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 lit-tle 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 remem-bered 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 Here in Vienna beauty has been replaced by civilization.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 morn-ing, 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 smil-ing. ‘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, doubt-less 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. ‘Good-bye,’ 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 with-draw into friendship and confidence, to enjoy an apparent se-curity 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 shiv-ering 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 vul-garity 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
