‘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 free-dom 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 hap-piness 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 coun-tenance 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 stand-ing 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 to-wards 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.
Chapter Four
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 dis-tance, 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 some-where 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 in-vestment, moreover, was more or less profitable, and he made up for his occasional losses, offering without remorse this trib-ute 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 no-blest 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 suit-case 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 vine-gar 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
