Chapter Three

 

PATRICE and Catherine are having their breakfast on the terrace, in the sun.  Catherine is in her bathing-suit, the Boy, as Mersault's friends call him, the Boy is in his shorts, a napkin around his neck.  They are eating salted tomatoes, potato salad, honey, and huge amounts of fruit.  They keep the peaches on ice, and lick the tiny drops which have congealed on the velvety skins.  They also make grape-juice, which they drink with their faces tipped towards the sun in order to get a tan - at least the Boy does, for he knows a suntan becomes him.  'Taste the sun,' Patrice said, holding out his arm to Catherine.  She licked his arm.  'Yes,' she said, 'Now you.'  He tasted too, then stretched, and stroked his ribs.  Catherine sprawled on her stomach and pulled her bathing-suit down to her hips.  'I'm not indecent, am I?'

      'No,' the Boy said, not looking.

      The sun streamed down, lingering over his face.  The moist pores absorbed this fire which sheathed his body and put him to sleep.  Catherine drowned in the sun, sighed, and moaned: 'Oh, it's good.'

      'Yes,' the Boy said.

      The house perched on a hilltop with a view of the bay.  It was known in the neighbourhood as the House of the Three Students.  A steep path led up to it, beginning in olive-trees and ending in olive-trees.  Between, a kind of landing followed a grey wall covered with obscene figures and political slogans to encourage the winded visitor.  Then more olive-trees, blue patches of sky between the branches, and the smell of the gum-trees bordering reddish fields in which purple-yellow and orange cloths were spread out to dry.  After a great deal of sweating and panting, the visitor pushed open a little blue gate, avoiding the bougainvillaea tendrils, and then climbed a stairway steep as a ladder but drenched in a blue shade which already slaked his thirst.  Rose, Claire, Catherine and the Boy called the place the House above the World.  Open to the view on all sides, it was a kind of balloon-gondola suspended in the brilliant sky over the motley dance of the world.  From the perfect curve of the bay far below, a nameless energy gathered up the weeds, the grass and the sun, swept on the pines and the cypresses, the dusty olive-trees and the eucalyptus to the very walls of the house.  According to the season, white dog-roses and mimosa bloomed at the heart of this offering, or the kind of honeysuckle that spread its fragrance over the walls on summer nights.  White sheets and red roofs, the sea smiling under a sky pinned without a wrinkle from one edge of the horizon to the other - the House above the World trained its huge bay-windows on a carnival of colours and lights, day and night.  But in the distance, a line of high purple mountains joined the bay and its extreme slope and contained this intoxication within its far contour.  Here no-one complained of the steep path or of exhaustion.  Everyone had his joy to conquer, every day.

      Living above the world, each discovered his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence which was at once a judge and a justification among them.  The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium had not killed love.  They called the world to witness:

      'The world and I,' Patrice would say about nothing in particular, 'we disapprove of you.'

      Catherine, for whom being naked meant ridding herself of inhibitions, took advantage of the Boy's absences to undress on the terrace.  And after staying out to watch the sky's colours change, she announced at dinner with a kind of sensual pride: 'I was naked in front of the world.'

      'Yes,' Patrice said scornfully, 'women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.'  Then Catherine protested: she loathed being an intellectual.  And Rose and Claire in chorus: 'Shut up, Catherine, you're wrong.'

      For it was understood that Catherine was always wrong, being the one the others were fond of in the same way.  She had a sluggish, toast-coloured, deliberate body and an animal instinct for what is essential.  No-one could decipher better than Catherine the secret language of trees, of the sea, of the wind.

      'That child,' Claire would say, eating incessantly, 'is a force of nature.'

      Then they would all go outside to lie in the sun, and no-one would speak.  Man diminishes man's powers.  The world leaves them intact.  Rose, Claire, Catherine and Patrice lived, at the windows of their house, on images and appearances, consented to a kind of game they played with each other, receiving with laughter friendship and affection alike, but returning to the dance of sea and sky, rediscovered the secret colour of their fate and finally confronted the deepest part of themselves.  Sometimes the cats came to join their masters.  Gula would creep out, perpetually offended, a black question-mark with green eyes, slender and delicate, suddenly seized by a fit of madness and pouncing on shadows.  'It's a matter of glands,' Rose said, and then she would laugh, surrendering to her laugh, her eyes squinting behind the round sunglasses under her curly hair, until Gula leaped into her lap (a special privilege), and then her fingers would wander over the glistening fur and Rose subsided, relaxed, becoming a cat with tender eyes, calming the animal with her mild and fraternal hands.  For cats were Rose's escape into the world, as nakedness was Catherine's.  Claire preferred Cali, the other cat, as gentle and stupid as his dirty white fur, who let himself be teased for hours at a time.  And Claire, her Florentine face intent, would feel her soul swell within her.  Silent and withdrawn, she was given to sudden outbursts, and had a splendid appetite.  Noticing that she was gaining weight, Patrice scolded her: 'You're disgusting.  A lovely creature is not entitled to grow ugly.'

      But Rose intervened: 'Please stop tormenting the child.  Eat, Claire darling.'

      And the day turned from the rising sun to the setting sun around the hills and over the sea, inside the delicate light.  They laughed, teased each other, made plans.  Everyone smiled at appearances and pretended to submit to them.  Patrice proceeded from the face of the world to the grave and smiling faces of the young women.  Sometimes he was amazed by this universe they had created around him.  Friendship and trust, sun and white houses, scarcely-heeded nuances; here felicities were born intact, and he could measure their precise resonance.  The House above the World, they said among themselves, was not a house of pleasure, it was a house of happiness.  Patrice knew it was true when night fell and they all accepted, with the last breeze on their faces, the human and dangerous temptation to be utterly unique.

      Today, after the sunbathe, Catherine had gone to her office.  'My dear Patrice,' Rose announced, suddenly appearing, 'I have some good news for you.'

      The Boy was conscientiously lounging on a couch in the terrace room, a detective-story in his hands.  'My dear Rose, I'm all ears.'

      'Today is your turn in the kitchen.'

      'Splendid,' Patrice said, without moving.

      Rose stuffed into her student's satchel not only the sweet peppers for her lunch but also volume three of Lavisse's boring History and left.  Patrice, who would be cooking lentils, loafed around the big ochre room until eleven, walking between the couches and the shelves decorated with green, red and yellow masks, touching the beige-and-orange curtains; then he quickly boiled the lentils, put some oil in the pot, an onion to brown, a tomato, a bouquet-garni, fussed over the stove and cursed Gula and Cali for announcing their hunger, despite the fact that Rose had explained to them yesterday, 'Now you animals know it's too hot in the summer to be hungry.'

      Catherine arrived at a quarter to twelve, wearing a light dress and open sandals and insisted on a shower and a nap in the sun - she would be the last at table.  And Rose would admonish her: 'Catherine, you're intolerable.'  The water hissed in the bathroom, and Claire appeared, breathless from the climb.  'Lentils?  I know the best way of ...'

      'I know too: you take thick cream ... We've all learnt our lesson, dear Claire.'  It is a fact that Claire's recipes always began with thick cream.

      'The Boy is absolutely right,' said Rose, who had just arrived.

      'Yes,' the Boy agreed.  'Let's sit down.'

      Meals are served in the kitchen, which looks like a prop-room: there is even a pad to write down Rose's good lines.  Claire says: 'We must be chic, but we're simple too,' and eats her sausage with her fingers.  Catherine comes to table duly late, drunk with the sun, and plaintive, her eyes pale with sleep.  There is not enough vitriol in her soul to do justice to her office - eight hours she subtracts from the world and her life to give to a typewriter.  The girls understand, thinking of what their own lives would be with those eight hours amputated.  Patrice says nothing.

      'Yes,' Rose says, made uneasy by any show of feelings.  'Well, it's your own business.  Besides, you talk about that office of yours every day.  We'll forbid you to speak.'

      'But ...' Catherine sighs.

      'Put it to a vote.  One, two, three, you're outvoted.'

      'You see,' Claire says, as the lentils are brought on, too dry, and everyone eats in silence.  When Claire does the cooking and tastes her food at the table, she always adds with a satisfied expression: 'My goodness, that's quite delicious!'  Patrice, who has his dignity, prefers to say nothing, until everyone bursts out laughing.  This is certainly not Catherine's day, for she lectures them all about reducing her office hours and asks someone to go with her to complain.

      'No,' Rose says, 'after all, you're the one who works.'

      Exasperated, the 'force of nature' goes outside and lies in the sun.  But soon everyone joins her there.  And absently caressing Catherine's hair, Claire decrees that what this 'child' needs is a man.  For it is common practice in the House above the World to settle Catherine's fate, to attribute certain needs to her, and to establish their extent and variety.  Of course she points out from time to time that she's old enough, etc., but no-one pays any attention.  'Poor thing,' Rose says, 'she needs a lover.'

      The everyone surrenders to the sun.  Catherine, who never holds a grudge, tells the gossip about her office: how Mademoiselle Perez, the tall blonde who's getting married soon, had asked everyone in the office for information in order to be prepared for the ordeal, and what horrifying descriptions the salesmen had given her, and with what relief, back from her honeymoon, she smilingly declared: 'It wasn't so bad as all that.'  'She's thirty years old,' Catherine adds, pityingly.

      And Rose, objecting to these off-colour stories: 'All right, Catherine,' she says, 'we aren't just girls here.'

      At this time of day the mail-plane passes over the city, bearing the glory of its glittering metal over land and through the heavens.  It enters into the movement of the bay, incorporates itself into the course of the world, and suddenly abandoning its frivolities, sheers off and dives down to the sea, landing in a tremendous explosion of blue and white water.  Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny-adder mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams.  The sky releases its burden of sun and colour.  Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall which carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.

      The next Sunday, guests have been invited.  It is Claire's turn in the kitchen.  Hence Rose has peeled the vegetables, set the table; Claire will put the vegetables in the pots and will watch over the cooking while reading in her room, occasionally emerging to glance under the lids.  Since Mina, the Arab girl, has not come this morning, having lost her father for the third time this year, Rose has also cleaned the house.  The first guest arrives: Eliane, whom Mersault calls the Idealist.  'Why?' Eliane asks.  'Because when you hear something true that upsets you, you say, "that's true, but it's not good".'  Eliane has a good heart, and she thinks she looks like The Man with a Glove, though no-one else does.  But her room is lined with reproductions of The Man with the Glove.  Eliane is studying something or other, and the first time she came to the House above the World, she announced that she was enchanted by the inhabitants' 'lack of inhibitions'.  In time, she has found this less convenient.  A lack of inhibitions means telling her that her stories are a bore, or declaring - quite amiably - as soon as the first words are out of her mouth: 'Eliane, you're just an idiot.'

      When Eliane comes into the kitchen with Noel, the second guest and a sculptor by profession, she stumbles over Catherine, who never does anything in a normal position.  Now she's lying on her back, eating grapes with one hand and with the other setting about a mayonnaise that is still thin.  Rose, in a huge blue apron, is admiring Gula's perspicacity - the cat has jumped to the shelf to eat the dessert.  'No doubt about it,' Rose says blissfully, 'that creature has a mind of her own.'

      'Yes,' Catherine says, 'she's outdone herself today,' adding that in the morning Gula, with more of a mind than ever, had broken the little green lamp and a vase as well.

      Eliane and Noel, doubtless too winded to express their disgust, decide to take a seat no-one has dreamed of offering them.  Claire arrives, friendly and languorous, shakes hands and tastes the bouillabaisse simmering on the stove.  She decides they can start.  But today Patrice is late.  Then he appears and explains in great detail to Eliane that he is in a good mood because the girls in the street are so pretty.  The hot season is just beginning, but already the firm bodies are beginning to be revealed by the light gowns - hence Patrice, as he testifies, is left in a devastated state, mouth dry, temples throbbing, loins hot.  This insistence upon detail silences Eliane.  At table, a general consternation follows the first spoonfuls of bouillabaisse.  Claire announces playfully: 'I'm afraid the bouillabaisse tastes of burnt onion.'

      'Oh no,' Noel answers politely.

      Then, to test those manners, Rose asks him to purchase for the household a certain number of useful items such as a hot-water heater, Persian carpets and a refrigerator.  When Noel replies by encouraging Rose to pray for him to win the lottery, Rose becomes quite realistic: 'We might as well pray for ourselves.'

      The sun is hot and heavy now, which makes the iced wine all the more precious, and the fruit welcome.  With the coffee, Eliane bravely changes the subject to love.  If she were in love, she would get married.  Catherine tells her that it's more urgent, when in love, to make love, a materialism that convulses Eliane.  Rose, the pragmatist, would approve 'if unfortunately experience did not show that marriage dissolves love'.  But Eliane and Catherine force their opinions into opposition and become unfair, as anyone with spirit feels obliged to do.  Noel, who thinks in shapes and in clay, believes in Woman, in children, and in the patriarchal truth of a concrete and sensuous life.  Then Rose, exasperated beyond endurance by the outcry raised by Eliane and Catherine, pretends to understand, suddenly, the reasons for Noel's frequent visits.

      'I want to thank you now,' she says, 'though I find it difficult to tell you how much this discovery overwhelms me.  I'll speak to my father tomorrow about "our" project, and you yourself may apply to him in a few days.'

      'But ...' Noels says, for Noel doesn't quite follow.

      'Oh,' Rose says, with tremendous energy, 'I know.  I understand without your having to speak a word: you're the kind of man who can hold his tongue and let other people guess what he's thinking.  But I'm glad you've declared yourself at last, for the persistence of your attentions was beginning to sully the purity of my reputation.'

      Noel, vaguely amused, and also vaguely alarmed, declares himself delighted to find his aspirations crowned with success.

      'Not to mention,' Patrice says, before lighting a cigarette, 'that you'll have to act quickly.  Rose's condition obliges you to take certain steps promptly.'

      'What?'

      'Oh heavens,' Claire says, 'it's only her second month.'

      'Besides,' Rose adds tenderly and persuasively, 'you've reached the age when you enjoy finding your own face in another man's child.'

      Noel frowns, and Claire says good-naturedly: 'It's only a joke.  Just play along with it, Noel, and let's go inside.'

      At which point, the discussion of principles comes to an end.  Nonetheless Rose, who does her good deeds in secret, speaks affectionately to Eliane.  In the big room, Patrice sits at the window, Claire leans against the table, and Catherine is lying on the floor.  The others are on the couch.  There is a heavy mist over the city and the harbour, but the tugs go about their work, and their deep hoots rise to the House on gusts of tar and fish, the world of black and red hulls, of rusty anchors and chains sticky with seaweed wakening down below.  As always, the strong, fraternal summons of a life of many efforts tempts everyone.  Eliane says to Rose sadly: 'Then you're just like me.'

      'No,' Rose answers, 'I'm merely trying to be happy - as happy as possible.'

      'And love isn't the only way,' Patrice says, without turning around.  He is very fond of Eliane, and afraid he has hurt her feelings just now.  But he understands Rose and her thirst for happiness.

      'A mediocre ideal,' Eliane declares.

      'I don't know if it's mediocre, but it's a healthy one.  And that ...'  Patrice breaks off.  Rose closes her eyes.  Gula has jumped into her lap, and by slowly caressing the cat's skull and back, Rose anticipates that secret marriage in which the squinting cat and the motionless woman will see the same universe out of the same half-closed eyes.  Everyone muses, between the long calls of the tug.  Rose lets Gula's purring rise within her, starting from the coiled beast in the hollow of her body.  The heat presses on her eyes and immerses her in a silence inhabited by the throbbing of her own blood.  The cats sleep for days at a time and make love from the first star until dawn.  Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep impenetrable.  And their know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.  'Yes,' Rose says, opening her eyes, 'to be as happy as possible.'

      Mersault was thinking about Lucienne Raynal.  When he had said that the women in the streets were pretty, he meant that one woman in particular was pretty.  He had met her at a friend's house.  A week before they had gone out together, and having nothing to do, had strolled along the harbour boulevards, all one fine hot morning.  Lucienne had not opened her mouth, and as he walked her home Mersault was startled to find himself squeezing her hand a long time and smiling at her.  She was quite tall and was wearing no hat - only a white linen dress and sandals.  On the boulevards they had walked into a slight breeze, and Lucienne set her feet flat on the warm cobbles, bracing herself with each step against the wind.  As she did so, her dress became pasted against her body, outlining her smooth, curving belly.  With her blond her pulled back, her small straight nose, and the splendid thrust of her breasts, she represented and even sanctioned a kind of secret agreement which linked her to the earth and organized the world around her movements.  As her bag swayed from her right wrist and a silver bracelet tinkled against its clasp, she raised her left hand over her head to protect herself from the sun; the tip of her right foot was still on the earth but was about to take off - and at that moment she seemed to Patrice to wed her gestures to the world.

      It was then that he experienced the mysterious harmony which matched his gestures with Lucienne's ... They walked well together, and it was no effort for him to keep in step with her.  Doubtless this harmony was facilitated by Lucienne's flat shoes.  But all the same, there was something in their respective strides which were similar in both length and flexibility.  Mersault noticed Lucienne's silence and the closed expression of her face; he decided she was probably not very intelligent, and that pleased him.  There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.  All of this made him linger over Lucienne's hand when he said goodbye, made him see her again, inviting her to take long walks at the same silent pace, offering their tanned faces to the sun or the stars, swimming together and matching their gestures and their strides without exchanging anything but the presence of their bodies.  And then last night, Mersault had discovered a familiar and overwhelming miracle on Lucienne's lips.  Until then, what moved him had been her way of clinging to his clothes, of following him, of taking his arm - her abandonment and her trust that touched him as a man.  Her silence, too, by which she put all of herself into each momentary gesture and emphasized her resemblance to the cats, a resemblance to which he already owed the gravity characterizing all her actions.  Yesterday, after dinner, they had strolled together on the docks.  They had stopped against the ramp leading up to the boulevard, and Lucienne had pressed against Mersault.  In the darkness, he felt under his fingers the cool prominent cheekbones and the warm lips which opened under his pressures.  Then there was something like a great cry within him, abstracted yet ardent.  From the starry night and the city that was like a spilled sky, swollen with human lights under the warm, deep breeze that rose from the harbour, he drew the thirst of this warm spring, the limitless longing to seize from these vibrant lips all the meaning of that inhuman and dormant world, like a silence enclosed in her mouth.  He bent over her, and it was as if he had rested his lips on a bird.  Lucienne moaned.  He nibbled her lips, and sucked in that warmth which transported him as if he had embraced the world in his arms.  And she clung to him like a drowning girl, rising again and again from the depth into which she had sunk, drew back and then offered him her lips again, falling once more into the cold abyss that enfolded her like a divine oblivion.

      ... But Eliane was leaving now.  A long afternoon of silence and reflection lay ahead of Mersault in his room.  At dinner, no-one spoke.  But by mutual consent they went out on to the terrace.  The days always ended by melting into the days: from the morning above the bay, glistening with sun and mist, to the mildness of the evening above the bay.  Day broke over the sea and the sun set behind the hills, for the sky showed only the one road, passing from the sea to the hills.  The world says only one thing, it wakens, then it wearies.  But there always comes a time when it vanquishes by mere repetition and gains the reward of its own severance.  Thus the days of the House above the World, woven of that luxuriant fabric of laughter and simple acts, ended on the terrace under the star-studded night.  Rose and Claire and Patrice stretched out on the divans, Catherine sat on the parapet.

      In the sky, night showed them its shining face, radiant and secret.  Lights passed far below in the harbour, and the screech of trains occasionally reached them.  The stars swelled, then shrank, vanished and were reborn, drawing evanescent figures, creating new ones moment by moment.  In the silence, the night recovered its density, its flesh.  Filled with twinkling stars, it left in their eyes the same play of light that tears can bring.  And each of them, plunging into the depths of the sky, found that extreme point where everything coincides, the secret and tender meditation which constitutes the solitude of one's life.

      Catherine, suddenly choked with love, could only sigh.  Patrice, who felt that his voice would crack, nonetheless asked: 'Don't you feel cold?'

      'No,' Rose said.  'Besides, it's so beautiful.'

      Claire stood up, put her hands on the parapet and held her face up to the sky.  Facing everything noble and elementary in the world, she united her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes with the movement of the stars.  Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: 'On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.'

      'Yes,' Patrice said, without looking at her.  A star fell.  Behind it a distant beacon broadened in the night that was deeper now.  Some men were climbing up the path in silence.  He could hear the sound of their footsteps, their heavy breathing.  Then the smell of flowers reached him.

      The world always says the same thing.  And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom which releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.  Patrice, Catherine, Rose and Claire then grew aware of the happiness born of their abandonment to the world.  If this night was in some sense the figure of their fate, they marvelled that it should be at once so carnal and so secret, that upon its countenance mingled both tears and the sun.  And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to the happy death.

      It is late now.  Already midnight.  Upon the brow of this night which is like the repose and the reflection of the world, a dim surge and murmur of stars heralds the coming dawn.  A tremulous light descends from the sky.  Patrice looks at his friends: Catherine sitting on the parapet, her head tipped back;  Rose huddled on the divan, her hands resting on Gula; Claire standing stiff against the parapet, her high, round forehead a white patch in the darkness.  Young creatures capable of happiness, who exchange their youth and keep their secrets.  He stands beside Catherine and stares over her glistening shoulder into the bowl of the sky.  Rose comes over to the parapet, and all four are facing the World now.  It is as if the suddenly cooler dew of the night were rinsing the signs of solitude from then, delivering them from themselves, and by that tremulous and fugitive baptism restoring them to the world.  At this moment, when the night overflows with stars, their gestures are fixed against the great mute face of the sky.  Patrice raises an arm towards the night, sweeping sheaves of stars in his gesture, the sea of the heavens stirred by his arm and all Algiers at his feet, around them like a dark, glittering cape of jewels and shells.