The Flood Read online

  All the cold of earth and sky, too, had met and coalesced here. It had erected its wall, and from this flat surface there proceeded sharp rays like splinters of ice, which pierced through flesh and melted in the very centre of the wounds they inflicted. A new sensation, somewhere between sound, smell and light, had thus been conjured up in the heart of matter; its birth had been helped on and influenced by this confused throbbing rhythm, its heart-beat followed a detectable pattern, it glittered and sparkled with all the appearance of life, and seemed to endure for all eternity. It was an odd mixture of toughness and friability, a dead period between two mysterious dangers, religion perhaps. It was an invisible yet familiar halo, a child-like wavy line, something soft and out of a fairy-tale, like the aureoles worn by saints in holy pictures.

  At the heart of this disintegration landscape still existed, a blend of memory and illusion. It bore traces of shadow, fragmentary exercises in relief, haloes the colour of which had faded after being washed clean a thousand times, over and over again. It was undulating, cracking up in all directions, a fleeting and unreal image dancing in a cone of light. First there was the street, just as it had always been, a perfect rectilinear figure, bare, frosty, shrunken. The steely hue of the macadam matching that of the sky. Trees tirelessly growing, dense and black against the snowy backdrop of the walls. Beneath the ground their roots stretched as far as their branches, continually exploring, digging between clods of earth, clutching at crumbling soil, seizing fragments of damp life still crawling with worms and decayed matter, letting them run through their fingers like the sea. Close to the fifteenth blackened plane-tree on the right-hand sidewalk steam was rising from a sewer-vent. The sound of empty cigarette packets being crumpled up mingled with that of footsteps crunching over the ground. A broken beer-bottle, lying beside the circular impression left by some ritually deposited dustbin, continued to rehearse every facet and variety of smashed-up ugliness in the world. At the centre of a smell approximating to that of butane, an aircraft inscribed its cross on the squared chart of the sky, making a thousand more, by implication, on each separate square, repeating the same game, for ever playing a winning gambit against itself.

  Objects previously fleeting and transient were now caught photographically on the ground, against the walls, embedded, as it were, in any plane surface. An empty cigarette-packet, thrown down an hour and a half earlier, lay there on the tarred surface in the cold. Now it was no more than a bright blue patch, a sharply defined area in that vast expanse of brown, roughly rectangular, tending towards shapelessness at the corners, its outline finely sketched in as though with a pen. Any unevenness on it had become a shadow, and nothing more. One ran towards the centre, dividing the printed letters on the label; another towards the bottom left-hand corner; and another one, long and regular, lay striped across the right-hand side. No wind, however strong, could whisk this object away now, no rain could besmirch it, no brush could sweep it up and quickly dispose of it in some dustbin, already stuffed with old newspapers and orange-peel. Whatever anyone might do, whatever action might be taken by the old man in blue who would pass that way during the night, would make no difference. If this empty cigarette-packet were to be removed from its apparent position, it would instantaneously re-create itself, just as a playing-card, removed from the pack, reveals another one beneath it.

  So it lay there, floating on that damp, ochre-coloured surface. Silence had invaded the world in a series of concentric circles. An ovoid sun shone back in an infinite series of reflections from the plate-glass: everything glittered, a bright whiteness of pain was all around. Something akin to an atonal musical theme—yet detached from its essential substance—scrawled itself in space like a line of writing, a public graffito endlessly repeating erotic or political catch-phrases. Some sharp, fine motif might well have created a pattern in this context. With the help of a brutal, emphatic rhythm, the concept could have advanced to the point of its own destruction, joining the general negation of colour and substance, mingling with the other sensations, moving forward and back in the pure, regular motion of water enclosed in a kettle, visible still by virtue of this seemingly logical succession of speed and inertia, poised now in equilibrium, tracing out a Byzantine-style decorative motif, sketching a helical pattern, a kind of spiral staircase for ever circling round the walls of a tower, replacing the visual image of darkness and light, concentrating more and more in intensity, yet at the same time expanding, merging with infinity, then coming into violent collision with the rampart of glass and polished steel, the mirror of crudeness and hate, till, stopping short with the final bar of the theme-tune, it planted itself in time like a fatal dagger-thrust, at one point and one only, in the criminal outrage of shattered tonality, with one sound uttered once and for ever, a cry quivering arrow-like at the very heart of the target. Distant horror had usurped the atmosphere. Objects recoiled centrifugally one from the other. Colours exploded like bombs and their fragments rose up in fine powdery clouds. Then they suddenly withdrew from the foreground, became thick curtains, swarms of birds or cicadas, and swiftly sank again in stormy tumult. Outlines broke up into hard, downward-leaning pothooks that flickered along the haze in endlessly repeated patterns. They had no more duration than a lightning-flash, but—like lightning—they burnt themselves permanently into the retina. Other substances, less easily identified, were exploding and volatilizing, a momentary flash, then gone: matter conceived of centrifugal and uncompoundable elements, of botched radiations, already destroyed, without essence or identity. An epoch too soon, or too late, metals came together in fusion. All the mute, colourless, non-material matter secreted by the human brain now floated free, purposeless jetsam.

  So at the same time as the nexus of forces had gathered on window number thirty-nine, this mushroom-like growth was expanding over the empty cigarette packet. By now it was considerably more than an ordinary swelling; it had achieved something close to the configuration of a volcano, or the deadly folds and creases thrown up by an earthquake. Stealthily, possessed by the memory of that music and rhythm, of the colour blue, of various tastes and odours, tension had blown up an invisible balloon of air; and this heavy, swollen envelope was now encroaching on the centre of the macadam, oscillating over it like a giant bubble, quivering, turning purple, growling with fury. Then, abruptly, it burst, only to reform a little farther on, against the foot of a street-lamp, in the sky, on a balcony, at the top of some church steeple, over a streak of shadow, in the glint of a bicycle hub, at the heart of a chestnut-tree’s elusive scent, on the tip of an eyelid, in the belly of a pregnant woman—in any place where it could swell to bursting point, develop its egg, crush the inert flesh, sprawl over the mud, pollute clear colours, trouble the waters of the air, screw up any part of space, however infinitesimal, and blow up the blister which resembled that made by a red-hot iron.

  It was as though the whole world had been laid out by way of public entertainment, with the elements dotted about in space like printer’s type. There were no more bicycles, no more old cigarette-packets, no more orange-peel. They all lay about en masse, just as though they had been tried, condemned, and executed: chill and melancholy objects, mere refuse now, immobilized by death.

  At the bottom of the building there hung a kind of frayed blind. Then came a cigarette-end, an empty box, a stained handbill; and another cigarette-end, another empty box, another handbill. They were no longer attached to any living entity, and it was this fact of withdrawal which alone endowed them with some sort of tangible surface. From a sheet of glossy newsprint carrying the photograph of a Pakistani girl, and a continual, endlessly repeated stream of phrases which told the same vague, semi-legendary story (crammed with dates and proper names—Naaz, Pritibala, Mehmood, Dattaram, Ved Madan, Shashi Kapoor, opp. Tooting Bec 19 18 49), some indefinable pattern was beginning to take on shape and substance. In an arbitrary and random sequence words were replacing fragments of reality, and inscribing themselves one below the other on this white plac
ard-like object, the back (it seemed) of some gigantic poster. This done, they remained there, mere senseless signs now, no longer hoping for decipherment. The letters followed one another (sometimes dropping out of place or even disappearing altogether), detached themselves, fell from sight, were gone. Here, caught in the cold beam of reality, was an abstract, illegible poem, which restored the sense of physical immediacy, of direct contact and understanding. All in an atmosphere of calm, absolute calm, unruffled serenity. The mountains had been flattened, the rivers all drunk dry, and the stains on the earth had dried out: all that remained were words, and still more words, a moving column of them, tapped out in a series of minuscule explosions on the white, jerkily advancing paper. They fastened upon it, bare and solitary as nails, dozens of nails.

  12th floor

  11th floor

  10th floor

  sun

  9th floor

  8th floor

  7th floor

  6th floor

  5th floor

  4th floor

  night

  3rd floor

  p

  2nd floor

  p

  1st floor

  p

  choice piece

  p

  gol

  cigarette tzracks!

  p

  00000 fold

  p

  aaa

  charabanc

  tssktipptong!

  he he she

  ‘Spada’

  tree roof apartment block ORANGE

  Imbert and Phelippeau Imbert and currant jelly January February March Apr feather pillow macadam

  Chaos stood revealed, disintegration was complete; and yet from this piece of ground, this pile of sterile refuse, the movement was an upward one, a process of ascension. Each object was a source of radiance, and one let oneself be gently borne up on these rays, in the patient expectation that they would take one to some destination. The universe was constructed like an inverted pyramid; each element produced its angle, and the further one moved from the pyramid’s base, the greater grew the area comprehended, opening up like some splendid corolla. Every being and object on this surface, whether alive or dead, was a point from which two lines ran skyward, forming a sign shaped like a waterspout, which tore you free from the grasp of actuality, and inspired you to explore the more easily accessible depths.

  Down below the town had been flattened: at some points houses and gardens repeated their two-dimensional geometric pattern ad nauseam. A layer of pale, silent cotton-wool padded the roofs and walls. Huge square gleaming blocks rested on the ground. Wires prolonged themselves to infinity, guttering was scored in the concrete beside the pavements like spreading roots. A unique and faintly sinister humming note could be heard under these carapaces of stone and steel, strong enough to make the soles of one’s shoes vibrate. In secluded corners of the squares, several men were curled up in hand-carts, as thought hibernating. On the esplanade, less than a hundred yards from the river, lay a litter of rotten tomatoes and potato cores: a scene of calm, cold desolation, like a photograph. To the left of the S.E.B.A. yoghourt shop, exposed to wind and rain, a great black dog stood barking fiercely in the middle of a barbed wire enclosure. At noon and seven p.m. (and when there was a war on) a siren screamed from the top of the hill. Perhaps it was the siren that began everything.

  One day, 25th January, at half past three in the afternoon, it started up for no apparent reason. At the precise moment when its wailing note first burst upon the air, at the precise moment when it began to sweep round from one concrete structure to the next, growing louder every second, at that absolutely precise moment when everything seemed to be collapsing in total disorder the following incident took place. A young girl on a moped appeared at the corner of the boulevard, between the avenue of chestnut trees and the main entrances to the S.P.A.D.A. store. Her passage down the street coincided exactly with the noise of the siren. She had emerged from the tall clutter of buildings just as the first ululation went up; and she disappeared three hundred yards farther on, swallowed up by another group of office blocks, just as the sound died away into silence once more. What took place between these two points was unbearable. She rode on, sitting very stiff and straight in the saddle of her blue moped, hair drawn back round her childish face, eyes staring straight in front of her. The wheels whirred as she moved, light, transparent. Their hub-caps gleamed, their dirty tyres crunched over the asphalt. Legs bare, knees gripping tightly, the young girl kept going; but already she had lost some part of her own identity. Under the pressure of that unique sound, that blind and strident note, she underwent a metamorphosis. Her body shredded away into scraps, became fine dust, and gradually vanished altogether. Her moped, pierced through by the tension which the vibration-frequencies set up, became mere shrill metal. What took place at this moment, without warning, was something like the conservative influence of long final i labializing short i into ü. The young girl continued to advance down the middle of the soaking wet street, her black-and-white body held stiffly forward. The wailing of the siren was (it seemed clear) inside her, and echoing waves of sound burst from her eyes and mouth and nostrils. She was utterly alone, like some mechanical doll, and passed into oblivion at the bottom of the street; some indescribable impulse was urging her towards annihilation. The monolithic masses of the buildings on either side hemmed her in, guided her, traced out the route which, now, there was no escaping. The slightest deviation from it would have stripped away her skin and flesh, ripped out her nails, broken every bone in her body. All that would have remained to commemorate her gesture of rebellion would have been a spatter of blood and hair and brains on the grey surface of the wall.

  So, cleaving through the air on her moped, the young girl advanced towards the end of her journey. A damp film covered her eyes. Her half-parted lips looked as though they were drinking some invisible liquid, and light shone from the glass of her head lamp. This was how she looked as she passed straight through the various barriers and bridges, the multiple layers of sounds and odours, smoke and ice. She rode through them all, supported by the single wire of that harsh, sawing noise, then dwindled away and vanished at the bottom of the street. At the same instant as I, or we, saw this door (as it were) opening for her between two solid blocks of houses, the siren stopped. There was absolute silence. And nothing, nothing remained in our minds, not even a living memory. From that day everything began to go bad, rotten. Today I, François Besson, see death everywhere.

  From time to time (I may either be up or in bed) I stiffen, and stare out through the window, forehead pressed against the cold glass. Behind the closed shutters I see a long curving street with people walking up and down it. A violet shadow has fallen across the ground; and it is on this shadow that men and women walk, not saying a word, slip away into oblivion and are gone. The glow of the lighted street-lamps and the glitter from the shop-windows are both reflected all around: the shadows retreat reluctantly, like fringes of dark fur. Everywhere twinkling points of light are visible.

  They are dead, I know it, no question about that; they are dead because everything external to myself is dead; a faint aura in the semblance of a winding-sheet hangs about their silhouettes as they pass. I feel as though I were casually leafing through some vast periodical that had ceased publication, and that it was on its pages I saw these printed names and faded photographs, the headlines and dates and figures, the blunted rubrics. Buildings and images have now been replaced by a bare and silent cemetery, some ten thousand square yards in extent. I see future generations arriving here. I see funerals and memorial plaques. Today the world is finished. Nothing lives any more. Ecstasy and pain are mere geometrical expressions.

  On my feet once more, pausing now in front of a wall, I let all movement stream on past me. I am a survivor from the maelstrom. The foreshortened column of the water-spout has left me here, in front of this wall. Death has not spared me. I too have been caught in the vortex, I have been flesh, colour, s
pace, time. But now the effects of that encounter have receded far from me, revealing—like some dried-up marsh—a quite new composition, no longer dominated by fluctuating moods, anger or desire, but by hard certainties, granulated surfaces, aspects of immortality. The gloss left on a vase by the last lingering traces of dampness, mounds of fine sand that the waves have licked, rough-textured shells eaten away by salt: the sort of shells that murmur like the sea when you put them to your ear, you surely remember the noise they make, that gentle, muted, breathing sound, so close to the rhythm of a city that one’s inevitably reminded of the time one was caught in the midday rush-hour, right in the heart of the city, marooned on a traffic-island while cars surged past all around one. You feel that appalling swelling sensation spread through the arteries, flooding your guts like blood spurting through a perforated intestine, wringing your heart with agony; and you let yourself go with it, overwhelmed by the murmurous, humming flow, vanquished, blissful, to the point where your identity is gone, merged in the vortex, senses swooning away. Impossible not to yield, just a little, to despair; and the forces of memory always took advantage of this, subjecting us to those damned childhood sensations of ours, those we shall never recapture again, moments of quiet pleasure and idleness, hints and intimations of the future, the simple patterns we loved so well, warm, secret hiding-places, pockets of air in which the sun and rain mingled, retreats full of wonderful objects, red and gold, delicate creatures like sea-anemones and limpets, dumb, fragile organisms, liquid scents and sensations on the fingers, small white chunky stones, whole universes like a dictionary, you know, the things they call pools of water; and all this returns slowly, trying, in vain, to pierce the surface of the living being, and you know that the whirling vortex which seemed to spring out of nothing, from the void, was in fact ultimate mockery, the meaningless scream of monkey or parrot.