Patrice felt he belonged to the mountain, its short turf powdered with saffron blossoms, his eager but weakening body a part of the icy springs, the shadows and the sunlight. They entered into the concentrated effort of climbing, the morning air sharp in their lungs, determined to conquer the slope. Rose and Claire, exhausted, began to slow down. Catherine and Patrice walked on, and soon lost sight of the other two.
‘Are you all right?’ Patrice asked. ‘Yes, it’s beautiful.’
The sun rose in the sky, and with it a hum of insects swelled in the growing warmth. Soon Patrice took off his shirt and walked on bare-chested. Sweat ran down his shoulders where the skin had peeled with sunburn. They took a little path that seemed to follow the mountainside. The grass was wetter here; soon a sound of springs greeted them, and in a hollow they almost stumbled over the sudden gush of coolness and shade.
They sprinkled each other, drank a little, and Catherine stretched out on the grass while Patrice, his hair black with water and curling over his forehead, stared blinking over the landscape that was covered with ruins, gleaming roads, and splinters of sunlight. Then he sat down beside Catherine. ‘While you’re alone, Mersault, tell me — are you happy now?’
‘Look,’ Mersault said. The road trembled in the sun, and the air was filled with a thousand coloured specks. He smiled and rubbed his arms.
‘Yes, but … Well, I wanted to ask you — of course you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to — ‘ She hesitated: ‘Do you love your wife?’
Mersault smiled: ‘That’s not essential.’ He gripped Cather-ine’s shoulder and shook his head, sprinkling water into her face. ‘You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really — is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present conscious-ness. The rest — women, art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.’
‘Yes,’ Catherine said, her eyes filled with sunlight.
‘What matters to me is a certain quality of happiness. I can only find it in a certain struggle with its opposite — a stubborn and violent struggle. Am I happy? Catherine! You know the famous formula — “if I had my life to live over again” — well, I would live it over again just the way it has been. Of course you can’t know what that means.’
‘No.’
‘And I don’t know how to tell you. If I’m happy, it’s because of my bad conscience. I had to get away and reach this solitude where I could face — in myself, I mean — what had to be faced, what was sun and what was tears … Yes, I’m happy, in human terms.’
Rose and Claire arrived. They shouldered their knapsacks. The path still followed the mountainside, keeping them in a zone of dense vegetation, prickly pears, olive-trees and jujubes. They passed Arabs on donkeys. Then they climbed again. The sun poured now on each stone in the path. At noon, crushed by the heat, drunk on fragrance and fatigue, they flung down their knapsacks and gave up reaching the top.
The slopes were sheer and full of sharp flints. A wizened oak sheltered them in its circle of shade. They took food out of the knapsacks and ate. The whole mountain quivered under the light. The cicadas were deafening as the heat assailed them under their oak. Patrice threw himself on the ground and pressed his chest against the stones, inhaling the scorched aroma.
Under his belly he could feel the faint throbs of the mountain that seemed to be in labour. This regular pulse and the unremitting song of the insects between the hot stones finally put him to sleep. When he awoke he was covered with sweat, and every muscle ached. It must have been three in the afternoon. The girls had vanished, but soon he heard their laughter and shouts. It was cooler now, time to go back down.
At this moment, as they were about to start, Mersault fainted for the first time. When he came to, he saw the cobalt sea between three anxious faces. They walked on more slowly. On the last slopes,.Mersault asked for a rest. The sea was turning green along with the sky, and the horizon began to blur. On the foothills that stretched from the Chenoua around the little bay, the cypresses blackened slowly. No-one spoke, until Claire said: ‘You look tired.’
‘I’m not surprised. Are you?’
‘It’s none of my business, but I don’t think this place is good for you. It’s too near the sea — too damp. Why don’t you go and live in France — in the mountains?’
‘This place isn’t good for me, Claire, but I’m happy here. I feel in harmony with it.’
‘Well, then you could be in harmony — longer.’
‘No-one is happy relatively — for a longer or shorter time. You’re happy or you’re not. That’s all. And death has nothing to do with it — death is an accident of happiness, in that case.’ No-one spoke.
After a long pause, Rose said: ‘I’m not convinced.’ They re-turned slowly, as night was falling. Catherine decided to send for Bernard. Mersault was in his room; beyond the shifting shadow of the windowpanes he could see the white patch of the parapet, the sea like a strip of dark linen undulating in the transparent air, and beyond it the night sky, paler but starless. He felt weak, and his weakness made him mysteriously lighter, gayer, and his mind grew more lucid. When Bernard knocked, Mersault sensed he would tell him everything. Not that his secret was a burden;
it was not that kind of secret. If he had kept it till now, it was because in certain circles a man keeps his thoughts to himself, knowing they will offend the prejudices and stupidity of others. But today, after his exhaustion, there was a sudden longing in his body to confide. It was the way an artist, after carefully moulding and caressing his work, at last feels the need to show it, to communicate with men — Mersault had the feeling he was going to speak now.
And without being certain he would do so, he waited impatiently for Bernard. From downstairs, two bursts of laughter made him smile. And at that moment Bernard came into the room. ‘Well?’
‘Well, here I am,’ Mersault said. Bernard listened to his chest, but he could tell nothing — he wanted to have an X-ray taken, if Mersault could manage to get to Algiers. ‘Later,’ Mersault replied.
Bernard said nothing and sat down on the window sill. ‘I don’t like being ill myself,’ he said. ‘I know what it is. Nothing is uglier or more degrading than illness.’
Mersault was unconcerned. He got up from his chair, offered Bernard a cigarette, lit his own, and said with a laugh: ‘Can I ask you a question, Bernard?’
‘Of course.’
‘You never swim, you’re never on the beach — why did you pick this place to live in?’
‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. It was a long time ago.’
After a pause he added: ‘Besides, I’ve always acted on the rebound. It’s better now. Before, I wanted to be happy, to do what had to be done, to settle down somewhere I really wanted to be, for instance. But sentimental anticipation is always wrong.
We have to live the way it’s easiest for us to live — not forcing ourselves. I suppose it sounds a little cynical, but it’s also the point of view you have to take to survive. In Indochina I ran all over the place. Here — here I just ruminate.
That’s all.’ ‘Yes,’ Mersault said, still smoking, deep in his armchair and staring at the ceiling. ‘But I’m not sure that all sentimental anticipation, as you call it, is wrong. Only unreasonable some-times. In any case, the only experiences that interest me are precisely the ones where everything turns out to be the way you hoped it would.’ Bernard smiled. ‘Yes, a ready-made destiny.’
‘A man’s destiny,’ Mersault said without moving, ‘is always passionately interesting, if he achieves it passionately. And for some men, a passionate destiny is always a readymade destiny.’
‘Yes,’ Bernard said. And he stood up deliberately and stared out at the night for a moment, his back to Mersault. He went on without looking at him: ‘You’re the only man besides my-self around here who lives alone. I don’t mean your wife and your friends downstairs. I know those are episodes. Still, even so, you seem to love life more than I do.’ He turned around.
‘Because for me, loving life is not going for a swim. It’s living in intoxication, intensity. Women, adventures, other countries… It’s action, making something happen. A burning, marvellous life. What I mean is — I want you to understand me —‘ He seemed ashamed of his excitement, ‘I love life too much to be satisfied with nature.’ Bernard put away his stethoscope and closed his bag.
Mersault said: ‘Actually, you’re an idealist.’ And he had the sense that everything was enclosed in that moment which shifts from birth to death, that everything was judged and con-secrated then.
‘That’s because, you see,’ Bernard said with a kind of sadness, ‘the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.’ ‘Don’t believe it,’ Mersault said, holding out his hand. Bernard held his hand a long time. ‘To think
