‘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 under-stand 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 inhab-ited 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 boule-vards, 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 cob-bles, 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 respec-tive 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 good-bye, 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 pres-ence of their bodies.
And then last night, Mersault had dis-covered a familiar and overwhelming miracle on Lucienne’s lips. Until then, what moved him had been her way of cling-ing 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 resem-blance 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 pres-sures. 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
