But it’s still amazing.’
Night was beginning to fall. Images came. Huge fantastic animals which nodded over desert landscapes. Mersault gently swept them away, despite his fever. He let only Zagreus’ face appear, a sign of blood brotherhood. He who had inflicted death was going to die. And then, as for Zagreus, the lucid gaze he cast upon his life was a man’s gaze. Until now he had lived. Now he could talk of his life.
Of that great ravaging energy which had borne him on, of that fugitive and generating poetry of life, nothing was left now but the transparent truth which is the opposite of poetry. Of all the men he had carried inside himself, as every man does at the beginning of this life, of all those various rootless, mingling beings who had created his life with consciousness, with courage. That was his whole happiness in living and dying.
He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved.
They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveller vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture which erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion. He spent a day and a night sitting on his bed, his arms on the bedside table and his head on his arms. He could not breathe lying down. Lucienne sat beside him and watched him without speaking a word.
Sometimes Mersault looked at her. He realized that after he was gone, the first man who put his arms around her would make her soften, submit. She would be offered her body, her breasts as she had been offered to him, and the world would continue in the warmth of her parted lips. Sometimes he raised his head and stared out of the window. He had not shaved, his red-rimmed, hollowed eyes had lost their dark lustre, and his pale sunken cheeks under the bluish stubble transformed him completely. His gaze came to rest on the panes.
He sighed and turned towards Lucienne. Then he smiled. And in his face that was collapsing, even vanishing, the hard lucid smile wakened a new strength, a cheerful gravity.
‘Better?’ Lucienne asked in a whisper.
‘Yes.’ Then he returned to darkness between his arms.
At the limit of his strength and his resistance, he joined Roland Zagreus for the first time, whose smile had so exasperated him in the beginning. His short, gasping breath left a moist cloud on the marble of the night table. And in that sickly warmth rising towards him from the stone, he felt even more distinctly the icy tips of his fingers and toes.
Even that revealed life, though, and in this journey from cold to warm, he discovered the exaltation which had seized Zagreus, thanking life ‘for allowing him to go on burning’.
He was overcome by a violent and fraternal love for this man from whom he had felt so far, and he realized that by killing him he had consummated a union which bound them together forever. That heavy approach of tears, a mingled taste of life and death, was shared by them both, he realized now. And in Zagreus’ very immobility confronting death, he encountered the secret image of his own life.
Fever helped him here, and with it an exultant certainty of sustaining conscious-ness to the end, of dying with his eyes open. Zagreus, too, had had his eyes open that day, and tears had fallen from them. But that was the last weakness of a man who had not had his share of life. Patrice was not afraid of such weakness. In the pounding of his feverish blood, though it failed to reach the limits of his body, he understood that such weakness would not be his.
For he had played his part, fashioned his role, perfected man’s one duty, which is only to be happy. Not for long, no doubt. He had destroyed the obstacle, and this inner brother he had engendered in himself what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
The blanket slipped from Mersault’s shoulders, and when Lucienne stood up to cover him, he shuddered at her touch. Since the day he had sneezed in the little square near Zagreus’ villa to this moment, his body had served him faithfully, had opened him to the world. But at the same time, it lived a life of its own, detached from the man it represented. For these few years it had passed through a slow decomposition; now it had completed its trajectory, and was ready to leave.Mersault, to restore him to the world.
In that sudden shudder of which Mersault was conscious, his body indicated once more a complicity which had already won so many joys for them both. Solely for this reason, Mersault took pleasure in that shudder. Conscious, he must be conscious with deception, without cowardice alone, face to face at grips with his body eyes open upon death. It was a man’s business.
Not love, not land-scape, nothing but an infinite waste of solitude and happiness in which Mersault was playing his last cards. He felt his breath-ing weaken. He gasped for air, and in that movement his ruined lungs wheezed. His wrists were cold now, and there was no feeling in his hands at all. Day was breaking. The new day was cool, filled with the sound of birds.
The sun rose quickly, and in a single leap was above the horizon. The earth was covered with gold, with warmth. In the morning, sky and sea were spattered with dancing patches of blue and yellow light. A light breeze had risen, and through the window a breath of salt air cooled Mersault’s arms.
At noonthe wind dropped, the day split open like ripe fruit and trick-led down the face of the world, a warm and choking juice in a sudden concert of cicadas. The sea was covered with this golden juice, a sheet of oil upon the water, and gave back to the sun-crushed earth a warm, softening breath which released odours of wormwood, rosemary, and hot stone. From his bed, Mersault received that impact, that offering, and he opened his eyes on the huge, curved, glistening sea irradiated with the smiles of his gods.
Suddenly he realized he was sitting on his bed, and that Lucienne’s face was very close to his. Slowly, as though it came from his stomach, there rose inside him a stone which approached his throat. He breathed faster and faster, taking advantage of the respites granted each time it moved.
It rose steadily, higher and higher. He looked at Lucienne. He smiled without wincing, and this smile too came from inside himself. He threw himself back on the bed, and felt the slow ascent within him. He looked at Lucienne’s swollen lips and, behind her, the smile of the earth. He looked at them with the same eyes, the same desire.
‘In a minute, in a second,’ he thought. The ascent stopped. And stone among the stones, he returned to the joy of his heart, to the truth of the motionless worlds.
The End
