Then there was that submarine abyss, the plummeting dive down, down, past a rampart high as a twenty-storey building, into the depths, down to squid-haunted grottoes and thick waving carpets of seaweed. The black hole expanded, became a volcano’s maw, a cavern, the heart of a glowing cathedral of embers, where the bloated, half-eaten corpse went tumbling down, over and over, to the bottom.
Minutes passed. Hours passed. Days, years passed. All elements mingled and merged, interlocking, fused in an automatic sequence Nothing was left now save the immense misery of having survived. Nothing — not a single pattern, not one word written on actual solid paper — could palliate that fact. The days resembled a knife, a knife with a keen blade. Maps and dictionaries were appalling, because they could never be complete: there was always some elusive factor omitted. The tiny palpitating animal fled through the undergrowth, leaving no trace behind, not even a scent; yet everything had been enclosed within a smooth-walled sphere, without any opening, crazily reflecting each object back towards its centre.
Besson lay stretched out on the pebbles — they had begun to hurt him — and watched the stormy future approach him. Here, too, it was possible to forget what was going to happen in a few mintues. In a few hours, days, years. Old age would descend, one of these days, bringing its shameful peace. Features would wither, muscles lose their strength. Yet none of this mattered. Death would come like any other visitant, falling from roof or sky without warning. In the street, in a group of loafers. In some stinking bed, against a beslobbered pillow. In a wrecked car. Half way up a staircase, so that the silly lifeless body rolled down to the bottom again, bumping from tread to tread, skull knocking like a hollow calabash. Forty years old. Fifty-five. Sixty-eight. Seventy-seven, seventy-nine, eighty-one, eighty-four, ninety-two, a hundred and four, a hundred and five, a hundred and six. Which of these figures would turn out to be the right one? Which would be the fatal day? 22nd August 1999, or 4th May 1983? Or 13th December 2002? Or perhaps 1st April 2014? Which day would it be? And what time of day? Noon? Two in the afternoon? Nine-thirty p.m.? Or in the small hours of the morning, after an exhausting and nightmare-ridden sleep? What would give out first? Heart? Kidneys? Liver? Lungs? Spine? But none of this had very much importance. For the years, the years would continue to unfold in their serried ranks, no more distinguishable from one another than buffaloes at a watering-hole, and the years would become centuries, and the centuries would follow one another in turn, like great striations of marble. In the remote future, far beyond this place, this moment, time would still be thrusting out its branches, a growing tree. Languages would decline, arts gutter into oblivion. Ideas would glide smoothly on, small boats borne by the stream, never reaching any destination. There would be no end, just as there had been no beginning: simply night falling over the world’s achievements, veiling them in light shadow. The invisible record would turn on its own axis, swiftly at the periphery, almost stationary towards the centre. And eternity would be there, not hidden but omnipresent; not an external pall, but permeating the inner heart of things, at the centre of time’s central point.
Then, when Besson recognized this great beauty; when he understood that all had been in vain, and that the moment could not be sustained; when he acknowledged his defeat, and saw the proclamation of his destiny; when, at last, he turned his violence against himself: then he opened his eyes wide and stared at the sun. The blinding brightness entered his eyeballs and exploded there; the sudden pain was almost unbearable, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Besson turned his head away for a moment, trying to find some object that could stop him slipping away from the world: his eyes scanned the beach avidly, trying to find something, anything, that instant — a wasp, a wandering ant, a gnat. But there was nothing, nothing but shingle and pebbles with a vast bluish hole in the middle that shifted as he looked at it. Then his hand closed on a small pebble shaped like a snail, and picked it up. Besson lay back on the beach, and still clutching the little pebble, opened his eyes and looked into the sun again. This time he did not shut them.
Light pierced his skull as though he had never seen light before, a burning and lava-like flood, a cleansing influx that permeated the furthest recesses of his skull. A blank, white, monotonous sound invaded his body little by little and floated it off the ground. The ground receded, opened to form his unfathomable tomb, and the air parted asunder. This was the moment, now. Stiffening his will to the uttermost, Besson pitted his staring eyes against the sun, against fire and earth and water, never flinching, against men and beasts, against stones, against the air, against the vast and planet-swarming emptiness of outer space. He stood there in defiance of them all, racked by pain and loathing, and offered them the delicate shield of his twin eyes, from which the tears now flowed ceaselessly. These two globes, with their delicate irises and dark translucent pupils, he now surrendered to the world. To the sun’s savage brightness he exposed the dark and secret surface of his retinas, so that by burning the memory of vengeance might be preserved, and never perish. Then, at last, he began a soft and agonized whimpering, the hoarse unhappy cry of a gibbon, screaming without rhyme or reason at the onset of darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
Society at large — In a train — A little boy smokes his first cigarette — The tourist bus — Mothers — The end of Anna’s story — Echo of a suicide
ON the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth days, and all the days that followed, there was no more day: only one black unbroken night, that went on for ever. The town was rid of its incubus now, and inside the houses, with their warm electric radiators, people went on living just as they had always done. Angèle Basman, for instance, a woman of forty-two, was busy deep-frying potatoes in boiling oil, a red-flowered apron round her waist, tiny drops of hot fat spitting out of the pan on to her bare arms as she stood over the gas-stove. Or Michou, a tabby cat, who was fast asleep in the sunny part of some suburban back garden, while the fleas tracked through his thick fur, looking for the best place to bite him. Or the thin young girl with washed-out complexion and cropped black hair, who was wrapping a handful of bleeding lights up in newspaper — having previously smeared her sheets with it to stop her mother realizing she was pregnant.