Jean-Marie Le Clézio: The Flood

No point in exaggerating: the concrete and sheet metal were flimsy enough, the tiling a bad joke; I still saw despite them.

Look at it in yet another way. About seven minutes to eleven every noise in the town merged and concentrated like salvoes of gunfire. Here the movement was so well timed that it achieved its own destruction. Under the clear daylight the houses stood in yellow rows. Rain streamed off the rooftops, the gutters gurgled. A strange wind, warm and moist in texture, sent scraps of refuse fluttering against walls and windows. All these little episodes were contained in a hemisphere of grey sky.

So you move away from this centre, at a reduced speed, and climb up in the direction of the near-by hills, mounting worn steps thick with mimosa, going up, up, till your breath begins to come short. Crows circle round the mountain. You cross a silent, macadamized road. Cats, hidden behind flower-pots, watch you go by. Goitrous lizards scurry away beneath heaps of old stones. You still climb on, up flight after flight of steps: nine of them before you reach the summit. You have to cross the road four times. You count sixty-three electric pylons, and about four hundred red-roofed suburban villas, with laurel hedges and orange-trees in the garden. You make out other mountains (which may be on fire) and the floating dome of an observatory. Greet an old woman with blackened hands. Kick through millions of fallen leaves, and ants, and olives. Catch the obscene odour of fig-trees. Then, somewhere high up the mountain, between the eighth and the ninth flight of steps, hidden away to the left of a small artificial square where children play, you come upon a fountain of icy water, issuing from a copper spout embedded in a stone monument. It bears the date 1871. All around it, in wild disorder, are various graffiti —J.C.B. 12/4/46, JOJO, HARRISON, 6/10/1960, MIREILLE, LIPOL, LUC, MAINANT, I WAS HERE — D.D., L.R., S., T.A.—M., 25/8/58, REG, 1st AUG. 1961, CASABLANCA, DIDI, 1949, POZSA, 1949, J.B., A.ZIN., HELSINKI 57, VICTOR HUGO, 12/8/1963. The water gushes out in sharp spurts and falls into the bowl of the fountain. You could sit there too, on the edge of the basin where the horse-flies hover, after carving your initials with a knife beside all the others — J.F.B., 9th April 1963—so as to know what’s going on. This would constitute the renewal of not-all-that-ancient history: history which had already left its mark on the stone stele above the fountain. For instance: A. and DAISY, 6th July 59.

Albonico — Daisy finds it very hot.

The sun had finally penetrated those thousands of tiny leaves. Later its angle had reached a point where the progressive ovalization of the shadows it cast produced innumerable mouth-like shapes. At present the sun was going down, trembling on the very edge of these triangular leaves, uttering tiny cries as it touched the gravel, glimmering jerkily downwards, yet with a smooth motion, so smooth — The tree in question was a pear; and this pear was cracking under the impact of the day’s heat, imperceptibly raising its head again now in the cool, stretching out its dry branches by millimetres, spreading each individual leaf. Like a dorsal fin. The air was almost completely still. Twenty-five yards farther on, under the patio of a villa, between the tomato-patch and the parrot-cage, the red mercury-column of a thermometer was steadily rising past the 80° mark.

Albonico sat under the pear-tree, espadrilled feet resting on the gravel. At that moment, it seems, a droning sound became audible, drilling its way through the atmosphere; and a wilting plant, sapped by the lack of water, bent over yet a little further. On this famous stretch of gravel one pebble stood out from the rest, because it was tall and pyramidal, whereas all the pebbles surrounding it were short and round — unless the near by splashing of the fountain created an illusion, by shedding a strange lustre on the stone’s facets, something midway between a reddish reflection and the sound of the sea. If Albonico had taken the trouble to dig there, with the toe of his espadrille, he would undoubtedly have unearthed an old coin, lost there some months earlier, and now very dirty. Only the cigarette-butts had escaped burial. Daisy pinched the base of her nose between the thumb and first finger of her right hand. Then, with the same hand, she traced out the contours of her full lips, and went back to the desultory perusal of some romantic magazine, Confidences or the like. The sun, burning hot and with widely scattered rays, shone on the glossy paper at four separate points. On the left, again, a withered stem quivered, letting fall some pistils, or stamens. A variety of sounds drifted up across the steps, from beyond the edge of the trees, skirting rows of back gardens, re-echoing and dividing. They originated at every point of the landscape — in the Foglia garage, for instance, or the Rosa-Bonheur warehouse. The sound of banging bottles, or a diesel engine, or a dog’s bark: all were flattened, made barren by the fierce-thrusting rays of the sun. The tin roof of the garage lay square to the sky’s smooth simmering surface. They might have been superimposed layers of sheet aluminium, each serving to reflect the other. Every twenty-four seconds a gong-stroke shuddered through the air, echoing on, blurred by much rubbing and grinding. A very long bundle of piping, lying wired up on the ground, gave back the slow, cadenced stroke of a perspiring man who was banging it with a hammer. Amid the general murmurous fragmentation of sound, the vague humming caused by the heat, these hammer-blows carried some unseen ghostly entity forward, while at the same time thrusting back an equally invisible obstacle, starting oscillations in a cloud. Every twenty-four seconds, another yard gained; a yard every twenty-four seconds — a sphere dilated a little further, something opaque and nebulous, like a foetus, or magma, and lost itself in the landscape. Dispersed. Or, to be more accurate, a coat of dust settled on everything, caking the dry-stone courses of the wall, thickening the outlines of the pebbles. The very sky, perhaps in an attempt to make its texture more like that of the ground, was hazy with a fine flour-like substance. Winged particles floated on pockets of air, collected in nuclei. No doubt it was the intense heat that, penetrating to the earth’s very core, had released these clouds of ash, lifting them, fanning them into airborne motion until they formed a long-lasting envelope round the world. At this point Albonico took the trouble to scrape with the toe of his espadrille, in the precise spot where the old, dirty coin lay, hidden beneath the surface. He found it, picked it up, and showed it to Daisy. It looked very round and ugly, lying there in the hollow of his hand.

‘I’ve just found twenty francs,’ he said, ‘down on the ground there.’

‘A coin, you mean?’

‘Strange, don’t you think?’ he said.

‘Someone must have lost it.’

‘I wonder.’

Daisy gave it back to him. Then she wiped her earth-stained fingers against the stone wall.

‘It must have been there quite a time. It’s thick with earth.’

‘No — not earth—

‘ What ?’ she said.

‘No, I mean, not earth, not exactly. More a kind of dust, something like ash. Here, I’ll clean it up a bit. Tear me off some of your paper—’

He began to clean the twenty-franc piece, very carefully, sitting there close to the sea, facing the fountain, half in the sun, half in shadow. He scraped every tiny corner and recess, using the sharp fingernail of his right-hand index finger, wrapped up in a scrap of paper. But the metal remained worn and lustreless, permanently blackened by its contact with the soil.

Far beyond the world of peace and quietness, far from that secret paradise where springs gush forth in undisturbed tranquillity, a place of murmuring trees, where each light breeze and wasp moves as the fancy takes it; far from the rain drumming down steep roofs and into the gaping maw of the gutters; far beyond all these scarcely-formulated worlds, this flesh-coloured beauty, these innumerable swarming crevasses, these mouths for ever muttering their interminable stories, mingled with breath smelling of food and soda-water — far away and beyond all this there seems to be a weight binding your feet and hands, a weight that tears you away, all trembling and bloody, from any pleasure in life. It’s like a block of marble, high as a house, weighing countless tons, dragging you through the birth-pangs of mortal being. Before you know it you’re off, without knowing where, the freezing cold penetrating every pore in a trice, while you vainly try to cry out, even to get your breath back; but those grim metallic shafts pierce through you like the long swift movement of a sword thrusting into your vitals. There are no set limits to this race: it is virtually interminable, so that nothing — neither the act of writing, nor a name (such as T E A P E), nor birth itself could check its advance. Imperceptibly, during this descending progress, the world expands: not in depth or surface area, but in quantity —the universe multiplies, colours, elements (both static and alive), living creatures, all become increasingly divergent. Strange endless scribblings encircle every part of space and make it incomprehensible. It is as though speed of movement, or the sharpness of the senses, or some such factor, were blowing up reality to the point where it passed beyond one’s grasp. Patches of light, dark shadows, straight lines, emphatic or lightly sketched shapes, all simultaneously merge, yet remain distinct. Every object becomes, at one and the same time, akin to, and different from, every other object. Then comes a murmurous sound, swelling into wild, harmonious music, rising from the heart of matter and mingling its mournful vibrations with those of the light. It is, you might say, as though the earth were on the boil, a slow succession of bursting bubbles. The human observer, deceived by his own sensibilities, plunges further into the depths; rhythm and theme catch him in mid-flight, while colour-patterns (ever-changing, ever-destructive) cast a camouflage over him. Voices have a heavy, cavernous boom, are linked every twenty-four seconds to the rhythm of a man hammering away with all his strength on a spark-bright bundle of crazy steel tubing. Somewhere between earth and sky there oscillates a large, flattish object, its surface daubed with blood, apparently made of riveted and interlapping steel plates, sliding to and fro with each compression or expansion of their overall mass, and yet very much all of a piece, easily liftable on some gigantic bar, like a curtain. Then, deeper still, the effect is akin to that other sea one discovers after plunging beneath the surface. The rhythm is slow still, that gong-stroke every twenty-two or twenty-three seconds: but the quality of the sound has changed. It is no longer music, but rather a kind of soft, continuous frictional note, somewhat like falling rain, or the hiss of wet tyres. Sometimes, especially round a gas-flare, or a cigarette-lighter, or even a flash of light off the bodywork of a car, there forms a note so high and shrill as to be quite unbearable; but it never lasts for long. Very soon it splits into two notes, then three, then four, then five, then six. A kind of musical shrubbery has been brought into existence. It grows, spreads, extends its branches, mingles with the other vegetal tissue of sounds about it. After some 2,503 further subdivisions, the shrill note has become no more than a fine, disembodied whisper, the sound of a finger brushing across skin, magnificent to the nth degree, the scarcely audible sound of a hand caressing the dry, powdery texture of some young girl’s thigh. Such is the unremitting frictional sound that accompanies these speeded-up movements in the blue of the sky; later, the blue might have been replaced by orange, but now colours, too, are separating off and multiplying — not in a static context, as it might be the white wall of the apartment block, but as part of the universal va-et-vient : a subtle and alarming movement, that modifies every least detail of existence, something for the insect world to imitate. Now time, too, splits up, propagates, drains and devours itself. The stereoscopic patterns divide: the higher ones pursue their vertical flight into the void, those beneath them plunge greedily downwards, are swallowed by oblivion.