The Flood

Chapter One

François Besson — François Besson listens to the tape-recorder in his room — The beginning of Anna’s story — Paul’s departure — Advice from Besson’s mother — The vendetta

THIS is the story of François Besson. One might have begun it somewhat earlier, after his meeting with Josette, for instance, or when he had given up his teaching job in the private school, and had come back to live with his parents, in the old dilapidated house near the centre of town. But granted one embarked on it at this later point, then François Besson was lying sprawled out on his bed, amid a disordered tangle of sheets and blankets, towards the end of winter, and, for the moment, not smoking. His eyes were shut. He was no longer asleep, but remained in the same position, fists clenched. The light from the street outside struck the wall of the building opposite; its reflection shone into Besson’s room, and stayed there. The yellow-bright chinks between the shutters showed occasional patches of paint.

Besson lay in a bath of colour. When it reached his face, the yellow shaded off into various tones of bistre; it was round his nostrils that he took on the most cadaverous appearance. The light distorted his naturally youthful features, sharpening the jawline, obliterating tones of red and brown, wrinkling the skin around the eyes. Colour, real colour, remained outside, beyond the closed shutters. What stalked the interior of the room was more a species of very soft and subtle reflection, much like the shadow cast on the ceiling by an electric light bulb.

When Besson got up and moved across the room, with measured steps, feet bare and both hands thrust into the pockets of his pyjama jacket, shoulders a little bent, it was like a cloud passing over the moon, or whatever else — street-lamps, headlights, the sky — might be producing that yellow illumination outside. Suddenly he came to himself, forced his eyelids apart and un-gummed his lips. There were dark rings under his eyes, he breathed noisily, and one of his ears was redder than the other, because of the way he had been lying on his pillow for the past hour.

He walked. He set down his bare feet on the cold tiled floor, one after the other, toes crimping as he did so. He only stopped when his nether belly bumped into the table. Then he abruptly tugged open one of its side drawers, and began to search through it, still in semi-darkness. The drawer was crammed with a variety of objects — dirty handkerchiefs, unwashed socks, notebooks, sunglasses with cracked lenses, razor-blades, a toy pistol, ink-soaked sticks of chalk, postcards, boxes of Italian matches, a packet of miniature cigars labelled ‘La Neuva Habana’, an assortment of wastepaper and scraps of cardboard, an Air France application form for a post as steward on one of the international lines, a fragment of mirror, an English-French French-English dictionary, the bottom of a Stiegl glass, a magnet, a snapshot of himself taken in a snow-covered London street, a roll of adhesive tape together with a pair of blunt-nosed scissors, passport, cufflinks, a watchstrap with no watch, a key-ring with no keys on it, a toothbrush-tube minus its toothbrush. He did no more than fumble through this detritus, with his right hand, using his left to keep the bottom of the drawer steady. Then he must have become aware of the discomfort of his position: he abandoned the bureau for a moment and went to fetch the one and only chair, a metal one, which stood at the far side of the room. He cleared off the heap of clothes littering it, and brought it slowly across, feet dragging, stubbing his rubbery toes on the tiles.

Walking thus on bare crimped feet, in a kind of uneasy glide, held up by the chair’s noiseless bumping over every crack between the tiles, Besson found the going progressively more difficult, with sudden swoops and twists of the body, like some boxer filmed in slow-motion. At every metallic bang on the floor he felt a kind of electric shock surge up his spinal column, through the marrow, dilating each vertebra as it went, spreading little clusters of thread-like matter through both sides of his body. This matter moved in a series of spasms up to his neck, where it formed a vast imbedded knot, a starved and avid glandular growth, round which the electric current spun in a vortex, rotating ever faster, crushing cartilage walls, desperately seeking some way out, fighting to resist invasion by other shock-waves; then hardened, petrified to a point at which it was no more than a kind of hoarse, intensely shrill cry at the bottom of an echoing, shadow-filled cavern, and at last exploded, one final red-and-white set-piece, a kind of floral illumination. Then, without warning, it would disappear, until the next time the chair struck a tile-edge. But meanwhile something else was happening: the last remaining electricity-charged fibres, doubtless in a final flare-up of energy, instead of disintegrating were transformed into fissures, which radiated out from the base of the neck over the entire length of the skull, thus capping Besson’s head as though with a hand, an insidious, hurtful hand, each time thrusting its bony fingers a little deeper into bone, flesh and meninges. Besson stopped; he waited there for a few moments, trying to erase the memory from his mind.

As one way of accomplishing this end he began to whistle softly between his teeth. Then he resumed his tangential advance, a consciously preoccupied expression showing on his face. He sat down at the table, placed the drawer on his knees, and began to ransack it once more. But almost at once he stopped, and returned the drawer to its place.

Outside, in the street below, some car was sounding its horn furiously. Besson looked at his watch, which lay on the table beside him, and then at the spirit-lamp for heating coffee, with its little tin saucepan on top. He put out his hand, almost touched the stand of the lamp, changed his mind, and instead picked up a coffee-spoon with his fingertips, planting it upright in the middle of the empty cup, and morosely stirring the mixture of coffee and glued-up sugar. Next he took the ashtray (a proprietory brand) and emptied it into the cup. He pushed the coffee-spoon round until ashes, cigarette-ends, sugar, coffee and matchsticks formed a kind of unified compost.

The sound of the horn interrupted him. He got up, opened a shutter, and looked down. He saw wet pavements, as though it had been raining, and a large number of stationary cars. The air was cold, and the sounds came from some distance off — the other side of the town, probably. It was like being shut at the bottom of an elbow-shaped cave, vaguely conscious, in the distance, of this white, confused mass of sound, light, scent and movement, Besson took it all in for a moment; then, very naturally, (insofar as having one forearm placed on the windowsill, his head resting against the open shutter, and his body bent forward in such a way as to throw weight on the pectoral muscles impelled him to take some sort of action), he settled into the pose; he also took a cigarette from the breast-pocket of his pyjama jacket, a box of matches from one side-pocket, and lit up.

When he had finished smoking, he stubbed his cigarette out against the window-sash and flipped it into the street. He remained there a moment longer, staring at the small black mark burnt into the wood, like a tiny extinguished brazier; then he quit his post, closed shutters and window once more, and returned to the middle of the room.

This time he made for a kind of commode, or chest of drawers, which stood in the left-hand corner of the room. On top of this commode stood a tape-recorder. Besson switched it on.

He waited without doing anything further until the greenish control light flickered on, shedding the faintest suspicion of brightness amid the yellowish gloom which had hitherto dominated the place. Then Besson pressed a button, and the spools of the tape-recorder began to revolve at top speed, clattering as they did so. Besson kept one eye on the revolution-counter, spelling out the figures as they flicked past: 145, 140, 135, 130, 125, 120,115, 110, 105, and so on. When the dial of the counter showed 45, he pressed another button, and the spools stopped. Then he switched over to ‘Playback’, hesitated a moment, and jabbed his finger down on the starter. Almost instantly the sound of a woman’s voice, a young girl’s voice pitched to something like F sharp, filled the room. With one swift movement he lay down on the bed and began to listen. At first there was a very soft hissing noise, like the resonances of some long and barely pronouncable word, such as parallelopiped or Ishikawa Goyemon, a sighing note shaped to an H or a J. Then for several seconds there was purring silence again, pullulating with words and gestures. Finally the green light at the far side of the room shivered; someone began to speak and breathe, mouth held close to the microphone, in a most fresh, delicate voice, a living, pulsing body encircling the warm machine. Though her words were barely audible, they seemed to quiver with power. They were murmured, breathed out with a husky catch in the throat, but vastly magnified by the loud-speaker. Now each syllable was a shout, consonants crashed against one another, the least indrawing of breath became a fearful death-rattle. A sort of spurious fury permeated every corner of the room, settling on the furniture and the odds and ends, gathering in each stratum of shadowy air.

…’cause I had no idea what to do. I tried writing to him, sent him a letter for Christmas. He’d written me once, a postcard from Coventry, without his name on it or anything. He’d even disguised his handwriting. That was silly of him, he knew very well it couldn’t be from anyone else. Even supposing, even supposing he didn’t think of that on the spur of the moment, when he printed the letters in capitals and the rest of it, all the same he can’t have helped realizing the truth when it came to signing the thing. It was a view of Coventry Cathedral, you know, something like that anyhow, and he’d sketched in a cowboy on top of the photograph, taking pot-shots at the passers-by with a revolver, and on the other side of the card he’d written, in English, Wish you were here. And he’d signed it with an imaginary name — scratched it out afterwards, but you could still read it, he couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper job of an erasure, and anyway he did it on purpose so that I’d try to decipher it. I looked through a magnifying-glass, and there under the ink-scratches was written John Wallon, or John Warren, something like that. It was so silly. If I—

Besson jumped off the bed and stopped the tape-recorder. Then he went through the whole rigmarole over again, except that this time he checked the spool when the dial showed 15. He pressed the button, and turned his head a fraction to one side, as though someone were on the point of entering the room. At the same moment, his eyes concentrated on a particular part of the wall, at the far end of the room. The tape played through in an uneasy silence, with tiny murmurs and whirring sounds from the motor, and the tense, quick note of his breathing. Something oppressive and conspicuous had dropped in on the scene, some single object as solid as a meteorite. The night was stifling, it must be like a tight band round people’s temples. The penetrating sound of the girl’s voice seemed held back in time for ten or a dozen minutes; and yet the genuine quality of this voice, the echo-presumptive of those preceding remarks, had already filled the whole place, was vibrating in every corner of it, spiralling out towards the kitchen door and the hall, exploring keyholes, sometimes comprehensible, sometimes not, disruptive of all ties, inimical to real life.

It was rather like making the attempt to catch a fragment of wind, entice it through an open window and shut it up in some bare, cube-like room. Or, more closely, like constructing a small cardboard box, lined with mirrors, in order to imprison a ray of light: the lid once shut, the ray of light would go on reflecting ad infinitum from one side of the box to the other. After catching it you would keep it a long time, a year, maybe, or even more, and then one evening, one particular evening, when it was dark, you would carry the little box into your room, and there, very gently, you would open it. And you would see the ray of light dart out, piercing through the night like a star, before it vanished into the black veils of darkness, oblivion’s pitchy chiffon.

François Besson went back to the bed. First he sat upright on it, keeping his eyes fixed on the traditional point some 22 cms to the left of the map of Europe pinned to the wall; then he let himself slump back, not even supporting himself on his elbows. His head missed the pillow by a good foot and a half, but he paid no attention. He stretched out his legs on the mattress, and avoided looking at the ceiling. Since he had to look at something, he preferred it to be an object which brought to mind the long hours he had spent on his feet during the past few days. He scrutinized his jacket, now suspended on a coat-hanger from the handle of the right-hand window. The winking neon-sign outside, by pure accident, suddenly began (having chosen an absurd reflection-point) to adorn the end of his nose, the cleft in his chin, and the tips of his eyelashes, at regular intervals, with little red patches. Every wink changed the colour-tone of the room by something like the ten-millionth of a degree. Then the girl’s voice began again, a hint of a tremor in it, like a guttering match:

François — my dear François. You’re going to find all this very silly. It’s just the way I felt like talking to you today, I don’t know why. How it came about I’ve no idea, but suddenly I began thinking of you. I was getting bored all alone in my room, and it was raining outside, and I had this attack of ’flu, oh you know — Good, you’re there at last, h’m? Then yesterday I ran into Lina, and she talked about you. Not directly, oh no, she just happened to bring the subject up in some other connection. She didn’t even remember your name, she told me: didn’t you ever see her again? That big thin gawky girl who was trying to make a career as an actress, remember? And then she went straight on to something else, so that I didn’t have time to think about you then. It was this morning, just as I was getting up, that I began to. I remembered I hadn’t even answered your letter, the one you sent two months ago. No, I hadn’t forgotten, but every time I meant to reply some snag came up, a visitor, something or other, and I put it off till later. Anyway, I had really made up my mind to get in touch with you, today, or a bit later. I tried to write a letter, but it wasn’t any good. The more I thought about the idea, the more difficult I found it. You know, generally letters are no bother to me at all, I mean, I just take a sheet of paper and the thing dictates itself as I write. But with you it was different. I read your letter through again, twice, do you realize? And the more I looked at it, the more it — the more it scared me. Really paralysed me, in fact. I mean, it was so well written, and so sincere too, and there was I with absolutely nothing to say. I know it’s absolutely ridiculous, but I just didn’t dare try to produce something in the same class. That’s the truth, I swear it, really it is. There was nothing so extraordinary about your letter, nothing all that literary, I mean, but it just, I don’t know, it just struck me as difficult. I didn’t even feel like trying to compete with it. In a way it was something that had to remain unique, like a compliment, do you see what I mean? I just couldn’t reply, if I had the whole thing would have been spoilt. I thought — well, for a moment I thought the best way out was to send you a very short little note, on a visiting-card, saying something like ‘Thank you for your letter’. I’m sure you’d have understood that. Or else I might have sent you a telegram, or come round to see you at your place. Or just done nothing at all. Nothing at all. Because, in the last resort, it was the kind of letter that doesn’t need a reply. I believe — But I was afraid you might be cross, and then I had an idea. Why, I told myself, I could tape my reply, and send you the spool. That way you can hear my actual voice. Besides, I can talk as I feel, I don’t need to make up any fine phrases, it doesn’t matter. I really do get the feeling that you’re going to listen, that I’m free to say what I like. So I went round to Lina and asked her to lend me her tape-recorder and a clean spool. I didn’t tell her why I wanted them. She agreed. Oh, there’s just one thing — when you’ve finished with the spool, she’d like it back. Just send it through the post, her address is 12 Rue de Copernic. That’s all.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, so I’ve got an excuse for saying I hope all goes well with you. There’s a whole heap of news I could tell you about me and the rest of us — but I’m not all that anxious to hold forth to you on that particular topic. Well, anyway, I’m still very much the same — going to psychology lectures, and working now and then. I’ve been doing some painting recently, too. I find it absorbing, but heaven knows if my stuff’s any good. For several days now I’ve been having a red phase. You simply have no idea what an extraordinary colour red is. I never realized till I started using it. I cover vast canvases with red and nothing else. Now I find myself noticing every red object, and you know, there’s an awful lot of them around. I’ve begun collecting them, too. Anything, so long as it’s red. I’ve got bits of material and cardboard boxes and scraps of paper, oh yes and cigarette packets, those Craven A ones, you know. I even keep bits of cotton-wool with blood on them, but the trouble about that is that the blood turns black when it dries. Remember the letters we used to write each other in the old days? Funny the way we invented excuses to send a letter, anything would do. And then we’d post them, very seriously, going home from school, and read them privately in our bedrooms. It was a fine idea for public holidays, or New Year’s Day or Easter, or celebrations like 21st September and 5th July. If we wanted to correspond at other times we had to find some special reason. I used to look in the calendar to see which saint’s day it was, and then write: My dear François, I’m sending you this note today with all my good wishes on the feast of St. Thingummy or St. Whatsit. I even remember there were occasions on which no saints appeared in the calendar, and then I’d send you good wishes for the Immaculate Conception, or the feast of Christ the King. Remember? But that’s all over and done with now. I can’t use dodges like that any more. Even with you. Even if I could be certain you’d understand. Even if I was sure you wouldn’t tell me I was trying to play arty poetic tricks with past memories. Anyway, my position nowadays is very simple on that score — I just can’t write any more, not a word. It’s — it’s a kind of illness. The mere sight of a blank white sheet of paper’s enough to depress me half out of my mind. Frankly, it beats me how anyone still manages to go in for writing — novels, poetry, that kind of kick. Because in the last resort it’s quite useless. Pure dumb egotism. Plus the urge to expose yourself, let other people gobble you up. Anyway it’s so exhausting. Honestly, I just don’t get it. I tell you, I can understand people writing letters and postcards better than I can someone settling down to a novel. It serves no purpose, there isn’t any truth in it. I mean, you don’t make any discoveries or isolate any area of knowledge, you just wallow in illusion. To my way of thinking, it’s like an animal manufacturing its own parasites, a shellfish that creates its own seaweed and attaches the stuff, personally, to its carapace. Art. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve had it. I just don’t believe in it any more. You know, when I told Marc Morgenstein that the other day, he just laughed at me. He said it was all nonsense — I wrote far too well, he liked my stuff, and I was crazy to take myself seriously on such a subject. He also told me that art’s never existed anyway, people talking about it is the only thing that counts. According to him, anything can be reduced to conversation. He also said that when someone had written a piece like ‘Imitation Leather’—you know, the story of the housewife who gets an obsessional thing about her trolley-bus — well, that proved they had something to say. And when one’s got something to say, sooner or later one always manages to say it. I told him that made no difference — everyone in the world had something to say. But he didn’t get it. All the same, I really believe it’s true. I do want to say things, yes, but not in the way I did before. I get the feeling one can express them equally well by — by doing almost anything, going round to the baker’s for bread, or having a chat with the concierge. Obviously I don’t talk about this to the others. You’re no longer in favour. But I don’t think it matters. What’s the point of being regarded as a person of intelligence? One can get along very well on one’s own, don’t you agree? What’s really needed, I feel, is the ability to detach oneself, stand aside. Anyway as far as I’m concerned it’s the end of the road. I can’t stomach lies and poetry any longer.

You know, when you get down to it, people like Morgenstein are about the lowest sort of bastards going. I might be sitting in some café, for instance, lost in my own thoughts — I mean, the kind of ideas that run through your mind sometimes when you’re on your own, and it’s raining, and you get the feeling that — that everything’s stopped. Then in come these types like Morgenstein, sit down, and begin to talk a lot of highflown guff about God, or Marxism, or that line you’ve got at the corner of your mouth—and about the sort of character you represent in their eyes, all alone like that in a café at two o’clock in the afternoon. It’s sure to remind them of some favourite quotation or other, some slop from Racine or Lorca — that kind of thing always gets me so mad! Then — as though you hadn’t thought about it enough on your own in the café or at home, as though you weren’t capable of such a reaction, as though the most you could rise to were silly whims and pseudo-problems — they say things like: Ah yes, I really enjoyed ‘Imitation Leather’, it reminded me of Conrad, or Kipling. You’ve got to go on writing, they tell you, you’re young: it’ll come, you see if it doesn’t. It’s not so much what they actually say to you at the time — what I can’t stand, what really disgusts me, is the thought that when you’ve left they’ll still be at it with some other victim. They couldn’t care less. They’ve had their little moment of friendship and private confidences, they’ve rinsed their mouth out with it and feel quite cock-a-hoop. They’re satisfied. The world belongs to them. I know what they make me think of, they make me think of all those half-wits who rush round back-stage after a performance to unload their crappy compliments on the actors. Just perfect, darling. I so much admired your performance. Honestly, no kidding, you were just great. You try to hide, but they pursue you into every corner, and the more compliments they shower on you, the more naked and half-witted you feel yourself. This sort of thing’s worse than any insult. Oh, I know I’ve no right to talk about you like this, I mean, I haven’t any experience, I only acted once in my life, with Morgenstein’s group. When it was over I was exhausted, you’ve just no idea how exhausted I was. I felt like throwing up, I was trembling from head to foot, I wanted to kill everyone in sight. Yet at the same time, isn’t it odd, I felt empty, flaccid, incapable of doing another thing. And there were other types who managed to catch hold of my arm, and embrace me, and offer their congratulations, and all that jazz. I mean, it’s the same sort of thing if you’re a writer, these days. Morgenstein’s remarks didn’t add up to anything on their own. But before that, you know, when Paul left — no, I’m wrong, it was several days earlier, I think — oh hell, it doesn’t matter anyway. Well, this is the honest truth, I damned nearly emptied all my mother’s tubes of Gardenal down my throat. I’d just finished a short story about a snail called Albert, pretty pretentious stuff, but at least I believed in it this time. All the same, thinking it over again now I can see I’d picked up all the smart mannerisms, you know, bombastic tricks of style, and cute jokes, and crude bits of allegory about self-awareness — and it all had a most unhappy ending, I mean, the snail was cut off from the rest of the world by having the opening in his shell sealed up, just a layer of calcareous matter did the trick, and there was Albert, immobilized. And died. It had amused me to believe in the whole idea, not so much because it might prove a work of genius, or any junk like that — but simply because it was good for a giggle. Well, that wasn’t how it turned out. Quite the reverse, in fact. I thought I’d got the thing under control, but I hadn’t. That snail really took it out of me. At first I set myself to love it a little, just a shade more than was normal. I spent whole days correcting and rewriting the story. Each time I gave the snail a different first name, to see which one suited him best. I tried calling him Jules, Baptiste, Jean-Bernard, Mathieu, Antoine, and heaven knows what else. This probably strikes you as childish, and now I come to think of it again, it strikes me as childish; but at the time I felt it was terribly important. I felt I’d caught, well, a kind of realism, if you like — realism which went far beyond the bounds of the plain narrative. And that as a result there had to be a special first name for every kind of character. I mean, a snail can’t be called anything but Albert, and a goldfish is always Stanislas, and alley-cats have to be called Rama. You know the kind of thing. In fact they were the last props, the last underprops I really mean, of my entire, well, my entire hypocritical life, no not that exactly, but — oh you know, that sort of sudden realization that your life’s one great lie, that you’re lurching on through a mass of trick-effects like a damned doll, a puppet with someone else pulling the strings, and the worst thing of all is that throughout you’re convinced you’re you, your real self. You let yourself be manipulated like this, and all the time you’re beaming a sunny satisfied smile, you’re happy, you imagine you’ve actually invented something on your own, that you’re writing because that’s the way things are. And all the time someone else is pulling the strings, some mentor is controlling your comings and goings, making you write words on bits of paper, and remember bits of your past, leaving you alone in your room, or on the street, in cafés, cinemas, buses, on the stage — do you understand? He’s the one who always leaves you in silent solitude, he’s the one who gnaws away at your confidence, who gets you down, little by little, breaks your spirit, an endless process of slow attrition.

That’s what really makes me sick. You know, there I was, working on this story of Albert the snail, spending all day pounding my typewriter — and then Paul took off, just walked out on me. I–I told you all about that before, in the park, remember? But I didn’t tell you everything. You must have thought me a complete ninny, going overboard for someone like Paul. It’s true he’s not an interesting sort of character, really, but all the same — I don’t know how to explain this — he’s got something, there are amusing sides to his personality, and he’s so unpredictable. One day he’ll come home and set about being a sort of caricature drunk, without taking any notice of a word you say for anything up to a quarter of an hour. Or else he’ll hurl himself at the typewriter and knock out a surrealist poem. I’ve known him get back at midnight, turn on the light, and start walking round and round the table like some sort of nut, pretending to be two people at once, answering his own questions. When he’s like that, he’s fine. Just fine. But he’s a bastard, all the same. I didn’t realize that at first. I couldn’t understand how anyone could spend fifteen minutes making you laugh, and then, the next instant, behave as though you just didn’t exist. I thought that under it all Paul must be an unhappy character, full of complexes and the rest of it, who wanted to hide his real personality. I felt that because it’s the way I am myself. What struck me as so incredible, though, was that anyone could play the kind of game that seemed to be saying to people, Look, you know I really love you deep down, the way children carry on — and then not give a damn when it came to the crunch. I didn’t understand, then, that people like that are really the worst of the lot, because they’re so totally self-obsessed. Like Morgenstein. It’s true, you know — it never struck me before, but when you get down to it Paul and Morgenstein are two of a kind. Every time they put on a comic act, or look hurt, it’s pure eyewash — they’re thinking about themselves the whole time, cocking an eye to see if they’re catching any applause — they fairly gorge themselves on praise, the conceited creatures. They can’t stand being losers, either. Oh I know I sound as though I’m working off some personal grudge against them, that’s obvious, but I’ll swear to God that’s not what really turns me up about them. No, what gets me is that these bastards always come out on top. I’m a sucker, I fall for it every time. They pretend to be drunk, but they’re — they’re just making a fool of me really, and even then it doesn’t make a damn of difference, I’m happy as Larry, I think they’re so good-looking and sensitive and intelligent they just make me melt. That’s the way it goes, every time. They’re always the winners. Even now. Paul really hurt me, do you realize that? There was I, wasting my time trying to get words down on bits of paper, going round the bend over this nonsense about a snail and its limed-up shell, while all the time he, he—God, he just didn’t give a fuck about the whole set-up, he knew perfectly well he was going to get out. He used to take off down the street in his new suit, and spend every evening going round the night-clubs — he picked up other girls, too, he — and on top of all this he was just plain bored, and made no secret of it. When he was with me he never said a word, unless he put on his drunk act. I want to tell you what happened the night before he left, though. I was sitting typing at my table — still the story about the snail. I’d made up my mind to start the whole thing again from scratch, changing all the names. I left nothing the same except the verbs. Some time between eleven and midnight he came in. He stared at me a moment without saying a word, narrowing his eyes the way he does when he’s looking at something that doesn’t interest him. As though he were examining you through the glass wall of an aquarium. I stopped my work and asked him what he wanted. He made no reply, just went on staring at me in that vague way, completely silent. So I started typing again, and just behaved as if he wasn’t there. He stayed like that for a moment, not doing anything, and then suddenly he went into one of his routines. This time it was shadowboxing. He pranced all round the room, weaving and feinting, jabbing away at the curtains and the pillows on my bed. Then he squared up to me and threw phoney punches at my face and stomach. He fell down for an imaginary count and got up again, he groaned and panted, he made kh! kh! noises through his nose to represent the sound of fists hitting flesh. After a moment I’d had more than enough of this, and I told him to knock it off and leave me to work in peace. He took no notice, just went on worse than ever. I went out to the kitchen and drank a glass of milk. When I came back I found him sitting on the bed and smoking one of my cigarettes. I said to him: ‘Are those cigarettes mine?’ and he replied: ‘I don’t know, probably.’ I went back to the table and started typing again. He just went on smoking, and that irritated me, because I couldn’t write with him sitting there on the bed. So I stopped again, and asked him (more for something to say than anything else) if he’d go and get me some more cigarettes when those ran out. At this he smirked rather unpleasantly, and got up to leave, glancing at me in that ironic way of his as he did so. His eyes held mine for about three or four seconds. Then he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray beside the typewriter. I pretended I didn’t give a damn, but the truth is it gave me quite a turn, seeing his arm and hand pass under my nose like that to stub out his cigarette in my ashtray. You — well, you know, it wasn’t just his arm as such, or whatever, it was, it was just the heap of odd thoughts that flashed through my mind as he did it, the notion that he could have been my brother, for instance, and only being able to see this detached bit of him, just his arm and the beginning of his pullover sleeve, a few inches from my nose. It made me feel queer to think that it could have been my arm, that in the beginning — him and me, I mean — it was like being one person.

What I want to say is, I get these weird ideas going through my head the whole time, about me, and Paul, or my father and mother. I can’t shake off the feeling that somehow I don’t exist in the way other people do. Or else I find myself wondering why I’m not Paul, why Paul is the one who’s stretching out his arm towards the ashtray. It’s just the same with my mother and father. I know it’s silly of me, but I can never isolate them as individuals, define them in relationship to myself. What I’m trying to say is, all I manage is the act, the external act, do you see what I mean? And that doesn’t, can’t, isolate anything, it just reflects back at me like a mirror. Paul was — Look, François, please, I’m not telling you all this just for the fun of it. I want you to understand why — why Paul going made such a difference to me. I think one of these days I really will take that overdose of Gardenal. And I wouldn’t want you to think I’d just done it for nothing but messy sentimental reasons. I — look, I think I must be having a kind of nervous breakdown. But there are always thousands of things like that, little hints and details that go over my head. It’s true, though, I’d hate you to think it was just maudlin self-pity. It’s a matter of general understanding, awareness, do you see? Well, anyway, I’d better finish my story. Paul stood over me like that for a moment, and then he began to leaf through my typescript. I can’t stand people going over my stuff when I’m there — I mean, reading a word or two at random on each page. Oh, now, obviously, I couldn’t care less, people can do what they like with my manuscripts, it’s all the same to me. They don’t mean anything to me any longer, they might as well be today’s newspaper. But at that particular moment it still really drove me crazy. I just sat there waiting till he was through. After a bit he must have got bored with turning pages over, because do you know what he did, he picked one out of all the pile at random, and began to read it aloud. When he did that—oh, you won’t understand, but it was at that moment I really saw what a bastard he was. I mean, he — it wasn’t just that he read it as though he didn’t give a damn about it, but on top of that, and this is what I found really awful, he read it so well, as though he understood every word, in a fine, serious voice, the works. Paul’s always had a beautiful speaking voice. He used to talk very loud, to make sure people noticed what a beautiful voice he had. The nerve of it, playing a dirty little trick like that on me—and with one of my own manuscripts! You know, he read so wonderfully, that was what got me. He didn’t give tuppence for the words, and still it was superb. It was, oh I can’t explain, like an apple with maggots inside it, do you see what I mean?

So there was Paul reading, and I wanted — oh, I don’t know what I wanted, not to cry, but to go really cold, suddenly, as though someone had removed an important, an essential part of my body. I watched his big heavy hands gripping the paper, heard that serious voice as it intoned my words, very relaxed, but with great power and life and individuality, while I — Oh hell, what does it matter, when he’d finished reading he walked out of the door and I haven’t seen him since. That isn’t quite the whole story, though. You remember he was alone in my room for a moment while I went out to get a glass of milk? Well, in the time it took me to open the fridge, get out a bottle, and have my drink, he managed to search the room and pocket the money I’d hidden in the wardrobe, under a pile of pullovers. There must have been about sixty notes there, and he took the lot. That’s why he put on such a performance when I came back — to distract my attention. That was really pretty steep, I thought. I suppose it’s how he paid his fare to England or wherever he went.

Afterwards I felt pretty mad because I had no idea what to do. I tried writing to him, sent him a letter for Christmas. He’d written me once, a postcard from Coventry, without his name on it or anything. He’d even disguised his handwriting. That was silly of him, he knew very well it couldn’t be from anyone else. Even supposing, even supposing he didn’t think of that on the spur of the moment, when he printed the letters in capitals and the rest of it, all the same he can’t have helped realizing the truth when it came to signing the thing. It was a view of Coventry Cathedral, you know, something like that anyhow, and he’d sketched in a cowboy on top of the photograph, taking pot-shots at the passers-by with a revolver, and on the other side of the card he’d written, in English, Wish you were here. And he’d signed it with an imaginary name — scratched it out afterwards, but you could still read it, he couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper job of an erasure, and anyway he did it on purpose so that I’d try to decipher it. I looked through a magnifying-glass, and there under the ink-scratches was written John Wallon, or John Warren, something like that. It was so silly. If I could ever — But it’s too late now.

There. I’ve told you. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. When I’m gone, try not to condemn me. I suppose everything I’ve said still comes under the heading of literature, really: a monologue doesn’t qualify as non-fiction, does it? But I’d like you, at least, to believe me, because of the rest of them, my father and mother, my friends, even Paul if somebody tells him about it one day, believe that I didn’t do it out of despair, or just for sloppy sentimental reasons, you know what I mean, but simply because there was nothing much else left for me to do. Tomorrow, if I have the courage, I shall take a glass and a carafe of water, and swallow all my mother’s little pink tablets. I’m stopping now because the tape’s just about finished. Au revoir, Anna Mathilde Passeron.

Besson got up and stopped the tape-recorder. Silence suddenly descended on the room again, mingling with the chiaroscuro, so palpable now that it was no longer distinguishable from the areas of shadow. Then it slipped and shifted, moving sideways with an indescribable pendulum-like motion. It penetrated even to Besson’s inner self, filling the secret recesses of his mind, stifling thought. Silence began to reverberate through his head and chest, with a sound not unlike the roar of a large cataract. He could feel its breathing, too, a gentle up and down motion. There was no room for anything else, neither sound nor colour: nothing but illimitable silence, here, in the night, amid this surrounding darkness: a silence that clung to every object, a horrible vast chill calm, clammy, tangible, that left you lying flat and helpless on the floor of an empty room, all alone, moving towards death.

For a long time Besson continued to stare at the motionless objects in front of him. He stood and scrutinized them with a gaze of fixed and burning intensity, which neither saw nor made any attempt to comprehend them. The words just spoken had entered his skull, and it was they that now swarmed in the silence. Like so much furniture, like a row of heavy, useless, ornamental vases, they had dragged on, vacant, floating, unattached; and now they were back in their own proper domain, that mute kingdom from which they would never re-emerge. From nothing they came, to nothing they returned. The world of insanity, the filthy sewer-flow of battering words, syllables chopped from distorted human lips, pointless and interminable chatter. And what, truly, was the object of it all, what was it after? To try and hook on somewhere, put out tentacles, infiltrate other people’s minds, though with all this they still never achieve personality. Accursed, accursed be the tongues of mankind! Had they never existed, had they not duped humanity century after century, how much happier would life on this earth have been!

After this lengthy contemplation of the deep-shadowed objects before him, Besson went back to his bed. For a moment he gazed up at the ceiling, with the reflected glow from passing cars’ headlights moving across it; then he stretched out on top of the blankets and tried to sleep. But it was not so easy. In the first place, the shadows had begun to move. Then there was music somewhere, a tune which Besson, though he stiffened his resistance till it was rock-hard, still could not help humming under his breath. At first it was an easy, flexible theme that could be followed without any trouble. But soon the parts multiplied, the humming became a regular symphony orchestra, complete with trumpet, clavicord, oboe, flute, violin, cello, harp and cymbals.

When he was tired of sorting out the score and following its variously divergent threads of melody, Besson opened his eyes, sat up on the bed, and waited.

The room was still the same: a large cube with barely visible walls, a grey expanse of floor, closed and white-slatted shutters: a sealed-off, private place, and one that he knew by heart. Sounds from outside drifted up the face of the building and made their way in through the window: familiar, unimportant noises, easily identifiable during their leisurely passage — the whirr of car-tyres on wet macadam, the drone of engines, a motor-cycle put-putting down the street, slowly fading away in the distance. The tap of heels on the pavement, murmuring of voices. A tremendous thunder-clap. Rain-drops pattering on the shutters. All these sounds were pleasurable. One forgot everything — even the fact that one was alive.

The darkness was rich-textured, its black surface shot with bluish glints, grey half-tones, gleams of whiteness. The room was sealed, hermetically sealed, and he, Besson, was inside it. Neither hot nor cold. Time passed smoothly, second by second, impalpable, untouched by chaos.

It was like being in a small and cosy dream, a house of one’s own, bought and paid for, surrounded by a big silent garden. A piece of property at Lorgues, two acres of land, umbrella pines, the scent of lavender, with a sweet little stream flowing through it, a five-roomed farmhouse, a well, some cobbles. In fact it was even better than that, because one possessed nothing at all. No, it was enough to be oneself, alone in a closed room, without light, with the sound of rain-drops tapping against the slats of the shutters. Minutes and hours stretch out interminably, their slow passage is sheer delight: actions and thoughts form a sequence of harmonious moments, lucid, exquisitely clear, suspended in continuity. What a good thing, what a really good thing it is to have a room of one’s own!

With slow movements, François Besson lit another cigarette. The flame of the match, white at first, then yellow, pierced through the darkness in the room. The loose strands of tobacco at the tip of the cigarette writhed and glowed, the paper caught fire. It occurred to Besson that what he would really like was a room lined with mirrors, so as not to miss any detail of what he was about. The match suddenly went out, without his needing to blow it, and all that remained in the darkness was a red glowing hole, close to his face, which got a little deeper each time he inhaled.

After a while Besson got up and began to prowl round the room. He wandered from one piece of furniture to another, peered through the slits in the shutters. As it was cold, he slipped his coat on over his pyjama jacket. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed again. Here he remained for a moment, quite still, contemplating the square mass of the table.

It must have been about half past twelve or one in the morning, because the church clock nearby had only chimed once. Somewhere off in the middle of the town a fire-engine was tearing along, siren screaming. From time to time a rumble of thunder could be heard. But inside the room there was no danger: neither rain nor lightning-flashes could penetrate there, and all remained still. There was no breath of wind. Everything was tranquil and assured; each object had its appointed place, the disposition of surfaces remained constant. You could shut your eyes, and when you opened them again a moment later nothing would have changed.

The whole thing was just right. François Besson sat there inside his calm and minuscule pattern, as though encircled by a frame. It was a very fine pattern, traced with a pen on white paper, where everything was fixed for some sort of eternity; a genuine caricature, too, in which every object — each ashtray, each piece of furniture — had found its precise silhouette recorded. The dado on the wall, with its small scrawled design, ochre against a white ground, had been faithfully reproduced; so had the handle of the door, a green plastic knob, and the key-hole, its wards so cut that it would only take the right key. Then there were the bedclothes, a pair of slippers, two chairs with purple cushions; the double window with its greenish shutters; the map of Europe pinned to the wall, with all those strange names printed against capes and peninsulas: Mandal, Cuxhaven, Penmarc’h, Jamaja, Mechra el Hader, Tomaszów, Ape, Sasovo, Yecla. And at the centre of the pattern, squatting on the edge of his bed, was this caricature of a man, with scrawny limbs and high cheekbones and cropped hair, who sat quite still, staring into space. It gave one an urge to develop the pattern further: to colour it, for instance, or write something in one of those white balloons emerging from people’s mouths, such as ‘I wonder what I’m doing here’, or ‘It’s good to be indoors at home when the rain’s coming down like that outside’.

Besson got up and walked to the right-hand window, pressed his forehead against the cold glass, and looked around. The street was almost deserted. Rain was beating down on its surface, and that of the pavement on either side; a great pool of unwavering light spread round the foot of each street-lamp. All the shops had turned off their illuminated signs except one, where a line of neon still glowed at the bottom of the display-window. Cars sped past with a hiss of tyres. From time to time some stooping, shadowy figure, wrapped in a macintosh, could be seen hurrying along under the lee of the walls. The way the shutter-slats were aligned, Besson was unable to see the sky; but the odds were that it was near-black with perhaps a touch of pink, and the rain coming down from the middle of it, and from heaven knows where before that.

Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain-drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world he had designed. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a cautious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music. A series of deep pulsing vibrations arose from the heart of darkness, out of flatness and obscurity, and then through him, through his conscious body, they became movement, throbbing, powerful movement, measuring time. They mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earth’s crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street-lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations. The void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the substance of the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went on growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers, gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its pattern on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistible feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there, for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceive the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare, skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tunes that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch infinity; to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you, the actions you perform, the song of all that is, that’s triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephemeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent.

Then, when everything had been touched, breathed, seen and heard with minutely detailed attention, Besson went across to the door and switched on the electric light. In a flash the room was filled with yellow radiance, which illuminated every remote corner, made objects stand out from the floor as though by levitation. Besson went back to his table, and sat down. But this time he did not touch anything. He simply rested both elbows on the wooden surfaces, and kept quite still.

Outside, the rain was still falling. There came a steady drumming from the swollen gutters, and another, softer sound, as each separate drop filled up another tiny patch on the exposed white stucco façade, very gently, without seeming to do so. The wind was blowing in sharp gusts, so that loose shutters banged to and fro, and twigs were torn from the trees and came pattering against the windows.

As he sat there Besson felt a numb torpor steal over him, the terrified urge to burrow right down to the bottom of a heap of leaves, and hibernate. He sensed something of what trees experience: sadness and melancholy clutched at his heart, his life seemed to ebb perceptibly. Beyond the ramparts of his room the sky still loomed heavily. Each time he drew breath, a pall of vapour penetrated his lungs, a strange sense of weathering descended on him. Was it for this that one was alive, was it for this that one tried to think, at all costs, that one fought to encompass the world by the power of reason? To be an organism scarcely distinguishable from a tree, to have, in the last resort, all these roots, these yellowed and slowly falling leaves? To become stooped and bent, to feel your bones creak, and wear out your ancient wrinkled skin in its long battle with time? To be shovelled away into the ground, held close in its vice-like grip, and achieve oneness with the turning seasons?

At this point someone knocked twice on the door of the room. Besson heard, but made no reply. A few seconds later the summons was repeated: four knocks this time. Besson turned his head towards the door and said: ‘Come in.’

A woman entered the room. She was about sixty, and wore a brown dressing-gown with red slippers. Her face was heavy with fatigue, and her grey hair hung loose down her back. Cautiously she took a step or two towards the table.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Besson said.

The woman sat down on the edge of the bed. She had very large eyes, with brownish rings under them. She smiled, tentatively.

‘You ought to go to bed,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly three in the morning.’

Besson made a show of searching for some paper on his table.

‘I’m not sleepy,’ he said.

‘You’ll make yourself ill—’

‘No, really, I’m not tired.’

The woman looked at the table.

‘Are you working?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tiring yourself out for nothing,’ the woman said. ‘You’d be better off asleep.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Besson said. ‘But I’m in the middle of sorting out these papers.’

She said nothing for a moment. Besson looked at her hands, and noticed that they were covered with thick bulging veins. Then he glanced up at her face.

‘What about you?’ he said. ‘You’re not asleep either.’

‘I heard you playing the tape-recorder just now,’ the woman said. ‘You’ll wake your father, you know. You ought to—’

She did not finish the sentence.

‘I’m going to bed in a minute,’ Besson said. ‘I had no idea it was so late.’

‘Very nearly three o’clock.’

‘I didn’t hear the clock strike.’

‘What about your watch?’

Besson glanced down at the table. ‘Twenty-five to three,’ he said. There was another silence.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ the woman said.

‘No.’

The woman turned her head a little to one side.

‘What a stink of stale tobacco-smoke,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you ought to cut down your smoking a bit?’

Besson shrugged. ‘Yes, maybe,’ he said.

‘All those cigarettes can’t be doing you any good.’ She pulled her dressing-gown tighter round her. ‘Well, I’m off to bed then,’ she said.

Besson began to fiddle with the coffee-spoon.

‘Have you been drinking a lot of coffee?’ the woman asked.

‘No, just one cup.’

‘Because that isn’t going to help you to sleep, you know.’

‘Maybe, but it keeps me warm.’

She got up and came towards the table.

‘Don’t be too long getting to bed,’ she said.

‘No, of course not, I’ll be off in a moment,’ Besson said.

‘Up every night like this till three o’clock, you’ll end by making yourself ill.’

‘There’s no danger of that, I assure you.’

The woman looked towards the windows. ‘My, just look at that rain,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Besson agreed. ‘It’s certainly coming down.’

‘The end-of-winter rains,’ she said, and began to retreat towards the door.

‘I’m going back to bed, then,’ she said.

‘Good,’ Besson said.

‘Don’t sit up like that too long, François.’

‘No, I’m going to bed too.’

She hesitated a moment, then said: ‘And — and don’t go on thinking about … all that business, François.’

Silence.

‘Do you hear me? Don’t go on thinking about—’

‘Yes. Yes, I heard you.’

She made a great effort. ‘It can’t — I mean, it does no good, do you see?’

He made no reply.

‘You mustn’t think about all that business. Go to sleep. Don’t think about anything.’

‘All right,’ Besson said.

‘If there’s anything you need, just let me know.’

‘I don’t need anything, thank you.’

She began to go out; and then she turned her puffy face back towards Besson, and the sight pierced him to the heart. Eyes, hands, mouth, grey hair — all carried the same message, of compassion and love. Besson lowered his head and looked away.

‘Goodnight, François,’ the woman’s voice said.

‘Goodnight,’ said Besson.

‘Sleep well,’ she said. ‘See you tomorrow—’ Then she gave a little laugh. ‘What am I saying, tomorrow’s today, isn’t it? I mean, three in the morning—’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Sleep well.’

‘Goodnight.’

The door closed behind her.

For a moment Besson remained quite still, as though his mother might have taken it into her head to watch his actions through the key-hole. Then he got up and, an imaginary gun in his hands, began to act out a vendetta within the four walls of his room.