lovemaking became perfect. But as he knew her better, she gradually lost the sense of strangeness, which
he would try to revive as he pressed upon her mouth. So that Marthe, accustomed to Mersault’s reserve
and even coldness, had never understood why, in a crowded streetcar, he had one day asked for her lips.
Bewildered, she had held up her face. And he had kissed her the way he liked to, first caressing her lips
with his own and then slowly biting them. “What’s come over you?” she asked him later. He had given her the smile she loved, the brief smile which answers, and he had said: “I feel like misbehaving,” and had lapsed back into silence. She did not understand Patrice’s vocabulary, either. After making love, at
that moment when the heart drowses in the released body, filled only with the tender affection he might
have felt for a winsome puppy, Mersault would smile at her and say, “Hello, image.”
Marthe was a secretary. She did not love Mer-sault, but she was attached to him insofar as he intrigued
her and flattered her. Since the day when Emmanuel, whom Mersault had introduced to her, had told her:
“Mersault’s a good guy, you know. He’s got guts. But he doesn’t talk—so people don’t always realize what he’s like,” she regarded him with curiosity. And since his lovemaking satisfied her, she asked nothing
more, adapting herself as best she could to a silent lover who made no demands and took her when she
wanted to come. She was only a little uneasy about this man whose weak points she could not discover.
10
But that night, as they left the movie theater, she realized that something could hurt Mersault. She said nothing about it the rest of the evening, and slept in Mersault’s bed. He did not touch her during the night.
But from now on she used her advantage. She had already told him she had had other lovers; now she
managed to find the necessary proofs.
The next day, departing from her usual practice, she came to his room after she had left the office. She
found Mersault asleep and sat down at the foot of the brass bed without waking him. He was in his
shirtsleeves, which exposed the white underside of his muscular brown forearms. He was breathing
regularly, chest and belly rising together. Two creases between his eyebrows gave him a look of strength
and stubbornness she knew very well. His hair curled around his tanned forehead, in which a vein
throbbed. Exposed this way, his arms lying close to
his sides, one leg bent, he looked like a solitary and obstinate god, flung sleeping into an alien world.
Staring at his sleep-swollen lips, she desired him, and just then Mersault half-opened his eyes and closed
them again, saying without anger: “I don’t like being watched when I’m sleeping.”
Marthe threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He didn’t move. “Oh, darling, another one of your
moods . . .”
“Don’t call me ‘darling,’ please. I’ve already asked you not to.”
She stretched out beside him and stared at his profile. “You remind me of someone that way, I wonder
who it is.”
He pulled up his trousers and turned his back to her. Marthe frequently noticed Mersault’s gestures in
strangers, in film actors; he took it as a sign of his influence over her, but now this habit which had often flattered him was an irritation. She squeezed herself against his back and took all the warmth of his sleep
against her body. Darkness was falling fast, and shadows soon filled the room. Somewhere in the building
there were shouts, children crying, a cat mewing, the sound of a door slamming. The street-lamps came
on, flooding the balcony. Streetcars went by occasionally. And then the neighborhood smell of anisette
and roasting meat rose in heavy gusts from the street into the room.
Marthe felt sleepy. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you? It started yesterday . . . that’s why I came. Aren’t you going to talk to me?” She shook him.
Mersault didn’t move, his eyes tracing the curve ef light on a shoe under the dressing table: it was already
dark in the room. “You know that man yesterday? Well, I was just kidding. He was never my lover.”
“No?”
“Well, not really.”
Mersault said nothing. He could see the gestures so clearly, the smiles … He clenched his teeth. Then he
got up, opened the windows, and sat down again on the bed. Marthe pressed against him, thrust her hand
between two buttons of his shirt and caressed his nipples. “How many lovers have you had?” he said
finally.
“Don’t be like that.”
Mersault said nothing.
“Maybe ten,” she said.
11
With Mersault sleepiness always called for a cigarette, “Do I know them?” he asked as he took one out.
All he could see now was a white patch where Marthe’s face was. “It’s the same as when we make love,”
he realized.
“Some of them. Around here.” She rubbed her face against his shoulder and spoke in that little girl’s voice she used to make Mersault treat her gently.
“Now listen to me,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Try to understand what I’m saying. Promise to tell me their names. And I want you to promise to point out the others—the ones I don’t know—if we pass them
in the street.”
Marthe pulled away. “Oh no!”
A car sounded its horn right under the windows, then again, then twice more—long, fierce blasts. A
streetcar bell sounded somewhere in the night. On the marble top of the dressing table, the alarm clock
ticked coldly. Mersault spoke with deliberation: “I’m asking you to tell me because I know myself. If I
don’t find out exactly who they are, each man I meet will make the same thing happen—I’ll wonder, I’ll
imagine. That’s what it is, I’ll imagine too much. I don’t know if you understand . . .”
She understood, amazingly. She told him the names. There was only one he didn’t recognize. The last she
named was a man he knew, and this was the one he thought about, because he was handsome and the
women ran after him. What astonished him about lovemaking was—the first time, at least—the terrible
intimacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could receive a part of a stranger’s body inside her
own. In such intoxication and abandonment, in such surrender he recognized the exalting and sordid
power of love. And it was this intimacy that was the first thing he imagined between Marthe and her
lover. Just then she sat up on the edge of his bed and putting her left foot on her right thigh, took off one shoe, then the other, dropping them next to the bed so that one was lying on its side, the other-standing on
its high heel. Mersault felt his throat tighten. Something was gnawing at his stomach.
“Is this the way you do it with Rene?” he said smiling.
Marthe looked up. “Don’t get any funny ideas,” she said. “We only did it once.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, I didn’t even take my shoes off.”
Mersault stood up. He saw her lying back, all her clothes on, on a bed like this one, and surrendering
everything, unreservedly. He shouted, “Shut up!” and walked over to the balcony.
“Oh darling!” Marthe said, sitting on the bed, her stocking feet on the floor.
Mersault controlled himself by watching the streetlamps glitter on the tracks. He had never felt so close to
Marthe. And realizing that at the same time he was letting her come a little closer to him, he felt pride
making his eyes sting. He walked back to her and pinched the warm skin of her neck under one ear. He
smiled. “And that Zagreus—who’s he? He’s the only one I don’t know.”
“Oh him,” Marthe said with a laugh, “I still see him.” Mersault pinched harder. “He was the first one, you have to understand that. I was just a kid. He was older. Now he’s had both legs amputated. He lives all
alone. So I go see him sometimes. He’s a nice man, and educated. He still reads all the time—in those
days he was a student. He’s always making jokes. A character. Besides, he says the same thing you do. He
tells me: ‘Come here, image.’ ”
12
Merault was thinking. He let go of Marthe, and she fell back on the bed, closing her eyes. After a moment he sat down beside her and bent over her
parted lips, seeking the signs of her animal divinity and the way to forget a suffering he considered
unworthy. But he did nothing more than kiss her.
As he walked Marthe home, she talked about Zagreus: “I’ve told him about you. I told him my darling
was very handsome and very strong. Then he said he’d like to meet you. Because—this is what he said: