‘Hey, Mersault,’ Celeste told him, ‘you haven’t changed. Still the same!’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said. He marvelled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so aware of what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been.
Just as dogs don’t change character, men are dogs for each other. And precisely to the degree that Celeste, René and the others had known him, he had become as alien and remote to them as an uninhabited planet. Yet he left them with affectionate farewells. And just outside the restaurant he ran into Marthe. As soon as he saw her he realized that he had almost forgotten her and that at the same time he had wanted to meet her. She still had her painted goddess’ face. He desired her vaguely but without conviction. They walked together.
‘Oh, Patrice,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad! What’s become of you?’ ‘Nothing, as you can see. I’m living in the country.’ ‘Wonderful. I’ve always dreamt of living in the country.’
And after a silence: ‘You know, I’m not angry with you or any-thing.’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said, laughing, ‘you’ve managed to console yourself.’
Then Marthe spoke in a tone of voice he did not recognize.
‘Don’t be nasty, Patrice. I knew it would end like this some day. You were a strange fellow. And I was nothing but a little girl.
That’s what you always used to say … Of course when it hap-pened I was furious. But finally I told myself, “He’s unhappy.” And you know, it’s funny. I don’t know how to say it, but that was the first time that what we … that what happened between us made me feel sad and happy at the same time.’
Surprised, Mersault stared at her. He suddenly realized that Marthe had always been very decent with him. She had ac-cepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness.
He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always de-ceive ourselves twice about the people we love first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Today he understood that Marthe had been genuine with him — that she had been what she was, and that he owed her a good deal. It was beginning to rain — just enough to reflect the lights of the street; through the shining drops he saw Marthe’s suddenly serious face and felt overcome by a burst of gratitude he could not express — in the old days he might have taken it for a kind of love. But he could find only stiff words: ‘You know, Marthe, I’m very fond of you. Even now, if there’s anything I could do …’
She smiled: ‘No. I’m young still. And I don’t do without …’ He nodded. What a distance there was between them, and yet what complicity! He left her in front of her own house. She had opened her umbrella, saying ‘I hope we’ll see each other again.’
‘Yes,’ Mersault said. She gave him a sad little smile. ‘Oh, that’s your little girl’s face.’ She had stepped into the doorway and closed her umbrella. Patrice held out his hand and smiled in his turn. ‘Till next time, image.’ She hugged him quickly, kissed him on both cheeks and ran upstairs. Mersault, standing in the rain, still felt Marthe’s cold nose and warm lips on his cheeks. And that sudden, disinterested kiss had all the purity of the one given him by the freckled little whore in Vienna.
Then he went to find Lucienne, slept at her flat, and asked her to walk with him on the boulevards. It was almost noon when they came downstairs. Orange boats were drying in the sun like fruit cut in quarters. The double flock of pigeons and their shadows swooped down to the docks and up again in a long, slow curve.
The sun was brilliant and the air grew stifling. Mersault watched the red and black steamer slowly gain the channel, put on speed and gradually veer towards the streak of light glistening where the sky met the sea. For the onlookers, there is a bitter sweetness in every department. ‘They’re lucky,’ Lucienne said.
‘Yes.’ He was thinking ‘No’ — or at least that he didn’t envy them their luck. For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain lustre, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: ‘Not the will the renounce, but the will to happiness.’ He had his arm around Lucienne, and her warm breast lay within his hand.
That same evening, as he drove back to the Chenoua, Mersault felt a huge silence in himself as he faced the swelling waves and the steep hillsides. By making the gesture of a fresh start, by becoming aware of his past, he had defined what he wanted and what he did not want to be. Those wasted days he had been ashamed of seemed dangerous but necessary now. He might have foundered then and missed his one chance, his one justification. But after all, he had to adapt himself to ev-erything.
Rounding one curve after the next, Mersault steeped himself in this humiliating yet priceless truth: the conditions of the singular happiness he sought were getting up early every morning, taking a regular swim — a conscious hygiene. He drove very fast, resolved to take advantage of his discovery in order to establish himself in a routine which would henceforth require no further effort, to harmonize his own breathing with the deepest rhythm of time, of life itself.
The next morning he got up early and walked down to the sea. The sky was already brilliant, and the morning full of rustling wings and crying birds. But the sun was only touch-ing the horizon’s curve, and when Mersault stepped into the still lustreless water, he seemed to be swimming in an indeter-minate darkness until, as the sun climbed higher, he thrust his arms into streaks of icy red and gold. Then he swam back to land and walked up to his house.
His body felt alert and ready for whatever the day might bring. Every morning, now, he came downstairs just before sunrise, and this first action con-trolled the rest of his day. Moreover, these swims exhausted him, but at the same time, because of the fatigue and the en-ergy they afforded, they gave his entire day a flavour of aban-donment and happy lassitude.
Yet the hours still seemed long to him — he had not yet detached time from a carcass of habits which were still so many guide-marks to him. He had nothing to do, and his time stretched out, measureless, before him.
Each minute recovered its miraculous value, but he did not yet recognize it for what it was. Just as the days of a journey seem interminable whereas in an office the trajectory from Monday to Monday occurs in a flash, so Mersault, stripped of all his props, still tried to locate them in a life which had nothing but itself to consider.
Sometimes he picked up his watch and stared as the minute-hand shifted from one number to the next, mar-velling that five minutes should seem so interminable. Doubtless that watch opened the way — a painful and tormenting way — which leads to the supreme art of doing nothing. He learned to walk; sometimes in the afternoon he would walk along the beach as far as the ruins of Tipasa; then he would lie down among the wormwood bushes, and with his hands on the warm stone would open his eyes and his heart to the intolera-ble grandeur of that seething sky.
He matched the pounding of his blood with the violent pulsation of the sun at two o’clock, and deep in the fierce fragrance, deafened by the invisible in-sects, he watched the sky turn from white to deep-blue, then pale to green, pouring down its sweetness upon the still-warm ruins. He would walk home early then, to go to bed.
In this passage from sun to sun, his days were organized according to a rhythm whose deliberation and strangeness became as necessary to him as that of his office, his restaurant, and his sleep in his mother’s room. In both cases, he was virtually unconscious of it. But now, in his hours of lucidity, he felt that time was his own, that in the brief interval which finds the sea red and leave it green, something eternal was represented for him in each second.
Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed nei-ther superhuman happiness nor eternity — happiness was hu-man, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched —
