by Albert Camus
Some time later, Lucienne came to the Chenoua for a few days, then left. One Sunday morning, Claira, Rose, and Catherine paid Mersault a visit, as they had promised. But Patrice was already very far
from the state of mind that had driven him to Algiers during the first days of his retreat. He was glad to see them again, nevertheless, and brought Bernard to meet them at the stop where the big yellow bus let them off. It was a magnificent day, the village full of the fine red carts of itinerant butchers, flowers everywhere, and the villagers dressed in bright colors. At Catherine's request they took a table at the cafe, and the girls marveled at all this brilliant life, divining the sea's presence behind the wall they leaned against. As they were leaving, an astonishing burst of music exploded in a nearby street: the toreador song from Carmen, but performed with an exuberance that prevented the instruments from keeping in tune or time. "The gymnastic society," Bernard explained. Then some twenty strange musicians appeared, each puffing on a different kind of wind instrument. They marched toward the cafe, and behind them, his hat worn over a handkerchief on the back of his head, fanning himself with a cheap fan, appeared Morales. He had hired these musicians in the city because, as he explained, "With this depression, life around here is too sad." He sat down at a table and grouped the musicians around him, where they finished their rendition. The cafe was crowded. Then Morales stood up and announced with tremendous dignity, making a sweeping movement toward the audience: "At my request, the orchestra will play 'Toreador' again." As they left, the girls were choking with laughter,
but once they reached Mersault's house and the cool shade of the rooms, which emphasized the dazzling whiteness of the sun-drenched garden walls, they discovered a silent harmony that Catherine expressed by the desire to take a sunbath on the terrace. Mersault walked Bernard home. This was the second time the doctor had glimpsed something of Mersault's life; they had never confided in each other, Mersault conscious that Bernard was not a happy man, and Bernard rather baffled by Mersault's way of life. They parted without a word. Mersault and the girls decided to make an excursion the following day, starting very early. The Chenoua was high and difficult to climb—ahead of them lay a splendid day of sunlight and fatigue.
At dawn they climbed the first steep slopes. Rose and Claire walked ahead, Patrice and Catherine following. No one spoke. Gradually they rose above the sea, still pale in the morning mist. Patrice felt he belonged to the mountain, with its pelt of saffron blossoms, his eager but weakening body a part of the icy springs, the shadows, and the sunlight. They entered into the concentrated effort of climbing, the morning air sharp in their lungs, determined to conquer the slope. Rose and Claire, exhausted, began to slow down. Catherine and Patrice walked on, and soon lost sight of the other two.
"Are you all right?" Patrice asked.
"Yes, it's beautiful."
The sun rose in the sky, and with it a hum of in-
sects swelled in the growing warmth. Soon Patrice took off his shirt and walked on bare-chested. Sweat ran down his shoulders where the skin had peeled with sunburn. They took a little path that seemed to follow the mountainside. The grass was wetter here; soon a sound of springs greeted them, and in a hollow they almost stumbled over the sudden gush of coolness and shade. They sprinkled each other, drank a little, and Catherine stretched out on the grass while Patrice, his hair black with water and curling over his forehead, stared blinking over the landscape that was covered with ruins, gleaming roads, and splinters of sunlight. Then he sat down beside Catherine.
"While we're alone, Mersault, tell me—are you happy now?"
"Look," Mersault said. The road trembled in the sun, and the air was filled with a thousand colored specks. He smiled and rubbed his arms.
"Yes, but . . . Well, I wanted to ask you—of course you don't have to answer if you don't want to . . ." She hesitated: "Do you love your wife?"
Mersault smiled: "That's not essential." He gripped Catherine's shoulder and shook his head, sprinkling water into her face. "You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really— is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, suc-
cess—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries."
"Yes," Catherine said, her eyes filled with sunlight.
"What matters to me is a certain quality of happi-nes. I can only find it in a certain struggle with its opposite—a stubborn and violent struggle. Am I happy? Catherine! You know the famous formula— 'If I had my life to live over again'—well, I would live it over again just the way it has been. Of course you can't know what that means."
"No."
"And I don't know how to tell you. If I'm happy, it's because of my bad conscience. I had to get away and reach this solitude where I could face—in myself, I mean—what had to be faced, what was sun and what was tears . . . Yes, I'm happy, in human terms."
Rose and Claire arrived. They shouldered their knapsacks. The path still followed the mountainside, keeping them in a zone of dense vegetation, prickly pears, olive trees, and jujubes. They passed Arabs on donkeys. Then they climbed again. The sun pounded now on each stone in the path. At noon, crushed by the heat, drunk on fragrance and fatigue, they flung down their knapsacks and gave up reaching the top. The slopes were sheer and full of sharp flints. A wizened oak sheltered them in its circle of shade. They took provisions out of the knapsack and ate. The whole mountain quivered
under the light. The cicadas were deafening as the heat assailed them under their oak. Patrice threw himself on the ground and pressed his chest against the stones, inhaling the scorched aroma. Under his belly he could feel the faint throbs of the mountain that seemed to be in labor. This regular pulse and the unremitting song of the insects between the hot stones finally put him to sleep.
When he awakened he was covered with sweat, and every muscle ached. It must have been three in the afternoon. The girls had vanished, but soon he heard their laughter and shouts. It was cooler now, time to go back down. At this moment, as they were about to start, Mersault fainted for the first time. When he came to, he saw the cobalt sea between three anxious faces. They walked on more slowly. On the last slopes, Mersault asked for a rest. The sea was turning green along with the sky, and the horizon began to blur. On the foothills that stretched from the Chenoua around the little bay, the cypresses blackened slowly. No one spoke, until Claire said: "You look tired."
"I'm not surprised. Are you?"
"It's none of my business, but I don't think this place is good for you. It's too near the sea—too damp. Why don't you go live in France—in the mountains?"
"This place isn't good for me, Claire, but I'm happy here. I feel in harmony with it."
"Well, then you could be in harmony—longer."
"No one is happy relatively—for a longer or
shorter time. You're happy or you're not. That's all. And death has nothing to do with it—death is an accident of happiness, in that case." No one spoke.
After a long pause, Rose said: "I'm not convinced." They returned slowly as night was falling.
Catherine decided to send for Bernard. Mersault was in his room; beyond the shifting shadow of the windowpanes he could see the white patch of the parapet, the sea like a strip of dark linen undulating in the transparent air, and beyond it the night sky, paler but starless. He felt weak, and his weakness made him mysteriously lighter, gayer, and his mind grew more lucid. When Bernard knocked, Mersault sensed he would tell him everything. Not that his secret was a burden; it was not that kind of secret. If he had kept it till now, it was because in certain circles a man keeps his thoughts to himself, knowing they will offend the prejudices and stupidity of others. But today, after his exhaustion, there was a sudden longing in his body to confide. It was the way an artist, after carefully molding and caressing his work, at least feels the need to show it, to communicate with
men—Mersault had the feeling he was going to speak now. And without being certain he would do so, he waited patiently for Bernard.
From downstairs, two bursts of laughter made him smile. And at that moment Bernard came into the room. "Well?"
"Well, here I am," Mersault said. Bernard listened to his chest, but he could tell nothing—he wanted to have an X ray taken, if Mersault could
manage to get to Algiers. "Later," Mersault replied.
Bernard said nothing and sat down on the win-dowsill. "I don't like being sick myself," he said. "I know what it is. Nothing is uglier or more degrading than sickness."
Mersault was unconcerned. He got up from his chair, offered Bernard a cigarette, lit his own, and said with a laugh: "Can I ask you a question, Bernard?"
"Of course."
"You never swim, you're never on the beach— why did you pick this place to live in?"
"Oh, I don't know exactly. It was a long time ago." After a pause he added: "Besides, I've always acted out of rancor. It's better now. Before, I wanted to be happy, to do what had to be done, to settle down somewhere I really wanted to be, for instance. But sentimental anticipation is always wrong. We have to live the way it's easiest for us to live—not forcing ourselves. I suppose it sounds a little cynical, but it's also the point of view you have to take to survive. In Indochina I ran all over the place. Here—here I just ruminate. That's all."
"Yes," Mersault said, still smoking, deep in his armchair and staring at the ceiling. "But I'm not sure that all sentimental anticipation, as you call it, is wrong. Only unreasonable sometimes. In any case, the only experiences that interest me are precisely the ones where everything turns out to be the way you hoped it would."
Bernard smiled. "Yes, a ready-made destiny."
"A man's destiny," Mersault said without moving, "is always passionately interesting, if he , achieves it passionately. And for some men, a passionate destiny is always a ready-made destiny."
"Yes," Bernard said. And he stood up deliberately and stared out at the night for a moment, his back to Mersault. He went on without looking at him: "You're the only man besides myself around here who lives alone. I don't mean your wife and your friends downstairs. I know those are episodes. Still, even so, you seem to love life more than I do." He turned around. "Because for me, loving life is not going for a swim. It's living in intoxication, intensity. Women, adventures, other countries . . . It's action, making something happen. A burning, marvelous life. What I mean is—I want you to understand me—" He seemed ashamed of his excitement. "I love life too much to be satisfied with nature." Bernard put away his stethoscope and closed his bag.
Mersault said: "Actually, you're an idealist." And he had the sense that everything was enclosed in that moment which shifts from birth to death, that everything was judged and consecrated then.
"That's because, you see," Bernard said with a kind of sadness, "the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love."
"Don't believe it," Mersault said, holding out his hand.
Bernard held his hand a long time. "To think the way you do," he said smiling, "you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope."
"Or both, perhaps."
"Oh, I wasn't asking!"
"I know," Mersault said seriously. But when Bernard was at the door, Mersault, impelled by a sudden need, called him back.
"Yes?" the doctor said turning around.
"Are you capable of feeling contempt for a man?"
"I think so."
"On what conditions?"
The doctor reflected. "It's quite simple, I think. In cases when he was motivated by expediency or a desire for money."
"That is simple," Mersault said. "Goodnight, Bernard."
"Goodnight."
Alone, Mersault reflected. At the point he had now reached, another man's contempt left him in-different. But he recognized in Bernard profound resonances that brought the two of them together. It seemed intolerable that a part of himself should condemn the rest. Had he acted out of expediency? He had become aware of the essential and immoral truth that money is one of the surest and swiftest means of acquiring one's dignity. He had managed to dispel the bitterness which besets any decent soul aware of the vile iniquities of the birth and growth
of a splendid fate. This sordid and revolting curse, whereby the poor end in poverty the life they have begun in poverty, he had rejected by using money as a weapon, opposing hatred with hatred. And out of this beast-to-beast combat, the angel sometimes emerged, intact, wings and halo and all, in the warm breath of the sea. It would be as it had been: he had said nothing to Bernard, and his creation would henceforth remain secret.
The girls left around five o'clock in the afternoon of the next day. As they got into the bus, Catherine turned back: "Goodbye, sea," she said.
A moment later, three laughing faces were staring at Mersault out of the rear window, and the yellow bus vanished like a huge golden insect into the sun. Though clear, the sky was a little heavy. Mersault, standing alone in the road, felt a deep sense of deliverance tinged with melancholy. Only today did his solitude become real, for only today did he feel bound to it. And to have accepted that solitude, to know that henceforth he was the master of all his days to come, filled him with the melancholy that is attached to all greatness.
Instead of taking the highway, he returned through the carob trees and the olives, following a little path that wound around the foothills and came out behind his house. He squashed several olives, and noticed that the path was speckled with these black ovals. At the summer's end, the carobs drench all Algeria with the smell of love, and in the evening or after the rain, it is as if the entire earth were rest-
ing, after giving itself to the sun, its womb drenched with a sperm smelling of bitter almonds. All day, their odor had poured down from the huge trees, heavy and oppressive. On this little path at twilight, in the released exhalations of earth, the fragrance grew light, scarcely apparent to Patrice's nostrils— like a mistress you walk with in the street after a long stifling afternoon, and who looks at you, shoulder to shoulder, among the lights and the crowd.
Amid that smell of love and squashed, fragrant fruit, Mersault realized then that the season was ending. A long winter would begin. But he was ready for it, he would wait. From this path he could not see the sea, but he could glimpse on the moun-taintop certain reddish mists which heralded the dark. On the ground, patches of sunshine paled among the shadows of the foliage. Mersault sniffed the bitter fragrance which consecrated his wedding to the earth this afternoon. The evening falling on the world, on the path between the olives and the gum trees, on the vines and the red soil, near the sea which whispered softly, this evening flowed into him like a tide. So many evenings had promised him happiness that to experience this one as happiness itself made him realize how far he had come, from hope to conquest. In the innocence of his heart, Mersault accepted this green sky and this love-soaked earth with the same thrill of passion and desire as when he had killed Zagreus in the innocence of his heart.
5
In January, the almond trees bloomed. In March, the pear, peach, 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; on othe
rs plowing had only just been finished. A little later, the almond trees were once again white 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 plowing. Halfway through the
year, the ripe fruits, juicy and sticky, were served on every table: between one threshing and the next, the men ate the figs, peaches, and pears greedily. During 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 confided 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 of night, his life seemed so remote to him, he was so solitary and indifferent to everything and to