‘One more Sunday got through,’ Mersault said.
Chapter Three
WHEN MERSAULT walked through the streets in the evening, proud to watch the lights and shadows flicker across Marthe’s face, everything seemed wonderfully simple, even his own strength and his courage. He was grateful to her for displaying in public, at his side, the beauty she offered him day after day, like some delicate intoxication.
An unnoticeable Marthe would have made him suffer as much as Marthe happy in the desire of other men. He was glad to walk into the cinema with her tonight, a little before the film began, when the auditorium was nearly full. She went in ahead of him, drawing glances of admiration, her flowerlike face smiling, her beauty violent.
Mersault, holding his hat in his hand, was overcome by a wonderful sense of ease, a kind of inner awareness of his own elegance. His expression grew remote and serious. He exaggerated his ceremonious manner, stepped back to let the usherette pass, lowered Marthe’s seat for her. And he did all this less from conceit, from ostentation, than because of the gratitude that suddenly swelled his heart and filled it with love for all these people around him.
If he gave the usherette too big a tip, it was because he did not know how else to pay for his joy, and because he worshipped, by making this everyday gesture, a divinity whose brilliant smile glistened like oil in his gaze. During the break between films, strolling in the foyer lined with mirrors, he saw the face of his own happiness reflected there, populating the place with elegant and vibrant images — his own tall, dark figure and Marthe smiling in her bright dress. Yes, he liked his face as he saw it there, his mouth quivering around the cigarette between his lips and the apparent ardour of his deep-set eyes.
But a man’s beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman’s face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons. Back in the cinema, he remembered that when he was alone he never left his seat between films, preferring to smoke and to listen to the records played while the lights were still on.
But tonight the excitement continued, and he felt that every chance of extending and renewing it was worth taking. Just as she was sitting down, however, Marthe returned the greeting of a man a few rows behind them. And Mersault, nodding in his turn, thought he noticed a faint smile on the man’s lips. He sat down without noticing the hand Marthe laid on his shoulder to catch his attention; a moment earlier he would have responded to it with delight, as another proof of that power she acknowledged in him.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, waiting for the perfectly natural ‘Who?’ which in fact followed at once.
‘You know. That man …’
‘Oh,’ Marthe said. And that was all. ‘Well?’
‘Do you have to know?’ ‘No,’ Mersault said.
He glanced behind him: the man was staring at the back of Marthe’s neck without moving a muscle of his face. He was rather good-looking, his lips very red and well-shaped, but his eyes, which were set shallowly in his face, had no expression in them. Mersault felt the blood pounding in his temples. In his suddenly darkened vision, the brilliant hues of that ideal world where he had been living the last few hours were sud-denly soiled. He didn’t need to hear what she would say.
He knew: the man had slept with Marthe. And what racked Mersault like panic was the thought of what this man might be thinking. He knew what it was, he had often thought the same thing:
‘Show off as much as you want …’
Realizing that this man was now imagining Marthe’s every gesture, even her way of putting her arm over her eyes at the moment of pleasure, re-alizing that this man too had once tried to pull her arm away in order to watch the tumultuous surge of the dark gods in her eyes, Mersault felt everything inside himself collapse, and tears of rage welled up under his closed eyelids while the cinema bell announced that the film was about to begin. He forgot Marthe, who had been merely the pretext of his joy and was now the liv-ing body of his rage.
Mersault kept his eyes closed a long time, and when he opened them again, a car was turning over on the screen, one of its wheels still spinning in complete silence, slower and slower, dragging into its persistent circle all the shame and humiliation that had been awakened in Mersault’s angry heart.
But a craving for certainty made him forget his dignity: ‘Marthe, was he ever your lover?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I want to watch the picture.’
That was the day Mersault began to be attached to Marthe.
He had met her several months before, and he had been aston-ished by her beauty, her elegance. Her golden eyes and carefully made up lips in that rather broad, regular face made her look like some painted goddess. The natural stupidity which glowed in her eyes emphasized her remote, impassive expres-sion. In the past, whenever Mersault had spent any time with one woman, had made the first gestures of commitment, he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way, and he would think about the end of the affair before even taking her in his arms. But Marthe had appeared at a moment when Mersault was ridding himself of everything, of himself as well.
A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope. For Mersault, nothing mattered in those days. And the first time Marthe went limp in his arms and her features blurred as they came closer, the lips that had been as motionless as painted flowers now quivering and extended, Mersault saw in her not the future but all the force of his desire focused upon her and satisfied by this appearance, this image. The lips she of-fered him seemed a message from a world without passion and swollen with desire, where his heart would find satisfaction.
And this seemed a miracle to him. His heart pounded with an emotion he almost took for love. And when he felt the ripe and resilient flesh under his mouth, it was as though he bit into a kind of fierce liberty, after caressing her a long time with his own lips. She became his mistress that same day. After some time, their harmony in love-making became perfect. But as he knew her better, she gradually lost the sense of strangeness which he would try to revive as he pressed upon her mouth.
So that Marthe, accustomed to Mersault’s reserve and even cold-ness, had never understood why, in a crowded tram, he had one day asked for her lips. Bewildered, she had held up her face. And he had kissed her the way he liked to, first caressing her lips with his own and then slowly biting them. ‘What’s come over you?’ she asked him later. He had given her the smile she loved, the brief smile which answers, and he had said: ‘I feel like misbehaving,’ and lapsed back into silence. She did not understand Patrice’s vocabulary either.
After making love, at that moment when the heart drowses in the released body, filled only with the tender affection he might have felt for a winsome puppy, Mersault would smile at her and said, ‘Hello, image.’ Marthe was a secretary. She did not love Mersault, but she was attracted to him insofar as he intrigued her and flattered her. Since the day when Emmanuel, whom Mersault had in-troduced to her, had told her: ‘Mersault’s a good fellow, you know.
He’s got guts. But he doesn’t talk so people don’t always realize what he’s like,’ she regarded him with curiosity. And since his lovemaking satisfied her, she asked nothing more, adapting herself as best she could to a silent lover who made no demands and took her when she wanted to come.
She was only a little uneasy about this man whose weak points she could not discover.
But that night, as they left the cinema, she realized that some-thing could hurt Mersault. She said nothing about it the rest of the evening, and slept in Mersault’s bed. He did not touch her during the night. But from now on she used her advantage. She had already told him she had had other lovers; now she managed to find the necessary proofs.
The next day, departing from her usual practice, she came to his room after she had left her office. She found Mersault asleep and sat down at the foot of the brass bed without waking him.
He was in his shirt sleeves, which exposed the white underside of his muscular brown forearms. He was breathing regularly, chest and belly rising together.
Two creases between his eyebrows gave him a look of strength and stubbornness she knew very well. His hair curled around
