‘I don’t like being watched when I’m sleeping.’
Marthe threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He didn’t move. ‘Oh, darling, another one of your moods …’ ‘Don’t call me “darling”, please. I’ve already asked you not to.’
She stretched out beside him and stared at his profile. ‘You remind me of someone when you’re like that, I wonder who it is.’
He pulled up his trousers and turned his back to her. Marthe frequently noticed Mersault’s gestures in strangers, in film-actors; he took it as a sign of his influence over her, but now this habit which had often flattered him was an irritation. She squeezed herself against his back and took all the warmth of his sleep against her body.
Darkness was falling fast, and shadows soon filled the room. Somewhere in the building there were children crying, a cat miaowing, the sound of a door slamming. The street lamps came on, flooding the balcony. Trams went by only occasionally. And then the neighbourhood smell of anisette and roasting meat rose in heavy gusts from the street into the room.
Marthe felt sleepy. ‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you? It started yesterday … that’s why I came. Aren’t you going to talk to me?’ She shook him. Mersault didn’t move, his eyes tracing the curve of light on a show under the dressing-table: it was already dark in the room. ‘You know that man yesterday?
Well, I was joking. He was never my lover.’ ‘No?’
‘Well, not really.’
Mersault said nothing. He could see the gestures so clearly, the smiles … He clenched his teeth. Then he got up, opened the windows, and sat down again on the bed. Marthe pressed against him, thrust her hand between two buttons of his shirt and caressed his nipples. ‘How many lovers have you had?’ he said finally.
‘Don’t be like that.’ Mersault said nothing. ‘Perhaps ten,’ she said.
With Mersault, sleepiness always called for a cigarette. ‘Do I know them?’ he asked as he took one out. All he could see now was a white patch where Marthe’s face was. ‘It’s the same as when we make love,’ he realized.
‘Some of them. Around here.’ She rubbed her face against his shoulder and spoke in that little girl’s voice she used to make Mersault treat her gently.
‘Now listen to me,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Try to un-derstand what I’m saying. Promise to tell me their names.
And I want you to promise to point out the others — the ones I don’t know — if we pass them in the street.’
Marthe pulled away. ‘Oh no!’
A car sounded its horn right under the windows, then again, then twice more — long, fierce blasts. A tram screeched somewhere in the night. On the marble top of the dressing-table, the alarm-clock ticked coldly. Mersault spoke with deliberation:
‘I’m asking you to tell me because I know myself. If I don’t find out exactly who they are, each man I meet will make the same thing happen — I’ll wonder, I’ll imagine. That’s what it is, I’ll imagine too much. I don’t know if you understand …’ She understood, amazingly. She told him the names.
There was only one he didn’t recognize. The last she named was a man he knew, and this was the one he thought about, because he was handsome and the women ran after him. What aston-ished him about lovemaking was the first time, at least the terrible intimacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could receive a part of a stranger’s body inside her own. In such intoxication and abandonment, in such surrender he rec-ognized the exalting and sordid power of love.
And it was this intimacy that was the first thing he imagined between Marthe and her lover. Just then she sat up on the edge of his bed and, putting her left foot on her right thigh, took off her shoes, drop-ping them next to the bed so that one was lying on its side, the other standing on its high heel. Mersault felt his throat tighten. Something was gnawing at his stomach.
‘Is this the way you do it with René?’ he said, smiling. Marthe looked up. ‘Don’t get any strange ideas,’ she said. ‘We only did it once.’
‘Oh.’
‘Besides, I didn’t even take my shoes off.’
Mersault stood up. He saw her lying back, all her clothes on, on a bed like this one, and surrendering everything, unre-servedly. He shouted ‘Shut up!’ and walked over to the balcony.
‘Oh darling!’ Marthe said, sitting on the bed, her stockinged feet on the floor.
Mersault controlled himself by watching the street-lamps glitter on the tram-rails. He had never felt so close to Marthe. And realizing that at the same time he was letting her come a little closer to him, his pride made his eyes sting. He walked back to her and pinched the warm skin of her neck under one ear. He smiled. ‘And that Zagreus — who’s he? He’s the only one I don’t know.’
‘Oh him,’ Marthe said with a laugh. ‘I still see him.’ Mersault pinched harder. ‘He was the first one, you have to understand that. I was just a kid. He was older. Now he’s had both legs amputated. He lives all alone. So I go to see him sometimes. He’s a nice man, and educated. He still reads all the time in those days he was a student. He’s always making jokes.
A character. Besides, he says the same thing as you do. He tells me: “Come here, image”.’
Mersault was thinking. He let go of Marthe, and she fell back on the bed, closing her eyes. After a moment he sat down beside her and bent over her parted lips, seeking the signs of her animal divinity and the way to forget a suffering he considered unworthy. But he did nothing more than kiss her.
As he walked Marthe home, she talked about Zagreus: ‘I’ve told him about you. I told him my darling was very handsome and very strong. Then he said he’d like to meet you. Because — this is what he said: “the sight of a good body helps me breathe”.’
‘Sounds pretty crazy.’
Marthe wanted to please him, and made up her mind this was the moment to stage the little scene of jealousy she had been planning, having decided she owed it to him somehow. ‘Oh, not so crazy as some of your friends.’
‘What friends?’ Mersault asked, genuinely startled. ‘Those little idiots …’
The little idiots were Rose and Claire, students in Tunis whom Mersault used to know and with whom he maintained the only correspondence in his life. He smiled and laid his hand on the nape of Marthe’s neck. They walked a long time. Marthe lived near the parade grounds. Lights shone in all the upper windows of the long street, though the dark, shuttered shop windows had a forbidding look.
‘Listen, darling, you don’t happen to be in love with those little idiots by any chance, do you?’
‘No.’
They walked on, Mersault’s hand on Marthe’s neck covered by the warmth of her hair.
‘Do you love me?’ Marthe asked suddenly.
Mersault burst out laughing. ‘Now that’s a serious question.’ ‘Answer me!’
‘People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe — they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.’
Marthe seemed sad, but he kissed her: ‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said. Mersault walked home through the dark streets. He walked quickly, aware of how the muscles in his thigh played against the smooth material of his trousers, and he thought of Zagreus and his amputated legs. He wanted to meet him, and decided to ask Marthe to introduce them.
The first time Mersault saw Zagreus, he was annoyed.
Yet Zagreus had tried to avoid anything that might be embarrass-ing about two lovers of the same woman meeting in her pres-ence. To do so, he had attempted to make Mersault his accomplice in treating Marthe as a ‘good girl’ and laughing very loud. Mersault had remained impassive. He told Marthe, as soon as they were alone, how much he had disliked the encounter.
‘I don’t like half-portions. It bothers me. It keeps me from thinking. And especially half-portions who brag.’
‘Oh, you and your thinking,’ Marthe answered, not under-standing, ‘if I paid any attention to you …’
But later, that boyish laugh of Zagreus’ which had at first annoyed him caught Mersault’s attention and interest. Moreover the obvious jealousy which had provoked Mersault’s first judgement had disappeared as soon as he saw Zagreus. Once when Marthe quite innocently referred to the time she had known Zagreus, he advised her: ‘Don’t bother. I can’t be jeal-ous of a man who doesn’t have his legs any more.
If I ever do think about the two of you, I see him like some kind of big worm on top of you. And it just makes me laugh. So don’t bother, angel.’ And after that he went back to visit Zagreus by himself.
Zagreus talked a great deal and very fast, laughed, then fell silent. Mersault felt comfortable in the big room where Zagreus lived surrounded by books and Moroccan brass trays, the fire casting reflections on the withdrawn face of the Khmer Buddha on the desk. He listened to Zagreus. What he noticed
