Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Then, when Besson recognized this great beauty; when he understood that all had been in vain, and that the moment could not be sustained; when he acknowledged his defeat, and saw the proclamation of his destiny; when, at last, he turned his violence against himself: then he opened his eyes wide and stared at the sun. The blinding brightness entered his eyeballs and exploded there; the sudden pain was almost unbearable, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Besson turned his head away for a moment, trying to find some object that could stop him slipping away from the world: his eyes scanned the beach avidly, trying to find something, anything, that instant — a wasp, a wandering ant, a gnat. But there was nothing, nothing but shingle and pebbles with a vast bluish hole in the middle that shifted as he looked at it. Then his hand closed on a small pebble shaped like a snail, and picked it up. Besson lay back on the beach, and still clutching the little pebble, opened his eyes and looked into the sun again. This time he did not shut them.

Light pierced his skull as though he had never seen light before, a burning and lava-like flood, a cleansing influx that permeated the furthest recesses of his skull. A blank, white, monotonous sound invaded his body little by little and floated it off the ground. The ground receded, opened to form his unfathomable tomb, and the air parted asunder. This was the moment, now . Stiffening his will to the uttermost, Besson pitted his staring eyes against the sun, against fire and earth and water, never flinching, against men and beasts, against stones, against the air, against the vast and planet-swarming emptiness of outer space. He stood there in defiance of them all, racked by pain and loathing, and offered them the delicate shield of his twin eyes, from which the tears now flowed ceaselessly. These two globes, with their delicate irises and dark translucent pupils, he now surrendered to the world. To the sun’s savage brightness he exposed the dark and secret surface of his retinas, so that by burning the memory of vengeance might be preserved, and never perish. Then, at last, he began a soft and agonized whimpering, the hoarse unhappy cry of a gibbon, screaming without rhyme or reason at the onset of darkness.

Society at large — In a train — A little boy smokes his first cigarette — The tourist bus — Mothers — The end of Anna’s story — Echo of a suicide

ON the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth days, and all the days that followed, there was no more day: only one black unbroken night, that went on for ever. The town was rid of its incubus now, and inside the houses, with their warm electric radiators, people went on living just as they had always done. Angèle Basman, for instance, a woman of forty-two, was busy deep-frying potatoes in boiling oil, a red-flowered apron round her waist, tiny drops of hot fat spitting out of the pan on to her bare arms as she stood over the gas-stove. Or Michou, a tabby cat, who was fast asleep in the sunny part of some suburban back garden, while the fleas tracked through his thick fur, looking for the best place to bite him. Or the thin young girl with washed-out complexion and cropped black hair, who was wrapping a handful of bleeding lights up in newspaper — having previously smeared her sheets with it to stop her mother realizing she was pregnant.

On one clear pane of glass a tiny gnat was visible: it might have been walking across the blue-grey sky. It advanced very slowly, millimetre by millimetre, on several gossamer-fine pairs of legs. Its body had a greenish tinge about it.

The newspapers carried their usual news items, with banner headlines for earthquakes and revolutions, somewhat smaller cross-heads for crimes passionnels , and so on down to ordinary close-set type for such things as car accidents, thefts from parked vehicles, or the exploits of bums and down-and-outs.

In various discreet corners the beggars were plying their trade. Old women were scattering crumbs for the pigeons on their window-sills, and in the restaurants couples were eating sauerkraut. Wherever you went there was the same faint odour of garlic and grease and rusty metal, the gurgle of stopped-up sinks. A man was sitting in his car at an intersection, waiting for the red light to turn green, and picking his nose. Drunks were taking nips from their bottles of wine, and fat women were licking at chocolate ices.

Some people were reading novels in the dim light of their shuttered rooms, stories all more or less written according to the same formula as this sample: ‘Once more my mouth tasted the joys of her soft, burning skin, and we rolled over on the quiet sand, muscles rigid with desire. When my hand, in the course of a wandering caress, found the zip of her swimsuit, down her back, she tried to struggle for a moment. But the satiny material parted, like a flower tremulously opening in the warm sunlight, to reveal the agonizing delights of her nakedness. But only for a brief instant did I feel her bare breasts soft and caressing against my chest, explore the roundness of her buttocks, feel her still childish stomach and long slender legs melting into mine; only for a brief instant did I savour that rare sensation of a body still freshly damp in patches from the sea, and tanned for long hours by the sun. For suddenly, supple and elusive, she slipped from my grasp and ran with a defiant air, still half-naked to the sun and wind. From a long way off came the faint hoot of the ferry-boat. With an enchanting lack of modesty she ran on, paying no attention to her unzipped swimsuit. The sun suddenly touched the horizon, turned blood-red, and flooded sea and beach with the glow of its magnificent demise … She came back towards me, hair flying, a grenadine tinge colouring her pointed breasts and the curve of her belly. “Half past five!” she called out furiously….’

Others were painting gaudy pictures, in which the dominant colours were shocking pink and madder. Others again spent all afternoon playing the flute, or listening to jazz records. Any insect society has its organization. Throughout the town at this moment everything was perfectly flat, or perfectly square, or, at a pinch, perfectly round. On the doors of public toilets and bar-room W.C.’s penknives had carved obscene words and incised pornographic figures; but these words and figures possessed a dignity almost amounting to virtuousness. On two identical notices, printed in red letters, appeared the words GENTLEMEN and LADIES. A train moved slowly along the coast from one stop to the next, twenty black carriages drawn by a steam locomotive belching smoke downwind. As it rattled along the track it emitted, with monotonous regularity, a deep wooooooooooooo! which shook the ground underfoot. It would plunge into tunnels, emerge again, steam round long curves, brake, whistle, labour up gradients and rattle down them the other side, trigger off signals and level-crossing alarm-bells. It wheels drummed along regularly over the rail-junctures, producing a cadenced clack-clack, clack-clack which formed its basic rhythm. Valves opened and shut, steam blew off. Occasionally the train passed over a set of points, and the rhythm of the wheels became confused, made noises like coughing and sneezing and spitting. In each compartment, with its worn felt seats, people sat smoking, chatting, eating, drinking, or just staring at one another, while the ground fled back beneath them. Their conversations were always the same:

‘What time do we get there?’

‘I’m not sure — if we’re not running late, we ought to be in about eight o’clock.’

‘They always run late.’

‘Did you see how long we were held up last time?’

‘Well, a train had been derailed further down the line.’