Jean-Marie Le Clézio
The Flood

~ ~ ~

AT the beginning there were clouds, and more clouds, heavy, black, blown by intermittent gusts of wind, contained within a ring of mountains on the horizon. Everything began to grow dark, objects took on a regular pattern, lapped scales like thin blades of steel, or chain-mail, that frittered away what little brightness still remained. Other objects, themselves sources of light, began to flicker feebly and unhappily, overwhelmed by the vast proportions of some ill-defined yet imminent happening, made ridiculous by the mere fact of comparison to this enemy (as it were) against whom they had to sally forth and do battle. The movement gradually faltered, not through any loss of intensity or change in approach, but because its impetus was exhausted by the effort to hold up the advance of this freezing universal oblivion — its very stillness imbued with a quality of eternity — now creeping on, and on, biting into the earth, swallowing it inch by inch, infiltrating any manifestation of activity, breaking up the established harmonies of contrast, penetrating to the core of all matter, annihilating the very origins of life itself. Delicate and paper-light, the texture of darkness lay upon every surface, creating a multiplicity of silhouettes, and enhancing the intensity of such brightness as there was to a quite remarkable degree, so that a single point of light, reflected from the broken glass lying along the sidewalk, where the water-truck had crushed it, blazed out for something like a hundred light-years over an area bordering on infinity, and with the fierceness of three or more suns.

Any part of the view — as it might be four hundred square yards of concreted surface, occupied by buildings made with cement and steel girders — now seemed a kind of weird glacial desert — a desert set down on top of the living soil, a tidy, planned desert, at once accommodating and abrasive, and self-contained, that is, equipped with an absolute, all-inclusive scheme of things, in which movement of bicycle + wilderness of streets echoing women’s footsteps + trickle of water seeping along a crack in the macadam + railings in sharp perspective + an almost complete absence of loud, shattering noises + fourteen storeys + cold air in frozen blocks like slabs of marble and a flurry of artificial rain smelling of polythene indicated the exact steps that had to be taken, plotted the rules of the inhuman game.

The various elements — all sorted and classified in their card-index universe — rearranged themselves in accordance with this new factor (time of day, atmospheric pressure, degree of humidity and temperature) and quickly produced a terrible, diabolical image, which allowed for every move being played several times over, an infinite number of times. A children’s maze, in which all the paths converged on the same spot, opposite the site of the buried treasure, where pirate and crocodile lay in wait together. A strange world, hard and infallible, in which not the tiniest rivulet flowed at random, not a single flower protruded through the protective asphalt, not a tree lived, not a door was opened, not one cigarette fell and was stubbed out, unless it was so willed by that vast, solitary, nameless demiurge who parcelled out all things in the world, set his mark upon them, and bound them into the structure of his formal pattern.

A world in which all objects, every atom could be expressed by the letter A, and every happening and construct, of whatever sort, traced out the formula of the magic square:

A A A A

A A A A

A A A A

A A A A

— that is to say, in which they kept up a constant process of simplification and purification, until the moment (impossible to describe it) was reached at which event and object, chain and link, were merged in a single phenomenon, A. The moped moved along the section of street between corner X and street-lamp Y, with a fading sound and reflected light glinting out from its hubs. But the moped as such was limited to this particular stretch of street, to the sound it made, to a glitter of light. In a moment its motion would be arrested, perhaps for a thousand years, or alternatively it might repeat, again and again, that quick, rhythmic passage from corner X to street-lamp Y, till the movement itself became the expression of its being. The rain would always go on falling here, the sidewalk would stretch away to the right for all eternity, yet both would be something different, rain and sidewalk no longer; there would be no more moped, no more corner, no more street-lamps, either lit or unlit, no more peeling walls, no more sounds of chains or wet tyres, no more bleak, chilly smells or dew-heavy smoke-drift hanging in mid-air; instead there would be a small, peaceful, undisturbed picture, a still-frozen image, dead before it had a chance to achieve immortality, part of a game which was no longer understood. Like pictures with such titles as ‘View of Port-Louis and the Pic des Tois-Mamelles’, or ‘The Crossing of the Beresina’, or ‘Engraving of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament’, and so on. Everything would come to this in the end. Meanwhile the water went on trickling down the gutters, and a whole host of small objects floated this way and that in the puddles along the road. It was the beginning.

Yet this was without importance, because from the moment the game began, the world had ceased to be — and to have been. There was a certain number — a little above the predictable average — of ideal curves and perfect angles. These were the last to fall, since they embodied, over and above such things as ‘Imbert and Phelippeau Building’ and ‘Rue Paganini’ and ‘War Memorial’ and ‘Atlantis Cinema’, various intellectual concepts — not to mention a number of vague and ill-defined smells, such as those of smoke, or earth, or cooking soup, or even smells tout court, adaptable to hundreds of different requirements. In the same way colours, though tagged with a name three-quarters of the time, could conjure up an illusive sense of abstraction. Reds, whites, browns, greens, blues — it was often because of them that the landscape began to split and crack apart.

A patch of white, for instance, might constitute the initial fissure; then, as on a sheet of glass or a frozen lake, other fissure-lines would radiate out around this central crack. Starting from the point of white, the break-up would spread and deepen visibly, gradually disintegrating both the object and its context. The sequence produced: white — round — pale light—3 m. 12 cm. — humming and flickering — heat — steel, bronze, smelting — verticality….

Gently the fissure would expand and encroach, so that, viewed in perspective, one object could break up another by a simple process of superimposition. Similar movements were being set up at countless different points, and the mere prolongation of two straight lines, in accordance with roughly geometrical principles, was enough to do the trick. Each fresh viewpoint increased the fragmentation of matter, so that it became an easy matter to achieve the demolition of a twelve-storey apartment block, with 198 windows, in less than sixty seconds. A series of these windows (the light glinting off them took on a violet tinge) would initiate the movement and then repeat it inexhaustibly, so that the ascending progression became generalized upward motion. This spatial development was accompanied by a parallel phenomenon in the time-factor: the extremities of time were looped together, duration bent into a circle, beginning and end merged together, establishing the perfect sphere. Just as the first and the twelfth window were no longer distinguishable, but both subsumed to the same idealized movement of ceasing-to-be and coming-into-being, so the first and the twenty-fourth hour, the first and the sixtieth second, shaken together by the uncertain rhythm of a no longer forward-moving time-sequence, would come and go, achieve and conclude their existence millions of times over, preserved from any progression by some dark hour, by a particular negative second, the retroactive impulse of which — predictable and inevitable as the next tick of a metronome — exemplified a species of mechanical perfection.

This, or something like it, was what must be taking place now at this point on earth, this complex sub-section of the world. It seemed to be decomposing like an animal’s cadaver, to all outward appearances intact still, but in reality decaying throughout, tortured and gnawed in all its parts. The walls of houses, the surfaces of the streets, the outlines of apartment blocks, the very air and the noises carried on it — all these, when seen from a distance, had a solid quality about them, reminiscent of bronze or marble; and yet the mere proximity of conscious awareness had a somehow stiffening effect on them, so that they revealed the existence of their own internal rottenness. Under one’s scrutiny they swarmed and faded, vanishing darkly behind a veil of clouds and mist. Confusion blurred previously clear outlines, overlaid the colours of down and hair, separated out previously pure elements, broke up the logical order of things, denied the evidence of the senses. Everything was shifting and reverberating simultaneously. There was a sound like the sea, a rumbling stillness, a universal thunderous roar. Mopeds sprouted feathers, men and women were spotted with peacock-eyes, skies took on checkerboard patterns. Hitherto indeterminate colorations formed into patterns of black and white, then regrouped themselves according to their two basic and contrasting characteristics, light against dark. The expression of form was reduced to a schematic minimum — straight line, spiral, angle. Sounds, smells, silhouettes, all hived off into their separate groups, teamed up afresh. Slowly and quietly a kind of vast, meticulous fresco was coming into being, an unchecked, passionless advance by sappers from one redoubt to the next. Anyone overtaken by the freeze-up very quickly cracked and broke apart; his hot and cold elements sloughed off around his feet like a cast skin, and almost at once his naked body could be seen rising from the confusion, sharp and thin as a knife-blade, and setting its mark on the rest of the process, with a series of distorted movements and nervous twitchings that verged on caricature. Then it would take on the semblance of a statue or an engraving; a few bold strokes and there it was, burning like a torch above the world, a world at long last restored to pristine clarity, to the realm of abstract ideas, indescribable in its vividness and beauty, a species of intellectual hell.

Flight was out of the question: each object and being was caught by surprise, in mid-flight. There was an instant when chaos began, a day on which light began to fade and the outlines of every feature were scribbled, as though in charcoal, on a surface more virgin than paper and harder than any stone. All was enmity and watchfulness; the circle closed little by little, it was as though great ramparts were there, growing thicker, moving closer to one another. The universe was being transformed into a room, its windows opened on to other windows. Men’s eyes fabricated a kind of impenetrable barbed-wire entanglement. What had previously been free and variable was now locked in a mad immutable pattern. Objects were replaced by sharp, angular figures, trees were transformed into Turkish scimitars, houses into sharp mountain ridges, flowers to jagged, bristling peaks. The four corners of the horizon swung in towards one another, tilting up vertically. It was like being cut off in a fortress, with the drawbridges going up on every side. It was now that the banked up clouds appeared on the scene, now that the first skirmishing movement towards shadow and darkness began. Cut off from the horizon in every direction, the town now writhed round on itself like some mortally stricken rhinoceros. The wind had turned to stone; though it blew still, there was no movement in it. It had become a monument erected to the memory of movement, and its downward-dragging gravity held a dead weight of millions of tons. In one quarter of this shattered town the forces of cold and silence had established themselves. A two-dimensional boulevard, its chaotic movement frozen into stillness, hung poised in mid-flow. Bare trees renewed the sap in their branches for all eternity. Adjacent blocks of flats gaped vacantly into the void, not yet in ruins, but no longer habitable. The windows that opened from those wan walls still grouped themselves in a regular pattern, but their character had changed; now they were nightmare freaks of fancy, a spectacle as sinister and mechanistic as the windows of a train moving past in a station. They hinted at a phenomenon as disturbing as it was powerful; they were dream-figments of an exhausted brain, which had somehow contrived to by-pass the pitfalls of stupor and oblivion: monotonous, blackened, repetitive features of this burnt-out landscape, ubiquitous and eternal.

There was no further relationship between them save in the context of these endlessly forming vertical or horizontal brick courses. All that had been done at other times and in other places was still contained in them. It was there, automatically, undeniably, on the façade of this apartment block; it offered a totality of vision, built up from the cumulative sum of various experiences, various likely inferences, which was self-perpetuating and progressively narrowing down its field. From town to town, from porch to porch, from tree to Cadillac, to railings, back-alleys, streets, corners, finally arriving at this vast white regular plane surface, this wall with its twelve storeys, 198 windows, eighteen doors; with its bustling corridors, its elevators (movements downwards, upwards, sideways), its diagonals, zigzags, lozenges, crosses, and the rest of it. This was where the trail had led to, this many-sounding wall (broken murmur of the rising tide, trains whistling in tunnels, tapping of feet on stone steps, hum of traffic, police car sirens, squeal of tyres, whining jet aircraft). It was there, amongst other places, that the great noisy hall, a kind of ghost-stadium, had come into being: a hall in which the loudspeaker, like a collective mouth, had carved out its particular niche.

Later the façade itself had collapsed. The elements of existence had, if that was possible, contracted still further: the world was shrinking in on itself, like a pool of spilt and evaporating petrol, that seems to move upwards towards some point in the sky as its total area diminishes. It had retreated from the outer edges of the building, withdrawn its frontiers until they comprised only a few rows of windows. For a while it had been contained between the eighth and second horizontal rows, and the tenth and the third vertical ones. Then it had retreated still further, slipping along the wall, tearing loose fragments of light and sound as it went. Now it had reached the last window on the third floor, window number thirty-nine. It was here that life had chosen to maintain itself, an intense and blindingly bright life, a star that concentrated within itself all the hundreds and hundreds of square yards which made up the town. On this square of violet-tinted glass the world had formed a sheer, outjutting mountain, endlessly toppling, collapsing, reforming, marking time, gleaming in rainbow iridescence. Here time still moved on, perhaps, in a film-strip of memories, unleashing its rough blows against the glass, fighting its profound and mysterious battle. It was the core of what used to be termed relativity, colours without colour, nameless names, inaudible sounds, transparent and volatile odours. Window number thirty-nine had stripped bare an entire world, leaving its inhabitants dead or naked, uncovering the harsh peaks and reefs, the bones of existence, all around it. Elsewhere all was blanched white: skeleton squares and streets, the fossil remains of men and dogs lay abandoned here and there beneath the scorching sun of awareness. They aged gently, powdered over with dust and sand, like so many huge shells cast up by the sea. Window number thirty-nine in the block — blacker and more concentrated than a child’s eye — drew them irresistibly to itself, sparked off their powder-trails of desire. Parched hair-lines converged on its centre like so many luminous rays. The rain drummed down on these bony relics with a soft, caressing hiss; and between each separate drop of water, each sonorous explosion, there sprang up a spinning vortex of wind which redirected the centrifugal elements towards the centre of the window-pane. The earth’s scales were hard and insensitive, like those on a fish’s sides. Torpor swam in the air; the great cavern of silence extended its vaulted roof still further. Like a loudspeaker in reverse, the window’s gullet swallowed up the sum of all noises in the town, and left nothing but tragic calm behind. No one could look steadily at it without flinching: it was a second sun, black and mournful, spreading out its rays of darkness. Within its globe matter fused, boiled, endlessly bubbling over and through itself. Ice had formed at the heart of the volcano’s turbulence: the tension on the glass was so strong that the whole earth seemed to tremble because of it, and the slightest thing, one felt, might trigger off the explosion.

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 placard-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, space, 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.

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 stereoscopic 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.

Besson stands rooted to the spot, staring straight in front of him, unable to see anything but this horror, and looking like some exotic statue. All unbeknown to himself he has become a fragment of black wood, a sculptured piece of ebony. His thick lips are motionless, his neck has stiffened into a knot of old cords. His limbs are thin and tough, his belly excessively swollen, hard and distended like that of a pregnant woman. Beneath his belly the penis is erect, pointed. There are no muscles or veins visible on the surface of his body: the whole thing is as smooth as a pebble. At the centre of his belly lies a hole dug with the point of a knife, enclosing a canal: this is his navel, like the puncture left by a pistol-shot. Besson’s legs are short and bowed; his toes are splayed out in an unpleasant fashion, rather as though, somewhere higher up, he were making the ghost of an obscene gesture. Above all, under the dome of his skull, breaking the frontal curve, are two enormous eyes, two balls of black wood set in black wood, two blind, senseless domes, soft to the finger’s touch: such is the persona, the frog-mask, that François Besson has chosen to wear. It is this monstrous weight of sorrow and pity that he allows to drag him down, so that he falls, falls, passing the striated layers of the earth’s surface, the sudden reddish explosions of the elements, basic clusters of matter; he falls deeper and faster than a man confronted by a smoking cigarette; yet he knows he will never arrive at any destination. Foreign languages all have their word for hope; but this word sticks in the throat. I am not isolated; I can communicate with you all; but it is bound to be too late. It may be that — caught in this trap, caught in the very midst of life — such languages work their way through me, turn me into a phantom, irresistibly strip me of all the individual characteristics I once possessed. After days of this journey, with nothing left of myself save this vast and vulnerable body, open to every emotional assault, I was expecting some sort of triumphal conclusion to the matter — and in the very midst of a clear and levelled world, I am still taken unawares. I have had scant opportunity to extract myself from my dilemma, since the town I am entering is very like the other one, I am hemmed in by near-identical walls, overwhelmed by the same colours and sounds and desires: time and space have made a complete revolution. On the other side of this liquid mass, on the earth’s further face, the darkness — despite the chaos close at hand — has not diminished one jot. It still holds everything in its vice-like grasp, covers each object with its friable skin. On the high level ground to the left of the town, a level area of a few acres contains emblems signifying silence and death. Here everything is rectilinear, comprehensible, and as a result almost joyful; under the vaguely aligned crosses, caught by this species of three-faced mirror, lie no end of curious beings. And it is true enough that, once upon a time, they were alive: vigorously, insolently alive. Now nothing remains of them but an ill-defined oblong of blackish earth, and two white sticks nailed together in an upright position. The burial-grounds of men, dogs, beetles and briars have merged and become one. Perhaps, indeed, the cemetery is a cemetery no longer, but rather a kind of vague terrain extending over the whole earth, a vision, it may be, to superimpose on that of our daily existence, to spread out — everywhere and to all eternity — the soul racked by indecisive respect and terror? The earth is a night-soil dump, very tranquil, very neatly ordered, where the device of these small meticulous crosses allows every being, despite their annihilation, to persist in the shape of black letters inscribed on pine-wood lathes.


armchair


hand


sun


machine


shrubbery


gravel


gravel


pebble


worm


grass


canalization


Villa Floréal


abyss


thread


mountain


water


water


leaf


jacket


spectacles


paper


box


tar


fossil


exercise-book


revolver


finger


fish


church


hour


fritter


pigeon


Of necessity, one wandered among these tombs without understanding them; the clouds had piled up thicker and thicker in the sky, and rain was pouring down. The turn events had taken came as a surprise, like a precipice beside some mountain road. From this cemetery, and from each of those symbolic crosses beneath which the world lay at rest, there rose the smell and the sound of death; a little way off the ground the two of them formed a still, sluggish layer of mist. It was like walking backwards through the streets of a totally destroyed town: not so much exploring a maze (since everything was clear-cut and visible) but running the gauntlet of trick mirrors, trompe-l’oeil devices, a series of cunning schemes and traps. In this symmetrical pattern there was no room, despite death’s presence, for sleep. True, there was a general atmosphere of tranquillity, or seeming tranquillity, to which the bare external shape of things, the austerity of their proportions, contributed something. Perhaps, indeed, this calm was the genuine article, the only kind of peace possible — that bred of violence and despair. Moreover, the memory of a time when things had been quite different — when colours had been firmly blocked in, when landscapes glittered with light, when every place and time had enjoyed a spell of drowsy relaxation at will, and then faded away as though they had been mere chimeras, without any importance — did not now evoke any self-flattering nostalgia. It had merely become unlivable, so that every allusion to the topic opened a door into Hell; the world’s elements had undergone such a swarming upheaval that the mere idea of the past could no longer restore them to their previous simplicity. In fact, there was no longer any question of purity or simplicity: both had become inevitable casualities. The thread of life running through them was now slender and elusive: so fine now, in fact, that the merest moment’s neglect could have proved fatal. The situation bore some resemblance, perhaps, to that of a giant thousand-year-old tree, so vast and heavy that it seemed, from its appearance, to belong to the mineral rather than the vegetable kingdom. The distance between these two kingdoms was minimal: the merest breath — a botanist’s defection, say — would have sufficed to push the tree over the border. Yet, despite appearances, life stirred in it still, though it was hundreds of years since it had last put out fresh branches or new spring leaves, or pushed its roots farther afield. Nevertheless, it continued to exist. Deep beneath its armour, at the very heart of the trunk, a knot, a core of wood still throbbed with life and continued to grow, till its circle was complete and the dry, withered fibres thrust back another tenth of a millimetre. It also bore some resemblance to a flimsy partition, separating two conflicting elements — though without any motive for such an arrangement being found, much less the corroboration afforded by bracketing two opposites together, as it might be air and water, water and stone, fire and air, gold and lead, darkness and light. The line between life and death had by now become so fine that everyone was vaguely expecting it to break at any moment, and let the blue and crimson tides meet in the breech, one mingling with the other, spreading out, rushing on with deep whirling eddies, bearing pebbles and gravel (soon to sink and be lost), ceaselessly driving forward the third, most terrible tidal wave, deeper in hue now, an ominous purple. This ghastly rupture, the one break that could really have fatal consequences, was in fact impossible: the barrier could not be broken down. It existed in analytical terms, could be named, figured out, placed — and yet, and yet, just supposing the situation did break loose, not through a brutal fusion of the two elements, but by an inversion which decreed that henceforth all that pertained to life should become dead, and all that had been dead should become life. Supreme illusion, raucous laughter from the Devil, a syllogism that could expand on the sustenance provided by white walls, staccato movements, carefully observed and described expressions, moments of ecstasy that for the time being managed to keep chaos at bay. At all events, symmetry was preserved; the world, so virgin in appearance, had been reduced to a state of utter weakness. In private rooms and public bars, down streets and alleys, numbers of men and women were living through this process of logical contraction. Their various destinies did not run together in confusion: both in the world of the living, and in that of the dead, excitement mounted steadily. There was discussion and gesticulation, or, if you prefer, muscles came into play and bones cracked, some four and a half yards underground. Gradually the truth began to shape itself, composed of noise no less than of silence, of bodies as well as corpses. Far from horizontal — indeed, decidedly animated — truth, disguised as a middle-aged woman, went striding down the middle of the street, hair plastered down by the rain, a somewhat blurred silhouette, hands shoved into the pockets of an indigo mac and held akimbo against her hips. The rain beat down on the ground in its ancient, delicate, well-worn rhythm; the ground reflected the middle-aged lady’s figure, and at every step she took towards her unknown destination, it seemed that she could no longer escape from herself. From steep roofs down which the rain of heaven coursed, all eternity watched her pass by; the songs in the bars became one united song, the urgent appeals of the upright and godly merged together, hundreds of voices were uplifted in the cold and the wet, wrapped her about in their rhythmical cocoon, then, finally, dwindled away skyward, among the clouds. And this manifestation of truth was neither sad nor gay: from the moment it had accepted the person of a woman, and had donned that indigo macintosh, and had agreed to walk the street in the rain, above her own pear-shaped reflection, it was as though she had saddled herself with a task for all eternity, something compounded of damp earth, tear-stained fabric, heavy breasts stretching the material of the bodice, weary legs plodding yard by yard down the street. Sighing voices murmured in your ear, telling you which way to go. One fell back into the very heart of existence, rather like a stone plummeting to the bottom of a well.

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.

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.

The houses now stand packed close against one another. Their roofs form a continuous, compact surface of red and brown, open to dust and rain: a new sort of regular-patterned floor that calls for a certain crazy extravagance in the user.

Trucks pass down the streets, wheels close to the sidewalk; the sky, heavy with clouds, tilts square to the vertical. The horizon is hemmed in by those volcano-like mountains, with vapour rising on their flanks. In some secret den or underground cave there must be men held prisoner, stifling from confinement. The sidewalk throws up people who have been buried alive, bodies steeped in bituminous deposits, which the worms refuse to eat. Everything has a suffocating air of impenetrability. Down there a hundred children are jostling each other in the dust of a gymnasium.

These were the things one could see, at that moment in time, if one climbed the hill where the cemetery stood. At the top of the gardens there was a landmark-indicator, together with a marble slab on which were inscribed the main references to the area, such as couplets by Byron or Lamartine. This, then, was the moment to lean over the balustrade, and listen to the sound of the artificial waterfall, and look at everything with an avid intensity, as though one were condemned to die immediately afterwards, or at the very least to go blind.

When you got down to it, there could have been no worse setting for love than this town; yet before love could be achieved, there had to be knowledge and understanding, one had to acclimatize oneself to this empty void, this sad mockery of freedom.

If only it were possible, one ought to be left to oneself again, among the stones and trees, the names, the shop-windows, the traffic; among the great close-packed crowd of men and women, among the shouts and smells and passionate emotions. Prepared long since, matured in antechambers charged with thunder and lightning, where the tension had swiftly become more shattering than the face of a god revealed, the atmospheric drama was now gathering to its climax. Now clouds were bursting in their dozens, the sky streamed with water like a plate-glass window. Burning perfumes gathered in clusters, began to revolve about each other like constellations; people caught at the storm’s centre hurriedly took shelter in doorways, anxious to avoid being left out in the open. Earth and buildings alike took on a bluish tinge, perilously liable to attract lightning and the plastic elements of water. And the same storm, dry, intangible, began to gather in men’s hearts; buildings, to all appearances intact, were collapsing internally of their own accord; every drop that fell from the sky took a small fragment of reality with it briefly tapping out a rhythmic pattern, a vague suggestion of something — conscious awareness, perhaps — before dissolving into nothingness. Very soon these palatial buildings and columns would vanish, leaving nothing but white ruined shells. But what was appalling, unbearable even, was that this process of destruction never reached completion: it went on continually, in every direction, over and over again, but never succeeded in exhausting the resistance of matter. The houses were nothing any longer, yet they still existed; movements, colours, desires — none of them had any further meaning, yet movements, colours and desires continued as before. Men were brute beasts of the void, mindless and bloodless, set in their ways — yet they still existed. You could walk down every street, even out into the stony, rain-rich countryside beyond, and nowhere would you discover true solitude, the fulfilment of that haunting passion for the absolute. Nowhere would you find complete silence.

Everywhere you went, you were bound to come up against existence, walls of solidity and life that drove you back like some echo of the birth-agony. It was all a trick with mirrors, reflection upon reflection, as intense as they were pointless. There was nothing in the world that could absorb and destroy you, return you to the indifferent blank expanse of the void; nothing that could be penetrated by the rapier of your frenzy. Wherever your footsteps carried you, the world was a kind of travelling circus, presenting you with a special vision: each object was self-contained, adaptable, and meticulously ringed round with a thin black wiry line. Reality, truth, the power of nature: vast-stretching deathless concepts against which the keen light of understanding and communication bruise themselves for ever. In this organized chaos there was no chance of escape. Four streets converging on a square where the clock in the clock-tower said six o’clock now held this inner reality for ever, stamped with its seal: hundreds of square yards of asphalt and concrete and plaster, rain beading its surface like sweat, right-angled corners on the pavement, gleaming rivulets down the gutters, scars left by winter frost and summer heat, cracks, the chalk marks of old hopscotch games, names, names, names: Salvetti, Geoffret, Milani, Apostello, Caterer, Chez Georges, Chinaware, Port Pharmaceutical Store, Astoria, Dental Surgeon, S.E.V.E., La Trappe de Staouëli, Lanfranchi, Caltex Tyres; Chevrolet 418 DU 02, winter banana, Motta ice-cream, Simon, 84.06.06. Empty spaces that darkness absorbs without effort, long streets lined with plane-trees at regular intervals, their branches bare and leafless, each planted in the pavement and growing up through a sunshaped iron grating. Fountains, concrete and stucco buildings, balconies overgrown with creepers; roofs bristling with aerials, or tilted over as though the sky leaned down more heavily on one side of them, barred windows, shutters open or closed, plywood doors, spy-holes, culverts and gutters. At one point in this rectangular pattern, a little way up on the left, stand two parallelopipeds, an exception to the general rule: it is just a trick of perspective, or are they really like that, two bluish blocks apparently joined at the top and forming a sort of triumphal arch? In fact they are the walls of the XVth Army Corps Barracks, St. Anne’s Hospital, and Police Headquarters. These walls are pierced with heavily-barred windows, which look out over the sidewalks, respectively, of the Rue Durante, the Rue Gilli, and the Rue Carnot.

At midday, during the rain, there is a man standing behind each of these windows, hands clutching the bars, staring out into space. You can see about a dozen of them in all, half-hidden by the shadowy background of their cells, tirelessly scrutinizing the bright and grimy world which they cannot reach. At first they are possessed by a violent desire to break through the metal barricade, free themselves in a flash — this, surely, is what freedom means—, embrace this patch of road in all its stunning brightness, so light in comparison with the gloom of their cells it seems the sun must be shining on it. Then the urge fritters away; they seem to retreat before a still stronger barrier, something like a thick sheet of glass, unseen and unexpected, doubtless the phenomenon they call ‘reason’; and their eyes relax into stillness again, gaze for days on end at the vision of freshness and brightness outside, never moving, so that in the end their overflowing love makes them cleave to it till they reach the point of oblivion.

In this state of counterfeit reality, this amalgam of atmospheres, equipped with this precise and clearly-outlined relief-map, one still would be hard put to it, at this moment, to tell whether it was raining still or a blazingly sunny day. The moment has been reached when the rectangle becomes progressively more blurred and undulating: other smaller rectangles exist within it, each enfolding its own adventure, human or vegetable. All that remain now are the edges, as though neatly cut out from the soft velvet shadows. At last, with the neat finality of a tunnel unfolding around a car in motion, the patch of white light opens its window on the infinite.

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