was deathly ill, that she would die. One day she died. People in the neighborhood felt sorry for Mersault.
6
They expected a lot from the funeral. They recalled the son’s deep feeling for his mother. They warned distant relatives not to mourn too much, so that Patrice would not feel his own grief too intensely. They
were asked to protect him, to take care of him. But Patrice, dressed in his best and with his hat in his
hand,
watched the arrangements. He walked in the procession, listened to the service, tossed his handful of
earth, and folded his hands. Only once did he look surprised, expressing his regret that there were so few
cars for those who had attended the service. That was all. The next day, a sign appeared in one of the
apartment windows: “For rent.” Now he lived in his mother’s room. In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it: when the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence
with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment. The
neighborhood was a quiet one. Mersault would stare at his mother’s slack mouth and smile. She would
smile back. He would start eating again. The lamp would smoke a little. His mother tended it with the
same exhausted gesture, extending only her right arm, her body slumped down in her chair. “You’re not
hungry any more?” she would ask, a moment later. “No.” He would smoke, or read. If he smoked, she always said: “Again!” If he read: “Sit closer to the lamp you’ll ruin your eyes.” But now the poverty in solitude was misery. And when Mersault thought sadly of the dead woman, his pity was actually for
himself. He could have found a more comfortable room, but he clung to this apartment and its smell of
poverty. Here, at least, he maintained contact with what he had been, and in a life where he deliberately
tried to expunge himself, this patient, sordid confrontation helped him to survive his hours of melancholy
and
regret. He had left on the door the frayed gray card on which his mother had written her name in blue
pencil. He had kept the old brass bed with its sateen spread, and the portrait of his grandfather with his
tiny beard and pale, motionless eyes. On the mantelpiece, shepherds and shepherdesses framed an old
clock that had stopped and an oil lamp he almost never lit. The dreary furnishings—some ricketry rattan
chairs, the wardrobe with its yellowed mirror, a dressing table missing one corner—did not exist for him:
habit had blurred everything. He moved through the ghost of an apartment that required no effort of him.
In another room, he would have had to grow accustomed to novelty, to struggle once again. He wanted to
diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed. For this purpose, the
old room served him well. One window overlooked the street, the other a yard always full of laundry,
and, beyond it, a few clumps of orange trees squeezed between high walls. Sometimes, on summer nights,
he left the room dark and opened the window overlooking the yard and the dim trees. Out of the darkness
the fragrance of orange blossoms rose into the darkness, strong and sweet, surrounding him with its
delicate shawls. All night during the summer, he and his room were enclosed in that dense yet subtle
perfume and it was as if, dead for days at a time, he had opened his window on life for the first time.
He wakened, his mouth full of sleep, his body
covered with sweat. It was very late. He combed his hair, ran downstairs, and jumped onto a streetcar. By
five past two he was in his office. He worked in a big room where the walls were covered with 414
pigeonholes into which folders were piled. The room was neither dirty nor sordid, but it suggested, at any
hour of the day, a catacomb in which dead hours had putrefied. Mersault checked shipping bills,
translated provision lists from English ships, and between three and four dealt with clients who wanted
crates or luggage shipped. He had asked for this work, which really wasn’t a part of his job. But at the
start, he had found it a way of escaping into life. There were living faces, familiar encounters, and a
passing breath of life in which at least he felt his own heart beating. And it allowed him to avoid the faces of the three secretaries and the supervisor, Monsieur Langlois. One of the secretaries was quite pretty and
had been recently married. Another lived with her mother, and the third was a dignified and energetic old
lady whom Mersault liked for her florid way of talking and her reticence about what Langlois called her
“misfortunes.” The supervisor would engage in peremptory arguments with old Madame Herbillon, who
always emerged victorious. She despised Langlois for the sweat that pasted his trousers to his buttocks
when he stood up and for the panic which seized him in the presence of the head of the firm and
occasionally on the phone when he heard the name of some lawyer or even
7
some idiot with a de in front of his name. The poor man was quite unable to soften the old lady’s heart or to win his way into her good graces. This afternoon he was strutting around the middle of the office. “We really get along very well together, don’t we, Madame Herbillon?” Mersault was translating “vegetables,”
staring over his head at the lightbulb in its corrugated green cardboard shade. Across from him was a
bright-colored calendar showing a religious procession in Newfoundland. Sponge, blotter, inkwell, and
ruler were lined up on his desk. The windows near him looked out over huge piles of wood brought from
Norway by yellow and white freighters. Mersault listened. On the other side of the wall, life had its own
deep, muffled rhythm, a respiration that filled the harbor and the sea. So remote, and yet so close to him .
. . The six o’clock bell released him. It was a Saturday.
Once home, he lay down on his bed and slept till dinnertime. He made himself some eggs and ate them
out of the pan (with no bread; he had forgotten to buy any), then stretched out again and fell asleep at
once. He awoke the next morning just before lunchtime, washed and went downstairs to eat. Back in his
room he did two crossword puzzles, carefully cut out an advertisement for Kruschen Salts which he
pasted into a booklet already filled with jovial grandfathers sliding down banisters. Then he washed his
hands and went out onto his balcony. It was a beautiful afternoon. Yet the side-
walks were damp, the occasional passer-by in a hurry. Mersault stared after each one until he was out of
sight, then attached his gaze to a new arrival within his field of vision. First came families walking
together—two little boys in sailor suits, uncomfortable in their starched blouses, and a girl with a huge
pink bow and black patent-leather shoes. Behind them a mother in a brown silk dress, a monstrous
creature swathed in a boa, the father, more elegant, carrying a cane. In a little while it was the turn of the young men of the neighborhood, hair slicked back and red neckties, close-fitting jackets with
embroidered pocket handkerchiefs, and square-toed shoes. They were on their way to the movies in the
center of town, and hurried toward the streetcar, laughing very loud. Then the street grew still again. The
afternoon diversions had begun. The neighborhood belonged to cats and shopkeepers. The sky, though
clear, was lusterless over the ficus trees lining the road. Across from Mersault, the tobacconist brought a
chair out in front of his door and straddled it, leaning his arms on the back. The streetcars that had been
crowded a little while ago were almost empty. In the little cafe Chez Pierrot, the waiter was sweeping
sawdust in the empty front room. Mersault turned his chair around, placed it like the tobacconist’s, and
smoked two cigarettes one after the other. He went back into his room, broke off a piece of chocolate, and
returned to his balcony to eat it. Soon the sky dark-
ened, then paled again. But the passing clouds had left a promise of rain over the street they dimmed. At
five, streetcars groaned past, jammed with soccer fans from the outlying stadiums perched on the run-
ningboards and hanging from the handrails. On the next streetcar, he could identify the players
themselves by their canvas bags. They shouted and sang at the top of their lungs that their teams would
never die. Several waved to Mersault. One shouted: “We did it this time!” “Yes,” was all Mersault answered, nodding. Then there were more cars. Some had flowers wreathed in their bumpers and looped