Chapter Three

 

WHEN MERSAULT walked through the streets in the evening, proud to watch the lights and shadows flicker across Marthe's face, everything seemed wonderfully simple, even his own strength and his courage.  He was grateful to her for displaying in public, at his side, the beauty she offered him day after day, like some delicate intoxication.  An unnoticeable Marthe would have made him suffer as much as Marthe happy in the desire of other men.  He was glad to walk into the cinema with her tonight, a little before the film began, when the auditorium was nearly full.  She went in ahead of him, drawing glances of admiration, her flower-like face smiling, her beauty violent.  Mersault, holding his hat in his hand, was overcome by a wonderful sense of ease, a kind of inner awareness of his own elegance.  His expression grew remote and serious.  He exaggerated his ceremonious manner, stepped back to let the usherette pass, lowered Marthe's seat for her.  And he did all this less from conceit, from ostentation, than because of the gratitude that suddenly swelled his heart and filled it with love for all these people around him.  If he gave the usherette too big a tip, it was because he did not know how else to pay for his joy, and because he worshipped, by making this everyday gesture, a divinity whose brilliant smile glistened like oil in his gaze.  During the break between films, strolling in the foyer lined with mirrors, he saw the face of his own happiness reflected there, populating the place with elegant and vibrant images - his own tall, dark figure and Marthe smiling in her bright dress.  Yes, he liked his face as he saw it there, his mouth quivering around the cigarette between his lips and the apparent ardour of his deep-set eyes.  But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.  And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face?  Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.

      Back in the cinema, he remembered that when he was alone he never left his seat between films, preferring to smoke and to listen to the records played while the lights were still on.  But tonight the excitement continued, and he felt that every chance of extending and renewing it was worth taking.  Just as she was sitting down, however, Marthe returned the greeting of a man a few rows behind them.  And Mersault, nodding in his turn, thought he noticed a faint smile on the man's lips.  He sat down without noticing the hand Marthe laid on his shoulder to catch his attention; a moment earlier he would have responded to it with delight, as another proof of that power she acknowledged in him.

      'Who's that?' he asked, waiting for the perfectly natural 'Who?' which in fact followed at once.

      'You know.  That man ...'

      'Oh,' Marthe said.  And that was all.

      'Well?'

      'Do you have to know?'

      'No,' Mersault said.

      He glanced behind him: the man was staring at the back of Marthe's neck without moving a muscle of his face.  He was rather good-looking, his lips very red and well-shaped, but his eyes, which were set shallowly in his face, had no expression in them.  Mersault felt the blood pounding in his temples.  In his suddenly darkened vision, the brilliant hues of that ideal world where he had been living the last few hours were suddenly soiled.  He didn't need to hear what she would say.  He knew: the man had slept with Marthe.  And what racked Mersault like panic was the thought of what this man might be thinking.  He knew what it was, he had often thought the same thing: 'Show off as much as you want ...'  Realizing that this man was now imagining Marthe's every gesture, even her way of putting her arm over her eyes at the moment of pleasure, realizing that this man too had once tried to pull her arm away in order to watch the tumultuous surge of the dark gods in her eyes, Mersault felt everything inside himself collapse, and tears of rage welled up under his closed eyelids while the cinema bell announced that the film was about to begin.  He forgot Marthe, who had been merely the pretext of his joy and was now the living body of his rage.  Mersault kept his eyes closed a long time, and when he opened them again, a car was turning over on the screen, one of its wheels still spinning in complete silence, slower and slower, dragging into its persistent circle all the shame and humiliation that had been awakened in Mersault's angry heart.  But a craving for certainty made him forget his dignity: 'Marthe, was he ever your lover?'

      'Yes,' she said.  'But I want to watch the picture.'

      That was the day Mersault began to be attached to Marthe.  He had met her several months before, and he had been astonished by her beauty, her elegance.  Her golden eyes and carefully made-up lips in that rather broad, regular face made her look like some painted goddess.  The natural stupidity which glowed in her eyes emphasized her remote, impassive expression.  In the past, whenever Mersault had spent any time with one woman, had made the first gestures of commitment, he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way, and he would think about the end of the affair before even taking her in his arms.  But Marthe had appeared at a moment when Mersault was ridding himself of everything, of himself as well.  A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.  For Mersault, nothing mattered in those days.  And the first time Marthe went limp in his arms and her features blurred as they came closer, the lips that had been as motionless as painted flowers now quivering and extended, Mersault saw in her not the future but all the force of his desire focused upon her and satisfied by this appearance, this image.  The lips she offered him seemed a message from a world without passion and swollen with desire, where his heart would find satisfaction.  And this seemed a miracle to him.  His heart pounded with an emotion he almost took for love.  And when he felt the ripe and resilient flesh under his mouth, it was as though he bit into a kind of fierce liberty, after caressing her a long time with his own lips.  She became his mistress that same day.  After some time, their harmony in love-making 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 tram, 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 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 said, 'Hello, image.'

      Marthe was a secretary.  She did not love Mersault, but she was attracted 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 fellow, 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.

      But that night, as they left the cinema, 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 her office.  She found Mersault asleep and sat down at the foot of the brass bed without waking him.  He was in his shirt-sleeves, 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 when you're like that, 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 children crying, a cat miaowing, the sound of a door slamming.  The street lamps came on, flooding the balcony.  Trams went by only occasionally.  And then the neighbourhood smell of anisette and roasting meat rose in heavy gusts from the street into the room.

      Marthe felt sleepy.  'You're angry with 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 of light on a show under the dressing-table: it was already dark in the room.  'You know that man yesterday?  Well, I was joking.  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.

      'Perhaps ten,' she said.

      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 tram screeched 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 her shoes, 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 René?' he said, smiling.

      Marthe looked up.  'Don't get any strange 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 stockinged feet on the floor.

      Mersault controlled himself by watching the street-lamps glitter on the tram-rails.  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, his pride made 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 to 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 as you do.  He tells me: "Come here, image".'

      Mersault 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: "the sight of a good body helps me breathe".'

      'Sounds pretty crazy.'

      Marthe wanted to please him, and made up her mind this was the moment to stage the little scene of jealousy she had been planning, having decided she owed it to him somehow.  'Oh, not so crazy as some of your friends.'

      'What friends?' Mersault asked, genuinely startled.

      'Those little idiots ...'

      The little idiots were Rose and Claire, students in Tunis whom Mersault used to know and with whom he maintained the only correspondence in his life.  He smiled and laid his hand on the nape of Marthe's neck.  They walked a long time.  Marthe lived near the parade grounds.  Lights shone in all the upper windows of the long street, though the dark, shuttered shop windows had a forbidding look.

            'Listen, darling, you don't happen to be in love with those little idiots by any chance, do you?'

      'No.'

      They walked on, Mersault's hand on Marthe's neck covered by the warmth of her hair.

      'Do you love me?' Marthe asked suddenly.

      Mersault burst out laughing.  'Now that's a serious question.'

      'Answer me!'

      'People don't love each other at our age, Marthe - they please each other, that's all.  Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone.  At our age, you just think you do.  That's all it is.'

      Marthe seemed sad, but he kissed her: 'Goodnight, darling,' she said.  Mersault walked home through the dark streets.  He walked quickly, aware of how the muscles in his thigh played against the smooth material of his trousers, and he thought of Zagreus and his amputated legs.  He wanted to meet him, and decided to ask Marthe to introduce them.

      The first time Mersault saw Zagreus, he was annoyed.  Yet Zagreus had tried to avoid anything that might be embarrassing about two lovers of the same woman meeting in her presence.  To do so, he had attempted to make Mersault his accomplice in treating Marthe as a 'good girl' and laughing very loud.  Mersault had remained impassive.  He told Marthe, as soon as they were alone, how much he had disliked the encounter.

      'I don't like half-portions.  It bothers me.  It keeps me from thinking.  And especially half-portions who brag.'

      'Oh, you and your thinking,' Marthe answered, not understanding, 'if I paid any attention to you ...'

      But later, that boyish laugh of Zagreus' which had at first annoyed him caught Mersault's attention and interest.  Moreover the obvious jealousy which had provoked Mersault's first judgement had disappeared as soon as he saw Zagreus.  Once when Marthe quite innocently referred to the time she had known Zagreus, he advised her: 'Don't bother.  I can't be jealous of a man who doesn't have his legs any more.  If I ever do think about the two of you, I see him like some kind of big worm on top of you.  And it just makes me laugh.  So don't bother, angel.'

      And after that he went back to visit Zagreus by himself.  Zagreus talked a great deal and very fast, laughed, then fell silent.  Mersault felt comfortable in the big room where Zagreus lived surrounded by books and Moroccan brass trays, the fire casting reflections on the withdrawn face of the Khmer Buddha on the desk.  He listened to Zagreus.  What he noticed about the cripple was that he thought before he spoke.  Besides, the pent-up passion, the intense life animating this absurd stump of a man was enough to attract Mersault, to produce in him something which, if he had been a little less guarded, he might have taken for friendship.