Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

You know, I nearly passed out then. I felt — I felt it was coming. I had to shake myself awake. Nearly dark now…. I feel fine, just fine — oh, but there was still something I wanted to tell you…. Yes, that was it…. The most important thing of all…. Look, I’m going to hold this glass in my hand so you can tell when, when it happens. I’m going to hold on to it as long as I can…. So when — when the moment comes, and I fall asleep, the glass will fall…. Fall on the floor, and you’ll hear it…. And then you’ll know it’s all over. All right?

Aa-a-aah , another cramp. God, this one’s going on and on — argggh , how it hurts…. Anyway, I’m sure this will be the best thing I’ve ever written … even if the ending isn’t all that brilliant.…

It’s some consolation for all the meretricious rubbish I’ve churned out….

Funny. If this is death, it wasn’t worth while making up all those … those philosophical systems…. You know, once before I thought I was going to die…. I was thirteen, something like that. And I–I fell down on the ground, I felt all the blood had drained out of my head, leaving it quite empty…. I was falling … falling … Oh, it was awful … People gathered round me….

It’s as if … as if the Flood had happened … you understand? … and Noah was looking at those still waters.… He didn’t realize that … [ long pause ] The earth was so teeming, so full of myriad life … and the sky … And the light is so diaphanous, especially — especially towards evening … I can still see it, through the window.… Translucent.… One day I believe it’ll be possible to … lose oneself in it.… out there … How lovely it’d be … I think I’ve thrown up.… I felt something.… I can’t be … a very pretty sight.… Aa-aah .… There goes the glass.… Listen.…

There was a sharp sound as the glass smashed, and then silence. Sound-waves distorted by electrical pulsations, the glass lying where it fell, scattered on the floor, tiny sharp-jagged fragments like claws, glittering in the gloom, bright, motionless, a granulation of salt-crystals.

Beyond the dividing barrier of darkness now. Death may be close at hand, that foul rain of destruction which will cover every object with its fine ashy film. Has this area so much as a name now? Do these places so much as exist on the face of the earth? In this harsh and frozen expanse nothing is missing, not one angle, not the tiniest surface scratch. The hospital’s façade, the barrack walls, the high front of the S.P.A.D.A. building loom heavier, lean inwards; and within this closing vice, as though oblivious of their condition, their destiny, men and women alike are getting their lives over. Away and beyond, the negative geometry becomes more marked: white bridges arching across the highways, deserted asphalt squares. Low down on the walls, and so small that you have to stoop to see them, are a series of graffiti, proof that people have lived and loved here. The letters are spidery, scratched with something like a fingernail, a penknife maybe or the edge of a sharp stone. Along the coast the airfields stretch out, parallel to the sea, dead flat, with the same desert-like appearance. And across this whole great desolate expanse, amid the isolation and the enfolding sense of sleep, under rain or sun, by lamplight or day’s bright reflections, the cars come and go, passing one another, tracing their insect-like tracks, a hum and susurrus over the ground, then dwindling out of sight over the horizon towards other man-surveyed domains.

Everything merges and deepens; sleep and torpor have their own sharp texture, which produces its own reality.

Now, at this moment, the abyss may be close. Rooms with yellow-painted walls harbour the smell of stale cigarette-smoke. Solitude closes in, a compact and indissoluble block, immobilizing arms, imprisoning torsos, pressing down on men’s guts and private parts. People are cast-iron statues, heavy, solid, dull, mute, frozen into a posute suggestive of anger. The storm continues to discharge its fury, the sky is like a sheet of iron, and lightning-flashes advance slowly across it like cracks in the metal. François Besson, seated in his coffin, has ceased to exist. Crouched in a corner, back resting against the bed, he nevertheless no longer exists. He has no name, no face. He has come to a stop. Nor does he survive as memory, since no object or artifact or visible shape exists except as itself: it is what it is, and no more, rooted in the bedrock of actuality. It can never be liquid, never melt and drift, bearing down with its fresh current feelings of happiness and pleasure. He is denied the unbounded pleasure of having lived —and quite by chance, because he finds himself shut in beside a window, facing the naked sky, because time itself has penetrated his room and traced every detail of it, in a caricature that can never be effaced.

What it means is suffering, continual and progressive suffering, an increasingly precise revelation of the life and beauty that have eluded him. I am rooted like a tree on a vast mountain plateau, in the heat of summer, hemmed all about with rock, unable to move, unable to escape anything, fixed, wide open to every hazard, like a pylon in a severe electric storm. Everything around me is dead — rock and glacis, dry scrub, sunken watercourses, dead, all dead, yet they never loosen their grip on me, and I can do nothing but count the slow minutes, number the very stones, while the clouds drift on over me. In the high rock-face a waterfall has scored its vertical channel. Flies cluster and buzz on my eyelids. An occasional reddish insect flies past, with great effort, as though dragged down by its own weight. Even here, surrounded by all this open space — it seems positively to invite movement — I can still do nothing. I am still the prisoner of those who belong down there ; this upland is gradually turning back into the concrete-and-girder platitude of which I form a part. Scaffolding. Parking lights, traffic lights. The surface of the pavement at two o’clock in the morning. The ever-louder creak and clatter of the night-time roadsweepers, advancing from road to road, dragging their sprinklers behind them. There’s no doubt about it, I’m a slave, reduced to mere dust. I can’t break free. Danger stalks the earth’s surface, you can feel its muted vibrations ripple through sewers and cellars. Danger, real danger. Hell is right under us, so close that you could knock a spyhole through to it. Hell is our memories, too, our sleepless memories, a little stiff and starchy, memories of the days when our eyes were opening — life as it used to be, tranquillity written across the lined pages of school exercise-books, sensitivity, egotism, happiness. Those pages are illegible today, yellow and spotted. It was as though one were fixed and static, stiff as a figurehead, while the strata of experience descended past one. The upward movement was illusory, the fiction of movement amid stillness; and one day, after long contemplation of these passing chimeras, it turned out that the universe was not the same, that the metamorphosis lay there, and not in you. It was the universe that had ordered this stratification of elements, these strange and transient smoke-patterns. Slow erosion has reduced you to a skeleton, yet you yourself have always remained in the same spot, you have never budged. You are still the same, this Besson-like person, now sitting in his room — third floor, on the right — back against the bed, eyes fixed on the slits in the closed shutters, perspiring in summer, torpid in winter. Yes, you are this freak, this pop-eyed clown, these grey features striped and haloed with light, these closed lips, this decayed tooth throbbing hotly in the jawbone. What you are is Besson + X, your body has been extended by a dimension you never imagined — the weight of a mahogany table, for example, or the burn you get from holding a match too long, or the smell of some particular scent, or the rough, powdery feel of a sheet of fine sandpaper.