Chapter Two

 

SUMMER crammed the harbour with noise and sunlight.  It was eleven-thirty.  The day split open down the middle, crushing the docks under the burden of its heat.  Moored at the sheds of the Algiers Municipal Depot, black-hulled, red-funnelled freighters were loading sacks of wheat.  Their dusty fragrance mingled with the powerful smell of tar melting under a hot sun.  Men were drinking at a little stall that reeked of creosote and anisette, while some Arab acrobats in red shirts somersaulted on the scorching flagstones in front of the sea in the leaping light.  Without so much as a glance at them, the stevedores carrying sacks walked up the two sagging planks that slanted from the dock to the freighter decks.  When they reached the top, their silhouettes were suddenly divided between the sea and the sky among the winches and masts.  They stopped for an instant, dazzled by the light, eyes gleaming in the whitish crust of dust and sweat that covered their faces, before they plunged blindly into the hold stinking of hot blood.  In the fiery air, a siren never stopped blowing.

      Suddenly the men on the plank stopped in confusion.  One of them had fallen, landing on the plank below.  But his arm was pinned under his body, crushed under the tremendous weight of the sack, and he screamed with pain.  Just at this moment, Patrice Mersault emerged from his office, and on the doorstep the summer heat took his breath away.  He opened his mouth, inhaled the tar vapours, which stung his throat, and then he went over to the stevedores.  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 out of which blood was dripping.  The drops rolled down his arm and fell, one by one, on to 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 lorry heading towards them with a salvo of backfires.  'That one?'  Patrice began to run as the lorry 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 jumped on to the moving lorry.  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 harbour crowded with masts and black cranes, the uneven cobbles of the dock jarring Emmanuel and Mersault as the lorry 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 sung 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 on to the kerb, 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 sport.  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 moustaches, walked over to greet them, scratching his belly under his apron.  'Pretty well,' Celeste answered, '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 fellow 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 fellow 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 tram.  So long and thanks.  Fine with me."'  Emmanuel laughed.  'Of course,' Celeste said, 'the fellow was no authority, but I liked him all right.'  He turned to Mersault.  'Anyway, it's better than this other fellow I knew.  When he made his money, he would talk with his head up and make 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 with it.  This fellow 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 hut out in the country, 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.'

      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 ...'

      'Less of 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 machine-guns 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.  René, his son, was eating a boiled egg over in a corner.  'Poor lad,' Emmanuel said, thumping his own chest, 'he's had it.'  It was true.  René 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'.  René 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 illness 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.'  René stopped eating, a piece of 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-up percolator.  He blinked his eyes.  Every day, his life alternated, from this calm consumptive to Emmanuel bursting into song, from the smell of coffee to the smell of tar, alienated from himself, and his interests, so far 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 pretty touchy this morning.'

      Mersault smiled and, leaving the restaurant, crossed the street and went upstairs to his room.  The flat 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 flat a long time.  Now that he was alone, Mersault let two rooms to a man he knew, a barrel-maker who lived with his sister, and he 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 colourless flat 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 clung to that life.  The suffering had lasted so long that those around her grew accustomed to her disease and forgot that she was deathly ill, that she would die.  One day she died.  People in the neighbourhood felt sorry for Mersault.  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 little 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 flat's windows: 'To let'.  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 neighbourhood 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've had enough?' 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 way of life, but he clung to this flat 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 grey 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 rickety 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 a flat, which required no effort of him.  In another room he would have 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 washing 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 the window to life for the first time.

      He awoke, his mouth full of sleep, his body covered with sweat.  It was very late.  He combed his hair, ran downstairs and jumped on to a tram.  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 of luggage shipped.  He had asked for this task, which was not really part of his job.  But at the start, he had found it a way of escaping into life.  There were human faces, repeated encounters and a pressing breath of life, wherein at last he felt his own heart beating.  And it allowed him to escape 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 of 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 on very well together, don't we, Madame Herbillon?'  Mersault was translating 'vegetables', staring over his head at the light-bulb in its corrugated green cardboard shade.  Across from him was a bright-coloured 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 harbour 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 dinner-time.  He cooked 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 once more.  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 on to his balcony.  It was a beautiful afternoon.  Yet the pavements were damp, the occasional passer-by in a hurry.  Mersault stared after each one until he was out of sight, attaching 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 more elegant father carrying a cane.  In a little while it was the turn of the young men of his neighbourhood, hair slicked back and red neckties, close-fitting jackets with embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs and square-toed shoes.  They were on their way to the cinema in the centre of town, and hurried towards the tram, laughing very loudly.  Then the street grew still again.  The evening diversions had begun.  The neighbourhood belonged to cats and shopkeepers.  The sky, though clear, was lustreless 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 trams that had been crowded a little while ago were almost empty.  In the little café 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 darkened, then paled again.  But the passing clouds had left a promise of rain over the street they dimmed.  At five, trams groaned past, jammed with soccer-fans from the outlying stadiums perched on the running-boards and the handrails.  On the next tram 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 around their fins.  Then the light faded a little more.  Over the roofs the sky reddened, and with evening the streets grew lively again.  The strollers returned, the tired children whining as they let  themselves be dragged home.  The neighbourhood cinemas disgorged a crowd into the street.  Mersault could tell, from the violent gestures of the young men, that they had seen some sort of adventure film.  Those who had been to films in the centre of town appeared a little later.  They were more serious: for all their laughter and teasing gestures, their eyes and their movements betrayed a kind of nostalgia for the magical lives they had just shared.  The lingered in the street, coming and going.  And on the pavement across from Mersault, two streams finally formed.  One consisted of neighbourhood girls, walking arm in arm, bare-headed.  The young men in the other cracked jokes which made the girls laugh and look away.  Older people went into the cafés or formed groups on the pavement which the human river flowed around as if they were islands.  The street lamps were on now, and the electric light made the first stars look pale in the night sky.  An audience of one, Mersault watched the procession of people under the lights.  The street lamps made the damp pavements gleam, and at regular intervals the trams would throw reflections on shiny hair, wet lips, a smile or a silver bracelet.  Gradually the trams became more infrequent, and the night was already black above the trees and the lamps as the neighbourhood gradually emptied and the first cat crept across the street as soon as it was deserted again.  Mersault thought about dinner.  His neck ached a little from leaning so long on the back of his chair.  He went downstairs to buy bread and macaroni, made his dinner and ate it.  Then he returned to his balcony.  People were coming out again, the air had cooled.  He shivered, closed his windows and walked over to the mirror above the fireplace.  Except for certain evenings when Marthe came or when he went out with her, and except for his correspondence with the girls in Tunis, his entire life lay in the yellowed image the mirror offered of a room where the filthy oil-lamp stood among the breadcrusts.

      'One more Sunday got through,' Mersault said.