Jean-Marie Le Clézio: The Flood

And above this scene of chaos, these ear-dulling noises, it seems to me that I myself am poised, dreaming, or drifting in chill and monumental splendour, like some great iceberg, blue depths glinting, nine-tenths under water, a solid mass of stiff glacial fury. My ears are filled with words in unknown, inhuman-sounding languages. The syllables jostle and trip against one another, build patterns in the void. They are not addressed to any person; they form a termite-language, their volubility is made up of endless tiny points. Nothing has any further significance. Everywhere — on the peeling walls and the monumental fountains, across the doors of dark, stinking retreats, in the station booking-hall, over millions of virgin pages — there runs that delicate secret writing which no one can read. Here are set forth facts of immediate concern and all-too-ghastly reality, which must yet pass unrevealed: rather like those frightful accidents, known yet somehow kept from the mind, which lie so heavy on our consciences. All measure and restraint have been lost; it seems to me that the world is in torment, that it bears an incurable wound.

Besson stands rooted to the spot, staring straight in front of him, unable to see anything but this horror, and looking like some exotic statue. All unbeknown to himself he has become a fragment of black wood, a sculptured piece of ebony. His thick lips are motionless, his neck has stiffened into a knot of old cords. His limbs are thin and tough, his belly excessively swollen, hard and distended like that of a pregnant woman. Beneath his belly the penis is erect, pointed. There are no muscles or veins visible on the surface of his body: the whole thing is as smooth as a pebble. At the centre of his belly lies a hole dug with the point of a knife, enclosing a canal: this is his navel, like the puncture left by a pistol-shot. Besson’s legs are short and bowed; his toes are splayed out in an unpleasant fashion, rather as though, somewhere higher up, he were making the ghost of an obscene gesture. Above all, under the dome of his skull, breaking the frontal curve, are two enormous eyes, two balls of black wood set in black wood, two blind, senseless domes, soft to the finger’s touch: such is the persona, the frog-mask, that François Besson has chosen to wear. It is this monstrous weight of sorrow and pity that he allows to drag him down, so that he falls, falls, passing the striated layers of the earth’s surface, the sudden reddish explosions of the elements, basic clusters of matter; he falls deeper and faster than a man confronted by a smoking cigarette; yet he knows he will never arrive at any destination. Foreign languages all have their word for hope; but this word sticks in the throat. I am not isolated; I can communicate with you all; but it is bound to be too late. It may be that — caught in this trap, caught in the very midst of life — such languages work their way through me, turn me into a phantom, irresistibly strip me of all the individual characteristics I once possessed. After days of this journey, with nothing left of myself save this vast and vulnerable body, open to every emotional assault, I was expecting some sort of triumphal conclusion to the matter — and in the very midst of a clear and levelled world, I am still taken unawares. I have had scant opportunity to extract myself from my dilemma, since the town I am entering is very like the other one, I am hemmed in by near-identical walls, overwhelmed by the same colours and sounds and desires: time and space have made a complete revolution. On the other side of this liquid mass, on the earth’s further face, the darkness — despite the chaos close at hand — has not diminished one jot. It still holds everything in its vice-like grasp, covers each object with its friable skin. On the high level ground to the left of the town, a level area of a few acres contains emblems signifying silence and death. Here everything is rectilinear, comprehensible, and as a result almost joyful; under the vaguely aligned crosses, caught by this species of three-faced mirror, lie no end of curious beings. And it is true enough that, once upon a time, they were alive: vigorously, insolently alive. Now nothing remains of them but an ill-defined oblong of blackish earth, and two white sticks nailed together in an upright position. The burial-grounds of men, dogs, beetles and briars have merged and become one. Perhaps, indeed, the cemetery is a cemetery no longer, but rather a kind of vague terrain extending over the whole earth, a vision, it may be, to superimpose on that of our daily existence, to spread out — everywhere and to all eternity — the soul racked by indecisive respect and terror? The earth is a night-soil dump, very tranquil, very neatly ordered, where the device of these small meticulous crosses allows every being, despite their annihilation, to persist in the shape of black letters inscribed on pine-wood lathes.

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armchair

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hand

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sun

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machine

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shrubbery

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gravel

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gravel

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pebble

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worm

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grass

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canalization

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Villa Floréal

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abyss

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thread

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mountain

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water

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water

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leaf

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jacket

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spectacles

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paper

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box

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tar

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fossil

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exercise-book

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revolver

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finger

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fish

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church

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hour

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fritter

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pigeon

Of necessity, one wandered among these tombs without understanding them; the clouds had piled up thicker and thicker in the sky, and rain was pouring down. The turn events had taken came as a surprise, like a precipice beside some mountain road. From this cemetery, and from each of those symbolic crosses beneath which the world lay at rest, there rose the smell and the sound of death; a little way off the ground the two of them formed a still, sluggish layer of mist. It was like walking backwards through the streets of a totally destroyed town: not so much exploring a maze (since everything was clear-cut and visible) but running the gauntlet of trick mirrors, trompe-l’oeil devices, a series of cunning schemes and traps. In this symmetrical pattern there was no room, despite death’s presence, for sleep. True, there was a general atmosphere of tranquillity, or seeming tranquillity, to which the bare external shape of things, the austerity of their proportions, contributed something. Perhaps, indeed, this calm was the genuine article, the only kind of peace possible — that bred of violence and despair. Moreover, the memory of a time when things had been quite different — when colours had been firmly blocked in, when landscapes glittered with light, when every place and time had enjoyed a spell of drowsy relaxation at will, and then faded away as though they had been mere chimeras, without any importance — did not now evoke any self-flattering nostalgia. It had merely become unlivable, so that every allusion to the topic opened a door into Hell; the world’s elements had undergone such a swarming upheaval that the mere idea of the past could no longer restore them to their previous simplicity. In fact, there was no longer any question of purity or simplicity: both had become inevitable casualities. The thread of life running through them was now slender and elusive: so fine now, in fact, that the merest moment’s neglect could have proved fatal. The situation bore some resemblance, perhaps, to that of a giant thousand-year-old tree, so vast and heavy that it seemed, from its appearance, to belong to the mineral rather than the vegetable kingdom. The distance between these two kingdoms was minimal: the merest breath — a botanist’s defection, say — would have sufficed to push the tree over the border. Yet, despite appearances, life stirred in it still, though it was hundreds of years since it had last put out fresh branches or new spring leaves, or pushed its roots farther afield. Nevertheless, it continued to exist. Deep beneath its armour, at the very heart of the trunk, a knot, a core of wood still throbbed with life and continued to grow, till its circle was complete and the dry, withered fibres thrust back another tenth of a millimetre. It also bore some resemblance to a flimsy partition, separating two conflicting elements — though without any motive for such an arrangement being found, much less the corroboration afforded by bracketing two opposites together, as it might be air and water, water and stone, fire and air, gold and lead, darkness and light. The line between life and death had by now become so fine that everyone was vaguely expecting it to break at any moment, and let the blue and crimson tides meet in the breech, one mingling with the other, spreading out, rushing on with deep whirling eddies, bearing pebbles and gravel (soon to sink and be lost), ceaselessly driving forward the third, most terrible tidal wave, deeper in hue now, an ominous purple. This ghastly rupture, the one break that could really have fatal consequences, was in fact impossible: the barrier could not be broken down. It existed in analytical terms, could be named, figured out, placed — and yet, and yet, just supposing the situation did break loose, not through a brutal fusion of the two elements, but by an inversion which decreed that henceforth all that pertained to life should become dead, and all that had been dead should become life. Supreme illusion, raucous laughter from the Devil, a syllogism that could expand on the sustenance provided by white walls, staccato movements, carefully observed and described expressions, moments of ecstasy that for the time being managed to keep chaos at bay. At all events, symmetry was preserved; the world, so virgin in appearance, had been reduced to a state of utter weakness. In private rooms and public bars, down streets and alleys, numbers of men and women were living through this process of logical contraction. Their various destinies did not run together in confusion: both in the world of the living, and in that of the dead, excitement mounted steadily. There was discussion and gesticulation, or, if you prefer, muscles came into play and bones cracked, some four and a half yards underground. Gradually the truth began to shape itself, composed of noise no less than of silence, of bodies as well as corpses. Far from horizontal — indeed, decidedly animated — truth, disguised as a middle-aged woman, went striding down the middle of the street, hair plastered down by the rain, a somewhat blurred silhouette, hands shoved into the pockets of an indigo mac and held akimbo against her hips. The rain beat down on the ground in its ancient, delicate, well-worn rhythm; the ground reflected the middle-aged lady’s figure, and at every step she took towards her unknown destination, it seemed that she could no longer escape from herself. From steep roofs down which the rain of heaven coursed, all eternity watched her pass by; the songs in the bars became one united song, the urgent appeals of the upright and godly merged together, hundreds of voices were uplifted in the cold and the wet, wrapped her about in their rhythmical cocoon, then, finally, dwindled away skyward, among the clouds. And this manifestation of truth was neither sad nor gay: from the moment it had accepted the person of a woman, and had donned that indigo macintosh, and had agreed to walk the street in the rain, above her own pear-shaped reflection, it was as though she had saddled herself with a task for all eternity, something compounded of damp earth, tear-stained fabric, heavy breasts stretching the material of the bodice, weary legs plodding yard by yard down the street. Sighing voices murmured in your ear, telling you which way to go. One fell back into the very heart of existence, rather like a stone plummeting to the bottom of a well.