Why don’t you go live in France—in the mountains?”
“This place isn’t good for me, Claire, but I’m happy here. I feel in harmony with it.”
“Well, then you could be in harmony—longer.”
“No one is happy relatively—for a longer or
shorter time. You’re happy or you’re not. That’s all. And death has nothing to do with it—death is an
accident of happiness, in that case.” No one spoke.
After a long pause, Rose said: “I’m not convinced.” They returned slowly as night was falling.
Catherine decided to send for Bernard. Mersault was in his room; beyond the shifting shadow of the
windowpanes he could see the white patch of the parapet, the sea like a strip of dark linen undulating in
the transparent air, and beyond it the night sky, paler but starless. He felt weak, and his weakness made
him mysteriously lighter, gayer, and his mind grew more lucid. When Bernard knocked, Mersault sensed
he would tell him everything. Not that his secret was a burden; it was not that kind of secret. If he had
kept it till now, it was because in certain circles a man keeps his thoughts to himself, knowing they will
offend the prejudices and stupidity of others. But today, after his exhaustion, there was a sudden longing
in his body to confide. It was the way an artist, after carefully molding and caressing his work, at least
feels the need to show it, to communicate with men—Mersault had the feeling he was going to speak
now. And without being certain he would do so, he waited patiently for Bernard.
From downstairs, two bursts of laughter made him smile. And at that moment Bernard came into the
room. “Well?”
“Well, here I am,” Mersault said. Bernard listened to his chest, but he could tell nothing—he wanted to have an X ray taken, if Mersault could
manage to get to Algiers. “Later,” Mersault replied.
46
Bernard said nothing and sat down on the win-dowsill. “I don’t like being sick myself,” he said. “I know what it is. Nothing is uglier or more degrading than sickness.”
Mersault was unconcerned. He got up from his chair, offered Bernard a cigarette, lit his own, and said
with a laugh: “Can I ask you a question, Bernard?”
“Of course.”
“You never swim, you’re never on the beach— why did you pick this place to live in?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly. It was a long time ago.” After a pause he added: “Besides, I’ve always acted out of rancor. It’s better now. Before, I wanted to be happy, to do what had to be done, to settle down
somewhere I really wanted to be, for instance. But sentimental anticipation is always wrong. We have to
live the way it’s easiest for us to live—not forcing ourselves. I suppose it sounds a little cynical, but it’s also the point of view you have to take to survive. In Indochina I ran all over the place. Here—here I just
ruminate. That’s all.”
“Yes,” Mersault said, still smoking, deep in his armchair and staring at the ceiling. “But I’m not sure that all sentimental anticipation, as you call it, is wrong. Only unreasonable sometimes. In any case, the only
experiences that interest me are precisely the ones where everything turns out to be the way you hoped it
would.”
Bernard smiled. “Yes, a ready-made destiny.”
“A man’s destiny,” Mersault said without moving, “is always passionately interesting, if he , achieves it passionately. And for some men, a passionate destiny is always a ready-made destiny.”
“Yes,” Bernard said. And he stood up deliberately and stared out at the night for a moment, his back to Mersault. He went on without looking at him: “You’re the only man besides myself around here who lives
alone. I don’t mean your wife and your friends downstairs. I know those are episodes. Still, even so, you
seem to love life more than I do.” He turned around. “Because for me, loving life is not going for a swim.
It’s living in intoxication, intensity. Women, adventures, other countries . . . It’s action, making something happen. A burning, marvelous life. What I mean is—I want you to understand me—” He seemed
ashamed of his excitement. “I love life too much to be satisfied with nature.” Bernard put away his stethoscope and closed his bag.
Mersault said: “Actually, you’re an idealist.” And he had the sense that everything was enclosed in that moment which shifts from birth to death, that everything was judged and consecrated then.
“That’s because, you see,” Bernard said with a kind of sadness, “the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.”
“Don’t believe it,” Mersault said, holding out his hand.
Bernard held his hand a long time. “To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.”
“Or both, perhaps.”
“Oh, I wasn’t asking!”
“I know,” Mersault said seriously. But when Bernard was at the door, Mersault, impelled by a sudden need, called him back.
47
“Yes?” the doctor said turning around.
“Are you capable of feeling contempt for a man?”
“I think so.”
“On what conditions?”
The doctor reflected. “It’s quite simple, I think. In cases when he was motivated by expediency or a desire for money.”
“That is simple,” Mersault said. “Goodnight, Bernard.”
“Goodnight.”
Alone, Mersault reflected. At the point he had now reached, another man’s contempt left him in-different.
But he recognized in Bernard profound resonances that brought the two of them together. It seemed
intolerable that a part of himself should condemn the rest. Had he acted out of expediency? He had
become aware of the essential and immoral truth that money is one of the surest and swiftest means of
acquiring one’s dignity. He had managed to dispel the bitterness which besets any decent soul aware of
the vile iniquities of the birth and growth
of a splendid fate. This sordid and revolting curse, whereby the poor end in poverty the life they have
begun in poverty, he had rejected by using money as a weapon, opposing hatred with hatred. And out of
this beast-to-beast combat, the angel sometimes emerged, intact, wings and halo and all, in the warm
breath of the sea. It would be as it had been: he had said nothing to Bernard, and his creation would
henceforth remain secret.
The girls left around five o’clock in the afternoon of the next day. As they got into the bus, Catherine
turned back: “Goodbye, sea,” she said.
A moment later, three laughing faces were staring at Mersault out of the rear window, and the yellow bus
vanished like a huge golden insect into the sun. Though clear, the sky was a little heavy. Mersault,
standing alone in the road, felt a deep sense of deliverance tinged with melancholy. Only today did his
solitude become real, for only today did he feel bound to it. And to have accepted that solitude, to know
that henceforth he was the master of all his days to come, filled him with the melancholy that is attached
to all greatness.
Instead of taking the highway, he returned through the carob trees and the olives, following a little path
that wound around the foothills and came out behind his house. He squashed several olives, and noticed
that the path was speckled with these black ovals. At the summer’s end, the carobs drench all Algeria with
the smell of love, and in the evening or after the rain, it is as if the entire earth were rest-
ing, after giving itself to the sun, its womb drenched with a sperm smelling of bitter almonds. All day,
their odor had poured down from the huge trees, heavy and oppressive. On this little path at twilight, in
the released exhalations of earth, the fragrance grew light, scarcely apparent to Patrice’s nostrils— like a
mistress you walk with in the street after a long stifling afternoon, and who looks at you, shoulder to
shoulder, among the lights and the crowd.
Amid that smell of love and squashed, fragrant fruit, Mersault realized then that the season was ending. A
long winter would begin. But he was ready for it, he would wait. From this path he could not see the sea,
but he could glimpse on the moun-taintop certain reddish mists which heralded the dark. On the ground,
patches of sunshine paled among the shadows of the foliage. Mersault sniffed the bitter fragrance which
consecrated his wedding to the earth this afternoon. The evening falling on the world, on the path between
48
the olives and the gum trees, on the vines and the red soil, near the sea which whispered softly, this evening flowed into him like a tide. So many evenings had promised him happiness that to experience
this one as happiness itself made him realize how far he had come, from hope to conquest. In the