He would start eating again. The lamp would smoke a little. His mother tended it with the same exhausted gesture, extending only her right arm, her body slumped down in her chair. ‘You’ve had enough?’ she would ask, a moment later. ‘No’. He would smoke or read.
If he smoked, she always said: ‘Again!’ If he read: ‘Sit closer to the lamp, you’ll ruin your eyes.’ But now the poverty in soli-tude was misery. And when Mersault thought sadly of the dead woman, his pity was actually for himself. He could have found a more comfortable way of life, but he clung to this flat and its smell of poverty. Here, at least, he maintained contact with what he had been, and in a life where he deliberately tried to expunge himself, this patient, sordid confrontation helped him to survive his hours of melancholy and regret.
He had left on the door the frayed grey card on which his mother had written her name in blue pencil. He had kept the old brass bed with its sateen spread, and the portrait of his grandfather with his tiny beard and pale, motionless eyes. On the mantelpiece, shepherds and shepherdesses framed an old clock that had stopped and an oil lamp he almost never lit. The dreary furnishings — some rickety rattan chairs, the wardrobe with its yellowed mir-ror, a dressing-table missing one corner — did not exist for him: habit had blurred everything.
He moved through the ghost of a flat, which required no effort of him. In another room he would have to grow accustomed to novelty, to struggle once again. He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed. For this purpose, the old room served him well. One window overlooked the street, the other a yard always full of washing and, beyond it, a few clumps of orange-trees squeezed between high walls.
Some-times, on summer nights, he left the room dark and opened the window overlooking the yard and the dim trees. Out of the darkness the fragrance of orange-blossoms rose into the darkness, strong and sweet, surrounding him with its delicate shawls. All night during the summer, he and his room were en-closed in that dense yet subtle perfume, and it was as if, dead for days at a time, he had opened the window to life for the first time.
He awoke, his mouth full of sleep, his body covered with sweat. It was very late. He combed his hair, ran downstairs and jumped on to a tram. By five past two he was in his office. He worked in a big room where the walls were covered with 414 pigeonholes, into which folders were piled. The room was neither dirty nor sordid, but it suggested, at any hour of the day, a catacomb in which dead hours had putrefied.
Mersault checked shipping-bills, translated provision-lists from English ships, and between three and four dealt with clients who wanted crates of luggage shipped. He had asked for this task, which was not really part of his job. But at the start, he had found it a way of escaping into life. There were human faces, repeated encounters and a pressing breath of life, wherein at last he felt his own heart beating.
And it allowed him to escape the faces of the three secretaries and the supervisor, Monsieur Langlois. One of the secretaries was quite pretty and had been recently married. Another lived with her mother, and the third was a dignified and energetic old lady whom Mersault liked for her florid way of talking and her reticence about what Langlois called her ‘misfortunes’.
The supervisor would engage in peremptory arguments with old Madame Herbillon, who always emerged victorious. She despised Langlois for the sweat that pasted his trousers to his buttocks when he stood up and for the panic which seized him in the presence of the head of the firm and occasionally on the phone when he heard the name of some lawyer or even of some idiot with a de in front of his name. The poor man was quite unable to soften the old lady’s heart or to win his way into her good graces.
This afternoon he was strutting around the middle of the office. ‘We really get on very well together, don’t we, Madame Herbillon?’ Mersault was translating ‘vegetables’, staring over his head at the lightbulb in its corrugated green cardboard shade.
Across from him was a bright coloured calendar showing a religious procession in Newfoundland. Sponge, blotter, inkwell and ruler were lined up on his desk. The windows near him looked out over huge piles of wood brought from Norway by yellow and white freighters.
Mersault listened. On the other side of the wall, life had its own deep, muffled rhythm, a respiration that filled the harbour and the sea. So remote, and yet so close to him… The six o’clock bell released him. It was a Saturday.
Once home, he lay down on his bed and slept till dinner time. He cooked himself some eggs and ate them out of the pan (with no bread; he had forgotten to buy any), then stretched out again and fell asleep once more. He awoke the next morning just before lunchtime, washed and went downstairs to eat. Back in his room he did two crossword puzzles, carefully cut out an advertisement for Kruschen Salts which he pasted into a booklet already filled with jovial grandfathers sliding down banisters. Then he washed his hands and went out on to his balcony.
It was a beautiful afternoon. Yet the pavements were damp, the occasional passer by in a hurry. Mersault stared after each one until he was out of sight, attaching his gaze to a new arrival within his field of vision. First came families walking together, two little boys in sailor suits, uncomfortable in their starched blouses, and a girl with a huge pink bow and black patent leather shoes. Behind them a mother in a brown silk dress, a monstrous creature swathed in a boa, the more elegant father carrying a cane. In a little while it was the turn of the young men of his neighbourhood, hair slicked back and red neckties, close-fitting jackets with embroidered pocket handkerchiefs and square toed shoes.
They were on their way to the cinema in the centre of town, and hurried towards the tram, laughing very loudly. Then the street grew still again. The evening diversions had begun. The neighbourhood belonged to cats and shopkeepers. The sky, though clear, was lustreless over the ficus trees lining the road. Across from Mersault, the tobacconist brought a chair out in front of his door and straddled it, leaning his arms on the back. The trams that had been crowded a little while ago were almost empty.
In the little café Chez Pierrot the waiter was sweeping sawdust in the empty front room. Mersault turned his chair around, placed it like the tobacconist’s and smoked two cigarettes one after the other. He went back into his room, broke off a piece of chocolate, and returned to his balcony to eat it. Soon the sky darkened, then paled again.
But the passing clouds had left a promise of rain over the street they dimmed. At five, trams groaned past, jammed with soccer fans from the outlying stadiums perched on the running boards and the handrails. On the next tram he could identify the players themselves by their canvas bags. They shouted and sang at the top of their lungs that their teams would never die. Several waved to Mersault. One shouted: ‘We did it this time!’ ‘Yes,’ was all Mersault answered, nodding. Then there were more cars.
Some had flowers wreathed in their bumpers and looped around their ins. Then the light faded a little more. Over the roofs the sky reddened, and with evening the streets grew lively again. The strollers returned, the tired children whining as they let themselves be dragged home. The neighbourhood cinemas disgorged a crowd into the street.
Mersault could tell, from the violent gestures of the young men, that they had seen some sort of adventure film. Those who had been to films in the centre of town appeared a little later. They were more serious: for all their laughter and teasing gestures, their eyes and their movements betrayed a kind of nostalgia for the magical lives they had just shared. The lingered in the street, coming and going.
And on the pavement across from Mersault, two streams finally formed. One consisted of neighbourhood girls, walking arm in arm, bareheaded. The young men in the other cracked jokes which made the girls laugh and look away. Older people went into the cafés or formed groups on the pavement which the human river flowed around as if they were islands. The street lamps were on now, and the electric light made the first stars look pale in the night sky.
An audience of one,.Mersault watched the procession of people under the lights. The street lamps made the damp pavements gleam, and at regular intervals the trams would throw reflections on shiny hair, wet lips, a smile or a silver bracelet. Gradually the trams became more infrequent, and the night was already black above the trees and the lamps as the neighbourhood gradually emptied and the first cat crept across the street as soon as it was deserted again.
Mersault thought about dinner. His neck ached a little from leaning so long on the back of his chair. He went downstairs to buy bread and macaroni, made
