“There’s the risk of being loved, little Catherine, and that would keep me from being happy.” Coiled on the couch, her head down, Catherine stared at Patrice. Without turning around he said: “A lot of men
complicate their lives and invent problems for themselves. In my case, it’s quite simple. Look . . .” He spoke facing the world, and Catherine felt forgotten. She looked at Patrice’s long fingers on the sill,
studied his way of resting his weight on one hip, and without even seeing his eyes she knew how
absorbed his gaze would be.
“What I . . .” but she broke off, still staring at Patrice.
Small sails began riding out to sea, taking advantage of the calm. They approached the channel, filled it
with fluttering wings, and suddenly sped
outward, leaving a wake of air and water that widened in long foamy trails. From where she sat, Catherine
watched them make their way out to sea, rising around Patrice like a flight of white birds. He seemed to
feel the weight of her silence and her stare, turned around, took her hands and brought them close to his
own body. “Never give up, Catherine. You have so much inside you, and the noblest sense of happiness
of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your
happiness in yourself.”
“I’m not complaining, Mersault,” Catherine said softly, putting one hand on Patrice’s shoulder. “The only thing that matters now is that you take good care of yourself.” He realized then how easily his certainty could be shaken. His heart was strangely hard.
“You shouldn’t have said that just now.” He picked up his suitcase and went down the steep stairs, then down the path from the olive trees to the olive trees. There was nothing ahead of him now except the
Chenoua, a forest of ruins and wormwood, a love without hope or despair, and the memory of a life of
vinegar and flowers. He turned around. Up above, Catherine was watching him leave, motionless.
In a little less than two hours, Mersault was in sight of the Chenoua. The night’s last violet shadows still
lingered on the slopes that plunged into the sea, while the peak glowed in the red and yellow sun-
light. There was a kind of vigorous and massive assertion of the earth here, thrusting up from the Sahel
and silhouetted on the horizon, ending in this enormous bestial back that plummeted straight down into
the sea. The house Mersault had bought stood on the last slopes, a hundred yards from the water already
turning golden in the heat. There was only one story above the ground floor, and only one room in it, but
this room was enormous and overlooked the front garden and the sea through a splendid bay window
opening onto a terrace as well. Mersault hurried up to it: the sea was already forming scarves of mist, and
its blue darkened while the warm red of the terrace tiles glistened in the morning dew. The whitewashed
parapet had already been conquered by the first tendrils of a triumphant rambler rose. The firm white
flesh of the open petals, sharp against the sea, was both voluptuous and satiating. Downstairs, one room
faced the foothills of the Chenoua, covered with fruit trees, the other two opened onto the garden and the
sea beyond. In the garden, two pines thrust their bare trunks high into the sky, the tips alone covered with
a green and yellow pelt. From the house he could see only the space bracketed between these two trees,
38
the curve of beach between the trunks. A little steamboat was moving out to sea now, and Mersault watched its entire trajectory from one pine to the other.
Here was where he would live. Doubtless because the beauty of the place touched his heart—why else
had he bought this house? But the release he hoped to find here dismayed him, this solitude he had sought
so deliberately seemed even more disturbing, now that he knew its setting. The village was not far away,
a few hundred yards. He walked out of the house. A little path sloped down from the road toward the sea.
Following it, he noticed for the first time that he could glimpse, across the bay, the slender peninsula of
Tipasa. At its very end were silhouetted the golden columns of the temple and around them the fallen
ruins among the wormwood bushes forming, at this distance, a blue-gray plumage. On June evenings,
Mersault reflected, the wind would bring the fragrance of those sun-gorged shrubs across the water
toward the Chenoua.
He had to set up his house, organize his life. The first days passed quickly. He whitewashed the walls,
bought hangings in Algiers, began to install electricity, and as he went about his work, interrupted by the
meals he took at the village cafe and by his dips in the sea, he forgot why he had come here and lost
himself in his body’s fatigue, loins aching and legs stiff, fretting over the shortage of paint or the defective installation of a light fixture in the hallway. He slept at the hotel and gradually became acquainted with
the village: the boys who came to play pool and ping-pong on Sunday afternoons (they would use the
table all afternoon, taking only one drink, to the owner’s great annoyance); the girls who strolled in the
evening along the road overlooking the sea
(they walked arm in arm, and there was a caressing, singsong note in their voices); Perez, the fisherman
who supplied the hotel with fish and had only one arm. Here, too, he met the village doctor, Bernard. But
the day the house was entirely ready, Mersault moved all his things into it and gradually recovered
himself. It was evening. He was in the big room upstairs, and behind the window two worlds fought for
the space between the two pines. In one, almost transparent, the stars multiplied. In the other, denser and
darker, a secret palpitation of the water betrayed the sea.
So far, he had lived sociably enough, chatting with the workmen who helped him in the house or with the
owner of the cafe. But now he realized that he had no one to meet tonight, nor tomorrow, nor ever, and
that he was facing his longed-for solitude at last. From the next moment he no longer had to see anyone,
the next day seemed terribly imminent. Yet he convinced himself that this was what he had wanted:
nothing before him but himself for a long time—until the end. He decided to stay where he was, smoking
and thinking late into the night, but by ten he was sleepy and went to bed. The next day he awakened very
late, around ten, made his breakfast and ate it before washing or shaving. He felt a little tired. He had not shaved and his hair was uncombed. But after he had eaten, instead of going into the bathroom he
wandered from room to room, leafed through a magazine, and finally was de-
lighted to find a light switch that had not been attached, and set to work. Someone knocked: the boy from
the cafe bringing his lunch, as he had arranged the day before. He sat down at his table just as he was, ate
without appetite before the food had a chance to cool, and began to smoke, lying on the couch in the
downstairs room. When he awakened, annoyed at having fallen asleep, it was four o’clock. He bathed
then, shaved carefully, dressed and wrote two letters, one to Lucienne, the other to the three girls. It was
already very late, and growing dark. Nonetheless he walked to the village to mail his letters and returned
without having met anyone. He went upstairs and out onto the terrace: the sea and the night were
conversing on the beach and above the ruins. Mersault reflected. The memory of this wasted day
embittered him. Tonight, at least, he would work, do something, read or go out and walk through the
night. The garden gate creaked: his dinner was coming. He was hungry, ate happily, then felt unable to
leave the house. He decided to read late in bed. But after the first pages his eyes closed, and the next
morning he woke up late.
39
In the days that followed, Mersault tried to struggle against this encroachment. As the days passed, filled by the creak of the gate and countless cigarettes, he was disconcerted by the variance between the gesture
which had brought him to this life and this life itself. One evening he wrote Lucienne to come, deciding
to break this solitude from which he had expected so much. After the letter was sent, he
was filled with a secret shame, but once Lucienne arrived the shame dissolved in a kind of mindless eager
joy to rediscover a familiar being and the easy life her presence signified. He made a fuss over her, and