Whenever he raised an arm, he cast sheaves of silver drops upon the sea, sowing under this mute and vivid sky the splendid harvest of happiness; then his arm thrust back into the water, and like a vigorous ploughshare tilled the waves, dividing them in order to gain a new support, a firmer hope.
Behind him, his feet churned the water into seething foam, producing a strangely distinct hissing noise in the night’s silence and solitude. Conscious of this cadence, this vigour, an exaltation seized Mersault, he swam faster and soon realized he was far from land, alone in the heart of the night, of the world. Suddenly he thought of the depths which lay beneath him and stopped moving.
Everything that was below attracted him like an unknown world, the extension of this darkness which restored him to himself, the salty centre of a life still unexplored. A temptation flashed through his mind, but he immediately rejected it in the great joy of his body he swam harder, farther. Gloriously tired, he turned back towards the shore. At that moment he suddenly entered an icy current and was forced to stop swimming, his teeth chattered, his movements lost their harmony. This surprise of the sea left him bewildered; the chill penetrated his limbs, blasted his body like the love of some god of impassioned exaltation whose embrace left him powerless.
Laboriously he returned to the beach where he dressed facing the sky and the sea, shivering and laughing with happiness. On his way home, he began to feel faint. From the path slop-ing up towards the house he could make out the rocky promon-tory across the bay, the smooth shafts of the columns among the ruins. Then suddenly the landscape tilted and he found himself leaning against a rock, half supported by a mastic bush, the fragrance of its crushed leaves strong in the nostrils.
He dragged himself back to the house. His body, which had just now carried him to the limits of joy, plunged him into a suf-fering that gripped his bowels, making him close his eyes. He decided tea would help, but he used a dirty pan to boil the wa-ter in, and the tea was so greasy it made him retch. He drank it, though, before he went to bed. As he was pulling off his shoes he noticed how pink his nails were, long and curving over the fingertips of his bloodless hands. His nails had never been like that, and they gave his hands a twisted, unhealthy look. His chest felt as though it were caught in a vice.
He coughed and spat several times only phlegm, though the taste of blood lingered on his tongue. In bed, his body was seized by long spasms of shivering. He could feel the chill rising from the very extremity of his body, meeting in his shoulders like a con-fluence of icy streams, while his teeth chattered and the sheets felt as if they had been soaked. The house seemed enormous, the usual noises swelled to infinity, as if they encountered no wall to put an end to their echoes.
He heard the sea, the peb-bles rolling under the receding wave, the night throbbing be-hind his windows, the dogs howling on distant farms. He was hot now, threw back the blankets, then cold again, and drew them up. As he wavered between one suffering and another, between somnolence and anxiety, he suddenly realized he was ill, and anguish overwhelmed him at the thought that he might die in this unconsciousness, without being able to see clearly. The village steeple chimed, but he could not keep count of the strokes. He did not want to die like a sick man.
He did not want his illness to be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death. What he really wanted was the encounter between his life — a life filled with blood and health and death. He stood up, dragged a chair over to the window and sat down in it, huddling in his blankets. Through the thin curtains, in the places where the material did not fall in folds, he saw the stars. He breathed heavily for a long time, and gripped the arms of his chair to control his trembling hands. He would reconquer his lucidity if he could. ‘I might die now,’ he was thinking.
And he was thinking, too, that the gas was still on in the kitchen. ‘I might die now,’ he thought again. Lucidity, too, was a long pa-tience. Everything could be won, earned, acquired. He struck his fist on the arm of the chair. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive. He becomes strong, he becomes lucid. Fate is not in man but around him. Then he realized he was crying. A strange weakness, a kind of cowardice born of his illness gave way to tears, to childishness. His hands were cold, his heart filled with an immense disgust. He thought of his nails, and un-der his collarbone he pressed tumours that seemed enormous.
Outside, all that beauty was spread upon the face of the world. He did not want to abandon his thirst for life, his jealousy of life. He thought of those evenings above Algiers, when the sound of sirens rises in the green sky and men leave their factories. The fragrance of wormwood, the wild flowers among the ruins, and the solitude of the cypresses in the Sahel gen-erated an image of life where beauty and happiness took on an aspect without the need of hope, a countenance in which Patrice found a kind of fugitive eternity.
That was what he did not want to leave — he did not want that image to persist with-out him. Filled with rebellion and pity, he saw Zagreus’ face turned towards the window. Then he coughed for a long time.
It was hard to breathe. He was smothering under his blankets. He was cold. He was hot. He was burning with a great confusing rage, his fists clenched, his blood throbbing heavily under his skull; eyes blank, he waited for a new spasm which would plunge him back into the blind fever. The chill came, restoring him to a moist, sealed world in which he silenced the animal rebellion, eyes closed, jealous of his thirst and his hunger.
But before losing consciousness, he had time to see the night turn pale behind the curtains and to head, with the dawn of the world’s awakening, a kind of tremendous chord of tenderness and hope which doubtless dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been the whole reason for living.
When he awakened, the morning had already begun, and all the birds and insects were singing in the warmth of the sun. He remembered Lucienne was coming today. Exhausted, he crawled back to his bed. His mouth tasted of fever, and he could feel the onset of that fragility which makes every effort arduous and other people so irritating in the eyes of the sick. He sent for Bernard, who came at once, quiet and businesslike as always.
He listened to Mersault’s chest, then took off his glasses and wiped the lenses. ‘Bad,’ was all he would say. He gave Mersault two injections. During the second, Mersault fainted, though ordinarily he was not squeamish. When he came to, Bernard was holding his wrist in one hand and his watch in the other, watching the jerky advance of the second hand. ‘That lasted fifteen minutes,’ Bernard said. ‘Your heart’s failing. The next time, you might not come out of it.’
Mersault closed his eyes. He was exhausted, his lips white and dry, his breathing a hoarse whistle. ‘Bernard,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want to die in a coma. I want to see what’s happen-ing — do you understand me?’
‘Yes,’ Bernard said, and gave him several ampoules. ‘If you feel weak, break this open and swallow it. It’s adrenalin.’ As he was leaving, Bernard met Lucienne on her way in. ‘As charming as ever.’
‘Is Patrice ill?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘No, he’s all right,’ Bernard said. And just before he was out the door: ‘One piece of advice, though — try to leave him alone as much as you can.’
‘Oh,’ Lucienne said, ‘then it can’t be anything.’
All day long, Mersault coughed and choked. Twice he felt the cold, stubborn chill which would draw him into anothercoma, and twice the adrenalin rescued him from that dark immersion. And all day long his dim eyes stared at the magnifi-cent landscape. At about four, a big red rowing boat appeared on the sea, gradually growing larger, glistening with sunlight, brine and fish scales.
Perez, standing, rowed on steadily. Mersault closed his eyes and smiled for the first time since the day before, though he did not unclench his teeth. Lucienne, who had been fussing around the room, vaguely uneasy, threw her-self on the bed and kissed him. ‘Sit down,’ Mersault said, ‘you can stay.’
‘Don’t talk, you’ll tire yourself out.’
Bernard came, gave injections, left. Huge red clouds moved slowly across the sky.
‘When I was a child,’ Mersault said laboriously, leaning back on the pillow, his eyes fixed on the sky, ‘my mother told me that was the souls of the dead going to paradise. I was amazed they had red souls.
Now I know it means a
