Chapter Four

 

THAT Sunday afternoon, after talking and laughing a great deal, Roland Zagreus sat silent near the fire in his big wheelchair, wrapped in white blankets.  Mersault was leaning against a bookshelf, staring at the sky and the landscape through the white silk curtains.  He had come during a light rain, and not wanting to arrive too early had spent an hour wandering around the countryside.  The day was dark, and even without hearing the wind Mersault could see the trees and branches writhing silently in the little valley.  The silence was broken by a milk-float, which trundled down the street past the villa in a tremendous racket of metal cans.  Almost immediately the rain turned into a downpour, flooding the windowpanes.  All this water like some thick oil on the panes, the faint hollow noise of the horse's hooves - more audible now than the cart's uproar - the persistent hiss of the rain, the stump of a man beside the fire, and the silence of the room - everything seemed to have happened before, a dim melancholy past that flooded Mersault's heart the way the rain had soaked his shoes and the wind had pierced the thin material of his trousers.  A few moments before, the falling vapour - neither a mist nor a rain -- had washed his face like a light hand and laid bare his dark-circled eyes.  Now he stared at the black clouds that kept pouring out of the sky, no sooner blurred than replaced.  The creases in his trousers had vanished, and with them the warmth and confidence of a world made for ordinary men.  He moved closer to the fire and to Zagreus and sat facing him, in the shadow of the high mantelpiece and yet within sight of the sky.  Zagreus glanced at Mersault, then looked away and tossed into the fire a ball of paper he had crumpled in his left hand.  The gesture, ridiculous as all the rest, disconcerted Mersault: the sight of this mutilated body made him uneasy.  Zagreus smiled but said nothing, then suddenly thrust his face towards Mersault.  The flames gleamed on his left cheek only, but something in his voice and eyes was filled with warmth.  'You look tired,' he said.

      From reserve, Mersault merely answered: 'Yes, I don't know what to do,' and after a pause straightened up, walked to the window and added as he stared outside: 'I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or else subscribing to L'illustration.  Something desperate, you know.'

      Zagreus smiled.  'You're a poor man, Mersault.  That explains half your disgust.  And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.'

      Mersault kept his back turned, staring at the trees in the wind.  Zagreus smoothed the blanket over his legs.

      'You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind.  You're judging yourself now, Mersault, and you don't like the sentence.  You live badly.  Like a barbarian.'  He turned his head towards Patrice.  'You like driving a car, don't you?'

      'Yes.'

      'You like women?'

      'When they're beautiful.'

      'That's what I meant.'  Zagreus turned back to the fire.  After a moment, he began: 'All those things ...'  Mersault turned around, leaning against the window which yielded slightly to his weight, and waited for the rest of the sentence.  Zagreus remained silent.  A fly buzzed against the glass.  Mersault turned, caught it under his hand, then let it go.  Zagreus watched him and said, hesitantly: 'I don't like talking seriously.  Because then there's only one thing to talk about - the justification you can give for your life.  And I don't see how I can justify my amputated legs.'

      'Neither do I,' Mersault said without turning around.

      Zagreus' young laugh suddenly burst out.  'Thanks.  You don't leave me any illusions.'  He changed his tone: 'But you're right to be hard.  Still, there's something I'd like to say to you.'  And he broke off again.  Mersault came over and sat down, facing him.  'Listen,' Zagreus resumed, 'and look at me.  I have someone to help me, to set me on the toilet, and afterwards to wash me and dry me.  Worse, I pay someone for it.  Yet I'll never make a move to cut short a life I believe in so much ... I'd accept even worse - blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly that dark fire that is me, me alive.  The only thing that would occur to me would be to thank life for letting me burn on.'  Zagreus flung his body back in the chair, out of breath.  There was less of him to see now, only the whitish reflection the blankets left on his chin.  Then he went on: 'And you, Mersault, with a body like yours, your one duty is to live and be happy.'

      'Don't make me laugh,' Mersault said.  'With eight hours a day at the office.  Oh, it would be different if I was free!'  He grew excited as he spoke, and as occasionally happened, hope flooded him once more, even more powerfully today because of Zagreus' reassurance.  He believed that at last he could confide in someone.  He resisted the impulse for a moment, began to stub out a cigarette, then continued more calmly: 'A few years ago I had everything before me - people talked to me about my life, about my future.  And I said yes.  I even did the things you had to do to have such things.  But even back then, it was all alien to me.  To devote myself to impersonality - that's what concerned me.  Not to be happy, not to be "against".  I can't explain it, but you know what I mean.'

      'Yes,' Zagreus said.

      'Even now, if I had the time ... I would only have to let myself go.  Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone.  The stone cools off and that's fine.  Another day, the sun bakes it.  I've always thought that's exactly what happiness would be.'

      Zagreus had folded his hands.  In the silence that followed, the rain seemed to come down twice as hard, and the clouds swelled in a vague mist.  The room grew a little darker, as if the sky was pouring its burden of shadow and silence into it.  And the cripple said intensely: 'A body always has the ideal it deserves.  That ideal of a stone - if I may say so, you'd have to have a demigod's body to sustain it.'

      'Right,' Mersault said, a little surprised, 'but don't exaggerate - I've played a lot of sport, that's all.  And I'm capable of going quite far in pleasure.'

      Zagreus reflected.  'Yes - so much the better for you.  To know your body's limits - that's the true psychology.  But it doesn't matter anyway.  We don't have time to be ourselves.  We only have time to be happy.  But would you mind defining what you mean by impersonality?'

      'No,' Mersault said, but that was all.

      Zagreus took a sip of tea and set down his full cup.  He drank very little, preferring to urinate only once a day.  He willed himself to reduce the burden of humiliations each day brought him.  'You can't save a little here, a little there,' he had told Mersault one day.  'It's a record like any other.'  For the first time a few raindrops fell down the chimney.  The fire hissed.  The rain beat harder on the windowpanes.  Somewhere a door slammed.  On the road, cars streaked by like gleaming rats.  One of them blew its horn, and across the valley the hollow lugubrious blast made the wet space of the world even larger, until its very memory became for Mersault an element of the silence and the agony of that sky.

      'I'm sorry, Zagreus, but it's been a long time since I talked about certain things.  So I don't know any more - or I'm not sure.  When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.  Like that sky.  It's rain and sun, both noon and midnight.  You know, Zagreus, I think of the lips I've kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away.  I'm all those things at once.  I'm sure there are times when you wouldn't even recognize me.  Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness - I can't say it.'

      'You're playing several games at the same time?'

      'Yes, but not as an amateur,' Mersault said vehemently.  'Each time I think of that flood of pain and joy in myself, I know - I can't tell you how deeply I know that the game I'm playing is the most serious and exciting one of all.'

      Zagreus smiled.  'Then you have something to do?'

      Mersault said vehemently: 'I have my life to earn.  My work - those eight hours a day other people can stand - my work keeps me from doing it.'  He broke off and lit the cigarette he had held till now between his fingers.  'And yet,' he said, the match still burning, 'if I was strong enough, and patient enough ...' He blew out the match and pressed the tip against the back of his left hand.  '... I know what kind of life I'd have.  I wouldn't make an experiment out of my life: I would be the experiment of my life.  Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power.  Before, I was too young.  I got in the way.  Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it's living only insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the me for everyone.'

      'Yes,' Zagreus said, 'but you can't live that way and work ...'

      'No, because I'm constantly in revolt.  That's what's wrong.'

      Zagreus said nothing.  The rain had stopped, but in the sky night had replaced the clouds, and the darkness was now virtually complete in the room.  Only the fire illuminated their gleaming faces.  Zagreus, silent for a long time, stared at Patrice, and all he said was: 'Anyone who loves you is in for a lot of pain ...' and stopped, surprised by Mersault's abrupt gesture.

      'Other people's feelings have no hold over me,' Patrice exclaimed, thrusting his head into the shadows.

      'True,' Zagreus said, 'I was just remarking on the fact.  You'll be alone some day, that's all.  Now sit down and listen to me.  What you've told me is interesting.  One thing especially, because it confirms everything my own experience of human beings has taught me.  I like you very much, Mersault.  Because of your body, moreover.  It's your body that's taught you all that.  Today I feel as if I can talk to you frankly.'

      Mersault sat down again slowly, and his face turned back to the already dimmer firelight that was sinking closer to the coals.  Suddenly a kind of opening in the darkness appeared in the square of the window between the silk curtains.  Something relented behind the panes.  A milky glow entered the room, and Mersault recognized on the Bodhisattva's ironic lips and on the chased brass of the trays the familiar and fugitive signs of the nights of moonlight and starlight he loved so much.  It was as if the night had lost its lining of clouds and shone now in its tranquil lustre.  The cars went by more slowly.  Deep in the valley, a sudden agitation readied the birds for sleep.  Footsteps passed in front of the house, and in this night that covered the world like milk, every noise seemed larger, more distinct.  Between the reddening fire, the ticking of the clock, and the secret life of the familiar objects which surrounded him, a fugitive poetry was being woven which prepared Mersault to receive in a different mood, in confidence and love, what Zagreus would say.  He leaned back in his chair, and it was in front of the milky sky that he listened to Zagreus' strange story.

      'What I'm sure of,' he began, 'is that you can't be happy without money.  That's all.  I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism.  I like to be conscious.  And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbery in certain "superior beings" who think that money isn't necessary for happiness.  Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly.  You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated.  It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will to renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will to happiness.  Only it takes time to be happy.  A lot of time.  Happiness, too, is a long patience.  And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time.  That's the only problem that's ever interested me.  Very specific.  Very clear.'  Zagreus stopped talking and closed his eyes.  Mersault kept on staring at the sky.  For a moment the sounds of the road and the countryside became distinct, and then Zagreus went on, without hurrying: 'Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of happiness.  But that's not the question.  To have money is to have time.  That's my main point.  Time can be bought.  Everything can be bought.  To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.'  He looked at Patrice.  'At twenty-five, Mersault, I had already realized that any man with the sense, the will, and the craving for happiness was entitled to be rich.  The craving for happiness seemed to me the noblest thing in man's heart.  In my eyes, that justified everything.  A pure heart was enough ...’ Still looking at Mersault, Zagreus suddenly began to speak more slowly, in a cold harsh tone, as if he wanted to rouse Mersault from his apparent distraction.  'At twenty-five I began making my fortune.  I didn't let the law get in my way.  I wouldn't have let anything get in my way.  In a few years, I had done it - you know what I mean.  Mersault, nearly two million.  The world was all before me.  And with the world, the life I had dreamed of in solitude and anticipation ...’ After a pause Zagreus continued in a lower voice: 'The life I would have had, Mersault, without the accident that took off my legs almost immediately afterwards.  I haven't been able to stop living ...  And now, here I am.  You understand - you have to understand that I didn't want to live a lesser life, a diminished life.  For twenty years my money has been here, beside me.  I've lived modestly.  I've scarcely touched the capital.'  He passed his hard palms over his eyelids and said, even more softly: 'Life should never be tainted with a cripple's kisses.'

      At this moment Zagreus had opened the chest next to the fireplace and showed Mersault a tarnished steel safe inside, the key in the lock.  On top of the safe lay a white envelope and a large black revolver.  Zagreus had answered Mersault's involuntarily curious stare with a smile.  It was very simple.  On days when the tragedy which had robbed him of his life was too much for him, he took out his letter, which he had not dated and which explained his desire to die.  Then he laid the gun on the table, bent down to it and pressed his forehead against it, rolling his temples over it, calming the fever of his cheeks against the cold steel.  For a long time he stayed like that, letting his fingers caress the trigger, lifting the safety-catch, until the world fell silent around him and his whole being, already half-asleep, united with the sensation of the cold, salty metal from which death could emerge.  Realizing then that it would be enough for him to date his letter and pull the trigger, discovering the absurd feasibility of death, his imagination was vivid enough to show him the full horror of what life's negation meant for him, and he drowned in his somnolence all his craving to live, to go on burning in dignity and silence.  Then, waking completely, his mouth full of already bitter saliva, he would lick the gun barrel, sticking his tongue into it and sucking out an impossible happiness.

      'Of course my life is ruined.  But I was right in those days: everything for happiness, against the world which surrounds us with its violence and its stupidity,' Zagreus laughed then and added: 'You see, Mersault, all the misery and cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.'

      It was very late now.  Mersault could not tell what time it was - his head throbbed with feverish excitement.  The heat and the harshness of the cigarette he had smoked filled his mouth.  Even the light around him was an accomplice still.  For the first time since Zagreus had begun his story, he glanced towards him: 'I think I understand.'

      Exhausted by his long effort, the cripple was breathing hoarsely.  After a silence he nonetheless said, laboriously: 'I'd like to be sure.  Don't think I'm saying that money makes happiness.  I only mean that for a certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time, and that having money is a way of being free of money.'

      He had slumped down in his chair, under his blankets.  The night had closed in again, and Mersault could scarcely see Zagreus now.  A long silence followed and Mersault, wanting to re-establish contact, to assure himself of the other man's presence in the darkness stood up and said, as though groping: 'It's a beautiful risk to take.'

      'Yes,' Zagreus said, almost in a whisper.  'And it's better to bet on this life than on the next.  For me, of course, it's another matter.'

      'A wreck' Mersault thought.  'A zero is the world.'

      'For twenty years I've been unable to have the experience of certain happiness.  This life which devours me - I won't have known it to the full, and what frightens me about death is the certainty it will bring me that my life has been consummated without me.  I will have lived ... marginally - do you understand?'  With no transition, a young man's laugh emerged from the darkness: 'Which means, Mersault, that underneath, and in my condition, I still have hope.'

      Mersault took a few steps towards the table.

      'Think about it,' Zagreus said, 'think about it.'

      Mersault merely asked: 'Can I turn on the light?'

      'Please.'

      Zagreus' nostrils and his round eyes looked paler in the sudden glare.  He was still breathing hard.  When Mersault held out his hand he replied by shaking his head and laughing too loud.  'Don't take me too seriously.  It always annoys me - the tragic look that comes into people's faces when they see my stumps.'

      'He's playing games with me,' Mersault thought.

      'Don't take anything seriously except happiness.  Think about it, Mersault, you have a pure heart.  Think about it.'  Then he looked him straight in the eyes and after a pause said: 'Besides, you have two legs, which doesn't do any harm.'  He smiled then and rang a bell.  'Clear off now, it's time for peepee.'