The Flood Read online

  ‘Looking up something?’ Josette asked. Besson raised his head.

  ‘Yes—no—that is, I was just looking.’

  They walked out of the post-office together.

  ‘Did you send your money-order?’ Besson enquired.

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Have you anything else to do?’

  She opened the car door. ‘No,’ she said.

  Inside the air was warm and sluggish. The closed windows muffled any noise from the street. They could hear rain pattering on the roof overhead.

  The car climbed steadily towards the top of the hill, headlights full on, negotiating hairpin bends and passing through shadowy stretches of woodland. From time to time houses showed up by the roadside, great black masses pierced by a single yellow window. The hill was a vast outcrop of rock and trees, a deeper black than the night. It dominated the town, rearing up beyond the flatness of sea and plain in all the might of its great arched ridge, so full and solid that it might bave heen a living creature. Riddled with wells, a bristling mass of shrub and undergrowth, it loomed up through the night like some gigantic stray animal, with its steep scree-covered slopes, its patches of waste ground, its scored, deep-cut water-channels, bare and arid, rain streaming softly down its flanks, dust-particles frittering away, quivering on its foundations. Here one climbed towards stillness, past streets winding or stepped, all lights out now, a slow ascent to that flat summit—not a tree, not even a ruined house—whence all other sounds had been banished by the wind, skirting invisible obstacles fissures, abandoned tracks, masses of rock half broken away from the soil but still hanging at a crazy angle; passing deep pools of water, compact bubbles of darkness, the rain dancing on their surface like bullets. More private property, barbed-wire fences, but nothing behind them save faint fluttering mystery, a kind of cloud, wisps of drifting mist. Crumbling chateaux, hidden cathedrals, floating towers. Then the road came out on the cliffs above the sea, and the bright red point of a lighthouse beacon became visible, drilling at regular intervals through the flux of the elements. Everything seemed to hinge around this light, according to its own metallic rhythm, as though each wink of that red beam, glimpsed through the curtains of rain and darkness, advanced the march of time, of knowledge, promised days of intense sunlight, a hard bare landscape stripped back to the bone by brightness and heat. The hill was rising still, its road stretching away ribbon-like between knolls and hollows. There were straggling bushes with a dense, rounded mass of foliage, pressed down now by sheer weight of water, and weird stunted plants with wide-spaced branches. Ruined walls, boundary-fences, and sometimes other blurred shapes which belonged to no recognizable order of things, but simply sprang up out of the darkness in a casual fashion that was both graceful and somehow alarming. Phantoms propped against each other, not people, not houses, but small dingy figures, decrepit possessions, stake-fences, skeletons planted in the earth and undulating fluidly as one glimpsed them going by, perhaps animated from within by some mysterious respiratory movement.

  Higher still the hill was hollowed out towards its summit like the crater of a volcano. The road ran its lonely course ringed in by a circle of rocks, through strata of chilly air. The darkness was total—not a glimmer of light anywhere, not even a solitary street-lamp from which to take one’s bearings. The ground was invisible, it merged with the shadows, and the trees seemed to float above it. Besson found himself plunging into this empty blackness on foot, half paralysed by fear, struggling forward through the mud, not able to recognize anything, eyes searching the void, feet clumsily sliding on loose shale, frightened stiff by the darkness and the power it contained. Onward now across the vast shifting plateau, searching for the right path, walking into gusts of icy wind blown from the uttermost ends of the world, whistling razor-sharp over the hillside. Down now among silo-like rock-formations, endless wells with no walls, no bottom, no entrance. Down, down, falling maybe. The rain seemed to bounce back off the ground, shoot vertically skywards. Or perhaps everything was gone—no more sky, no more rocks, no more hill, nothing. Nothing but this vast fluid emptiness, this impalpable void, in which sombre patches of colour continued to spread and multiply.

  Then, suddenly, as though seen from a parapet, the whole city appeared below, a shimmering carpet of light, so far below that it was as though it no longer had any real existence. There it lay, vivid and resplendent, a pool of brightness rippling on the earth’s surface, with its myriad windows, its pin-bright street-lamps and twinkle of crawling headlights, all exposed in the cold and the stillness; exquisite, remote, a vision so magnified and transmuted that one felt one had never seen anything remotely comparable to it.

  Behind Besson a voice suddenly called: ‘François! François! Where are you?’ And a moment later: ‘Hi, François! Fran-çois!’

  It was a strange feeling of apprehension which made Besson turn back. His clothes sodden through, he made his way—more by luck than judgment—to the point in the middle of the hollow where the car had stopped. He saw the dumpy lines of its bodywork, and the girl still sitting inside it. He was aware of himself moving forward towards the centre of the basin, and with a stab of delight he saw that it was no longer black but white all over, with the radiant whiteness of hoar-frost, a dazzling landscape of snow and marble where silence grew and spread with the wind. He got back into the car.

  ‘Where were you?’ Josette asked. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Nothing—over there,’ Besson muttered. ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’

  When she started the engine the headlights came on, and the two converging shafts of yellow light picked out the shadowy figure of a man crouching beside a bush. Two peeping-tom eyes glinted for a brief moment, and then the man made off across country. Besson, watching him go, felt how much he, too, would have loved to be free just then, able to observe other people when they came up here to make love, secretly, in this milky nocturnal landscape.

  Chapter Four

  François Besson watches the sleeping woman—He sketches the map of her body—The noise—A chained mongrel in a garden prowls round in the rain—Conversation with the blind paper-seller—In which we are concerned with a person who lived in a barrel

  ON the fourth day François Besson awoke fairly early. He found himself lying in a double bed, with a comfortable box-mattress and brand-new sheets. The pillow, where his head was not actually resting on it, felt cold, and the whole place gave off a damp and disagreeable atmosphere, heavy with the smell of stale breathing. Through the slats of the shutters a pale half-light filtered into the room. The ceiling above the bed was flat, almost colourless, and there was no electric light cord. It looked as though there was no one else apart from himself in this room: nothing but a pale ceiling suspended in space, a vast and plain-like expanse stretching further than the eye could reach.

  Then, suddenly, in the cold grey depths of the room, Besson heard a noise approaching: a slow, soft, powerful sound, that sprang from nowhere, travelling from the furthest bounds of silence beyond sleep, a rasping, saw-like note, light, regular, unemphatic, seemingly produced by some mechanical task that called for great persistence and effort. Besson listened carefully, and almost at once identified it as the breathing of a woman—Josette—who was stretched out in bed beside him. The deep, even note rose and faded peacefully in the still air: Besson lay and listened to it without turning his head.

  It began with a tiny, almost inaudible whistling sound, which gradually swelled to a crescendo, growing rougher as it did so, then dwindled away once more: there followed a kind of raucous gasp, and the sound repeated itself (no doubt in the opposite direction), tenuous at first, then rising, a solemn droning descant, to dwindle and sink once more, this time into complete silence. For a fraction of a second silence would reign in the room, and reach up to blanket the greenish surface of the ceiling. Then the sound would repeat itself as before, powerful and inescapable, with a hoarse, musical edge to it that penetrated every la
st square inch of air in the dimly-lit apartment.

  For some time Besson simply listened to the sound without doing anything. Then he set himself to breathe in the same cadence rhythm, imitating every detail with perfect accuracy. It was not an easy task. Sometimes the noise stopped abruptly, for no apparent reason. When the rhythmic sequence began again, it was prefaced by a long, unhappy sigh. There were occasions, too, when the noise mysteriously quickened its tempo, so that it turned into a kind of panting. It interspersed with shrill and broken little cries that emerged all blurred and unrecognizable, and were quite impossible to imitate.

  Other sounds likewise reached the room, a slow, monotonous procession that drifted in through the slatted shutters and rose up until they plastered themselves against the wide and dismal surface of the ceiling. Hooting of car-horns, vehicles back-firing, the clatter of iron shutters being raised somewhere along the street. A faint, mournful, sibilance, impossible to pin down, compounded of tyres on wet asphalt, water pouring from gutters, the hiss of air-brakes. All this went on more or less non-stop, without a break, merging with the repetitive rhythm of Josette’s breathing, the fresh damp air, the grey light outside. Easy enough to stay like this for a long while, ears and senses alert, without moving or thinking. So François Besson continued to lie in bed, eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling above him.

  At length he turned on his side and scrutinized the horizontal outline of the sleeping girl. She was entirely hidden under the bed-clothes, and nothing could be seen of her apart from a tangle of black hair on the pillow. Strands of it had straggled loose, and lay there quite motionless, like so much sodden seaweed.

  Besson sat up in bed. The alarm-clock on the bedside table beside Josette told him it was a quarter to eight. The noises outside in the street suddenly intensified. Cars began to tear past in a kind of frenzy, and there came the unmistakable sound of someone sweeping the sidewalk. Besson reached over Josette’s recumbent body and took a packet of cigarettes from the bedside table. He found a box of matches in the drawer. With tidy, careful movements he lit a cigarette and began to smoke. Then he realized he had no ashtray. He leaned across to the bedside table again, but this time drew a blank: after which he settled back where he had previously been, and made no further attempt to move. Smoke and cold air plumed out of his nostrils simultaneously. The smoke drifted gently ceilingwards, forming two thin columns, each of a different colour. That which came directly from the cigarette spiralled up in fluctuating bluish rings: that which emerged from his mouth or nostrils spread like a patch of dull grey fog. Besson watched the two columns of smoke for a moment. About a yard short of the ceiling they dissolved in the air of their own accord, without it being possible to determine exactly how this vanishing trick was brought about.

  When Besson had finished his cigarette, he stubbed it out on the floor, beneath the bed, tucked the tab-end away out of sight, and blew on the tiny pile of ash to disperse it. An odd scorching smell hung in air for a moment, then everything returned to normal.

  Slowly Besson turned towards the girl’s body, lying there so still under the bed-clothes, and studied this mountain range, with its folds and patches of shadow, its harsh hollows and spurs, its ridges and traverses. He watched the white sheet rise and fall with a regular, peaceful motion, disturbing one or two folds as it did so. Indefatigably, exuding a sort of confident energy that nothing could upset, the silhouetted figure continued to swell and sink, never jerking, very gently, like the sea rising and falling in a narrow inlet, with that dull booming sound compounded of wind and water, simultaneously alive and dead. It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle, and anyone might have stayed there, like François Besson, resting on one elbow, simply in order to enjoy it: to stare in fascination at the rising and falling of this white sheet in the chill prison that was a bedroom half lit by morning light.

  The black hair visible above the sheet was spread out in a star-shaped mass, rather like an ink-blot on absorbent blotting-paper.

  With infinite precaution Besson grasped the edge of the sheet and gave it a tug. Little by little more hair appeared, some of it lying in curls. The sheet edged down a little further. A warm and sickening smell rose from under the clothes. Then the forehead came into view, followed by the entire face and neck. The head was asleep, upturned towards the ceiling, resting on the white bulk of the pillow. On that pale brow, where the hair had been flattened down, there was no trace of any wrinkles. Her skin was taut, almost transparent, so much did sleep rob it of life. The double arch of her eyebrows lay peacefully above closed eyes, and a bluish-grey shadow marked the line of the orbital sockets. Her nose, straight and fine, barely quivered at the very edge of the nostrils. There was no flush on her cheeks, and through her half-open mouth, above the slightly receding chin, the upper incisors were visible, gleaming white against lips that were nearly as white themselves. The head lay there, quite motionless, as though weighing like a stone on the stuff of the pillow. Small, neat, rounded, it looked like the head of a casualty on a stretcher: a head, so to speak, that had been surgically separated from the rest the body, and through which the respiratory process operated as though it began somewhere quite different: a mask, perhaps, a plaster mask without any life of its own, not formed from bone and flesh, that neither slept nor dreamed, and was incapable of smiling. A sad, impenetrable death’s-head, all apertures closed, with some vague and woolly matter gradually crumbling away inside it; embalmed, wreathed in orange-blossom, the face of a saint, all the blood drained out of it, a smooth ivory ball lying balanced on the rough, crumpled sheets.

  François Besson stared at this woman’s unknown face, and a feeling of doubt and uneasiness crept over him. He wanted to find out more about this calm, nostalgia-ridden case-history, this body now presented for his inspection in a deep-freeze compartment at the morgue. He wanted to learn this woman’s true nature and identity, to see how this alabastrine head fitted on to its body—always supposing there was a body. Gently, without making a sound, he drew the sheet right down. There on the bed, all covering now gone, head and naked body lay stretched out, still breathing.

  The upper part of the torso, against which the breasts showed even whiter than the rest, rose and fell deeply, in a long, slow movement. When the rib-cage sank back, for about a second the heart-beat was visible on the skin covering the midriff. So the body was alive, beyond any doubt, preserved its internal heat, had air and gases passing through it, secreted smells, breathed through minuscule pores. These legs with their heavy thighs, these full hips, the sexual cleft, the long, rounded arms, the worn hands, clenched into fists—surely all these possessed life? Yet this pale, naked flesh, this woman, was nevertheless acting out a comedy of death, with Besson as spectator. The whole thing had been laid on for his benefit—the inert limbs, the bony vertebrae that seemed about to break through the skin; all for him, this slack and flaccid body, its head—a wretched ball too heavy for the neck to sustain it—lolling back as though on the point of breaking off completely. He had to look at her for a long time, with every ounce of concentration he could muster. Half gagging, tears of shame in his eyes, he knew he must scrutinize this embodiment of abomination and indulgence down to the smallest detail. He had to pay, yes, pay for his life: and the woman, rejected and miserable, must exact her own retribution. He had to bend down over her, listen to her powerful, mysterious breathing, hear the air rasp hoarse as a bellows beneath those white breasts, feel the warm odorous exhalations gather above her dilated nostrils, there, inside this room, while outside, beyond the barrier of the shutters, people trudged down the damp street, to and fro.

  With a kind of glum intensity he bent over the outstretched body and began to examine it. He studied every square inch of pale flesh, each separate hair, each brownish line scored across the skin, every mole and pimple. Then he made what might be called a mental map of it all, to ensure that he never forgot what he had seen. When he had taken in every visible detail, he got out of bed, leaving the girl’s body
as it was, exposed to the cold air. When Besson left the apartment she was still lying there on the stripped bed, still breathing, utterly alone, ghastly in her pallor, deep in that heavy sleep, as though after some act of profanation.

  Besson walked along the street just as he had done on the previous days, between groups of pedestrians and passing cars. It was Saturday, or Sunday perhaps, and a great deal of activity was going on. The rain had almost completely stopped, leaving large muddy puddles everywhere, so opaque they reflected nothing. People had rolled up their umbrellas, and the windscreen-wipers were enjoying a rest. Wind-blown clouds scudded across the sky, high above the roof-tops, and from time to time the pale disc of the sun glided into sight from behind them.

  Besson passed a church where some kind of funeral procession was assembling. Then he walked down towards the sea, and came out on a square jam-packed with stationary vehicles. A removal van had broken down, and as a result all the traffic had ground to a halt in the adjacent streets. Besson found himself caught up in a dense crowd, and did not even attempt to extricate himself from it. He simply let himself go with the tide. When he had reached a point near the sidewalk someone asked him what was going on.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Besson said.

  ‘An accident, most likely,’ the man remarked. He was a short person with a cloth cap and a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. Then a movement of the crowd separated them.

  It was at this point that the noise made itself heard over the square. It began in the far distance, with one or two warning signals. The roar of engines seemed to increase in volume, and from somewhere only a few hundred yards away there came an incomprehensible explosion. Besson shrank back against the wall, mustering all his strength in preparation for the approaching din. He felt it steadily mounting as it got nearer, like a hurricane. The shining cars that blocked every corner of the square had all begun to sound their horns by now: the separate notes merged in a single ear-shattering cacophony. Deep and shrill simultaneously, vibrating in the bass register at ground-level while drilling shrilly through the upper air, like a jet engine, the sound-waves surged outwards, bouncing off the surrounding buildings, until they filled every last cubic inch of empty space. Beneath their metal coverings rows of engines were revving up, and the sound of their exhausts swelled and intensified, echoing all around. Human voices were drowned by this collective uproar, faces grimaced inaudibly: it was as though the entire world had become deaf, or dumb, or perhaps both at once.