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. Fol-lowing 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, al-most 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 work-men 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 any-one, 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 with-out 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 vari-ance 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 se-cret 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 Luci-enne’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 to-wards 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.
