Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

But already events are moving on, with a series of minute changes in every square inch of space, changes that set the whole complex rocking. No doubts, no fears: man, if you like, is gradually dwindling away, moving towards the vegetable condition en route for the mineral. The rich, fluctuating body of matter which formerly provided his relaxation now wholly eludes him, flows out of and away from his body without his even being aware of it. Once he possessed a halo of mystery, the product of his collisions with the real world; then a dream, a premonitory vision of ruin and destruction enters the picture, and this man at once becomes united with his true self. The gods are sent packing, the void spins around him, and the earth becomes, in his eyes, a deserted planet, a complex place full of signs and booby-traps. He no longer sees or hears anything; even his sense of touch betrays him. The earth is mist-bound and sterile; towns no longer have any weight — perhaps they are floating, perhaps this is only an illusion caused by the two gaseous spheres; the sky has penetrated solid matter and blown it up, the whole world is gas and more gas, smoke and cloud; everything here merges and blends. Old distinctions are jettisoned: the horizon smokes over Uranus, and what before was hard and brilliant, rough-diamond-edged, has passed into drops of water, whence it disperses in the air. That is the measure of what this much-buffeted man’s power has contrived to accomplish.

He has lost his kingdom, which was one of light and of rocky places. Speed he has relinquished in favour of shadow; the ground he treads now is compact of sounds and odours; a loud yet almost melodious uproar swells and runs all around. The uproar becomes a scarlet torrent, a spate of blood, gushing out interminably before his eyes. The man, being cut off now from his little household gods, cannot remain a homogeneous entity for much longer; he melts and flows, spreading into holes, and his heart, his central kernel, solid and hard and imperturbable as flint, founders gently beneath the furred surface of some brackish tideway. Soon there will be nothing left for him but these things: death, stitching him into its shroud; his wheezing, panting breath; the milky sap seeping drop by drop through each clod of earth; the long pendulum swing of rubbery continental land-masses, drifting over roof-tops all lustrous with boiling magma. This is what the man dreams of. And this dream pierces him to his very bowels, spreads through him like a poison, pulses in his veins, sheds its dust over the delicate membrane of the eye: a fearful dream, since it dwells not merely in his own life, but in the reality beyond time and space.

All this was contained in one single skull, yet remained universally present. What despair, what unimaginable agony it must have brought to all earth’s inhabitants — that precise, mind-shattering assemblage of countless howls and screams, rhythmic and assonant, a hymn of joy and of stricken misfortune, a flood of sound that streamed on and on, spreading and extending towards the mist, so that the cliffs re-echoed with the last cries of suicides, yet never overstepping the dimensions of a single object; a controlled outburst, a force turned back on itself and achieving its own destruction, an orgy that aroused and sustained every living creature, a savage breath blown out in an explosive spiral, suddenly offering an insight into the perfect hallucination, and vertigo, and queasiness, and the bottomless pit of the intellect. Then the floor and the walls of the houses and the whole town resumed their original aspect, their embryonic roundness. Men were becoming increasingly solitary and myopic: seen against the vortex they looked no bigger than insects, a sort of warrior-ant. Each bore on his skin the fatal tattoo-mark, the sign of time passing, guttering uselessly away. Under the flesh of their faces, like some sterile seed, there always lurked the same death’s-head, with its gaping orbital sockets and anonymous rictus, its worn cheekbones and converging suture-joints. In the narrow square, together with the weight of the void, that time-honoured landscape, a hard and tangible passion now made itself felt. Each body, every fragment served its purpose: none were ignored or cast down at random. But this did not signify friendly agreement: the force binding mankind one to the other seemed more like some invisible and malevolent spirit. Messages were displayed everywhere: in the form of letters of the alphabet they could be read on walls. First names collided, odd phrases refused to vanish. On the big off-white wall of the factory had been inscribed the legend PARKING FORBIDDEN.

The frosted-glass door clicked open from time to time as women passed through it. Or there was this man dressed in blue linen trousers and a nylon shirt, his eyes fixed and staring, only the faintest flicker of awareness discernible in them under the electric light: he was in the middle of a room where heat was dormant, smoking a Gauloise 474 from a half-empty packet with the factory-letter J on it. Farther on, or rather to one side, a young woman was walking down the town’s main thoroughfare: her quick, short steps carried her easily forward. Yet her entire body — shoulders, breasts, neck, hips, belly — was quite rigid. For her, too, time scarcely existed; it streamed down in the rain, something ineffable and far away. Stiff in her movements, isolated from the rest, oddly submissive, she seemed weighed down by the burden of endless thousand symbols, figures and memories. So she moved forward, well-rooted in reality, and even had one counted her steps one would have failed to get the better of her. Her gait — which was quite remote from any normal human rhythm, yet made use of her intensely feminine feet — thus presented an odd phenomenon, abrupt and nervous in the extreme; her red leather shoes clipped down on the pavement, spike-heel first, sole afterwards, with a faint flick of loose laces. These footfalls did not have a regular pattern; they simply occurred one after the other, individual and autonomous, an explosive clack! against the massive asphalt surface. The ground, as though shaken by their impact, seemed to rise up at each touch of the steel heel-tip and thrust the girl’s weight, all 114 lbs of it, forward into her next step. Yet there was nothing could force that tap-tap-tapping into a two-by-two pattern, and their monotonous progress seemed to have no end in sight. It was not an absence of rhythm, exactly: hearts continued to beat approximately ninety-four times a minute, the movements of thigh-muscles were still as usual, respiration remained normal, there was no changing in the blinking pattern of eyelids. But this particular pattern of sound was mechanical. It concealed no form, enclosed no melody. It was a graph-curve that evolved below zero, the discharge of a flood of events that coagulated instantly, like blood. The woman walked on and on, through the hissing rain, and entered the slack-tide area. Its tension penetrated to her vocal chords: her lips parted slightly to form some indistinguishable sound. Her darting eyes gleamed against the reflections of the wet cars, her hands opened, her white unruffled skin shivered at the touch of the wind. Under her woollen dress she was superbly naked, and frozen. Reinforced concrete had poured down her body, moulding every minuscule detail, outlining the snake-curves of her silhouette. She was here, or there, eternally alive, jostled on corners, fashioned by matter to the condition of matter. Solitude and pride were both abandoned at this precise point of life’s natural progression: a mass of flesh, a statue both warm and cold, two legs in motion, mud, polished nails, stiff or lustrous hair. She was a black insect with long overcrossing wing-sheaths, a cockroach in the cupboard, a reptile, a night-bird, or, more solitary still, a small pile of domestic garbage: orange-peel protruding from the open mouths of empty cans, while under trickling gutter-water wrapping-paper and the rolled-off tops of sardine-cans lie scattered around, and the smell spreads and drifts, and ashes descend, and a thin layer of grease settles on the sides of these pyramidal heaps; futile as a shroud they stand, waiting for an indifferent dawn to fulfil their destiny at last, through the agency of street-cleaners armed with shovels. This woman, and all these other women, blindly marched on the way they were going; events proceeded in the same fashion everywhere; outside a bar the neon-lights winked day and night. Right above the door, close to the first-floor balconies, two advertising signs had been set up, one sky-blue, the other pink; they announced, respectively, ADELSCHOFFEN and BIERE D’ALSACE. Very low down, on the left of the entrance, glowed the letters P.M.U. [i.e. ‘Pari Mutuel Urbain’, or ‘City Tote Stakes’: Trs.]. Between the two a white neon legend proclaiming BAR TABAC winked on and off in five different stages: (i) White lettering with a ring round it; (2) Just the ring; (3) Just the lettering; (4) The lettering flashing on and off three times; (5) Lettering and ring flashing on and off three times together. After this there would be four seconds of darkness, and then the whole cycle would begin afresh. It might go on for hours, days, years: these vague words floating in front of the bar were not subject to any limitations. They were eloquent, they described real and forgotten things: whole towns abandoned to men’s devices, huge squares where the cars are all parked diagonally, vast exhibition halls, factories with names like Martini or Maccari and Franco, endless labyrinths of grey streets to which the sun never penetrates, coastlines and valleys, concrete fly-over bridges spanning motorways, airports loud with the roar of jets tearing themselves free from earth’s pull, black boulevards where heavy-laden trucks thunder past, wharves smelling of coal-dust and oil, wire-cluttered, loud with the screech and rattle of cranes.