They had moved the man who had been hurt, and he was lying in the dust, his lips white with pain, his
arm dangling, broken above the elbow. A sliver of bone had pierced the flesh, making an ugly wound
from which blood was dripping. The drops rolled down his arm and fell, one by one, onto the scorching
stones with a tiny hiss, and turned to steam. Mersault was staring, motionless, at the blood when someone
took his arm. It was Emmanuel, one of the clerks. He pointed to a truck heading toward them with a salvo
of backfires. “That one?” Patrice began to run as the truck drove past them, chains rattling. They dashed after it, swallowed up by dust and noise, panting and blind, just conscious enough to feel themselves
swept on by the frenzied effort of running, in a wild rhythm of winches and machines, accompanied by
the dancing masts on the horizon and the pitching of the leprous hulls they passed. Mersault was the first
to grab hold, confident of his strength and skill, and he jumped onto the moving truck. He helped
Emmanuel up, and the two men sat with their legs dangling in the chalk-white dust, while a luminous
suffocation poured out of the sky over the circle of the harbor crowded with masts and black cranes, the
uneven cobbles of the dock jarring Emmanuel and Mersault as the truck
gained speed, making them laugh until they were breathless, dizzied by the jolting movement, the searing
sky, their own boiling blood.
When they reached Belcourt, Mersault slid off with Emmanuel, who was singing now, loud and out of
tune. “You know,” he told Mersault, “it comes up in your chest. It comes when you feel good. When you’re in the water.” It was true: Emmanuel sang when he swam, and his voice, hoarse from shouting,
inaudible against the sea, marked time for the gestures of his short, muscular arms. They were walking
down the rue de Lyon, Mersault tall beside Emmanuel, his broad shoulders rolling. In the way he stepped
onto the curb, the way he twisted his hips to avoid the crowd that occasionally closed in on him, his body
seemed curiously young and vigorous, capable of bearing him to any extreme of physical joy. Relaxed, he
rested his weight on one hip with a self-conscious litheness, like a man whose body has acquired its style
from sports. His eyes sparkled under the heavy brows, and as he talked to Emmanuel he would tug at his
collar with a mechanical gesture to free his neck muscles, tensing his curved mobile lips at the same time.
They walked into their restaurant, sat down at a table, and ate in silence. It was cool inside, among the
flies, the clatter of plates, the hum of conversation. The owner, Celeste, a tall man with huge mustaches,
walked over to greet them, scratching his belly under his apron. “Pretty good,” Celeste answered them,
“good for an
old man.” Celeste and Emmanuel exchanged exclamations and thumped each other on the shoulder. “Old
men,” Celeste said, “you know what old men are, they’re all the same. Shitheads. They tell you a real man’s got to be fifty. But that’s because they’re fifty. I knew this one guy who could have his good times just with his son. They’d go out together. On the town. They’d go to the Casino, and this guy would say:
‘Why should I hang around with a lot of old men! Every day they tell me they’ve taken some medicine,
there’s always something wrong with their liver. I have a better time with my son. Sometimes he picks up
a whore, I look the other way, I take the streetcar. So long and thanks. Fine with me.’ ” Emmanuel
laughed. “Of course,” Celeste said, “the guy was no authority, but I liked him all right.” He turned to Mersault. “Anyway, it’s better than this other guy I knew. When he made his money, he would talk with
his head way up making gestures all the time. Now he’s not so proud of himself—he’s lost it all.”
“Serves him right,” Mersault said.
“Oh, you can’t be a bastard in life. This guy took it while he had it, and he was right. Almost a million francs he had . . . Now if it had been me!”
“What would you do?” Emmanuel asked.
“I’d buy myself a cabin on the beach, I’d put some glue in my navel, and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing.”
5
Mersault ate quietly until Emmanuel started to tell Celeste how he had fought the battle of the Marne.
“See, they sent us Zouaves out in front . . .”
“Cut the bullshit,” Mersault said calmly.
“The major said, ‘Charge!’ and we ran down into a kind of gully, only with trees in it. He told us to
charge, but no one was there. So we just marched right on, kept on walking. And then all of a sudden
these machineguns are firing right into us. We all fall on top of each other. There were so many dead and
wounded that you could have rowed a boat across the blood in that gully. Some of them kept screaming,
‘Mama!’ Christ, it was awful.”
Mersault stood up and tied a knot in his napkin. The owner walked over to the kitchen door and chalked
the price of his dinner on it. When one of his customers hadn’t paid up, Celeste would take the door off its
hinges and bring the evidence on his back. Rene, his son, was eating a boiled egg over in a corner. “Poor kid,” Emmanuel said, thumping his own chest, “he’s had it.” It was true. Rene was usually quiet and serious. Though he was not particularly thin, his eyes glittered. Just now another customer was explaining
to him that “with time and patience, TB can be cured.” Rene nodded and answered solemnly between
bites. Mersault walked over to the counter and ordered coffee, leaning on his elbows. The other customer
went on: “Did you ever know Jean Perez? He worked for the gas company. He’s dead now. He had this
one bad lung. But
he wanted to get out of the hospital and go home. His wife was there, see. She was nothing but his horse.
You know, his sickness made him like that— he was always on top of her. She wouldn’t want it, but he
had to. So two, three times, every day of the week—it ends up killing a sick man.” Rene stopped eating, a piece a bread between his teeth, and stared at the man. “Yes,” he said finally, “the thing comes on fast, but it takes time to get rid of it.” Mersault wrote his name with one finger on the steamed-over percolator. He blinked his eyes. Every day his life alternated between this calm consumptive and Emmanuel bursting
into song, between the smell of coffee and the smell of tar, alienated from himself and his interests, from
his heart, his truth. Things that in other circumstances would have excited him left him unmoved now, for
they were simply part of his life, until the moment he was back in his room using all his strength and care
to smother the flame of life that burned within him.
“What do you think, Mersault? You’ve been to school,” Celeste said.
“Oh, cut it out,” Patrice said, “you’ll get over it.”
“You’re touchy this morning.”
Mersault smiled and, leaving the restaurant, crossed the street and went upstairs to his room. The
apartment was over a horse butcher’s. Leaning over his balcony, he could smell blood as he read the sign:
“To Man’s Noblest Conquest.” He stretched out on his bed, smoked a cigarette, and fell asleep.
He slept in what used to be his mother’s room. They had had this little three-room apartment a long time.
Now that he was alone, Mersault rented two rooms to a man he knew, a barrelmaker who lived with his
sister, and he had kept the best room for himself. His mother had been fifty-six when she died. A
beautiful woman, she had enjoyed—and expected to enjoy—a life of diversion, a life of pleasure. At
forty, she had been stricken by a terrible disease. She had had to give up her clothes, her cosmetics, and
was reduced to hospital gowns, her face deformed by terrible swellings; her swollen legs and her
weakness kept her almost immobilized, and she would grope frantically around the colorless apartment
she could no longer take care of, for she was half blind as well. The diabetes she had neglected had been
further aggravated by her careless life. Mersault had had to abandon his studies and take a job. Until his
mother’s death, he had continued to read, to reflect. And for ten years, the sick woman endured that life.
The suffering had lasted so long that those around her grew accustomed to her disease and forgot that she