Mersault was the first to grab hold, confident of his strength and skill, and jumped on to the moving lorry. He helped Emmanuel up, and the two men sat with their legs dangling in the chalk-white dust, while a lumi-nous suffocation poured out of the sky over the circle of the harbour crowded with masts and black cranes, the uneven cob-bles of the dock jarring Emmanuel and Mersault as the lorry gained speed, making them laugh until they were breathless, dizzied by the jolting movement, the searing sky, their own boiling blood.
When they reached Belcourt, Mersault slid off with Em-manuel, who was singing now, loud and out of tune.
‘You know,’ he told Mersault, ‘it comes up in your chest. It comes when you feel good. When you’re in the water.’ It was true:
Emmanuel sung when he swam, and his voice, hoarse from shouting, inaudible against the sea, marked time for the gestures of his short, muscular arms. They were walking down the rue de Lyon, Mersault tall beside Emmanuel, his broad shoulders rolling. In the way he stepped on to the kerb, the way he twisted his hips to avoid the crowd that occasionally closed in on him, his body seemed curiously young and vigorous, capable of bearing him to any extreme of physical joy.
Relaxed, he rested his weight on one hip with a self-conscious litheness, like a man whose body has acquired its style from sport. His eyes sparkled under the heavy brows, and as he talked to Emmanuel he would tug at his collar with a mechanical gesture to free his neck muscles, tensing his curved mobile lips at the same time.
They walked into their restaurant, sat down at a table, and ate in silence. It was cool inside, among the flies, the clatter of plates, the hum of conversation. The owner, Celeste, a tall man with huge moustaches, walked over to greet them, scratching his belly under his apron. ‘Pretty well,’ Celeste answered, ‘for an old man.’ Celeste and Emmanuel exchanged exclamations and thumped each other on the shoulder. ‘Old men,’ Celeste said, ‘you know what old men are, they’re all the same. Shitheads.
They tell you a real man’s got to be fifty. But that’s because they’re fifty. I knew this one fellow who could have his good times just with his son. They’d go out together. On the town. They’d go to the Casino, and this fellow would say:
“Why should I hang around with a lot of old men! Every day they tell me they’ve taken some medicine, there’s always something wrong with their liver. I have a better time with my son. Sometimes he picks up a whore, I look the other way, I take the tram. So long and thanks. Fine with me.”’
Emmanuel laughed. ‘Of course,’ Celeste said, ‘the fellow was no authority, but I liked him all right.’ He turned to Mersault. ‘Anyway, it’s better than this other fellow I knew. When he made his money, he would talk with his head up and make gestures all the time. Now he’s not so proud of himself he’s lost it all.’ ‘Serves him right,’ Mersault said.
‘Oh, you can’t be a bastard with it. This fellow took it while he had it, and he was right. Almost a million francs he had … Now if it had been me!’
‘What would you do?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘I’d buy myself a hut out in the country, I’d put some glue
in my navel and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing.’
Mersault ate quietly until Emmanuel started to tell Celeste how he had fought the battle of the Marne. ‘See, they sent us zouaves out in front …’
‘Less of the bullshit,’ Mersault said calmly.
‘The major said “Charge!” and we ran down into a kind of gully, only with trees in it. He told us to charge, but no-one was there. So we just marched right on, kept on walking.
And then all of a sudden these machine-guns are firing right into us. We all fall on top of each other. There were so many dead and wounded that you could have rowed a boat across the blood in that gully. Some of them kept screaming “Mama!” Christ, it was awful.’
Mersault stood up and tied a knot in his napkin. The owner walked over to the kitchen door and chalked the price of his dinner on it. When one of his customers hadn’t paid up, Ce-leste would take the door off its hinges and bring the evidence on his back. René, his son, was eating a boiled egg over in a corner. ‘Poor lad,’
Emmanuel said, thumping his own chest, ‘he’s had it.’ It was true. René was usually quiet and serious. Though he was not particularly thin, his eyes glittered. Just now another customer was explaining to him that ‘with time and patience, TB can be cured’. René nodded and answered solemnly between bites. Mersault walked over to the counter and ordered coffee, leaning on his elbows. The other customer went on:
‘Did you ever know Jean Perez? He worked for the gas company. He’s dead now. He had this one bad lung. But he wanted to get out of the hospital and go home. His wife
was there, see. She was nothing but his horse. You know, his illness made him like that — he was always on top of her.
She wouldn’t want it, but he had to. So two, three times, every day of the week — it ends up killing a sick man.’ René stopped eat-ing, a piece of bread between his teeth, and stared at the man.
‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘the thing comes on fast, but it takes time to get rid of it.’ Mersault wrote his name with one finger on the steamed-up percolator. He blinked his eyes. Every day, his life alternated, from this calm consumptive to Emmanuel bursting into song, from the smell of coffee to the smell of tar, alienated from himself, and his interests, so far from his heart, his truth.
Things that in other circumstances would have excited him left him unmoved now, for they were simply part of his life, until the moment he was back in his room using all his strength and care to smother the flame of life that burned within him. ‘What do you think, Mersault? You’ve been to school,’ Ce-leste said.
‘Oh, cut it out,’ Patrice said, ‘you’ll get over it.’ ‘You’re pretty touchy this morning.’
Mersault smiled and, leaving the restaurant, crossed the street and went upstairs to his room. The flat was over a horse-butcher’s. Leaning over his balcony, he could smell blood as he read the sign: ‘To Man’s Noblest Conquest’. He stretched out on his bed, smoked a cigarette, and fell asleep. He slept in what used to be his mother’s room.
They had had this little three-room flat a long time. Now that he was alone, Mersault let two rooms to a man he knew, a barrel maker who lived with his sister, and he kept the best room for himself. His mother had been fifty-six when she died.
A beautiful woman, she had enjoyed — and expected to enjoy — a life of diversion, a life of pleasure. At forty, she had been stricken by a terrible disease. She had had to give up her clothes, her cosmetics, and was reduced to hospital gowns, her face deformed by ter-rible swellings; her swollen legs and her weakness kept her almost immobilized, and she would grope frantically around the colourless flat she could no longer take care of, for she was half-blind as well.
The diabetes she had neglected had been further aggravated by her careless life. Mersault had had to abandon his studies and take a job. Until his mother’s death he had con-tinued to read, to reflect. And for ten years the sick woman clung to that life. The suffering had lasted so long that those around her grew accustomed to her disease and forgot that she was deathly ill, that she would die. One day she died.
People in the neighbourhood felt sorry for Mersault. They expected a lot from the funeral. They recalled the son’s deep feeling for his mother. They warned distant relatives not to mourn too much, so that Patrice would not feel his own grief too intensely. They were asked to protect him, to take care of him. But Patrice, dressed in his best and with his hat in his hand, watched the arrangements. He walked in the little procession, listened to the service, tossed his handful of earth, and folded his hands.
Only once did he look surprised, expressing his regret that there were so few cars for those who had attended the service. That was all. The next day a sign appeared in one of the flat’s windows: ‘To let’. Now he lived in his mother’s room. In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it: when the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil-lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment. The neighbourhood was a quiet one. Mersault would
