Even that miracle of the lips she offered him was noth-ing more than the delighted astonishment of a power acknowl-edged and awakened by conquest. The meaning of his affair with Marthe consisted of the replacement of that initial aston-ishment 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 ex-periments. 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 ev-erything in his life, even at the cost of a solitude he knew now was so difficult to endure. He would not submit.
All his vio-lence 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 pow-ers 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 in-toxication 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 re-alized 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.
Chapter Three
PATRICE and Catherine are having their breakfast on the ter-race, 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, see-ing 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 partic-ular, ‘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, be-ing the one the others were fond of in the same way. She had a sluggish, toast-coloured, deliberate body and an animal in-stinct 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 pre-ferred 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
