The Flood

Chapter Thirteen

Society at large — In a train — A little boy smokes his first cigarette — The tourist bus — Mothers — The end of Anna’s story — Echo of a suicide

ON the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth days, and all the days that followed, there was no more day: only one black unbroken night, that went on for ever. The town was rid of its incubus now, and inside the houses, with their warm electric radiators, people went on living just as they had always done. Angèle Basman, for instance, a woman of forty-two, was busy deep-frying potatoes in boiling oil, a red-flowered apron round her waist, tiny drops of hot fat spitting out of the pan on to her bare arms as she stood over the gas-stove. Or Michou, a tabby cat, who was fast asleep in the sunny part of some suburban back garden, while the fleas tracked through his thick fur, looking for the best place to bite him. Or the thin young girl with washed-out complexion and cropped black hair, who was wrapping a handful of bleeding lights up in newspaper — having previously smeared her sheets with it to stop her mother realizing she was pregnant.

On one clear pane of glass a tiny gnat was visible: it might have been walking across the blue-grey sky. It advanced very slowly, millimetre by millimetre, on several gossamer-fine pairs of legs. Its body had a greenish tinge about it.

The newspapers carried their usual news items, with banner headlines for earthquakes and revolutions, somewhat smaller cross-heads for crimes passionnels, and so on down to ordinary close-set type for such things as car accidents, thefts from parked vehicles, or the exploits of bums and down-and-outs.

In various discreet corners the beggars were plying their trade. Old women were scattering crumbs for the pigeons on their window-sills, and in the restaurants couples were eating sauerkraut. Wherever you went there was the same faint odour of garlic and grease and rusty metal, the gurgle of stopped-up sinks. A man was sitting in his car at an intersection, waiting for the red light to turn green, and picking his nose. Drunks were taking nips from their bottles of wine, and fat women were licking at chocolate ices.

Some people were reading novels in the dim light of their shuttered rooms, stories all more or less written according to the same formula as this sample: ‘Once more my mouth tasted the joys of her soft, burning skin, and we rolled over on the quiet sand, muscles rigid with desire. When my hand, in the course of a wandering caress, found the zip of her swimsuit, down her back, she tried to struggle for a moment. But the satiny material parted, like a flower tremulously opening in the warm sunlight, to reveal the agonizing delights of her nakedness. But only for a brief instant did I feel her bare breasts soft and caressing against my chest, explore the roundness of her buttocks, feel her still childish stomach and long slender legs melting into mine; only for a brief instant did I savour that rare sensation of a body still freshly damp in patches from the sea, and tanned for long hours by the sun. For suddenly, supple and elusive, she slipped from my grasp and ran with a defiant air, still half-naked to the sun and wind. From a long way off came the faint hoot of the ferry-boat. With an enchanting lack of modesty she ran on, paying no attention to her unzipped swimsuit. The sun suddenly touched the horizon, turned blood-red, and flooded sea and beach with the glow of its magnificent demise … She came back towards me, hair flying, a grenadine tinge colouring her pointed breasts and the curve of her belly. “Half past five!” she called out furiously….’

Others were painting gaudy pictures, in which the dominant colours were shocking pink and madder. Others again spent all afternoon playing the flute, or listening to jazz records. Any insect society has its organization. Throughout the town at this moment everything was perfectly flat, or perfectly square, or, at a pinch, perfectly round. On the doors of public toilets and bar-room W.C.’s penknives had carved obscene words and incised pornographic figures; but these words and figures possessed a dignity almost amounting to virtuousness. On two identical notices, printed in red letters, appeared the words GENTLEMEN and LADIES. A train moved slowly along the coast from one stop to the next, twenty black carriages drawn by a steam locomotive belching smoke downwind. As it rattled along the track it emitted, with monotonous regularity, a deep wooooooooooooo! which shook the ground underfoot. It would plunge into tunnels, emerge again, steam round long curves, brake, whistle, labour up gradients and rattle down them the other side, trigger off signals and level-crossing alarm-bells. It wheels drummed along regularly over the rail-junctures, producing a cadenced clack-clack, clack-clack which formed its basic rhythm. Valves opened and shut, steam blew off. Occasionally the train passed over a set of points, and the rhythm of the wheels became confused, made noises like coughing and sneezing and spitting. In each compartment, with its worn felt seats, people sat smoking, chatting, eating, drinking, or just staring at one another, while the ground fled back beneath them. Their conversations were always the same:

‘What time do we get there?’

‘I’m not sure — if we’re not running late, we ought to be in about eight o’clock.’

‘They always run late.’

‘Did you see how long we were held up last time?’

‘Well, a train had been derailed further down the line.’

‘That’s no excuse.’

‘After all, we’ve paid for our tickets …’

‘Let me tell you, madam, when my son came out of the army, do you know what time he got home? At midnight, madam—midnight!’

‘Just like my sister-in-law — she was on her way home from Italy—’

‘And the time when our kid had the mumps—’

‘What can you expect, eh? What can you expect….’

A little boy stood leaning against the wall in a quiet back street, smoking his first cigarette. He had taken it from a brand-new packet with red and white stripes, labelled WINSTON. Then he put it in his mouth. He struck a match and lit it. Now he was inhaling the acrid, sweetish aroma of the smoke, and salivating.

Two young women in bikinis were strolling round the edge of a swimming-pool that smelt of disinfectant. The one on the right was a tall brunette; her costume had a pattern of small green and white squares. The one on the left was thinner, and wore a white bikini, all covered with little pearl shells. Both had on sunglasses with large circular lenses, and the white radiance blazed down on them like a searchlight’s beam.

Everywhere civilization was established, and had set up its notices: no parking, no entry, no billsticking, private property.

In the middle of the countryside lay a large ham-shaped rock, quite motionless. The plane-trees grew imperceptibly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, simply thrusting back clods and granules of earth, stretching up their branchy fingers to the bright sky above them. This was the way it was.

A coachful of tourists spent some time threading its way through the streets of the town. Then it set off across the hills, and each time it stopped all the passengers turned their heads as one man to left, or right, in obedience to a voice which announced, in several languages:

‘You can see on your right the ruins of an aqueduct built by the Romans. Lens aperture, f.1.5.’

‘Vous apercevez sur votre droite les ruines de l’aqueduc construit par les Romains. Ouverture de l’objectif: 1.5.’

‘Rechts können Sie die Ruinen der von den Römern gebauten Wasserleitung sehen. Offnung des Objektifs: 1.5’.

‘U ziet nu op uw recht de ruinen van de romeinse waterleiding. Opening van de lens: 1.5.’

‘U kan regts die ruiëne van die Waterleiding sien, wat deur die Romeins gebou was. Opening van die lens: 1.5.’

The construction team was still busily at work on their site in the middle of the river bed. Another month or two, and the bridge would be finished. The blind man sat on the beat he had bought and sold newspapers, listening to music from his transistor radio. Every night the voyeur prowled through the thickets up on the hill and every evening, at the same time, the woman whose face was so white that it might have been made of plaster would enter the church and sit staring straight in front of her, at a point just above the closed tabernacle.

Josette was driving through the streets in her new car, looking for somewhere to park. A young red-headed girl, accompanied by a small red-headed boy, could often be seen walking along the pavement. But these were not the only solitary women in town: there were many others, blonde, brunette, light brown, dyed or rinsed, grey and black. Each went her own separate way to her private domain, in a green or a blue dress, or sometimes in check pants, equipped with stockings and bra and briefs, or nylon tights; suffering from toothache, or migraine, or diarrhoea, constipation or a cold in the head; depressed or cheerful, jealous, in love; real people. Real people.

In the dining-room of a flat half-way up the dilapidated apartment block, a man sat smoking and reading the paper. A women was there too, darning socks. Her heavy face was weighed down by fatigue. Light and shadow flitted across it like puffs of air. She was there, a massive maternal presence, whose belly had opened and closed again, queening it all unawares over the world, at once triumphant and humble. There was nothing in her; yet she was immovable, solid as a marble statue, a weathered, polished block of quarried stone, and in her water and fire came together, in her, there in the folds of her inmost parts, the hollow seeds of past and future were already concealed. The tree, the green tree with its upthrusting, bursting shoots grew perennially from her belly. But of this she remained unaware.

It was for her, or against her, that everything had been created. Blood, bone, nails and hair, all belonged to her. Outrage her, fling her down and kill her, she would still emerge victorious. She would look up at you with those heavy, liquid eyes, and go on giving birth to you, without hate, without respite. Even in defeat her face would still wear an expression of victory, and her body would contain all the strength of a conqueror.

When those three drunks fought at night outside a bar, it was for her. They threw clumsy punches at each other, and rolled on the ground, and one of them lost his shoe. The other two stopped fighting, went down on hands and knees, recovered the shoe, and carefully put it back on its owner’s bare foot. It was for her, too, that the sadist of Fontainebleau attacked his victims; for her that cars skidded off the highway and piled up in fields.

Century after century, women had given birth in joy and travail. Céline had borne Marguerite, Marguerite had borne Jeanne, Jeanne had borne Eléonore, Eléonore had borne Thérèse, Thérèse had borne Eugénie, Eugénie had borne Cécile, Cécile had borne Alice, Alice had borne Catherine, Catherine had borne Laura, Laura had borne Simone, Simone had borne Pauline, Pauline had borne Julie, Julie had borne Yvette, Yvette had borne Monique, Monique had borne Gabrielle, Gabrielle had borne Claudia, Claudia had borne Gioia.

In the deserted room the voice rose from the tape-recorder through the darkness. It spoke for the yellow walls with flashes of light playing over them, for the bed with red blankets, for the curtainless windows, for the empty ash-trays, for the moths asleep under the coverlets, for each thing in its place, including the creature like a bundle of old rags feeling its way blindly round the room. It said:

I’m going to record on the other side of the spool. I want you to know — Well, perhaps it’s not all that important, after all. But I did want to tell you everything that I said that first time, ten days ago, was untrue. Honestly. I was lying the whole time. But I didn’t know I was lying, and that’s the reason — that’s the reason I spoke to you the way I did. Afterwards I realized the truth. Oh, I didn’t play the tape back — I hadn’t the courage to listen to my own words, all I’d said about me and Paul and the rest of it, because if I had I’d never have summoned up enough courage to send it to you afterwards. It was just remembering what I’d said. I mean, when I told you all that stuff, it was all fairy stories, just plain lies. Well, obviously, everything I said to you, the facts I mean, was true enough — but it was all wrong to tell you. It was stupid, I–I thought one could talk to people in a straightforward way, tell them what one thought, or believed one thought. That’s why I lied to you. I talked on and on, holding the microphone and watching the spools of tape unwind, and it was all pure drivel. An alibi, that’s what it was, a way of hiding the truth from myself no less than from others. Just the same as when I was typing a story, just like it was when I did that thing on Albert the snail or the old woman with an obsession about her trolleybus. Now I know — I know what it was fundamentally in aid of: lying, concealing the truth, oh, everything — You know, it’s an awful thing, not talking. It’s an awful thing never lying, too. That’s what I’d have liked to learn how to do. I don’t know if I’ll manage it. I’m going to try and carry it right through to the end, but it won’t be easy. In any case, when you’ve heard the spool through, please do one thing for me: wipe off what I’ve recorded. Don’t preserve any of it, not one word. Leave nothing but silence in its place. Do you understand? The thing is, I’m always being tempted to wander off from the point — anecdotes. Really, you know, there’s only one thing I have to tell you. I–I don’t know how to begin, though, because it’s really very simple, and it’s not easy to explain something simple without — well, without talking a lot of rubbish, and dressing it up and putting frills on it.

One thing that will make it easier for me is that I’m going to die. It’s true. It’s only a question of moments now. I’ve got very little time left. That tube of pink sleeping-pills belonging to my mother — well, I’ve taken the lot. I’ve still got the glass in my hand, I had to drink nearly a quart of water to get them all down. I’m beginning to have feelings of nausea already, and my head’s spinning. I must act quickly now. I want to tell you everything I left out last time. I don’t know where to begin, though. In a few moments everything will be over. I shall be dead. I hope it won’t hurt. Anyway I know now this isn’t just make-believe. What I’m experiencing is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I don’t run any risk of, well, of making a fuss about nothing. Not this time. I know what I’m doing is cowardly, but the thing is I couldn’t stand being alone any longer. Loneliness is a horrible thing, you know — that, and knowing you’re past all self-deception. Oh, words used to deceive me all right, well and truly, but that’s finished now. Or will be in a moment or two. Words, words, an endless unnecessary stream of them, all the stuff they teach you and you dish up again thinking it’s your own. And knowing you’re not alone, too. That’s the trouble. No longer being sure what’s part of you and what isn’t, can you understand that? Do what you like, play it flippant, try the couldn’t-care-less line, it’s no good, you’re always screwed in the end. There’s always someone who fixes you — so many people around, everywhere, nothing but people the world over, and things that hurt you, words that raise your hopes only to dash them down more abjectly, and all those emotions — it makes you dizzy thinking how many emotions there are around; love, the sort of love you get in picture magazines, and friendship, hatred, jealousy, rancour, pity, compassion, faith, pride, all that jazz, on and on, never any end to it. And each individual has his own special emotion, and my the trouble he takes over it, waters it like a tender seedling, listens to its complaints, nurses its crises, makes a full-time job of it. I mean, you’ve got to, after all, we’re not animals, are we? Oh, it’s too ridiculous for words. You know, when it comes to the crunch I’m sorry to be shot of all this nonsense. Oh, there were some things I really liked, that’s true. Pity. But as for the rest—! Surely it wasn’t worth all the effort of being born and growing up and struggling through illnesses and going to school — all that just to enjoy a succession of fine delicate emotions? When you’re young, you fall in love. That lands you with problems, right? You fight to make someone else love you. You want to get married, but your parents are against it. You have crises. Crises. Jealousy, too. It’s all so complicated, such a tangle — I mean, civilization’s brought problems to a fine art too, hasn’t it? Well, in the end everything sorts itself out and you get married. Fine. Then there are children, and the problems of education. My son wets his bed at night, doctor, what should I do about it? Or my daughter now, she’s three and a half, she’s a little madam, won’t let anyone order her around. I don’t want to damage her psyche or give her a trauma. What’s the answer? Oh yes, every age-group has its own problems. There’s the midday demon, the menopause, the stepmother’s role. And then old age. Old people are wise, that’s well known. They’ve got their heads screwed on all right, they have their memories, they can’t be really vicious. It’s funny, just so funny …

You see, there’s too much going on in the world for me, I can’t take it, people doing all those things at once, that’s what gets me down. I’ve tried to contract out and just be a spectator. But it’s not possible. They come and search you out. You can hide where you like, it makes no difference, there’s always friends or relatives or somebody after you. They button-hole you and discuss things with you, they’re full of ideas and just bursting with good intentions. They smile a lot, on the street, in cafés, out of photographs in the papers. All right, I’ll admit it, some of them — well, I find them quite touching, they’re so nice, they roll up just like that, they haven’t a clue. And that touches me and hurts me and I need all my will power to resist them, to avoid getting sucked in. That’s what happened with him—Paul, I mean. That’s how he managed to pull a fast one on me. That’s what I wanted to tell you, too — Because I don’t feel at all well now. I’ve got this nausea, I think — I think I’m going to throw up. It’s so idiotic that one can’t die more easily. I wish I could obliterate myself without any effort, just like that, peaceful annihilation. Maybe I’d have done better to put a bullet through my head, but I didn’t happen to own a pistol. And with these pills there’s even a chance that — that I won’t die, after all. They ought to knock me out, and at the moment I feel anything but sleepy. There’s — there’s just this awful feeling of nausea. You know, my mother tried to commit suicide once, when she was a young girl. She threw herself into the river, but someone fished her out again. She had no idea why she did it, but in any case it wasn’t because she’d been jilted. Apparently she’d had a whitlow on her thumb, and had been in a depressed state after taking antibiotics. There are people who say that when you do something like that you’re temporarily insane. But seriously, François, I do assure you I’m not mad. You can’t conceive just how much I’m conscious of what I’m about. On my word of honour, I can see the whole thing very clearly, black and white, and in the most minute detail. It’s as though, well, as though my body had had enough of living, as though it was absolutely exhausted, and had to sleep. I’m living in a desert, that’s the long and short of it. There’s nothing whatsoever to hold me back. It’s weird, François — everything being such a desert, I mean. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like. You’re in a sort of bubble, and everyone’s deaf, they can’t hear you screaming, and your voice bounces back at you like a ball, like — it’s difficult for me to say this, François, but there ought to be a God…. When anyone’s reached this point, how can you expect them to turn back? You can’t turn the desert into — I mean, it would be mere illusion, and anyway you can’t go on deceiving yourself all that long. There’s no pleasure in anything any longer. I–I was right to take these pills, because I honestly believe I’ve come to the end of the road, whichever way you look at it. That was my basic motive. Maybe I should have just let myself starve to death. I’d given up, lost my belief in anything. So had my body, that I’m sure of. So—

I don’t know if evening’s coming on, or if it’s the effect of the pills, but I feel everything’s getting dark. There’s a slight chill in my legs and hands, too. I don’t feel I want to throw up any more now. But I’m getting stomach cramps—ooh, they hurt like hell — What was I saying? Yes, well, it’s — that’s how it is, and I’m going to be able to rest now. When the pain stops. What I ought to have had, when you really get down to it, is some sort of deformity — a leg withered by polio, or a club-foot, or a hunched back, some very obvious defect, a constant source of suffering. That would have given me something to hang on to. I once knew a girl who had one leg shorter than the other. She used to walk by under our apartment every day. She had an awful limp. But there was something about her face and bearing — a sort of pride, can you understand that? I’d have liked to be the way she was. Maybe then I’d have had the same courage and will-power — I realize that now, when I’m feeling so frightful—a-ah-aah, oh God, yes, that’s what I needed. Blind! That’s what I ought to have been. Too late now. I’m passing the secret on to you. It might even have saved me. Weakness, disability. With a white stick. Seeing nothing, seeing nothing people would have moved aside to let me pass. There’d have been no need for me to say or do anything, just the struggle for survival. I’d have had, oh, big black glasses made out of plastic, and I’d have learnt to feel things out with my finger-tips. Warm colours, cold colours…. I’d have really listened, used my ears. The feel of blackness. Not seeing anything, ever again…. Blind! That’s it, tossed like a parcel into areas of movement, feeling my way. Armed with a stick. The victim’s weapon. — Too late now…. I’ve taken these pink pills…

You know, I nearly passed out then. I felt — I felt it was coming. I had to shake myself awake. Nearly dark now…. I feel fine, just fine — oh, but there was still something I wanted to tell you…. Yes, that was it…. The most important thing of all…. Look, I’m going to hold this glass in my hand so you can tell when, when it happens. I’m going to hold on to it as long as I can…. So when — when the moment comes, and I fall asleep, the glass will fall…. Fall on the floor, and you’ll hear it…. And then you’ll know it’s all over. All right?

Aa-a-aah, another cramp. God, this one’s going on and on — argggh, how it hurts…. Anyway, I’m sure this will be the best thing I’ve ever written … even if the ending isn’t all that brilliant.…

It’s some consolation for all the meretricious rubbish I’ve churned out….

Funny. If this is death, it wasn’t worth while making up all those … those philosophical systems…. You know, once before I thought I was going to die…. I was thirteen, something like that. And I–I fell down on the ground, I felt all the blood had drained out of my head, leaving it quite empty…. I was falling … falling … Oh, it was awful … People gathered round me….

It’s as if … as if the Flood had happened … you understand? … and Noah was looking at those still waters.… He didn’t realize that … [long pause] The earth was so teeming, so full of myriad life … and the sky … And the light is so diaphanous, especially — especially towards evening … I can still see it, through the window.… Translucent.… One day I believe it’ll be possible to … lose oneself in it.… out there … How lovely it’d be … I think I’ve thrown up.… I felt something.… I can’t be … a very pretty sight.… Aa-aah.… There goes the glass.… Listen.…

There was a sharp sound as the glass smashed, and then silence. Sound-waves distorted by electrical pulsations, the glass lying where it fell, scattered on the floor, tiny sharp-jagged fragments like claws, glittering in the gloom, bright, motionless, a granulation of salt-crystals.

Beyond the dividing barrier of darkness now. Death may be close at hand, that foul rain of destruction which will cover every object with its fine ashy film. Has this area so much as a name now? Do these places so much as exist on the face of the earth? In this harsh and frozen expanse nothing is missing, not one angle, not the tiniest surface scratch. The hospital’s façade, the barrack walls, the high front of the S.P.A.D.A. building loom heavier, lean inwards; and within this closing vice, as though oblivious of their condition, their destiny, men and women alike are getting their lives over. Away and beyond, the negative geometry becomes more marked: white bridges arching across the highways, deserted asphalt squares. Low down on the walls, and so small that you have to stoop to see them, are a series of graffiti, proof that people have lived and loved here. The letters are spidery, scratched with something like a fingernail, a penknife maybe or the edge of a sharp stone. Along the coast the airfields stretch out, parallel to the sea, dead flat, with the same desert-like appearance. And across this whole great desolate expanse, amid the isolation and the enfolding sense of sleep, under rain or sun, by lamplight or day’s bright reflections, the cars come and go, passing one another, tracing their insect-like tracks, a hum and susurrus over the ground, then dwindling out of sight over the horizon towards other man-surveyed domains.

Everything merges and deepens; sleep and torpor have their own sharp texture, which produces its own reality.

Now, at this moment, the abyss may be close. Rooms with yellow-painted walls harbour the smell of stale cigarette-smoke. Solitude closes in, a compact and indissoluble block, immobilizing arms, imprisoning torsos, pressing down on men’s guts and private parts. People are cast-iron statues, heavy, solid, dull, mute, frozen into a posute suggestive of anger. The storm continues to discharge its fury, the sky is like a sheet of iron, and lightning-flashes advance slowly across it like cracks in the metal. François Besson, seated in his coffin, has ceased to exist. Crouched in a corner, back resting against the bed, he nevertheless no longer exists. He has no name, no face. He has come to a stop. Nor does he survive as memory, since no object or artifact or visible shape exists except as itself: it is what it is, and no more, rooted in the bedrock of actuality. It can never be liquid, never melt and drift, bearing down with its fresh current feelings of happiness and pleasure. He is denied the unbounded pleasure of having lived—and quite by chance, because he finds himself shut in beside a window, facing the naked sky, because time itself has penetrated his room and traced every detail of it, in a caricature that can never be effaced.

What it means is suffering, continual and progressive suffering, an increasingly precise revelation of the life and beauty that have eluded him. I am rooted like a tree on a vast mountain plateau, in the heat of summer, hemmed all about with rock, unable to move, unable to escape anything, fixed, wide open to every hazard, like a pylon in a severe electric storm. Everything around me is dead — rock and glacis, dry scrub, sunken watercourses, dead, all dead, yet they never loosen their grip on me, and I can do nothing but count the slow minutes, number the very stones, while the clouds drift on over me. In the high rock-face a waterfall has scored its vertical channel. Flies cluster and buzz on my eyelids. An occasional reddish insect flies past, with great effort, as though dragged down by its own weight. Even here, surrounded by all this open space — it seems positively to invite movement — I can still do nothing. I am still the prisoner of those who belong down there; this upland is gradually turning back into the concrete-and-girder platitude of which I form a part. Scaffolding. Parking lights, traffic lights. The surface of the pavement at two o’clock in the morning. The ever-louder creak and clatter of the night-time roadsweepers, advancing from road to road, dragging their sprinklers behind them. There’s no doubt about it, I’m a slave, reduced to mere dust. I can’t break free. Danger stalks the earth’s surface, you can feel its muted vibrations ripple through sewers and cellars. Danger, real danger. Hell is right under us, so close that you could knock a spyhole through to it. Hell is our memories, too, our sleepless memories, a little stiff and starchy, memories of the days when our eyes were opening — life as it used to be, tranquillity written across the lined pages of school exercise-books, sensitivity, egotism, happiness. Those pages are illegible today, yellow and spotted. It was as though one were fixed and static, stiff as a figurehead, while the strata of experience descended past one. The upward movement was illusory, the fiction of movement amid stillness; and one day, after long contemplation of these passing chimeras, it turned out that the universe was not the same, that the metamorphosis lay there, and not in you. It was the universe that had ordered this stratification of elements, these strange and transient smoke-patterns. Slow erosion has reduced you to a skeleton, yet you yourself have always remained in the same spot, you have never budged. You are still the same, this Besson-like person, now sitting in his room — third floor, on the right — back against the bed, eyes fixed on the slits in the closed shutters, perspiring in summer, torpid in winter. Yes, you are this freak, this pop-eyed clown, these grey features striped and haloed with light, these closed lips, this decayed tooth throbbing hotly in the jawbone. What you are is Besson + X, your body has been extended by a dimension you never imagined — the weight of a mahogany table, for example, or the burn you get from holding a match too long, or the smell of some particular scent, or the rough, powdery feel of a sheet of fine sandpaper.

Just as you could never escape from the hell of your visible surroundings, just as you could never escape the tormenting presence of those countless million faces that hemmed you in on all sides, so likewise you will not be able to escape the revelation of your own existence. Your name will be inscribed on the wooden panels: BESSON. Your date will be set down at the foot of a memorandum: 22nd March 1963. Your life, your shrivelled-up existence, the life of a fusty, parchment-yellow creature now, plunging down the final slope of oblivion, will be known and recorded in detail. Your end will take on a cataclysmic magnitude; you will be devoured alive by your own powers, your energies will spend themselves on your own destruction. You are BESSON. You are alive. One day you will be a mere bundle of bones, dead meat, the pale gelatinous substance of a coffin-worm. One day you will lie on your back, as though on the beach, and become aware that the earth no longer supports your weight, that it’s opening slowly under the pressure of your body, deeper, deeper, till it becomes the cushion of foul air contained within a sepulchre. Thicknesses of black marble still stand between you and that day, but each passing second gnaws a little more from your protective ramparts. Now, till the hours of sunshine and clarity return, the rain still falls, the gentle drifting rain, all-imbibing, falling noiselessly on my face in the street, a few yards from the intersection, moistening my eyes, leaving my shirt heavy and sodden. It is just such peace and harmony that produce yet another hell: calm and tranquillity become remorse, grinding me down into powder. Water trickles through the excavations, and I know this water is bearing me away with it, bit by bit, is stripping me of my secrets.

Behind the rampart of mist and ruin, I know, paradise lies concealed. But this paradise is one that needs must remain lost to us, since no road to its attainment exists. Such are harmony and beauty. Everything was swift, logical, well-defined. This was the time of that mystery that I bore within myself all unawares, and which bound all things together one with another. It was neither faith nor passion, but a delicate subtle joy, the perfect virtue of a shadow hermetically sealed in a box, cohesion in thought and deed, a reunited family about to sit down to table. And all this was irremediably destroyed by the acuteness of a pair of eyes, the agony of two retinas, the exacerbated functioning of nerves and cells.

The landscape, the scenery, has passed beyond whiteness now to a dazzling radiance. Lines have become razor-edged, colours stick like glue. Each sound is magnified into a vast uproar, and silk-smooth coverlets suddenly harden, become great rough-surfaced blocks against which — as though after falling twelve storeys or so — the flesh smashes with squelching impact.

Language has resumed its crazy ballet: words pass, join up, divide, streaking across the night like so many fireworks, without rhyme or reason, an endless, repetitive sequence, always tracing the same image. The mind of this man is exactly like a long sentence: you think, every moment, that you’re about to reach the end of it, yet you’re confronted by one extension after another, interminably, all linked up by connecting particles, prepositions, adverbs or whatever, while the movement and articulation of the sentence as a whole gets progressively faster and faster. There is an invisible hand engraving it on some imaginary wall, word by word, phrase by phrase, drawing it out with clause after modifying clause, each letter adding a fresh nuance to the whole, each syllable imperceptibly altering the overall tone, just as one can spoil a room’s colour-scheme by the slightest rearrangement of its contents — masking the orange-tinted surfaces, grouping a lot of shiny reds and blues in the corners, cluttering up the line of the skirting-boards with baroque pieces that are all glittering reflection and dark shadow — and so the sentence continues, swells to colossal dimensions, until it reaches that precise point — a tenth of a second will turn the scale — where the mind is no longer capable of grasping its meaning, whereupon the whole ill-balanced structure explodes into a thousand pieces, plunges down the void, tumbles into madness and night, the fierce, echoing vortex of the abyss.

Yet this Besson, Besson I as it were, is still alive behind all his sufferings. Once in the past he was alone, caught in the ant-heap, shoved and jostled by the surging crowds. In the evening, he used to walk up and down the street near the gates of a factory, or outside cinemas, unknown and unnoticed, hands thrust into the pockets of his Bedford cord trousers, wearing an old out-at-elbow jacket. Neon signs flooded him with their dull yet intense glare; raindrops, descending magnificently from the furthest reaches of a black and hole-like sky, beat down on his head and hands and the glass of his wrist-watch, spotting the toe-caps of his suede shoes, zig-zagging invisibly before his eyes. He was well and truly planted, yes indeed he was, in the centre of this town, he really belonged to this century, this year, day, and hour, recoverable in perpetuity; a Lartigue, a Benoît, a Schultz, a Rivière. Cars swept silently past him as he walked the pavements. A bus, every light ablaze, stood waiting by its metal stop-sign, shuddering in triple-time rhythm, rak-a-dak, dak, dak, rak-a-dak, dak, dak. A man in ragged brown clothing lurched along past the shop-windows. Dim figures were making love unconcernedly in doorways. And there were voices that kept calling out, hoarse voices, and these hoarse, human voices mingled with one another, perhaps they rose out of the ground, something else to add to the smells of tar and petrol, and the voices rose and the stink of sulphur grew and spread, in a general atmosphere of power and intoxication and chaos, suggesting confusion and death indeed, but also hinting at resurrection: ‘Now then, now then! … Sorry … Henri’s going to … You just look out or I’ll wring your bloody neck … What did I tell you [slash] … Bit of friction there….’

Most of the men are wearing glasses. Their features look quite monstrous, distended by sudden appetites which only puff out their lips and cheeks. The way they walk is sheer torture, each movement harsh and abrupt. In the half-light one can see the swarm to which they belong grouping itself in accordance with some unknown structure: to the left, to the left, left yet again, one more to the left. Right. Left. Right; right; right. Right; left; right. Sounds stab the atmosphere like buzzing flies; then, caught between those pitiless jaws, they imprint themselves on the surface of vapours and clouds, incised reminders of the objects they have left behind. On the roofs of houses we find outlined, in reverse, the confused mythological figures that watch over men’s lives: the dangerous bestiary, those maleficent points in space that one links together almost without intending it, greedy suckers, sharpened claws, vertebrae eaten away with tetanus, teeth hollowed out by necrobioses, chapped and wrinkled lips, blood dripping from the secret folds of the belly, and eyes, eyes, eyes — huge, glowing, full of fragmentated gallows-imagery, eyes with seized-up muscles, eyes with glaucous humours, eyes with constantly weeping tear ducts, a flood, a rain, water streaming over the flat roofs of the apartment buildings, water striping the air, a grim and deadly liquid that in all likelihood, one day soon, will disintegrate the unique existence of mankind, and leave them sinking in the mud, half dressed and half asleep still, like so many iron crosses, still protesting their eternal fidelity to that hellish oath — ignoble mindlessness, after the deluge, abomination and suffering, suffering, fear.

Silence is creeping over the town, and the street-lamps are humming again. It is nearly dark now. Here, on the smooth level surface of this concrete bridge, is this person, this individual, turning hesitantly, like a metal top dropped spinning into an ashtray. The rotations of his body are accelerating ad infinitum, his fury is caught and held in a series of metallic reflections, vibrates on his spinning centre, drills through glass, mingles with the blurred strata of the air. A tiny breeze blows over the ground, scattering the dust before it can come to rest. This is the song — hard and chill as a blade-edge — that has taken root here. Its words are barely audible, they are mere inarticulate sounds, the words make and unmake themselves in vertiginous sequence, in impotence and hatred. Bright flashes of light, exploding at irregular intervals, black lightning, powdery branches.

I no longer believe in god

I no longer believe in god

I no longer believe in god

I no longer believe in god

A giant hand presses down on Besson, bending him double, forcing him to embrace the earth. Slowly he crawls beneath it. The top still revolves on its glass plate. All round him — it — the indispensable crowd of people wearing glasses. The sound of footsteps approaches, dwindles, returns. No more portraits. What is this enormous Café that’s suddenly sprung up on the right? No more books. The sum and totality of every flash of light is there, a blurred spectrum in which every element has to be absorbed simultaneously, blood-red, blue, ultramarine, black, white, the pure and terrible whiteness of snow. A workman with a negroid face trudges through the streets carrying a beam on his shoulder. It jogs as he moves. Suddenly the windows are counted, just like that—854, there are 854 of them. Tiny flames rise trembling from match-heads. Look, the world is breaking up. Look, I am going to die. That’s the alarm going off. Or clockwork toys, that some hidden hand wound up while I slept, underneath my worn and rumpled pillow. In the scars left by biting teeth, in yellow patches of mucus. Besson turns on himself, without turning.

Today,

22nd March 1963

he alone remains; his features have shrunk all round, symmetrically, his cheeks have sunk below the inner angle of the eye. His drowned hair lies at rest now, rain and air rest sprawling over him. He has given up. Two things have happened. The barrier of his will no longer exists. He wanted dissolution, and now this dissolution is coming about without him. Houses collapse in the roadway with the most grotesque sound — the noise you hear in a hollow rock cavern when the tide, surging forward with that to-and-fro motion, pours through for a moment, swells, rises, is cut hollow rock cavern when the tide, surging forward with that to-off, fills with internal eddies, becomes rock, then — in another brief moment — streams back out of the dark abyss, hard, glassy, utterly different now, sucked out by the ebbing current, flowing down below the surface in foam-streaked tumult, leaving trails of bubbles behind.

As though a moon had suddenly appeared, a parasitical heavenly body within the vault of the firmament, as though another planet were in existence, rounded, spherical, a pale refulgent globe, charged with the magnetic powers of iron, of the mineral world frost reflecting naked sunlight, the motion of the sea has communicated itself to the world ashore. In the part of the town immediately around Besson, say a square mile or so, the tide ebbs and flows continually; magnetic fusion has thrown gravity askew. The mass, the volume of objects becomes elongated, things possess skin-like surfaces. Ramparts erect themselves, stratifications appear. One layer, then another. Men merge and mingle, the undertow sucks them in, spews them out, sucks them in once more. The misty air is alive with waving hands and a thrash of limbs. The sounds of voices meet, cross, low-level sound-waves interweaving. They leave a warm yet impalpable ball in the hollow of the ear, a liquid globule quivering a hair’s breadth from the tympanum. The head grows heavier moment by moment, balanced painfully on its supporting neck, the cervical vertebrae cracking in protest, preparing, no doubt, for the moment of final crushing annihilation, the tiny spark-cluster of the death-agony. Into this head the square mile of the town now passes — not direct, but obliquely, as though by way of a mirror. Pat on its cue the void moves into action, drilling its bottomless well through the brain. The gulf that was his skull and the gulf opening beneath his feet are isolated from each other, cut off. Little by little objects leave the earth and enter his body, one after the other, with cries of pain, mute vibration of vocal cords. Like a fish with dilated gills, he embarks on this process of deglutition, swallowing, devouring. Houses pass into him, slowly, like huge mouthfuls of stale bread. Railroad tracks twist up their hideous rails into his mouth, two by two, roads hump themselves towards him. Then come waves of colour, special colours. Orange orange. Violet. Grey. Green green green green. Grey. Pink. Pink. Black. Pink. Emerald emerald. Black black black black black black black. Yellowish. Locomotives, boiling hot engines sweating oil drop by drop. Blocks of ferro-concrete, still humming with sound, lift-shafts with closed lifts going up in them. Grey, grey, grey. Black pink green blue black white WHITE. Floors of rooms covered with a thin film of dust. Cigarettes, lit or stubbed out. The sound of a peal of bells, a drunk cursing, the flatulent bumbling of a television station. These vast sloping roofs, where birds cluster to watch the sun go down. The East Side pylon with a few insulators missing. Electrocution. Danger, no entry, high voltage, death. A small hut into which one could slip without a qualm, teetering as though half-anaesthetized, both hands turning cold already, already encased in a strange blackish skin, feeling their way towards that complex centre where thousands of blue-steel wires hum on their red bobbins; then a soft, furtive scraping sound, and the blinding shock, like a door being flung open to let in pure fresh air.

Then a sudden flood of men sweeps him from his vertical position, a maelstrom that seems as though it was never born, and can never die, from everlasting to everlasting: a stream of black ants, gently bearing away the empty husk of a huge grasshopper.

Not at another time, for there was only the one time, day and night mingled together, vast and indifferent: with rain still falling from the sky and cascading down the steps of the town, the noise and the terror reached their climax. Letters and words began to play general post; thoughts, as replaceable elements, underwent various permutations. The messages no longer reached anyone. Strange passwords made a road for themselves through the tumult, cries to which no individual could have laid claim: CHRIST, SALUT, OLLA, LE GA. Letters were dispatched in white enevlopes with the flaps stuck down. In the top right-hand corner of each was a stamp carrying within its serrated edges some little picture — a woman’s head, a cook, or a landscape drawn in fine minuscule outline. Wherever you looked there were millions of written messages; their power still survived when they lay abandoned in garbage-cans or at the bottom of drawers, exposed to every insult. Pages of unknown bibles retracing people’s private, insignificant histories:

My dear Jean:

Thanks for your letter. I’ve fixed up the insurance and all that jazz, though because of the fine they made me cough up an extra £4.10.od. The worst thing of the lot is that I lent the motor-bike to John James, who took off with Anna on the pillion. All of which means that we’re still not in the clear; this infernal bike is beginning to cost me a pretty penny.

I’ve paid ₤20 for it — hope that’s the price you had in mind. I’ve handed the money over to Libby, and you ought to get it fairly soon.

France and Eric agreed to take the guitar back to Paris for me — I expect you’ll know who they are? Anyway they’ve left it with some friends of theirs, and Libby’s given your brother the address, so I suppose he’ll have picked it up by now.

See you one of these days.

Yours ever,

Nick.

‘You are young, you want to study, and have fun, and live.

BUT

Do you realize that every year the world spends 60 billion francs (old currency) on weapons of destruction?

Do you realize that 100 million men and 70 per cent of the world’s scientists are employed on war production?

Do you realize that 60 tons of T.N.T. per human being could at any time reduce the entire globe to a cinder?

Do you realize, lastly, that if nuclear war broke out it would kill 300 million people in a matter of minutes?

THREE HUNDRED MILLION CORPSES: THAT IS YOUR FUTURE

But it is not inevitable. You can and must exorcize this bogey. Of course you are against war. But that is not enough: you must SAY SO. You think it’s pointless, that it’s none of your business—

YOU’RE WRONG, IT IS NOT POINTLESS, AND IT IS VERY MUCH YOUR BUSINESS

BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIVE

If you are on your own, no one will hear you. BUT YOU ARE NOT ON YOUR OWN.’

‘Jessie James: Hopeless Blues’

There are other words, more secret and terrible still. What hand — adult’s or teen-ager’s — carved them with a penknife in the wood of the table? They’re nothing much in themselves, it’s true, and ever since the moment when hand and knife came together in this Café, they have been overlaid by a constant stream of bottles, glasses, cups, other hands, other words; an endless battering assault, a silent act of restraint made endemic by events, a paralyser of time, skewering the hours like a long steel engraver’s point. And yet they continue to proclaim, for all time, this message of happiness and torment; they still eternally relate, in time’s unmoving sphere, that exodus of God’s people through war-torn lands and the swamps of good fortune.

Drum

Molotov

Lollypop

Shrimp

Elite

Key

Foot

Sékou Touré

Passion Flowers

Bourbon

Honey-bee

In this rough sketch, so sharply outlined that it is as though one saw it from a third-floor window, the distant houses repeat their pattern of solid cubes, and a layer of pink gently spreads over the walls, frittering out towards the roof-tops like a shock of hair. At the centre of the sky are deployed all these signs and traces of superhuman life: each knot, each concentric circle to be found below is traced on its wide and ashen surface. The black broken lines and anthracite gleam of cars’ bodywork flicker aloft there, with an imperceptible and tireless motion. From the human city there goes up a multitude of voices, a hubbub of activity, and this monotonous clamour reconstitutes itself among the clouds. Twentieth-century awareness. And speed overtakes innumerable objects, projects itself in a near-scientific illusion, as here with slate tiles, for instance, or the flesh of women and children, or some dark-coloured metal of unknown composition. The eye must penetrate to the very heart of matter, cutting a path with agony and fever and palpitations of the heart — through millions of molecules. Deeper still then, at the core of cloud and vapour, the eye must become number, must pierce further, while molecules separate and matter divides, till it reaches the unchartable point of mathematical bewilderment, that point x of anguish and despair where all physical matter ends and nothing remains beyond it but the empty void.

The landscape has suddenly become, at one and the same time, so vast and yet so restricted: a cone, a genuine cone, its apex non-existent, its base always stretching further than one can see. Cohesion has not totally vanished: some element of being still remains, a vague blurred light, as still as a letter of the alphabet, amid this vast void which is illuminated by its presence. And yet an order has been broken: some process of acceleration, some electrical charge, perhaps — who knows? — has split the atoms apart at a point near the surface, breaking away small masses of energy which are liable to shoot off on a dangerous course of their own. Gamma rays. But this process of dissociation is not unlimited as far as the eye qua number can see, objective existence still survives, its presence theoretical but certain, like that of a nebula. Sources of energy have their own appointed place: behold them now, like stars, gleaming alone in the night’s immensity. They are words, they are symbols, they stand inscribed in the turn of a formula on the blackboard, and from them spring truth and abundance. Each fragment of granite mingled with tar that makes up the pavement, every gleaming piece of enamel, each square yard of the sea’s surface, each plane-tree, every patch of living skin — all have been destroyed utterly, yet still remain alive. The world has an infinite capacity for breaking down and rebuilding its elements: everything is subsumed in that apotheosis of letters and numbers, Xi Zero — Anti Xi Zero. And then, by way of counter-current, and springing from the hard central core of this certainty, there rises a kind of damnable hope, a kind of hope like the onset of a cyclone. The will projected by these centuries of energy. Little by little tables and chairs assume solid form, gradually harden into existence beneath these blind fingers, arrange themselves architecturally within the four walls of a room. Corpuscles agglomerate, wooden feet thrust out, colours vibrate like sounds. Red, red. Black, red. Ochre, red. White, white, red, Red, black, red. Cohesion begins again, the slack assembly of nails and dadoes. The floor shakes back into its pattern of squared lines and purplish tiles. Dust lays its film over the cracks again, time puts on its make-up. A second. Dust. A second. Dust. A second. Dust A second. Dust. Everywhere homes become ready, one after the other, solid and durable; everywhere, without one realizing it, flesh quivers into life, veins distend as the rhythmic flow passes through them. Here is a woman. Here is a man. There is a child. A dog. A winged ant. Here is another woman. In one corner of the kitchen, near the cubic yard or so of air impregnated by the odours from two overflowing garbage-cans, a cockroach rustles as it moves under the sole of a slipper. Against a wall down near the beach a tree (impossible to describe it) stands stifling in its own washed-out halo. Rain trickles over its outspread branches a deep drain eats it away at root-level.

So everything is ready: ready for the journey to Purgatory, the journey to the land of black and white. The whole town glows ruddily with matter, with solid substances. In twenty seconds, perhaps even sooner, the crisis may return, and the whole process begin all over again. Things will pass into themselves, like devouring serpents that greedily consume their own bodies. Life will plan itself unaided, and at random, on the first coarse and yellowing sheet of paper that comes to hand. The plan will grow and grow, bursting and pullulating with details, like a kind of lengthy narrative, its handwritten words gradually nibbling away what free space remains. The point of the ballpoint pen moves forward, on and on, very fast and in a small neat hand, tracing a wriggling, broken blue line, from left to right, next line down, left to right, next line down, and so on. When the whole surface of the paper is covered with this scribbling, the tip of the ballpoint still goes on searching. It finds blank spaces between the lines or down the margins. It fills them all. The words on the page now run in every direction. But the ballpoint still goes on searching indefatigably. It overscores what it has previously written, it crams every cranny, first making fine scratches like tufts of hair, then a whole fuzzy topknot, and finally a large sooty cloud. There are still words, more and more of them, interminable adverbs; the crosses on the t’s trace a kind of straight line from one side of the paper to the other. Too much overwriting has produced the occasional hole. About six inches from the top there is an accidental and quite unbearable row of looping o’s. But the words keep flowing back, and suddenly, after using up several thousandths of an ounce of dark blue ink, after hours on the job, after working through three ballpoint pens, as though a million spiders had wandered over the page, at nightfall only one empty space remains — a tiny star-shaped patch at the bottom left-hand corner, preserved by the slapdash loop of an 1, in some word now otherwise obliterated—‘Iliad’, maybe, or ‘calamity’, or ‘Lilliputian’. Then the hand grips the ballpoint pen, all slippery with sweat now, and closes the loop of the 1. During the accomplishment of this act, in silence and fear, something akin to darkness, a sense of solemn peace, like the deepest night, spreads over the paper. The last remaining area of imperfection seems to disappear; and nothing is left now, beneath that bent forehead, before those weary, burning eyes, except this vast page of writing, in which all the words and letters have melted into one another, the perfect work of not-being, a beautiful poem, monochrome and illegible.

Looking out of the window, or down in the stair-well, head squeezed between the banisters, or lost among the mirrors of a cinema foyer, or — more simply — just stubbed out at the bottom of a jam-pot doing duty as an ashtray. Tobacco coming out of the body, thrusting through the skin, sticking to the glass sides of the jar. Head still burning, a mass of close-packed embers, but guttering down to extinction, giving off carbonic gas. Occasional tiny explosions from glowing fragments of wood, and that sickening smell given off by the dead cinders, rising gradually towards the ceiling, the acrid stink of cooling ash. On every part of the street, on every house, over the whole town, Besson descends and settles: like a fly circling round some imaginary lamp, moving in a random course across level or uneven surfaces, leaving its trail of excrement and microbes behind it.

These white houses, that square you can see, these still, tranquil streets are the areas in which he deposits his eggs. This neighbourhood is his domain: here he hunts, sleeps, lives, and perhaps reproduces in season. In front and on all sides of him cars speed to and fro, passing, repassing. The continual snarl of their engines forms a harsh, metallic song: the rhythmic pulsing of valves and pistons, vibrating bodywork, the silent whirr of the fan, and so on and so on, all that blurred mass of minuscule sounds, endlessly affirming the existence, as a construct, of the internal combustion engine, in all its beauty, power, novelty, warmth and regularity. A view from a telegraph pole. Or even, if you prefer it, arched over the road like a bridge, body curving slightly, set on pillar-firm limbs, back supporting the passage of all those swarming creatures known collectively as ‘mankind’. This sudden joy that comes over you, this manic passion for bright metals and translucent inflammable liquids, the sense of roundedness, the smooth enamelled skin you’ve acquired, which turns you into an object, and the delight, the indescribable sense of optimism that hits you, yes, there, between the radiator cap and the rubber lining of the windshield, the joy of being made out of sheet-metal, thirty-six B.H.P. with direct injection, and kindling, down under those steel cylinder-heads, the explosive spark that irradiates out on combustion like the spokes of a wheel. Opel Olympia. Ford V.8. Man-into-car enclosed within this room with its four unyielding walls. The insect is flying round the table. It came down from the ceiling during the night, Through the open window drift the sounds of falling rain. The insect is a gnat, a square millimetre of black body and wings, its flight sustained by some invisible plane surface, as though the horizon that suddenly tilted its plexiglass sheet and left no sign of any living presence on it save this one solitary creature. Inside the room atmospheric waves eddy and multiply. Bodies of gas move from one corner to the other, knocking against the bed, the skirting-boards, the door, the two open windows. This undulatory movement intensifies, becomes more precise. The gnat, crushed between two layers of oxygen, lies there on the table, asphyxiated, delicate legs just quivering their last, one wing half torn off and adhering to the creamy matter discharged from its abdomen. But the air in the room has suddenly changed to water, and the to-and-fro movement passes through this new body, braiding its texture, tying slip-knots into it. In the aquarium objects smoke through the water, sometimes leaving a trail of bubbles behind them. Strange noises, rumblings as of an earthquake, the motive force behind heavy vehicles, now make themselves heard: the S.P.A.D.A. trucks, enabled thus to pass through the walls of the room, arrive loaded with transistor radios, barrels of olive oil, refrigerators. The oscillatory motion of this matter steadily increases, reaches a high peak of intensity, a regular rhythm which nothing can disrupt. With effort certain obstacles at the back of the mind are removed — things such as human flesh, the breasts and bellies and buttocks of women, perhaps even a face, the face of a young goddess, with fine features and a Byzantine profile; deep sad eyes, set at a curious and touching angle to the line of the nose; the expression of a statue, all statues, eyes looking gently upward from the inclined head, revealing a sclerotic pattern of unhappiness and yearning regret, endlessly repeated; a tiny mouth, set in a firm line above the chin, and that lone pale, almost translucent body, draped in blue material. Near her, a man lying on a divan stretches out one hand in token of command, and calls, like Orsino Duke of Illyria, for music.

But nothing here is real: these eyes and hands have no existence, the guitar, the mist-shrouded landscape, all are illusory. The oscillatory motion reaches down to the deeper points at the back of the mind, dredges up young untroubled voices, afternoons spent leafing through the dictionary, sitting in the pleasant slate-grey common-room, with its leather armchairs and cake at tea-time and bells ringing the Angelus. Noises dwindle away, giving place to a kind of magical silence: soundlessness such as exists under a glass bell, or in telephone booths that let through nothing, almost, except the vibrations immediately beneath them, a hair-fine thread floating on the air that alone serves to remind us of that other world outside. Then, after a little more time, a little more suffering, one finds oneself enclosed by four walls, a floor, a ceiling; a closed door, two open windows. Continual restriction. Hollow, hollow. Equilateral.

For the last time during this immense day-and-night there appears that supreme synthesis, that stunning of the senses, that conscious abrogation of mind which is known as hatred.

Besson stands outside the building now, hidden in the shadow of the arcade, eyes devouring the whole sweep of the scene before him. Hands thrust in his pockets, right shoulder resting against a pillar, he feels an inexplicable stiffness spreading through him, centred somewhere in the back of his neck, but makes no resistance to it. The sun is rising, or setting: it makes no difference which. Buses come and go, brake to a jerky halt along the kerbside. From time to time a green wall of metal interposes itself between those staring eyes and the middle distance, and sits there, shuddering in time with its engine. There is a smell of exhaust gases everywhere; nothing can disperse them, not even the upward-moving air-current that rises skyward with the force of a plane on vertical take-off.

Millions of tiny holes in the tarred macadam, all made by women’s stiletto heels.

In a trash-can attached to the bus-stop sign lies a half-eaten tangerine, exuding acidity. Memories of plums brush lightly across the cornea of the eye, with just enough friction to start a tear, a fleeting pain much like grazing one’s skin against the rough surface of a wall, the small pleasures afforded by something utterly insignificant, the sharp impact of a cigarette-butt lying on an ashtray’s edge, smoke curling up from it — everything is there, really everything, nothing has been forgotten. The whole pattern comes together at this moment before his eyes, there between the two pillars, presenting a panoramic spectacle from which not a single element is missing.

The picture is complete now. If there are still a few movements down in its bottom left-hand corner, they are caused by nothing more than streaks of colour gliding along their set tracks, masses of black metal (or grey, or green), the shadows of human figures walking. It is as if a sudden breeze had got up, blowing away their mists; as though the latent power inherent in matter, cube upon cube of electric energy, had slowly invaded the air and all open spaces. At an angle of 24°, behind the public lavatory, stand the stark trees and the wrought-iron palisade dominating the harbour. Cast metal, wherever you look you see cast metal. The landscape is naked in the half-light. The street-lamps have just been lit — or are about to be turned off. You can see this by the glow of that neon-blue star that flashes on at each cardinal point of the compass: NORTH, flash, WEST, flash, SOUTH, flash, EAST, flash. Each object is lightning-struck in turn: the surface of the street, first, where all noises sound like the screech of brakes. Is it a fierce heat, come from God knows where, a kind of sun blazing out through the windows? Or is it a Polar freeze-up, with blue iceberg reflections, a pale and whirling whiteness, misty, vapour-shrouded? Perhaps it could even be a mixture of the two, the weird result of setting a fiery furnace at the very heart of the ice? Two extremes in conflict, penetrating each other’s defences, in a tearing orgy of mutual annihilation. As though a giant hand, a hand without any body attached to it, not a god’s, rather the crude fist of a worker, its joints all muscle-bound, as though this human hand had seized both of them, ice and fire, and crushed them together in its palm, while away on the periphery of things, beyond reach of the hand, the two bodies thrashed and reared amid drifting clouds of steam and vapour.

Then each vortex returns to its own sanctuary at the earth’s centre, close to the liquid core of the planet. But where the hand holds them fast, there remains two colourless, shrunken cords, hardened by intense agony into spirals of twisted glass.

Phenomena are now transformed into states of being. The void has struck at the very heart of this big square between the surrounding apartment blocks, bringing all movement to a halt: the man who was running towards the steps of the church, that other one getting off the bus, the helicopter passing over the river, the child playing hopscotch in the arcade, the hundreds of flies blazing invisible trails everywhere, between the wheels of that coach, or towards this garbage-pail, or in the vicinity of that sixty-five-year-old woman. The movement of an American car, an Oldsmobile by the look of it, has been brought to a halt in this square by the mere existence of four or five reflections glinting on its beige bodywork. There is no more movement now, no more action. Even the normal swarming dazzle in the sky — that misty agglomeration of countless million tiny points, black, grey, white, blue, red or green, which formerly kept up a ceaseless dance, soaring upward heavenwards or sinking slowly back towards the ground — has entirely ceased to function.

The sky is as spacious as ever, but with that stipple of black dots gone dead, nothing remains but a half-tone screen photograph, newspaper style, blown up to enormous dimensions, and embracing the entire visible landscape. The still points coagulate, become a more intense black, increase in number — and there is a pigeon. They space themselves out, become almost imperceptible — and there is the sunlight reflected on a young girl’s face. Eyes become dark hollows, noses are accentuated, mouths tend to be optional. This fierce and incessant rain of dots leaves both people and inanimate objects looking calm but cheerless, as the colour drains slowly out of them. The process is a very simple one, and one gets the impression that as these impalpable surface layers peel away, angles become sharper and cleaner, the framework stands out, ridges are stripped bare to the bone. The plane-tree has been drastically reduced to a mere black skeleton of its former self. The modern apartment block has crumbled away and is now floating up in the blue empyraean like a cloud. Men’s faces have been replaced by a strange inhuman mask, dead white, hollow, with great empty eye-sockets and a bird-like beak. In an old worm-eaten foreign tome, dated 1683, and entitled The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, Knight of the Order of St James, the following passage is to be found:

Howsoever ye others know not what Death may be: it is ye yourselves who are your own proper Death: Death beareth the features of each several one of you, be ye never so mighty, ye are your own deaths. Your skull is Death; and your features are Death; that which ye term dying is the conclusion of life, and that which ye term birth is the beginning of death: in like fashion, that which ye term living is but dying in the midst of life: and bones are but what death leaves of your kind, and what remaineth behind in the sepulture. If ye were well apprised of this, then each would have a mirror of Death within himself all the days of his life; and then would ye see divers truths, as that all your houses are full of dead men, that there are as many dead persons as living, that though ye hear not Death, natheless ye walk beside him all the days of your life. Think ye that Death is but bones, and a carcase, and that Death cometh not unto your person ere ye behold a Skeleton that holdeth a Scythe? Thus do ye deceive yourselves in heinous wise, for ye shall be bones, carcase and skeleton sooner than ye may conceive.

And further off, away beyond the square where everything has come to a stop, the whole town lies spread out between the sea and the mountains, quite motionless, like a great sombre pool. This battered skin, with so many countless wrinkled contours, this purple-tinged coverlet of fine interwoven thread, is in fact the town’s upper surface; and blackness has flowed into every hollow of it, silently, as though filling a mould. Here is the photographic representation of death; and above and below it the tragic twilight raises a long and voiceless chant, unfurling its purple ribbons across the horizon, whole spools of purple ribbon, bright crimson streamers, bloodstained dressings, shot-torn tattered ensigns, lightning by the barrelful, lurid orange storm-clouds, bombs bursting to reveal vermilion craters, the whole majestic airy procession that forms a refuge for the last outpourings of passion, torture and war. There: now all is poised in ardent stillness.

As the sun retreats, or the street-lamps are extinguished, the world grows steadily darker, with inceasing calmness and serenity to match the broad swathes of crepuscular twilight now drawn across it. The sea’s glinting surface has burnt out. Ships lying at anchor send up columns of black smoke to mingle with these violent reds and golds. Here too colours have become so elongated, so extended, that they might as well not be colours at all: it would make no odds if they were transposed into smells, or phrases of music. The humble, hackneyed odour of a brioche, lard and butter mingled, all interwoven from an off-yellow colour and the taste of vanilla, insipid, too insipid, then, suddenly piercing it, the tart flavour, pencil-sharp, of one dried raisin.

Or look at this man, riven by the white lightning-flash that struck down on the tree. The rescue party makes its way back down the mountainside in the rain, gently bearing the blackened body on the stretcher, taking it back to the widow, who will lose her wits. Rising through light like the length of a drawn sword, passing joyfully into that agonizing effulgence, he vanishes from sight as the boiling, turbulent mass closes over him; moves on with it now, up, up, to the topmost peaks of the world, plunged naked into the volcano’s maw, carried up to that field of black azure that lies beyond all human values. Made light. Purified.

Or else, again, the dull thunder and murmurous confusion rising far out in some kind of sea, those glaucous, malleable rhythms — and then, hundreds of yards, perhaps miles away, so far off that it seems to lag behind the rest, the sound of a warning siren, the reverberations of war: like a cat miaowing, exactly the same as a cat miaowing, all alone on a vast and dreary expanse of tin roof.