorcycles and were taking somebody’s name and address. A woman with a goitre, looking on at them. An airfield, a hairdresser’s shop, and a restaurant with candles on the tables and its name written up in big red letters: LA FOURCHETTE. A group of five palm trees. More waste lots, fields lying fallow, patches of earth and rubble in which the flint sparkled like ground glass. And all these things were in continual motion, streaming back horizontally past the windows of the bus, merging and blurring, receding in a growing complexity of lines and angles. A long way off, behind the moving foreground of houses and tree-trunks, the hills floated, blue and magnified. On the other side of the road the sea’s surface revolved round its own axis, like a record. And somewhere ahead of them their destination was vaguely taking shape. Mountains rose up, headlands stretched out into the water, and one small light cloud hung motionless in the sky.