Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

I no longer believe in god

I no longer believe in god

I no longer believe in god

I no longer believe in god

A giant hand presses down on Besson, bending him double, forcing him to embrace the earth. Slowly he crawls beneath it. The top still revolves on its glass plate. All round him — it — the indispensable crowd of people wearing glasses. The sound of footsteps approaches, dwindles, returns. No more portraits. What is this enormous Café that’s suddenly sprung up on the right? No more books. The sum and totality of every flash of light is there, a blurred spectrum in which every element has to be absorbed simultaneously, blood-red, blue, ultramarine, black, white, the pure and terrible whiteness of snow. A workman with a negroid face trudges through the streets carrying a beam on his shoulder. It jogs as he moves. Suddenly the windows are counted, just like that—854, there are 854 of them. Tiny flames rise trembling from match-heads. Look, the world is breaking up. Look, I am going to die . That’s the alarm going off. Or clockwork toys, that some hidden hand wound up while I slept, underneath my worn and rumpled pillow. In the scars left by biting teeth, in yellow patches of mucus. Besson turns on himself, without turning.

Today,

22nd March 1963

he alone remains; his features have shrunk all round, symmetrically, his cheeks have sunk below the inner angle of the eye. His drowned hair lies at rest now, rain and air rest sprawling over him. He has given up. Two things have happened. The barrier of his will no longer exists. He wanted dissolution, and now this dissolution is coming about without him. Houses collapse in the roadway with the most grotesque sound — the noise you hear in a hollow rock cavern when the tide, surging forward with that to-and-fro motion, pours through for a moment, swells, rises, is cut hollow rock cavern when the tide, surging forward with that to-off, fills with internal eddies, becomes rock, then — in another brief moment — streams back out of the dark abyss, hard, glassy, utterly different now, sucked out by the ebbing current, flowing down below the surface in foam-streaked tumult, leaving trails of bubbles behind.

As though a moon had suddenly appeared, a parasitical heavenly body within the vault of the firmament, as though another planet were in existence, rounded, spherical, a pale refulgent globe, charged with the magnetic powers of iron, of the mineral world frost reflecting naked sunlight, the motion of the sea has communicated itself to the world ashore. In the part of the town immediately around Besson, say a square mile or so, the tide ebbs and flows continually; magnetic fusion has thrown gravity askew. The mass, the volume of objects becomes elongated, things possess skin-like surfaces. Ramparts erect themselves, stratifications appear. One layer, then another. Men merge and mingle, the undertow sucks them in, spews them out, sucks them in once more. The misty air is alive with waving hands and a thrash of limbs. The sounds of voices meet, cross, low-level sound-waves interweaving. They leave a warm yet impalpable ball in the hollow of the ear, a liquid globule quivering a hair’s breadth from the tympanum. The head grows heavier moment by moment, balanced painfully on its supporting neck, the cervical vertebrae cracking in protest, preparing, no doubt, for the moment of final crushing annihilation, the tiny spark-cluster of the death-agony. Into this head the square mile of the town now passes — not direct, but obliquely, as though by way of a mirror. Pat on its cue the void moves into action, drilling its bottomless well through the brain. The gulf that was his skull and the gulf opening beneath his feet are isolated from each other, cut off. Little by little objects leave the earth and enter his body, one after the other, with cries of pain, mute vibration of vocal cords. Like a fish with dilated gills, he embarks on this process of deglutition, swallowing, devouring. Houses pass into him, slowly, like huge mouthfuls of stale bread. Railroad tracks twist up their hideous rails into his mouth, two by two, roads hump themselves towards him. Then come waves of colour, special colours. Orange orange. Violet. Grey. Green green green green. Grey. Pink. Pink. Black. Pink. Emerald emerald. Black black black black black black black. Yellowish. Locomotives, boiling hot engines sweating oil drop by drop. Blocks of ferro-concrete, still humming with sound, lift-shafts with closed lifts going up in them. Grey, grey, grey. Black pink green blue black white WHITE. Floors of rooms covered with a thin film of dust. Cigarettes, lit or stubbed out. The sound of a peal of bells, a drunk cursing, the flatulent bumbling of a television station. These vast sloping roofs, where birds cluster to watch the sun go down. The East Side pylon with a few insulators missing. Electrocution. Danger, no entry, high voltage, death. A small hut into which one could slip without a qualm, teetering as though half-anaesthetized, both hands turning cold already, already encased in a strange blackish skin, feeling their way towards that complex centre where thousands of blue-steel wires hum on their red bobbins; then a soft, furtive scraping sound, and the blinding shock, like a door being flung open to let in pure fresh air.

Then a sudden flood of men sweeps him from his vertical position, a maelstrom that seems as though it was never born, and can never die, from everlasting to everlasting: a stream of black ants, gently bearing away the empty husk of a huge grasshopper.

Not at another time, for there was only the one time, day and night mingled together, vast and indifferent: with rain still falling from the sky and cascading down the steps of the town, the noise and the terror reached their climax. Letters and words began to play general post; thoughts, as replaceable elements, underwent various permutations. The messages no longer reached anyone. Strange passwords made a road for themselves through the tumult, cries to which no individual could have laid claim: CHRIST, SALUT, OLLA, LE GA. Letters were dispatched in white enevlopes with the flaps stuck down. In the top right-hand corner of each was a stamp carrying within its serrated edges some little picture — a woman’s head, a cook, or a landscape drawn in fine minuscule outline. Wherever you looked there were millions of written messages; their power still survived when they lay abandoned in garbage-cans or at the bottom of drawers, exposed to every insult. Pages of unknown bibles retracing people’s private, insignificant histories:

My dear Jean:

Thanks for your letter. I’ve fixed up the insurance and all that jazz, though because of the fine they made me cough up an extra £4.10.od. The worst thing of the lot is that I lent the motor-bike to John James, who took off with Anna on the pillion. All of which means that we’re still not in the clear; this infernal bike is beginning to cost me a pretty penny.

I’ve paid ₤20 for it — hope that’s the price you had in mind. I’ve handed the money over to Libby, and you ought to get it fairly soon.

France and Eric agreed to take the guitar back to Paris for me — I expect you’ll know who they are? Anyway they’ve left it with some friends of theirs, and Libby’s given your brother the address, so I suppose he’ll have picked it up by now.

See you one of these days.

Yours ever,

Nick.

‘You are young, you want to study, and have fun, and live.

BUT

Do you realize that every year the world spends 60 billion francs (old currency) on weapons of destruction?

Do you realize that 100 million men and 70 per cent of the world’s scientists are employed on war production?

Do you realize that 60 tons of T.N.T. per human being could at any time reduce the entire globe to a cinder?