Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Looking out of the window, or down in the stair-well, head squeezed between the banisters, or lost among the mirrors of a cinema foyer, or — more simply — just stubbed out at the bottom of a jam-pot doing duty as an ashtray. Tobacco coming out of the body, thrusting through the skin, sticking to the glass sides of the jar. Head still burning, a mass of close-packed embers, but guttering down to extinction, giving off carbonic gas. Occasional tiny explosions from glowing fragments of wood, and that sickening smell given off by the dead cinders, rising gradually towards the ceiling, the acrid stink of cooling ash. On every part of the street, on every house, over the whole town, Besson descends and settles: like a fly circling round some imaginary lamp, moving in a random course across level or uneven surfaces, leaving its trail of excrement and microbes behind it.

These white houses, that square you can see, these still, tranquil streets are the areas in which he deposits his eggs. This neighbourhood is his domain: here he hunts, sleeps, lives, and perhaps reproduces in season. In front and on all sides of him cars speed to and fro, passing, repassing. The continual snarl of their engines forms a harsh, metallic song: the rhythmic pulsing of valves and pistons, vibrating bodywork, the silent whirr of the fan, and so on and so on, all that blurred mass of minuscule sounds, endlessly affirming the existence, as a construct, of the internal combustion engine, in all its beauty, power, novelty, warmth and regularity. A view from a telegraph pole. Or even, if you prefer it, arched over the road like a bridge, body curving slightly, set on pillar-firm limbs, back supporting the passage of all those swarming creatures known collectively as ‘mankind’. This sudden joy that comes over you, this manic passion for bright metals and translucent inflammable liquids, the sense of roundedness, the smooth enamelled skin you’ve acquired, which turns you into an object , and the delight, the indescribable sense of optimism that hits you, yes, there , between the radiator cap and the rubber lining of the windshield, the joy of being made out of sheet-metal, thirty-six B.H.P. with direct injection, and kindling, down under those steel cylinder-heads, the explosive spark that irradiates out on combustion like the spokes of a wheel. Opel Olympia. Ford V.8. Man-into-car enclosed within this room with its four unyielding walls. The insect is flying round the table. It came down from the ceiling during the night, Through the open window drift the sounds of falling rain. The insect is a gnat, a square millimetre of black body and wings, its flight sustained by some invisible plane surface, as though the horizon that suddenly tilted its plexiglass sheet and left no sign of any living presence on it save this one solitary creature. Inside the room atmospheric waves eddy and multiply. Bodies of gas move from one corner to the other, knocking against the bed, the skirting-boards, the door, the two open windows. This undulatory movement intensifies, becomes more precise. The gnat, crushed between two layers of oxygen, lies there on the table, asphyxiated, delicate legs just quivering their last, one wing half torn off and adhering to the creamy matter discharged from its abdomen. But the air in the room has suddenly changed to water, and the to-and-fro movement passes through this new body, braiding its texture, tying slip-knots into it. In the aquarium objects smoke through the water, sometimes leaving a trail of bubbles behind them. Strange noises, rumblings as of an earthquake, the motive force behind heavy vehicles, now make themselves heard: the S.P.A.D.A. trucks, enabled thus to pass through the walls of the room, arrive loaded with transistor radios, barrels of olive oil, refrigerators. The oscillatory motion of this matter steadily increases, reaches a high peak of intensity, a regular rhythm which nothing can disrupt. With effort certain obstacles at the back of the mind are removed — things such as human flesh, the breasts and bellies and buttocks of women, perhaps even a face, the face of a young goddess, with fine features and a Byzantine profile; deep sad eyes, set at a curious and touching angle to the line of the nose; the expression of a statue, all statues, eyes looking gently upward from the inclined head, revealing a sclerotic pattern of unhappiness and yearning regret, endlessly repeated; a tiny mouth, set in a firm line above the chin, and that lone pale, almost translucent body, draped in blue material. Near her, a man lying on a divan stretches out one hand in token of command, and calls, like Orsino Duke of Illyria, for music.

But nothing here is real: these eyes and hands have no existence, the guitar, the mist-shrouded landscape, all are illusory. The oscillatory motion reaches down to the deeper points at the back of the mind, dredges up young untroubled voices, afternoons spent leafing through the dictionary, sitting in the pleasant slate-grey common-room, with its leather armchairs and cake at tea-time and bells ringing the Angelus. Noises dwindle away, giving place to a kind of magical silence: soundlessness such as exists under a glass bell, or in telephone booths that let through nothing, almost, except the vibrations immediately beneath them, a hair-fine thread floating on the air that alone serves to remind us of that other world outside. Then, after a little more time, a little more suffering, one finds oneself enclosed by four walls, a floor, a ceiling; a closed door, two open windows. Continual restriction. Hollow, hollow. Equilateral.

For the last time during this immense day-and-night there appears that supreme synthesis, that stunning of the senses, that conscious abrogation of mind which is known as hatred.

Besson stands outside the building now, hidden in the shadow of the arcade, eyes devouring the whole sweep of the scene before him. Hands thrust in his pockets, right shoulder resting against a pillar, he feels an inexplicable stiffness spreading through him, centred somewhere in the back of his neck, but makes no resistance to it. The sun is rising, or setting: it makes no difference which. Buses come and go, brake to a jerky halt along the kerbside. From time to time a green wall of metal interposes itself between those staring eyes and the middle distance, and sits there, shuddering in time with its engine. There is a smell of exhaust gases everywhere; nothing can disperse them, not even the upward-moving air-current that rises skyward with the force of a plane on vertical take-off.

Millions of tiny holes in the tarred macadam, all made by women’s stiletto heels.

In a trash-can attached to the bus-stop sign lies a half-eaten tangerine, exuding acidity. Memories of plums brush lightly across the cornea of the eye, with just enough friction to start a tear, a fleeting pain much like grazing one’s skin against the rough surface of a wall, the small pleasures afforded by something utterly insignificant, the sharp impact of a cigarette-butt lying on an ashtray’s edge, smoke curling up from it — everything is there, really everything, nothing has been forgotten. The whole pattern comes together at this moment before his eyes, there between the two pillars, presenting a panoramic spectacle from which not a single element is missing.

The picture is complete now. If there are still a few movements down in its bottom left-hand corner, they are caused by nothing more than streaks of colour gliding along their set tracks, masses of black metal (or grey, or green), the shadows of human figures walking. It is as if a sudden breeze had got up, blowing away their mists; as though the latent power inherent in matter, cube upon cube of electric energy, had slowly invaded the air and all open spaces. At an angle of 24°, behind the public lavatory, stand the stark trees and the wrought-iron palisade dominating the harbour. Cast metal, wherever you look you see cast metal. The landscape is naked in the half-light. The street-lamps have just been lit — or are about to be turned off. You can see this by the glow of that neon-blue star that flashes on at each cardinal point of the compass: NORTH, flash, WEST, flash, SOUTH, flash, EAST, flash. Each object is lightning-struck in turn: the surface of the street, first, where all noises sound like the screech of brakes. Is it a fierce heat, come from God knows where, a kind of sun blazing out through the windows? Or is it a Polar freeze-up, with blue iceberg reflections, a pale and whirling whiteness, misty, vapour-shrouded? Perhaps it could even be a mixture of the two, the weird result of setting a fiery furnace at the very heart of the ice? Two extremes in conflict, penetrating each other’s defences, in a tearing orgy of mutual annihilation. As though a giant hand, a hand without any body attached to it, not a god’s, rather the crude fist of a worker, its joints all muscle-bound, as though this human hand had seized both of them, ice and fire, and crushed them together in its palm, while away on the periphery of things, beyond reach of the hand, the two bodies thrashed and reared amid drifting clouds of steam and vapour.