Noticing that she was gain-
ing weight, Patrice scolded her: “You’re disgusting. A lovely creature is not entitled to grow ugly.”
But Rose intervened: “Please stop tormenting the child. Eat, Claire darling.”
And the day turned from the rising sun to the setting sun around the hills and over the sea, inside the
delicate light. They laughed, teased each other, made plans. Everyone smiled at appearances and
pretended to submit to them. Patrice proceeded from the face of the world to the grave and smiling faces
of the young women. Sometimes he was amazed by this universe they had created around him. Friendship
and trust, sun and white houses, scarcely heeded nuances, here felicities were born intact, and he could
measure their precise resonance. The House above the World, they said among themselves, was not a
house of pleasure, it was a house of happiness. Patrice knew it was true when night fell and they all
accepted, with the last breeze on their faces, the human and dangerous temptation to be utterly unique.
Today, after the sunbath, Catherine had gone to her office. “My dear Patrice,” Rose announced, suddenly appearing, “I have some good news for you.”
The Boy was conscientiously lounging on a couch in the terrace room, a detective story in his hands. “My dear Rose, I’m all ears.”
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“Today is your turn in the kitchen.”
“Splendid,” Patrice said, without moving.
Rose stuffed into her student’s satchel not only the sweet peppers for her lunch but also volume three of
Lavisse’s boring History, and left. Patrice, who would be cooking lentils, loafed around the big ocher room until eleven, walking between the couches and the shelves decorated with green, yellow, and red
masks, touching the beige-and-orange draperies; then he quickly boiled the lentils, put some oil in the pot,
an onion to brown, a tomato, a bouquet garni, fussed over the stove and cursed Gula and Cali for
announcing their hunger, despite the fact that Rose had explained to them yesterday, “Now you animals
know it’s too hot in the summer to be hungry.”
Catherine arrived at a quarter to twelve, stripped off her light dress and open sandals and insisted on a
shower and a nap in the sun—she would be the last at the table. And Rose would admonish her:
“Catherine, you’re intolerable.” The water hissed in the bathroom, and Claire appeared, breathless from the climb. “Lentils? I know the best way of . . .”
“I know too: you take fresh cream . . . We’ve all learned our lesson, dear Claire.” It is a fact that Claire’s recipes always begin with fresh, thick cream.
“The Boy is absolutely right,” said Rose, who had just arrived.
“Yes,” the Boy agreed. “Let’s sit down.”
Meals are served in the kitchen, which looks like a prop room: there is even a pad to write down
Rose’s good lines. Claire says: “We may be chic, but we’re simple too,” and eats her sausage with her fingers. Catherine comes to the table duly late, drunk with the sun, and plaintive, her eyes pale with sleep.
There is not enough vitriol in her soul to do justice to her office—eight hours she subtracts from the
world and her life to give to a typewriter. The girls understand, thinking of what their own lives would be
with those eight hours amputated. Patrice says nothing.
“Yes,” Rose says, made uneasy by any show of feelings. “Well, it’s your own business. Besides, you talk about that office of yours every day. We’ll forbid you to speak.”
“But . . .” Catherine sighs.
“Put it to a vote. One, two, three, you’re outvoted.”
“You see,” Claire says, as the lentils are brought on, too dry, and everyone eats in silence. When Claire does the cooking and tastes her food at the table, she always adds with a satisfied expression: “My, that’s just delicious!” Patrice, who has his dignity, prefers to say nothing, until everyone bursts out laughing.
This is certainly not Catherine’s day, for she lectures them all about reducing her office hours and asks
someone to go with her to complain.
“No,” Rose says, “after all, you’re the one who works.”
Exasperated, the “force of nature” goes outside
and lies in the sun. But soon everyone joins her there. And absently caressing Catherine’s hair, Claire
decrees that what this “child” needs is a man. For it is common practice in the House above the World to settle Catherine’s fate, to attribute certain needs to her, and to establish their extent and variety. Of course she points out from time to time that she’s old enough, etc., but no one pays any attention. “Poor thing,”
Rose says, “she needs a lover.”
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Then everyone surrenders to the sun. Catherine, who never holds a grudge, tells the gossip about her office: how Mademoiselle Perez, the tall blonde who got married recently, had asked everyone in the
office for information in order to be prepared for the ordeal, and what horrifying descriptions the
salesmen had given her, and with what relief, back from her honeymoon, she had smilingly declared: “It
wasn’t so bad as all that.” “She’s thirty years old,” Catherine adds, pityingly.
And Rose, objecting to these off-color stories: “All right, Catherine,” she says, “we aren’t just girls here.”
At this time of day the mail plane passes over the city, bearing the glory of its glittering metal over land
and through the heavens. It enters into the movement of the harbor, incorporates itself into the course of
the world, and, suddenly abandoning its frivolities, sheers off and dives down to the sea, landing in a
tremendous explosion of blue and white water. Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny
adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams.
The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her
deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
The next Sunday, guests have been invited. It is Claire’s turn in the kitchen. Hence Rose has peeled the
vegetables, set the table; Claire will put the vegetables in the pots and watch over the cooking reading in
her room, occasionally emerging to glance under the lids. Since Mina, the Arab girl, has not come this
morning, having lost her father for the third time this year, Rose has also cleaned the house. The first
guest arrives: Eliane, whom Mer-sault calls the Idealist. “Why?” Eliane asks. “Because when you hear something true that upsets you, you say, ‘That’s true, but it’s not good.’ ” Eliane has a good heart, and she thinks she looks like The Man with a Glove, though no one else does. But her room is lined with
reproductions of The Man with a Glove. Eliane is studying something or other, and the first time she came to the House above the World, she announced that she was enchanted by the inhabitants’ “lack of
inhibitions.” In time, she has found this less convenient. A lack of inhibition means telling her that her stories are a bore, or declaring—quite amiably—as soon as the first words are out of her mouth: “Eliane, you’re an idiot.”
When Eliane comes into the kitchen with Noel, the second guest and a sculptor by profession, she
stumbles over Catherine, who never does anything in a normal position. Now she’s lying on her back,
eating grapes with one hand and stirring with the other a mayonnaise that is still thin. Rose, in a huge blue apron, is admiring Gula’s perspicacity—the cat has jumped up onto the shelf to eat the dessert. “No doubt about it,” Rose says blissfully, “that creature has a mind of her own.”
“Yes,” Catherine says, “she’s outdone herself today,” adding that in the morning Gula, with more of a mind than ever, had broken the little green lamp and a vase as well.
Eliane and Noel, doubtless too winded to express their disgust, decide to take a seat no one has dreamed
of offering them. Claire arrives, friendly and languorous, shakes hands and tastes the bouillabaisse
simmering on the stove. She decides they can start. But today Patrice is late. Then he appears and
explains in great detail to Eliane that he is in a good mood because the girls in the street are so pretty. The hot season is just beginning, but already the firm bodies are beginning to be revealed by the light
dresses—hence Patrice, as he testifies, is left in a devastated state, mouth dry, temples throbbing, loins
hot. This insistence on detail silences Eliane. At table, a general consternation follows the first spoonfuls of bouillabaisse. Claire announces playfully: “I’m afraid the bouillabaisse tastes of burned onion.”
“Oh no,” Noel answers politely.
Then, to test those manners, Rose asks him to purchase for the household a certain number of useful items
such as a hot-water heater, Persian carpets, and a refrigerator. When Noel replies by encouraging Rose to