as if they encountered no wall to put an end to their echoes. He heard the sea, the pebbles rolling under
the receding wave, the night throbbing behind his windows, the dogs howling on distant farms. He was
hot now, threw back the blankets, then cold again, and drew them up. As he wavered between one
suffering and another, between somnolence and anxiety, he suddenly realized he was sick, and anguish
overwhelmed him at the thought that he might die in this unconsciousness, without being able to see
clearly. The village steeple chimed, but he could not keep count of the strokes.
50
He did not want to die like a sick man. He did not want his sickness to be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death. What he really wanted was the encounter between his life—a life filled
with blood and health—and death. He stood, dragged a chair over to the window and sat down in it,
huddling in his blankets. Through the thin curtains, in the places where the material did not fall in folds,
he saw the stars. He breathed heavily for a long time, and gripped the arms of his chair to control his
trembling hands. He would reconquer his lucidity if he could. “It could be done,” he was thinking. And he was thinking, too, that the gas was still on in the kitchen. “It could be done,” he thought again. Lucidity too was a long patience. Everything could be won, earned, acquired. He struck his fist on the arm of the
chair. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive. He becomes strong, he becomes lucid. Fate is not in
man but around him, Then he realized he was crying. A strange weakness, a kind of cowardice born of his
sickness gave way to tears, to childishness. His hands were cold, his heart filled with an immense disgust.
He thought of his nails, and under his collarbone he pressed tumors that seemed enormous. Outside, all
that beauty was spread upon the face of the world. He did not want to abandon his thirst for life, his
jealousy of life. He thought of those evenings above Algiers, when the sound of sirens rises in the green
sky and men leave their factories. The fragrance of wormwood, the
wildflowers among the ruins, and the solitude of the cypresses in the Sahel generated an image of life
where beauty and happiness took on an aspect without the need of hope, a countenance in which Patrice
found a kind of fugitive eternity. That was what he did not want to leave—he did not want that image to
persist without him. Filled with rebellion and pity, he saw Zagreus’ face turned toward the window. Then
he coughed for a long time. It was hard to breathe. He was smothering under his blankets. He was cold.
He was hot. He was burning with a great confusing rage, his fists clenched, his blood throbbing heavily
under his skull; eyes blank, he waited for the new spasm that would plunge him back into the blind fever.
The chill came, restoring him to a moist, sealed world in which he silenced the animal rebellion, eyes
closed, jealous of his thirst and his hunger. But before losing consciousness, he had time to see the night
turn pale behind the curtains and to hear, with the dawn and the world’s awakening, a kind of tremendous
chord of tenderness and hope which without doubt dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it
assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been his whole reason for living.
When he awakened, the morning had already begun, and all the birds and insects were singing in the
warmth of the sun. He remembered Lucienne was coming today. Exhausted, he crawled back to his
bed. His mouth tasted of fever, and he could feel the onset of that fragility which makes every effort
arduous and other people so irritating in the eyes of the sick. He sent for Bernard, who came at once, quiet
and businesslike as always. He listened to Mersault’s chest, then took off his glasses and wiped the lenses.
“Bad,” was all he would say. He gave Mersault two injections. During the second, Mer-sault fainted, though ordinarily he was not squeamish. When he came to, Bernard was holding his wrist in one hand
and his watch in the other, watching the jerky advance of the second hand. “That lasted fifteen minutes,”
Bernard said. “Your heart’s failing. The next time, you might not come out of it.”
Mersault closed his eyes. He was exhausted, his lips white and dry, his breathing a hoarse whistle.
“Bernard,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to die in a coma. I want to see what’s happening—do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Bernard said, and gave him several ampules. “If you feel weak, break this open and swallow it. It’s adrenalin.” As he was leaving, Bernard met Lucienne on her way in. “As charming as ever.”
“Is Patrice sick?”
“Yes.”
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“Is is serious?”
“No, he’s all right,” Bernard said. And just be-
force he was out the door: “One piece of advice, though—try to leave him alone as much as you can.
“Oh,” Lucienne said, “then it can’t be anything.”
All day long, Mersault coughed and choked. Twice he felt the cold, stubborn chill which would draw him
into another coma, and twice the adrenalin rescued him from that dark immersion. And all day long his
dim eyes stared at the magnificent landscape. Around four, a large red rowboat appeared on the sea,
gradually growing larger, glistening with sunlight, brine, and fish scales. Perez, standing, rowed on
steadily. Mersault closed his eyes and smiled for the first time since the day before, though he did not
unclench his teeth. Lucienne, who had been fussing around the room, vaguely uneasy, threw herself on
the bed and kissed him. “Sit down,” Mersault said, “you can stay.”
“Don’t talk, you’ll tire yourself out.”
Bernard came, gave injections, left. Huge red clouds moved slowly across the sky.
“When I was a child,” Mersault said laboriously, leaning back on the pillow, his eyes fixed on the sky,
“my mother told me that was the souls of the dead going to paradise. I was amazed they had red souls.
Now I know it means a storm is coming. But it’s still amazing.”
Night was beginning to fall. Images came. Enormous fantastic animals which nodded over desert
landscapes. Mersault gently swept them away, de-
spite his fever. He let only Zagreus’ face appear, a sign of blood brotherhood. He who had inflicted death
was going to die. And then, as for Zagreus, the lucid gaze he cast upon his life was a man’s gaze. Until
now he had lived. Now he could talk of his life. Of that great ravaging energy which had borne him on, of
that fugitive and generating poetry of life, nothing was left now but the transparent truth which is the
opposite of poetry. Of all the men he had carried inside himself, as every man does at the beginning of
this life, of all those various rootless, mingling beings, he had created his life with consciousness, with
courage. That was his whole happiness in living and dying. He realized now that to be afraid of this death
he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless
attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their
lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence—they were afraid of death because of the sanction it
gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.
And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his
thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion. He spent a day and a night sitting on his bed, his arms on the night table and his head on his
arms. He could not breathe lying down. Lucienne sat beside him and
watched him without speaking a word. Sometimes Mersault looked at her. He realized that after he was
gone, the first man who put his arms around her would make her soften, submit. She would be offered—
her body, her breasts—as she had been offered to him, and the world would continue in the warmth of her
parted lips. Sometimes he raised his head and stared out the window. He had not shaved, his red-rimmed,
hollow eyes had lost their dark luster, and his pale, sunken cheeks under the bluish stubble transformed
him completely.
His gaze came to rest on the panes. He sighed and turned toward Lucienne. Then he smiled. And in his
face that was collapsing, even vanishing, the hard, lucid smile wakened a new strength, a cheerful gravity.