Malevil, Page 9

  The end of the world, or rather the end of the world in which we had lived until then, began in the simplest and least dramatic of ways. The electricity failed. When the darkness fell there was laughter, someone observed that it must be a power failure, a cigarette lighter crackled twice and a flame appeared, lighting up Thomas’s face.

  “Will you light the candles?” I asked as I walked over to him. “No, better still, give me the lighter. I’ll do it myself. I know where the brackets are.”

  “I can still find my mouth without candles,” Peyssou’s voice said.

  And someone, perhaps Colin, said in a quiet voice with a little laugh, “It’s certainly big enough.”

  With the lighter flame quivering in front of me, I walked past Momo and realized that his radio had ceased its bellowing, although the dial was still lit up. I lit the four candles in the two nearest brackets, and their light, after the darkness, seemed almost too intense, even though they still left the greater part of the cellar in obscurity. The brackets had been fixed fairly low down on the walls in order not to spoil the lines of the vaulting, and our shadows on the latter looked gigantic and dislocated. I handed the lighter back to Thomas, who replaced it in his raincoat pocket and once more set off toward the door.

  “So you’ve turned that damn thing off at last!” I said to Momo.

  “I’nt hur it hoff!” he answered, looking at me with deep reproach, as though I had cast a spell on the radio. “It hon’t hurk!”

  “It won’t work!” La Menou cried indignantly. “A brand new radio! And the batteries new from yesterday! I bought them in La Roque!”

  “It would be extremely surprising,” Thomas’s voice broke in. His face swam once more into the light as he walked back toward us yet again. “It was working only a moment ago, wasn’t it? Are you sure you haven’t been messing about with the batteries?”

  “No, no,” Momo grunted.

  “Show me,” Thomas said as he laid his maps down on a stool.

  I expected to see Momo clutch his radio to him and back away, but he handed it over to Thomas immediately, with the air of a worried mother entrusting her sick baby to a doctor. Thomas switched the radio off, thereby extinguishing the dial light, then switched it on again, turned it up to full volume, and slowly moved the needle across the entire tuning range. There were violent crackling noises, but no recognizable sounds emerged.

  “When the lights went out, did you drop it? Did you knock it against anything?”

  Momo shook his head. Thomas took a red penknife out of his pocket and, using the smallest blade, unscrewed the back of the radio. Then he held it up close to one of the candle brackets and inspected the insides.

  “I can’t see anything wrong,” he said. “It looks in perfect shape to me.”

  He replaced the screws one by one, and I thought he was going to hand the radio back to Momo and get on his way, but he did nothing of the sort. He stayed there motionless, a preoccupied expression on his face, moving the needle back and forth across the dial.

  We were all standing there, the seven of us, silently listening to the silence, if I can put it that way, of the portable radio, when a noise exploded of which I can convey no idea except by using comparisons that all seem to me ludicrously inadequate: rolls of thunder, pneumatic drills, sirens, airplanes going through the sound barrier, herds of maddened locomotives. But anyway, something hammering, screaming, metallically grinding, and screaming, the highest and lowest frequencies of sound at the same time, screwed up to such a volume that it went beyond human perception. I don’t know whether noise when it reaches such paroxysmic proportions is capable of killing. But I believe that it would have done so if it had lasted.

  I flattened my hands desperately against my ears, I bent double, I tried to turn myself into a ball, and I realized that I was trembling from head to foot. I am certain that this convulsive trembling was a purely physiological reaction to a noise intensity at the limit of human tolerance. Because at that moment I had not yet begun to be afraid. I was too stupid and shaken to form any idea. I didn’t even tell myself that this cacophony had to be incredibly loud in order to be reaching me through walls seven feet thick and a whole story below ground.

  I pressed my hands against my temples, I shook, and I had the feeling my head was about to explode. At the same time idiotic notions began shooting through my mind. I wondered indignantly who had knocked over my glass, which I could see lying on its side two yards away. I also wondered why Momo was lying flat on his stomach on the flagged floor, face pressed to the stone, hands pressed against the back of his head, and why La Menou, who was shaking him by the shoulders, had her mouth stretched wide open without emitting the slightest sound.

  The words I have used—din, cacophony, thunder—give no idea of the intensity of the noise. It stopped after a period of time I have no way of gauging. A few seconds, I suspect. I realized it had stopped when I myself stopped trembling, and when Colin, who had been sitting on the floor to my right throughout, said something in my ear and I recognized the word “racket.” At the same time I became aware of a plaintive yapping sound. It was coming from Momo.

  I cautiously unstuck my hands from my tortured ears, and the yapping became shriller, mingled now with La Menou’s murmurs of commiseration. Then the yapping ceased, La Menou stopped speaking, and following upon the inhuman noise we had just undergone a silence fell upon the cellar so profound, so abnormal, and so painful that it made me want to cry out. It was as though I had been leaning against the noise, and when it ceased I found myself suspended in a void. I felt incapable of moving an inch, and at the same time my field of vision had shrunk. Apart from La Menou and Momo, who were lying directly in front of me, I could see no one, not even Colin, even though he later assured me that he had not budged from his position beside me.

  Linked in some way I could not understand to the silence, a feeling of horror filled me. I realized simultaneously that I was suffocating and streaming with sweat. I removed, or rather ripped off, the turtleneck sweater I had pulled on before coming down into the cellar. But I scarcely noticed any difference without it. The sweat continued to well from my forehead and run down my cheeks, under my armpits, and down the small of my back. I was experiencing an intense thirst, my lips were dry, and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. After a moment I realized that I was holding my mouth open and panting like a dog, in quick short gasps, yet without being able to overcome the sensation of being slowly choked. At the same time I experienced an extreme lassitude, and sitting there on the floor, back against a barrel, I felt incapable of either speaking or moving.

  No one uttered a word. The cellar was now as silent as a tomb, and there was no sound whatever to be heard other than that of seven mouths panting for breath. I could now make out the rest of my companions, but the image was blurred, confused in my mind with a sensation of weakness and nausea, as though I was about to faint. I closed my eyes. The effort to look around me seemed intolerably exhausting. There was no thought in my head, no questions, not even puzzlement as to why I was being slowly suffocated. I slumped in my corner like a dying animal, wholly inert. I panted, I sweated, and I experienced a feeling of appalling dread. I knew only one thing with absolute certainty: I was going to die.

  I saw Thomas’s face appear in my field of vision and come gradually into focus. He was naked to the waist, pale, streaming with sweat. He said in a whisper, “Take your clothes off.” I was staggered at not having thought of it earlier. I removed my shirt and undershirt. Thomas helped me. Very fortunately I wasn’t wearing my riding boots, since even with his assistance I would never have succeeded in getting them off. The smallest movement reduced me to exhaustion. It took me three tries to pull my pants off, and even then it was only thanks to Thomas that I succeeded.

  A second time he put his mouth to my ear, and I heard “Thermometer... by tap... hundred and fifty degrees.”

  I heard him clearly, but it took me some moments to comprehend that he had disc
overed from a reading of the thermometer over the water tap that the temperature in the cellar had risen from plus fifty-five degrees to plus a hundred and fifty.

  I felt a sense of relief. I was not dying of an incomprehensible disease after all. I was dying of heat. But the expression was still no more than a metaphor in my mind. I did not envisage for a second the possibility that the temperature might continue to rise and become lethal. Limited by past experience, I was wholly unable to conceive the notion that it was possible, quite literally, to die of heat in a cellar.

  I succeeded in pulling myself up onto my knees, and at the expense of agonizing effort I managed to crawl over to the tub of rinsing water. I fastened both hands onto the rim of the tub, and with my heart thumping against my ribs, everything swimming in front of my eyes, half choking, I managed to pull myself upright and plunge my arms and head in the water. It gave me a delicious sensation of coolness, which meant, I suppose, that it had not yet had time to heat up to the temperature of the surrounding air. I stayed in that position so long that I would probably have drowned if my hands had not come into contact with the bottom of the tub and began pushing, as though of their own accord, so that my head finally emerged. I became aware then that while immersed in the dirty wine-tainted water pumped back into the tub by the rinser I had been drinking it. After that I succeeded in keeping on my feet and seeing my companions clearly. Apart from Colin, who had probably heard what Thomas whispered to me, they were all still fully dressed. Peyssou’s eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep. Momo, incredibly it seemed to me, still had his sweater on. He was lying on the floor motionless, head on La Menou’s lap. La Menou herself was propped up against a barrel, eyes closed, emaciated face absolutely without a trace of life. Meyssonnier was looking at me with eyes in which I could read despair and impotence. I realized that he had seen me drink, that he wanted to do the same, but that he hadn’t the strength to drag himself over to the tub.

  I said, “Take off your clothes.”

  I had intended to speak with authority, but the result was a shock. The voice that emerged from my lips was wispy, toneless, a feeble croak. I added with absurd politeness, “If you don’t mind.”

  Peyssou didn’t move. La Menou opened her eyes and made an effort to take off Momo’s sweater, but she was unable to lift her son’s torso and fell back again, streaming with sweat, against the curved staves of the barrel. She kept opening and closing her mouth in the most horrifyingly painful way, like a fish dying on a riverbank. Meyssonnier kept his eyes fixed on me, and his fingers began unbuttoning his shirt, but so slowly that I realized he was never going to manage it.

  I myself fell down again into a sitting position beside the tub, panting hard, but with my eyes still fixed on the despair in Meyssonnier’s, determined to help him if I could find the strength. Pushing myself up on one elbow, I knocked against one of the two six-compartment metal crates that Momo had been using to carry the bottles back and forth between La Menou and myself. I counted the six bottles in it. And so badly was my mind functioning that I had to start over twice before I succeeded in counting up to six. I took hold of the nearest bottle. It seemed very heavy. I lifted it with a great deal of effort to my lips and drank, puzzled as to why I had been drinking dirty water when there was so much wine all around me. The liquid was warm and acrid. I drank about half the bottle at one go. I was sweating so profusely that my eyebrows, despite their thickness, were unable to dam the stream of perspiration. It trickled down in a constant stream into my eyes and blinded me. Nevertheless I felt my vigor returning slightly, and began moving toward Meyssonnier, not crawling, but dragging myself along on my left side while holding the half-full bottle in my right hand.

  I noticed that the flagstones were very hot against my hip. I halted to regain my breath while the drops of sweat streamed down my face and body as though I had just emerged from a bath. I threw my head back in order to keep the sweat out of my eyes and caught sight of the ribbed vaulting above my head. I couldn’t see it very clearly, because the light from the candles was too dim, but I had the impression that the ribs were glowing as though heated to white heat.

  And as I lay there, stupefied and stifling, watching my sweat dripping ceaselessly onto the burning flagstones, the thought came to me that we were all imprisoned in that cellar like roasting fowl in an oven, our skin already blistered and streaming with melting fat. Yet even then, even at that moment when I had succeeded in formulating what was after all a fairly accurate notion of the situation, I still thought of that notion as a metaphor, and so paralyzed was my logical faculty that I did not for a single second try to picture to myself what was happening outside. On the contrary, if I had had the strength to open the two doors of the little vaulted corridor, to climb the stairs and make my way outside, I would have done so, in the complete conviction that I would find the selfsame coolness outside that I had left only an hour before.

  I reached Meyssonnier and held out the bottle, then realized that he was incapable of taking hold of it. So I pushed the neck between his dry lips, which seemed to have stuck to each other. At first most of the wine spilled down his chin, but as soon as his mouth was well moistened, his lips tightened around the glass and his swallow became more rapid. I experienced a vast relief at seeing the bottle emptying itself, because holding it up to his mouth required an enormous effort, and I scarcely had the strength to set it down on the floor when he had finished.

  Meyssonnier then turned his head toward me, without speaking, but with a look of gratitude at once so piteous and so childlike that in my state of weakness at that moment I felt near to tears. But at the same time the fact of having come to his aid gave me added strength, and I was able to help him undress. When it was done I arranged his clothes underneath him and under myself to isolate our bodies from the burning stones, and with my head leaning back beside his against a barrel I must have gone into a faint for several seconds, because suddenly I was wondering where I was and what I was doing there. Everything in front of me was so blurred and vague that I thought my sweat must be blinding me. At the cost of an incredible effort I managed to wipe my hand over my eyes, but the blurring still remained for several more seconds. I hadn’t even the strength to focus my eyes.

  When my vision did eventually become clearer I saw Colin and Thomas moving around Peyssou, undressing him and helping him drink. Turning my head painfully to the right, I saw Momo and his mother lying side by side completely naked, La Menou with her eyes closed and huddled into a foetal position, like those tiny skeletons unearthed from prehistoric burial mounds. I wondered how she had found the strength to undress herself and even to get Momo’s clothes off as well, but the thought vanished again almost immediately.

  I had just conceived a plan that would require every ounce of my strength, that of crawling back to the tub and climbing into it. How I succeeded in doing so I have no idea, because the flagstones were by now hotter than ever, but I can see myself still at the foot of the tub making desperate efforts to haul myself up its side, pressing the palm of my left hand against the wall, then pulling it back again immediately as though I had touched a sheet of red-hot metal. I must assume that I succeeded, however, since I remember finding myself sitting in the water, knees pressed against my chin and keeping my head just above the level of the liquid. I am certain, having thought it over later, that it must have been the hottest bath I have ever taken, but at the time I experienced an amazing sensation of coolness. I also remember having drunk my bath water on several occasions. And I imagine that I must also have dozed off, because I suddenly awoke with a terrible start to see the cellar door swinging open to disclose the figure of a man.

  I stared at him. He took two steps into the cellar, then stood swaying on his feet. He was naked. His hair and eyebrows had disappeared, his body was as red and swollen as though it had been immersed for several minutes in boiling water. But the thing that seemed to me most horrible and froze me with terror was that there were strips of bloody fl
esh hanging from his chest, his belly, and his legs. Yet despite all that, I don’t know how, he was standing upright, he was looking at me, and although his face was no longer anything but one bloody wound, I recognized him by his eyes. It was Germain, my hired hand from Les Sept Fayards.

  I said, “Germain!”

  And immediately, as though he had only been waiting for that cry, he collapsed forward, rolled over in a somersault, and came to rest flat on his back, motionless, legs straight, arms spread-eagled on either side. At the same time, a current of air reached me from the still open door so scorching that I decided to climb out of the tub and close it. And quite incredibly I succeeded, either by crawling on all fours or dragging myself, I no longer remember, but there I was pushing with all my weight against the heavy oak panel. It slowly began to budge at last, and with an immense feeling of relief I heard the latch click into its slot.

  I was panting and streaming with sweat, the flagstones were scorching me, and I wondered with inexpressible anguish if I was going to succeed in getting back to my tub. I was propped on elbows and knees, totally exhausted, head hanging down, barely a few steps away from Germain, and I hadn’t even the strength to crawl over to him. But it would have been pointless. I knew that already. He was dead. And at that point, when I no longer had the strength even to lift my head, elbows and knees being burned by the floor, fighting down a desire to give up and let myself die, I looked across at Germain’s corpse and comprehended for the first time, in a flash of illumination, that we were surrounded by an ocean of fire in which all human, animal, and plant life had been consumed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I have just read through what I have written, and a number of things I had not noticed before immediately sprang to my attention. For example, I wonder how Germain, already dying and stripped of clothing by the fire—in fact stripped even of his skin, poor fellow—found the strength to reach us down in the cellar. I imagine that he must have received an urgent message from a customer, realized that he couldn’t phone me because he knew I was in the cellar, set out for Malevil on his motorbike, and was caught by the holocaust just as he was entering the castle, in other words at some point where he was already relatively protected from the sheet of fire by the cliff. Given that hypothesis, he must only have been licked by the very fringe, as it were, of the titanic tongue of flame that shot down like a vast lightning flash from north to south. Which would explain, it seems to me, the fact that he was not totally consumed by it, like most of the population of Malejac, of whom nothing remained but a few blackened bones beneath a layer of ash.