The Flood

Chapter Twelve

In the public toilets — François Besson goes on a journey — Walking and looking about one — The earth seen from a dirigible balloon — The breath of eternity — A bird circling alone in the sky — Conversation between two children on the beach: a matter of monks and candlesticks — Between past and future — How François Besson became blind by staring at the sun

ON the twelfth day, François Besson began by going to the public toilets for a wash and a shave. He found himself in a big old strong-smelling room, with very clean walls and floor and ceiling, all covered with white porcelain tiles. On the left-hand side, close to the entrance, was an old woman sitting on a stool, and immersed in a paper. In front of her was a table, on which stood a little bowl with a few low-denomination coins in it. The first wall was occupied by a row of wash-basins with mirrors above them. The second was empty, the third had the urinals along it, and the fourth was accounted for by six closed toilets, of which five were marked ‘Free’ and one ‘Engaged’. Men came and went without saying a word. They washed their hands in the basins, combed their hair in the mirrors, dried themselves on the roller-towels. Others urinated facing the wall, pressed into the hollows of the bright white porcelain stalls, only half protected by the shallow divisions between them. They did not look at each other, apart from two or three who flashed quick furtive glances at their neighbours. Some stood at the mirrors and blew their noses, with a loud trumpeting sound, after, which they would stride out briskly, tossing a small coin into the bowl on the old woman’s table as they passed, with a tinkle of falling metal.

Besson shaved himself in very leisurely fashion. First he plugged in his electric razor, and the motor began to buzz. Then he ran the razor up and down his cheeks, very slowly, listening to the rasp of the rotary blades as they sliced through the stubble. In some places his beard was tougher than in others, and he had to go over the patch four or five times, giving an involuntary grimace when a hair was pulled out or a pimple removed. His face looked much thinner in the mirror, and the electric light shone directly on his dark eyes, so that they had a bright gleam in them. Daylight only just struggled through to this underground region, and light-bulbs glittered along the walls like so many drops of water. Besson held this buzzing, slightly rounded object in his right hand. He was much attached to his electric razor; he would have hated to lose or break it. Inside that plastic shell the motor revolved at great speed, while the tiny helical blades shaved through endless stubble, flush with the skin, setting up their minute and cushioning current of warm air. The motor was very smooth and efficient: it vibrated smoothly against hand and cheek, nothing more, with a noise that sounded as though it could go on for ever. Holding it was like travelling in an aircraft, drawn effortlessly through the air by four droning engines, sitting safely inside a metal fuselage and watching the patchwork earth slide by far below.

At one point there was the sound of flushing water from the toilet marked ‘Engaged’. Besson, watching in the mirror above the basin, saw the toilet-door open, and a tall, powerfully built man come out. He was, Besson noticed, going a little bald on top. He stopped for a moment to button his overcoat. He had a rosy complexion and a sharp, aquiline nose. His deep-set eyes twinkled with vigour and affability. He picked up a brief-case and hurried out, whistling as he went. The rattle of a coin in the bowl accompanied his departure.

When he had finished shaving, Besson put his razor away in a red case, and put the case in the beach-bag. Then he washed his hands and sluiced his face with cold water and combed his hair. He also swallowed two or three mouthfuls of water, which smelt of disinfectant.

He hoped he might get out of the public toilets without paying, but when he drew level with the table the old woman looked up and stared at him over the top of her paper, and Besson was forced to put a coin in the bowl.

Outside, the streets of the town were bustling with life, and the sky was an unbroken blue. Besson counted the money which the foreman had given him, and walked off in the direction of the bus-station. He was going to take a little trip, he decided; he was going to get out of this hellish town, where the houses just sat and sat for ever on the tarred asphalt. Besides, he ran the risk of meeting people he had known — his parents, Marthe and the little red-haired boy, Josette, Bayard, Siljelcoviva, even the police, who were liable to slap a murder charge on him.

When he got to the station he found about a dozen buses there, standing by the kerbside, or manoeuvring slowly into their parking-space. People were waiting in queues, behind various rusty signboards set up at the top of poles. Most of these carried very curious combinations of words and figures, such as:

9 A PESSICART

LAS PLANAS

108 FABRON

10 12

6 ISOLA

ROQUESTERON

AEROPORT

SAVONA-GENOA

B 444

People elbowed their way through the waiting crowds. Old women sat on the benches with baskets on their knees, and children ran about in all directions, screaming shrilly. From time to time a bus would open its doors, and the crowd would surge in, pushing and jostling. The engine would start up under the mud-encrusted bonnet, and keep ticking over, its every vibration transmitted shudderingly to bodywork and windows. Crates and cases were being loaded on the roof-racks, and men in dark blue uniform, with stained caps pushed to the backs of their heads, stood smoking on the kerbside or shouting at each other. An Arab wandered round trying to sell carpets. A little man with a brown moustache and a tray of confectionery balanced on his head threaded his way through the crowd, singing:

‘It’s me who makes ’em and sells ’em, by golly,

But it’s my wife who blows all the lolly …’

Newspaper kiosks displayed their motley wares, klaxons sounded, petrol fumes rose in the air, trafficators winked on and off. This was the place of departure, the centre from which people fled the town. The routes to every different destination converged here in this dusty square, mile upon mile of baking or muddy asphalt winding its solitary way through the empty countryside. From here people took off for foreign towns, for unknown territories covered with sprouting jungles of olive and vine. They encountered deserts striped in red and green, great savannahs, hazy oases, gorges running through deep faults in the mountains. They were journeying towards hunger and thirst, and mystery, and fear. Each of them had dressed up for the occasion, and buckled the straps round his luggage, and packed a cold meal to take along — not forgetting a bottle of wine. Besson wandered among the groups at random, soaking himself in this atmosphere, this smell of departure. Little by little uneasiness began to creep up inside him, accompanied by something much resembling hope.

Finally he picked a bus, and joined the queue of passengers waiting to board it. Nothing happened for a few moments; then the doors creaked open, and people began to file inside. It was a splendid white coach, almost brand-new, with anti-glare windows and strips of chromium-plated steel that glinted in the sunlight. The engine was already running, vibrating rhythmically, so that everything which could be made to judder did so. Besson was among the last passengers aboard; he walked down the aisle, head bent, looking for somewhere to sit down. There was a vacant seat near the back, and he dropped into it without looking any further. Then he put his beach-bag between his knees, and sat there, waiting. Beside him, pressed against the window, was a young girl, conversing in gestures with her fiancé, who had stayed outside on the sidewalk. She was so close to the glass that her breath made semi-circles of condensation on it, and her eyes never left the man below, whose head barely came level with the window. She kept waving to him. Once or twice she stood up and put her mouth to some aperture at the top of the window. ‘Mind you write to me,’she called out. ‘Lots and lots!’ She even tried to get her arm through the gap so as to touch the man’s hand, but merely succeeded in skinning her knuckles. Then she sat down again and exhibited the scratch through the window, waving her left hand. The man outside lit a cigarette to keep himself in countenance. He was a skinny boy with a crew-cut and a brand-new blue suit.

A few seconds later the bus moved off, manoeuvring slowly out of the bus-station, sounding its horn to clear a path through the crowd. The passengers sank back in their pullman seats and clung to the metal hand-grips. Every jolt bounced their bodies up and down; the vibrations of the engine set their jaws and the fleshy parts of their arms quivering. They drove through the town with the main traffic stream. Up in front, on a higher seat than the rest, sat the driver, turning the wheel this way and that, thrusting his feet down on the pedals, shifting the gear-levers: you could hear the insulated growl of the engine responding to his directions. The cylinders fired smoothly in sequence, and every now and then there came the mysterious sound of compressed air escaping, rather like a sneeze. The lights at the crossroads changed to yellow, then to red. The bus braked to a standstill, and every head jerked backwards. These jolts and vibrations made the passengers look a little ridiculous. Bodies swayed slackly in their seats, passive victims now, manipulated in unison by each plunge or check of the wheels. A jay-walker crossed the road right in front of the bus, and everyone swayed, as though to underline the incident. All down the aisle conversation had broken out. Women wrapped up in thick woolly coats were talking about the weather — would it rain or clear up? One was discussing the ulcer on her leg. Men pointed out houses, or cars. A soldier was trying to make conversation with a plain young girl who said not a word back.

Gradually the bus worked its way out of town, taking a very, straight road that ran along the coast beside the sea. The wind blew strongly here: grass began to appear between houses, and trees became more frequent. The sun shone over the horizon, and the road was hard. Through the window Besson watched the landscape slip past, very fast in the foreground, then more slowly, till the distant scene appeared motionless, even perhaps shifting in the opposite direction. There were waste lots enclosed by wooden fences, with four or five wrecked cars inside them. There were mounds and hillocks and rows of bungalows, each with its watch-dog. There were brand-new white-painted apartment blocks, with endless empty balconies patterning their façades. There were gypsy caravans, and roofs bristling with television aerials, and telegraph poles, and washing-lines hung with women’s underwear. There were kitchen-gardens and clumps of rose-bushes or rhododendrons and sheds and rusty abandoned bicycles and parked trucks and cemeteries and blue-and-white filling stations. There was a high brick wall with the words U.S. GO HOME painted on it in white, and a grocer’s shop, and a café with several indistinct characters just emerging from it. There were more villas with shutters closed or open as the case might be, and children playing at cops and robbers. There was a church with a pointed steeple and a clock that had gone wrong and showed the time as twelve noon, or midnight. There was a naval dockyard and a general repair shop and a half-built apartment block beside the road, rising amid a curious scaffolding of planks and sticks. Two policemen who had parked their motorcycles and were taking somebody’s name and address. A woman with a goitre, looking on at them. An airfield, a hairdresser’s shop, and a restaurant with candles on the tables and its name written up in big red letters: LA FOURCHETTE. A group of five palm trees. More waste lots, fields lying fallow, patches of earth and rubble in which the flint sparkled like ground glass. And all these things were in continual motion, streaming back horizontally past the windows of the bus, merging and blurring, receding in a growing complexity of lines and angles. A long way off, behind the moving foreground of houses and tree-trunks, the hills floated, blue and magnified. On the other side of the road the sea’s surface revolved round its own axis, like a record. And somewhere ahead of them their destination was vaguely taking shape. Mountains rose up, headlands stretched out into the water, and one small light cloud hung motionless in the sky.

François Besson watched the landscape with eager curiosity. Through every window in the bus he could see it unrolling past them at a great rate, producing the oddest inverted reflections in the polished metal framework of each seat. The vehicle drove straight ahead, very smoothly on the whole, cleaving a path through the transparent air. They were caught in the still centre of movement, of advance without self-propulsion. What they had here was a small section of earth gliding across the earth, not in order to conquer anything at all, but simply floating on the level asphalt with four whirring tyres, cruising, drawn into the void, climbing hills, coming down faster the other side, skimming along on a straight flat road.

Sometimes the bus would stop by the roadside, generally beside a clump of houses; people would get up and leave the vehicle, and others would take their places. People stared at the newcomers for a moment or two, made fun of them in whispers, and then forgot them.

The conductor had by now worked his way down to Besson.

‘Terminus, please,’ Besson said, holding out a note.

The man counted out several coins, gave them to Besson, and turned the handle on his ticket-machine. With a ping! a little piece of paper emerged from the slot, and the conductor put it in Besson’s hand. ‘Next, please,’ he called.

‘Les Mimosas’, said the girl in the next seat, and the same process was repeated.

On his scrap of yellowish paper Besson read:

108576329

Route: A

F

00

325

1012

3

Thank you

He put the ticket in his raincoat pocket, and watched the conductor making his way along the central aisle. He was a man of about forty, with a heavy lined face and rounded shoulders. From time to time he would stoop down and peer through the window, and then whistle to the driver, who stopped the bus. When he whistled again, the bus would move off again, engine labouring.

It occurred to Besson that being the driver or conductor of a bus was by no means a bad job. You walked up and down inside this long metal tube, and turned the little handle which cut off so much paper a time. When you had collected all the fares you went up front and sat by the driver and kept a vague eye on the grey ribbon of road endlessly unwinding in front of you. Or else you were the driver, esconced in that little cabin-like enclosure of anti-glare glass, turning the steering-wheel, following the contours of the landscape. You pulled up at the halts, then let in your clutch and moved off again. You changed gear, first, second, third, fourth, down to third, up to fourth again. You braked violently to annoy the passengers. You could keep up a grumbling commentary the whole time on drivers who overtook you or pedestrians crossing the road, this sort of thing: ‘Well, get on with it, then — Jesus, will you just look at that! What the hell d’you think I was signalling for? Yes, you, want your face bashed in, then? Move yourself, you half-wit! And what about that clod on the island, is he going to cross or isn’t he? Come on, you stupid bugger, you clapped-out thing you—’ And so on. You could sound the horn, too, that clarion note which really made people’s hearts miss a beat if they weren’t expecting it. And you could look out for the pretty women all along your route, and whistle at them as you went by. There were the girls who hitched up their skirts as they clambered aboard at a stop, and those who just missed tipping over when you jammed the brakes on, and those who travelled standing, close to the door, and chatted you up, and were good for a laugh. In the evening you’d have a drink, and go to bed tired out, and dream all night of that never-ending road. You’d know the route by heart, of course, you could drive it without tiring yourself, and the days passed quickly. You made your own private map of this small section of the world. You learnt all the important things about it — the bits where you had to keep a sharp look-out, the bits where there were always lots of people around, the deserted stretches where you could relax. You knew every fountain and signpost and built-up corner and crossroads and bridge and level-crossing. You had your own landmarks. You knew exactly where you were going. Several dozen miles of wealthy and thickly-populated countryside, where something — the same sort of thing — was always happening.

The bus drove on through the countryside. There were large numbers following the same route, bowling along in the sunshine, glossy as cockchafers, leaving a small trail of whitish exhaust-smoke behind them. They came in all shapes and sizes — long automobiles with high tail-fins, in various pastel colours; squat rounded mini-cars with rear-lights like small portholes, and engines that roared loudly going uphill; light vans and heavy haulage trucks, vehicles old and new, some all chromium plating and shiny enamel that you could see your face in, others with smashed headlights and dented bonnets and patches of red-lead undercoat everywhere. The men inside these steel carapaces were more or less invisible. You might just catch a glimpse of them — pale ghosts lolling back on the seat-cushions, half-hidden behind dirty windows. Every make of car was represented. Volkswagens, stuffy and claustrophobic, like tiny armoured vehicles. High-riding Chevrolets, low-slung Panhards. Mole-like Citroëns, Jaguars built to resemble smart slippers. Narrow Austins, foreshortened Renaults; the Alfa-Romeo for women, the Mercedes Benz for men. Simcas looking like Prisunic toys, Skodas, NSU’s, BMW’s, Lancias. Fords straight from the hardware shop, funeral parlour Cadillacs. All were exactly the same in the last resort, fast, noisy, each with its load of feet and hands and heads, each like a railway carriage transporting its humble crowd of women in shawls and men with dark glasses, children, grandmothers, sleepy dogs. Life gleamed from their polished metal, diffused the smell of hot rubber. One day their journey would end in some vast scrap-iron dump, an old cars’ cemetery outside the nearest town, where the rust, season by season, would slowly bind their immobilized bodywork into one solid mass.

The road was straight as a ruler now, running beside the sea to the right of the railway track, and the houses were thinning out. Fields stretched away to the hills beyond. There were fruit orchards, rock-gardens, ruined buildings, clumps of cacti. The sun was high over the sea, and the sea was a dazzling blue, with small crisp ripples ruffling its surface.

Besson decided this would be a good point to get off. He rang the bell, waited till the bus stopped, and found himself out on the road. When the bus started off again without him, he watched it pass; but the windows were opaque, and he could not recognize anyone. He began to walk along the shoulder of the road, in the same direction.

In this manner he covered several miles. The ground was soft and covered with a kind of short springy grass that crackled underfoot. The sea was now completely out of sight, and the earth was beginning to crack and split under the effect of the heat. Everywhere insects were buzzing in the undergrowth, and the air was loud with the dry chirp of locusts. The landscape was completely deserted. Across this rough stretch of open countryside the road carved a furrow of noise and movement. The houses, set between sloping fields and surrounded by clumps of umbrella pine wore an abandoned air. There was nothing to do here except go on walking and survey the scene around you.

The sun was beating down fiercely, and Besson had to take off his raincoat. For a moment or two he carried it over one arm, but this hampered his movements, so instead he left it on a sheltered spot close to the roadside. A little further on he abandoned his beach-bag too, hiding it behind a bush so that he could pick it up again later if he ever had need of it.

When he was tired of walking he stopped and sat down on a milestone to watch the cars go by. He could see them coming a long way off, wavering in the air when they hit a patch of heat-mirage. Then they came tearing past Besson at a tremendous lick, some of them sounding their horns as they came, and dwindled away to the horizon again, with a glitter of metal before they finally vanished for good.

Further on still, Besson passed a filling station. At the top of a sort of cement tower was a large sign on which was written the one word: AZUR. The garage itself, below the tower, was a sprawling, all-white edifice, as beautiful as a church. There were lots of signboards swinging in the wind, with red and blue stars on them. Pot-geraniums were much in evidence, and at the entrance to the workshop a wolf-hound lay asleep. Beneath a concrete roof four petrol pumps stood enthroned: square-cut, blue and red, each with its rubber hose neatly folded away, and a glass-fronted panel at the top for reading the figures on the dials, but not in use now, unattended. Not a soul was to be seen anywhere — man, woman, or child. The ground had been sluiced down with water, but the smell of petrol and oil still clung to it. The sun beat down fiercely on all exposed areas, white light striking white stucco.

Besson walked right through the service station. When he passed near the garage workshop, the wolf-hound pricked up its ears, still with its eyes closed, and growled. Besson retreated to the road.

A few yards further on, close to a stream which much resembled a blocked sewer, Besson found a beaten earth track, and turned off on it. He proceeded across country in this way, stumbling as he negotiated the old path, struggling up steep rises, catching his clothes on thorn-bushes, lizards scattering at his approach. The track led heaven knows where, between high thorn hedges, twisting, turning, meandering, sometimes even doubling back the way it had come. He had his back to the sea now. In front of him were the hills with their rough, arching backs. A few houses were scattered here and there among the trees, surrounded by vineyards and olive-groves and terraced slopes. Spirals of smoke curled up into the sky, and animals crowded into the shade behind half-demolished walls. Behind, the sun continued to climb towards its zenith, reaching a maximum intensity of heat and brightness. Light and shade were sharp and clear-cut, as though sliced out with a razor, and there were thorn-bushes everywhere. Grass covered the earth like a furry pelt, letting the heat smoulder damply beneath it. All odours were strong and acrid, clinging to the ground like a second atmosphere. Little by little, as he strode along the track, feet crunching over prehistoric pebbles, Besson made a surprising discovery: there were no men on earth. The landscape was vast, indisputably there, its whole weight pressing down on the outer surface of the soil. It was a mask, a curious celluloid skin which had melted over the countryside’s contours and could no longer be unstuck. He could see it quite clearly now. He examined it as though from the vantage-point of a dirigible balloon, observed mile upon square mile of solitude and brutishness spreading out to all four points of the compass. Towns, squared-off apartment blocks, streets, stations, cars, highways, airports, stadia — all these had suddenly vanished, absorbed by the soft-textured skin of the landscape, lost in those shades of brown, those reddish striations, that fine still graining. And the inhabitants had disappeared with them, had been swallowed up by the sand, reduced to dust once more, not wiped out of existence, simply turned into microscopic entities like any other. Trees, mushrooms, mosses, lichens; grasshoppers and millipedes; crocodiles, oxen, horses, even elephants — all were dissolved now, their substance thinned out in mud and alluvial deposits, written in the soil, brought low by this tyrannous and ghostly hand, tiny spiders in their grey webs, ridiculous parasites burrowing into the pink and bristly skin, and drinking, with their small repulsive mouths, two or three drops of all those millions of pints of blood!

Besson sat down on a large stone by the roadside. He was no longer so occupied by the scene around him. In the bright sunlight swarms of tiny insects began to dance on the spot, like mayflies: he could distinctly hear the beating of their wings, and see the bluish gleam from their backs. The air was still fresh, especially when the wind got up, but here and there the sun’s rays struck home with burning intensity. It occurred to Besson that he would have enjoyed sitting here and smoking a cigarette. He would have smoked it unhurriedly, legs stretched out over the sandy soil, from time to time dropping a little ash on the ground. Then, when he had finished the cigarette, he would have stubbed it out with his heel, right beside the big stone he was now sitting on. In this way some record of his passing would have been left there, a tiny, scarcely visible black smear, topped by the eviscerated dog-end, with strands of yellow tobacco still escaping from it.

Every point in this landscape was worth stopping for. Each little patch of mud and bushy undergrowth was worth one’s building a hut there, and staying for at least a day and a night. Here one could make vast and endless journeys, in stages of fifty yards or so, travelling from one stone to another, from tree to a well, from a ruined cottage to a thyme-bush. One could set off on one’s adventures through the hills, living off the land, picking brambleberries in the tangled thorn-bushes and wild strawberries from the arbutus trees, gathering windfall black olives. Here was a vast continent, scored by rivers a few inches long, with torrid deserts and sheer mountains and forests of knife-edged grass, through which there scuttled lithe and monstrous creatures all bristling with paws and antennae and mandibles. No doubt about it, the earth was limitless. There was no end to the process of exploration and reclamation and conquest. Every inch of these territories was guarded by vigilant creatures ready to fight for their own. They had authorized men to hack paths and roads here and there through the area. They had ceded them plots of land on which to build their houses and towns. But all the rest was well and truly theirs, and woe betide anyone who tried to take it from them. They would raise their savage armies, by the million, indeed by the billion, and commence hostilities on their own account. Night and day they would keep up the assault, wave after invincible wave, swarming over the houses, nibbling, destroying, endless winged battalions that darkened the sky from one horizon to the other, their minuscule bodies eclipsing the light of the sun. You could try anything you liked on them, fire, insecticides, bombing, it would all prove useless. They were sure to win in the end. They’d appear from every corner, marching over corpses, putting out fires, swimming across oceans, devouring, gnawing, stripping back to the bone. At all costs you had to avoid provoking them. At all costs you had to avoid arousing their anger.

Besson lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky. He could feel the densely-packed stems pricking his skin through his clothes. There were certain small protruding stones, too, shaped — or so it felt — like pyramids, which pressed hard against his body. Lying there close to the ground he could hear everything distinctly: all the strange and myriad noises of life vibrated in his ears, yet each remained clear-cut, individual, standing up like a separate twig in the brushwood. The rattle and whirr of insects, seed-pods bursting in the sunlight, the displacement of stones and sand, little crumbling and crackling noises — there were millions of such sounds, no one could ever count them all, however hard he listened. Existence was located here, at ground level: a mist, a kind of warm, milky cloud in constant motion.

Soon Besson found himself stretched out on the grass like a dozing giant who has been tied up, while asleep, by an army of little dwarfs. These Lilliputian creatures had driven pegs into the ground and then attached his hair to them with lengths of spider’s thread. His clothes had been sewn down, his hands and feet were covered with a fine-meshed, almost invisible network of creepers. That was it, he had been made one with the grass he lay on, they had taken him by surprise, he was a prisoner of the stubble and brushwood. Above him the sky stretched, pale and unfathomable, so vast that it was as though it did not really exist. Far up in the empyraean light swarmed and dazzled, streaming out on the sun’s right hand.

Little by little, Besson realized his position. He was pegged out as an offering on some high plateau, spreadeagled over the naked dome of the world in preparation for an incomprehensible sacrifice. Even from the depths of that tenderly pellucid sky the threat of death could materialize. There was no sure protection, nothing to cover him. Man’s flesh was frail, a touch could shiver his bones, he was exposed to endless unknown dangers. Stars, dead planets, meteorites — at any moment one of these could slam through the violet barrier of the atmosphere into the earth’s crust, digging a crater anything up to four hundred miles in diameter. Between him, Besson, and the freezing vertiginous nothingness of outer space, where suns exploded instantaneously, like bombs, what protection was there save this curtain of tulle, this scanty phosphorescent veil, this thin and all-too-penetrable envelope which did not even conceal him from view? A cold and comet-like frisson seemed to flash down from the clouds, entering Besson’s body by way of his navel. In broad daylight — despite the sun and the scent of pollen and these semi-reassuring noises — the cold breath of eternity spread through Besson’s guts as he lay there on the ground.

Some time later a white bird began to wheel around, far overhead: Besson watched its movements, the tight circles it described in the boundless air, with scarcely a flicker of his own eyes. The bird did not really use its wings at all, simply spread them wide and sailed down in a long planing glide, banking on air-currents, turning incessantly, round and round, so far up in the sky that its movements seemed reduced to immobility. It revolved about an invisible axis right over Besson’s head, constantly turning back on itself, following its previous track, dipping, rising, pivoting in the calm and silent void. Sometimes — whether on account of an air-pocket, or because it felt its balance in some way disturbed — it would flap its great soft wings, for a moment or two; but then it would set course once more, gliding, banking, turning, as though coming down an invisible staircase with no apparent bottom to it. Besson watched the bird with passionate absorption: he felt that its flight should go on for ever. From where he lay, on his patch of grass, he could not make out any details of the creature’s body: he could not isolate its head or its talons or the brown patches (if there were any) on its feathers. It could have been anything — seagull, sparrow-hawk, falcon, buzzard. Or an eagle, perhaps, an eagle that had flown down from the nearby mountains, and was now using those cruel eyes to spy out the victim on which it would shortly drop like a stone. It was impossible to tell which it was.

The bird continued to circle round, with a kind of stubborn violence. But all one could see of it was the cross formed by its body and outspread wings, poised aloft while the earth turned slowly under it. A sign indeed, a living emblem hung in that white abyss of sky, its progress stiffly majestic, rigid with hatred. The bird was the only image of activity throughout this whole enormous void: it was monarch of all it surveyed. As far as the eye could reach, on every side, nothing else existed. It hung there, supported by the density of the atmosphere, as one might imagine death — opening and shutting its snow-white calyx, or gathering its strength in preparation for the struggle against mankind. Its light, buoyant body exulted with joy, faint breezes ruffled its white plumage, and the light played over it from all sides, rendered it diaphanous, a mere drop of glass and vapour with blurring, crumbling outlines. It was flying, it would go on flying for ever. It belonged to the range of gaseous matter, and without the slightest doubt would never be able to return to earth. It would have to go on circling in the upper air, describing one circle after another, until the moment came when it reached exhaustion-point and gently evaporated into nothingness. It no longer breathed, it was in all likelihood no longer alive — or else had entered upon eternal life: volplaning, glittering in the azure void, forthright, concealing nothing, casting its terrible cruciform shadow on the ground, three yards from wing-tip to wing-tip, gliding in blank and solitary splendour, nothing now but the living, breathing spirit of flight, unable to give up. Intoxicated by its own perfect circles, hunger and fear all forgotten, having quit the world’s heights and crevasses centuries since. Lost, dumb, a sacrifice to the horizontal infinite; airborne. Airborne.

When Besson could no longer see the bird, he got up and made his way back down the path. At the foot of the hills lay the sea, under a blanket of mist. The sun had almost reached its zenith, and the wind had fallen. The chill in the air slowly turned to heat, drying off the rocks and forming dust in every cranny. Cars came tearing full pelt along the highway; the roar of their engines set Besson’s teeth on edge.

He set off along the shoulder of the road again, till he reached a clump of houses. The cars slowed down here, because of traffic lights. A little way off the highway Besson saw a square, with old men sitting on benches. In the middle of the square a jet-hose was spitting over a patch of green lawn, and pigeons swarmed everywhere. The sidewalks were also occupied by dogs, and cats with raw scabs on their backs, and sparrows. The houses were ugly and decrepit, with barred shutters. At a pinch, he thought, one could live here, too: marry, and have children, and call them names like André or Mireille. Twice a week the town hall was turned into a cinema: there were the posters on the walls—The Plainsman, The Crook who Defied Scotland Yard. The tobacconist’s name was Giugi; the doctor was called Bonnard, and the local lady of easy virtue Marie de Cavalous. From time to time there was a robbery, or some other crime. The village idiot was the deputy mayor’s illegitimate son. None of this mattered very much.

Everyone stared at Besson as he went by. He stopped at a bar and ordered a glass of lemonade over the counter, staring with great concentration at the yellow plastic surfaces and the chromium plating on the coffee-machine. At the far end of the room a juke-box started up: a raucous woman’s voice, supported by chorus and rhythm group, singing a mutedly vibrant number that went:

C’est bien la plus la

C’est bien la plus la

C’est bien la plus belle

Celle qu’on appelle la

Celle qu’on appelle la

Celle qu’on appelle la belle

La belle Isabelle

Besson drank his lemonade and paid for it. Then he stayed for a moment with his elbows on the counter, staring out at the street. Flies were busily sipping at the spilt water on the tables. Down the far end of the bar someone sneezed twice, and blew his nose.

Besson walked on out of the village. He had hardly seen anyone there.

Half a mile or so further on he went over a level-crossing and took a road that led down to the beach. The whole site was dotted with huts, shut up now, where they sold ice-cream, and peanuts during the summer. There were one or two notice-boards, too, which said things like CAMPING SITE or THIS WAY TO THE SEA or ALTITUDE ZERO or FIESTA BEACH. Besson stopped for a moment to look at the beach, and the headlands that enclosed it on either side of the horizon. The long stretch of shingle was deserted; incoming tides had forced it up into a high ridge. To the left, some way off, there was a concrete jetty, with groups of anglers dotted along it. To the right, in the distance again, there was what looked like a sewage dump. It was in this direction that Besson now proceeded, stumbling along over the warm shingle, breathing in the tangy smell of the sea. Everything had become white, grey, or pink, except the sea, which was so blue it hurt one’s eyes to look at it. Occasional patches of crude oil glistened in the sunlight, and along the tide-mark, small heaps of vitreous blubber, lay a number of stranded jellyfish.

When Besson had got almost as far as the sewage dump, he sat down on the shingle for a breather. It was now decidedly hot, so hot that he had to remove his coat and shirt. He leaned back on his elbows, watching the waves roll gently in. Time dragged, and the second-hand of the watch on Besson’s wrist moved forward in a series of tiny jerks, on and on. Eventually this irritated him so much that he unstrapped the watch, laid it on a flat stone, and then hammered it into tiny fragments with a sharp flint. Bits of spring and fragments of broken glass were scattered over the beach. He examined them with interest.

There was no longer a cloud in sight; they had all been absorbed into the azure expanse of the sky — all, that is, except the long white trail left by a jet aircraft flying at about 40,000 feet, though this too soon melted away. The bird had flown away, and there were no people around any more. Nothing remained except the sun, now at its zenith, beating down on land and sea as though through a burning-glass.

The last time he heard signs of human activity was when these two children passed close by him, talking in loud voices. The little boy was called Robert, and the little girl’s name was Blanche.They strolled along slowly, stopping every two or three yards to discuss something. Without sitting up so that he could see them, Besson lay and listened to their conversation.

‘Blanche! Blanche!’ Robert called out. ‘Come and look here!’

‘Found a monk?’ Blanche enquired.

‘No. Come and see.’

‘It’s a candlestick,’ Blanche said.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’

‘Not bad. That’s one more you’ve got. What’s your total now?’

‘Three,’ Robert said.

‘I’ve got two candlesticks and about ten monks,’ said Blanche.

‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘but one of them’s no good: it hasn’t got a stripe.’

‘It has got a stripe! You can’t see it very well, but it’s got one.’

‘Anyway,’ Robert said, ‘I’ve got a candlestick with something written on it.’

‘What sort of thing? Show me.’

‘Wait a tick — it says Farge, or Farga, something like that.’

‘Here, let me see,’ Blanche said, and then, after a pause: ‘It’s Forge. That’s what’s written on it. Forge.’

‘No it isn’t, that’s an A there, not an O. It’s Farga.’

‘Going to let me have it?’

‘I found it, didn’t I? Down there in the rubbish-dump.’

‘If you give it me, I’ll swop you half my monks.’

‘Nothing doing. You can pick up monks anywhere.’

‘Even one with three stripes?’

‘If you want my candlestick, it’s because it’s worth more.’

‘Oh keep your silly candlestick, then. Anyway, I’ve got two already.’

‘Yes, but they haven’t got anything written on them.’

‘I don’t care. Anyway, Farga doesn’t mean anything. Hey, look, over there — another monk.’

‘That’s just what I was telling you, you can find monks anywhere.’

‘Yes, but you don’t.’

‘Monks are just pebbles, anyway.’

‘Well, so are candlesticks.’

‘That’s not true. Candlesticks are more like cement.’

‘Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

‘Anyway I prefer candlesticks. At least they’re useful for something. Come on, let’s have a look further on—’

The voices dwindled and faded. Silence closed in again, there was nothing but heat and brightness. Besson gradually began to perspire.

This moment had been a long time coming. Besson had been waiting for it for years, perhaps for centuries. Today the curtain of rain and cloud had suddenly been torn apart, to reveal the sky in all its nakedness, the blinding circle of the sun. The agonizing beauty of this hard landscape, all rough and stippled with crosshatching, was so intense now as to be quite unbearable. The light had become a bright and burning abyss into which one had to plunge head first. The town, the highways, the noisy airfields, the blocked-out pattern of fields and woodland, the steep mountainsides, animals watchful or sleeping, women and children — all had led here, to the place and moment chosen by the gods for the expiatory sacrifice to be accomplished. Every line had been traced so as to converge on this one point, this beach of grey pebbles, this particular day and hour. He could not escape. He could not go back: time had stopped for this event, there was no possibility of either advance or retreat. It was there, and now. The things had to happen. Like a sequence of events the action of which progresses by its own impetus towards its first and final crux, so Besson’s life (as he was well aware) had been orientated towards this. As though to avoid the moment of reckoning, he tried, briefly, to conjure up old memories. Faded snapshots flashed through his mind. Here was a picture of a child leaning against an iron balustrade, in a village the name of which had vanished beyond recall. Here was the seated figure of a mother, her hair braided up round her head, with a tiny bald grimacing doll held in the crook of her right arm. Other shapes and figures, absurd figments of his imagination, flickered across the blood-red screen of his closed eyelids: wolves with pointed ears, runaway horses, monsters wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He was shut in the spider-haunted cupboard, the gleaming texture of a porcelain flower-bowl held and mesmerized him through the drowsy evening, while the voices went on talking, talking, in the flat exhausted accents of those who have nothing to say. He was back in the shut rooms of his childhood dreams, that fearful, hermetically sealed chamber in which the walls were at once so close and so remote.

Then there was that submarine abyss, the plummeting dive down, down, past a rampart high as a twenty-storey building, into the depths, down to squid-haunted grottoes and thick waving carpets of seaweed. The black hole expanded, became a volcano’s maw, a cavern, the heart of a glowing cathedral of embers, where the bloated, half-eaten corpse went tumbling down, over and over, to the bottom.

Minutes passed. Hours passed. Days, years passed. All elements mingled and merged, interlocking, fused in an automatic sequence Nothing was left now save the immense misery of having survived. Nothing — not a single pattern, not one word written on actual solid paper — could palliate that fact. The days resembled a knife, a knife with a keen blade. Maps and dictionaries were appalling, because they could never be complete: there was always some elusive factor omitted. The tiny palpitating animal fled through the undergrowth, leaving no trace behind, not even a scent; yet everything had been enclosed within a smooth-walled sphere, without any opening, crazily reflecting each object back towards its centre.

Besson lay stretched out on the pebbles — they had begun to hurt him — and watched the stormy future approach him. Here, too, it was possible to forget what was going to happen in a few mintues. In a few hours, days, years. Old age would descend, one of these days, bringing its shameful peace. Features would wither, muscles lose their strength. Yet none of this mattered. Death would come like any other visitant, falling from roof or sky without warning. In the street, in a group of loafers. In some stinking bed, against a beslobbered pillow. In a wrecked car. Half way up a staircase, so that the silly lifeless body rolled down to the bottom again, bumping from tread to tread, skull knocking like a hollow calabash. Forty years old. Fifty-five. Sixty-eight. Seventy-seven, seventy-nine, eighty-one, eighty-four, ninety-two, a hundred and four, a hundred and five, a hundred and six. Which of these figures would turn out to be the right one? Which would be the fatal day? 22nd August 1999, or 4th May 1983? Or 13th December 2002? Or perhaps 1st April 2014? Which day would it be? And what time of day? Noon? Two in the afternoon? Nine-thirty p.m.? Or in the small hours of the morning, after an exhausting and nightmare-ridden sleep? What would give out first? Heart? Kidneys? Liver? Lungs? Spine? But none of this had very much importance. For the years, the years would continue to unfold in their serried ranks, no more distinguishable from one another than buffaloes at a watering-hole, and the years would become centuries, and the centuries would follow one another in turn, like great striations of marble. In the remote future, far beyond this place, this moment, time would still be thrusting out its branches, a growing tree. Languages would decline, arts gutter into oblivion. Ideas would glide smoothly on, small boats borne by the stream, never reaching any destination. There would be no end, just as there had been no beginning: simply night falling over the world’s achievements, veiling them in light shadow. The invisible record would turn on its own axis, swiftly at the periphery, almost stationary towards the centre. And eternity would be there, not hidden but omnipresent; not an external pall, but permeating the inner heart of things, at the centre of time’s central point.

Then, when Besson recognized this great beauty; when he understood that all had been in vain, and that the moment could not be sustained; when he acknowledged his defeat, and saw the proclamation of his destiny; when, at last, he turned his violence against himself: then he opened his eyes wide and stared at the sun. The blinding brightness entered his eyeballs and exploded there; the sudden pain was almost unbearable, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Besson turned his head away for a moment, trying to find some object that could stop him slipping away from the world: his eyes scanned the beach avidly, trying to find something, anything, that instant — a wasp, a wandering ant, a gnat. But there was nothing, nothing but shingle and pebbles with a vast bluish hole in the middle that shifted as he looked at it. Then his hand closed on a small pebble shaped like a snail, and picked it up. Besson lay back on the beach, and still clutching the little pebble, opened his eyes and looked into the sun again. This time he did not shut them.

Light pierced his skull as though he had never seen light before, a burning and lava-like flood, a cleansing influx that permeated the furthest recesses of his skull. A blank, white, monotonous sound invaded his body little by little and floated it off the ground. The ground receded, opened to form his unfathomable tomb, and the air parted asunder. This was the moment, now. Stiffening his will to the uttermost, Besson pitted his staring eyes against the sun, against fire and earth and water, never flinching, against men and beasts, against stones, against the air, against the vast and planet-swarming emptiness of outer space. He stood there in defiance of them all, racked by pain and loathing, and offered them the delicate shield of his twin eyes, from which the tears now flowed ceaselessly. These two globes, with their delicate irises and dark translucent pupils, he now surrendered to the world. To the sun’s savage brightness he exposed the dark and secret surface of his retinas, so that by burning the memory of vengeance might be preserved, and never perish. Then, at last, he began a soft and agonized whimpering, the hoarse unhappy cry of a gibbon, screaming without rhyme or reason at the onset of darkness.