The Flood Read online

  This was the fate meted out to each being, hanging over every object. One man lay sprawling in a wicker basket-chair, caught short in the middle of his own private affairs. His hands rested flat along his thighs, just above the knees, and his round back was pressed against the back of the chair. He was beginning to find breathing difficult; every three or four seconds he gave a harsh, rattling cough. He was in the process of dying there, imperceptibly, with no regrets, and quite alone. Outside, beyond the window, the sky was blue. But the concentric circles grew and multiplied; one by one, like so many vultures, they crossed the threshold of this room, where already the smell of death hung in the air.

  It was the same along this snow-covered wintry boulevard, and, yes, round about that window, that focal-point of glass, and in the unknown hiding-places scattered through the countryside, middens and iced-over ponds and ash-pits: what still remained? What flame still glowed in the firebox of that stationary locomotive, what whistle went up from its steam-vent? What light shone inside the tinplate storm-lantern? Events were modulated to an infinite variety of frequencies, so that they eluded the eye and continued their business alone, in an unending round of self-induced growth and destruction. There was no longer a woman getting out of a red car at the crossroad and continuing her journey on foot, clumsily patting her hair into place with one hand as she passed a shop-window with the word ASPIRIN inscribed across it in large letters. Instead there was a movement of a soft, slim arm which imprinted itself for ever on the reflecting surface of the glass, and revealed the silhouette of a seeming statue, three bent fingers touching that electric mass of black hair. Facts were flights of stairs down invisible corridors.

  Then, in a flash, peace returned to all these places, spreading over hard intractible matter as though guided by a conductor’s baton. It did not so much encircle the state of fixity as prolong it, overtracing and completing the outline of the pavement, the sharp, three-dimensional pattern of the cast-iron street-lamps, the circular bandstand in the middle of the public gardens. Other human beings, or animals, very calm and quiet, stood frozen into familiar postures, in their houses, outside doors, beside windows; hands resting on tables, gnawing a bone perhaps, or lips set to a glass. On them, on each and every one of them, fell the fine rain of ashes. They were dying peaceably behind celluloid posters. Their lustreless eyes had taken on a leaden tinge, their substance was draining away drop by drop.

  What delicate design, drawn with a fine-pointed pen on the surface of coarse wrapping-paper, what exquisite music—its notes rising into the air like a flight of ravens—what rich savour, constantly generating itself by the catalysis of acids, the regular breakdown of fatty elements, theme and variations played out by alkaloids and carbohydrates, what piercing pain there, in the nether belly, would suffice to portray this luminous, rounded, frozen kingdom—this domain of which I formed part, in which I lost myself, floating in some strange fashion on my back, arms crossed, stretched out to my full extent in the middle of this supporting surface, silent and afraid, watching the gods move about their business? An expanse so wide it seemed like infinity, stretching widely to the sharp division of the horizon. An empty page with a line moving blindly over it, a springy motion, up a little, now to the left, still left, left, now right, cutting a pattern on life. Life. Superb, heroic, majestic, hammer-forged and childish, impossible to destroy. So pure and lovely, it looks as though one simple gesture would suffice to blot it out of view. I stretch on my back, and float; black veils and mourning drapes, hollow, cavernous, abyss-like surfaces pass slowly overhead, draw me towards sleep, volatilize my being by the pristine freshness of their ghostly premonitions. Now, perhaps, I am going to die: no more steel then, no more keen and cutting blades of light! But this world is terribly here. Everything overlaid with yellow and gold. Below me stretches this vast expanse of stone and stucco, this stark bird’s-eye view, a line on an aerial photograph, everything closed and dead—hospitals, mental homes, factories, power stations. The railway tracks are rusted up. But this process of decomposition, having corrupted every species and spared no object in the world, now finds that it may, after all, have achieved nothing. It is possible, in fact—not to go too closely into the matter—that nothing has changed in any way: sounds are as rich and complex as ever, trees still stand where they did, cottages still gleam with corrugated iron and formica flooring. Men and women looked just as smooth and healthy as they had always done. And yet something had happened. The threatening presence of some diluvian past hung everywhere in the air, a throat-catching memory. The smell of ill-buried corpses, perhaps, or the dry rottenness of fallen branches.

  No point in exaggerating: the concrete and sheet metal were flimsy enough, the tiling a bad joke; I still saw despite them.

  Look at it in yet another way. About seven minutes to eleven every noise in the town merged and concentrated like salvoes of gunfire. Here the movement was so well timed that it achieved its own destruction. Under the clear daylight the houses stood in yellow rows. Rain streamed off the rooftops, the gutters gurgled. A strange wind, warm and moist in texture, sent scraps of refuse fluttering against walls and windows. All these little episodes were contained in a hemisphere of grey sky.

  So you move away from this centre, at a reduced speed, and climb up in the direction of the near-by hills, mounting worn steps thick with mimosa, going up, up, till your breath begins to come short. Crows circle round the mountain. You cross a silent, macadamized road. Cats, hidden behind flower-pots, watch you go by. Goitrous lizards scurry away beneath heaps of old stones. You still climb on, up flight after flight of steps: nine of them before you reach the summit. You have to cross the road four times. You count sixty-three electric pylons, and about four hundred red-roofed suburban villas, with laurel hedges and orange-trees in the garden. You make out other mountains (which may be on fire) and the floating dome of an observatory. Greet an old woman with blackened hands. Kick through millions of fallen leaves, and ants, and olives. Catch the obscene odour of fig-trees. Then, somewhere high up the mountain, between the eighth and the ninth flight of steps, hidden away to the left of a small artificial square where children play, you come upon a fountain of icy water, issuing from a copper spout embedded in a stone monument. It bears the date 1871. All around it, in wild disorder, are various graffiti—J.C.B. 12/4/46, JOJO, HARRISON, 6/10/1960, MIREILLE, LIPOL, LUC, MAINANT, I WAS HERE—D.D., L.R., S., T.A.—M., 25/8/58, REG, 1st AUG. 1961, CASABLANCA, DIDI, 1949, POZSA, 1949, J.B., A.ZIN., HELSINKI 57, VICTOR HUGO, 12/8/1963. The water gushes out in sharp spurts and falls into the bowl of the fountain. You could sit there too, on the edge of the basin where the horse-flies hover, after carving your initials with a knife beside all the others—J.F.B., 9th April 1963—so as to know what’s going on. This would constitute the renewal of not-all-that-ancient history: history which had already left its mark on the stone stele above the fountain. For instance: A. and DAISY, 6th July 59.

  Albonico—Daisy finds it very hot.

  The sun had finally penetrated those thousands of tiny leaves. Later its angle had reached a point where the progressive ovalization of the shadows it cast produced innumerable mouth-like shapes. At present the sun was going down, trembling on the very edge of these triangular leaves, uttering tiny cries as it touched the gravel, glimmering jerkily downwards, yet with a smooth motion, so smooth—The tree in question was a pear; and this pear was cracking under the impact of the day’s heat, imperceptibly raising its head again now in the cool, stretching out its dry branches by millimetres, spreading each individual leaf. Like a dorsal fin. The air was almost completely still. Twenty-five yards farther on, under the patio of a villa, between the tomato-patch and the parrot-cage, the red mercury-column of a thermometer was steadily rising past the 80° mark.

  Albonico sat under the pear-tree, espadrilled feet resting on the gravel. At that moment, it seems, a droning sound became audible, drilling its way through the atmosphere; and a wilting plant, sapped by the lack of water, bent
over yet a little further. On this famous stretch of gravel one pebble stood out from the rest, because it was tall and pyramidal, whereas all the pebbles surrounding it were short and round—unless the near by splashing of the fountain created an illusion, by shedding a strange lustre on the stone’s facets, something midway between a reddish reflection and the sound of the sea. If Albonico had taken the trouble to dig there, with the toe of his espadrille, he would undoubtedly have unearthed an old coin, lost there some months earlier, and now very dirty. Only the cigarette-butts had escaped burial. Daisy pinched the base of her nose between the thumb and first finger of her right hand. Then, with the same hand, she traced out the contours of her full lips, and went back to the desultory perusal of some romantic magazine, Confidences or the like. The sun, burning hot and with widely scattered rays, shone on the glossy paper at four separate points. On the left, again, a withered stem quivered, letting fall some pistils, or stamens. A variety of sounds drifted up across the steps, from beyond the edge of the trees, skirting rows of back gardens, re-echoing and dividing. They originated at every point of the landscape—in the Foglia garage, for instance, or the Rosa-Bonheur warehouse. The sound of banging bottles, or a diesel engine, or a dog’s bark: all were flattened, made barren by the fierce-thrusting rays of the sun. The tin roof of the garage lay square to the sky’s smooth simmering surface. They might have been superimposed layers of sheet aluminium, each serving to reflect the other. Every twenty-four seconds a gong-stroke shuddered through the air, echoing on, blurred by much rubbing and grinding. A very long bundle of piping, lying wired up on the ground, gave back the slow, cadenced stroke of a perspiring man who was banging it with a hammer. Amid the general murmurous fragmentation of sound, the vague humming caused by the heat, these hammer-blows carried some unseen ghostly entity forward, while at the same time thrusting back an equally invisible obstacle, starting oscillations in a cloud. Every twenty-four seconds, another yard gained; a yard every twenty-four seconds—a sphere dilated a little further, something opaque and nebulous, like a foetus, or magma, and lost itself in the landscape. Dispersed. Or, to be more accurate, a coat of dust settled on everything, caking the dry-stone courses of the wall, thickening the outlines of the pebbles. The very sky, perhaps in an attempt to make its texture more like that of the ground, was hazy with a fine flour-like substance. Winged particles floated on pockets of air, collected in nuclei. No doubt it was the intense heat that, penetrating to the earth’s very core, had released these clouds of ash, lifting them, fanning them into airborne motion until they formed a long-lasting envelope round the world. At this point Albonico took the trouble to scrape with the toe of his espadrille, in the precise spot where the old, dirty coin lay, hidden beneath the surface. He found it, picked it up, and showed it to Daisy. It looked very round and ugly, lying there in the hollow of his hand.

  ‘I’ve just found twenty francs,’ he said, ‘down on the ground there.’

  ‘A coin, you mean?’

  ‘Strange, don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘Someone must have lost it.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  Daisy gave it back to him. Then she wiped her earth-stained fingers against the stone wall.

  ‘It must have been there quite a time. It’s thick with earth.’

  ‘No—not earth—

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘No, I mean, not earth, not exactly. More a kind of dust, something like ash. Here, I’ll clean it up a bit. Tear me off some of your paper—’

  He began to clean the twenty-franc piece, very carefully, sitting there close to the sea, facing the fountain, half in the sun, half in shadow. He scraped every tiny corner and recess, using the sharp fingernail of his right-hand index finger, wrapped up in a scrap of paper. But the metal remained worn and lustreless, permanently blackened by its contact with the soil.

  Far beyond the world of peace and quietness, far from that secret paradise where springs gush forth in undisturbed tranquillity, a place of murmuring trees, where each light breeze and wasp moves as the fancy takes it; far from the rain drumming down steep roofs and into the gaping maw of the gutters; far beyond all these scarcely-formulated worlds, this flesh-coloured beauty, these innumerable swarming crevasses, these mouths for ever muttering their interminable stories, mingled with breath smelling of food and soda-water—far away and beyond all this there seems to be a weight binding your feet and hands, a weight that tears you away, all trembling and bloody, from any pleasure in life. It’s like a block of marble, high as a house, weighing countless tons, dragging you through the birth-pangs of mortal being. Before you know it you’re off, without knowing where, the freezing cold penetrating every pore in a trice, while you vainly try to cry out, even to get your breath back; but those grim metallic shafts pierce through you like the long swift movement of a sword thrusting into your vitals. There are no set limits to this race: it is virtually interminable, so that nothing—neither the act of writing, nor a name (such as T E A P E), nor birth itself could check its advance. Imperceptibly, during this descending progress, the world expands: not in depth or surface area, but in quantity—the universe multiplies, colours, elements (both static and alive), living creatures, all become increasingly divergent. Strange endless scribblings encircle every part of space and make it incomprehensible. It is as though speed of movement, or the sharpness of the senses, or some such factor, were blowing up reality to the point where it passed beyond one’s grasp. Patches of light, dark shadows, straight lines, emphatic or lightly sketched shapes, all simultaneously merge, yet remain distinct. Every object becomes, at one and the same time, akin to, and different from, every other object. Then comes a murmurous sound, swelling into wild, harmonious music, rising from the heart of matter and mingling its mournful vibrations with those of the light. It is, you might say, as though the earth were on the boil, a slow succession of bursting bubbles. The human observer, deceived by his own sensibilities, plunges further into the depths; rhythm and theme catch him in mid-flight, while colour-patterns (ever-changing, ever-destructive) cast a camouflage over him. Voices have a heavy, cavernous boom, are linked every twenty-four seconds to the rhythm of a man hammering away with all his strength on a spark-bright bundle of crazy steel tubing. Somewhere between earth and sky there oscillates a large, flattish object, its surface daubed with blood, apparently made of riveted and interlapping steel plates, sliding to and fro with each compression or expansion of their overall mass, and yet very much all of a piece, easily liftable on some gigantic bar, like a curtain. Then, deeper still, the effect is akin to that other sea one discovers after plunging beneath the surface. The rhythm is slow still, that gong-stroke every twenty-two or twenty-three seconds: but the quality of the sound has changed. It is no longer music, but rather a kind of soft, continuous frictional note, somewhat like falling rain, or the hiss of wet tyres. Sometimes, especially round a gas-flare, or a cigarette-lighter, or even a flash of light off the bodywork of a car, there forms a note so high and shrill as to be quite unbearable; but it never lasts for long. Very soon it splits into two notes, then three, then four, then five, then six. A kind of musical shrubbery has been brought into existence. It grows, spreads, extends its branches, mingles with the other vegetal tissue of sounds about it. After some 2,503 further subdivisions, the shrill note has become no more than a fine, disembodied whisper, the sound of a finger brushing across skin, magnificent to the nth degree, the scarcely audible sound of a hand caressing the dry, powdery texture of some young girl’s thigh. Such is the unremitting frictional sound that accompanies these speeded-up movements in the blue of the sky; later, the blue might have been replaced by orange, but now colours, too, are separating off and multiplying—not in a static context, as it might be the white wall of the apartment block, but as part of the universal va-et-vient: a subtle and alarming movement, that modifies every least detail of existence, something for the insect world to imitate. Now time, too, splits up, propagates, drains and devours itself. The ste
reoscopic patterns divide: the higher ones pursue their vertical flight into the void, those beneath them plunge greedily downwards, are swallowed by oblivion.

  And above this scene of chaos, these ear-dulling noises, it seems to me that I myself am poised, dreaming, or drifting in chill and monumental splendour, like some great iceberg, blue depths glinting, nine-tenths under water, a solid mass of stiff glacial fury. My ears are filled with words in unknown, inhuman-sounding languages. The syllables jostle and trip against one another, build patterns in the void. They are not addressed to any person; they form a termite-language, their volubility is made up of endless tiny points. Nothing has any further significance. Everywhere—on the peeling walls and the monumental fountains, across the doors of dark, stinking retreats, in the station booking-hall, over millions of virgin pages—there runs that delicate secret writing which no one can read. Here are set forth facts of immediate concern and all-too-ghastly reality, which must yet pass unrevealed: rather like those frightful accidents, known yet somehow kept from the mind, which lie so heavy on our consciences. All measure and restraint have been lost; it seems to me that the world is in torment, that it bears an incurable wound.