Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

When Besson had got almost as far as the sewage dump, he sat down on the shingle for a breather. It was now decidedly hot, so hot that he had to remove his coat and shirt. He leaned back on his elbows, watching the waves roll gently in. Time dragged, and the second-hand of the watch on Besson’s wrist moved forward in a series of tiny jerks, on and on. Eventually this irritated him so much that he unstrapped the watch, laid it on a flat stone, and then hammered it into tiny fragments with a sharp flint. Bits of spring and fragments of broken glass were scattered over the beach. He examined them with interest.

There was no longer a cloud in sight; they had all been absorbed into the azure expanse of the sky — all, that is, except the long white trail left by a jet aircraft flying at about 40,000 feet, though this too soon melted away. The bird had flown away, and there were no people around any more. Nothing remained except the sun, now at its zenith, beating down on land and sea as though through a burning-glass.

The last time he heard signs of human activity was when these two children passed close by him, talking in loud voices. The little boy was called Robert, and the little girl’s name was Blanche.They strolled along slowly, stopping every two or three yards to discuss something. Without sitting up so that he could see them, Besson lay and listened to their conversation.

‘Blanche! Blanche!’ Robert called out. ‘Come and look here!’

‘Found a monk?’ Blanche enquired.

‘No. Come and see.’

‘It’s a candlestick,’ Blanche said.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’

‘Not bad. That’s one more you’ve got. What’s your total now?’

‘Three,’ Robert said.

‘I’ve got two candlesticks and about ten monks,’ said Blanche.

‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘but one of them’s no good: it hasn’t got a stripe.’

‘It has got a stripe! You can’t see it very well, but it’s got one.’

‘Anyway,’ Robert said, ‘ I’ve got a candlestick with something written on it.’

‘What sort of thing? Show me.’

‘Wait a tick — it says Farge, or Farga, something like that.’

‘Here, let me see,’ Blanche said, and then, after a pause: ‘It’s Forge. That’s what’s written on it. Forge.’

‘No it isn’t, that’s an A there, not an O. It’s Farga.’

‘Going to let me have it?’

‘I found it, didn’t I? Down there in the rubbish-dump.’

‘If you give it me, I’ll swop you half my monks.’

‘Nothing doing. You can pick up monks anywhere.’

‘Even one with three stripes?’

‘If you want my candlestick, it’s because it’s worth more.’

‘Oh keep your silly candlestick, then. Anyway, I’ve got two already.’

‘Yes, but they haven’t got anything written on them.’

‘I don’t care. Anyway, Farga doesn’t mean anything. Hey, look, over there — another monk.’

‘That’s just what I was telling you, you can find monks anywhere.’

‘Yes, but you don’t.’

‘Monks are just pebbles, anyway.’

‘Well, so are candlesticks.’

‘That’s not true. Candlesticks are more like cement.’

‘Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

‘Anyway I prefer candlesticks. At least they’re useful for something. Come on, let’s have a look further on—’

The voices dwindled and faded. Silence closed in again, there was nothing but heat and brightness. Besson gradually began to perspire.

This moment had been a long time coming. Besson had been waiting for it for years, perhaps for centuries. Today the curtain of rain and cloud had suddenly been torn apart, to reveal the sky in all its nakedness, the blinding circle of the sun. The agonizing beauty of this hard landscape, all rough and stippled with crosshatching, was so intense now as to be quite unbearable. The light had become a bright and burning abyss into which one had to plunge head first. The town, the highways, the noisy airfields, the blocked-out pattern of fields and woodland, the steep mountainsides, animals watchful or sleeping, women and children — all had led here, to the place and moment chosen by the gods for the expiatory sacrifice to be accomplished. Every line had been traced so as to converge on this one point, this beach of grey pebbles, this particular day and hour. He could not escape. He could not go back: time had stopped for this event, there was no possibility of either advance or retreat. It was there, and now. The things had to happen. Like a sequence of events the action of which progresses by its own impetus towards its first and final crux, so Besson’s life (as he was well aware) had been orientated towards this . As though to avoid the moment of reckoning, he tried, briefly, to conjure up old memories. Faded snapshots flashed through his mind. Here was a picture of a child leaning against an iron balustrade, in a village the name of which had vanished beyond recall. Here was the seated figure of a mother, her hair braided up round her head, with a tiny bald grimacing doll held in the crook of her right arm. Other shapes and figures, absurd figments of his imagination, flickered across the blood-red screen of his closed eyelids: wolves with pointed ears, runaway horses, monsters wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He was shut in the spider-haunted cupboard, the gleaming texture of a porcelain flower-bowl held and mesmerized him through the drowsy evening, while the voices went on talking, talking, in the flat exhausted accents of those who have nothing to say. He was back in the shut rooms of his childhood dreams, that fearful, hermetically sealed chamber in which the walls were at once so close and so remote.

Then there was that submarine abyss, the plummeting dive down, down, past a rampart high as a twenty-storey building, into the depths, down to squid-haunted grottoes and thick waving carpets of seaweed. The black hole expanded, became a volcano’s maw, a cavern, the heart of a glowing cathedral of embers, where the bloated, half-eaten corpse went tumbling down, over and over, to the bottom.

Minutes passed. Hours passed. Days, years passed. All elements mingled and merged, interlocking, fused in an automatic sequence Nothing was left now save the immense misery of having survived. Nothing — not a single pattern, not one word written on actual solid paper — could palliate that fact. The days resembled a knife, a knife with a keen blade. Maps and dictionaries were appalling, because they could never be complete: there was always some elusive factor omitted. The tiny palpitating animal fled through the undergrowth, leaving no trace behind, not even a scent; yet everything had been enclosed within a smooth-walled sphere, without any opening, crazily reflecting each object back towards its centre.

Besson lay stretched out on the pebbles — they had begun to hurt him — and watched the stormy future approach him. Here, too, it was possible to forget what was going to happen in a few mintues. In a few hours, days, years. Old age would descend, one of these days, bringing its shameful peace. Features would wither, muscles lose their strength. Yet none of this mattered. Death would come like any other visitant, falling from roof or sky without warning. In the street, in a group of loafers. In some stinking bed, against a beslobbered pillow. In a wrecked car. Half way up a staircase, so that the silly lifeless body rolled down to the bottom again, bumping from tread to tread, skull knocking like a hollow calabash. Forty years old. Fifty-five. Sixty-eight. Seventy-seven, seventy-nine, eighty-one, eighty-four, ninety-two, a hundred and four, a hundred and five, a hundred and six. Which of these figures would turn out to be the right one? Which would be the fatal day? 22nd August 1999, or 4th May 1983? Or 13th December 2002? Or perhaps 1st April 2014? Which day would it be? And what time of day? Noon? Two in the afternoon? Nine-thirty p.m.? Or in the small hours of the morning, after an exhausting and nightmare-ridden sleep? What would give out first? Heart? Kidneys? Liver? Lungs? Spine? But none of this had very much importance. For the years, the years would continue to unfold in their serried ranks, no more distinguishable from one another than buffaloes at a watering-hole, and the years would become centuries, and the centuries would follow one another in turn, like great striations of marble. In the remote future, far beyond this place, this moment, time would still be thrusting out its branches, a growing tree. Languages would decline, arts gutter into oblivion. Ideas would glide smoothly on, small boats borne by the stream, never reaching any destination. There would be no end, just as there had been no beginning: simply night falling over the world’s achievements, veiling them in light shadow. The invisible record would turn on its own axis, swiftly at the periphery, almost stationary towards the centre. And eternity would be there, not hidden but omnipresent; not an external pall, but permeating the inner heart of things, at the centre of time’s central point.