Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Do you realize, lastly, that if nuclear war broke out it would kill 300 million people in a matter of minutes?

THREE HUNDRED MILLION CORPSES: THAT IS YOUR FUTURE

But it is not inevitable. You can and must exorcize this bogey. Of course you are against war. But that is not enough: you must SAY SO. You think it’s pointless, that it’s none of your business—

YOU’RE WRONG, IT IS NOT POINTLESS, AND IT IS VERY MUCH YOUR BUSINESS

BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIVE

If you are on your own, no one will hear you. BUT YOU ARE NOT ON YOUR OWN.’

‘Jessie James: Hopeless Blues ’

There are other words, more secret and terrible still. What hand — adult’s or teen-ager’s — carved them with a penknife in the wood of the table? They’re nothing much in themselves, it’s true, and ever since the moment when hand and knife came together in this Café, they have been overlaid by a constant stream of bottles, glasses, cups, other hands, other words; an endless battering assault, a silent act of restraint made endemic by events, a paralyser of time, skewering the hours like a long steel engraver’s point. And yet they continue to proclaim, for all time, this message of happiness and torment; they still eternally relate, in time’s unmoving sphere, that exodus of God’s people through war-torn lands and the swamps of good fortune.

Drum

Molotov

Lollypop

Shrimp

Elite

Key

Foot

Sékou Touré

Passion Flowers

Bourbon

Honey-bee

In this rough sketch, so sharply outlined that it is as though one saw it from a third-floor window, the distant houses repeat their pattern of solid cubes, and a layer of pink gently spreads over the walls, frittering out towards the roof-tops like a shock of hair. At the centre of the sky are deployed all these signs and traces of superhuman life: each knot, each concentric circle to be found below is traced on its wide and ashen surface. The black broken lines and anthracite gleam of cars’ bodywork flicker aloft there, with an imperceptible and tireless motion. From the human city there goes up a multitude of voices, a hubbub of activity, and this monotonous clamour reconstitutes itself among the clouds. Twentieth-century awareness. And speed overtakes innumerable objects, projects itself in a near-scientific illusion, as here with slate tiles, for instance, or the flesh of women and children, or some dark-coloured metal of unknown composition. The eye must penetrate to the very heart of matter, cutting a path with agony and fever and palpitations of the heart — through millions of molecules. Deeper still then, at the core of cloud and vapour, the eye must become number, must pierce further, while molecules separate and matter divides, till it reaches the unchartable point of mathematical bewilderment, that point x of anguish and despair where all physical matter ends and nothing remains beyond it but the empty void.

The landscape has suddenly become, at one and the same time, so vast and yet so restricted: a cone, a genuine cone, its apex non-existent, its base always stretching further than one can see. Cohesion has not totally vanished: some element of being still remains, a vague blurred light, as still as a letter of the alphabet, amid this vast void which is illuminated by its presence. And yet an order has been broken: some process of acceleration, some electrical charge, perhaps — who knows? — has split the atoms apart at a point near the surface, breaking away small masses of energy which are liable to shoot off on a dangerous course of their own. Gamma rays. But this process of dissociation is not unlimited as far as the eye qua number can see, objective existence still survives, its presence theoretical but certain, like that of a nebula. Sources of energy have their own appointed place: behold them now, like stars, gleaming alone in the night’s immensity. They are words, they are symbols, they stand inscribed in the turn of a formula on the blackboard, and from them spring truth and abundance. Each fragment of granite mingled with tar that makes up the pavement, every gleaming piece of enamel, each square yard of the sea’s surface, each plane-tree, every patch of living skin — all have been destroyed utterly, yet still remain alive. The world has an infinite capacity for breaking down and rebuilding its elements: everything is subsumed in that apotheosis of letters and numbers, Xi Zero — Anti Xi Zero. And then, by way of counter-current, and springing from the hard central core of this certainty, there rises a kind of damnable hope, a kind of hope like the onset of a cyclone. The will projected by these centuries of energy. Little by little tables and chairs assume solid form, gradually harden into existence beneath these blind fingers, arrange themselves architecturally within the four walls of a room. Corpuscles agglomerate, wooden feet thrust out, colours vibrate like sounds. Red, red. Black, red. Ochre, red. White, white, red, Red, black, red. Cohesion begins again, the slack assembly of nails and dadoes. The floor shakes back into its pattern of squared lines and purplish tiles. Dust lays its film over the cracks again, time puts on its make-up. A second. Dust. A second. Dust. A second. Dust A second. Dust. Everywhere homes become ready, one after the other, solid and durable; everywhere, without one realizing it, flesh quivers into life, veins distend as the rhythmic flow passes through them. Here is a woman. Here is a man. There is a child. A dog. A winged ant. Here is another woman. In one corner of the kitchen, near the cubic yard or so of air impregnated by the odours from two overflowing garbage-cans, a cockroach rustles as it moves under the sole of a slipper. Against a wall down near the beach a tree (impossible to describe it) stands stifling in its own washed-out halo. Rain trickles over its outspread branches a deep drain eats it away at root-level.

So everything is ready: ready for the journey to Purgatory, the journey to the land of black and white. The whole town glows ruddily with matter, with solid substances. In twenty seconds, perhaps even sooner, the crisis may return, and the whole process begin all over again. Things will pass into themselves, like devouring serpents that greedily consume their own bodies. Life will plan itself unaided, and at random, on the first coarse and yellowing sheet of paper that comes to hand. The plan will grow and grow, bursting and pullulating with details, like a kind of lengthy narrative, its handwritten words gradually nibbling away what free space remains. The point of the ballpoint pen moves forward, on and on, very fast and in a small neat hand, tracing a wriggling, broken blue line, from left to right, next line down, left to right, next line down, and so on. When the whole surface of the paper is covered with this scribbling, the tip of the ballpoint still goes on searching. It finds blank spaces between the lines or down the margins. It fills them all. The words on the page now run in every direction. But the ballpoint still goes on searching indefatigably. It overscores what it has previously written, it crams every cranny, first making fine scratches like tufts of hair, then a whole fuzzy topknot, and finally a large sooty cloud. There are still words, more and more of them, interminable adverbs; the crosses on the t’s trace a kind of straight line from one side of the paper to the other. Too much overwriting has produced the occasional hole. About six inches from the top there is an accidental and quite unbearable row of looping o’s. But the words keep flowing back, and suddenly, after using up several thousandths of an ounce of dark blue ink, after hours on the job, after working through three ballpoint pens, as though a million spiders had wandered over the page, at nightfall only one empty space remains — a tiny star-shaped patch at the bottom left-hand corner, preserved by the slapdash loop of an 1, in some word now otherwise obliterated—‘Iliad’, maybe, or ‘calamity’, or ‘Lilliputian’. Then the hand grips the ballpoint pen, all slippery with sweat now, and closes the loop of the 1. During the accomplishment of this act, in silence and fear, something akin to darkness, a sense of solemn peace, like the deepest night, spreads over the paper. The last remaining area of imperfection seems to disappear; and nothing is left now, beneath that bent forehead, before those weary, burning eyes, except this vast page of writing, in which all the words and letters have melted into one another, the perfect work of not-being, a beautiful poem, monochrome and illegible.