Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

‘That’s no excuse.’

‘After all, we’ve paid for our tickets …’

‘Let me tell you, madam, when my son came out of the army, do you know what time he got home? At midnight, madam— midnight!’

‘Just like my sister-in-law — she was on her way home from Italy—’

‘And the time when our kid had the mumps—’

‘What can you expect, eh? What can you expect….’

A little boy stood leaning against the wall in a quiet back street, smoking his first cigarette. He had taken it from a brand-new packet with red and white stripes, labelled WINSTON. Then he put it in his mouth. He struck a match and lit it. Now he was inhaling the acrid, sweetish aroma of the smoke, and salivating.

Two young women in bikinis were strolling round the edge of a swimming-pool that smelt of disinfectant. The one on the right was a tall brunette; her costume had a pattern of small green and white squares. The one on the left was thinner, and wore a white bikini, all covered with little pearl shells. Both had on sunglasses with large circular lenses, and the white radiance blazed down on them like a searchlight’s beam.

Everywhere civilization was established, and had set up its notices: no parking, no entry, no billsticking, private property.

In the middle of the countryside lay a large ham-shaped rock, quite motionless. The plane-trees grew imperceptibly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, simply thrusting back clods and granules of earth, stretching up their branchy fingers to the bright sky above them. This was the way it was.

A coachful of tourists spent some time threading its way through the streets of the town. Then it set off across the hills, and each time it stopped all the passengers turned their heads as one man to left, or right, in obedience to a voice which announced, in several languages:

‘You can see on your right the ruins of an aqueduct built by the Romans. Lens aperture, f.1.5.’

‘Vous apercevez sur votre droite les ruines de l’aqueduc construit par les Romains. Ouverture de l’objectif: 1.5.’

‘Rechts können Sie die Ruinen der von den Römern gebauten Wasserleitung sehen. Offnung des Objektifs: 1.5’.

‘U ziet nu op uw recht de ruinen van de romeinse waterleiding. Opening van de lens: 1.5.’

‘U kan regts die ruiëne van die Waterleiding sien, wat deur die Romeins gebou was. Opening van die lens: 1.5.’

The construction team was still busily at work on their site in the middle of the river bed. Another month or two, and the bridge would be finished. The blind man sat on the beat he had bought and sold newspapers, listening to music from his transistor radio. Every night the voyeur prowled through the thickets up on the hill and every evening, at the same time, the woman whose face was so white that it might have been made of plaster would enter the church and sit staring straight in front of her, at a point just above the closed tabernacle.

Josette was driving through the streets in her new car, looking for somewhere to park. A young red-headed girl, accompanied by a small red-headed boy, could often be seen walking along the pavement. But these were not the only solitary women in town: there were many others, blonde, brunette, light brown, dyed or rinsed, grey and black. Each went her own separate way to her private domain, in a green or a blue dress, or sometimes in check pants, equipped with stockings and bra and briefs, or nylon tights; suffering from toothache, or migraine, or diarrhoea, constipation or a cold in the head; depressed or cheerful, jealous, in love; real people. Real people.

In the dining-room of a flat half-way up the dilapidated apartment block, a man sat smoking and reading the paper. A women was there too, darning socks. Her heavy face was weighed down by fatigue. Light and shadow flitted across it like puffs of air. She was there , a massive maternal presence, whose belly had opened and closed again, queening it all unawares over the world, at once triumphant and humble. There was nothing in her; yet she was immovable, solid as a marble statue, a weathered, polished block of quarried stone, and in her water and fire came together, in her, there in the folds of her inmost parts, the hollow seeds of past and future were already concealed. The tree, the green tree with its upthrusting, bursting shoots grew perennially from her belly. But of this she remained unaware.

It was for her, or against her, that everything had been created. Blood, bone, nails and hair, all belonged to her. Outrage her, fling her down and kill her, she would still emerge victorious. She would look up at you with those heavy, liquid eyes, and go on giving birth to you, without hate, without respite. Even in defeat her face would still wear an expression of victory, and her body would contain all the strength of a conqueror.

When those three drunks fought at night outside a bar, it was for her. They threw clumsy punches at each other, and rolled on the ground, and one of them lost his shoe. The other two stopped fighting, went down on hands and knees, recovered the shoe, and carefully put it back on its owner’s bare foot. It was for her, too, that the sadist of Fontainebleau attacked his victims; for her that cars skidded off the highway and piled up in fields.

Century after century, women had given birth in joy and travail. Céline had borne Marguerite, Marguerite had borne Jeanne, Jeanne had borne Eléonore, Eléonore had borne Thérèse, Thérèse had borne Eugénie, Eugénie had borne Cécile, Cécile had borne Alice, Alice had borne Catherine, Catherine had borne Laura, Laura had borne Simone, Simone had borne Pauline, Pauline had borne Julie, Julie had borne Yvette, Yvette had borne Monique, Monique had borne Gabrielle, Gabrielle had borne Claudia, Claudia had borne Gioia.

In the deserted room the voice rose from the tape-recorder through the darkness. It spoke for the yellow walls with flashes of light playing over them, for the bed with red blankets, for the curtainless windows, for the empty ash-trays, for the moths asleep under the coverlets, for each thing in its place, including the creature like a bundle of old rags feeling its way blindly round the room. It said:

I’m going to record on the other side of the spool. I want you to know — Well, perhaps it’s not all that important, after all. But I did want to tell you everything that I said that first time, ten days ago, was untrue. Honestly. I was lying the whole time. But I didn’t know I was lying, and that’s the reason — that’s the reason I spoke to you the way I did. Afterwards I realized the truth. Oh, I didn’t play the tape back — I hadn’t the courage to listen to my own words, all I’d said about me and Paul and the rest of it, because if I had I’d never have summoned up enough courage to send it to you afterwards. It was just remembering what I’d said. I mean, when I told you all that stuff, it was all fairy stories, just plain lies. Well, obviously, everything I said to you, the facts I mean, was true enough — but it was all wrong to tell you. It was stupid, I–I thought one could talk to people in a straightforward way, tell them what one thought, or believed one thought. That’s why I lied to you. I talked on and on, holding the microphone and watching the spools of tape unwind, and it was all pure drivel. An alibi, that’s what it was, a way of hiding the truth from myself no less than from others. Just the same as when I was typing a story, just like it was when I did that thing on Albert the snail or the old woman with an obsession about her trolleybus. Now I know — I know what it was fundamentally in aid of: lying, concealing the truth, oh, everything — You know, it’s an awful thing, not talking. It’s an awful thing never lying, too. That’s what I’d have liked to learn how to do. I don’t know if I’ll manage it. I’m going to try and carry it right through to the end, but it won’t be easy. In any case, when you’ve heard the spool through, please do one thing for me: wipe off what I’ve recorded. Don’t preserve any of it, not one word. Leave nothing but silence in its place. Do you understand? The thing is, I’m always being tempted to wander off from the point — anecdotes. Really, you know, there’s only one thing I have to tell you. I–I don’t know how to begin, though, because it’s really very simple, and it’s not easy to explain something simple without — well, without talking a lot of rubbish, and dressing it up and putting frills on it.