by Albert Camus
The way the book was printed would give the reader advance notice of the pleasure he would derive from it. P. and J. did not like books set in large type with wide margins, such as pleased readers of more refined tastes, but rather pages set in small type stretching all the way across tightly justified lines, filled to the brim with words and sentences, like those enormous rustic dishes you can eat at long and heartily without ever emptying them, and are all that can satisfy some gigantic appetites. They had no use for subtleties; they knew nothing and wanted to know everything. It mattered little if the book was poorly written and crudely printed, as long as the writing was clear and it was full of violent activity; those books, and those alone, would feed their dreams, and on that they could go into a heavy sleep.
Moreover, each book had its own smell according to the paper on which it was printed, always delicate and discreet, but so distinct that with his eyes closed J.
could have told a book in the Nelson series1 from one of the contemporary editions Fasquelle was then publishing. And each of those odors, even before he had begun reading, would transport Jacques to another world full of promises already [kept], that was beginning even now to obscure the room where he was, to blot out the neighborhood itself and its noises, the city, and the whole world, which would completely vanish as soon as he began reading with a wild exalted intensity that would transport the child into an ecstasy so total that even repeated commands could not extract him:a "Jacques, for the third time, set the table." Finally he would set the table, his expression empty and without color, a bit staring, as if drunk on his reading, and he would return to his book as if he had never put it down. "Jacques, eat," and finally he would eat food that, heavy as it was, seemed less real and less solid than what he found in the books; then he cleared the table and went back to his book. Sometimes his mother came to him before seating herself in her usual place. "It's the library," she would say. She mispronounced this word she had heard spoken by her son that had no meaning to her, but she recognized the jackets of books.b "Yes," Jacques said without looking up. Catherine Cormery leaned over his shoulder. She looked at the double rectangle under the light, the regular rows
1. A series of classics—Trans. a. to develop.
b. They made him (Uncle Ernest) a small desk of blond wood.
of the lines; she would inhale the odor, and sometimes she would run her swollen fingers, wrinkled by the water from doing laundry, across the page, as if she were trying better to understand what a book was, to come a little closer to these mysterious signs, incomprehensible to her, but where her son so often and for hours on end found a life unknown to her and from which he would return with such an expression, looking at her as if she were a stranger. Her gnarled hand gently caressed the boy's head; he did not react; she sighed, then went and sat down, far from him. "Jacques, go to bed." The grandmother repeated the command. "You'll be late tomorrow." Jacques got to his feet, prepared his satchel for the next day's classes, not letting go of his book, which he held in his armpit, and then, like a drunkard, he fell into a heavy sleep, after slipping the book under his bolster.
So, for years, Jacques's existence was divided unequally into two lives between which he was unable to make any connection. For twelve hours, to the sound of the drum, in a society of children and teachers, amidst games and study. For two or three hours of daily life, in the home in the old neighborhood, close to his mother, whom he did not really join except in the sleep of the poor. Although the earliest part of his life was this neighborhood, his present and even more his future were at the lycée. So that in a sense the neighborhood eventually blended in with night, with sleep and with dreams. Moreover, did this neighborhood even exist, and was it not the desert it became for the child one evening when he was unconscious? He had fallen on ce-
ment ... At the lycée, in any case, there was no one he could talk to about his mother and his family. In his family no one he could talk to about the lycée. No friend, no teacher ever came to his home during all the years before he received his baccalaureate. And as for his mother and grandmother, they never came to the lycée, except once a year, when awards were given, at the beginning of July. On that day, it is true, they would enter by the monumental door, in a crowd of dressed-up parents and students. The grandmother put on the black dress and scarf she wore for major outings; Catherine Cormery wore a hat adorned with brown net and black waxen grapes, a brown summer dress, and the only pair of shoes with heels that she owned. Jacques wore a short-sleeved white shirt with an open-necked collar, pants that were first short then long, but always carefully ironed by his mother on the previous evening; and, walking between the two women, he himself led them to the red trolley, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, settled them on a seat in the motorcar while he remained standing at the front, looking back through the glass partition at his mother, who smiled at him from time to time and throughout the journey checked the angle of her hat or whether her stockings were falling, or the position of the small golden medal of the Virgin she wore at the end of a thin chain. At the place du Gouverne-ment began the daily journey along the length of the rue Bab-Azoun, which he made just once in the year with the two women. Jacques sniffed the [lampero] lotion on his mother, which she had liberally applied for the occasion, the grandmother walking erect and proud, scold-
ing her daughter when she complained about her feet ("That'll teach you to wear shoes too small for you at your age"), while Jacques persisted in showing them the stores and shopkeepers that had come to have such an important place in his life. At the lycée, the monumental door was open, potted plants adorned the monumental stairs from top to bottom, stairs that the first parents and students were beginning to climb, the Cormerys naturally being far ahead of time, as the poor always are, for they have few social obligations and pleasures, and are afraid of not being punctual for those few.a Then they arrived at the older students' courtyard, full of rows of chairs rented from a firm that staged dances and concerts, while at the far end, under the great clock, the whole width of the courtyard was occupied by a platform filled with chairs and armchairs; it too was decorated, and profusely, with green plants. Little by little the yard was filled up with light-colored outfits, women being in the majority. The first arrivals chose places sheltered from the sun, under the trees. The others fanned themselves with Arab fans made of fine plaited straw decorated with red woolen tassels on their rims. Above the audience the blue of the sky congealed and became harder and harder as it baked in the heat.
At two o'clock a military orchestra, out of sight in
a. and those whom fate has poorly endowed cannot help thinking somewhere inside that they are responsible and they feel they must not add to this general culpability by any small failings ...
the upper arcade, launched into the "Marseillaise," all the spectators rose to their feet, and the teachers entered in their square caps and long gowns trimmed in colors that differed according to their discipline, led by the headmaster and the official personage (usually a high-ranking bureaucrat in the colonial administration) drafted this year for the occasion. Another military march covered for the seating of the teachers, and right after that the official personage took the podium and gave his opinions on France in general and education in particular. Catherine Cormery listened without hearing, but with no sign of impatience or weariness. The grandmother could hear, but did not understand very much. "He speaks well," she said to her daughter, who assented with conviction. This encouraged the grandmother to turn and smile at her neighbor to the left, confirming with a nod of her head the opinion she had just expressed. The first year, Jacques noticed that his grandmother was the only person wearing the old Spanish woman's black mantilla, and he was embarrassed by it. To tell the truth, this false sense of shame had never left him; he just decided he could do nothing about it after he timidly ventured to mention a hat to his grandmother and she answered that she had no money to waste and besides the mantilla kept her ears warm. But when his grandmother
spoke to her neighbors during the awards ceremony, he felt himself meanly blushing. After the official personage, the youngest teacher rose to speak; he was usually newly arrived that year from France and was traditionally entrusted with delivering the
formal address. The speech could last from half an hour to an hour, and the young academician never failed to stuff it with cultural allusions and humanist subtleties that made it utterly unintelligible to this Algerian audience. With the help of the heat, attention flagged, and the fans waved faster. Even the grandmother showed her lassitude by glancing around. Only Catherine Cormery, attentive, received without blinking the rain of erudition and wisdom that was falling on* her without interruption. As to Jacques, he was squirming; he looked around for Pierre and his other friends, signaled discreetly to them, and began a long conversation that consisted of making faces. At last, vigorous applause thanked the orator for being kind enough to conclude, and the announcement of the awards began. First came the upper classes, and, in the early years, the two women spent the entire afternoon sitting and waiting for them to come to Jacques's class. The awards for excellence were the only ones to be saluted with a fanfare of invisible music. The winners, who became younger and younger, rose, walked the side of the courtyard, went up on the platform, received a handshake sprinkled with fine words from the official personage, then from the headmaster, who presented each with his bundle of books (after getting it from an attendant, who preceded the award-winner to the platform, at the foot of which rolling carts full of books
* bouncing off
had been stationed). Then, in the midst of music and applause, the award-winner came back down, his books under his arm, radiant and looking around for his happy relatives, who were wiping away their tears. The sky became a little less blue, losing some of its heat through an invisible cleft somewhere over the sea. The prizewinners went up and returned, one fanfare followed another, the courtyard gradually emptying out, while the sky began now to turn a greenish hue, and they came to Jacques's class. As soon as his class was announced, he stopped fooling around and became serious. At the sound of his name, he rose, his head buzzing. Behind he could barely hear his mother, who had not heard, saying: "Did he say Cormery?"
"Yes," said the grandmother, her face flushed with excitement. The cement path he walked along, the platform, the official's vest with his watch chain, the headmaster's good smile, sometimes a friendly look from one of his teachers in the crowd on the platform; then returning accompanied by the music to the two women who were already standing in the aisle, his mother gazing at him with a sort of astonished joy, and he gave her the thick list of awards to keep, his grandmother with a look calling her neighbors to witness—it all happened too fast after the interminable afternoon, and Jacques was in a hurry to go home and look at the books he had been given.a
a. Les Travailleurs de la mer. [By Victor Hugo—Trans.}
They usually went home with Pierre and his mother,a the grandmother silently comparing the height of the two stacks of books. At home, Jacques took the award list, and, at his grandmother's request, turned down the corners of the pages where his name appeared, so she could show them to the neighbors and family. Then he made an inventory of his treasures. He had not finished when he saw his mother come back—already having removed her dress—in slippers, buttoning her linen blouse, and drawing her chair toward the window. She smiled at him. "You did good work," she said, and she shook her head as she gazed at him. He returned her gaze; he was waiting, for what he did not know, and she turned to the street, in the posture that was familiar to him, far away now from the lycée she would not see for another year, while shadows invaded the room and the first lights came on above the street,* where no one was passing by but faceless pedestrians.
But if his mother was leaving forever that lycée she had hardly glimpsed, Jacques found himself suddenly back for good in the midst of his family and his neighborhood.
Vacations also returned Jacques to his family, at least in the first years. No one in his home had a vacation; the men worked the year round without respite. Only an
a. She had never seen the lycée nor anything of its daily life. She had attended a program arranged for the relatives. That was not the lycée, it was . ..
* the sidewalks.
accident at work, when they were employed by firms that had insured them against such risks, could give them any time off, and their vacation came by way of the hospital or the doctor. For example, Uncle Ernest, one time when he felt worn out, had "put himself on insurance," as he said, by deliberately shaving a thick slice of meat off his palm with a plane. As for the wives, and Catherine Cormery, they worked without a break for the good reason that a rest meant poorer meals for all of them. Unemployment, for which there was no insurance at all, was the calamity they most dreaded. That explained why these workers, in Pierre's home as in Jacques's, who in their daily lives were the most tolerant of men, were always xenophobes on labor issues, accusing in turn the Italians, the Spaniards, the Jews, the Arabs, and finally the whole world of stealing their work—an attitude that is certainly disconcerting to those intellectuals who theorize about the proletariat, and yet very human and surely excusable. It was not for mastery of the earth or the privileges of wealth and leisure that these unexpected nationalists were contending against other nationalities; it was for the privilege of servitude. Work in this neighborhood was not a virtue but a necessity that, in order to survive, led to death.
In any case, and no matter how hard the Algerian summer was, while overloaded boats took bureaucrats and well-off people to recuperate in the good "French air" (and those who returned brought back fabulous and unbelievable descriptions of lush fields where the water was flowing right in the middle of August), nothing at all changed in the lives of the poor neighbor-
hoods, and, far from being half emptied, as were the downtown districts, their population seemed to increase because of the great numbers of children pouring out into the streets.a
For Pierre and Jacques, wandering in the dry streets, wearing espadrilles with holes, cheap pants, and skimpy undershirts with round necks, vacation meant above all the hot season. The last rains fell in April, or May at the latest. Over the weeks and the months, the sun, more and more intense, hotter and hotter, had dried, then dried out, then roasted the walls, had ground plaster, stone, and tile into a fine dust that, blown at random by the wind, would cover the streets, the store windows, and the leaves of all the trees. In July the entire neighborhood became a sort of gray-and-yellowb labyrinth, deserted during the day, all the shutters of all the houses carefully closed, ruled by the ferocious sun, felling dogs and cats on the doorsteps of buildings, forcing living beings to hug the walls to stay out of its reach. In August the sun disappeared behind the thick oakum of a sky that was gray with heat, heavy and humid, shedding a diffuse, whitish light, tiring to the eyes, which erased the last traces of color from the streets. In the coopers' workshops, the sound of the hammers slackened, and the workers stopped occasionally to put their sweaty heads and chests under the cool stream of water from the pump.c In the apartments, the bottles of water and,
a. above toys carousel useful presents.
b. wild
c. Sablettes? and other summer activities.
less often, wine were swaddled in damp cloth. Jacques's grandmother moved around the shady rooms barefooted, wearing a plain shift, mechanically shaking her straw fan, working in the morning, dragging Jacques to bed for the siesta, then waiting for the first cool of the evening to go back to work. Thus for weeks the summer and those subject to it would crawl along under the heavy, sweaty, and roasting sky, until even the memory of winter's cool and its waters* was lost, as if the earth had never known the wind, nor the snow, nor light waters, and from the Creation to this day in September nothing had existed but this enormous desiccated mineral structure tunneled with overheated corridors where sweating and dust-covered beings, a bit haggard, eyes staring, were slowly moving about. And then,
all at once, the sky contracted until it broke open under the stress. The first rain of September, violent and abundant, flooded the city. All the streets of the neighborhood began to gleam, along with the shiny leaves of the ficus trees, the overhead wires, and the trolley rails. Over the hills that looked down on the city came the scent of damp earth from more distant fields, bringing a message of open space and freedom to the prisoners of the summer. Then the children dashed into the streets, running through the rain in their scanty clothes and wallowing happily in the big frothing streams in the street, making a circle in the big puddles while holding each other's shoulders, faces full of shouts and laughter
* rains.
turned up into the incessant rain, trampling out this new vintage in unison so that it gave forth a gush of dirty water more intoxicating than wine.
Oh yes, the hot season was terrible, and often it drove almost everyone crazy, nerves more on edge day by day and without the strength or energy to react, to shout, to insult or strike out, and exasperation accumulated, like the heat itself, until, here and there in the sad and untamed neighborhood, it exploded—like that day when, in the rue de Lyon, almost at the border of the Arab district known as the Marabout, by the cemetery cut into the red clay of the hillside, Jacques saw an Arab, dressed in blue with his head shaved, come out of a dusty Moorish barbershop; he took a few steps on the sidewalk in front of the child, in a strange posture, his body leaning forward, his head thrown back farther than seemed possible, and in fact it was not possible. The barber had gone mad while shaving him, and with a single blow of his long razor had cut the exposed throat; all the Arab felt from the smooth slicing was the blood choking him, and he went out, running like a duck with its throat poorly cut, while the barber, immediately subdued by other customers, was howling horribly—like the heat itself during these interminable days.