Chapter Four
THAT Sunday afternoon, after talking and laughing a great deal, Roland Zagreus sat silent near the fire in his big wheelchair, wrapped in white blankets. Mersault was leaning against a bookshelf, staring at the sky and the landscape through the white silk curtains. He had come during a light rain, and not wanting to arrive too early had spent an hour wandering around the countryside.
The day was dark, and even without hearing the wind Mersault could see the trees and branches writhing silently in the little valley. The silence was broken by a milk-float, which trundled down the street past the villa in a tremendous racket of metal cans. Almost immediately the rain turned into a downpour, flooding the windowpanes.
All this water like some thick oil on the panes, the faint hollow noise of the horse’s hooves — more audible now than the cart’s uproar — the persistent hiss of the rain, the stump of a man beside the fire, and the silence of the room — everything seemed to have happened before, a dim melancholy past that flooded Mersault’s heart the way the rain had soaked his shoes and the wind had pierced the thin material of his trousers.
A few moments before, the falling vapour — neither a mist nor a rain — had washed his face like a light hand and laid bare his dark circled eyes. Now he stared at the black clouds that kept pouring out of the sky, no sooner blurred than replaced. The creases in his trousers had vanished, and with them the warmth and confidence of a world made for ordinary men. He moved closer to the fire and to Zagreus and sat facing him, in the shadow of the high mantelpiece and yet within sight of the sky.
Zagreus glanced at Mersault, then looked away and tossed into the fire a ball of paper he had crumpled in his left hand. The gesture, ridiculous as all the rest, disconcerted Mersault: the sight of this mutilated body made him uneasy. Zagreus smiled but said nothing, then suddenly thrust his face towards Mersault.
The flames gleamed on his left cheek only, but something in his voice and eyes was filled with warmth. ‘You look tired,’ he said.
From reserve, Mersault merely answered: ‘Yes, I don’t know what to do,’ and after a pause straightened up, walked to the window and added as he stared outside: ‘I feel like getting mar-ried, or committing suicide, or else subscribing to L’illustration. Something desperate, you know.’
Zagreus smiled. ‘You’re a poor man, Mersault. That explains half your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.’
Mersault kept his back turned, staring at the trees in the wind. Zagreus smoothed the blanket over his legs.
‘You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, Mersault, and you don’t like the sentence. You live badly. Like a barbarian.’ He turned his head towards Patrice. ‘You like driving a car, don’t you?’ ‘Yes.’
‘You like women?’
‘When they’re beautiful.’
‘That’s what I meant.’ Zagreus turned back to the fire. Af-ter a moment, he began: ‘All those things …’ Mersault turned around, leaning against the window which yielded slightly to his weight, and waited for the rest of the sentence. Zagreus re-mained silent.
A fly buzzed against the glass. Mersault turned, caught it under his hand, then let it go. Zagreus watched him and said, hesitantly: ‘I don’t like talking seriously. Because then there’s only one thing to talk about — the justification you can give for your life. And I don’t see how I can justify my amputated legs.’
‘Neither do I,’ Mersault said without turning around. Zagreus’ young laugh suddenly burst out. ‘Thanks. You don’t leave me any illusions.’ He changed his tone: ‘But you’re right to be hard. Still, there’s something I’d like to say to you.’ And he broke off again. Mersault came over and sat down, facing him.
‘Listen,’ Zagreus resumed, ‘and look at me. I have someone to help me, to set me on the toilet, and afterwards to wash me and dry me. Worse, I pay someone for it. Yet I’ll never make a move to cut short a life I believe in so much … I’d accept even worse — blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly that dark fire that is me, me alive.
The only thing that would occur to me would be to thank life for letting me burn on.’ Zagreus flung his body back in the chair, out of breath. There was less of him to see now, only the whitish reflection the blankets left on his chin. Then he went on: ‘And you,.Mersault, with a body like yours, your one duty is to live and be happy.’
‘Don’t make me laugh,’
Mersault said. ‘With eight hours a day at the office. Oh, it would be different if I was free!’ He grew excited as he spoke, and as occasionally happened, hope flooded him once more, even more powerfully today because of Zagreus’ reassurance. He believed that at last he could confide in someone. He resisted the impulse for a moment, began to stub out a cigarette, then continued more calmly: ‘A few years ago I had everything before me — people talked to me about my life, about my future.
And I said yes. I even did the things you had to do to have such things. But even back then, it was all alien to me. To devote myself to impersonality — that’s what concerned me. Not to be happy, not to be “against”. I can’t explain it, but you know what I mean.’
‘Yes,’ Zagreus said.
‘Even now, if I had the time … I would only have to let myself go. Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone.
The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.’
Zagreus had folded his hands. In the silence that followed, the rain seemed to come down twice as hard, and the clouds swelled in a vague mist. The room grew a little darker, as if the sky was pouring its burden of shadow and silence into it.
And the cripple said intensely: ‘A body always has the ideal it deserves. That ideal of a stone — if I may say so, you’d have to have a demigod’s body to sustain it.’
‘Right,’ Mersault said, a little surprised, ‘but don’t exaggerate — I’ve played a lot of sport, that’s all. And I’m capable of going quite far in pleasure.’
Zagreus reflected. ‘Yes — so much the better for you. To know your body’s limits — that’s the true psychology. But it doesn’t matter anyway. We don’t have time to be ourselves. We only have time to be happy. But would you mind defining what you mean by impersonality?’
‘No,’ Mersault said, but that was all.
Zagreus took a sip of tea and set down his full cup. He drank very little, preferring to urinate only once a day. He willed himself to reduce the burden of humiliations each day brought him.
‘You can’t save a little here, a little there,’ he had told Mersault one day. ‘It’s a record like any other.’ For the first time a few raindrops fell down the chimney. The fire hissed. The rain beat harder on the windowpanes. Somewhere a door slammed.
On the road, cars streaked by like gleaming rats. One of them blew its horn, and across the valley the hollow lugubrious blast made the wet space of the world even larger, until its very memory became for Mersault an element of the silence and the agony of that sky.
‘I’m sorry, Zagreus, but it’s been a long time since I talked about certain things. So I don’t know any more — or I’m not sure. When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It’s rain and sun, both noon and midnight. You know, Zagreus, I think of the lips I’ve kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away.
I’m all those things at once. I’m sure there are times when you wouldn’t even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness — I can’t say it.’
‘You’re playing several games at the same time?’
‘Yes, but not as an amateur,’ Mersault said vehemently. ‘Each time I think of that flood of pain and joy in myself, I know — I can’t tell you how deeply I know that the game I’m playing is the most serious and exciting one of all.’
Zagreus smiled. ‘Then you have something to do?’
Mersault said vehemently: ‘I have my life to earn. My work — those eight hours a day other people can stand — my work keeps me from doing it.’ He broke off and lit the cigarette
he had held till now between his fingers. ‘And yet,’ he said, the match still burning, ‘if I was strong enough, and patient enough …’ He blew out the match and pressed the tip against
the back of his left hand. ‘… I know what kind of life I’d have.
I wouldn’t make an experiment out of my life:
