Chapter Five

 

IN January, the almond trees bloomed.  In March, the pears, peaches and apple-trees were covered with blossoms.  The next month, the streams gradually swelled, then returned to a normal flow.  Early in May, the hay was cut, and the oats and barley at the month's end.  Already the apricots were ripening.  In June, the early pears appeared with the major crops.  The streams began to dry up, and the heat grew more intense.  But the earth's blood, shrinking here on the coast, made the cotton bloom farther inland and sweetened the first grapes.  A great hot wind arose, parching the land and spreading brushfires everywhere.  And then, suddenly, the year changed direction: hurriedly, the grape-harvests were brought to an end.  The downpours of September and October drenched the land.  No sooner was the summer's work done than the first sowing began, while the streams and springs suddenly swelled to torrents with the rain.  At the year's end, the wheat was already sprouting in some fields, while in others ploughing had only just been finished.  A little later, the almond trees were once again while against the ice-blue sky.  The new year had begun in the earth, in the sky.  Tobacco was planted, vines cultivated and fertilized, trees grafted.  In the same month, the medlars ripened.  Again, the haymaking, the harvesting, the summer ploughing.  Half-way through the year, the ripe fruits, juicy and sticky, were served on every table: between one threshing and the next grape-harvest, the sky grew overcast.  Out of the north, silent flocks of black starlings and thrushes passed over - for them the olives were already ripe.  Soon after they had flown away, the olives were gathered.  The wheat sprouted a second time from the viscous soil.  Huge clouds, also from the north, passed over the sea, then the land, brushing the water with foam and leaving it smooth and icy under a crystal sky.  For several days there were distant, silent flashes in the sky.  The first cold spells set in.

      During this period, Mersault took to his bed for the first time.  Bouts of pleurisy confined him to his room for a month.  When he got up, the foothills of the Chenoua were covered with flowering trees, all the way to the sea's edge.  Never had spring touched him so deeply.  The first night of his convalescence, he walked across the fields for a long time - as far as the hill where the ruins of Tipasa slept.  In a silence violated only by the silky sounds of the sky, the night lay like milk upon the world.  Mersault walked along the cliff, sharing the night's deep concentration.  Below him the sea whispered gently.  It was covered with velvety moonlight, smooth and undulating, like the pelt of some animal.  At this hour, Mersault's life seemed so remote to him, he felt so solitary and indifferent to everything and to himself as well, that it seemed to him he had at last attained what he was seeking, that the peace which filled him now was born of that patient self-abandonment he had pursued and achieved with the help of this warm world so willing to deny him without anger.  He walked lightly, and the sound of his own footsteps seemed alien to him, familiar too, no doubt, but familiar in the way the rustling of animals in the mastic-bushes was familiar, or the breaking waves, or the rhythm of the night itself in the sky overhead.  And he could feel his own body too, but with the same external consciousness as the warm breath of this spring night and the smell of salt and decay that rose from the beach.  His actions in the world, his thirst for happiness, Zagreus' terrible wound baring brain and bone, the sweet, uncommitted hours in the House above the World, his wife, his hopes and his gods - all this lay before him, but no more than one story chosen among so many others without any valid reason, at once alien and secretly familiar, a favourite book which flatters and justifies the heart at its core, but a book someone else has written.  For the first time, Mersault was aware of no other reality in himself than that of a passion for adventure, a desire for power, a warm and intelligent instinct for a relationship with the world - without anger, without hatred, without regret.  Sitting on a rock he let his fingers explore its crannies as he watched the sea swell in silence under the moon.  He thought of Lucienne's face he had caressed, and of the warmth of her lips.  The moon poured its long, straying smiles like oil on the water's smooth surface - the sea would be warm as a mouth, and as soft, ready to yield beneath a man's weight.  Motionless now, Mersault felt how close happiness is to tears, caught up in that silent exaltation which weaves together the hopes and despairs of human life.  Conscious yet alien, devoured by passion yet disinterested, Mersault realized that his life and his fate were completed here and that henceforth all his efforts would be to submit to this happiness and to confront the terrible truth.

      Now he must sink into the warm sea, lose himself in order to find himself again, swim in that warm moonlight in order to silence what remained of the past, to bring to birth the deep song of his happiness.  He undressed, clambered down a few rocks and entered the sea.  It was as warm as a body, another ineffable yet omnipresent embrace.  Mersault swam steadily now, feeling the muscles of his back shift with each stroke.  Whenever he raised an arm, he cast sheaves of silver drops upon the sea, sowing under this mute and vivid sky the splendid harvest of happiness; then his arm thrust back into the water, and like a vigorous ploughshare tilled the waves, dividing them in order to gain a new support, a firmer hope.  Behind him, his feet churned the water into seething foam, producing a strangely distinct hissing noise in the night's silence and solitude.  Conscious of this cadence, this vigour, an exaltation seized Mersault, he swam faster and soon realized he was far from land, alone in the heart of the night, of the world.  Suddenly he thought of the depths which lay beneath him and stopped moving.  Everything that was below attracted him like an unknown world, the extension of this darkness which restored him to himself, the salty centre of a life still unexplored.  A temptation flashed through his mind, but he immediately rejected it in the great joy of his body - he swam harder, farther.  Gloriously tired, he turned back towards the shore.  At that moment he suddenly entered an icy current and was forced to stop swimming, his teeth chattered, his movements lost their harmony.  This surprise of the sea left him bewildered; the chill penetrated his limbs, blasted his body like the love of some god of impassioned exaltation whose embrace left him powerless.  Laboriously he returned to the beach where he dressed facing the sky and the sea, shivering and laughing with happiness.

      On his way home, he began to feel faint.  From the path sloping up towards the house he could make out the rocky promontory across the bay, the smooth shafts of the columns among the ruins.  Then suddenly the landscape tilted and he found himself leaning against a rock, half-supported by a mastic bush, the fragrance of its crushed leaves strong in the nostrils.  He dragged himself back to the house.  His body, which had just now carried him to the limits of joy, plunged him into a suffering that gripped his bowels, making him close his eyes.  He decided tea would help, but he used a dirty pan to boil the water in, and the tea was so greasy it made him retch.  He drank it, though, before he went to bed.  As he was pulling off his shoes he noticed how pink his nails were, long and curving over the fingertips of his bloodless hands.  His nails had never been like that, and they gave his hands a twisted, unhealthy look.  His chest felt as though it were caught in a vice.  He coughed and spat several times - only phlegm, though the taste of blood lingered on his tongue.  In bed, his body was seized by long spasms of shivering.  He could feel the chill rising from the very extremity of his body, meeting in his shoulders like a confluence of icy streams, while his teeth chattered and the sheets felt as if they had been soaked.  The house seemed enormous, the usual noises swelled to infinity, as if they encountered no wall to put an end to their echoes.  He heard the sea, the pebbles rolling under the receding wave, the night throbbing behind his windows, the dogs howling on distant farms.  He was hot now, threw back the blankets, then cold again, and drew them up.  As he wavered between one suffering and another, between somnolence and anxiety, he suddenly realized he was ill, and anguish overwhelmed him at the thought that he might die in this unconsciousness, without being able to see clearly.  The village steeple chimed, but he could not keep count of the strokes.  He did not want to die like a sick man.  He did not want his illness to be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death.  What he really wanted was the encounter between his life - a life filled with blood and health - and death.  He stood up, dragged a chair over to the window and sat down in it, huddling in his blankets.  Through the thin curtains, in the places where the material did not fall in folds, he saw the stars.  He breathed heavily for a long time, and gripped the arms of his chair to control his trembling hands.  He would reconquer his lucidity if he could.  'I might die now,' he was thinking.  And he was thinking, too, that the gas was still on in the kitchen.  'I might die now,' he thought again.  Lucidity, too, was a long patience.  Everything could be won, earned, acquired.  He struck his fist on the arm of the chair.  A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive.  He becomes strong, he becomes lucid.  Fate is not in man but around him.  Then he realized he was crying.  A strange weakness, a kind of cowardice born of his illness gave way to tears, to childishness.  His hands were cold, his heart filled with an immense disgust.  He thought of his nails, and under his collarbone he pressed tumours that seemed enormous.  Outside, all that beauty was spread upon the face of the world.  He did not want to abandon his thirst for life, his jealousy of life.  He thought of those evenings above Algiers, when the sound of sirens rises in the green sky and men leave their factories.  The fragrance of wormwood, the wild flowers among the ruins, and the solitude of the cypresses in the Sahel generated an image of life where beauty and happiness took on an aspect without the need of hope, a countenance in which Patrice found a kind of fugitive eternity.  That was what he did not want to leave - he did not want that image to persist without him.  Filled with rebellion and pity, he saw Zagreus' face turned towards the window.  Then he coughed for a long time.  It was hard to breathe.  He was smothering under his blankets.  He was cold.  He was hot.  He was burning with a great confusing rage, his fists clenched, his blood throbbing heavily under his skull; eyes blank, he waited for a new spasm which would plunge him back into the blind fever.  The chill came, restoring him to a moist, sealed world in which he silenced the animal rebellion, eyes closed, jealous of his thirst and his hunger.  But before losing consciousness, he had time to see the night turn pale behind the curtains and to head, with the dawn of the world's awakening, a kind of tremendous chord of tenderness and hope which doubtless dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been the whole reason for living.

      When he awakened, the morning had already begun, and all the birds and insects were singing in the warmth of the sun.  He remembered Lucienne was coming today.  Exhausted, he crawled back to his bed.  His mouth tasted of fever, and he could feel the onset of that fragility which makes every effort arduous and other people so irritating in the eyes of the sick.  He sent for Bernard, who came at once, quiet and businesslike as always.  He listened to Mersault's chest, then took off his glasses and wiped the lenses.  'Bad,' was all he would say.  He gave Mersault two injections.  During the second, Mersault fainted, though ordinarily he was not squeamish.  When he came to, Bernard was holding his wrist in one hand and his watch in the other, watching the jerky advance of the second hand.  'That lasted fifteen minutes,' Bernard said.  'Your heart's failing.  The next time, you might not come out of it.'

      Mersault closed his eyes.  He was exhausted, his lips white and dry, his breathing a hoarse whistle.  'Bernard,' he said.

      'Yes.'

      'I don't want to die in a coma.  I want to see what's happening - do you understand me?'

      'Yes,' Bernard said, and gave him several ampoules.  'If you feel weak, break this open and swallow it.  It's adrenalin.'  As he was leaving, Bernard met Lucienne on her way in.  'As charming as ever.'

      'Is Patrice ill?'

      'Yes.'

      'Is it serious?'

      'No, he's all right,' Bernard said.  And just before he was out the door: 'One piece of advice, though - try to leave him alone as much as you can.'

      'Oh,' Lucienne said, 'then it can't be anything.'

      All day long, Mersault coughed and choked.  Twice he felt the cold, stubborn chill which would draw him into another coma, and twice the adrenalin rescued him from that dark immersion.  And all day long his dim eyes stared at the magnificent landscape.  At about four, a big red rowing boat appeared on the sea, gradually growing larger, glistening with sunlight, brine and fish-scales.  Perez, standing, rowed on steadily.  Mersault closed his eyes and smiled for the first time since the day before, though he did not unclench his teeth.  Lucienne, who had been fussing around the room, vaguely uneasy, threw herself on the bed and kissed him.  'Sit down,' Mersault said, 'you can stay.'

      'Don't talk, you'll tire yourself out.'

      Bernard came, gave injections, left.  Huge red clouds moved slowly across the sky.

      'When I was a child,' Mersault said laboriously, leaning back on the pillow, his eyes fixed on the sky, 'my mother told me that was the souls of the dead going to paradise.  I was amazed they had red souls.  Now I know it means a storm is coming.  But it's still amazing.'

      Night was beginning to fall.  Images came.  Huge fantastic animals which nodded over desert landscapes.  Mersault gently swept them away, despite his fever.  He let only Zagreus' face appear, a sign of blood-brotherhood.  He who had inflicted death was going to die.  And then, as for Zagreus, the lucid gaze he cast upon his life was a man's gaze.  Until now he had lived.  Now he could talk of his life.  Of that great ravaging energy which had borne him on, of that fugitive and generating poetry of life, nothing was left now but the transparent truth which is the opposite of poetry.  Of all the men he had carried inside himself, as every man does at the beginning of this life, of all those various rootless, mingling beings who had created his life with consciousness, with courage.  That was his whole happiness in living and dying.  He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life.  Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man.  And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence - they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved.  They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.  And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveller vainly seeking to slake his thirst.  But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture which erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.  He spent a day and a night sitting on his bed, his arms on the bedside table and his head on his arms.  He could not breathe lying down.  Lucienne sat beside him and watched him without speaking a word.  Sometimes Mersault looked at her.  He realized that after he was gone, the first man who put his arms around her would make her soften, submit.  She would be offered - her body, her breasts - as she had been offered to him, and the world would continue in the warmth of her parted lips.  Sometimes he raised his head and stared out of the window.  He had not shaved, his red-rimmed, hollowed eyes had lost their dark lustre, and his pale sunken cheeks under the bluish stubble transformed him completely.

      His gaze came to rest on the panes.  He sighed and turned towards Lucienne.  Then he smiled.  And in his face that was collapsing, even vanishing, the hard lucid smile wakened a new strength, a cheerful gravity.

      'Better?' Lucienne asked in a whisper.

      'Yes.'  Then he returned to darkness between his arms.  At the limit of his strength and his resistance, he joined Roland Zagreus for the first time, whose smile had so exasperated him in the beginning.  His short, gasping breath left a moist cloud on the marble of the night-table.  And in that sickly warmth rising towards him from the stone, he felt even more distinctly the icy tips of his fingers and toes.  Even that revealed life, though, and in this journey from cold to warm, he discovered the exaltation which had seized Zagreus, thanking life 'for allowing him to go on burning'.  He was overcome by a violent and fraternal love for this man from whom he had felt so far, and he realized that by killing him he had consummated a union which bound them together forever.  That heavy approach of tears, a mingled taste of life and death, was shared by them both, he realized now.  And in Zagreus' very immobility confronting death, he encountered the secret image of his own life.  Fever helped him here, and with it an exultant certainty of sustaining consciousness to the end, of dying with his eyes open.  Zagreus, too, had had his eyes open that day, and tears had fallen from them.  But that was the last weakness of a man who had not had his share of life.  Patrice was not afraid of such weakness.  In the pounding of his feverish blood, though it failed to reach the limits of his body, he understood that such weakness would not be his.  For he had played his part, fashioned his role, perfected man's one duty, which is only to be happy.  Not for long, no doubt.  He had destroyed the obstacle, and this inner brother he had engendered in himself - what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years?  Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

      The blanket slipped from Mersault's shoulders, and when Lucienne stood up to cover him, he shuddered at her touch.  Since the day he had sneezed in the little square near Zagreus' villa to this moment, his body had served him faithfully, had opened him to the world.  But at the same time, it lived a life of its own, detached from the man it represented.  For these few years it had passed through a slow decomposition; now it had completed its trajectory, and was ready to leave Mersault, to restore him to the world.  In that sudden shudder of which Mersault was conscious, his body indicated once more a complicity which had already won so many joys for them both.  Solely for this reason, Mersault took pleasure in that shudder.  Conscious, he must be conscious with deception, without cowardice - alone, face to face - at grips with his body - eyes open upon death.  It was a man's business.  Not love, not landscape, nothing but an infinite waste of solitude and happiness in which Mersault was playing his last cards.  He felt his breathing weaken.  He gasped for air, and in that movement his ruined lungs wheezed.  His wrists were cold now, and there was no feeling in his hands at all.  Day was breaking.

      The new day was cool, filled with the sound of birds.  The sun rose quickly, and in a single leap was above the horizon.  The earth was covered with gold, with warmth.  In the morning, sky and sea were spattered with dancing patches of blue and yellow light.  A light breeze had risen, and through the window a breath of salt air cooled Mersault's arms.  At noon the wind dropped, the day split open like ripe fruit and trickled down the face of the world, a warm and choking juice in a sudden concert of cicadas.  The sea was covered with this golden juice, a sheet of oil upon the water, and gave back to the sun-crushed earth a warm, softening breath which released odours of wormwood, rosemary, and hot stone.  From his bed, Mersault received that impact, that offering, and he opened his eyes on the huge, curved, glistening sea irradiated with the smiles of his gods.  Suddenly he realized he was sitting on his bed, and that Lucienne's face was very close to his.  Slowly, as though it came from his stomach, there rose inside him a stone which approached his throat.  He breathed faster and faster, taking advantage of the respites granted each time it moved.  It rose steadily, higher and higher.  He looked at Lucienne.  He smiled without wincing, and this smile too came from inside himself.  He threw himself back on the bed, and felt the slow ascent within him.  He looked at Lucienne's swollen lips and, behind her, the smile of the earth.  He looked at them with the same eyes, the same desire.

      'In a minute, in a second,' he thought.  The ascent stopped.  And stone among the stones, he returned to the joy of his heart, to the truth of the motionless worlds.