The Flood

Chapter Nine

François Besson runs away — Do Indians kill wolves? — The ogre — People watch the big yellow dog dying — Description of rabies — François Besson burns his papers — In the canyons of the town — A missed meal — The sphere of water without water

ON the ninth day François Besson decided to leave Marthe’s house. There were several reasons for this:

(1) He was getting fond of the girl.

(2) He was tired.

(3) He wanted to see what was going on elsewhere.

(4) The bed was uncomfortable.

(5) The girl had bad breath and sometimes smelt of perspiration.

(6) Time was passing, and he had to act fast.

In the morning he waited till Marthe had gone out to do the shopping, and then got his things together. The little boy, still in his dressing gown, was playing with some toy cars on the floor of the kitchen. After a while he got up and came over to Besson, who was just putting his razor into the beach-bag.

‘Where are you going?’ he said.

‘Out,’ Besson told him.

‘What for?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Besson.

‘What do you mean, nothing?’ the boy said. Then he went and fetched one of the toy cars, and began to push it round Besson’s feet, making broo-o-m-broom noises to simulate a car’s engine.

Besson put the last of his belongings in the beach-bag. The little boy came back again and scrutinized him with black, unwavering eyes.

‘Where are you going to, then?’ he repeated.

‘Outside,’ said Besson.

‘Going for a walk?’

‘Yes,’ Besson said. He strapped on his wristwatch and went to comb his hair. When he returned to pick up his bag the little red-haired boy was carefully staging an accident between two of the cars.

‘What are you up to?’ Besson asked him.

‘This one’s a Peugeot,’ the boy explained, ‘and this other one here’s a Citroën. It’s going very fast, so the driver of the Peugeot doesn’t see it. Now watch what happens.’

The little blue vehicle was travelling flat out across the kitchen floor; proportionately to its scaled-down size it must have been doing the equivalent of something like three hundred miles an hour. Then the other car appeared, coming in from the right. This one was bright red. It curved round the table-leg and cut right across the first car’s path. There was no time for anyone to brake: they crashed into each other with appalling violence, and both vehicles were hurled across the plastic-tiled floor, bouncing and somersaulting over and over, until at last they came to rest on their backs. If there had been any passengers on board they would have been killed on the spot. Next, the fire-engine came out of a corner at the other end of the kitchen. Zig-zagging over its imaginary highway, siren going full blast, it made flat out for the scene of the accident, stopping at each wrecked car to extinguish the fire before it could get under way. Then, after picking up the dead and wounded, it returned the way it had come, sounding its siren louder than ever. When it was back in its corner, two breakdown trucks drove across to the scene of the accident. When they got there they hooked up the two crashed cars by their bumpers and towed them away across the kitchen.

Besson still had a few minutes to spare before he left. He sat down and lit a cigarette, letting the little boy blow out the flame for him.

‘What’s your name?’ Besson asked.

The little red-haired boy made no reply.

‘Go on, what’s your name?’ Besson said again.

‘Lucas,’ said the little boy.

‘Lucas what?’

‘Lucas …’

‘And you live here, right?’

‘Yes …’

‘And how old are you?’

No answer.

‘You mean you’ve forgotten? You know how to count, anyway, don’t you? Go on, you know how to count, surely?’

The child wavered on his short podgy legs. He had a heavy head, with high forehead and a very bright pair of eyes under his red hair. His mouth was half-open, and two incisors were just visible, resting against the top of his lower lip. He was wearing a blue bathrobe, check trousers and floral-pattern slippers.

Besson bent down towards him and said: ‘Come on — try a bit of counting with me. One, two, three—’

‘Four—’

‘Five, six—’

‘Eight … eleven … fourteen—’

‘No, no! Six, seven, eight, nine … You go on from there.’

‘M’m…. Ten—’

‘Well done, that’s right—’

‘M’m…. Fourteen….’

‘No not, fourteen, you said that just now.’

‘Six….

‘No, not six…. Eleven, twelve, thirteen….’

‘Fourteen—’

‘What’s after that?’

‘I don’t know,’ the little red-haired boy said, and began to play with one of his cars again. Besson watched him crawling across the linoleum floor, and for a moment felt the urge to take him along too, have him as a companion wherever he went. He might even teach the kid something, just exactly what he wasn’t sure, but maybe, one day, he’d be able to teach him something really useful, like pilfering from shop-counters, or how to swim really fast. But it occurred to him that he’d soon have the police on his tail, with charges of child-abduction.

‘Why don’t you get in your little cars and drive them?’ Besson asked.

The child looked up and puzzled over this for a moment.

‘But they’re too small for me,’ he said. ‘Look—’

He held the toy car in front of his face.

‘Would you like a bigger car?’

‘I’d like a truck,’ the little boy said. ‘A big truck like that one.’

‘Where would you go in it?’

‘I’d take it to school. And I’d take Mama for drives round the garden in it.’

Besson flicked his cigarette-ash on the ground.

‘When you’re a big boy,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said the little boy. ‘When I’m eight. But — but why aren’t I eight?’

‘Because you’re four and a half,’ Besson said.

‘When I’m asleep at night I see lots of things,’ the little boy said. ‘Wolves, whole forests full of wolves. And Indians.’

‘Do the Indians kill the wolves?’

‘No, they can’t, they’re not big enough. But when I’m grown up I’ll take a stick and I’ll kill the wolves, I’ll, I’ll poke my stick into their eyes, that’s what I’ll do. There was one wolf wanted to eat me, but I said to him, no, wolf, don’t eat me, because — because I’m going to kill you. And he got terrible cross, and caught hold of my throat. So I grabbed a knife and slit him up the middle, right into two halves.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Then the wolf locked me in a dark room, and kept me there.’

‘Were you afraid of the dark?’

‘Oh yes, I was afraid, and then when it was light I jumped out of the window.’

‘Ever seen the Big Bad Wolf?’

‘Oh, I see him sometimes at night — he’s got a big stick and he goes through the forest with all the foxes. But I run away and he can’t catch me.’

‘Why can’t he catch you?’

‘Because I met an ogre who put me up in the top of a tree. The Big Bad Wolf couldn’t climb the tree because the ogre was protecting me.’

‘Didn’t the ogre try and eat you?’

‘Oh no, he was a nice ogre. He never ate little children. He was a kind good ogre.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Big, ever so big, with black legs and white hands and face.’

‘What about his nose?’

‘White’.

‘And his hair?’

‘Blue. No, bluey-green.’

‘Bluey-green?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his eyes?’

‘Yellow.’

‘So he was a handsome ogre, eh?’

‘Yes, he was. And I went on running for ages and ages.’

‘And what did the Big Bad Wolf do?’

‘The Big Bad Wolf tried to catch me, so I took a big stone and smashed his head in.’

‘Suppose he’d eaten you?’

‘Then I’d have cut open his tummy and got out.’

‘And why doesn’t the chicken you eat cut open your tummy?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

‘And you’re not dead, eh?’

‘Course not.’

‘Well, suppose the Big Bad Wolf ate you, would you be dead then?’

‘Yes, but I can’t die yet, I’m too small, otherwise I’d grow up in a flash, just like that.’

‘And why aren’t you a chicken, do you suppose?’

‘Well, if I was a chicken, I’d run off and hide in the forest.’

Besson stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

‘At school,’ the boy went on, ‘there’s a little boy called Michel, and he’s got a dog called Paddy.’

‘What about it?’

‘When it’s dark, that dog, I mean, it looks just like a wolf.’

Besson said: ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’

‘When I was big I joined the army and got killed, twice.’

‘What about after you came to life again?’

‘I flew off in an aeroplane, very fast, and the plane went up in sky where you can’t see it, very high, ’normously high. I nearly fell out. After that I swam through the sea to an island.’

‘What was this island called?’

‘I don’t know. It didn’t have any name, that’s what.’

‘It didn’t have any name?’

‘Then I ate too much chocolate and got a tummy-ache and threw up.’

‘Do you know how to write?’

‘Oh yes, I can write — I know how to read, too.’

‘What sort of thing can you read?’

‘Well, the paper—’

‘What’s in the paper, then?’

‘Stories about animals — bear stories and giraffe stories and gazelle stories and dromedary stories and elephant stories—’

‘And duckbilled platypi?’

‘Yes …’

‘And hooded cassowaries?’

‘Yes…. And tigers and lions and panthers …’

‘Microbes, too?’

‘Yes, and lions and giraffes….’

‘And diplodoci and megatheria and labyrinthosauri….’

‘Yes, and tigers and lions—’

Besson sat looking at the child for a little after this, holding his gaze, absorbing and memorizing the soft lines of his face, the way his skull was ridged, those black eyes of his that possessed no depth of their own, simply reflected the external world. He studied his way of sitting and moving, which still had no real connection with that childish body, yet already displayed the mysterious consistency of action which characterizes any individual personality. At the end of this scrutiny Besson decided to go. He picked up the beach-bag, put on his raincoat, and said to the little red-haired boy: ‘Right, I’m off now. You be a good boy and play with your cars. When Mummy comes home tell her I’ve gone, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Got that?’

‘Yes,’ said the little boy.

Besson opened the door and walked down the stairs.

Outside the weather had more or less cleared up. The sky was still overcast, but the ground had dried, and a cold wind blew intermittently down the streets. Besson walked on, swinging his beach-bag, and keeping away from the main thoroughfares, where there were too many people. Without consciously intending to do so, he found himself making for the river.

Here the quais were lined with tumbledown shacks where the rag-and-bone men lived. Besson stopped at a snack-bar to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of lemonade. Beside him was a soldier, munching his way through two hunks of stale bread with sliced sausage between them. When he had finished his lemonade and sandwich, Besson paid and went over to the water’s edge, where he stood with his elbows resting on the balustrade. The river flowed swiftly past below him, in torrential and muddy spate; a smell of decaying vegetable matter rose from it. A little way upstream, the workers on the site were moving busily to and fro behind a rampart of stones. The cranes and bulldozers were not in use, and near the scaffolding Besson could see smoke rising from a brazier.

He strolled on up the quais until he came level with the building site. Then he stopped again and took a good look at what was going on. There were about a dozen workers, dressed in filthy old clothes, moving about over the pebble-ridges with shovels and buckets. Some were digging holes in the sand, others stood watching them and smoking. All this looked somewhat disorganized, and was probably quite useless; yet Besson found himself suddenly wanting to do as they did, to labour bent over a shovel, not understanding what he was doing, asking no questions, simply doing his share of the mysterious work which would end one day in a new ferro-concrete bridge. A few moments later a tramp trudged slowly across the site, dragging a sack stuffed full of old papers. No one paid the slightest attention to him, and he slouched on into the bushes, following the swollen line of the river round until he vanished behind a fence, perhaps into the mouth of a sewer outlet. It was an odd sort of desert world to find in the middle of this tough, overcrowded town; a kind of minuscule savannah which, after nightfall, became the hunting-ground of rats and stray dogs.

It was also a little frightening. It stood for depressing things like solitude, misery, or old age. The town, confronted with this frozen, refuse-strewn channel, and the muddy stream running through it, pressed in on it with the full weight of its disapproval, the concentrated violence of its window-studded walls. As he leaned on the balustrade Besson realized that he was exactly on the demarcation-line, the frontier. It cost him quite an effort to drag himself away and return to the centre of town.

Shortly afterwards, as he was crossing at an intersection, he noticed the crowd. He went over to find out what was happening, but at first could see nothing out of the ordinary. People had gathered along the sidewalk, all craning and staring in the same direction. It was only when he got right up to the thing they were looking at that he realized what was going on. Stretched out in the conduit beside the gutter lay a big yellow dog, obviously dying. It lay on its back with its head in the drainage course and its paws up in the air; it was panting away, open-mouthed, and so loudly that the painful rasp of each breath it drew was quite audible. Only a few yards away stood this group of men and women, quite still, just watching. Some others felt a certain ashamed embarrassment, and either stopped a good way further on, peering over their shoulders, or else lurked behind parked cars. Others again, who were driving past in their own vehicles, would slow down as they went by the spot where the dog lay dying. Besson took all this in very rapidly as he walked, shuddering, past the death-scene himself.

He saw the creature’s prostrate body, already very nearly the colour of bitumen, its stiffened paws still feebly quivering. He saw the long head, sunk in the filth of the gutter, and trying to breathe the sluggish air. There were no traces of blood on the dog’s lacklustre coat, but the effect was even more unpleasant: the skin hung slack and shapeless, like a half-empty sack. And in front of him stood these motionless, silent people. As he made his way to the edge of the pavement, Besson was suddenly hit by the ugly visual image this body presented, lying there sprawled on the ground, wrong side up, still choking for breath. Two glazed and mud-flecked eyes stared into empty space, and the curled tail hung down over the kerbside. Then from that gaping throat, which the air could no longer penetrate, there burst — mingled with dust and slobber — a faint, hoarse, plaintive cry that broke the silence hanging over the intersection. But this sound did not last long. The body continued to heave and pant, in the throes of the death agony now, and Besson moved swiftly away without turning back. He was not really moved, and yet for a long while afterwards, as he walked through the noise and bustle of the street, he could not forget one single detail of that tableau — the weirdly still body of the dying yellow dog, alone at his intersection, and the faces of the people watching.

For a few brief moments he even felt something resembling a tragic recollection of sickness and death: the clutching hand of the unknown, of grim inevitability. No, perhaps rather a sense of remorse and uneasiness, sprung from the hidden origins of his life, and now surging up inside him, spreading along the network of his veins, passing through nerves and muscles, an obscure pain, a kind of spasm, burning, refining, making each individual cell a watchful and malevolent eye. It was like some fatal epidemic, bringing stark terror, frantic hatred, pangs of conscience, and leading to a terrible, ineluctable dénouement: plague, nervous leprosy, l’ Ainhum, le Goundou, le Kala-Azar, or indeed rabies:

Under normal conditions rabies develops very fast, and the patient therefore will suffer certain psychological symptoms at an early stage of the disease. He tends to exhibit signs of anxiety and melancholia, and to be obsessed by strange premonitions. Sleep becomes impossible for him. Very soon areas of numbness and irritation, together with an itching sensation, develop locally around the wound, which appears soft and swollen. Sometimes the first symptom of which the patient complains is a strange feeling in the throat, coupled with a sense of constriction in the windpipe.

The mental symptoms can be merely hysterical, and in many cases the disease first manifests itself after some psychological shock. Instances arise in which fear or terror can be regarded as genuine symptoms of this complaint. But generally speaking the most frequent initial indication is a rise in temperature. These symptoms may last for several days before the disease declares its true nature, but normally they last between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. Hydrophobia, the main symptom, is dominant in a majority of cases: this is caused by intensely painful spasms which occur in the deglutitive [swallowing] and respiratory organs whenever the patient attempts to eat or drink.

The pain produced by these spasms is such that in all likelihood for sheer intensity it exceeds all other forms of human suffering. This is why the smell, sight, or even sound of water or other liquids will suffice to bring on a crisis. When an effort is made to imbibe even a tiny quantity of liquid, it is instantly rejected, with a violent spasm of the throat and larynx. One characteristic symptom is the hypersensitive state of the nervous cells to external stimulants. A draught or breeze can produce convulsions: the reflexes of the skin and tendons become exaggerated, and the respiratory spasms of the thoracic muscles do not respond to tracheotomy. Solid nourishment can more easily be absorbed than fluids.

Once the disease is past the incubatory period it progresses rapidly. In many cases there tend to be periods of apparent improvement, which might lead one to believe a cure to have taken place, or, alternatively, to doubt the original diagnosis. The patient’s mind is in most cases exceptionally lucid, and he will give intelligent answers to any questions he is asked; but then his voice becomes inaudible and his speech incomprehensible. Certain phases of hyper-excitement may reach the level of actual insanity. The patient will smash and destroy everything within reach, although attacks on living persons are very rare. Sexual excitement, accompanied by priapism, is a common symptom. The voice becomes hoarse; the strange sounds produced during major spasms are what gave rise to the popular belief that ‘anyone with rabies barks like a dog’.

The spasms and convulsions become increasingly frequent, until the patient passes into a state of paralysis from which death results. The muscles that have been strained to the very limits of endurance now relax; the patient’s features lose that rictus of ultimate agony and terror they previously wore, and become quite expressionless. There is usually an excessive secretion of saliva, which the patient is incapable of controlling. Finally, respiration becomes irregular and weak, and after a while stops altogether. Before death there is a rise in temperature. Sugar and acetone are normally found in the urine. When the patient passes into a state of paralysis, his pupils dilate….

Afterwards François Besson returned once more to his parents’ house. When he rang the bell they had just sat down at table. They talked for a moment over the plates of steaming food, and Besson said he had one or two more things to collect from his room.

The room itself, he found, had been carefully tidied since his departure. There was a new bedspread, with small red and green patterns running across it. The floor had been swept and polished, the ashtrays emptied and washed.

Besson placed the drawer of his table on the floor and began to burn the papers in it one by one. He held each of them by one end, lit a match beneath them, and dropped them into a large glass ashtray. In this way he burnt everything: it took him the best part of the afternoon. Poems, love-letters, end-of-the-affair letters, handbills, lecture-notes on geography and Latin, algebra problems, sketches of naked women, photographs, vaccination certificates, all the accumulated scribblings and confessions of many years. Not all the papers burnt in the same way. Some flared up and were gone in a flash, giving off a quick wave of heat as they did so. Others went on crackling for quite a time as the match-flame licked up at them; these ones burnt slowly, with a great deal of smoke. The fire crept up these white squares of flimsy, obliterating the handwriting, twisting up the lines of the sketches, bright red patches spreading, slowly guttering out in a black and acrid cloud. The pages torn from pornographic magazines were thick, glossy sheets, which never burnt through properly, so that an irregular bite, ringed with sooty foam, would appear in the middle of some lissom beauty’s body. To keep the flames alight you had to supply extra fuel underneath — say a handful of light, scented airmail letters. Sheets of onion-skin paper went black in a second, but on the fossil and all-too-fragile page thus produced you could still see little serpentine lines of lettering against the black cindered background. The flames devoured everything, without distinction or regret, wrinkling up fine parchment, melting glossy surfaces, volatilizing celluloid; and from the tiny brazier there rose a spiral of hot smoke, in which thoughts and acts were reduced to mere ephemeral grey particles floating on the air.

Each time the ashtray was full Besson emptied it out on the floor. Then he patiently began to fill it again, burning sheet after sheet of paper. In order to economize on matches, he watched for the moment when the fire was about to go out, and then presented the guttering flame with a fresh victim.

Soon the air was thick with stinking, acrid fumes that left Besson’s throat sore. Tiny fragments floated up to the ceiling and then eddied down again, settling on his hair and hands and clothes. But Besson did not open the window. Bent over the ashtray (which was conveniently placed on the floor) he feverishly gathered fresh piles of paper as fuel for the red and yellow flames. The glass walls of the ashtray were now covered with a kind of orange glue, where the fire touched them, and round the rim blue tongues of heat flickered from tiny piles of soot.

Sweat was beginning to run down Besson’s face and off his hands; the fire blazed up, sank, blazed up again, sank once more; the baking hot air scorched his eyeballs, the smoke deposited its stinging cinders in his throat. Now and then a spurt of flame came up and burnt his fingers, but it was as though he felt nothing. He went on fuelling his bonfire, reducing all the papers in his room to malodorous ashes. There was nothing worth saving, nothing worth reading. Every item belonged in this crazy holocaust, in the popping, crackling, flaring eddies of red-hot flame, shot through with spurts of green, in the warmth and light and fanaticism of those greedy tongues of fire dancing over the floor. Besson no longer even bothered to empty the ashtray now; papers rolled blazing across the room, setting fire to others as they went. Besson threw on whole packets at a time, and the fire grew in size, sending up a high corona of flame. The smoke thickened into a sticky black consistency, rose in a single column that only began to spread out somewhere near the ceiling. Unable now to make out anything in this dim fog except the outline of the burning mass, Besson began to throw papers and books into the heart of the flames. Novels, dictionaries, travel-books, philosophical treatises — all vanished into that living gullet, which consumed them instantly.

By the time that Besson’s parents — alerted by the unmistakable crackling roar of the fire — came rushing into his room, flames were already licking over the bedclothes and up the wallpaper. There were shouts of alarm, footsteps hurrying across the floor. At this point Besson picked up his beach-bag and went, without one backward glance. In order to shake off the effects of that blinding heat, though, he had to sit down for a bit on a park bench, and smoke a cigarette.

When evening came, François Besson strolled through the canyon-like streets of the town. He saw men and women walking along the pavement, in couples, and gangs of children playing war games. Everyone was busy, they all had a warm, comfortable lodging to bury themselves in for the night. In each cell of those vast apartment blocks some heavy-bosomed housewife would be preparing the evening meal, and the brightly-lit kitchens would be redolent of leek-and-potato soup, fish-fries, apple fritters, a peaceful domestic aroma. People smiled as they passed one another: sometimes they called out a greeting, and when they talked it was in very loud voices. But none of this was for Besson. He walked on in silence, and passers-by either stared very hard at him, eyes narrowed, or else gave him a furtive glance and looked away again. Workmen and builders’ labourers stood about in the bars, drinking glasses of beer, eyes fixed on the television set quacking away in its corner. From somewhere a long way off came the faint sound of church bells ringing. Shop-windows began to light up, one after the other, and the neon signs embarked on their endless, endlessly repeated, flashing messages. Above one travel agency words flickered along a broad strip dotted with electric light bulbs. Besson read: STOP PRESS NEWS PLANE CRASH AT TEL-AVIV EIGHTEEN DEAD. A little further on he saw some pigeons perched on the letters of a neon-sign, just under the roof-guttering, waddling about and warming their feet. Beyond them he came on an old man leaning against the wall, playing ‘Mon ami Pierrot’ on a tin whistle, with an upturned hat at his feet. Behind the glass of a display case there were photographs of babies and small kneeling girls. Their mouths gaped open in fixed smiles, their eyes shone as though wax-polished. Everywhere men had left their mark: house-doors, window-sills, sidewalk, sky and trees, dogs’ backs, rusty iron street-signs — all bore their names and addresses. Nowhere could one get away from them. These vertical mountains, all honeycombed with rectangular holes, were full of spying eyes, mouths that gossiped when they weren’t eating, well-washed skin, well-combed hair, bitten fingernails, bodies swathed in wool or nylon. No other landscape had ever existed remotely like this one: such a limited area had never contained so many impenetrable cavities, so many defiles and moraines. No mountain could be as high as these buildings, no valley as deep and narrow as the streets outside them. Some fearful force had carved out these contours, it had taken a hideous and incomparable explosion of violence to erect these monuments, drain the soil, level out the rough places, crush the rocks, plan, dig, manipulate the elements, organize space, and make the little streams run meekly obedient to the will of authority. The houses had their roots dug deep into the rock, and clung to this conquered territory with a kind of ferocious hatred.

Besson walked humbly through these streets in which he had no part, moving aside to let the victors have free passage — the round-shouldered women, the crop-haired children, the men on their way home from work. When he wanted to cross the street he waited until there was a gap in the traffic, no more rubber tyres hissing past. He ducked his head and hunched himself defensively against the assaults of lights and noises and frantic scrambling movement. Lights winked on and off everywhere, at the summits of steel pylons, in the streets, out at sea: red and yellow points riveted into place, then wiped out, replaced by others. It was like being shut under a gigantic lid, made of lead and resting firmly on the ground, a lid that pressed down with its whole weight on one’s skin and eardrums and diaphragm and neck. The cold air had become a kind of liquid substance; people were mostly staying indoors now. Very soon Besson had to stop through sheer fatigue. It was completely dark now, and indeed time for dinner. With the money he had left Besson decided to go and eat in the self-service restaurant.

Sitting at a black table with smears of sauce on it, opposite a fat and ugly old woman whose small mean eyes watched his every move, Besson did his best to swallow some food. On his tray he had collected the following: a plate of sliced tomatoes with chopped parsley on them, an egg mayonnaise, a dish containing one portion of roast chicken (leg) and fried potatoes, a glass of water, a yoghourt, three sachets of granulated sugar, a hunk of stale bread, knife, fork, soup-spoon, coffee-spoon, a thin paper napkin with Bon Appétit! or some such legend inscribed on it, and a piece of paper which read:

ROYAL SELF-SERVICE RESTAURANT

80

120

550

80

15

20

= = 865

Besson tried to swallow the tomatoes and cut up the chicken. But the food was hostile, it slid about on the plate, refused to be chewed or swallowed. Water dribbled over his chin when he drank, as though some joker had drilled a hole in the glass. The egg slipped about in its mayonnaise, and the chicken wouldn’t keep still either. It was all somehow quite repulsive — ill-cooked flesh, dead roots, a taste of earth, perhaps even of excrement. Besson attempted to chew this stuff. He swallowed lumps of dry meat and slices of egg-white that smelt of sulphur. He dribbled, struggled, messed up his hands and clothes, dropped first his knife then his spoon. Eating, it seemed, was impossible. And on top of everything else there was the old woman, taking in every detail of his defeat with an ironic eye. Besson abandoned solid food and set about the yoghourt. But this turned out very little better. He managed to get the little spoon to his mouth, but the viscous substance acquired a life of its own: it tried to get away from him, it ran under his tongue, slipped past the barrier of the uvula, came back down his nasal passages. Bent over the pot of yoghourt, in a mere simulacrum of the nutritional process, Besson felt as though he were a small child again. The hard stare of the old woman and the inscrutable faces of other diners scattered through the restaurant all showed him his own reflection, as clearly as so many mirrors: a tenuous, cloudy object, curled up on itself, a phantom, or a foetus still covered with glaireous matter, something that scarcely belonged to the human species.

So there it was, the group rejected him spontaneously, like any freak. Having robbed him of his most intimate thoughts and actions, they were now about to strip him of his body, too, and condemn him to the void. This was the message to be read on the sneering faces around him, the thick hands so competent at dismembering roast chicken, the mouths with their rows of sharp teeth that could chew, salivate, reduce to pulp, the coiled and deep-hidden organs that wanted to transform everything into scarlet blood, its regular pulsing flow pricking out under the skin like millions of tiny needles.

What he had to do now was to fight back, with all his strength: get out of this glittering morgue, to begin with, plunge right into the frozen depths of darkness and seek help there. Walk along the deserted boulevards under a mist of rain, in the grey light of the street-lamps; drink water from a public fountain, gaze up avidly at the invisible sky; then, after smoking a cigarette, stretch out on a bench under the most thickly-leafed tree in some public square, and wait. Then fall asleep, extinguish at one stroke all the lights that burnt in the chamber of one’s imagination — if need be smash the hot bulb hanging like a drop of fire at the end of its plaited cord — and plunge, tremulous with hope, into the heart of solitude, the solitude of the unknown.

Stretched out on his bench, head against unyielding wood, eyes wide open, Besson gazed up at the darkness. The branches of a laurel-tree spread their complex architecture over him, hung motionless in the cold air. Everything was dim, sombre. Sounds from the neighbouring streets had an odd muffled quality, that enveloped them like a shadow. There were no insects, no spiders even: the world had the kind of still, fixed quality one might expect inside a marble mausoleum. The night’s vast presence loomed above the earth, a vaulted and windowless dome. Its whole weight bore down on these minuscule creatures called men who set themselves up against it, yet it did not crush them. This gigantic floating roofage, more opaque than the sea itself, seemed to comprehend, even to love them. It too, no doubt, possessed a rhythm: not the rhythm of breathing, or heart-beats, but a heavy pendular swing that came and went in silence, permeated with non-presence, vibrant with vacancy, eternal and majestic music that only the infinite could have produced. All stars and planets, suns and nebulae were contained in it; the galaxies nestled in its bosom and were rocked to its measure. Delicate and ethereal, yet full of latent violence, the black dome embraced them all, revolved smoothly on its own axis, for ever turning, turning. This sphere of water without water, so ductile and glacial in motion, advancing and then — its thousands of silver-bellied fishes all atwinkle — retreating little by little upon itself, was prayer, was thought, was life itself. Shadow falling on shadow, a veil of blackness for ever spread and for ever opening, an intermittent umbrella, only vanishing in order to deploy new schemes and offshoots, a smooth dark cloud arching across the universe, for ever drawing up into itself, through a chill vortex, the substance of happiness and unhappiness; alert, uncluttered, watchful, drawing men one by one into the peace of its womb; night, the Great Mother.