Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Then each vortex returns to its own sanctuary at the earth’s centre, close to the liquid core of the planet. But where the hand holds them fast, there remains two colourless, shrunken cords, hardened by intense agony into spirals of twisted glass.

Phenomena are now transformed into states of being. The void has struck at the very heart of this big square between the surrounding apartment blocks, bringing all movement to a halt: the man who was running towards the steps of the church, that other one getting off the bus, the helicopter passing over the river, the child playing hopscotch in the arcade, the hundreds of flies blazing invisible trails everywhere, between the wheels of that coach, or towards this garbage-pail, or in the vicinity of that sixty-five-year-old woman. The movement of an American car, an Oldsmobile by the look of it, has been brought to a halt in this square by the mere existence of four or five reflections glinting on its beige bodywork. There is no more movement now, no more action. Even the normal swarming dazzle in the sky — that misty agglomeration of countless million tiny points, black, grey, white, blue, red or green, which formerly kept up a ceaseless dance, soaring upward heavenwards or sinking slowly back towards the ground — has entirely ceased to function.

The sky is as spacious as ever, but with that stipple of black dots gone dead, nothing remains but a half-tone screen photograph, newspaper style, blown up to enormous dimensions, and embracing the entire visible landscape. The still points coagulate, become a more intense black, increase in number — and there is a pigeon. They space themselves out, become almost imperceptible — and there is the sunlight reflected on a young girl’s face. Eyes become dark hollows, noses are accentuated, mouths tend to be optional. This fierce and incessant rain of dots leaves both people and inanimate objects looking calm but cheerless, as the colour drains slowly out of them. The process is a very simple one, and one gets the impression that as these impalpable surface layers peel away, angles become sharper and cleaner, the framework stands out, ridges are stripped bare to the bone. The plane-tree has been drastically reduced to a mere black skeleton of its former self. The modern apartment block has crumbled away and is now floating up in the blue empyraean like a cloud. Men’s faces have been replaced by a strange inhuman mask, dead white, hollow, with great empty eye-sockets and a bird-like beak. In an old worm-eaten foreign tome, dated 1683, and entitled The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, Knight of the Order of St James , the following passage is to be found:

Howsoever ye others know not what Death may be: it is ye yourselves who are your own proper Death: Death beareth the features of each several one of you, be ye never so mighty, ye are your own deaths. Your skull is Death; and your features are Death; that which ye term dying is the conclusion of life, and that which ye term birth is the beginning of death: in like fashion, that which ye term living is but dying in the midst of life: and bones are but what death leaves of your kind, and what remaineth behind in the sepulture. If ye were well apprised of this, then each would have a mirror of Death within himself all the days of his life; and then would ye see divers truths, as that all your houses are full of dead men, that there are as many dead persons as living, that though ye hear not Death, natheless ye walk beside him all the days of your life. Think ye that Death is but bones, and a carcase, and that Death cometh not unto your person ere ye behold a Skeleton that holdeth a Scythe? Thus do ye deceive yourselves in heinous wise, for ye shall be bones, carcase and skeleton sooner than ye may conceive.

And further off, away beyond the square where everything has come to a stop, the whole town lies spread out between the sea and the mountains, quite motionless, like a great sombre pool. This battered skin, with so many countless wrinkled contours, this purple-tinged coverlet of fine interwoven thread, is in fact the town’s upper surface; and blackness has flowed into every hollow of it, silently, as though filling a mould. Here is the photographic representation of death; and above and below it the tragic twilight raises a long and voiceless chant, unfurling its purple ribbons across the horizon, whole spools of purple ribbon, bright crimson streamers, bloodstained dressings, shot-torn tattered ensigns, lightning by the barrelful, lurid orange storm-clouds, bombs bursting to reveal vermilion craters, the whole majestic airy procession that forms a refuge for the last outpourings of passion, torture and war. There: now all is poised in ardent stillness.

As the sun retreats, or the street-lamps are extinguished, the world grows steadily darker, with inceasing calmness and serenity to match the broad swathes of crepuscular twilight now drawn across it. The sea’s glinting surface has burnt out. Ships lying at anchor send up columns of black smoke to mingle with these violent reds and golds. Here too colours have become so elongated, so extended, that they might as well not be colours at all: it would make no odds if they were transposed into smells, or phrases of music. The humble, hackneyed odour of a brioche , lard and butter mingled, all interwoven from an off-yellow colour and the taste of vanilla, insipid, too insipid, then, suddenly piercing it, the tart flavour, pencil-sharp, of one dried raisin.

Or look at this man, riven by the white lightning-flash that struck down on the tree. The rescue party makes its way back down the mountainside in the rain, gently bearing the blackened body on the stretcher, taking it back to the widow, who will lose her wits. Rising through light like the length of a drawn sword, passing joyfully into that agonizing effulgence, he vanishes from sight as the boiling, turbulent mass closes over him; moves on with it now, up, up, to the topmost peaks of the world, plunged naked into the volcano’s maw, carried up to that field of black azure that lies beyond all human values. Made light. Purified.

Or else, again, the dull thunder and murmurous confusion rising far out in some kind of sea, those glaucous, malleable rhythms — and then, hundreds of yards, perhaps miles away, so far off that it seems to lag behind the rest, the sound of a warning siren, the reverberations of war: like a cat miaowing, exactly the same as a cat miaowing, all alone on a vast and dreary expanse of tin roof.

1Presumably a reference to the ballet Le Festin de l’Araignée , by the French composer Albert Roussel (1869–1937) [Trs].