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Title: A Happy Death Author: Albert Camus Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: fiction, death, existentialism, philosophy, absurdism Source: http://centretruths.co.uk/fahdtu/A%20HAPPY%20DEATH.htm Notes: Translated from the French by Richard Howard
IT was ten in the morning, and Patrice Mersault was walking steadily
towards Zagreus’ villa. By now the housekeeper had left for the market
and the villa was deserted. It was a beautiful April morning, chilly and
bright; the sky was radiant, but there was no warmth in the glistening
sunshine. The empty road sloped up towards the villa, and a pure light
streamed between the pines covering the hillside. Patrice Mersault was
carrying a suitcase, and as he walked on through the primal morning, the
only sounds he heard were the click of his own footsteps on the cold
road and the regular creak of the suitcase handle.
Not far from the villa, the road crossed a little square decorated with
flower beds and benches. The effect of the early red geraniums among the
grey aloes, the blue sky and the whitewashed walls was so fresh, so
childlike that Mersault stopped a moment before walking on through the
square. Then the road sloped down again towards Zagreus’ villa. On the
doorstep he paused and put on his gloves. Mersault opened the door which
the cripple never locked and carefully closed it behind him. He walked
down the hall to the third door on the left, knocked and went in.
Zagreus was there of course, a blanket over the stumps of his legs,
sitting in an armchair by the fire exactly where Mersault had stood two
days ago. He was reading, and his book lay open on the blanket; there
was no surprise in his round eyes as he stared up at Mersault, who was
standing in front of the closed door. The curtains were drawn back, and
patches of sunshine lay on the floor, the furniture, making objects
glitter in the room. Beyond the window, the morning rejoiced over the
cold, golden earth. A great icy joy, the birds’ shrill, tentative
outcry, the flood of pitiless light gave the day an aspect of innocence
and truth. Mersault stood motionless, the room’s stifling heat filling
his throat, his ears. Despite the change in the weather, there was a
blazing fire in the grate. And Mersault felt his blood rising to his
temples, pounding at the tips of his ears. Zagreus’ eyes followed his
movements, though he did not say a word. Patrice walked towards the
chest on the other side of the fireplace and put his suitcase down on a
table without looking at the cripple. He felt a faint tremor in his
ankles now. He took out a cigarette and lit it — clumsily, for he was
wearing gloves. A faint noise behind him made him turn around, the
cigarette between his lips. Zagreus was still staring at him, but had
just closed the book. Mersault — the fire was painfully hot against his
knees now — could read the title upside down: Capital Courtier by
Baltasar Gracian. Then he bent over the chest and opened it. The
revolver was still there, its lustrous black, almost feline curves on
the white letter. Mersault picked up the envelope with his left hand and
the revolver with his right. After an instant’s hesitation, he thrust
the gun under his left arm and opened the envelope. It contained one
large sheet of paper, with only a few lines of Zagreus’ tall angular
handwriting across the top:
‘I am doing away with only half a man. In need cause no problem — there
is more than enough here to pay off those who have taken care of me till
now. Please use what is left over to improve conditions of the men in
the condemned cell. But I know it’s asking a lot.’
Expressionless, Mersault folded the sheet and put it back in the
envelope. As he did so the smoke from his cigarette stung his eyes, and
a tiny chunk of ash fell on the envelope. He shook it off, set the
envelope on the table where it was sure to be noticed, and turned
towards Zagreus who was staring at the envelope now, his stubby powerful
fingers still holding the book. Mersault bent down, turned the key of
the little strongbox inside the chest, and took out the packets of
banknotes, only their ends visible in the newspaper wrappings. Holding
the gun under one arm, with the other hand he methodically filled up the
suitcase. There were fewer than twenty packets of a hundred, and
Mersault realized he had brought too large a suitcase. He left one
packet in the safe. Then he closed the suitcase, flicked the half-smoked
cigarette into the fire and, taking the revolver in his right hand,
walked towards the cripple.
Zagreus was staring at the window now. A car drove slowly past, making a
faint chewing sound. Motionless, Zagreus seemed to be contemplating all
the inhuman beauty of this April morning. When he felt the barrel
against his right temple, he did not turn away. But Patrice, watching
him, saw his eyes fill with tears. It was Patrice who closed his eyes.
He stepped back and fired. Leaning against the wall for a moment, his
eyes still closed, he felt his blood throbbing in his ears. Then he
opened his eyes. The head had fallen over on to the left shoulder, the
body only slightly tilted. But it was no longer Zagreus he saw now, only
a huge bulging wound of brain, blood and bone. Mersault began to
tremble. He walked around to the other side of the armchair, groped for
Zagreus’ right hand, thrust the revolver into it, raised it to the
temple and let it fall back. The revolver dropped on to the arm of the
chair and then into Zagreus’ lap. Now Mersault noticed the cripple’s
mouth and chin — he had the same serious and sad expression as when he
was staring at the window. Just then a shrill horn sounded in front of
the door. A second time. Mersault, still leaning over the armchair, did
not move. The sound of tyres meant that the butcher had driven away.
Mersault picked up his suitcase, turned the door knob, gleaming suddenly
in a sunbeam, and left the room, his head throbbing, his mouth parched.
He opened the outer door and walked away quickly. There was no-one in
sight except a group of children at one end of the little square. He
walked on. Past the square, he was suddenly aware of the cold, and
shivered under his light jacket. He sneezed twice, and the valley filled
with shrill mocking echoes which the crystal sky carried higher and
higher. Staggering slightly, he stopped and took a deep breath. Millions
of tiny white smiles thronged down from the blue sky. They played over
the leaves still cupping the rain, over the damp earth of the paths,
soared to the blood-red tile roofs, then back into the lakes of air and
light from which they had just overflowed. A tiny plane hummed its way
across the sky. In this flowering of air, this fertility of the heavens,
it seemed as if a man’s one duty was to live and be happy. Everything in
Mersault fell silent. He sneezed a third time, and shivered feverishly.
Then he hurried away without glancing around him, the suitcase creaking,
his footsteps loud on the road. Once he was back in his room and had put
the suitcase in a corner, he lay down on his bed and slept until the
middle of the afternoon.
SUMMER crammed the harbour with noise and sunlight. It was
eleven-thirty. The day split open down the middle, crushing the docks
under the burden of its heat. Moored at the sheds of the Algiers
Municipal Depot, black-hulled, red-funnelled freighters were loading
sacks of wheat. Their dusty fragrance mingled with the powerful smell of
tar melting under a hot sun. Men were drinking at a little stall that
reeked of creosote and anisette, while some Arab acrobats in red shirts
somersaulted on the scorching flagstones in front of the sea in the
leaping light. Without so much as a glance at them, the stevedores
carrying sacks walked up the two sagging planks that slanted from the
dock to the freighter decks. When they reached the top, their
silhouettes were suddenly divided between the sea and the sky among the
winches and masts. They stopped for an instant, dazzled by the light,
eyes gleaming in the whitish crust of dust and sweat that covered their
faces, before they plunged blindly into the hold stinking of hot blood.
In the fiery air, a siren never stopped blowing.
Suddenly the men on the plank stopped in confusion. One of them had
fallen, landing on the plank below. But his arm was pinned under his
body, crushed under the tremendous weight of the sack, and he screamed
with pain. Just at this moment, Patrice Mersault emerged from his
office, and on the doorstep the summer heat took his breath away. He
opened his mouth, inhaled the tar vapours, which stung his throat, and
then he went over to the stevedores. They had moved the man who had been
hurt, and he was lying in the dust, his lips white with pain, his arm
dangling, broken above the elbow. A sliver of bone had pierced the
flesh, making an ugly wound out of which blood was dripping. The drops
rolled down his arm and fell, one by one, on to the scorching stones
with a tiny hiss, and turned to steam. Mersault was staring, motionless,
at the blood when someone took his arm. It was Emmanuel, one of the
clerks. He pointed to a lorry heading towards them with a salvo of
backfires. ‘That one?’ Patrice began to run as the lorry drove past
them, chains rattling. They dashed after it, swallowed up by dust and
noise, panting and blind, just conscious enough to feel themselves swept
on by the frenzied effort of running, in a wild rhythm of winches and
machines, accompanied by the dancing masts on the horizon and the
pitching of the leprous hulls they passed. Mersault was the first to
grab hold, confident of his strength and skill, and jumped on to the
moving lorry. He helped Emmanuel up, and the two men sat with their legs
dangling in the chalk-white dust, while a luminous suffocation poured
out of the sky over the circle of the harbour crowded with masts and
black cranes, the uneven cobbles of the dock jarring Emmanuel and
Mersault as the lorry gained speed, making them laugh until they were
breathless, dizzied by the jolting movement, the searing sky, their own
boiling blood.
When they reached Belcourt, Mersault slid off with Emmanuel, who was
singing now, loud and out of tune. ‘You know,’ he told Mersault, ‘it
comes up in your chest. It comes when you feel good. When you’re in the
water.’ It was true: Emmanuel sung when he swam, and his voice, hoarse
from shouting, inaudible against the sea, marked time for the gestures
of his short, muscular arms. They were walking down the rue de Lyon,
Mersault tall beside Emmanuel, his broad shoulders rolling. In the way
he stepped on to the kerb, the way he twisted his hips to avoid the
crowd that occasionally closed in on him, his body seemed curiously
young and vigorous, capable of bearing him to any extreme of physical
joy. Relaxed, he rested his weight on one hip with a self-conscious
litheness, like a man whose body has acquired its style from sport. His
eyes sparkled under the heavy brows, and as he talked to Emmanuel he
would tug at his collar with a mechanical gesture to free his neck
muscles, tensing his curved mobile lips at the same time. They walked
into their restaurant, sat down at a table, and ate in silence. It was
cool inside, among the flies, the clatter of plates, the hum of
conversation. The owner, Celeste, a tall man with huge moustaches,
walked over to greet them, scratching his belly under his apron. ‘Pretty
well,’ Celeste answered, ‘for an old man.’ Celeste and Emmanuel
exchanged exclamations and thumped each other on the shoulder. ‘Old
men,’ Celeste said, ‘you know what old men are, they’re all the same.
Shitheads. They tell you a real man’s got to be fifty. But that’s
because they’re fifty. I knew this one fellow who could have his good
times just with his son. They’d go out together. On the town. They’d go
to the Casino, and this fellow would say: “Why should I hang around with
a lot of old men! Every day they tell me they’ve taken some medicine,
there’s always something wrong with their liver. I have a better time
with my son. Sometimes he picks up a whore, I look the other way, I take
the tram. So long and thanks. Fine with me.”’ Emmanuel laughed. ‘Of
course,’ Celeste said, ‘the fellow was no authority, but I liked him all
right.’ He turned to Mersault. ‘Anyway, it’s better than this other
fellow I knew. When he made his money, he would talk with his head up
and make gestures all the time. Now he’s not so proud of himself — he’s
lost it all.’
‘Serves him right,’ Mersault said.
‘Oh, you can’t be a bastard with it. This fellow took it while he had
it, and he was right. Almost a million francs he had ... Now if it had
been me!’
‘What would you do?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘I’d buy myself a hut out in the country, I’d put some glue in my navel
and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind
was blowing.’
Mersault ate quietly until Emmanuel started to tell Celeste how he had
fought the battle of the Marne. ‘See, they sent us zouaves out in front
...’
‘Less of the bullshit,’ Mersault said calmly.
‘The major said “Charge!” and we ran down into a kind of gully, only
with trees in it. He told us to charge, but no-one was there. So we just
marched right on, kept on walking. And then all of a sudden these
machine-guns are firing right into us. We all fall on top of each other.
There were so many dead and wounded that you could have rowed a boat
across the blood in that gully. Some of them kept screaming “Mama!”
Christ, it was awful.’
Mersault stood up and tied a knot in his napkin. The owner walked over
to the kitchen door and chalked the price of his dinner on it. When one
of his customers hadn’t paid up, Celeste would take the door off its
hinges and bring the evidence on his back. René, his son, was eating a
boiled egg over in a corner. ‘Poor lad,’ Emmanuel said, thumping his own
chest, ‘he’s had it.’ It was true. René was usually quiet and serious.
Though he was not particularly thin, his eyes glittered. Just now
another customer was explaining to him that ‘with time and patience, TB
can be cured’. René nodded and answered solemnly between bites. Mersault
walked over to the counter and ordered coffee, leaning on his elbows.
The other customer went on: ‘Did you ever know Jean Perez? He worked for
the gas company. He’s dead now. He had this one bad lung. But he wanted
to get out of the hospital and go home. His wife was there, see. She was
nothing but his horse. You know, his illness made him like that — he was
always on top of her. She wouldn’t want it, but he had to. So two, three
times, every day of the week — it ends up killing a sick man.’ René
stopped eating, a piece of bread between his teeth, and stared at the
man. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘the thing comes on fast, but it takes time
to get rid of it.’ Mersault wrote his name with one finger on the
steamed-up percolator. He blinked his eyes. Every day, his life
alternated, from this calm consumptive to Emmanuel bursting into song,
from the smell of coffee to the smell of tar, alienated from himself,
and his interests, so far from his heart, his truth. Things that in
other circumstances would have excited him left him unmoved now, for
they were simply part of his life, until the moment he was back in his
room using all his strength and care to smother the flame of life that
burned within him.
‘What do you think, Mersault? You’ve been to school,’ Celeste said.
‘Oh, cut it out,’ Patrice said, ‘you’ll get over it.’
‘You’re pretty touchy this morning.’
Mersault smiled and, leaving the restaurant, crossed the street and went
upstairs to his room. The flat was over a horse-butcher’s. Leaning over
his balcony, he could smell blood as he read the sign: ‘To Man’s Noblest
Conquest’. He stretched out on his bed, smoked a cigarette, and fell
asleep.
He slept in what used to be his mother’s room. They had had this little
three-room flat a long time. Now that he was alone, Mersault let two
rooms to a man he knew, a barrel-maker who lived with his sister, and he
kept the best room for himself. His mother had been fifty-six when she
died. A beautiful woman, she had enjoyed — and expected to enjoy — a
life of diversion, a life of pleasure. At forty, she had been stricken
by a terrible disease. She had had to give up her clothes, her
cosmetics, and was reduced to hospital gowns, her face deformed by
terrible swellings; her swollen legs and her weakness kept her almost
immobilized, and she would grope frantically around the colourless flat
she could no longer take care of, for she was half-blind as well. The
diabetes she had neglected had been further aggravated by her careless
life. Mersault had had to abandon his studies and take a job. Until his
mother’s death he had continued to read, to reflect. And for ten years
the sick woman clung to that life. The suffering had lasted so long that
those around her grew accustomed to her disease and forgot that she was
deathly ill, that she would die. One day she died. People in the
neighbourhood felt sorry for Mersault. They expected a lot from the
funeral. They recalled the son’s deep feeling for his mother. They
warned distant relatives not to mourn too much, so that Patrice would
not feel his own grief too intensely. They were asked to protect him, to
take care of him. But Patrice, dressed in his best and with his hat in
his hand, watched the arrangements. He walked in the little procession,
listened to the service, tossed his handful of earth, and folded his
hands. Only once did he look surprised, expressing his regret that there
were so few cars for those who had attended the service. That was all.
The next day a sign appeared in one of the flat’s windows: ‘To let’. Now
he lived in his mother’s room. In the past, the poverty they shared had
a certain sweetness about it: when the end of the day came and they
would eat their dinner in silence with the oil-lamp between them, there
was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment. The
neighbourhood was a quiet one. Mersault would stare at his mother’s
slack mouth and smile. She would smile back. He would start eating
again. The lamp would smoke a little. His mother tended it with the same
exhausted gesture, extending only her right arm, her body slumped down
in her chair. ‘You’ve had enough?’ she would ask, a moment later. ‘No’.
He would smoke or read. If he smoked, she always said: ‘Again!’ If he
read: ‘Sit closer to the lamp, you’ll ruin your eyes.’ But now the
poverty in solitude was misery. And when Mersault thought sadly of the
dead woman, his pity was actually for himself. He could have found a
more comfortable way of life, but he clung to this flat and its smell of
poverty. Here, at least, he maintained contact with what he had been,
and in a life where he deliberately tried to expunge himself, this
patient, sordid confrontation helped him to survive his hours of
melancholy and regret. He had left on the door the frayed grey card on
which his mother had written her name in blue pencil. He had kept the
old brass bed with its sateen spread, and the portrait of his
grandfather with his tiny beard and pale, motionless eyes. On the
mantelpiece, shepherds and shepherdesses framed an old clock that had
stopped and an oil lamp he almost never lit. The dreary furnishings —
some rickety rattan chairs, the wardrobe with its yellowed mirror, a
dressing-table missing one corner — did not exist for him: habit had
blurred everything. He moved through the ghost of a flat, which required
no effort of him. In another room he would have to grow accustomed to
novelty, to struggle once again. He wanted to diminish the surface he
offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed. For this
purpose, the old room served him well. One window overlooked the street,
the other a yard always full of washing and, beyond it, a few clumps of
orange-trees squeezed between high walls. Sometimes, on summer nights,
he left the room dark and opened the window overlooking the yard and the
dim trees. Out of the darkness the fragrance of orange-blossoms rose
into the darkness, strong and sweet, surrounding him with its delicate
shawls. All night during the summer, he and his room were enclosed in
that dense yet subtle perfume, and it was as if, dead for days at a
time, he had opened the window to life for the first time.
He awoke, his mouth full of sleep, his body covered with sweat. It was
very late. He combed his hair, ran downstairs and jumped on to a tram.
By five past two he was in his office. He worked in a big room where the
walls were covered with 414 pigeonholes, into which folders were piled.
The room was neither dirty nor sordid, but it suggested, at any hour of
the day, a catacomb in which dead hours had putrefied. Mersault checked
shipping-bills, translated provision-lists from English ships, and
between three and four dealt with clients who wanted crates of luggage
shipped. He had asked for this task, which was not really part of his
job. But at the start, he had found it a way of escaping into life.
There were human faces, repeated encounters and a pressing breath of
life, wherein at last he felt his own heart beating. And it allowed him
to escape the faces of the three secretaries and the supervisor,
Monsieur Langlois. One of the secretaries was quite pretty and had been
recently married. Another lived with her mother, and the third was a
dignified and energetic old lady whom Mersault liked for her florid way
of talking and her reticence about what Langlois called her
‘misfortunes’. The supervisor would engage in peremptory arguments with
old Madame Herbillon, who always emerged victorious. She despised
Langlois for the sweat that pasted his trousers to his buttocks when he
stood up and for the panic which seized him in the presence of the head
of the firm and occasionally on the phone when he heard the name of some
lawyer or even of some idiot with a de in front of his name. The poor
man was quite unable to soften the old lady’s heart or to win his way
into her good graces. This afternoon he was strutting around the middle
of the office. ‘We really get on very well together, don’t we, Madame
Herbillon?’ Mersault was translating ‘vegetables’, staring over his head
at the light-bulb in its corrugated green cardboard shade. Across from
him was a bright-coloured calendar showing a religious procession in
Newfoundland. Sponge, blotter, inkwell and ruler were lined up on his
desk. The windows near him looked out over huge piles of wood brought
from Norway by yellow and white freighters. Mersault listened. On the
other side of the wall, life had its own deep, muffled rhythm, a
respiration that filled the harbour and the sea. So remote, and yet so
close to him.... The six o’clock bell released him. It was a Saturday.
Once home, he lay down on his bed and slept till dinner-time. He cooked
himself some eggs and ate them out of the pan (with no bread; he had
forgotten to buy any), then stretched out again and fell asleep once
more. He awoke the next morning just before lunchtime, washed and went
downstairs to eat. Back in his room he did two crossword puzzles,
carefully cut out an advertisement for Kruschen Salts which he pasted
into a booklet already filled with jovial grandfathers sliding down
banisters. Then he washed his hands and went out on to his balcony. It
was a beautiful afternoon. Yet the pavements were damp, the occasional
passer-by in a hurry. Mersault stared after each one until he was out of
sight, attaching his gaze to a new arrival within his field of vision.
First came families walking together, two little boys in sailor-suits,
uncomfortable in their starched blouses, and a girl with a huge pink bow
and black patent-leather shoes. Behind them a mother in a brown silk
dress, a monstrous creature swathed in a boa, the more elegant father
carrying a cane. In a little while it was the turn of the young men of
his neighbourhood, hair slicked back and red neckties, close-fitting
jackets with embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs and square-toed shoes.
They were on their way to the cinema in the centre of town, and hurried
towards the tram, laughing very loudly. Then the street grew still
again. The evening diversions had begun. The neighbourhood belonged to
cats and shopkeepers. The sky, though clear, was lustreless over the
ficus trees lining the road. Across from Mersault, the tobacconist
brought a chair out in front of his door and straddled it, leaning his
arms on the back. The trams that had been crowded a little while ago
were almost empty. In the little café Chez Pierrot the waiter was
sweeping sawdust in the empty front room. Mersault turned his chair
around, placed it like the tobacconist’s and smoked two cigarettes one
after the other. He went back into his room, broke off a piece of
chocolate, and returned to his balcony to eat it. Soon the sky darkened,
then paled again. But the passing clouds had left a promise of rain over
the street they dimmed. At five, trams groaned past, jammed with
soccer-fans from the outlying stadiums perched on the running-boards and
the handrails. On the next tram he could identify the players themselves
by their canvas bags. They shouted and sang at the top of their lungs
that their teams would never die. Several waved to Mersault. One
shouted: ‘We did it this time!’ ‘Yes,’ was all Mersault answered,
nodding. Then there were more cars. Some had flowers wreathed in their
bumpers and looped around their fins. Then the light faded a little
more. Over the roofs the sky reddened, and with evening the streets grew
lively again. The strollers returned, the tired children whining as they
let themselves be dragged home. The neighbourhood cinemas disgorged a
crowd into the street. Mersault could tell, from the violent gestures of
the young men, that they had seen some sort of adventure film. Those who
had been to films in the centre of town appeared a little later. They
were more serious: for all their laughter and teasing gestures, their
eyes and their movements betrayed a kind of nostalgia for the magical
lives they had just shared. The lingered in the street, coming and
going. And on the pavement across from Mersault, two streams finally
formed. One consisted of neighbourhood girls, walking arm in arm,
bare-headed. The young men in the other cracked jokes which made the
girls laugh and look away. Older people went into the cafés or formed
groups on the pavement which the human river flowed around as if they
were islands. The street lamps were on now, and the electric light made
the first stars look pale in the night sky. An audience of one, Mersault
watched the procession of people under the lights. The street lamps made
the damp pavements gleam, and at regular intervals the trams would throw
reflections on shiny hair, wet lips, a smile or a silver bracelet.
Gradually the trams became more infrequent, and the night was already
black above the trees and the lamps as the neighbourhood gradually
emptied and the first cat crept across the street as soon as it was
deserted again. Mersault thought about dinner. His neck ached a little
from leaning so long on the back of his chair. He went downstairs to buy
bread and macaroni, made his dinner and ate it. Then he returned to his
balcony. People were coming out again, the air had cooled. He shivered,
closed his windows and walked over to the mirror above the fireplace.
Except for certain evenings when Marthe came or when he went out with
her, and except for his correspondence with the girls in Tunis, his
entire life lay in the yellowed image the mirror offered of a room where
the filthy oil-lamp stood among the breadcrusts.
‘One more Sunday got through,’ Mersault said.
WHEN MERSAULT walked through the streets in the evening, proud to watch
the lights and shadows flicker across Marthe’s face, everything seemed
wonderfully simple, even his own strength and his courage. He was
grateful to her for displaying in public, at his side, the beauty she
offered him day after day, like some delicate intoxication. An
unnoticeable Marthe would have made him suffer as much as Marthe happy
in the desire of other men. He was glad to walk into the cinema with her
tonight, a little before the film began, when the auditorium was nearly
full. She went in ahead of him, drawing glances of admiration, her
flower-like face smiling, her beauty violent. Mersault, holding his hat
in his hand, was overcome by a wonderful sense of ease, a kind of inner
awareness of his own elegance. His expression grew remote and serious.
He exaggerated his ceremonious manner, stepped back to let the usherette
pass, lowered Marthe’s seat for her. And he did all this less from
conceit, from ostentation, than because of the gratitude that suddenly
swelled his heart and filled it with love for all these people around
him. If he gave the usherette too big a tip, it was because he did not
know how else to pay for his joy, and because he worshipped, by making
this everyday gesture, a divinity whose brilliant smile glistened like
oil in his gaze. During the break between films, strolling in the foyer
lined with mirrors, he saw the face of his own happiness reflected
there, populating the place with elegant and vibrant images — his own
tall, dark figure and Marthe smiling in her bright dress. Yes, he liked
his face as he saw it there, his mouth quivering around the cigarette
between his lips and the apparent ardour of his deep-set eyes. But a
man’s beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he
can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a
woman’s face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity
and smiling at his secret demons.
Back in the cinema, he remembered that when he was alone he never left
his seat between films, preferring to smoke and to listen to the records
played while the lights were still on. But tonight the excitement
continued, and he felt that every chance of extending and renewing it
was worth taking. Just as she was sitting down, however, Marthe returned
the greeting of a man a few rows behind them. And Mersault, nodding in
his turn, thought he noticed a faint smile on the man’s lips. He sat
down without noticing the hand Marthe laid on his shoulder to catch his
attention; a moment earlier he would have responded to it with delight,
as another proof of that power she acknowledged in him.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, waiting for the perfectly natural ‘Who?’ which
in fact followed at once.
‘You know. That man ...’
‘Oh,’ Marthe said. And that was all.
‘Well?’
‘Do you have to know?’
‘No,’ Mersault said.
He glanced behind him: the man was staring at the back of Marthe’s neck
without moving a muscle of his face. He was rather good-looking, his
lips very red and well-shaped, but his eyes, which were set shallowly in
his face, had no expression in them. Mersault felt the blood pounding in
his temples. In his suddenly darkened vision, the brilliant hues of that
ideal world where he had been living the last few hours were suddenly
soiled. He didn’t need to hear what she would say. He knew: the man had
slept with Marthe. And what racked Mersault like panic was the thought
of what this man might be thinking. He knew what it was, he had often
thought the same thing: ‘Show off as much as you want ...’ Realizing
that this man was now imagining Marthe’s every gesture, even her way of
putting her arm over her eyes at the moment of pleasure, realizing that
this man too had once tried to pull her arm away in order to watch the
tumultuous surge of the dark gods in her eyes, Mersault felt everything
inside himself collapse, and tears of rage welled up under his closed
eyelids while the cinema bell announced that the film was about to
begin. He forgot Marthe, who had been merely the pretext of his joy and
was now the living body of his rage. Mersault kept his eyes closed a
long time, and when he opened them again, a car was turning over on the
screen, one of its wheels still spinning in complete silence, slower and
slower, dragging into its persistent circle all the shame and
humiliation that had been awakened in Mersault’s angry heart. But a
craving for certainty made him forget his dignity: ‘Marthe, was he ever
your lover?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I want to watch the picture.’
That was the day Mersault began to be attached to Marthe. He had met her
several months before, and he had been astonished by her beauty, her
elegance. Her golden eyes and carefully made-up lips in that rather
broad, regular face made her look like some painted goddess. The natural
stupidity which glowed in her eyes emphasized her remote, impassive
expression. In the past, whenever Mersault had spent any time with one
woman, had made the first gestures of commitment, he was conscious of
the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same
way, and he would think about the end of the affair before even taking
her in his arms. But Marthe had appeared at a moment when Mersault was
ridding himself of everything, of himself as well. A craving for freedom
and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope. For
Mersault, nothing mattered in those days. And the first time Marthe went
limp in his arms and her features blurred as they came closer, the lips
that had been as motionless as painted flowers now quivering and
extended, Mersault saw in her not the future but all the force of his
desire focused upon her and satisfied by this appearance, this image.
The lips she offered him seemed a message from a world without passion
and swollen with desire, where his heart would find satisfaction. And
this seemed a miracle to him. His heart pounded with an emotion he
almost took for love. And when he felt the ripe and resilient flesh
under his mouth, it was as though he bit into a kind of fierce liberty,
after caressing her a long time with his own lips. She became his
mistress that same day. After some time, their harmony in love-making
became perfect. But as he knew her better, she gradually lost the sense
of strangeness which he would try to revive as he pressed upon her
mouth. So that Marthe, accustomed to Mersault’s reserve and even
coldness, had never understood why, in a crowded tram, he had one day
asked for her lips. Bewildered, she had held up her face. And he had
kissed her the way he liked to, first caressing her lips with his own
and then slowly biting them. ‘What’s come over you?’ she asked him
later. He had given her the smile she loved, the brief smile which
answers, and he had said: ‘I feel like misbehaving,’ and lapsed back
into silence. She did not understand Patrice’s vocabulary either. After
making love, at that moment when the heart drowses in the released body,
filled only with the tender affection he might have felt for a winsome
puppy, Mersault would smile at her and said, ‘Hello, image.’
Marthe was a secretary. She did not love Mersault, but she was attracted
to him insofar as he intrigued her and flattered her. Since the day when
Emmanuel, whom Mersault had introduced to her, had told her: ‘Mersault’s
a good fellow, you know. He’s got guts. But he doesn’t talk — so people
don’t always realize what he’s like,’ she regarded him with curiosity.
And since his lovemaking satisfied her, she asked nothing more, adapting
herself as best she could to a silent lover who made no demands and took
her when she wanted to come. She was only a little uneasy about this man
whose weak points she could not discover.
But that night, as they left the cinema, she realized that something
could hurt Mersault. She said nothing about it the rest of the evening,
and slept in Mersault’s bed. He did not touch her during the night. But
from now on she used her advantage. She had already told him she had had
other lovers; now she managed to find the necessary proofs.
The next day, departing from her usual practice, she came to his room
after she had left her office. She found Mersault asleep and sat down at
the foot of the brass bed without waking him. He was in his
shirt-sleeves, which exposed the white underside of his muscular brown
forearms. He was breathing regularly, chest and belly rising together.
Two creases between his eyebrows gave him a look of strength and
stubbornness she knew very well. His hair curled around his tanned
forehead, in which a vein throbbed. Exposed this way, his arms lying
close to his sides, one leg bent, he looked like a solitary and
obstinate god, flung sleeping into an alien world. Staring at his
sleep-swollen lips, she desired him, and just then Mersault half-opened
his eyes and closed them again, saying without anger: ‘I don’t like
being watched when I’m sleeping.’
Marthe threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He didn’t move.
‘Oh, darling, another one of your moods ...’
‘Don’t call me “darling”, please. I’ve already asked you not to.’
She stretched out beside him and stared at his profile. ‘You remind me
of someone when you’re like that, I wonder who it is.’
He pulled up his trousers and turned his back to her. Marthe frequently
noticed Mersault’s gestures in strangers, in film-actors; he took it as
a sign of his influence over her, but now this habit which had often
flattered him was an irritation. She squeezed herself against his back
and took all the warmth of his sleep against her body. Darkness was
falling fast, and shadows soon filled the room. Somewhere in the
building there were children crying, a cat miaowing, the sound of a door
slamming. The street lamps came on, flooding the balcony. Trams went by
only occasionally. And then the neighbourhood smell of anisette and
roasting meat rose in heavy gusts from the street into the room.
Marthe felt sleepy. ‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you? It started
yesterday ... that’s why I came. Aren’t you going to talk to me?’ She
shook him. Mersault didn’t move, his eyes tracing the curve of light on
a show under the dressing-table: it was already dark in the room. ‘You
know that man yesterday? Well, I was joking. He was never my lover.’
‘No?’
‘Well, not really.’
Mersault said nothing. He could see the gestures so clearly, the smiles
... He clenched his teeth. Then he got up, opened the windows, and sat
down again on the bed. Marthe pressed against him, thrust her hand
between two buttons of his shirt and caressed his nipples. ‘How many
lovers have you had?’ he said finally.
‘Don’t be like that.’
Mersault said nothing.
‘Perhaps ten,’ she said.
With Mersault, sleepiness always called for a cigarette. ‘Do I know
them?’ he asked as he took one out. All he could see now was a white
patch where Marthe’s face was. ‘It’s the same as when we make love,’ he
realized.
‘Some of them. Around here.’ She rubbed her face against his shoulder
and spoke in that little girl’s voice she used to make Mersault treat
her gently.
‘Now listen to me,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Try to understand
what I’m saying. Promise to tell me their names. And I want you to
promise to point out the others — the ones I don’t know — if we pass
them in the street.’
Marthe pulled away. ‘Oh no!’
A car sounded its horn right under the windows, then again, then twice
more — long, fierce blasts. A tram screeched somewhere in the night. On
the marble top of the dressing-table, the alarm-clock ticked coldly.
Mersault spoke with deliberation: ‘I’m asking you to tell me because I
know myself. If I don’t find out exactly who they are, each man I meet
will make the same thing happen — I’ll wonder, I’ll imagine. That’s what
it is, I’ll imagine too much. I don’t know if you understand ...’
She understood, amazingly. She told him the names. There was only one he
didn’t recognize. The last she named was a man he knew, and this was the
one he thought about, because he was handsome and the women ran after
him. What astonished him about lovemaking was — the first time, at least
— the terrible intimacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could
receive a part of a stranger’s body inside her own. In such intoxication
and abandonment, in such surrender he recognized the exalting and sordid
power of love. And it was this intimacy that was the first thing he
imagined between Marthe and her lover. Just then she sat up on the edge
of his bed and, putting her left foot on her right thigh, took off her
shoes, dropping them next to the bed so that one was lying on its side,
the other standing on its high heel. Mersault felt his throat tighten.
Something was gnawing at his stomach.
‘Is this the way you do it with René?’ he said, smiling.
Marthe looked up. ‘Don’t get any strange ideas,’ she said. ‘We only did
it once.’
‘Oh.’
‘Besides, I didn’t even take my shoes off.’
Mersault stood up. He saw her lying back, all her clothes on, on a bed
like this one, and surrendering everything, unreservedly. He shouted
‘Shut up!’ and walked over to the balcony.
‘Oh darling!’ Marthe said, sitting on the bed, her stockinged feet on
the floor.
Mersault controlled himself by watching the street-lamps glitter on the
tram-rails. He had never felt so close to Marthe. And realizing that at
the same time he was letting her come a little closer to him, his pride
made his eyes sting. He walked back to her and pinched the warm skin of
her neck under one ear. He smiled. ‘And that Zagreus — who’s he? He’s
the only one I don’t know.’
‘Oh him,’ Marthe said with a laugh. ‘I still see him.’ Mersault pinched
harder. ‘He was the first one, you have to understand that. I was just a
kid. He was older. Now he’s had both legs amputated. He lives all alone.
So I go to see him sometimes. He’s a nice man, and educated. He still
reads all the time — in those days he was a student. He’s always making
jokes. A character. Besides, he says the same thing as you do. He tells
me: “Come here, image”.’
Mersault was thinking. He let go of Marthe, and she fell back on the
bed, closing her eyes. After a moment he sat down beside her and bent
over her parted lips, seeking the signs of her animal divinity and the
way to forget a suffering he considered unworthy. But he did nothing
more than kiss her.
As he walked Marthe home, she talked about Zagreus: ‘I’ve told him about
you. I told him my darling was very handsome and very strong. Then he
said he’d like to meet you. Because — this is what he said: “the sight
of a good body helps me breathe”.’
‘Sounds pretty crazy.’
Marthe wanted to please him, and made up her mind this was the moment to
stage the little scene of jealousy she had been planning, having decided
she owed it to him somehow. ‘Oh, not so crazy as some of your friends.’
‘What friends?’ Mersault asked, genuinely startled.
‘Those little idiots ...’
The little idiots were Rose and Claire, students in Tunis whom Mersault
used to know and with whom he maintained the only correspondence in his
life. He smiled and laid his hand on the nape of Marthe’s neck. They
walked a long time. Marthe lived near the parade grounds. Lights shone
in all the upper windows of the long street, though the dark, shuttered
shop windows had a forbidding look.
‘Listen, darling, you don’t happen to be in love with those little
idiots by any chance, do you?’
‘No.’
They walked on, Mersault’s hand on Marthe’s neck covered by the warmth
of her hair.
‘Do you love me?’ Marthe asked suddenly.
Mersault burst out laughing. ‘Now that’s a serious question.’
‘Answer me!’
‘People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe — they please each
other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love
someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.’
Marthe seemed sad, but he kissed her: ‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said.
Mersault walked home through the dark streets. He walked quickly, aware
of how the muscles in his thigh played against the smooth material of
his trousers, and he thought of Zagreus and his amputated legs. He
wanted to meet him, and decided to ask Marthe to introduce them.
The first time Mersault saw Zagreus, he was annoyed. Yet Zagreus had
tried to avoid anything that might be embarrassing about two lovers of
the same woman meeting in her presence. To do so, he had attempted to
make Mersault his accomplice in treating Marthe as a ‘good girl’ and
laughing very loud. Mersault had remained impassive. He told Marthe, as
soon as they were alone, how much he had disliked the encounter.
‘I don’t like half-portions. It bothers me. It keeps me from thinking.
And especially half-portions who brag.’
‘Oh, you and your thinking,’ Marthe answered, not understanding, ‘if I
paid any attention to you ...’
But later, that boyish laugh of Zagreus’ which had at first annoyed him
caught Mersault’s attention and interest. Moreover the obvious jealousy
which had provoked Mersault’s first judgement had disappeared as soon as
he saw Zagreus. Once when Marthe quite innocently referred to the time
she had known Zagreus, he advised her: ‘Don’t bother. I can’t be jealous
of a man who doesn’t have his legs any more. If I ever do think about
the two of you, I see him like some kind of big worm on top of you. And
it just makes me laugh. So don’t bother, angel.’
And after that he went back to visit Zagreus by himself. Zagreus talked
a great deal and very fast, laughed, then fell silent. Mersault felt
comfortable in the big room where Zagreus lived surrounded by books and
Moroccan brass trays, the fire casting reflections on the withdrawn face
of the Khmer Buddha on the desk. He listened to Zagreus. What he noticed
about the cripple was that he thought before he spoke. Besides, the
pent-up passion, the intense life animating this absurd stump of a man
was enough to attract Mersault, to produce in him something which, if he
had been a little less guarded, he might have taken for friendship.
THAT Sunday afternoon, after talking and laughing a great deal, Roland
Zagreus sat silent near the fire in his big wheelchair, wrapped in white
blankets. Mersault was leaning against a bookshelf, staring at the sky
and the landscape through the white silk curtains. He had come during a
light rain, and not wanting to arrive too early had spent an hour
wandering around the countryside. The day was dark, and even without
hearing the wind Mersault could see the trees and branches writhing
silently in the little valley. The silence was broken by a milk-float,
which trundled down the street past the villa in a tremendous racket of
metal cans. Almost immediately the rain turned into a downpour, flooding
the windowpanes. All this water like some thick oil on the panes, the
faint hollow noise of the horse’s hooves — more audible now than the
cart’s uproar — the persistent hiss of the rain, the stump of a man
beside the fire, and the silence of the room — everything seemed to have
happened before, a dim melancholy past that flooded Mersault’s heart the
way the rain had soaked his shoes and the wind had pierced the thin
material of his trousers. A few moments before, the falling vapour —
neither a mist nor a rain — had washed his face like a light hand and
laid bare his dark-circled eyes. Now he stared at the black clouds that
kept pouring out of the sky, no sooner blurred than replaced. The
creases in his trousers had vanished, and with them the warmth and
confidence of a world made for ordinary men. He moved closer to the fire
and to Zagreus and sat facing him, in the shadow of the high mantelpiece
and yet within sight of the sky. Zagreus glanced at Mersault, then
looked away and tossed into the fire a ball of paper he had crumpled in
his left hand. The gesture, ridiculous as all the rest, disconcerted
Mersault: the sight of this mutilated body made him uneasy. Zagreus
smiled but said nothing, then suddenly thrust his face towards Mersault.
The flames gleamed on his left cheek only, but something in his voice
and eyes was filled with warmth. ‘You look tired,’ he said.
From reserve, Mersault merely answered: ‘Yes, I don’t know what to do,’
and after a pause straightened up, walked to the window and added as he
stared outside: ‘I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or
else subscribing to L’illustration. Something desperate, you know.’
Zagreus smiled. ‘You’re a poor man, Mersault. That explains half your
disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.’
Mersault kept his back turned, staring at the trees in the wind. Zagreus
smoothed the blanket over his legs.
‘You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike
between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re
judging yourself now, Mersault, and you don’t like the sentence. You
live badly. Like a barbarian.’ He turned his head towards Patrice. ‘You
like driving a car, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You like women?’
‘When they’re beautiful.’
‘That’s what I meant.’ Zagreus turned back to the fire. After a moment,
he began: ‘All those things ...’ Mersault turned around, leaning against
the window which yielded slightly to his weight, and waited for the rest
of the sentence. Zagreus remained silent. A fly buzzed against the
glass. Mersault turned, caught it under his hand, then let it go.
Zagreus watched him and said, hesitantly: ‘I don’t like talking
seriously. Because then there’s only one thing to talk about — the
justification you can give for your life. And I don’t see how I can
justify my amputated legs.’
‘Neither do I,’ Mersault said without turning around.
Zagreus’ young laugh suddenly burst out. ‘Thanks. You don’t leave me any
illusions.’ He changed his tone: ‘But you’re right to be hard. Still,
there’s something I’d like to say to you.’ And he broke off again.
Mersault came over and sat down, facing him. ‘Listen,’ Zagreus resumed,
‘and look at me. I have someone to help me, to set me on the toilet, and
afterwards to wash me and dry me. Worse, I pay someone for it. Yet I’ll
never make a move to cut short a life I believe in so much ... I’d
accept even worse — blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly
that dark fire that is me, me alive. The only thing that would occur to
me would be to thank life for letting me burn on.’ Zagreus flung his
body back in the chair, out of breath. There was less of him to see now,
only the whitish reflection the blankets left on his chin. Then he went
on: ‘And you, Mersault, with a body like yours, your one duty is to live
and be happy.’
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Mersault said. ‘With eight hours a day at the
office. Oh, it would be different if I was free!’ He grew excited as he
spoke, and as occasionally happened, hope flooded him once more, even
more powerfully today because of Zagreus’ reassurance. He believed that
at last he could confide in someone. He resisted the impulse for a
moment, began to stub out a cigarette, then continued more calmly: ‘A
few years ago I had everything before me — people talked to me about my
life, about my future. And I said yes. I even did the things you had to
do to have such things. But even back then, it was all alien to me. To
devote myself to impersonality — that’s what concerned me. Not to be
happy, not to be “against”. I can’t explain it, but you know what I
mean.’
‘Yes,’ Zagreus said.
‘Even now, if I had the time ... I would only have to let myself go.
Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone.
The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve
always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.’
Zagreus had folded his hands. In the silence that followed, the rain
seemed to come down twice as hard, and the clouds swelled in a vague
mist. The room grew a little darker, as if the sky was pouring its
burden of shadow and silence into it. And the cripple said intensely: ‘A
body always has the ideal it deserves. That ideal of a stone — if I may
say so, you’d have to have a demigod’s body to sustain it.’
‘Right,’ Mersault said, a little surprised, ‘but don’t exaggerate — I’ve
played a lot of sport, that’s all. And I’m capable of going quite far in
pleasure.’
Zagreus reflected. ‘Yes — so much the better for you. To know your
body’s limits — that’s the true psychology. But it doesn’t matter
anyway. We don’t have time to be ourselves. We only have time to be
happy. But would you mind defining what you mean by impersonality?’
‘No,’ Mersault said, but that was all.
Zagreus took a sip of tea and set down his full cup. He drank very
little, preferring to urinate only once a day. He willed himself to
reduce the burden of humiliations each day brought him. ‘You can’t save
a little here, a little there,’ he had told Mersault one day. ‘It’s a
record like any other.’ For the first time a few raindrops fell down the
chimney. The fire hissed. The rain beat harder on the windowpanes.
Somewhere a door slammed. On the road, cars streaked by like gleaming
rats. One of them blew its horn, and across the valley the hollow
lugubrious blast made the wet space of the world even larger, until its
very memory became for Mersault an element of the silence and the agony
of that sky.
‘I’m sorry, Zagreus, but it’s been a long time since I talked about
certain things. So I don’t know any more — or I’m not sure. When I look
at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears. Like
that sky. It’s rain and sun, both noon and midnight. You know, Zagreus,
I think of the lips I’ve kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of
the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I’m
all those things at once. I’m sure there are times when you wouldn’t
even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness — I can’t
say it.’
‘You’re playing several games at the same time?’
‘Yes, but not as an amateur,’ Mersault said vehemently. ‘Each time I
think of that flood of pain and joy in myself, I know — I can’t tell you
how deeply I know that the game I’m playing is the most serious and
exciting one of all.’
Zagreus smiled. ‘Then you have something to do?’
Mersault said vehemently: ‘I have my life to earn. My work — those eight
hours a day other people can stand — my work keeps me from doing it.’ He
broke off and lit the cigarette he had held till now between his
fingers. ‘And yet,’ he said, the match still burning, ‘if I was strong
enough, and patient enough ...’ He blew out the match and pressed the
tip against the back of his left hand. ‘... I know what kind of life I’d
have. I wouldn’t make an experiment out of my life: I would be the
experiment of my life. Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all
its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that
acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s living
only insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the
unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the me for
everyone.’
‘Yes,’ Zagreus said, ‘but you can’t live that way and work ...’
‘No, because I’m constantly in revolt. That’s what’s wrong.’
Zagreus said nothing. The rain had stopped, but in the sky night had
replaced the clouds, and the darkness was now virtually complete in the
room. Only the fire illuminated their gleaming faces. Zagreus, silent
for a long time, stared at Patrice, and all he said was: ‘Anyone who
loves you is in for a lot of pain ...’ and stopped, surprised by
Mersault’s abrupt gesture.
‘Other people’s feelings have no hold over me,’ Patrice exclaimed,
thrusting his head into the shadows.
‘True,’ Zagreus said, ‘I was just remarking on the fact. You’ll be alone
some day, that’s all. Now sit down and listen to me. What you’ve told me
is interesting. One thing especially, because it confirms everything my
own experience of human beings has taught me. I like you very much,
Mersault. Because of your body, moreover. It’s your body that’s taught
you all that. Today I feel as if I can talk to you frankly.’
Mersault sat down again slowly, and his face turned back to the already
dimmer firelight that was sinking closer to the coals. Suddenly a kind
of opening in the darkness appeared in the square of the window between
the silk curtains. Something relented behind the panes. A milky glow
entered the room, and Mersault recognized on the Bodhisattva’s ironic
lips and on the chased brass of the trays the familiar and fugitive
signs of the nights of moonlight and starlight he loved so much. It was
as if the night had lost its lining of clouds and shone now in its
tranquil lustre. The cars went by more slowly. Deep in the valley, a
sudden agitation readied the birds for sleep. Footsteps passed in front
of the house, and in this night that covered the world like milk, every
noise seemed larger, more distinct. Between the reddening fire, the
ticking of the clock, and the secret life of the familiar objects which
surrounded him, a fugitive poetry was being woven which prepared
Mersault to receive in a different mood, in confidence and love, what
Zagreus would say. He leaned back in his chair, and it was in front of
the milky sky that he listened to Zagreus’ strange story.
‘What I’m sure of,’ he began, ‘is that you can’t be happy without money.
That’s all. I don’t like superficiality and I don’t like romanticism. I
like to be conscious. And what I’ve noticed is that there’s a kind of
spiritual snobbery in certain “superior beings” who think that money
isn’t necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a
certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born,
being happy is never complicated. It’s enough to take up the general
fate, only not with the will to renunciation like so many fake great
men, but with the will to happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A
lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every
case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our
money to gain time. That’s the only problem that’s ever interested me.
Very specific. Very clear.’ Zagreus stopped talking and closed his eyes.
Mersault kept on staring at the sky. For a moment the sounds of the road
and the countryside became distinct, and then Zagreus went on, without
hurrying: ‘Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of
happiness. But that’s not the question. To have money is to have time.
That’s my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To
be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.’ He
looked at Patrice. ‘At twenty-five, Mersault, I had already realized
that any man with the sense, the will, and the craving for happiness was
entitled to be rich. The craving for happiness seemed to me the noblest
thing in man’s heart. In my eyes, that justified everything. A pure
heart was enough ...’ Still looking at Mersault, Zagreus suddenly began
to speak more slowly, in a cold harsh tone, as if he wanted to rouse
Mersault from his apparent distraction. ‘At twenty-five I began making
my fortune. I didn’t let the law get in my way. I wouldn’t have let
anything get in my way. In a few years, I had done it — you know what I
mean. Mersault, nearly two million. The world was all before me. And
with the world, the life I had dreamed of in solitude and anticipation
...’ After a pause Zagreus continued in a lower voice: ‘The life I would
have had, Mersault, without the accident that took off my legs almost
immediately afterwards. I haven’t been able to stop living ... And now,
here I am. You understand — you have to understand that I didn’t want to
live a lesser life, a diminished life. For twenty years my money has
been here, beside me. I’ve lived modestly. I’ve scarcely touched the
capital.’ He passed his hard palms over his eyelids and said, even more
softly: ‘Life should never be tainted with a cripple’s kisses.’
At this moment Zagreus had opened the chest next to the fireplace and
showed Mersault a tarnished steel safe inside, the key in the lock. On
top of the safe lay a white envelope and a large black revolver. Zagreus
had answered Mersault’s involuntarily curious stare with a smile. It was
very simple. On days when the tragedy which had robbed him of his life
was too much for him, he took out his letter, which he had not dated and
which explained his desire to die. Then he laid the gun on the table,
bent down to it and pressed his forehead against it, rolling his temples
over it, calming the fever of his cheeks against the cold steel. For a
long time he stayed like that, letting his fingers caress the trigger,
lifting the safety-catch, until the world fell silent around him and his
whole being, already half-asleep, united with the sensation of the cold,
salty metal from which death could emerge. Realizing then that it would
be enough for him to date his letter and pull the trigger, discovering
the absurd feasibility of death, his imagination was vivid enough to
show him the full horror of what life’s negation meant for him, and he
drowned in his somnolence all his craving to live, to go on burning in
dignity and silence. Then, waking completely, his mouth full of already
bitter saliva, he would lick the gun barrel, sticking his tongue into it
and sucking out an impossible happiness.
‘Of course my life is ruined. But I was right in those days: everything
for happiness, against the world which surrounds us with its violence
and its stupidity,’ Zagreus laughed then and added: ‘You see, Mersault,
all the misery and cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this
one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.’
It was very late now. Mersault could not tell what time it was — his
head throbbed with feverish excitement. The heat and the harshness of
the cigarette he had smoked filled his mouth. Even the light around him
was an accomplice still. For the first time since Zagreus had begun his
story, he glanced towards him: ‘I think I understand.’
Exhausted by his long effort, the cripple was breathing hoarsely. After
a silence he nonetheless said, laboriously: ‘I’d like to be sure. Don’t
think I’m saying that money makes happiness. I only mean that for a
certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time,
and that having money is a way of being free of money.’
He had slumped down in his chair, under his blankets. The night had
closed in again, and Mersault could scarcely see Zagreus now. A long
silence followed and Mersault, wanting to re-establish contact, to
assure himself of the other man’s presence in the darkness stood up and
said, as though groping: ‘It’s a beautiful risk to take.’
‘Yes,’ Zagreus said, almost in a whisper. ‘And it’s better to bet on
this life than on the next. For me, of course, it’s another matter.’
‘A wreck’ Mersault thought. ‘A zero is the world.’
‘For twenty years I’ve been unable to have the experience of certain
happiness. This life which devours me — I won’t have known it to the
full, and what frightens me about death is the certainty it will bring
me that my life has been consummated without me. I will have lived ...
marginally — do you understand?’ With no transition, a young man’s laugh
emerged from the darkness: ‘Which means, Mersault, that underneath, and
in my condition, I still have hope.’
Mersault took a few steps towards the table.
‘Think about it,’ Zagreus said, ‘think about it.’
Mersault merely asked: ‘Can I turn on the light?’
‘Please.’
Zagreus’ nostrils and his round eyes looked paler in the sudden glare.
He was still breathing hard. When Mersault held out his hand he replied
by shaking his head and laughing too loud. ‘Don’t take me too seriously.
It always annoys me — the tragic look that comes into people’s faces
when they see my stumps.’
‘He’s playing games with me,’ Mersault thought.
‘Don’t take anything seriously except happiness. Think about it,
Mersault, you have a pure heart. Think about it.’ Then he looked him
straight in the eyes and after a pause said: ‘Besides, you have two
legs, which doesn’t do any harm.’ He smiled then and rang a bell. ‘Clear
off now, it’s time for peepee.’
AS he walked home that Sunday evening, Mersault couldn’t stop thinking
about Zagreus. But as he walked up the stairs to his room, he heard
groans coming from the barrel-maker Cardona’s flat. He knocked. No-one
answered, but the groans continued, and Mersault walked straight in. The
barrel-maker was huddled on his bed, sobbing like a child. At his feet
was the photograph of an old woman. ‘She’s dead,’ Cardona gasped. It was
true, but it had happened a long time ago.
Cardona was deaf, half-dumb, a mean and violent man. Until recently he
had lived with his sister, but his tyranny had at last exhausted the
woman, and she had taken refuge with her children. And he had remained
alone, as helpless as a man can be who must cook and clean for himself
for the first time in his life. His sister had described their quarrels
to Mersault, one day when he had met him in the street. Cardona was
thirty, short, rather handsome. Since childhood he had lived with his
mother, the only human being ever to inspire him with fear —
superstitious rather than justified, moreover. He had loved her with all
his uncouth heart, which is to say both harshly and eagerly, and the
best proof of his affection was the way of teasing the old woman by
mouthing, with difficulty, the worst abuse of priests and the Church. If
he had lived so long with his mother, it was also because he had never
induced any other woman to care for him. Infrequent episodes in a
brothel authorized him, however, to call himself a man.
The mother died. From then on, he had lived with his sister. Mersault
rented them the room they occupied. Each quite solitary, they struggled
through a long, dark, dirty life. They found it hard to speak to one
another, they went for days without a word. But now she had left. He was
too proud to complain, to ask her to come back: he lived alone. In the
mornings he ate in the restaurant downstairs, in the evenings up in his
room, bringing the food from a charcuterie. He washed his own sheets,
his overalls. But he left his room utterly filth. Sometimes, though —
soon after the sister had left him — he would start his Sundays by
taking a rag and trying to clean up the place. But his man’s clumsiness
— a casserole on the mantelpiece that had once been decorated with vases
and figurines — showed in the neglect in which everything was left. What
he called ‘putting things in order’ consisted of hiding the disorder,
pushing dirty clothes behind cushions or arranging the most disparate
objects on the sideboard. Finally he tired of making the effort, no
longer bothered to make his bed, and slept with his dog on the fetid
blankets. His sister had said to Mersault: ‘He carries on in the café,
but the woman in the laundry told me she saw him crying when he had to
wash his own sheets.’ And it was a fact that, hardened as he was, a
terror seized this man at certain times and forced him to acknowledge
the extent of his desolation. Of course the sister had lived with him
out of pity, she had told Mersault. But Cardona kept her from seeing the
man she loved. At their age, though, it didn’t matter much any more. Her
boyfriend was a married man. He brought her flowers he had picked in the
suburban hedgerows, oranges, and tiny bottles of liqueur he had won at
shooting-galleries. Not that he was handsome or anything — but you can’t
eat good looks for dinner, and he was so decent. She valued him, and he
valued her — wasn’t that love? She did his laundry for him and tried to
keep things nice. He used to wear a handkerchief folded in a triangle
and knotted round his neck: she made his handkerchiefs very white, and
that was one of his pleasures.
But her brother wouldn’t let him come to the house. She had to see him
on the sly. Once she had let him come, and her brother had caught them,
and there had been a terrible brawl. The handkerchief folded in a
triangle had been left behind, in a filthy corner of the room, and she
had taken refuge with her son. Mersault thought of that handkerchief as
he stared around the sordid room.
At the time, people had felt sorry for the lonely barrel-maker. He had
mentioned a possible marriage to Mersault. An older woman, who had
doubtless been tempted by the prospect of young, vigorous caresses ...
She had them before the wedding. After a while her suitor abandoned the
plan, declaring she was too old for him. And he was alone in this little
room. Gradually the filth encircled him, besieged him, took over his
bed, then submerged everything irretrievably. The place was too ugly,
and for a man who doesn’t like his own room, there is a more accessible
one, comfortable, bright and always welcoming: the café. In this
neighbourhood the cafés were particularly lively. They gave off that
heard warmth which is the last refuge against the terror of solitude and
its vague aspirations. The taciturn creature took up his residence in
them. Mersault saw him in one or another every night. Thanks to the
cafés, he postponed the moment of his return as long as possible. In
them he regained his place among men. But tonight, no doubt, the cafés
had not been enough. And on his way home he must have taken out that
photograph which wakened the echoes of a dead past. He rediscovered the
woman he had loved and teased so long. In the hideous room, alone with
the futility of his life, mustering his last forces, he had become
conscious of the past which had once been his happiness. Or so he must
have thought, at least, since at the contact of that past and his
wretched present, a spark of the divine had touched him and he had begun
to weep.
Now, as whenever he found himself confronting a brutal manifestation of
life, Mersault was powerless, filled with respect for that animal pain.
He sat down on the dirty, rumpled blankets and laid one hand on
Cardona’s shoulder. In front of him, on the oilcloth covering the table,
was an oil-lamp, a bottle of wine, crusts of bread, a piece of cheese
and toolbox. In the corners of the ceiling, festoons of cobwebs.
Mersault, who had never been in this room since his own mother’s death,
measured the distance this man had travelled by the desolation around
him. The window overlooking the courtyard was closed. The other window
was open only a crack. The oil-lamp, in a fixture surrounded by a tiny
pack of china cards, cast its calm circle of light on the table, on
Mersault’s and Cardona’s feet, and on a chair facing them. Meanwhile
Cardona had picked up the photographs and was staring at it, kissing it,
mumbling: ‘Poor Maman.’ But it was himself he was pitying. She was
buried in the hideous cemetery Mersault knew well, on the other side of
town.
He wanted to leave. Speaking slowly to make himself understood, he said:
‘You-can’t-stay-here-like-this.’
‘No more work,’ Cardona gasped, and holding out the photograph, he
stammered: ‘I loved her, I loved her,’ and Mersault translated: ‘She
loved me.’ ‘She’s dead,’ and Mersault understood: ‘I’m alone.’ ‘I made
her that for her last birthday.’ On the mantelpiece was a tiny wooden
barrel with brass hoops and a shiny tap. Mersault let go of Cardona’s
shoulder, and he collapsed on the dirty pillows. From under the bed came
a deep sigh and a sickening smell. The dog dragged itself out,
flattening its rump, and rested its head on Mersault’s lap, its long
ears pricked up, its golden eyes staring into his own. Mersault looked
at the little barrel. In the miserable room where there was scarcely
enough air to breathe, with the dog’s warmth under his fingers, he
closed his eyes on the despair which rose within him like a tide for the
first time in a long while. Today, in the face of abjection and
solitude, his heart said: ‘No.’ And in the great distress that washed
over him, Mersault realized that his rebellion was the only authentic
thing in him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission.
The street that had been so animated under his windows the day before
was still lively. From the gardens beyond the courtyard rose a smell of
grass. Mersault offered Cardona a cigarette, and both men smoked without
speaking. The last trams passed and with them the still-livid memories
of men and lights. Cardona fell asleep and soon began snoring, his nose
stuffed with tears. The dog, curling up at Mersault’s feet, stirred
occasionally and moaned in its dreams. Each time it moved, its smell
reached Mersault, who was leaning against the wall, trying to choke down
the rebellion in his heart. The lamp smoked, charred, and finally went
out with a stink of oil. Mersault dozed off and awakened with his eyes
fixed on the bottle of wine. Making a tremendous effort, he stood up,
walked over to the rear window and stood there: out of the night’s heart
sounds and silences mounted towards him. At the sleeping world, a long
blast from a ship summoned men to depart, to begin again.
The next morning Mersault killed Zagreus, came home and slept all
afternoon. He awoke in a fever. That evening, still in bed, he sent for
the local doctor, who told him he had flu. A man from his office who had
come to find out what was the matter took Mersault’s resignation to
Monsieur Langlois. A few days later, everything was settled: a report in
the newspaper, an investigation. There was every motive for Zagreus’
action. Marthe came to see Mersault and said with a sigh: ‘Sometimes
there are days when you’d like to change places with him. But sometimes
it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.’ A week later,
Mersault boarded a ship for Marseilles. He told everyone he was going to
France for a rest. From Lyons, Marthe received a letter of farewell from
which only her pride suffered. In the same letter Mersault said he had
been offered an exceptional job in central Europe. Marthe wrote to him,
at a general-delivery address, about how much she was suffering. Her
letter never reached Mersault, who had a violent attack of fever the day
after he reached Lyons, and took the first train for Prague. As it
happened, Marthe told him that after several days in the morgue, Zagreus
had been buried and that it had taken a lot of pillows to wedge his body
into the coffin.
__________________
‘I’D like a room,’ the man said in German.
The clerk was sitting in front of a board covered with keys and was
separated from the lobby by a broad table. He stared at the man who had
just come in, a grey raincoat over his shoulders, and who spoke with his
head turned away. ‘Certainly, sir. For one night?’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘We have rooms at eighteen, twenty-five and thirty crowns.’
Mersault looked through the glass door of the hotel out into the little
Prague street, his hands in his pockets, his hair rumpled. Not far away,
he could hear the trams screeching down the Avenue Wenceslas.
‘Which room would you like, sir?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mersault said, still staring through the glass
door. The clerk took a key off the rack and handed it to Mersault.
‘Room number twelve,’ he said.
Mersault seemed to wake up. ‘How much is this room?’
‘Thirty crowns.’
‘That’s too much. Give me a room for eighteen.’
Without a word, the man took another key off the rack and indicated the
brass star attached to it: ‘Room number thirty-four.’
Sitting in his room Mersault took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and
mechanically rolled up his shirtsleeves. He walked over to the mirror
above the sink, meeting a drawn face slightly tanned where it was not
darkened by several days’ growth of beard. His hair fell in a tangle
over his forehead, down to the two deep creases between his eyebrows
which gave him a grave, tender expression, he realized. Only then did he
think of looking around this miserable room which was all the comfort he
had and beyond which he envisioned nothing at all. On a sickening carpet
— huge yellow flowers against a grey background — a whole geography of
filth suggested a grimy universe of wretchedness. Behind the huge
radiator, clots of dust: the regulator was broken, and the brass
contact-points exposed. Over the sagging bed dangled a fly-specked flex,
at its end a sticky light-bulb. Mersault inspected the sheets, which
were clean. He took his toilet things out of the overnight bag and
arranged them one by one on the sink. Then he started to wash his hands,
but turned off the tap and walked over to open the uncurtained window.
It overlooked a courtyard with a washing-trough and a series of tiny
windows in the walls. Washing was drying on a line stretched between two
of them. Mersault lay down on the bed and fell asleep at once. He
awakened with a start, sweating, his clothes rumpled, and walked
aimlessly around the room. Then he lit a cigarette, sat down on the bed,
and stared at the wrinkles in his trousers. The sour taste of sleep
mingled with the cigarette smoke. He stared at the room again,
scratching his ribs through his shirt. He was flooded by a dreadful
pleasure at the prospect of so much desolation and solitude. To be so
far away from everything, even from his fever, to suffer so distinctly
here what was absurd and miserable in even the tidiest lives, showed him
the shameful and secret countenance of a kind of freedom born of the
suspect, the dubious. Around him the flaccid hours lapped like a
stagnant pond — time had gone slack.
Someone knocked violently, and Mersault, startled, realized that he had
been awakened by the same knocking. He opened the door to find a little
old man with red hair, bent double under Mersault’s two suitcases, which
looked enormous in his hands. He was choking with rage, and his
wide-spaced teeth released a stream of saliva as well as insults and
recriminations. Mersault remembered the broken handle which made the
larger suitcase so difficult to carry. He wanted to apologize, but had
no idea how to say he had never thought the porter would be so old. The
tiny creature interrupted him: ‘That’s fourteen crowns.’
‘For one day’s storage?’ Mersault asked, surprised. Then he understood,
from the old man’s laborious explanations, that the porter had taken a
taxi. But Mersault dared not say that he himself could also have taken a
taxi in that case, and paid out of sheer reluctance to argue. Once the
door was shut, Mersault felt inexplicable sobs swelling his chest. A
nearby clock chimed four times. He had slept for two hours. He realized
he was separated from the street only by the house opposite his window,
and he felt the dim, mysterious current of life so close to him. It
would be better to go outside. Mersault washed his hands very carefully.
He sat down on the bed again to clean his nails, and worked the file
methodically. Down in the courtyard two or three buzzers rang out so
emphatically that Mersault went back to the window. He noticed then that
an arched passageway led through the house to the street. It was as if
all the voices of the street, all the unknown life on the other side of
that house, the sounds of men who have an address, a family, arguments
with an uncle, preferences at dinner, chronic diseases, the swarm of
beings each of whom has his own personality, forever divided from the
monstrous heart of humanity by individual beats, filtered now through
the passageway and rose through the courtyard to explode like bubbles in
Mersault’s room. Discovering how porous he was, how attentive to each
sign the world made, Mersault recognized the deep flaw that opened his
being to life. He lit another cigarette and hurriedly dressed. As he
buttoned his jacket, the smoke stung his eyes. He turned back to the
sink, put cold water on his eyes and decided to comb his hair. But his
comb had vanished. He was unable to smooth the sleep-rumpled curls with
his fingers. He went downstairs as he was, his hair sticking up behind
and hanging down his forehead. He felt diminished even further. Once out
in the street, he walked around the hotel to reach the little passageway
he had noticed. It opened on to the square in front of the old town
hall, and in the heavy evening that sank over Prague, the gothic
steeples of the town hall and of the old Tyn church were silhouetted,
black against the dim sky. Crowds of people were walking under the
arcades lining the old streets. Each time a woman passed him, Mersault
waited for the glance that would permit him to consider himself still
capable of playing the delicate and tender game of life. But healthy
people have a natural skill in avoiding feverish eyes. Unshaven, his
hair rumpled, in his eyes the expression of some restless animal, his
trousers as wrinkled as his shirt-collar, Mersault had lost that
wonderful confidence bestowed by a well-cut suit or the steering-wheel
of a new car. The light turned coppery, and the day still lingered on
the gold of the baroque domes at the far end of the square. He walked
towards one of them, went into the church, and overcome by the ancient
smell, sat down on a bench. The vaults above him were quite dark, but
the gilded capitals shed a mysterious golden liquid which flowed down
the grooves of the columns to the puffy faces of angels and grinning
saints. Peace, yes, there was peace here, but so bitter that Mersault
hurried to the threshold and stood on the steps, inhaling the evening’s
cooler air, into which he would plummet. In another moment, he saw the
first star appear, pure and unadorned, between the steeples of Tyn.
He began to look for a cheap restaurant, making his way into darker,
less crowded streets. Though it had not rained during the day, the
ground was damp, and Mersault had to pick his way among black puddles
glimmering between the infrequent paving-stones. A light rain started to
fall. The busy streets could not be far away, for he could hear the
newspaper sellers hawking the Narodni Politika. Mersault was walking in
circles now, and suddenly stopped. A strange odour reached him out of
the darkness. Pungent, sour, it awakened all his associations with
suffering. He tasted it on his tongue, deep in his nose, even his eyes,
somehow, tasted it. It was far away, then it was at the next
street-corner, between the now-opaque sky and the sticky pavement it was
there, the evil spell of the nights of Prague. He advanced to meet it,
and as he did so it became more real, filling him entirely, stinging his
eyes until the tears came, leaving him helpless. Turning a corner, he
understood: an old woman was selling cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and it
was their fragrance which had assaulted Mersault. A passer-by stopped,
bought a cucumber which the old woman wrapped in a piece of paper. He
took a few steps, unwrapped his purchase in front of Mersault, and as he
bit into the cucumber, its broken, sopping flesh released the odour even
more powerfully. Nauseated, Mersault lent against a post and for a long
moment inhaled all the alien solitude the world could offer him. Then he
walked away and without even thinking what he was doing entered a
restaurant where an accordion was playing. He went down several steps,
stopped at the foot of the stairs, and found himself in a dim cellar
filled with red lights. He must have looked peculiar, for the musician
played more softly, the conversations stopped, and all the diners looked
in his direction. In one corner, some whores were eating together, their
mouths shiny with grease. Other customers were drinking the brown,
sweetish Czech beer. Many were smoking without having ordered anything
at all. Mersault went over to a rather long table at which only one man
was seated. Tall and slender with yellow hair, he sprawled in his chair
with his hands in his pockets and pursed his chapped lips round a
matchstick already swollen with saliva, sucking it noisily or sliding it
from one corner of his mouth to the other. When Mersault sat down, the
man barely moved, wedged his back against the wall, shifted the match in
Mersault’s direction and squinted faintly. At that moment Mersault
noticed a red star in his buttonhole.
Mersault ate the little he had ordered rapidly. He was not hungry. The
accordionist was playing louder now, and staring fixedly at the
newcomer. Twice Mersault stared back defiantly and tried to meet the
man’s gaze. But fever had weakened him. The man was still staring.
Suddenly one of the whores burst out laughing, the man with the red star
sucked noisily on his match and produced a little bubble of saliva, and
the musician, still staring at Mersault, broke off the lively dance tune
he had been playing and began a slow melody heavy with the dust of
centuries. At this moment the door opened and a new customer walked in.
Mersault did not see him, but through the open door the smell of vinegar
and cucumbers pressed in upon him, immediately filling the dark cellar,
mingling with the mysterious melody of the accordion, swelling the
bubbles of saliva on the man’s matchstick, making the conversations
suddenly more meaningful, as if out of the night that lay upon Prague
all the significance of a miserable suffering ancient world had taken
refuge in the warmth of this room, among these people. Mersault suddenly
felt the flaw he carried within himself yield, exposing him still more
completely to pain and fever. Unable to bear another moment he stood up,
called to the waiter, and understanding nothing of his explanations
overpaid the bill, realizing that the musician’s gaze was once again
fixed upon him. He walked to the door, passing the accordionist, and saw
that he was still staring at the place at the table Mersault had just
left. Then he realized that the man was blind; he walked up the steps
and, opening the door, was entirely engulfed by the omnipresent odour as
he walked through the little streets into the depths of the night.
Stars glittered over the houses. He must have been near the river; he
could detect its powerful mutter. In front of a little gate in a thick
wall covered with Hebrew characters, he realized that he was in the
ghetto. Over the wall stretched the branches of a sweet-smelling willow.
Through the gate he could make out big brown stones lying among the
weeds: it was the old Jewish cemetery of Prague. A moment later Mersault
realized he had been running and was now in the square in front of the
old town hall. Near his hotel he had to lean against a wall and vomit,
retching painfully. With all the lucidity extreme weakness affords, he
managed to reach his room without making any mistakes, went to bed, and
fell asleep at once.
The next day he was awakened by the newspaper sellers. The day was still
overcast, but the sun glowed behind the clouds. Though still a little
weak, Mersault felt better. But he thought of the long day which lay
ahead of him. Living this way, in his own presence, time took on its
most extreme dimensions, and each hour seemed to contain a world. The
important thing was to avoid crises like the one yesterday. It would be
best to do his sightseeing methodically. He sat at the table in his
pyjamas and worked out a systematic schedule which would occupy each of
his days for a week. Monasteries and baroque churches, museums and the
old parts of the city, nothing was omitted. Then he washed, realized he
had forgotten to buy a comb, and went downstairs as he had the day
before, unkempt and taciturn, past the clerk whose bristling hair,
bewildered expression and jacket with the second button missing he
noticed now, in broad daylight. As he left the hotel he was brought to a
halt by a childish, sentimental accordion tune. The blind man of the
night before, squatting on his heels at the corner of the old square,
was playing with the same blank and smiling expression, as though
liberated from himself and entirely contained within the motion of a
life which exceeded him. Mersault turned the corner and again recognized
the smell of cucumbers. And with the smell, his suffering.
That day was the same as those which followed. Mersault got up late,
visited monasteries and churches, sought refuge in their fragrance of
crypts and incense, and then, back in the daylight, confronted his
secret fears at every corner, where a cucumber-seller was invariably
posted. It was through this odour that he saw the museums and discovered
the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague with
its gold magnificence. The altars which glowed softly in the darkness
seemed borrowed from the coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent
over the city. The glistening spirals and scrolls, the elaborate setting
that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its
resemblance to the crèches made for children at Christmas, the grandiose
and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of
infantile, feverish and overblown romanticism by which men protect
themselves against their own demons. The god worshipped here was the god
man fears and honours, not the god who laughs with man before the warm
frolic of sea and sun. Emerging from the faint fragrance of dust and
extinction which reigned under the dim vaults, Mersault felt he had no
country. Every evening he visited the cloister of the Czech monks, on
the west side of the city. In the cloister garden the hours fluttered
away with the doves, the bells chimed softly over the grass, but it was
still his fever which spoke to Mersault. Nonetheless, the time passed.
But then came the hour when the churches and monuments closed and the
restaurants had not yet opened. That was the dangerous time. Mersault
walked along the Vltava’s banks, dotted with flowerbeds and bandstands,
as the day came to an end. Little boats worked their way up the river
from lock to lock. Mersault kept pace with them, left behind the
deafening noise and rushing water of a sluice-gate, gradually regained
the peace and quiet of the evening, then walked on to meet a murmur
which swelled to a terrible roar. At the new lock, he watched the bright
little boats vainly trying to pass over the dam without capsizing until
one of them passed the danger point and shouts rang out above the sound
of the water. The rising and falling river with its burden of shouts,
tunes, and the fragrance of gardens, full of the coppery glow of the
setting sun and the twisted, grotesque shadows of the statues on the
Charles Bridge, made Mersault bitterly conscious of his desolation: a
solitude in which love had no part. Coming to a standstill as the
fragrance of leaves and water reached him, he felt a catch in his throat
and imagined tears which did not come. Tears would be for a friend, or
for open arms. But tears gave way to the world without tenderness in
which he was immersed. Some evenings, always at the same times, he
crossed the Charles Bridge and strolled through the Hradcany district
above the river, a deserted and silent neighbourhood though only a few
steps from the busiest streets in the city. He wandered among these huge
palaces, across enormous paved courtyards, past ironwork gates, around
the cathedral. His footsteps echoed in the silence between high walls. A
dim noise from the city reached him here. There was no cucumber-seller
in this district, but something oppressive in the silence, in the
grandeur of the place. So that Mersault always ended by walking back
towards the odour or the melody which henceforth constituted his only
country. He ate his meals in the restaurant he had discovered, for at
least it remained familiar. He had his place beside the man with the red
star who came only in the evenings, drank a beer and chewed on his
matchstick. At dinner, too, the blind man played his accordion, and
Mersault ate quickly, paid his bill, and returned to his hotel and the
unfailing sleep of a feverish child.
Every day he thought of leaving, and every day, sinking a little deeper
into desolation, his longing for happiness had a little less hold over
him. He had been in Prague four days now, and he had not yet bought the
comb whose absence he discovered each morning. Yet he had the vague
sense of something missing, and this was what he irresolutely waited
for. One evening, he walked towards his restaurant down the little
street where he had first smelled the cucumbers. Already he anticipated
that odour, when just before he reached the restaurant, on the pavement
opposite him, something made him stop, then come closer. A man was lying
there, arms folded, head fallen on the left cheek. Three or four people
were standing against the wall, apparently waiting for something, though
very calm. One was smoking, the others were speaking in low voices. But
one man in shirtsleeves, his jacket over his arm, hat pushed back on his
head, was performing a kind of wild dance around the body, his gestures
emphatic and disturbing. Overhead, the faint light of a distant
street-lamp mingled with the glow from the nearby restaurant. The man
tirelessly dancing, the body with its folded arms, the calm spectators,
the ironic contrast and the inexplicable silence — here at last,
combining contemplation and innocence, among the rather impressive
interplay of light and shadow, was a moment of equilibrium past which it
seemed to Mersault that everything would collapse into madness. He came
closer: the dead man’s head was lying in a pool of blood. The head was
turned so that it rested on the wound. In this remote corner of Prague,
between the faint light on the moist pavement, the long wet hiss of
passing cars a few steps away, the distant screech of occasional trams,
death seemed insipid yet insistent too, and it was death’s summons, its
damp breath that Mersault sensed at the very moment he began walking
away, very fast, without turning back. Suddenly the odour, which he had
forgotten, was all around him: he went into the restaurant and sat down
at his table. The man was there, but without his matchstick. It seemed
to Mersault that there was something distraught in his eyes. He
dismissed the stupid notion that occurred to him. But everything was
whirling in his mind. Before ordering anything he jumped up and ran to
his hotel, went to his room and threw himself on the bed. Something
sharp was throbbing in his temples. His heart empty, his belly tight,
Mersault’s rebellion exploded. Images of his life rushed before his
eyes. Something inside him clamoured for the gestures of women, for arms
that opened, and for warm lips. From the depth of the painful night of
Prague, amid smells of vinegar and sentimental tunes, mounted towards
him the anguished countenance of the old baroque world which had
accompanied his fever. Breathing with difficulty, seeing nothing, moving
mechanically, he sat up on his bed. The drawer of the bedside table was
open, lined with an English newspaper in which he read a whole article.
Then he stretched out on the bed again. The man’s head had been lying on
the wound, and three or four fingers would have fitted inside that
wound. Mersault stared at his hands and his fingers, and childish
desires rose in his heart. An intense and secret fervour swelled within
him, and it was a nostalgia for cities filled with sunlight and women,
with the green evenings that close all wounds. Tears burst from his
eyes. Inside him widened a great lake of solitude and silence above
which ran the sad song of his deliverance.
IN the train taking him north, Mersault stared at his hands. The train’s
speed traced an onrush of heavy clouds across the lowering sky. Mersault
was alone in this overheated compartment — he had left suddenly in the
middle of the night, and with the dark morning hours ahead of him, he
let the mild landscape of Bohemia rush by, the impending rain between
the tall silky poplars and the distant factory chimneys filling him with
an impulse to burst into tears. Then he looked at the white plaque with
its three sentences: Nicht hinauslehnen, E pericoloso sporgersi, Il est
dangereux de se pencher au-dehors. He looked again at his hands, which
lay like living, wild animals on his knees: the left one long and
supple, the right thicker, muscular. He knew them, recognized them, yet
they were distinct from himself, as though capable of actions in which
his will had no part. One came to rest against his forehead now,
pressing against the fever which throbbed in his temples. The other slid
down his jacket and took out of its pocket a cigarette that he
immediately discarded as soon as he became aware of an overpowering
desire to vomit. His hands returned to his knees, palms cupped, where
they offered Mersault the emblem of his life, indifferent once more and
offered to anyone who would take it.
He travelled for two days. But now it was not an instinct of escape
which drove him on. The very monotony of the journey satisfied him. This
train which was jolting him halfway across Europe suspended him between
two worlds — it had taken him abroad, and would deposit him somewhere,
draw him out of a life the very memory of which he wanted to erase and
lead him to the threshold of a new world where desire would be king. Not
for a single moment was Mersault bored. He sat in his corner, rarely
disturbed by anyone, stared at his hands, then at the countryside, and
reflected. He deliberately extended his trip as far as Breslau, merely
rousing himself at the border to change tickets. He wanted to stay where
he was, contemplating his freedom. He was tired and did not feel well
enough to move; he hoarded every last fragment of his strength, of his
hopes, kneaded them together until he had refashioned himself and his
fate as well. He loved these long nights when the train rushed along the
gleaming rails, roaring through the little stations where only a clock
was illuminated, the sudden stops among the clustered lights of cities
where there was no time to discover where he was before the train was
already swallowed up, a golden warmth cast into the compartments and
then gone. Hammers pounded on the wheels, the engine exhaled its cloud
of steam, and the robot gesture of the signalman lowering his red disc
hurled Mersault into the train’s wild course, only his lucidity, his
anxiety awake. The crossword puzzle of lights and shadows went on in the
compartment, a black and gold motley: Dresden, Bautzen, Görlitz,
Lugknitz. The long lonely night ahead of him, with all the time in the
world to decide on the actions of a future life, the patient struggle
with the thoughts eluding him on a station siding, recaptured and
pursued again, the consequences reappearing and escaping once more
before the dance of wires glistening under the rain and the lights.
Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formulate hope in
his heart, that would resolve his anxiety. In his weakened state, he
needed formulas. The night and then the day passed in this obstinate
struggle with the word, the image which from now on would constitute the
whole tonality of his mind, the sympathetic or miserable dream of his
future. He closed his eyes. It takes time to live. Like any work of art,
life needs to be thought about. Mersault thought about his life and
exercised his bewildered consciousness and his longing for happiness in
a train compartment which was like one of those cells where a man learns
to know what he is by what is more than himself.
On the morning of the second day, in the middle of a field, the train
slowed down. Breslau was still hours away, and the day broke over the
vast Silesian plain, a treeless sea of mud under an overcast sky sagging
with rainclouds. As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals,
huge black birds with glistening wings flew in flocks a few yards above
the ground, incapable of rising any higher under a sky heavy as a
tombstone. They circled in a slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one
of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost inseparable from
it, and flap off in the same lethargic flight, until it was far enough
away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot. Mersault wiped the
steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long streaks his
fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colourless
sky appeared an image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first
time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair
of innocence, a traveller lost in a primitive world, he retained
contact, and with his fist pressed to his chest, his face flattened
against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the
certainty of the splendours dormant within him. He wanted to crush
himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself in
that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt,
stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though
confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm
his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life’s
accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great
impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he
left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold
pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape disappeared.
A few hours later he arrived in Breslau. From a distance the city looked
like a forest of factory chimneys and church steeples. At close range,
it was made of brick and black stone: men in peaked caps walked slowly
through the streets. Mersault followed them, spent the morning in a
workman’s café. A boy was playing the harmonica: tunes of a sentimental
stupidity which eased the soul. Mersault decided to travel south again,
after buying a comb. The next day he was in Vienna. He slept a part of
the day and the whole next night. When he awakened, his fever was
completely gone. He stuffed himself on boiled eggs and thick cream for
breakfast, and feeling a little squeamish walked out into a morning
speckled with sunshine and rain. Vienna was a refreshing city: there was
nothing to visit. St Stephen’s cathedral was too big, and bored him. He
preferred the cafés around it, and in the evening a little dance-hall
near the banks of the canal. During the day he strolled along the Ring,
in the luxury of the shop windows and the elegant women. He enjoyed this
frivolous and expensive décor which divides man from himself in the
least natural city in the world. But the women were pretty, the flowers
bright and sturdy in the gardens, and over the Ring at twilight, in the
brilliant carefree crowd, Mersault stared at the futile caracole of
stone horses against the red sky. It was then that he remembered his
friends Rose and Claire. For the first time since Lyons, he wrote a
letter. It was the overflow of his silence that he put down on paper:
Dear Children,
I’m writing from Vienna. I don’t know what you’re doing, but speaking
for myself I’m travelling for a living. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful
things with a heavy heart. Here in Vienna beauty has been replaced by
civilization. It’s a relief. I’m not looking at churches or ruins. I
take walks in the Ring. And in the evening, over the theatres and the
sumptuous palaces, the blind steeplechase of stone horses in the sunset
fills me with a strange mixture of bitterness and delight. In the
morning I eat boiled eggs and thick cream. I get up late, the hotel
people wait on me hand and foot. I’m very impressed with the style of
the maître d’hôtel and stuffed with good food (oh, the cream here!).
There is lots of entertainment and the women are good-looking. The only
thing missing is the sun.
What are you up to? Tell me about yourselves and describe the sun to a
miserable wretch who has no roots anywhere and who remains your faithful
Patrice Mersault
That evening, having written his letter, he went back to the dance-hall.
He had arranged to spend the evening with Helen, one of the hostesses
who knew a little French and understood his poor German. Leaving the
dance-hall at two in the morning, he walked her home, made love
efficiently, and awoke the next morning against Helen’s back,
disinterestedly admiring her long hips and broad shoulders. He got up
without waking her, slipped the money into her shoe. As he was about to
open the door, she called to him: ‘But darling, you’ve made a mistake.’
He returned to the bed. And he had made a mistake. Unfamiliar with
Austrian currency, he had left a five-hundred shilling note instead of a
hundred shillings. ‘No,’ he said smiling. ‘It’s for you — you were
wonderful.’ Helen’s freckled face broke into a grin under her rumpled
blond hair; she jumped up on the bed and kissed him on both cheeks. That
kiss, doubtless the first she had given him spontaneously, kindled a
spark of emotion in Mersault. He made her lie down, tucked her in,
walked to the door again and looked back with a smile. ‘Goodbye,’ he
said. She opened her eyes wide above the sheet that was pulled up to her
nose and let him vanish without a word.
A few days later Mersault received an answer postmarked Algiers:
Dear Patrice,
We’re in Algiers. Your children would be very glad to see you again. If
you have no roots anywhere, why don’t you come to Algiers — we have room
for you in the House. We’re all happy here. We’re ashamed of it, of
course, but only for appearance’s sake. And because of popular
prejudice. If happiness appeals to you, come and try it here. It’s
better than re-enlisting. We bend our brows to your paternal kisses.
Rose, Claire, Catherine
P.S. Catherine protests against the word paternal. Catherine is living
with us. If you approve, she can be your third daughter.
He decided to return to Algiers by way of Genoa. As other men need to be
alone before making their crucial decisions, Mersault, poisoned by
solitude and alienation, needed to withdraw into friendship and
confidence, to enjoy an apparent security before choosing his life.
In the train heading across northern Italy towards Genoa, he listened to
the thousand voices that lured him on, the siren-songs of happiness. By
the time he reached the first cypresses, springing straight up from the
naked soil, he had yielded. He still felt weak, feverish. But something
in him had relented. Soon, as the sun advanced through the day and the
sea drew closer, under a broad sky pouring light and air over the
shivering olive-trees, the exaltation which stirred the world joined the
enthusiasms of his own heart. The noise of the train, the chatter in the
crowded compartment, everything that laughed and sang around him kept
time to a kind of inner dance which projected him, sitting motionless
hour after hour, to the ends of the earth and at last released him,
jubilant and speechless, into the deafening bustle of Genoa, the
brilliant harbour echoing the brilliant sky, where desire and indolence
struggled against each other until dark. He was thirsty, hungry for
love, eager for pleasure. The gods who burned within him cast him into
the sea, on a tiny beach at one end of the harbour, where the water
tasted of salt and tar and he swam until he forgot his own body. Then he
wandered through the narrow, redolent streets of the old part of the
city, letting the colours claw at his eyes and the sky devour itself
above the houses, the cats sleeping among the summer’s filth flattened
by the burden of the sun. He walked along a road overlooking the entire
city, and the flickering fragrant sea rose towards him in one long,
irresistible swell. Closing his eyes, Mersault gripped the warm stone he
sat on, opening them again to stare at this city where sheer excess of
life flaunted its exultant bad taste. At noon he would sit on the ramp
leading down to the harbour and watch the women walking up from the
offices on the docks. In sandals and bright summer dresses, breasts
bobbing, they left Mersault’s tongue dry and his heart pounding with
desire, a desire in which he recognized both a release and a
justification. In the evenings, he would see the same women in the
streets and follow them, the ardent animal coiled in his loins stirring
with a fierce delight. For two days he smouldered in this inhuman
exaltation. On the third day he left Genoa for Algiers.
Throughout the crossing, staring at the water and the light on the
water, first in the morning then in the middle of the day and then in
the evening, he matched his heart against the slow pulse of the sky, and
returned to himself. He scorned the vulgarity of certain cures.
Stretched out on the deck, he realized that there could be no question
of sleeping but that he must stay awake, must remain conscious despite
friends, despite the comfort of body and soul. He had to create his
happiness and his justification. And doubtless the task would be easier
for him now. At the strange peace that filled him as he watched the
evening suddenly freshening upon the sea, the first star slowly
hardening in the sky, where the light died out green to be reborn
yellow, he realized that after this great tumult and this fury, what was
dark and wrong within him was gone now, yielding to the clear water,
transparent now, of a soul restored to kindness, to resolution. He
understood. How long he had craved a woman’s love! And he was not made
for love. All his life — the office on the docks, his room and his
nights of sleep there, the restaurant he went to, his mistress — he had
pursued single-mindedly a happiness which in his heart he believed was
impossible. In this he was no different from everyone else. He had
played at wanting to be happy. Never had he sought happiness with a
conscious and deliberate desire. Never until the day ... And from that
moment on, because of a single act calculated in utter lucidity, his
life had changed and happiness seemed possible. Doubtless he had given
birth to this new being in suffering — but what was that suffering
compared to the degrading farce he had performed till now? He saw, for
instance, that what had attracted him to Marthe was vanity, not love.
Even that miracle of the lips she offered him was nothing more than the
delighted astonishment of a power acknowledged and awakened by conquest.
The meaning of his affair with Marthe consisted of the replacement of
that initial astonishment by a certainty, the triumph of vanity over
modesty. What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would
walk into the cinema and men’s eyes turned towards her, that moment when
he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his
ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh
probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely
body, at mastering and humiliating it. Now he knew he was not made for
such love, but for the innocent and terrible love of the dark god he
would henceforth serve.
As often happens, what was best in his life had crystallized around what
was worst. Claire and her friends, Zagreus and his will to happiness had
all crystallized around Marthe. He knew now that it was his own will to
happiness which must make the next move. But if it was to do so, he
realized that he must submit to time, that to come to terms with time
was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments.
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. Most men cannot even prove they
are not mediocre. He had won that right. But the proof remained to be
shown, the risk to be run. Only one thing had changed. He felt free of
his past, and of what he had lost. He wanted nothing now but this
contraction and this enclosure inside himself, this lucid and patient
fervour in the face of the world. Like warm dough being squeezed and
kneaded, all he wanted was to hold his life between his hands: the way
he felt during those two long nights on the train when he would talk to
himself, prepare himself to live. To lick his life like barley-sugar, to
shape it, sharpen it, love it at last — that was his whose passion. This
presence of himself to himself — henceforth his effort would be to
maintain it in the face of everything in his life, even at the cost of a
solitude he knew now was so difficult to endure. He would not submit.
All his violence would help him now, and at the point to which it raised
him, his love would join him, like a furious passion to live.
The sea wrinkled slowly against the ship’s sides. The sky filled with
stars. And Mersault, in silence, felt in himself extreme and violent
powers to love, to marvel at this life with its countenance of sunlight
and tears, this life in its salt and hot stone — it seemed that by
caressing this life, all his powers of love and despair would unite.
That was his poverty, that was his sole wealth. As if by writing zero,
he was starting over again, but with a consciousness of his powers and a
lucid intoxication which urged him on in the face of his fate.
And then Algiers — the slow arrival in the morning, the dazzling cascade
of the Kasbah above the sea, the hills and the sky, the bay’s
outstretched arms, the houses among the trees and the smell, already
upon him, of the docks. Then Mersault realized that not once since
Vienna had he thought of Zagreus as the man he had killed with his own
hands. He recognized in himself that power to forget which only children
have, and geniuses, and the innocent. Innocent, overwhelmed by joy, he
understood at last that he was made for happiness.
PATRICE and Catherine are having their breakfast on the terrace, in the
sun. Catherine is in her bathing-suit, the Boy, as Mersault’s friends
call him, the Boy is in his shorts, a napkin around his neck. They are
eating salted tomatoes, potato salad, honey, and huge amounts of fruit.
They keep the peaches on ice, and lick the tiny drops which have
congealed on the velvety skins. They also make grape-juice, which they
drink with their faces tipped towards the sun in order to get a tan — at
least the Boy does, for he knows a suntan becomes him. ‘Taste the sun,’
Patrice said, holding out his arm to Catherine. She licked his arm.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Now you.’ He tasted too, then stretched, and stroked
his ribs. Catherine sprawled on her stomach and pulled her bathing-suit
down to her hips. ‘I’m not indecent, am I?’
‘No,’ the Boy said, not looking.
The sun streamed down, lingering over his face. The moist pores absorbed
this fire which sheathed his body and put him to sleep. Catherine
drowned in the sun, sighed, and moaned: ‘Oh, it’s good.’
‘Yes,’ the Boy said.
The house perched on a hilltop with a view of the bay. It was known in
the neighbourhood as the House of the Three Students. A steep path led
up to it, beginning in olive-trees and ending in olive-trees. Between, a
kind of landing followed a grey wall covered with obscene figures and
political slogans to encourage the winded visitor. Then more
olive-trees, blue patches of sky between the branches, and the smell of
the gum-trees bordering reddish fields in which purple-yellow and orange
cloths were spread out to dry. After a great deal of sweating and
panting, the visitor pushed open a little blue gate, avoiding the
bougainvillaea tendrils, and then climbed a stairway steep as a ladder
but drenched in a blue shade which already slaked his thirst. Rose,
Claire, Catherine and the Boy called the place the House above the
World. Open to the view on all sides, it was a kind of balloon-gondola
suspended in the brilliant sky over the motley dance of the world. From
the perfect curve of the bay far below, a nameless energy gathered up
the weeds, the grass and the sun, swept on the pines and the cypresses,
the dusty olive-trees and the eucalyptus to the very walls of the house.
According to the season, white dog-roses and mimosa bloomed at the heart
of this offering, or the kind of honeysuckle that spread its fragrance
over the walls on summer nights. White sheets and red roofs, the sea
smiling under a sky pinned without a wrinkle from one edge of the
horizon to the other — the House above the World trained its huge
bay-windows on a carnival of colours and lights, day and night. But in
the distance, a line of high purple mountains joined the bay and its
extreme slope and contained this intoxication within its far contour.
Here no-one complained of the steep path or of exhaustion. Everyone had
his joy to conquer, every day.
Living above the world, each discovered his own weight, seeing his face
brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four
inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence which was at once a
judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a
personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those
in whom equilibrium had not killed love. They called the world to
witness:
‘The world and I,’ Patrice would say about nothing in particular, ‘we
disapprove of you.’
Catherine, for whom being naked meant ridding herself of inhibitions,
took advantage of the Boy’s absences to undress on the terrace. And
after staying out to watch the sky’s colours change, she announced at
dinner with a kind of sensual pride: ‘I was naked in front of the
world.’
‘Yes,’ Patrice said scornfully, ‘women naturally prefer their ideas to
their sensations.’ Then Catherine protested: she loathed being an
intellectual. And Rose and Claire in chorus: ‘Shut up, Catherine, you’re
wrong.’
For it was understood that Catherine was always wrong, being the one the
others were fond of in the same way. She had a sluggish, toast-coloured,
deliberate body and an animal instinct for what is essential. No-one
could decipher better than Catherine the secret language of trees, of
the sea, of the wind.
‘That child,’ Claire would say, eating incessantly, ‘is a force of
nature.’
Then they would all go outside to lie in the sun, and no-one would
speak. Man diminishes man’s powers. The world leaves them intact. Rose,
Claire, Catherine and Patrice lived, at the windows of their house, on
images and appearances, consented to a kind of game they played with
each other, receiving with laughter friendship and affection alike, but
returning to the dance of sea and sky, rediscovered the secret colour of
their fate and finally confronted the deepest part of themselves.
Sometimes the cats came to join their masters. Gula would creep out,
perpetually offended, a black question-mark with green eyes, slender and
delicate, suddenly seized by a fit of madness and pouncing on shadows.
‘It’s a matter of glands,’ Rose said, and then she would laugh,
surrendering to her laugh, her eyes squinting behind the round
sunglasses under her curly hair, until Gula leaped into her lap (a
special privilege), and then her fingers would wander over the
glistening fur and Rose subsided, relaxed, becoming a cat with tender
eyes, calming the animal with her mild and fraternal hands. For cats
were Rose’s escape into the world, as nakedness was Catherine’s. Claire
preferred Cali, the other cat, as gentle and stupid as his dirty white
fur, who let himself be teased for hours at a time. And Claire, her
Florentine face intent, would feel her soul swell within her. Silent and
withdrawn, she was given to sudden outbursts, and had a splendid
appetite. Noticing that she was gaining weight, Patrice scolded her:
‘You’re disgusting. A lovely creature is not entitled to grow ugly.’
But Rose intervened: ‘Please stop tormenting the child. Eat, Claire
darling.’
And the day turned from the rising sun to the setting sun around the
hills and over the sea, inside the delicate light. They laughed, teased
each other, made plans. Everyone smiled at appearances and pretended to
submit to them. Patrice proceeded from the face of the world to the
grave and smiling faces of the young women. Sometimes he was amazed by
this universe they had created around him. Friendship and trust, sun and
white houses, scarcely-heeded nuances; here felicities were born intact,
and he could measure their precise resonance. The House above the World,
they said among themselves, was not a house of pleasure, it was a house
of happiness. Patrice knew it was true when night fell and they all
accepted, with the last breeze on their faces, the human and dangerous
temptation to be utterly unique.
Today, after the sunbathe, Catherine had gone to her office. ‘My dear
Patrice,’ Rose announced, suddenly appearing, ‘I have some good news for
you.’
The Boy was conscientiously lounging on a couch in the terrace room, a
detective-story in his hands. ‘My dear Rose, I’m all ears.’
‘Today is your turn in the kitchen.’
‘Splendid,’ Patrice said, without moving.
Rose stuffed into her student’s satchel not only the sweet peppers for
her lunch but also volume three of Lavisse’s boring History and left.
Patrice, who would be cooking lentils, loafed around the big ochre room
until eleven, walking between the couches and the shelves decorated with
green, red and yellow masks, touching the beige-and-orange curtains;
then he quickly boiled the lentils, put some oil in the pot, an onion to
brown, a tomato, a bouquet-garni, fussed over the stove and cursed Gula
and Cali for announcing their hunger, despite the fact that Rose had
explained to them yesterday, ‘Now you animals know it’s too hot in the
summer to be hungry.’
Catherine arrived at a quarter to twelve, wearing a light dress and open
sandals and insisted on a shower and a nap in the sun — she would be the
last at table. And Rose would admonish her: ‘Catherine, you’re
intolerable.’ The water hissed in the bathroom, and Claire appeared,
breathless from the climb. ‘Lentils? I know the best way of ...’
‘I know too: you take thick cream ... We’ve all learnt our lesson, dear
Claire.’ It is a fact that Claire’s recipes always began with thick
cream.
‘The Boy is absolutely right,’ said Rose, who had just arrived.
‘Yes,’ the Boy agreed. ‘Let’s sit down.’
Meals are served in the kitchen, which looks like a prop-room: there is
even a pad to write down Rose’s good lines. Claire says: ‘We must be
chic, but we’re simple too,’ and eats her sausage with her fingers.
Catherine comes to table duly late, drunk with the sun, and plaintive,
her eyes pale with sleep. There is not enough vitriol in her soul to do
justice to her office — eight hours she subtracts from the world and her
life to give to a typewriter. The girls understand, thinking of what
their own lives would be with those eight hours amputated. Patrice says
nothing.
‘Yes,’ Rose says, made uneasy by any show of feelings. ‘Well, it’s your
own business. Besides, you talk about that office of yours every day.
We’ll forbid you to speak.’
‘But ...’ Catherine sighs.
‘Put it to a vote. One, two, three, you’re outvoted.’
‘You see,’ Claire says, as the lentils are brought on, too dry, and
everyone eats in silence. When Claire does the cooking and tastes her
food at the table, she always adds with a satisfied expression: ‘My
goodness, that’s quite delicious!’ Patrice, who has his dignity, prefers
to say nothing, until everyone bursts out laughing. This is certainly
not Catherine’s day, for she lectures them all about reducing her office
hours and asks someone to go with her to complain.
‘No,’ Rose says, ‘after all, you’re the one who works.’
Exasperated, the ‘force of nature’ goes outside and lies in the sun. But
soon everyone joins her there. And absently caressing Catherine’s hair,
Claire decrees that what this ‘child’ needs is a man. For it is common
practice in the House above the World to settle Catherine’s fate, to
attribute certain needs to her, and to establish their extent and
variety. Of course she points out from time to time that she’s old
enough, etc., but no-one pays any attention. ‘Poor thing,’ Rose says,
‘she needs a lover.’
The everyone surrenders to the sun. Catherine, who never holds a grudge,
tells the gossip about her office: how Mademoiselle Perez, the tall
blonde who’s getting married soon, had asked everyone in the office for
information in order to be prepared for the ordeal, and what horrifying
descriptions the salesmen had given her, and with what relief, back from
her honeymoon, she smilingly declared: ‘It wasn’t so bad as all that.’
‘She’s thirty years old,’ Catherine adds, pityingly.
And Rose, objecting to these off-colour stories: ‘All right, Catherine,’
she says, ‘we aren’t just girls here.’
At this time of day the mail-plane passes over the city, bearing the
glory of its glittering metal over land and through the heavens. It
enters into the movement of the bay, incorporates itself into the course
of the world, and suddenly abandoning its frivolities, sheers off and
dives down to the sea, landing in a tremendous explosion of blue and
white water. Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny-adder mouths
showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful
and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and colour. Eyes
closed, Catherine takes the long fall which carries her deep into
herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
The next Sunday, guests have been invited. It is Claire’s turn in the
kitchen. Hence Rose has peeled the vegetables, set the table; Claire
will put the vegetables in the pots and will watch over the cooking
while reading in her room, occasionally emerging to glance under the
lids. Since Mina, the Arab girl, has not come this morning, having lost
her father for the third time this year, Rose has also cleaned the
house. The first guest arrives: Eliane, whom Mersault calls the
Idealist. ‘Why?’ Eliane asks. ‘Because when you hear something true that
upsets you, you say, “that’s true, but it’s not good”.’ Eliane has a
good heart, and she thinks she looks like The Man with a Glove, though
no-one else does. But her room is lined with reproductions of The Man
with the Glove. Eliane is studying something or other, and the first
time she came to the House above the World, she announced that she was
enchanted by the inhabitants’ ‘lack of inhibitions’. In time, she has
found this less convenient. A lack of inhibitions means telling her that
her stories are a bore, or declaring — quite amiably — as soon as the
first words are out of her mouth: ‘Eliane, you’re just an idiot.’
When Eliane comes into the kitchen with Noel, the second guest and a
sculptor by profession, she stumbles over Catherine, who never does
anything in a normal position. Now she’s lying on her back, eating
grapes with one hand and with the other setting about a mayonnaise that
is still thin. Rose, in a huge blue apron, is admiring Gula’s
perspicacity — the cat has jumped to the shelf to eat the dessert. ‘No
doubt about it,’ Rose says blissfully, ‘that creature has a mind of her
own.’
‘Yes,’ Catherine says, ‘she’s outdone herself today,’ adding that in the
morning Gula, with more of a mind than ever, had broken the little green
lamp and a vase as well.
Eliane and Noel, doubtless too winded to express their disgust, decide
to take a seat no-one has dreamed of offering them. Claire arrives,
friendly and languorous, shakes hands and tastes the bouillabaisse
simmering on the stove. She decides they can start. But today Patrice is
late. Then he appears and explains in great detail to Eliane that he is
in a good mood because the girls in the street are so pretty. The hot
season is just beginning, but already the firm bodies are beginning to
be revealed by the light gowns — hence Patrice, as he testifies, is left
in a devastated state, mouth dry, temples throbbing, loins hot. This
insistence upon detail silences Eliane. At table, a general
consternation follows the first spoonfuls of bouillabaisse. Claire
announces playfully: ‘I’m afraid the bouillabaisse tastes of burnt
onion.’
‘Oh no,’ Noel answers politely.
Then, to test those manners, Rose asks him to purchase for the household
a certain number of useful items such as a hot-water heater, Persian
carpets and a refrigerator. When Noel replies by encouraging Rose to
pray for him to win the lottery, Rose becomes quite realistic: ‘We might
as well pray for ourselves.’
The sun is hot and heavy now, which makes the iced wine all the more
precious, and the fruit welcome. With the coffee, Eliane bravely changes
the subject to love. If she were in love, she would get married.
Catherine tells her that it’s more urgent, when in love, to make love, a
materialism that convulses Eliane. Rose, the pragmatist, would approve
‘if unfortunately experience did not show that marriage dissolves love’.
But Eliane and Catherine force their opinions into opposition and become
unfair, as anyone with spirit feels obliged to do. Noel, who thinks in
shapes and in clay, believes in Woman, in children, and in the
patriarchal truth of a concrete and sensuous life. Then Rose,
exasperated beyond endurance by the outcry raised by Eliane and
Catherine, pretends to understand, suddenly, the reasons for Noel’s
frequent visits.
‘I want to thank you now,’ she says, ‘though I find it difficult to tell
you how much this discovery overwhelms me. I’ll speak to my father
tomorrow about “our” project, and you yourself may apply to him in a few
days.’
‘But ...’ Noels says, for Noel doesn’t quite follow.
‘Oh,’ Rose says, with tremendous energy, ‘I know. I understand without
your having to speak a word: you’re the kind of man who can hold his
tongue and let other people guess what he’s thinking. But I’m glad
you’ve declared yourself at last, for the persistence of your attentions
was beginning to sully the purity of my reputation.’
Noel, vaguely amused, and also vaguely alarmed, declares himself
delighted to find his aspirations crowned with success.
‘Not to mention,’ Patrice says, before lighting a cigarette, ‘that
you’ll have to act quickly. Rose’s condition obliges you to take certain
steps promptly.’
‘What?’
‘Oh heavens,’ Claire says, ‘it’s only her second month.’
‘Besides,’ Rose adds tenderly and persuasively, ‘you’ve reached the age
when you enjoy finding your own face in another man’s child.’
Noel frowns, and Claire says good-naturedly: ‘It’s only a joke. Just
play along with it, Noel, and let’s go inside.’
At which point, the discussion of principles comes to an end.
Nonetheless Rose, who does her good deeds in secret, speaks
affectionately to Eliane. In the big room, Patrice sits at the window,
Claire leans against the table, and Catherine is lying on the floor. The
others are on the couch. There is a heavy mist over the city and the
harbour, but the tugs go about their work, and their deep hoots rise to
the House on gusts of tar and fish, the world of black and red hulls, of
rusty anchors and chains sticky with seaweed wakening down below. As
always, the strong, fraternal summons of a life of many efforts tempts
everyone. Eliane says to Rose sadly: ‘Then you’re just like me.’
‘No,’ Rose answers, ‘I’m merely trying to be happy — as happy as
possible.’
‘And love isn’t the only way,’ Patrice says, without turning around. He
is very fond of Eliane, and afraid he has hurt her feelings just now.
But he understands Rose and her thirst for happiness.
‘A mediocre ideal,’ Eliane declares.
‘I don’t know if it’s mediocre, but it’s a healthy one. And that ...’
Patrice breaks off. Rose closes her eyes. Gula has jumped into her lap,
and by slowly caressing the cat’s skull and back, Rose anticipates that
secret marriage in which the squinting cat and the motionless woman will
see the same universe out of the same half-closed eyes. Everyone muses,
between the long calls of the tug. Rose lets Gula’s purring rise within
her, starting from the coiled beast in the hollow of her body. The heat
presses on her eyes and immerses her in a silence inhabited by the
throbbing of her own blood. The cats sleep for days at a time and make
love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and
their sleep impenetrable. And their know that the body has a soul in
which the soul has no part. ‘Yes,’ Rose says, opening her eyes, ‘to be
as happy as possible.’
Mersault was thinking about Lucienne Raynal. When he had said that the
women in the streets were pretty, he meant that one woman in particular
was pretty. He had met her at a friend’s house. A week before they had
gone out together, and having nothing to do, had strolled along the
harbour boulevards, all one fine hot morning. Lucienne had not opened
her mouth, and as he walked her home Mersault was startled to find
himself squeezing her hand a long time and smiling at her. She was quite
tall and was wearing no hat — only a white linen dress and sandals. On
the boulevards they had walked into a slight breeze, and Lucienne set
her feet flat on the warm cobbles, bracing herself with each step
against the wind. As she did so, her dress became pasted against her
body, outlining her smooth, curving belly. With her blond her pulled
back, her small straight nose, and the splendid thrust of her breasts,
she represented and even sanctioned a kind of secret agreement which
linked her to the earth and organized the world around her movements. As
her bag swayed from her right wrist and a silver bracelet tinkled
against its clasp, she raised her left hand over her head to protect
herself from the sun; the tip of her right foot was still on the earth
but was about to take off — and at that moment she seemed to Patrice to
wed her gestures to the world.
It was then that he experienced the mysterious harmony which matched his
gestures with Lucienne’s ... They walked well together, and it was no
effort for him to keep in step with her. Doubtless this harmony was
facilitated by Lucienne’s flat shoes. But all the same, there was
something in their respective strides which were similar in both length
and flexibility. Mersault noticed Lucienne’s silence and the closed
expression of her face; he decided she was probably not very
intelligent, and that pleased him. There is something divine in mindless
beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it. All of this made
him linger over Lucienne’s hand when he said goodbye, made him see her
again, inviting her to take long walks at the same silent pace, offering
their tanned faces to the sun or the stars, swimming together and
matching their gestures and their strides without exchanging anything
but the presence of their bodies. And then last night, Mersault had
discovered a familiar and overwhelming miracle on Lucienne’s lips. Until
then, what moved him had been her way of clinging to his clothes, of
following him, of taking his arm — her abandonment and her trust that
touched him as a man. Her silence, too, by which she put all of herself
into each momentary gesture and emphasized her resemblance to the cats,
a resemblance to which he already owed the gravity characterizing all
her actions. Yesterday, after dinner, they had strolled together on the
docks. They had stopped against the ramp leading up to the boulevard,
and Lucienne had pressed against Mersault. In the darkness, he felt
under his fingers the cool prominent cheekbones and the warm lips which
opened under his pressures. Then there was something like a great cry
within him, abstracted yet ardent. From the starry night and the city
that was like a spilled sky, swollen with human lights under the warm,
deep breeze that rose from the harbour, he drew the thirst of this warm
spring, the limitless longing to seize from these vibrant lips all the
meaning of that inhuman and dormant world, like a silence enclosed in
her mouth. He bent over her, and it was as if he had rested his lips on
a bird. Lucienne moaned. He nibbled her lips, and sucked in that warmth
which transported him as if he had embraced the world in his arms. And
she clung to him like a drowning girl, rising again and again from the
depth into which she had sunk, drew back and then offered him her lips
again, falling once more into the cold abyss that enfolded her like a
divine oblivion.
... But Eliane was leaving now. A long afternoon of silence and
reflection lay ahead of Mersault in his room. At dinner, no-one spoke.
But by mutual consent they went out on to the terrace. The days always
ended by melting into the days: from the morning above the bay,
glistening with sun and mist, to the mildness of the evening above the
bay. Day broke over the sea and the sun set behind the hills, for the
sky showed only the one road, passing from the sea to the hills. The
world says only one thing, it wakens, then it wearies. But there always
comes a time when it vanquishes by mere repetition and gains the reward
of its own severance. Thus the days of the House above the World, woven
of that luxuriant fabric of laughter and simple acts, ended on the
terrace under the star-studded night. Rose and Claire and Patrice
stretched out on the divans, Catherine sat on the parapet.
In the sky, night showed them its shining face, radiant and secret.
Lights passed far below in the harbour, and the screech of trains
occasionally reached them. The stars swelled, then shrank, vanished and
were reborn, drawing evanescent figures, creating new ones moment by
moment. In the silence, the night recovered its density, its flesh.
Filled with twinkling stars, it left in their eyes the same play of
light that tears can bring. And each of them, plunging into the depths
of the sky, found that extreme point where everything coincides, the
secret and tender meditation which constitutes the solitude of one’s
life.
Catherine, suddenly choked with love, could only sigh. Patrice, who felt
that his voice would crack, nonetheless asked: ‘Don’t you feel cold?’
‘No,’ Rose said. ‘Besides, it’s so beautiful.’
Claire stood up, put her hands on the parapet and held her face up to
the sky. Facing everything noble and elementary in the world, she united
her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes with the
movement of the stars. Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: ‘On
good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.’
‘Yes,’ Patrice said, without looking at her. A star fell. Behind it a
distant beacon broadened in the night that was deeper now. Some men were
climbing up the path in silence. He could hear the sound of their
footsteps, their heavy breathing. Then the smell of flowers reached him.
The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which
proceeds from star to star is established a freedom which releases us
from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which
proceeds from death to death. Patrice, Catherine, Rose and Claire then
grew aware of the happiness born of their abandonment to the world. If
this night was in some sense the figure of their fate, they marvelled
that it should be at once so carnal and so secret, that upon its
countenance mingled both tears and the sun. And with pain and joy, their
hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to the happy
death.
It is late now. Already midnight. Upon the brow of this night which is
like the repose and the reflection of the world, a dim surge and murmur
of stars heralds the coming dawn. A tremulous light descends from the
sky. Patrice looks at his friends: Catherine sitting on the parapet, her
head tipped back; Rose huddled on the divan, her hands resting on Gula;
Claire standing stiff against the parapet, her high, round forehead a
white patch in the darkness. Young creatures capable of happiness, who
exchange their youth and keep their secrets. He stands beside Catherine
and stares over her glistening shoulder into the bowl of the sky. Rose
comes over to the parapet, and all four are facing the World now. It is
as if the suddenly cooler dew of the night were rinsing the signs of
solitude from then, delivering them from themselves, and by that
tremulous and fugitive baptism restoring them to the world. At this
moment, when the night overflows with stars, their gestures are fixed
against the great mute face of the sky. Patrice raises an arm towards
the night, sweeping sheaves of stars in his gesture, the sea of the
heavens stirred by his arm and all Algiers at his feet, around them like
a dark, glittering cape of jewels and shells.
EARLY in the morning, the fog-lamps of Mersault’s car were gleaming
along the coast road. Leaving Algiers, he passed milk carts, and the
warm smell of the horses made him even more aware of the morning’s
freshness. It was still dark. A last star dissolved slowly in the sky,
and on the pale road he could hear only the motor’s contented purr and
occasionally, in the distance, the sound of hooves, the clatter of
milk-cans, until out of the dark his lights glittered on the horseshoes.
Then everything vanished in the sound of speed. He was driving faster
now, and the night swiftly veered to day.
Out of the darkness still retained between the hills, the car climbed an
empty road overlooking the sea, where the morning declared itself.
Mersault accelerated. The tiny sucking sound of the wheels grew louder
on the dewy tarmac. At each of the many turns, Mersault’s braking made
the tyres squeal, and as the road straightened, the sound of the motor
gaining speed momentarily drowned out the soft voices of the sea rising
from the beaches below. Only an aeroplane permits man a more apparent
solitude than the kind he discovers in a car. Utterly confident of his
own presence, satisfied with the precision of his gestures, Mersault
could at the same time return to himself and to what concerned him. The
day lay open, now, at the end of the road. The sun rose over the sea,
awakening the fields on either side of the road, still deserted a moment
before, filling them with the red fluttering of birds and insects.
Sometimes a farmer would cross one of these fields, and Mersault,
rushing past, retained no more than the image of a figure with a sack
bending over the moist, clinging soil. Again and again the car brought
him to the edge of slopes overlooking the sea; they grew steeper and
their outline, barely suggested in the light of dawn, grew more distinct
now, suddenly revealing prospects of olive-trees, pines, and whitewashed
cottages. Then another turn hurled the car towards the sea which tipped
up towards Mersault like an offering glowing with salt and sleep. Then
the car hissed on the tarmac and turned back towards other hillsides and
the unchanging sea.
A month before, Mersault had announced his departure to the House above
the World. He would travel again, then settle down somewhere near
Algiers. Several weeks later he was back, convinced that travel now
meant an alien way of life to him: wandering seemed no more than the
happiness of an anxious man. And deep inside himself he felt a dim
exhaustion. He was eager to carry out his plan of buying a little house
somewhere in the Chenoua, between the sea and the mountains, a few
kilometres from the ruins of Tipasa. When he arrived in Algiers, he had
envisioned the setting of his life. He had made a large investment in
German pharmaceuticals, paid a broker to manage his holdings for him,
and thereby justified his absences from Algiers and the independent life
he was leading. The investment, moreover, was more or less profitable,
and he made up for his occasional losses, offering without remorse this
tribute to his profound freedom. The world is always satisfied, it turns
out, with a countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do
the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.
Mersault then concerned himself with Lucienne’s fate.
She had no family, lived alone, worked as a secretary for a coal
company, ate little but fruit and did Swedish exercises. Mersault lent
her books which she returned without a word. To his questions, she
replied: ‘Yes, I liked it,’ or else: ‘It was a little sad.’ The day he
decided to leave Algiers, he suggested that she live with him but
continued to keep her apartment in Algiers without working, joining him
when he sent for her. He promised this with enough conviction for
Lucienne to find nothing humiliating in the offer, and in fact there was
nothing humiliating in it. Lucienne often realized through her body what
her mind could not understand; she agreed. Mersault added: ‘If you want,
I can marry you. But I don’t see the point.’
‘Whatever you prefer,’ Lucienne said. A week later he married her and
made ready to leave the city.
Meanwhile Lucienne bought an orange canoe to skin over the blue sea.
Mersault twisted the wheel to avoid a venturesome hen. He was thinking
of the conversation he had had with Catherine, the day he had left the
House above the World — he had spent the night alone in a hotel.
It was early in the afternoon, and because it had rained that morning,
the whole bay was like a wet pane of glass, the sky utterly blank above
it. The cape at the opposite end of the bay stood out wonderfully clear,
and lay, gilded by a sunbeam, like a huge summer snake upon the sea.
Patrice had finished packing and now, his arms leaning on the sill,
stared greedily at this new birth of the world.
‘But if you’re happy here, why are you leaving?’ Catherine had asked.
‘There’s a risk of being loved, little Catherine, and that would keep me
from being happy.’ Coiled on the couch, her head down, Catherine stared
at Patrice. Without turning around he said: ‘A lot of men complicate
their lives and invent problems for themselves. In my case, it’s quite
simple. Look ...’ He spoke facing the world, and Catherine felt
forgotten. She looked at Patrice’s long fingers on the sill, studied his
way of resting his weight on one hip, and without even seeing his eyes
she knew how absorbed his gaze would be.
‘What I ...’ but she broke off, still staring at Patrice.
Little sails began riding out to sea, taking advantage of the calm. They
approached the channel, filled it with fluttering wings, and suddenly
sped outwards, leaving a wake of air and water that widened in long
foamy trails. Catherine watched them make their way out to sea from
where she sat, rising around Patrice like a flight of white birds. He
seemed to feel the weight of her silence and her stare, turned around,
took her hands and brought them close to his own body. ‘Never give up,
Catherine. You have so much inside you, and the noblest sense of
happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the
mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.’
‘I’m not complaining, Mersault,’ Catherine said softly, putting one hand
on Patrice’s shoulder. ‘The only thing that matters now is that you take
good care of yourself.’ He realized then how easily his certainty could
be shaken. His heart was strangely hard.
‘You shouldn’t have said that just now.’ He picked up his suitcase and
went down the steep stairs, then down the path from the olive-trees to
the olive-trees. There was nothing ahead of him now except the Chenoua,
a forest of ruins and wormwood, a love without hope or despair, and the
memory of a life of vinegar and flowers. He turned around. Up above,
Catherine was watching him leave, motionless.
In a little less than two hours, Mersault was in sight of the Chenoua.
The night’s last violent shadows still lingered on the slopes that
plunged into the sea, while the peak glowed in the red and yellow
sunlight. There was a kind of vigorous and massive assertion of the
earth here, thrusting up from the Sahel and silhouetted on the horizon,
ending in this enormous bestial back which plummeted straight down into
the sea. The house Mersault had bought stood on the last slopes, a
hundred yards from the water already turning golden in the heat. There
was only one storey above the ground floor, and only one room in it, but
this room was enormous and overlooked the front garden and the sea
through a splendid bay-window opening on to a terrace as well. Mersault
hurried up to it: the sea was already forming scarves of mist, and its
blue darkened while the warm red of the terrace tiles glistened in the
morning dew. The whitewashed parapet had already been conquered by the
first tendrils of a triumphant rambler-rose. The firm white flesh of the
open petals, sharp against the sea, was both voluptuous and satiating.
Downstairs, one room faced the foothills of the Chenoua, covered with
fruit-trees, the other two opened on to the garden and the sea beyond.
In the garden, two pines thrust their bare trunks high into the sky, the
tips alone covered with a green and yellow pelt. From the house he could
see only the space bracketed beneath the trunks. A little steamship was
moving out to sea now, and Mersault watched its entire trajectory from
one pine to the other.
Here was where he would live. Doubtless because the beauty of the place
touched his heart — why else had he bought this house? But the release
he hoped to find here dismayed him, this solitude he had sought so
deliberately seemed even more disturbing, now that he knew its setting.
The village was not far away, a few hundred yards. He walked out of the
house. A little path sloped down from the road towards the sea.
Following it, he noticed for the first time that he could glimpse,
across the bay, the slender peninsula of Tipasa. At its very end were
silhouetted the golden columns of the temple and around them the fallen
ruins among the wormwood bushes forming, at this distance, a blue-grey
plumage. On June evenings, Mersault reflected, the wind would bring the
fragrance of those sun-gorged shrubs across the water towards the
Chenoua.
He had to set up his house, organize his life. The first days passed
quickly. He whitewashed the walls, bought hangings in Algiers, began to
install electricity, and as he went about his work, interrupted by the
meals he took at the village café and by his dips in the sea, he forgot
why he had come here and lost himself in his body’s fatigue, loins
aching and legs stiff, fretting over the shortage of paint or the
defective installation of a light-switch in the hallway. He slept at the
café and gradually became acquainted with the village: the boys who came
to play pool and ping-pong on Sunday afternoons (they would use the
table all afternoon, on the basis of one drink, to the owner’s great
annoyance); the girls who strolled in the evening along the road
overlooking the sea (they walked arm in arm, and there was a caressing,
sing-song note in their voices); Perez the fisherman who supplied the
hotel with fish and had only one arm. Here, too, he met the village
doctor, Bernard. But the day the house was entirely ready, Mersault
moved all his things into it and gradually recovered himself. It was
evening. He was in the big room upstairs, and behind the window two
worlds fought for the space between the two pines. In one, almost
transparent, the stars multiplied. In the other, denser and darker, a
secret palpitation of the water betrayed the sea.
So far, he had lived sociably enough, chatting with the workmen who
helped him in the house or with the owner of the café. But now he
realized that he had no-one to meet tonight, nor tomorrow, nor ever, and
that he was facing his longed-for solitude at last. From the moment he
no longer had to see anyone, the next day seemed terribly imminent. Yet
he convinced himself that this was what he had wanted: nothing before
him but himself for a long time — until the end. He decided to stay
where he was, smoking and thinking late into the night, but by ten he
was sleepy and went to bed. The next day he wakened very late, around
ten, made his breakfast and ate it before washing or shaving. He felt a
little tired. He had not shaved, and his hair was uncombed. But after he
had eaten, instead of going into the bathroom he wandered from room to
room, leafed through a magazine, and finally, was delighted to find a
light-switch that had not been attached, and set to work. Someone
knocked: the boy from the café bringing his lunch, as he had arranged
the day before. He sat down at his table just as he was, ate without
appetite before the food had a chance to cool, and began to smoke, lying
on the couch in the downstairs room. When he wakened, annoyed at having
fallen asleep, it was four o’clock. He bathed then, shaved carefully,
dressed and wrote two letters, one to Lucienne, the other to the three
girls. It was already very late, and growing dark. Nonetheless he walked
to the village to post his letters and returned without having met
anyone. He went upstairs and out on to the terrace: the sea and the
night were conversing on the beach and above the ruins. Mersault
reflected. The memory of this wasted day embittered him. Tonight, at
least, he would work, do something, read or go out and walk through the
night. The garden gate creaked: his dinner was coming. He was hungry,
ate happily, then felt unable to leave the house. He decided to read
late in bed. But after the first pages his eyes closed, and the next
morning he woke up late.
The following days, Mersault tried to struggle against this
encroachment. As the days passed, filled by the creak of the gate and
countless cigarettes, he was disconcerted by the variance between the
gesture which had brought him to this life and this life itself. One
evening he wrote to Lucienne to come, deciding to break this solitude
from which he had expected so much. After the letter was sent, he was
filled with a secret shame, but once Lucienne arrived the shame
dissolved in a kind of mindless eager joy to rediscover a familiar being
and the easy life her presence signified. He made a fuss over her, and
Lucienne seemed almost surprised by his solicitude, when she could tear
herself away from her carefully pressed white linen dress.
He took walks now, but with Lucienne. He recovered his complicity with
the world, but by resting his hand on Lucienne’s shoulder. Taking refuge
in humanity, he escaped his secret dread. Within two days, however,
Lucienne bored him. And this was the moment she chose to ask him to let
her live there. They were at dinner, and Mersault had simply refused,
not raising his eyes from his plate.
After a pause, Lucienne had added in a neutral tone of voice: ‘You don’t
love me.’
Mersault looked up. Her eyes were full of tears. He relented: ‘But I
never said I did, my child.’
‘I know,’ Lucienne said, ‘and that’s why.’
Mersault stood up and walked to the window. Between the pines, the stars
throbbed in the night sky. And never had Patrice felt, along with his
dread, so much disgust as at this moment for the days they had just
passed together. ‘You’re a lovely girl, Lucienne. I can’t see any
further than that. It’s all I ask of you. It has to be enough for the
two of us.’
‘I know,’ Lucienne said. She was sitting with her back to Patrice,
scoring the tablecloth with the tip of her knife. He walked over to her
and rested a hand on the nape of her neck.
‘Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret,
great memory ... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s
what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There’s only
a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a
while. That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to
have had an unhappy passion — it gives you an alibi for the vague
despairs we all suffer from.’ After a pause, he added: ‘I don’t know if
you understand what I mean.’
‘I think I understand.’ She suddenly turned her head towards Mersault.
‘You’re not happy?’
‘I will be,’ Mersault said violently. ‘I have to be. With this night,
this sea, and this flesh under my fingers?’ He had turned back towards
the window and was tightening his hand on Lucienne’s neck. She said
nothing.
Then, without looking at him, ‘At least you feel friendly towards me,
don’t you?’
Patrice knelt beside her and bit her shoulder. ‘Friendly, yes, the way I
feel friendly towards the night. You are the pleasure of my eyes, and
you don’t know what a place such joy has in my heart.’
She left the next day. And the day after that Mersault was unable to
stand himself, and drove to Algiers. He went first to the House above
the World. His friends promised to visit him at the end of the month.
Then he decided to visit his old neighbourhood.
His flat had been rented to a man who ran a café. He inquired after the
barrel-maker, but no-one knew anything — someone thought he had gone to
Paris to look for work. Mersault walked through the streets. At the
restaurant, Celeste had aged — but not much; René was still there, with
his tuberculosis and his solemn expression. They were all glad to see
Patrice again, and he felt moved by this encounter.
‘Hey, Mersault,’ Celeste told him, ‘you haven’t changed. Still the
same!’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said. He marvelled at the strange blindness by which
men, though they are so aware of what changes in themselves, impose on
their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being
judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don’t change character, men are
dogs for each other. And precisely to the degree that Celeste, René and
the others had known him, he had become as alien and remote to them as
an uninhabited planet. Yet he left them with affectionate farewells. And
just outside the restaurant he ran into Marthe. As soon as he saw her he
realized that he had almost forgotten her and that at the same time he
had wanted to meet her. She still had her painted goddess’ face. He
desired her vaguely but without conviction. They walked together.
‘Oh, Patrice,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad! What’s become of you?’
‘Nothing, as you can see. I’m living in the country.’
‘Wonderful. I’ve always dreamt of living in the country.’ And after a
silence: ‘You know, I’m not angry with you or anything.’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said, laughing, ‘you’ve managed to console yourself.’
Then Marthe spoke in a tone of voice he did not recognize. ‘Don’t be
nasty, Patrice. I knew it would end like this some day. You were a
strange fellow. And I was nothing but a little girl. That’s what you
always used to say ... Of course when it happened I was furious. But
finally I told myself, “He’s unhappy.” And you know, it’s funny. I don’t
know how to say it, but that was the first time that what we ... that
what happened between us made me feel sad and happy at the same time.’
Surprised, Mersault stared at her. He suddenly realized that Marthe had
always been very decent with him. She had accepted him as he was and had
spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his
imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had
given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always
deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their
advantage, then to their disadvantage. Today he understood that Marthe
had been genuine with him — that she had been what she was, and that he
owed her a good deal. It was beginning to rain — just enough to reflect
the lights of the street; through the shining drops he saw Marthe’s
suddenly serious face and felt overcome by a burst of gratitude he could
not express — in the old days he might have taken it for a kind of love.
But he could find only stiff words: ‘You know, Marthe, I’m very fond of
you. Even now, if there’s anything I could do ...’
She smiled: ‘No. I’m young still. And I don’t do without ...’
He nodded. What a distance there was between them, and yet what
complicity! He left her in front of her own house. She had opened her
umbrella, saying ‘I hope we’ll see each other again.’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said. She gave him a sad little smile. ‘Oh, that’s your
little girl’s face.’ She had stepped into the doorway and closed her
umbrella. Patrice held out his hand and smiled in his turn. ‘Till next
time, image.’ She hugged him quickly, kissed him on both cheeks and ran
upstairs. Mersault, standing in the rain, still felt Marthe’s cold nose
and warm lips on his cheeks. And that sudden, disinterested kiss had all
the purity of the one given him by the freckled little whore in Vienna.
Then he went to find Lucienne, slept at her flat, and asked her to walk
with him on the boulevards. It was almost noon when they came
downstairs. Orange boats were drying in the sun like fruit cut in
quarters. The double flock of pigeons and their shadows swooped down to
the docks and up again in a long, slow curve. The sun was brilliant and
the air grew stifling. Mersault watched the red-and-black steamer slowly
gain the channel, put on speed and gradually veer towards the streak of
light glistening where the sky met the sea. For the onlookers, there is
a bitter sweetness in every department. ‘They’re lucky,’ Lucienne said.
‘Yes.’ He was thinking ‘No’ — or at least that he didn’t envy them their
luck. For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain
lustre, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness
to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a
concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: ‘Not the will the
renounce, but the will to happiness.’ He had his arm around Lucienne,
and her warm breast lay within his hand.
That same evening, as he drove back to the Chenoua, Mersault felt a huge
silence in himself as he faced the swelling waves and the steep
hillsides. By making the gesture of a fresh start, by becoming aware of
his past, he had defined what he wanted and what he did not want to be.
Those wasted days he had been ashamed of seemed dangerous but necessary
now. He might have foundered then and missed his one chance, his one
justification. But after all, he had to adapt himself to everything.
Rounding one curve after the next, Mersault steeped himself in this
humiliating yet priceless truth: the conditions of the singular
happiness he sought were getting up early every morning, taking a
regular swim — a conscious hygiene. He drove very fast, resolved to take
advantage of his discovery in order to establish himself in a routine
which would henceforth require no further effort, to harmonize his own
breathing with the deepest rhythm of time, of life itself.
The next morning he got up early and walked down to the sea. The sky was
already brilliant, and the morning full of rustling wings and crying
birds. But the sun was only touching the horizon’s curve, and when
Mersault stepped into the still lustreless water, he seemed to be
swimming in an indeterminate darkness until, as the sun climbed higher,
he thrust his arms into streaks of icy red and gold. Then he swam back
to land and walked up to his house. His body felt alert and ready for
whatever the day might bring. Every morning, now, he came downstairs
just before sunrise, and this first action controlled the rest of his
day. Moreover, these swims exhausted him, but at the same time, because
of the fatigue and the energy they afforded, they gave his entire day a
flavour of abandonment and happy lassitude. Yet the hours still seemed
long to him — he had not yet detached time from a carcass of habits
which were still so many guide-marks to him. He had nothing to do, and
his time stretched out, measureless, before him. Each minute recovered
its miraculous value, but he did not yet recognize it for what it was.
Just as the days of a journey seem interminable whereas in an office the
trajectory from Monday to Monday occurs in a flash, so Mersault,
stripped of all his props, still tried to locate them in a life which
had nothing but itself to consider. Sometimes he picked up his watch and
stared as the minute-hand shifted from one number to the next,
marvelling that five minutes should seem so interminable. Doubtless that
watch opened the way — a painful and tormenting way — which leads to the
supreme art of doing nothing. He learned to walk; sometimes in the
afternoon he would walk along the beach as far as the ruins of Tipasa;
then he would lie down among the wormwood bushes, and with his hands on
the warm stone would open his eyes and his heart to the intolerable
grandeur of that seething sky. He matched the pounding of his blood with
the violent pulsation of the sun at two o’clock, and deep in the fierce
fragrance, deafened by the invisible insects, he watched the sky turn
from white to deep-blue, then pale to green, pouring down its sweetness
upon the still-warm ruins. He would walk home early then, to go to bed.
In this passage from sun to sun, his days were organized according to a
rhythm whose deliberation and strangeness became as necessary to him as
that of his office, his restaurant, and his sleep in his mother’s room.
In both cases, he was virtually unconscious of it. But now, in his hours
of lucidity, he felt that time was his own, that in the brief interval
which finds the sea red and leave it green, something eternal was
represented for him in each second. Beyond the curve of the days he
glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity — happiness was
human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to
organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting
their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture
must be left as it is, the painting untouched — just as a determination
not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance
— so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life of
happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it:
unintelligence must be earned.
On Sundays, Mersault played pool with Perez. The old fisherman, one arm
a stump cut off above the elbow, played pool in a peculiar fashion,
puffing out his chest and leaning his stump on the cue. When they went
out fishing in the morning, Perez rowed with the same skill, and
Mersault admired the way he would stand in the boat, pushing one oar
with his chest, the other with his good hand. The two men got along
well. After the morning’s fishing, Perez cooked cuttlefish in a hot
sauce, stewing them in their own ink, and soaking up the black juice
left in the pan with pieces of bread. As they sat in the fisherman’s
kitchen over the sooty stove, Perez never spoke, and Mersault was
grateful to him for this gift of silence. Sometimes, after his morning
swim, he would see the old man putting his boat in the sea, and he would
join him. ‘Shall I come with you, Perez?’
‘Get in.’
They put the oars in the rowlocks and rowed together, Mersault being
careful not to catch his feet in the trawling-hooks. Then they would
fish, and Mersault would watch the lines, gleaming to the water’s
surface, black and wavering underneath. The sun broke into a thousand
fragments on the sea, and Mersault breathed the heavy stifling smell
that rose from it like fumes. Sometimes Perez pulled in a little fish he
would throw back, saying ‘Go home to your mother.’ At eleven they rowed
home and Mersault, his hands glistening with scales and his face swollen
with sun, waited in his cool dark house while Perez prepared a pan of
fish they would eat together in the evening. Day after day, Mersault let
himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into water. And just as
the swimmer advances by the complicity of his arms and the water which
bears him up, helps him on, it was enough to make a few essential
gestures — to rest one hand on a tree trunk, to take a run on the beach
— in order to keep himself intact and conscious. Thus he became one with
a life in its pure state, he rediscovered a paradise given only to
animals of the least or the greatest intelligence. At the point where
the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme
glory, his extreme love.
Thanks to Bernard, he also mingled with the life of the village. He had
been obliged to send for Bernard to treat some minor indisposition, and
since then they had seen each other repeatedly, with pleasure. Bernard
was a silent man, but he had a kind of bitter wit that cast a gleam in
his horn-rimmed spectacles. He had practised medicine for a long time in
Indochina, and at forty had retired to this corner of Algeria, where for
several years he had led a tranquil life with his wife, an almost mute
Indochinese who wore western suits and arranged her hair in a bun.
Bernard’s capacity for indulgence enabled him to adapt himself to any
milieu. He liked the whole village, and was liked in return. He took
Mersault on his rounds. Mersault already knew the owner of the café, a
former tenor who would sing behind his bar and between two bleats of
Tosca threaten his wife with a beating. Patrice was asked to serve with
Bernard on the holiday committee, and on 14^(th) July they walked
through the streets in tricolour armbands or argued with the other
committee-members sitting around a zinc table sticky with aperitifs as
to whether the bandstand should be decorated with ferns or palms. There
was even an attempt to lure him into an electoral contest, but Mersault
had had time to know the mayor, who had ‘presided over the destiny of
his commune’ (as he said) for the last decade, and this semi-permanent
position inclined him to regard himself as Napoleon Bonaparte. A wealthy
grape-grower, he had had a Greek-style house built for himself, and
proudly showed it to Mersault. It consisted of a ground floor and second
floor around a courtyard, but the mayor had spared no expense and
installed a lift, which he insisted that Mersault and Bernard ride in.
And Bernard commented placidly: ‘Very smooth.’ The visit had inspired
Mersault with a profound admiration for the mayor, and he and Bernard
wielded all their influence to keep him in the office he deserved on so
many counts.
In springtime, the little village with its close-set red roofs between
the mountains and the sea overflowed with flowers — roses, hyacinths,
bougainvilleas — and hummed with insects. In the afternoons, Mersault
would walk out on to his terrace and watch the village dozing under the
torrent of light. Local history consisted of a contest between Morales
and Bingues, two rich Spanish landowners whom a series of speculations
had transformed into millionaires, in the grip of a terrible rivalry.
When one bought a car, he chose the most expensive make; but the other,
who would buy the same make, would add silver door-handles. Morales was
a genius at such tactics. He was known in the village as the King of
Spain, for on each occasion he triumphed over Bingues, who lacked
imagination. During the war, when Bingues subscribed several hundred
thousand francs for a national bond drive, Morales had declared: ‘I’ll
do better than that, I’ll give you my son.’ And he had made his son, who
was too young to be mobilized, volunteer. In 1925, Bingues had driven
out from Algiers in a magnificent racing Bugatti; two weeks later,
Morales had built himself a hangar, and bought a plane. The plane was
still sleeping in its hangar, and was shown to visitors on Sundays.
Bingues called Morales ‘that barefoot beggar’, and Morales referred to
Bingues as ‘that lime-kiln’.
Bernard took Mersault to visit Morales, who welcomed them warmly to his
huge farm, humming with wasps and fragrant with grapes. Wearing
espadrilles and shirtsleeves because he could not endure a jacket and
shoes, Morales showed them the aeroplane, the son’s medal framed in the
living-room, and explained the necessity of keeping foreigners out of
Algeria (he was naturalized, ‘but that Bingues, for instance ...’), then
led them to inspect his latest acquisition. They walked through an
enormous vineyard in the middle of which was cleared space where a kind
of Louis XV salon had been set up, each piece made of the most precious
woods and fabrics. Thus Morales could receive visitors to his grounds.
When Mersault courteously asked what happened when it rained, Morales
shifted his cigar and, without even blinking, answered: ‘I replace it.’
On his way home, Mersault spent the time arguing with Bernard over the
difference between the nouveau-riche and the poet. Morales, according to
Bernard, was a poet. Mersault declared he would have made a splendid
Roman emperor during the decline.
Some time later, Lucienne came to the Chenoua for a few days, then left.
One Sunday morning, Claire, Rose and Catherine paid Mersault a visit, as
they had promised. But Patrice was already very far from the state of
mind which had driven him to Algiers during the first days of his
retreat. He was glad to see them again, even so, and brought Bernard to
meet them at the stop where the big yellow bus dropped them off. It was
a magnificent day, the village full of the fine red carts of itinerant
butchers, flowers everywhere, and the villagers dressed in bright
colours. At Catherine’s request they took a table at the café, and the
girls marvelled at all this brilliant life, divining the sea’s presence
behind the wall they leaned against. As they were leaving, an
astonishing burst of music exploded in a nearby street: The Toreador
Song from Carmen, but performed with an exuberance which prevented the
instruments from keeping in tune or time. ‘The gymnastic society,’
Bernard explained. Then some twenty strange musicians appeared, each
puffing on a different kind of wind-instrument. They marched towards the
café, and behind them, his hat worn over a handkerchief on the back of
his head, cooling himself with a cheap fan, appeared Morales. He had
hired these musicians in the city because, as he explained, ‘with this
depression, life around here is too sad’. He sat down at a table and
grouped the musicians around him. Then Morales stood up and announced
with tremendous dignity, making a sweeping movement towards the
audience: ‘At my request, the orchestra will play “Toreador’ again.’
As they left, the girls were choking with laughter, but once they
reached Mersault’s house and the cool shade of the rooms which
emphasized the dazzling whiteness of the sun-drenched garden walls, they
discovered a silent harmony which Catherine expressed by the desire to
take a sunbath on the terrace. Mersault walked Bernard home. This was
the second time the doctor had glimpsed something of Patrice’s life;
they had never confided in each other, Mersault conscious that Bernard
was not a happy man, and Bernard rather baffled by Mersault’s way of
life. They parted without a word. Mersault and the girls decided to make
an excursion the following day, starting very early. The Chenoua was
high and difficult to climb — ahead of them lay a splendid day of
sunlight and fatigue.
At dawn they climbed the first steep slope. Rose and Claire walked
ahead, Patrice and Catherine following. No-one spoke. Gradually they
rose above the sea, still pale in the morning mist. Patrice felt he
belonged to the mountain, its short turf powdered with saffron blossoms,
his eager but weakening body a part of the icy springs, the shadows and
the sunlight. They entered into the concentrated effort of climbing, the
morning air sharp in their lungs, determined to conquer the slope. Rose
and Claire, exhausted, began to slow down. Catherine and Patrice walked
on, and soon lost sight of the other two.
‘Are you all right?’ Patrice asked.
‘Yes, it’s beautiful.’
The sun rose in the sky, and with it a hum of insects swelled in the
growing warmth. Soon Patrice took off his shirt and walked on
bare-chested. Sweat ran down his shoulders where the skin had peeled
with sunburn. They took a little path that seemed to follow the
mountainside. The grass was wetter here; soon a sound of springs greeted
them, and in a hollow they almost stumbled over the sudden gush of
coolness and shade. They sprinkled each other, drank a little, and
Catherine stretched out on the grass while Patrice, his hair black with
water and curling over his forehead, stared blinking over the landscape
that was covered with ruins, gleaming roads, and splinters of sunlight.
Then he sat down beside Catherine.
‘While you’re alone, Mersault, tell me — are you happy now?’
‘Look,’ Mersault said. The road trembled in the sun, and the air was
filled with a thousand coloured specks. He smiled and rubbed his arms.
‘Yes, but ... Well, I wanted to ask you — of course you don’t have to
answer if you don’t want to — ‘ She hesitated: ‘Do you love your wife?’
Mersault smiled: ‘That’s not essential.’ He gripped Catherine’s shoulder
and shook his head, sprinkling water into her face. ‘You make the
mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you
want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that
matters, really — is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous,
ever-present consciousness. The rest — women, art, success — is nothing
but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.’
‘Yes,’ Catherine said, her eyes filled with sunlight.
‘What matters to me is a certain quality of happiness. I can only find
it in a certain struggle with its opposite — a stubborn and violent
struggle. Am I happy? Catherine! You know the famous formula — “if I had
my life to live over again” — well, I would live it over again just the
way it has been. Of course you can’t know what that means.’
‘No.’
‘And I don’t know how to tell you. If I’m happy, it’s because of my bad
conscience. I had to get away and reach this solitude where I could face
— in myself, I mean — what had to be faced, what was sun and what was
tears ... Yes, I’m happy, in human terms.’
Rose and Claire arrived. They shouldered their knapsacks. The path still
followed the mountainside, keeping them in a zone of dense vegetation,
prickly pears, olive-trees and jujubes. They passed Arabs on donkeys.
Then they climbed again. The sun poured now on each stone in the path.
At noon, crushed by the heat, drunk on fragrance and fatigue, they flung
down their knapsacks and gave up reaching the top. The slopes were sheer
and full of sharp flints. A wizened oak sheltered them in its circle of
shade. They took food out of the knapsacks and ate. The whole mountain
quivered under the light. The cicadas were deafening as the heat
assailed them under their oak. Patrice threw himself on the ground and
pressed his chest against the stones, inhaling the scorched aroma. Under
his belly he could feel the faint throbs of the mountain that seemed to
be in labour. This regular pulse and the unremitting song of the insects
between the hot stones finally put him to sleep.
When he awoke he was covered with sweat, and every muscle ached. It must
have been three in the afternoon. The girls had vanished, but soon he
heard their laughter and shouts. It was cooler now, time to go back
down. At this moment, as they were about to start, Mersault fainted for
the first time. When he came to, he saw the cobalt sea between three
anxious faces. They walked on more slowly. On the last slopes, Mersault
asked for a rest. The sea was turning green along with the sky, and the
horizon began to blur. On the foothills that stretched from the Chenoua
around the little bay, the cypresses blackened slowly. No-one spoke,
until Claire said: ‘You look tired.’
‘I’m not surprised. Are you?’
‘It’s none of my business, but I don’t think this place is good for you.
It’s too near the sea — too damp. Why don’t you go and live in France —
in the mountains?’
‘This place isn’t good for me, Claire, but I’m happy here. I feel in
harmony with it.’
‘Well, then you could be in harmony — longer.’
‘No-one is happy relatively — for a longer or shorter time. You’re happy
or you’re not. That’s all. And death has nothing to do with it — death
is an accident of happiness, in that case.’ No-one spoke.
After a long pause, Rose said: ‘I’m not convinced.’ They returned
slowly, as night was falling.
Catherine decided to send for Bernard. Mersault was in his room; beyond
the shifting shadow of the windowpanes he could see the white patch of
the parapet, the sea like a strip of dark linen undulating in the
transparent air, and beyond it the night sky, paler but starless. He
felt weak, and his weakness made him mysteriously lighter, gayer, and
his mind grew more lucid. When Bernard knocked, Mersault sensed he would
tell him everything. Not that his secret was a burden; it was not that
kind of secret. If he had kept it till now, it was because in certain
circles a man keeps his thoughts to himself, knowing they will offend
the prejudices and stupidity of others. But today, after his exhaustion,
there was a sudden longing in his body to confide. It was the way an
artist, after carefully moulding and caressing his work, at last feels
the need to show it, to communicate with men — Mersault had the feeling
he was going to speak now. And without being certain he would do so, he
waited impatiently for Bernard.
From downstairs, two bursts of laughter made him smile. And at that
moment Bernard came into the room. ‘Well?’
‘Well, here I am,’ Mersault said. Bernard listened to his chest, but he
could tell nothing — he wanted to have an X-ray taken, if Mersault could
manage to get to Algiers. ‘Later,’ Mersault replied.
Bernard said nothing and sat down on the window sill. ‘I don’t like
being ill myself,’ he said. ‘I know what it is. Nothing is uglier or
more degrading than illness.’
Mersault was unconcerned. He got up from his chair, offered Bernard a
cigarette, lit his own, and said with a laugh: ‘Can I ask you a
question, Bernard?’
‘Of course.’
‘You never swim, you’re never on the beach — why did you pick this place
to live in?’
‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. It was a long time ago.’ After a pause he
added: ‘Besides, I’ve always acted on the rebound. It’s better now.
Before, I wanted to be happy, to do what had to be done, to settle down
somewhere I really wanted to be, for instance. But sentimental
anticipation is always wrong. We have to live the way it’s easiest for
us to live — not forcing ourselves. I suppose it sounds a little
cynical, but it’s also the point of view you have to take to survive. In
Indochina I ran all over the place. Here — here I just ruminate. That’s
all.’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said, still smoking, deep in his armchair and staring at
the ceiling. ‘But I’m not sure that all sentimental anticipation, as you
call it, is wrong. Only unreasonable sometimes. In any case, the only
experiences that interest me are precisely the ones where everything
turns out to be the way you hoped it would.’
Bernard smiled. ‘Yes, a ready-made destiny.’
‘A man’s destiny,’ Mersault said without moving, ‘is always passionately
interesting, if he achieves it passionately. And for some men, a
passionate destiny is always a ready-made destiny.’
‘Yes,’ Bernard said. And he stood up deliberately and stared out at the
night for a moment, his back to Mersault. He went on without looking at
him: ‘You’re the only man besides myself around here who lives alone. I
don’t mean your wife and your friends downstairs. I know those are
episodes. Still, even so, you seem to love life more than I do.’ He
turned around. ‘Because for me, loving life is not going for a swim.
It’s living in intoxication, intensity. Women, adventures, other
countries ... It’s action, making something happen. A burning,
marvellous life. What I mean is — I want you to understand me — ‘ He
seemed ashamed of his excitement, ‘I love life too much to be satisfied
with nature.’ Bernard put away his stethoscope and closed his bag.
Mersault said: ‘Actually, you’re an idealist.’ And he had the sense that
everything was enclosed in that moment which shifts from birth to death,
that everything was judged and consecrated then.
‘That’s because, you see,’ Bernard said with a kind of sadness, ‘the
opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.’
‘Don’t believe it,’ Mersault said, holding out his hand. Bernard held
his hand a long time. ‘To think the way you do,’ he said, smiling, ‘you
have to be either a man who lives on tremendous despair, or on a
tremendous hope.’
‘On both, perhaps.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t asking!’
‘I know,’ Mersault said seriously. But when Bernard was at the door,
Mersault, impelled by a sudden need, called him back.
‘Yes?’ the doctor said, turning around.
‘Are you capable of feeling contempt for a man?’
‘I think so.’
‘On what conditions?’
The doctor reflected. ‘It’s quite simple, I think. In cases when he was
motivated by expedience or a desire for money.’
‘That is simple,’ Mersault said. ‘Good night, Bernard.’
‘Good night.’
Alone, Mersault reflected. At the point he had now reached, another
man’s contempt left him indifferent. But he recognized in Bernard
profound resonances which brought the two of them together. It seemed
intolerable that a part of himself should condemn the rest. Had he acted
out of expediency? He had become aware of the essential and immoral
truth that money is one of the surest and swiftest means of acquiring
one’s dignity. He had managed to dispel the bitterness which besets any
decent soul aware of the vile iniquities of the birth and growth of a
splendid fate. This sordid and revolting curse, whereby the poor end in
poverty the life they have begun in poverty, he had rejected by using
money as a weapon, opposing hatred with hatred. And out of this
beast-to-beast combat, the angel sometimes emerged, intact, wings and
halo and all, in the warm breath of the sea. It would be as it had been:
he had said nothing to Bernard, and his creation would henceforth remain
secret.
The girls left around five o’clock in the afternoon of the next day. As
they got into the bus, Catherine turned back: ‘Goodbye, sea,’ she said.
A moment later, three laughing faces were staring at Mersault out of the
rear window, and the yellow bus vanished like a huge golden insect into
the sun. Though clear, the sky was a little heavy. Mersault, standing
alone in the road, felt a deep sense of deliverance tinged with
melancholy. Only today did his solitude become real, for only today did
he feel bound to it. And to have accepted that solitude, to know that
henceforth he was the master of all his days to come, filled him with
the melancholy that is attached to all greatness.
Instead of taking the road, he returned through the carob-trees and the
olives, following a little path which wound around the foothills and
came out behind his house. He squashed several olives, and noticed that
the path was speckled with these black ovals. At the summer’s end, the
carobs drench all Algeria with the smell of love, and in the evening or
after the rain, it is as if the entire earth were resting, after giving
itself to the sun, its womb drenched with a sperm smelling of bitter
almonds. All day, their odour had poured down from the huge trees, heavy
and oppressive. On this little path at twilight, scarcely apparent to
Patrice’s nostrils — like a mistress you walk with in the street after a
long stifling afternoon, and who looks at you, shoulder to shoulder,
among the lights and the crowd.
Amid that smell of love and squashed, fragrant fruit, Mersault realized
then that the season was ending. A long winter would begin. But he was
ready for it, he would wait. From this path he could not see the sea,
but he could glimpse on the mountain-top certain reddish mists which
heralded the dark. On the ground, patches of sunshine paled among the
shadows of the foliage. Mersault sniffed the bitter fragrance which
consecrated his wedding to the earth this afternoon. The evening falling
on the world, on the path between the olives and the gum-trees, on the
vines and the red soil, near the sea which whispered softly, this
evening flowed into him like a tide. So many evenings had promised him
happiness that to experience this one as happiness itself made him
realize how far he had come, from hope to conquest. In the innocence of
his heart Mersault accepted this green sky and this love-soaked earth
with the same thrill of passion and desire as when he had killed Zagreus
in the innocence of his heart.
IN January, the almond trees bloomed. In March, the pears, peaches and
apple-trees were covered with blossoms. The next month, the streams
gradually swelled, then returned to a normal flow. Early in May, the hay
was cut, and the oats and barley at the month’s end. Already the
apricots were ripening. In June, the early pears appeared with the major
crops. The streams began to dry up, and the heat grew more intense. But
the earth’s blood, shrinking here on the coast, made the cotton bloom
farther inland and sweetened the first grapes. A great hot wind arose,
parching the land and spreading brushfires everywhere. And then,
suddenly, the year changed direction: hurriedly, the grape-harvests were
brought to an end. The downpours of September and October drenched the
land. No sooner was the summer’s work done than the first sowing began,
while the streams and springs suddenly swelled to torrents with the
rain. At the year’s end, the wheat was already sprouting in some fields,
while in others ploughing had only just been finished. A little later,
the almond trees were once again while against the ice-blue sky. The new
year had begun in the earth, in the sky. Tobacco was planted, vines
cultivated and fertilized, trees grafted. In the same month, the medlars
ripened. Again, the haymaking, the harvesting, the summer ploughing.
Half-way through the year, the ripe fruits, juicy and sticky, were
served on every table: between one threshing and the next grape-harvest,
the sky grew overcast. Out of the north, silent flocks of black
starlings and thrushes passed over — for them the olives were already
ripe. Soon after they had flown away, the olives were gathered. The
wheat sprouted a second time from the viscous soil. Huge clouds, also
from the north, passed over the sea, then the land, brushing the water
with foam and leaving it smooth and icy under a crystal sky. For several
days there were distant, silent flashes in the sky. The first cold
spells set in.
During this period, Mersault took to his bed for the first time. Bouts
of pleurisy confined him to his room for a month. When he got up, the
foothills of the Chenoua were covered with flowering trees, all the way
to the sea’s edge. Never had spring touched him so deeply. The first
night of his convalescence, he walked across the fields for a long time
— as far as the hill where the ruins of Tipasa slept. In a silence
violated only by the silky sounds of the sky, the night lay like milk
upon the world. Mersault walked along the cliff, sharing the night’s
deep concentration. Below him the sea whispered gently. It was covered
with velvety moonlight, smooth and undulating, like the pelt of some
animal. At this hour, Mersault’s life seemed so remote to him, he felt
so solitary and indifferent to everything and to himself as well, that
it seemed to him he had at last attained what he was seeking, that the
peace which filled him now was born of that patient self-abandonment he
had pursued and achieved with the help of this warm world so willing to
deny him without anger. He walked lightly, and the sound of his own
footsteps seemed alien to him, familiar too, no doubt, but familiar in
the way the rustling of animals in the mastic-bushes was familiar, or
the breaking waves, or the rhythm of the night itself in the sky
overhead. And he could feel his own body too, but with the same external
consciousness as the warm breath of this spring night and the smell of
salt and decay that rose from the beach. His actions in the world, his
thirst for happiness, Zagreus’ terrible wound baring brain and bone, the
sweet, uncommitted hours in the House above the World, his wife, his
hopes and his gods — all this lay before him, but no more than one story
chosen among so many others without any valid reason, at once alien and
secretly familiar, a favourite book which flatters and justifies the
heart at its core, but a book someone else has written. For the first
time, Mersault was aware of no other reality in himself than that of a
passion for adventure, a desire for power, a warm and intelligent
instinct for a relationship with the world — without anger, without
hatred, without regret. Sitting on a rock he let his fingers explore its
crannies as he watched the sea swell in silence under the moon. He
thought of Lucienne’s face he had caressed, and of the warmth of her
lips. The moon poured its long, straying smiles like oil on the water’s
smooth surface — the sea would be warm as a mouth, and as soft, ready to
yield beneath a man’s weight. Motionless now, Mersault felt how close
happiness is to tears, caught up in that silent exaltation which weaves
together the hopes and despairs of human life. Conscious yet alien,
devoured by passion yet disinterested, Mersault realized that his life
and his fate were completed here and that henceforth all his efforts
would be to submit to this happiness and to confront the terrible truth.
Now he must sink into the warm sea, lose himself in order to find
himself again, swim in that warm moonlight in order to silence what
remained of the past, to bring to birth the deep song of his happiness.
He undressed, clambered down a few rocks and entered the sea. It was as
warm as a body, another ineffable yet omnipresent embrace. Mersault swam
steadily now, feeling the muscles of his back shift with each stroke.
Whenever he raised an arm, he cast sheaves of silver drops upon the sea,
sowing under this mute and vivid sky the splendid harvest of happiness;
then his arm thrust back into the water, and like a vigorous ploughshare
tilled the waves, dividing them in order to gain a new support, a firmer
hope. Behind him, his feet churned the water into seething foam,
producing a strangely distinct hissing noise in the night’s silence and
solitude. Conscious of this cadence, this vigour, an exaltation seized
Mersault, he swam faster and soon realized he was far from land, alone
in the heart of the night, of the world. Suddenly he thought of the
depths which lay beneath him and stopped moving. Everything that was
below attracted him like an unknown world, the extension of this
darkness which restored him to himself, the salty centre of a life still
unexplored. A temptation flashed through his mind, but he immediately
rejected it in the great joy of his body — he swam harder, farther.
Gloriously tired, he turned back towards the shore. At that moment he
suddenly entered an icy current and was forced to stop swimming, his
teeth chattered, his movements lost their harmony. This surprise of the
sea left him bewildered; the chill penetrated his limbs, blasted his
body like the love of some god of impassioned exaltation whose embrace
left him powerless. Laboriously he returned to the beach where he
dressed facing the sky and the sea, shivering and laughing with
happiness.
On his way home, he began to feel faint. From the path sloping up
towards the house he could make out the rocky promontory across the bay,
the smooth shafts of the columns among the ruins. Then suddenly the
landscape tilted and he found himself leaning against a rock,
half-supported by a mastic bush, the fragrance of its crushed leaves
strong in the nostrils. He dragged himself back to the house. His body,
which had just now carried him to the limits of joy, plunged him into a
suffering that gripped his bowels, making him close his eyes. He decided
tea would help, but he used a dirty pan to boil the water in, and the
tea was so greasy it made him retch. He drank it, though, before he went
to bed. As he was pulling off his shoes he noticed how pink his nails
were, long and curving over the fingertips of his bloodless hands. His
nails had never been like that, and they gave his hands a twisted,
unhealthy look. His chest felt as though it were caught in a vice. He
coughed and spat several times — only phlegm, though the taste of blood
lingered on his tongue. In bed, his body was seized by long spasms of
shivering. He could feel the chill rising from the very extremity of his
body, meeting in his shoulders like a confluence of icy streams, while
his teeth chattered and the sheets felt as if they had been soaked. The
house seemed enormous, the usual noises swelled to infinity, as if they
encountered no wall to put an end to their echoes. He heard the sea, the
pebbles rolling under the receding wave, the night throbbing behind his
windows, the dogs howling on distant farms. He was hot now, threw back
the blankets, then cold again, and drew them up. As he wavered between
one suffering and another, between somnolence and anxiety, he suddenly
realized he was ill, and anguish overwhelmed him at the thought that he
might die in this unconsciousness, without being able to see clearly.
The village steeple chimed, but he could not keep count of the strokes.
He did not want to die like a sick man. He did not want his illness to
be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death. What he
really wanted was the encounter between his life — a life filled with
blood and health — and death. He stood up, dragged a chair over to the
window and sat down in it, huddling in his blankets. Through the thin
curtains, in the places where the material did not fall in folds, he saw
the stars. He breathed heavily for a long time, and gripped the arms of
his chair to control his trembling hands. He would reconquer his
lucidity if he could. ‘I might die now,’ he was thinking. And he was
thinking, too, that the gas was still on in the kitchen. ‘I might die
now,’ he thought again. Lucidity, too, was a long patience. Everything
could be won, earned, acquired. He struck his fist on the arm of the
chair. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive. He becomes strong,
he becomes lucid. Fate is not in man but around him. Then he realized he
was crying. A strange weakness, a kind of cowardice born of his illness
gave way to tears, to childishness. His hands were cold, his heart
filled with an immense disgust. He thought of his nails, and under his
collarbone he pressed tumours that seemed enormous. Outside, all that
beauty was spread upon the face of the world. He did not want to abandon
his thirst for life, his jealousy of life. He thought of those evenings
above Algiers, when the sound of sirens rises in the green sky and men
leave their factories. The fragrance of wormwood, the wild flowers among
the ruins, and the solitude of the cypresses in the Sahel generated an
image of life where beauty and happiness took on an aspect without the
need of hope, a countenance in which Patrice found a kind of fugitive
eternity. That was what he did not want to leave — he did not want that
image to persist without him. Filled with rebellion and pity, he saw
Zagreus’ face turned towards the window. Then he coughed for a long
time. It was hard to breathe. He was smothering under his blankets. He
was cold. He was hot. He was burning with a great confusing rage, his
fists clenched, his blood throbbing heavily under his skull; eyes blank,
he waited for a new spasm which would plunge him back into the blind
fever. The chill came, restoring him to a moist, sealed world in which
he silenced the animal rebellion, eyes closed, jealous of his thirst and
his hunger. But before losing consciousness, he had time to see the
night turn pale behind the curtains and to head, with the dawn of the
world’s awakening, a kind of tremendous chord of tenderness and hope
which doubtless dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it
assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been the whole
reason for living.
When he awakened, the morning had already begun, and all the birds and
insects were singing in the warmth of the sun. He remembered Lucienne
was coming today. Exhausted, he crawled back to his bed. His mouth
tasted of fever, and he could feel the onset of that fragility which
makes every effort arduous and other people so irritating in the eyes of
the sick. He sent for Bernard, who came at once, quiet and businesslike
as always. He listened to Mersault’s chest, then took off his glasses
and wiped the lenses. ‘Bad,’ was all he would say. He gave Mersault two
injections. During the second, Mersault fainted, though ordinarily he
was not squeamish. When he came to, Bernard was holding his wrist in one
hand and his watch in the other, watching the jerky advance of the
second hand. ‘That lasted fifteen minutes,’ Bernard said. ‘Your heart’s
failing. The next time, you might not come out of it.’
Mersault closed his eyes. He was exhausted, his lips white and dry, his
breathing a hoarse whistle. ‘Bernard,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want to die in a coma. I want to see what’s happening — do you
understand me?’
‘Yes,’ Bernard said, and gave him several ampoules. ‘If you feel weak,
break this open and swallow it. It’s adrenalin.’ As he was leaving,
Bernard met Lucienne on her way in. ‘As charming as ever.’
‘Is Patrice ill?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘No, he’s all right,’ Bernard said. And just before he was out the door:
‘One piece of advice, though — try to leave him alone as much as you
can.’
‘Oh,’ Lucienne said, ‘then it can’t be anything.’
All day long, Mersault coughed and choked. Twice he felt the cold,
stubborn chill which would draw him into another coma, and twice the
adrenalin rescued him from that dark immersion. And all day long his dim
eyes stared at the magnificent landscape. At about four, a big red
rowing boat appeared on the sea, gradually growing larger, glistening
with sunlight, brine and fish-scales. Perez, standing, rowed on
steadily. Mersault closed his eyes and smiled for the first time since
the day before, though he did not unclench his teeth. Lucienne, who had
been fussing around the room, vaguely uneasy, threw herself on the bed
and kissed him. ‘Sit down,’ Mersault said, ‘you can stay.’
‘Don’t talk, you’ll tire yourself out.’
Bernard came, gave injections, left. Huge red clouds moved slowly across
the sky.
‘When I was a child,’ Mersault said laboriously, leaning back on the
pillow, his eyes fixed on the sky, ‘my mother told me that was the souls
of the dead going to paradise. I was amazed they had red souls. Now I
know it means a storm is coming. But it’s still amazing.’
Night was beginning to fall. Images came. Huge fantastic animals which
nodded over desert landscapes. Mersault gently swept them away, despite
his fever. He let only Zagreus’ face appear, a sign of
blood-brotherhood. He who had inflicted death was going to die. And
then, as for Zagreus, the lucid gaze he cast upon his life was a man’s
gaze. Until now he had lived. Now he could talk of his life. Of that
great ravaging energy which had borne him on, of that fugitive and
generating poetry of life, nothing was left now but the transparent
truth which is the opposite of poetry. Of all the men he had carried
inside himself, as every man does at the beginning of this life, of all
those various rootless, mingling beings who had created his life with
consciousness, with courage. That was his whole happiness in living and
dying. He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at
with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a
limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not
made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared
and exalted impotence — they were afraid of death because of the
sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had
not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of
gesture, forever withholding water from the traveller vainly seeking to
slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender
gesture which erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.
He spent a day and a night sitting on his bed, his arms on the bedside
table and his head on his arms. He could not breathe lying down.
Lucienne sat beside him and watched him without speaking a word.
Sometimes Mersault looked at her. He realized that after he was gone,
the first man who put his arms around her would make her soften, submit.
She would be offered — her body, her breasts — as she had been offered
to him, and the world would continue in the warmth of her parted lips.
Sometimes he raised his head and stared out of the window. He had not
shaved, his red-rimmed, hollowed eyes had lost their dark lustre, and
his pale sunken cheeks under the bluish stubble transformed him
completely.
His gaze came to rest on the panes. He sighed and turned towards
Lucienne. Then he smiled. And in his face that was collapsing, even
vanishing, the hard lucid smile wakened a new strength, a cheerful
gravity.
‘Better?’ Lucienne asked in a whisper.
‘Yes.’ Then he returned to darkness between his arms. At the limit of
his strength and his resistance, he joined Roland Zagreus for the first
time, whose smile had so exasperated him in the beginning. His short,
gasping breath left a moist cloud on the marble of the night-table. And
in that sickly warmth rising towards him from the stone, he felt even
more distinctly the icy tips of his fingers and toes. Even that revealed
life, though, and in this journey from cold to warm, he discovered the
exaltation which had seized Zagreus, thanking life ‘for allowing him to
go on burning’. He was overcome by a violent and fraternal love for this
man from whom he had felt so far, and he realized that by killing him he
had consummated a union which bound them together forever. That heavy
approach of tears, a mingled taste of life and death, was shared by them
both, he realized now. And in Zagreus’ very immobility confronting
death, he encountered the secret image of his own life. Fever helped him
here, and with it an exultant certainty of sustaining consciousness to
the end, of dying with his eyes open. Zagreus, too, had had his eyes
open that day, and tears had fallen from them. But that was the last
weakness of a man who had not had his share of life. Patrice was not
afraid of such weakness. In the pounding of his feverish blood, though
it failed to reach the limits of his body, he understood that such
weakness would not be his. For he had played his part, fashioned his
role, perfected man’s one duty, which is only to be happy. Not for long,
no doubt. He had destroyed the obstacle, and this inner brother he had
engendered in himself — what did it matter if he existed for two or for
twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
The blanket slipped from Mersault’s shoulders, and when Lucienne stood
up to cover him, he shuddered at her touch. Since the day he had sneezed
in the little square near Zagreus’ villa to this moment, his body had
served him faithfully, had opened him to the world. But at the same
time, it lived a life of its own, detached from the man it represented.
For these few years it had passed through a slow decomposition; now it
had completed its trajectory, and was ready to leave Mersault, to
restore him to the world. In that sudden shudder of which Mersault was
conscious, his body indicated once more a complicity which had already
won so many joys for them both. Solely for this reason, Mersault took
pleasure in that shudder. Conscious, he must be conscious with
deception, without cowardice — alone, face to face — at grips with his
body — eyes open upon death. It was a man’s business. Not love, not
landscape, nothing but an infinite waste of solitude and happiness in
which Mersault was playing his last cards. He felt his breathing weaken.
He gasped for air, and in that movement his ruined lungs wheezed. His
wrists were cold now, and there was no feeling in his hands at all. Day
was breaking.
The new day was cool, filled with the sound of birds. The sun rose
quickly, and in a single leap was above the horizon. The earth was
covered with gold, with warmth. In the morning, sky and sea were
spattered with dancing patches of blue and yellow light. A light breeze
had risen, and through the window a breath of salt air cooled Mersault’s
arms. At noon the wind dropped, the day split open like ripe fruit and
trickled down the face of the world, a warm and choking juice in a
sudden concert of cicadas. The sea was covered with this golden juice, a
sheet of oil upon the water, and gave back to the sun-crushed earth a
warm, softening breath which released odours of wormwood, rosemary, and
hot stone. From his bed, Mersault received that impact, that offering,
and he opened his eyes on the huge, curved, glistening sea irradiated
with the smiles of his gods. Suddenly he realized he was sitting on his
bed, and that Lucienne’s face was very close to his. Slowly, as though
it came from his stomach, there rose inside him a stone which approached
his throat. He breathed faster and faster, taking advantage of the
respites granted each time it moved. It rose steadily, higher and
higher. He looked at Lucienne. He smiled without wincing, and this smile
too came from inside himself. He threw himself back on the bed, and felt
the slow ascent within him. He looked at Lucienne’s swollen lips and,
behind her, the smile of the earth. He looked at them with the same
eyes, the same desire.
‘In a minute, in a second,’ he thought. The ascent stopped. And stone
among the stones, he returned to the joy of his heart, to the truth of
the motionless worlds.