Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Just as you could never escape from the hell of your visible surroundings, just as you could never escape the tormenting presence of those countless million faces that hemmed you in on all sides, so likewise you will not be able to escape the revelation of your own existence. Your name will be inscribed on the wooden panels: BESSON. Your date will be set down at the foot of a memorandum: 22nd March 1963. Your life, your shrivelled-up existence, the life of a fusty, parchment-yellow creature now, plunging down the final slope of oblivion, will be known and recorded in detail. Your end will take on a cataclysmic magnitude; you will be devoured alive by your own powers, your energies will spend themselves on your own destruction. You are BESSON. You are alive. One day you will be a mere bundle of bones, dead meat, the pale gelatinous substance of a coffin-worm. One day you will lie on your back, as though on the beach, and become aware that the earth no longer supports your weight, that it’s opening slowly under the pressure of your body, deeper, deeper, till it becomes the cushion of foul air contained within a sepulchre. Thicknesses of black marble still stand between you and that day, but each passing second gnaws a little more from your protective ramparts. Now, till the hours of sunshine and clarity return, the rain still falls, the gentle drifting rain, all-imbibing, falling noiselessly on my face in the street, a few yards from the intersection, moistening my eyes, leaving my shirt heavy and sodden. It is just such peace and harmony that produce yet another hell: calm and tranquillity become remorse, grinding me down into powder. Water trickles through the excavations, and I know this water is bearing me away with it, bit by bit, is stripping me of my secrets.

Behind the rampart of mist and ruin, I know, paradise lies concealed. But this paradise is one that needs must remain lost to us, since no road to its attainment exists. Such are harmony and beauty. Everything was swift, logical, well-defined. This was the time of that mystery that I bore within myself all unawares, and which bound all things together one with another. It was neither faith nor passion, but a delicate subtle joy, the perfect virtue of a shadow hermetically sealed in a box, cohesion in thought and deed, a reunited family about to sit down to table. And all this was irremediably destroyed by the acuteness of a pair of eyes, the agony of two retinas, the exacerbated functioning of nerves and cells.

The landscape, the scenery, has passed beyond whiteness now to a dazzling radiance. Lines have become razor-edged, colours stick like glue. Each sound is magnified into a vast uproar, and silk-smooth coverlets suddenly harden, become great rough-surfaced blocks against which — as though after falling twelve storeys or so — the flesh smashes with squelching impact.

Language has resumed its crazy ballet: words pass, join up, divide, streaking across the night like so many fireworks, without rhyme or reason, an endless, repetitive sequence, always tracing the same image. The mind of this man is exactly like a long sentence: you think, every moment, that you’re about to reach the end of it, yet you’re confronted by one extension after another, interminably, all linked up by connecting particles, prepositions, adverbs or whatever, while the movement and articulation of the sentence as a whole gets progressively faster and faster. There is an invisible hand engraving it on some imaginary wall, word by word, phrase by phrase, drawing it out with clause after modifying clause, each letter adding a fresh nuance to the whole, each syllable imperceptibly altering the overall tone, just as one can spoil a room’s colour-scheme by the slightest rearrangement of its contents — masking the orange-tinted surfaces, grouping a lot of shiny reds and blues in the corners, cluttering up the line of the skirting-boards with baroque pieces that are all glittering reflection and dark shadow — and so the sentence continues, swells to colossal dimensions, until it reaches that precise point — a tenth of a second will turn the scale — where the mind is no longer capable of grasping its meaning, whereupon the whole ill-balanced structure explodes into a thousand pieces, plunges down the void, tumbles into madness and night, the fierce, echoing vortex of the abyss.

Yet this Besson, Besson I as it were, is still alive behind all his sufferings. Once in the past he was alone, caught in the ant-heap, shoved and jostled by the surging crowds. In the evening, he used to walk up and down the street near the gates of a factory, or outside cinemas, unknown and unnoticed, hands thrust into the pockets of his Bedford cord trousers, wearing an old out-at-elbow jacket. Neon signs flooded him with their dull yet intense glare; raindrops, descending magnificently from the furthest reaches of a black and hole-like sky, beat down on his head and hands and the glass of his wrist-watch, spotting the toe-caps of his suede shoes, zig-zagging invisibly before his eyes. He was well and truly planted, yes indeed he was, in the centre of this town, he really belonged to this century, this year, day, and hour, recoverable in perpetuity; a Lartigue, a Benoît, a Schultz, a Rivière. Cars swept silently past him as he walked the pavements. A bus, every light ablaze, stood waiting by its metal stop-sign, shuddering in triple-time rhythm, rak-a-dak, dak, dak, rak-a-dak, dak, dak . A man in ragged brown clothing lurched along past the shop-windows. Dim figures were making love unconcernedly in doorways. And there were voices that kept calling out, hoarse voices, and these hoarse, human voices mingled with one another, perhaps they rose out of the ground, something else to add to the smells of tar and petrol, and the voices rose and the stink of sulphur grew and spread, in a general atmosphere of power and intoxication and chaos, suggesting confusion and death indeed, but also hinting at resurrection: ‘Now then, now then! … Sorry … Henri’s going to … You just look out or I’ll wring your bloody neck … What did I tell you [ slash ] … Bit of friction there….’

Most of the men are wearing glasses. Their features look quite monstrous, distended by sudden appetites which only puff out their lips and cheeks. The way they walk is sheer torture, each movement harsh and abrupt. In the half-light one can see the swarm to which they belong grouping itself in accordance with some unknown structure: to the left, to the left, left yet again, one more to the left. Right. Left. Right; right; right. Right; left; right. Sounds stab the atmosphere like buzzing flies; then, caught between those pitiless jaws, they imprint themselves on the surface of vapours and clouds, incised reminders of the objects they have left behind. On the roofs of houses we find outlined, in reverse, the confused mythological figures that watch over men’s lives: the dangerous bestiary, those maleficent points in space that one links together almost without intending it, greedy suckers, sharpened claws, vertebrae eaten away with tetanus, teeth hollowed out by necrobioses, chapped and wrinkled lips, blood dripping from the secret folds of the belly, and eyes, eyes, eyes — huge, glowing, full of fragmentated gallows-imagery, eyes with seized-up muscles, eyes with glaucous humours, eyes with constantly weeping tear ducts, a flood, a rain, water streaming over the flat roofs of the apartment buildings, water striping the air, a grim and deadly liquid that in all likelihood, one day soon, will disintegrate the unique existence of mankind, and leave them sinking in the mud, half dressed and half asleep still, like so many iron crosses, still protesting their eternal fidelity to that hellish oath — ignoble mindlessness, after the deluge, abomination and suffering, suffering, fear .

Silence is creeping over the town, and the street-lamps are humming again. It is nearly dark now. Here, on the smooth level surface of this concrete bridge, is this person, this individual, turning hesitantly, like a metal top dropped spinning into an ashtray. The rotations of his body are accelerating ad infinitum , his fury is caught and held in a series of metallic reflections, vibrates on his spinning centre, drills through glass, mingles with the blurred strata of the air. A tiny breeze blows over the ground, scattering the dust before it can come to rest. This is the song — hard and chill as a blade-edge — that has taken root here. Its words are barely audible, they are mere inarticulate sounds, the words make and unmake themselves in vertiginous sequence, in impotence and hatred. Bright flashes of light, exploding at irregular intervals, black lightning, powdery branches.