The Flood

Chapter Eight

The storm — The wind — François Besson and Marthe talk together — What might have been the beginning of love — A walk through a hurricane — The sea — How to become immortal — The pattern of a lightning-flash

ON the eighth day a storm blew up over the town. The wind had come from the east. After travelling across the sea all night, it reached the houses and the riverside early that morning. It burst furiously on all these stone and concrete canyons, smashing against the façades of buildings, bending the trees, driving down on the ground in whirling eddies of dust, whipping up the breakers so that they surged high along the line of the groins. Invisible ramparts of air were set in violent motion, with a long sinister wailing sound that filled the chimney flues. Clouds stretched out across the sky, shredded into wisps, acquired long off-white tails reaching from one horizon to the other. Doors began to creak softly; and on each closed shutter or pane of glass there was a feeling of pressure, as though some gigantic panting beast were out there on the other side, pushing and grinding at it with vicious tentacles. All along those worn, crumbling walls, loose bits of stucco tore free and plunged groundwards into the street, falling very fast, leaving a thin trail of dust behind them. Scraps of paper, leaves from the plane-trees, odd bits of material would go spinning into the air, as high as the upper storeys of the surrounding houses then fall back, then whirl aloft once more, as though they had suddenly gone mad. Various objects were blown off roofs and balconies. Sudden whirling columns of air formed at street intersections, weird raging maelstroms that — revolving round a still point at their base — hollowed out deep craters in the lifeless dust. At the very centre of these inverted vortices was a point of concentrated nothingness, which moved with great precision, thrusting its single upturned eye down over the surface of the earth. Through the wind’s steady whistling the whole town resounded with a series of cracks and bangs and underground rumblings. When the storm was right over the town, the wind began to launch its assault on the houses. Regularly, several times a minute, an airy avalanche would roar down against walls and windows, in an effort to penetrate, to breach the defences. It did not last long, but each time it happened — after a second or so of lowering silence — it felt as though every vertical object were shuddering and cracking up. Even the thickest walls, great blocks of ferro-concrete, roofs, colonnades and all, would quiver in unison under this violent onslaught. Gaping holes, swollen with liquid gas, opened their mouths wide. The corridors of the streets, every gap and crack, yawned open for a brief moment, while there surged into them, torrent upon torrent, this bestial thing that had come from so far to be their conqueror. From time to time, between one squall and the next, a flight of pigeons would take off and vanish in the mazy back-streets, fleeing the invisible enemy, searching desperately for any hiding-place — under the guttering, beside a balcony, in the lee of some thick bushy tree, where these lethal attacks could no longer find them. People, too, were trying to escape. They were running along the pavement, sodden clothes plastered to their bodies, hair all anyhow, eyes red from the dust that had blown into them. They would take shelter for a moment in doorways, wait till the gust died down, and then stagger on their way, struggling clumsily against the heavy pressure of the atmosphere. Slowly, far above them, a jet aircraft forced its way through the wind. Women’s skirts lifted like wings, giving fleeting glimpses of pale, lardy thighs.

For more than an hour Besson stayed in the room, listening, while the storm rose to its climax. He saw the sky clear, close in, and then lighten again, enough to let the sun’s rays struggle through. He heard the wind smash against the walls like a battering-ram, again and again, the whining, slamming rumpus of its impact. Outside even the daylight now seemed unsure of itself: it wavered intermittently, sometimes becoming so dim and overcast that one felt the flame had finally gone out altogether. But then it would pick up again, suddenly blaze out more brightly than before, flooding walls and pavements with sheets of light against which the shadows stood out black and intense.

It was comfortable up there in the room; one felt truly sheltered and protected, it might have been a ship’s cabin. The air was tranquil here, nothing stirred, no fear of stifling. The flies were all asleep, upside-down, clustering on the light-bulb or hanging from the tulle curtains.

Besson stretched out on the bed. In the kitchen the redheaded girl was busy ironing, a green apron tied round her waist. Occasionally she, too, cocked an ear at the noise the wind was making against the windows. Finally she turned on her transistor radio, and the flat was flooded with music — a cinema organ recital that floated in the air, nasal, monotonous, vulgar, sometimes rising in a run of excruciating trills, then falling back, a blurred mess of sound, only to repeat the pattern once more: endless wearisome reiterations, a kind of recurrent stutter that swathed you from head to foot, paralysed not only your movements but also your speech, your very though-processes, and finally toppled you into a kind of shallow black hole, quite helpless.

Besson heard the music right through to the end. When it stopped there was the sound of a woman’s voice, talking fast and volubly, but the radio was too far away for Besson to make out what she was saying. When the voice ceased, there was silence for four or five seconds, broken only by the crackle of static. Then came more music, but swing this time, and a woman singing to its accompaniment. The song had a slow, muted tempo, occasionally rising to a harsh crescendo, sometimes lingering softly on one word, sustaining the note. Besson tried to catch what the singer was saying, but the most he picked up were single words or mere broken syllables: ‘… me …’, ‘… I … flowers … ow ers … ’, ‘… told me …’, ‘… you knew …’, ‘… me … or people …’ ‘…ated …’, ‘… fi-i-ire …’

The song ended with a most curious sound, a sort of low-pitched throaty buzz that vibrated in the air for a long time, together with the accompaniment, and then stopped, abruptly. There followed another three or four seconds of crackling silence, and then the same voice as before began to speak again, very fast, telling an incomprehensible story in its unknown tongue. What it actually said was more or less as follows: ‘Listen, ladies, don’t worry about wind and rain and seasonal inclemencies of that sort, you can tame them, yes, you can make them your best friends, the most reliable aids to your beauty, if you just know how to get the better of them, these furious elements will freshen up your complexion, put a bright sparkle in your eye, fill you with joie de vivre, but if on the other hand you don’t take them seriously you’ll wish you had afterwards, they’ll dry up your skin and ruin your delicate complexion and give you premature wrinkles, in fact they’ll treat you as enemies, they’ll be absolutely pitiless, so get the better of this severe cold and wind and rain, ladies, learn to preserve your beauty just as you preserve your health and happiness, and to achieve this, make a rule of using Pollen Face Cream every morning, Pollen, exclusively manufactured by Boyer-Vidal, which will keep the proper quota of moisture in your skin all day, Pollen, the face cream for every occasion! Good shopping, ladies!’

Besson stayed where he was for some time, listening to the voice from the little white-and-gold plastic box. If his watch was right, it was half past three; but the clock that stood on the refrigerator, in the kitchen, made the time nearer four o’clock.

A little later the redheaded girl came in, and they talked for a while.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve sort of got used to seeing — to seeing you around.’ She used the familiar tu, and the word came out with embarrassed hesitancy.

‘What do you mean, seeing me around?’ Besson asked.

‘Well, here. I mean to say, you’ve become a feature of the landscape, haven’t you?’

Besson tried to make a joke of it, but felt depressed despite himself.

‘That’s serious,’ he said.

The girl fumbled in her apron pocket and fished a cigarette out of a new packet.

‘Got any matches?’ she asked.

Besson offered her his box. As she took it, she grasped Besson’s hand at the same moment, then let it go again. Her hair was tousled, and its flaming red texture seemed to be reflected in her face. Even her eyes had a red glint about them, under the fine sweep of her gleaming lashes. She smoked her cigarette, watching Besson all the time.

‘You’re not in the least like him,’ she said. ‘He was always chattering, always on the move, couldn’t keep still for a second. Whereas you — well, honestly, I’ve never seen a more inert character.’

‘Oh, I can move, all right,’ Besson said.

‘You? Why, you spend all day stretched out on that bed.’

‘It isn’t true. I go out a lot. I take plenty of walks.’

‘You don’t do a job of work, though. You don’t want to—’

‘Oh, I’ve done that, too. When I was a teacher. Off I’d go to school, day in day out, and rattle off the same stuff to a classroom full of idiots—’

‘Did they rag you?’

‘No, not really. At first I made a real effort and kept them under control. Afterwards I let them do whatever they liked. They used to read the comics. Some of them even smoked — those at the back of the class, anyway — and drank bottles of Coca-Cola. But they didn’t make any noise. I told them one day. Do whatever you like, but I’m not having any noise. I had a book to read, you see. I told them, if I hear so much as a whisper, I’ll paste the stuffing out of you. That was about it. I spent my period reading, and when I heard the bell, I just got up and went.’

‘You weren’t a good teacher.’

‘I was, you know. My lessons were fine. I prepared them very carefully. But the kids just weren’t interested.’

‘Were they all like that?’

‘No, of course not. There were two or three — at first they used to stay and ask me questions, after class. But I soon sent them packing and, they got bored. In the end they got to be just like the others.’

‘And what—’

‘There was one who did interest me, though. A boy called David. He showed me his poems, once. He was an unhealthy kid, with a lot of lines on his face for his age. He really was different from the rest of them. He wrote the weirdest poems, all about the story of the Creation. There was a character in them called Elleüs, if I remember rightly. It was all very much in the mythical tradition, but not bad stuff by any means. I don’t know what became of him afterwards.’

‘What about the others? Did they just play along?’

‘Three-quarters of them, sure. But I didn’t bother. It was their look-out. Luckily, in the end, the Head got wind of what was going on. He dropped in on the class one day, unannounced. Some of the boys were smoking, and others reading their comics. He slaughtered the lot of them — and I got the sack, on the spot. That’s all there is to tell about it.’

The redheaded girl giggled. ‘I’d love to have been there,’ she said.

Outside the wind was blowing more fiercely than ever, howling down the street, wrenching loose everything in sight. In the middle of the room, on the bed, Besson and Marthe felt as though they were in a railway carriage, travelling at full speed, and drawn by an invisible engine.

The redheaded girl said: ‘That’s funny. Do you know, just about the same thing happened to me, too. I used to work in the Post Office, you know. I managed to get a job as a telephone operator. Just part-time, in the afternoon. While I was working I left Lucas in a children’s nursery. I did the job any old how, no kidding, just hit or miss. And no one noticed a bloody thing. I had to make up my own mind that I’d got to get out — if I hadn’t I’d be there still. But after it was finished I felt so damned depressed. Told myself I was a failure, that there wasn’t a single thing in life I was capable of doing, all that jazz.’

She paused, and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her forefinger.

‘Well, maybe in the last resort it’s not all that important anyway,’ she said.

‘Maybe not,’ said Besson.

She hesitated a moment, and then, her eyes on the ash-laden tip of her cigarette, added: ‘The really important thing is to be happy.’

When Besson made no answer to this, she said: ‘What about you? Are you happy?’

He tried to answer the question seriously.

‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I’m happy, yes. Sometimes not. But it isn’t all that important.’

‘Yes, it is important. Just when do you feel happy?’ She looked straight at him as she spoke.

‘I’m not sure,’ Besson said. ‘It all depends. One fellow I used to know said that if you wanted to be happy, all you needed was a system.’

‘A system?’

‘Yes, you know — religious faith, Marxism, anything you like so long as it’s got a system behind it.’

‘But being happy’s a simpler matter than that, surely?’

‘Or more complicated. Maybe it’s having a real grasp of what you’re about — I mean, you’re in a car, and you know you’re in a car.’ He too used the familiar tu.

She said nothing for a moment, as though digesting this idea — or perhaps as though she had not understood it.

‘But don’t you think it’s easy to know what you’re doing?’ she asked him. ‘Surely it’s easy?’

‘No,’ Besson said. ‘But sometimes it happens.’

Her great deep liquid eyes gazed at him as though they would penetrate to the very depths of his soul. Besson felt a wave of shame surge up within him. In a somewhat lower voice she went on: ‘When I’m happy I know about it all right. But I never manage to work out why. I’m never happy when I’m alone, though. You can see that, can’t you? Well, at this moment, for instance, But I can’t figure out the reason—’ She paused, then added, nervously: ‘Maybe, it’s well, because — because of you—’

‘You’re wrong,’ Besson said.

‘Maybe,’ Marthe conceded.

But it was too late: her white face moved forward towards him, and as it approached — like a tragic mask, pierced by these two dark and heavy-lashed eyes — he felt as though it were an abyss yawning dizzily before him, a void, an emptiness that he could never fill. He tried to forget the eyes, but the head with its mass of tumbled hair settled on his chest, and he had to put his hands behind it, round the nape of the neck. He could feel the warm skin that lay over the vertebrae, and a little lower down a mole or beauty-spot. Her hands were clutching the material of his shirt, on either side of his ribs, fingers crooked and dug in, as though to claw the flesh. And the regular sound of her all-too-human breathing filled his ears, forcing him to breathe too, to be alive, to show awareness.

Then she raised her head, bent it backwards, let the daylight illuminate it — the tremulous, breathing mouth, the fine-bridged nose, pale cheeks flushed with pink, each tiny line and wrinkle, every spot, the fine down along the jaw-line, the pores in her skin that were like thousands of minuscule windows through which the air came and went. Her great staring eyes blurred, became patches of brown mist, floated towards one another, suddenly merged in the middle of her forehead, forming a moist circle within the unfocused framework of the mask, a circle charged with violence and humiliation and hope. Furiously he plunged into it, no longer hearing the fragmentary words that reached him, calling him by name; plummeted down into the troubled waters of dissension and unhappiness, let them close above his head.

A little while later François Besson found himself out in the street again, all alone in the midst of the hurricane. Fighting against the wind all the way, he went down through the town, street after street, till he reached the sea. The pavements were more or less deserted, and those few people he did meet looked like ghostly silhouettes: they could be seen struggling across the road at an intersection, or hugging the wall as they advanced, harrassed and wind-tossed fugitives, their clothes blown every which way, scarcely able to breathe. A litter of plaster and bits of wood and loose scraps of corrugated iron sheeting testified to the route the hurricane had taken. Besson followed this trail, leaning now forwards, now backwards, hair standing on end, raincoat flattened against his legs, the wind whipping round overhead. But he no longer took any heed of his surroundings: the shop-windows and mirrors, far from becoming dimmer, more opaque, had taken on an extra dimension of brightness, so much so, indeed, that it was as though reality were contained in them. No more stopping to contemplate the images, whether beautiful or hideous, that they presented: anyone who did so would be struck motionless, frozen, maybe turned into a pillar of salt.

One had to keep alert, too. All over town objects came raining down out of the sky: there was danger everywhere. People were liable to get hit on the head by tiles, or chimney-pots, or even by shutters that had been wrenched off their hinges. Besson kept close in against the wall, hands thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, collar turned up around his neck. The cars passing him in the road were travelling at reduced speed: some had their headlights switched on, others were using their windscreen-wipers. Café doors were shut, and many shop blinds had been ripped to ribbons. Whole newspapers went looping along the streets; ‘No Entry’ signs rattled themselves loose from their brackets. Refuse went skittering along beside the gutter, across muddy puddles, took off for some unknown destination.

It had not required much to sow the seeds of panic in the town. There had been a sudden, but quite peaceful, displacement of air. That was all. Just a little air in motion. But this air was hard and solid. It slammed into houses with the speed of an express train. It blew in violent gusts along the tarred surface of the roads, made skylights tremble, shook window-panes loose.

With considerable effort Besson made his way towards the sea-front. It was from this direction that the storm was coming. Already he could hear a low malevolent roar, a confusion of sounds that blended with the sheets of spray now being flung up behind the last row of houses, and spreading across the sky over the roof-tops like a great invisible curtain. Besson walked through one square in which the trees would bend over, cracking and splitting, then suddenly whip upright again with a great rustle of leaves. At one intersection he passed there was a crazy spiral of dust whirling round. A little further on, he reached the street which gave directly on to the front, and the wind took him slap in the face, like the wind of a big gun being fired. Besson stopped in astonishment, and felt a sort of ghostly hand thrusting his head back, trying to push its fingers into his mouth and nostrils. In order to recover his breath, he was forced to turn his back on the wind for a few seconds; this done, he set off down the narrow corridor-like street once more. At the further end of it, like a mirage, hung the pink and black cloud-patterns of the sky, veiled now by flying spindrift. He tacked from one sidewalk to the other, always moving slantwise, his right hand protecting his eyes. He travelled the hundred yards which separated him from the front without once looking up, his eyes fixed on his feet as they stumbled over the ground. At last he reached the end of the street, and the panoramic spectacle of the sea stood revealed before him.

The impact was total and instantaneous. As the wind slammed against his body, forcing him backwards, he saw the whole of that vast heaving expanse, mile upon mile of it, heard the continuous howling of the storm. From the mist-enshrouded horizon waves came rolling in one behind the other, surging, dipping, flecked with white crests that the wind scythed away as they moved, roaring on till they reached the high bastion of the promenade, then soaring up for the last time, up, up, hanging there briefly as though frozen, so that you could see the great hollow underside of the comber, gunmetal grey, glinting with wisps of straw, then falling in one swift movement, with a bang like a lid being slammed home. Each breaker began to rise far out in the bay, and came closer, closer, its muted thunder shaking the earth’s foundations as it moved, till it reached that point of the shore where Besson now stood: then the spray would rise vertically into the sky like a geyser, there would be that noise like a giant casserole being shut, and the spray would form a grey, powdery column that the air blew apart into shreds driving it towards the houses, fanning it out into quicksilver branches, dwindling now, stems, slivers, blades of grass, glittering yet lustreless strands of hair, threads of silver and silk that melted in the gusty air and, as they whipped along, let fall a few big, dirty drops of moisture, which evaporated as soon as they hit the ground.

After each wave broke, Besson’s hair and skin and clothes were drenched with spindrift. Tiny globules of spray were blown into his mouth as he breathed, so that he tasted salt and smelt the pungent odour of iodine. For a moment he remained like this, buffeted by the wind, taking an occasional step forward or back, struggling to maintain his balance. The town seemed quite dead. Black clouds scudded over it, heavy, charged with electricity, now and then emitting a great flash of pale sheet-lightning, which sent shadows and colours dancing across the storm-tossed front, as though a great conflagration had broken out on the further horizon.

The promenade was completely deserted. No cars ventured along the road because of the waves bursting over it. The shutters in the houses were closed and barred.

Sometimes a wave would rise up higher than the rest, and it looked as though the swollen waters were trying to regain possession of their ancient domain. Pebbles were scooped up from the beach and sent flying across the pavements or against the foot of the wall. One of them, about the size of an egg, came rolling in front of Besson. He stooped and picked it up, and tried to throw it back into that heaving mountainous mass of water, but the wind caught it in mid-flight and flung it back again. A sudden panic swept over Besson. He wondered whether he ought not get away from there, beat a retreat inland, seek refuge on some mountaintop. But he was determined to see more of what was going on. He struggled down to the shore, and painfully made his way along it, stumbling through puddles of dirty sea-water, drenched with bursts of spray, twisting his ankles on stones. At the far end of the beach there was a causeway, protected by breakwaters. Besson made his way towards it.

In order to get on to the causeway, he had to climb over a barricade with a notice that read: OUT OF BOUNDS: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The causeway ran a long way out into the sea. At its far end there stood a lighthouse, and a flagpole with a red flag flying from it. Panting from the wind, which took his breath away, sodden by bursts of spray, Besson began to walk along the causeway, clinging to the iron handrail. Here the sea was divided into two parts. On the right the great waves came piling in on top of one another, burst against the foot of the wall; on the left lay the harbour entrance. The water here was black, its surface churned up by long eddies that spread out like oil-slicks.

Danger threatened on all sides; the sea writhed into countless voracious mouths, here, there, horrible fascinating mouths that came mooing up at you. There would be a sudden upsurge of water, and the mouth would rise rapidly towards the level of the causeway. For a moment it would hang there, only a few inches away, opening and closing its toothless gums, so that behind that slobbering curtain of spray you could see the black tunnel of its throat. It reached up towards the living flesh, imploringly, with its long tonsils and palpitating gullet and eager belly: it resembled the huge liquid eye of some big carnivore, struggling to reach up further, but struggling in vain. The waves could no longer sustain it, and it would fall back in a burst of fury, break up on the groyne with a thunderous report that left the causeway’s stone foundations quivering for some time afterwards. The iron guide-rail shuddered under Besson’s hand, and this shuddering sensation passed up his arm into every part of his body, troubling the waters, dredging up silt off the bottom, rapidly opening and closing the feed-valves of depression. Then the healing cloud rose right overhead in the sky, the angry breathing of the frustrated elements was all around him. Besson leaned back and for several long seconds let the chill rain drive down on his face and clothes, which absorbed it hungrily. Then, refreshed by this break he broke into a run.

When he was about half-way to the lighthouse, he came upon a kind of shelter built as a protection against the wind. He stopped there a moment to rest and smoke a cigarette. But the packet had got damp, and the tobacco burnt badly; Besson needed at least fifteen matches to smoke one cigarette right through.

Here in the shelter he had his back to the sea. He heard the noise of the storm behind him, but he himself was facing the town. In the distance, outside the harbour, he could dimly see the old crumbling houses, squared up against the wind, not budging, letting the gusts buffet their vertical façades. Grey, pink-tinged clouds of spume, whipping up off the waves, drifted across in front of their walls and gave them the appearance of retreating. But they did not retreat one inch. They stayed exactly where they were, closed in, four-square to the elements, a chiaroscuro of deep black and the palest grey, like a line of rocks that had tumbled down from the mountainside centuries before. The storm was moving down the valley now: trees bent groundwards, and now and then with a sharp crack, a branch would break. Fields of grass were flattened in every direction, and across the curving hills there was a motion as of some giant hand, stroking their surface to and fro in a kind of caress. Further still, right on the horizon, at the most distant point from the source of the storm, the mountains reared their violet-tinged bastion against the clouds. Sometimes there would be a flash of bluish light above one of the peaks, but no thunder was audible afterwards. The whole landscape was dim, pitch-dark, crazy, and the bowl of the wind had blotted out all other sounds.

When he had finished looking at the pink-flushed sea-front and the rounded hills and the rampart of mountains behind them, Besson abandoned his shelter and began to advance along the causeway again. Progress became more and more difficult the further out into the sea one got. Worst of all, the handrail stopped before the lighthouse, and Besson was reduced to crawling along the causeway on all fours. At one point the water seemed to gather itself, the sea sank back, withdrew so far that the rocks on the sea-bottom, with their clustering limpets, were exposed to view. For a second or so there was nothing but this huge sinister well, this boiling vortex at the foot of the causeway. Then in a flash the hole filled up, and a great column of water soared shuddering into the air. When it began to topple above the sea-wall, Besson flung himself down flat and held his breath. The vast liquid mass came hissing down on him, with such force that it poured across into the harbour basin. As soon as the water had ebbed away again, Besson got up and began to run in the direction of the lighthouse. He reached it at last, and took shelter behind the tall stone bastion on which it stood.

He remained there some minutes, an hour perhaps, in the midst of the hurricane, unconscious of the cold, not noticing that his clothes were soaked through with sea-water. All around him, to left and right, straight ahead, even under his feet, the wild spectacle continued. The waves mouthed and slapped against the jetty, with a drawn-out, clinging, wetly explosive sound. Clouds of spray rose and mingled in the air, daylight acquired rainbow tints. The long black headlands stretching out on either side seemed to cleave through the water like surfaced submarines. Warring gusts tore and ripped at each other, made strange thin noises like seagulls or crying children. On the horizon sea and sky blurred together in a welter of spray, cloud, and bright heaving hollows of water. Sometimes the sun appeared for a moment or two, suddenly exposed through some rent in the middle of the dense cloud-base, and yellow rays would slant down on the surface of the waves. At times, again, strange and baffling shadows (or what looked like shadows) formed under the swell, as though some vast creature were swimming along on the bottom. Harsh and incandescent blue patches, like streams of marine lava, would suddenly appear.

The movement of these masses of water was constant and indefatigable. Under the transparent grey skin, with its endless rising and falling rhythm, heavy triangular shapes were in constant movement, leaving lines of bubbles, swift straight eddies, the occasional branching, fibrous vortex boiling round on its own axis. Above, the swooping, gusty air thrust down on this grey and opaque surface with the full force of its atmospheric pressure, carved out hollows, sculpted undulating valleys and mountain ridges and volcanoes and angry, belching sulphur-springs. It was like a dance in which everything joined, even the fish and the waving seaweed in the shadowy depths below, a dance that moved each mass of green and clouded slime, swung it softly but firmly to and fro with the rest. This music, mingled with the wind’s shrill whine, marked out a rhythm for the sea’s overall sequence of movements. First there came a deep, deep indrawing as of breath, when the water shrank back into itself, emptying the rock-pools, cascading and gurgling down, pouring back on its own substance. Then came the counter-wave, surging back against the sea-wall, trying to breach it, then in its panic-stricken flight creating a loud, choppy crest of water from the two liquid masses in opposition. After this there would be a brief silence while the sea grew still and collected its strength, followed by the muted roar of unleashed energy, the rush and hiss of moving water, a sort of tchchchchchchchch, steadily increasing in volume, a harsh, rasping note that echoed round the surging curve of the wave. Finally the sound made by this climatic discharge underwent a swift transformation, reverberating and swelling into a long, solemn roll of thunder, though by now the waves were so huge that even this remained almost inaudible. A vast chchchbrooooom!, a thunderous explosion made solid and palpable, a majestic circle, a rampart of stone and spray that rose slowly skywards and floated amid the wind, slowing down everything around it, checking time’s pendulum, making the world, for one brief moment, an abode of giants.

Standing there behind the lighthouse, his eyes fixed on the sea. Besson felt himself possessed by this rhythm — the rhythm of eternity, or something very like it. His mind vanished utterly, was lost amid the dance of the waves: it was as though the wind had entered into him, blowing straight through the open windows of his body. Each fresh assault by the waves took shape simultaneously in the very depths of his being, making him stiffen, filling him with an agony of hatred. The violence of these great liquid masses, ton upon ton of water, possessed him completely, and as each wave broke a complementary explosion took place somewhere inside his chest, metamorphosing him into a kind of human bomb. When he was fully attuned to the rhythm of wind and sea, when he was one with it, standing four-square against the assaults of the elements, yet at the same time vibrating with their own exultation, like a rock, or some old black slimy ring-bolt, covered with wrack and barnacles, then he began to breathe. Slowly, surely, he breathed in harmony with them. His lungs filled with the same air as the wave imbibed, leaning on the cloud-swollen horizon, accumulating the same vast burden of violence and determination. His breast expanded magnificently to contain it all, stretched almost to bursting point, he was taller and broader than a mountain. Then the intake of breath ended, and for a moment the elemental forces hung poised in equilibrium. But at the mysterious signal from that whole wide expanse of sea, the unknown signal with so strong and regular a rhythm that he no longer even heard it, the sluice-gates opened and another great mass of water hurled itself at the obstacle in its way — at the town, too, and at those vast gawping crowds — while a sound like a great gong-stroke spread rippling out to the four corners of the horizon, a sun of sheer sound, its rays swimming far above the earth, creating universal panic, leaving all inconsequential objects scattered face downwards.

Like some point of blind intensity, there was created, at the very heart of the uproar, a zone of calm and silence in which, for some few seconds, everything was destroyed, annihilated. But the curse never ran out, the cycle of respiration began all over again, just as before, without haste or exhaustion. Besson felt that in some way he was entering upon eternity. To avoid death was a simple matter: all one needed to do was to breathe in this special way, long slow powerful breaths that followed the rhythm of the sea.

To join the waves in their struggle against the earth’s bastions, against scurrying, hurrying mankind, whose tiny hearts always raced madly, like a shrewmouse’s.

Soon one’s whole body would begin to follow this respiratory rhythm. The skin would turn cold and colourless, like water, and blood would pulse slowy through one’s veins, streaky, bubbling, saline, ebbing and flowing in the circulatory system according to the same soft rhythm, flux and reflux. Soon thoughts would no longer roam freely through one’s mind, but simply float there in situ, captive and unchanging, like sea-anemones, for ever digesting the minute scraps of matter around them: inexhaustible thoughts, without verbal form, bereft of desire, thoughts that all conveyed an identical message, though just what this was it was impossible to know for certain. ‘Light and shadow’, perhaps, or ‘singing singing’, or even ‘God’.

Eyes would no longer see, nor ears hear; the skin would no longer react to cold or sunlight, nor the stomach be conscious of hunger. All that would exist would be the inner self, the inner self that contained the heaving sea, the wind in its courses, the scudding clouds; the inner self that was absorbed in its proper task of respiration. Every organ would breathe in unison — heart, intestines, private parts, brain, throat, even down to the cells of the skin and each individual granule of bone. The body would inflate itself and breathe out in time with the natural scene around it, endlessly, like some gigantic lung. Here was the secret of eternal life: respiration. Breathe, never stop breathing, breathe in harmony with the rest of creation, breathe in the sea, breathe in the heart of the living rock, in the nimbus of clouds, in the midst of that black void where the galaxies wheel through space. Breathe according to the rhythm of truth.

The minutes passed, and at last the wind fell. The sky was now completely covered with thick cloud. Darkness was falling on the shadowy town, filling the streets through which Besson walked. Silence had returned, and the sidewalks were crowded once more. through brightly-lit shop windows various displays of goods caught the eye — fabrics, furniture, decorated pastries. Besson stopped a moment at a window behind which there stood two mechanical birds, done up in green and red plush respectively, both bobbing up and down, clacking their beaks, with much frenzied flappings of wings. Behind the birds was a girl in an armchair, smoking a cigarette and staring in front of her with vacant, heavily made-up eyes.

A little further on, as he was passing a public park, Besson heard the leaves begin to rustle in the trees. A breath of wind stirred the branches, and the first drops of rain started to fall, plopping heavily on the asphalt. Then, high above the town, the black clouds suddenly exploded, and water came slamming down with a noise like a thunderclap. Besson ran across and took shelter in a doorway, and stood watching the avalanche descend. The rain fell at a very slight angle, in thick straight voluted lines, as though the sky were a vast colander.

The gutters soon overflowed on to the sidewalks, washing away masses of dead leaves and bits of paper. Water from the roof-tops came crashing down through every drain-pipe. The whole town was built on a slope, and the water went streaming over concrete and asphalt and tiling as though drawn towards a great hole somewhere near the bottom. Moisture dripped from every object in sight: the impression it gave was not so much that it had dropped out of the sky, as that it was there already, embodied in all matter, and had been given some magic order to distil itself. It came bursting out of everything — leaves, posters on hoardings, cracks in the pavement, manhole covers, even from people’s skins. It was like sweat, the kind of sweat that comes streaming through every dilated pore when one’s running a high temperature; an endless flow, from the fountain gush to the slow trickle, drop by pearly drop, pitting all its soft and pliant strength against the hard element of stone, the air’s impenetrability.

Above the line of trees in the park Besson could see the still dark sky. The roofs of the houses round the square stood out very pale against it, and the television aerials gleamed as though coated with silver paint.

Sounds still existed, but they were no longer clear-cut: the downpour had cast a halo about them, they shone in a brief and murmurous aureole before being drowned and snuffed out. Besson breathed in the odour of damp earth through the covering layers of bitumen. He could also smell the current of fresh air coming down from the upper atmosphere, laden with ozone. He strained his ears to catch any echo, from behind the rampart-like rows of houses, of the river’s roar as it rose higher and higher, milk-coloured now, washing down clouds of earth and turf in its spate. He even opened his mouth to catch and taste the flavour of the rain.

But, most striking of all, at this precise moment — without any visible hint of how the effect was produced, there came a bright triple crack in the expanse of jet-black cloud, stretching half-way across the sky, from zenith to horizon. Clear-cut, unmoving, as though traced with a crayon, a pattern of branching veins, this sudden phenomenon broke through the obscurity with such pure unwavering brightness, so intense and snow-white a degree of incandescence that it almost ceased to be light. It hung there, its three-timed fork branching down towards the earth, shattering the sky, carved upon the firmament, like some gigantic root, and at that moment nothing else existed: the sky and horizon, the surface of the town, seas and rivers — all vanished in an instant, shattered into a thousand fragments, were enveloped in darkness. Nothing remained but this vast and silent testament to the presence of electrical power, this divine and blinding emblem of whiteness, beauty, peace; the great unmoving design that had annihilated all else, in whose light years and centuries of effort and striving would find illumination, would be impregnated with violence, penetrated by happiness. Cold and incandescence here blended in a single flashlight crack, one scored line of brightness that had photographed the entire world.

When this moment was over — a second that felt like infinity — the thunderclap followed. It rumbled, hesitated, then crashed down over Besson, making the very earth tremble. The rain now began to flow more freely, flooding the street with its beneficent tide: it was rather like the sensation of opening a door wide to let some fresh air into a firelit room — or warmth into a cold one.