Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

The town was an extraordinary kind of vortex, in which every movement or collision could be clearly felt by the individual. Like so many points, like so many agonizingly sharp needles, the eyes and hands and necks of other men began to converge on your life. The eyes, the eyes above all, were terrible: ceaselessly stripping, flaying, burning with fury. Millions of eyes opened now, at the corners of the streets, however far distant, and on each leaf of every tree. A rising current of humanity blew like a storm, though in no ascertainable direction. A man, picked at random from the swarming ant-hill of the town’s population, wore the hunted and visionary air of some black death’s-head spider, swaying under a rain of insecticide. The flow of speech was swelling to Babel pitch; all down the street, between the black trees, near the gutter-gratings, there was a constant echoing reverberation — isolated cries, angry muttering, quick, volatile chatter. Behind drawn blinds, on the second floor of the hospital, one old woman had borne her name — Janine Angèle Erebo — to the end of her allotted span. The blinds were the product of S.I.M.A.C. (Fabrication française), and many other names were involved, such as Hoizai, Serre, Fillipacci, Guigo, Zimmerman, Amerigo.

And, like a spark leaping from point to point, the dominant quality of each character was translated in terms of his name: the women’s faces were framed in masses of blue hyacinths, leaving nothing visible save the dark smudges beneath a pair of tired eyes, heavy with sleep, and from time to time dissolving into tears. An eddy in the vortex hid their faces once more, but others appeared in their stead. Behind this impalpable curtain, fine as smoke, such architectural human groupings deployed themselves after the manner of cathedrals: long slender noses, terminating in arched and Gothic eyebrows. Mouths. Parted lips, the indefinable mystery of incisors, their white stained with tartar. Memory of freshness, something verdant and bloody at the same time, the clinging pasty remnants of dentifrice. Or, under the bright glare of a naked electric light-bulb, the criss-cross play of lines and wrinkles. Cheeks hollowed themselves, wisps of hair fell cleanly about one’s ears under the razor’s edge. Jaws lay in their condyles, square or triangular. One forehead stood out high above the rest, lovely as a domed crag. On its thick-set base were inscribed the individual crow’s-foot lines made by frowning eyebrows. All around these faces, these craniums, lay thick darkness, powerful and immutable.

Individuals emerged from nothingness, grouped themselves into cohorts, and the dull crunch of their footsteps began to circle around: here was a future revolution in embryonic form, rage and solitude intermingled, the strength of the future contained in matter. The purposeful will that they had created, which had emerged almost at random from a series of disordered agitations, was now taking over. At the heart of this rainy symphony, at the centre of this obscure and filthy muddiness, one found oneself caught, held, wrenched out of one’s own awareness, sidetracked from silence, compelled to follow them, march with them, cry out, speak, live. The attraction was too new and too subtle to be resisted. It was like being seated at the window of your room, at midday, in winter. As the noises increase and colours fade away, as countless different wave-patterns set their mirages quivering beyond the glass, this great gaping hole drains you of your peace and abandons you, naked, shivering, hunched up on the corner of your mattress, overcome by the weight of your no-longer-moving blood-stream. At such a time you must abandon the field of solitary contemplation, the false protection of forgetfulness; you have to sally forth recklessly into the open, determined to explore the outside world in all its aspects, driven on by a mad desire to invade every space and drain every attraction to the dregs. No longer, either, by analytical reason, but by a willing acceptance of the illogical in your reactions to every room and person, each tree, each speck of dust.

As on other occasions, the music carried you away, but you were no longer responsible for it. The combinations of notes were produced somewhere behind you, in a forbidden tabernacle; and farther off, in the shadows, the thematic material fused and soared with the mounting arrow of the melody.

The town was an inexhaustible sea, and its ebb and flow contained harmony. Not the kind of harmony that you or I knew, intelligent comprehension of the links between life and death, for instance, or faith in ultimate limitations, but a literally monstrous harmony, something quite unique, which, being a collective phenomenon, could not be perceived by the solitary individual. It was, so to speak, lucidity returning to darkness after its work of destruction was accomplished. Man set in the world like a grain of sand lying on the earth, and knowing nothing more. Like the planet one inhabited, everything with spherical, magnificently spherical. Perfection was the reigning deity. And if there had not been this constraint, if there had been no mouth to suck your sap, pumping it through your body, impelling it towards that beyondness which is called life, without pause or digression, then there would have been nothing at all. At this time, under men’s frigid scrutiny, I was full of doubt. Though personally alive, I remained the prisoner of my anxieties; I existed in a kind of permanent time-lag, a staggered relationship between me and myself. My head and limbs were foggy, my reiterated questions always went unanswered: but it did not matter. What really counted was, frozen on the ground of the here-and-now, pinned down and paralysed by decomposition and analysis. The universe of mankind was akin to darkness, verging on corruption. There were fearful desires, followed by inexplicable feelings of disgust. A kind of nervous tremor seemed to invest each concept, making it shake like a packet of gelatine.

Men and women no longer possessed much privacy: they formed a collective mass. And in this barbarous chaos you — you personally — were lost. You were overwhelmed by such an environment; in your naïvety you had thought you could stand aloof. There was a time, long before, when you had, in a sense, placed yourself outside time: you had been that miniature landscape — remember? — that plaque of pale blue and pink mosaic representing the Acropolis. The one patch of light in the centre of a black marble slab. You were, theoretically, the open window — or, better still, the curved and swelling surface, the blister, the bubble of life. You were, perhaps, a central point, or a circle, in any case an irreducible geometric figure, incapable of assimilation. And yet, one day, you were forced to surrender. At first there had been no more than the suspicion, an isolated corner of your solitude, a sense of unhappiness. Then the thing grew and spread, and by the time you understood, it was too late. The trap had been sprung on you. Cynicism, evil-doing, the temptation of weakness — there was nothing left for them to achieve, since you were now a mere victim. You were already nothing but a shifting, mutable halo; you no longer possessed a self to offer. That was how I entered life. Now I know nothing else. Trees have grown up here and there, houses have been built, they have driven tunnels right down to the sea, trimmed and tidied the roads, enlarged the public squares, enclosed the gardens. This is how a district becomes unrecognizable. In any case, as far as I am concerned these woods and houses and gardens may exist for others, but not for me. I no longer even perceive them. I have no new sensations, nor any past to sharpen my taste for them: I am in a state of immanence. There are many who live through this unconscious conflict, without hatred, without beliefs, never piercing the black veil that enshrouds them. One might say that they had lost something, were it not that their condition is very far from that of deprivation; yet somewhere along the line they have had a difficult passage, perhaps failing to stop at some intermediate point when they should have done. It is the power of the unknown, that damaging chain of unresolved analyses, that have (all unbeknown to them) affected their judgment, and left them with a haunting, ever-greater fear of abduction. It is the same process that still gains control of them today, by wearing out, and then simply destroying, all elements of clarity and light; it begins its circuit in hell, where suffering is for all eternity, snuffing them out one by one, but there’ll never be an end of them, those myriad lines and wrinkles, darkness in the heart, the soul’s abysses, gauze dressings on the wound, death after death, each encompassing a thousand other acts of destruction.