A Happy Death Read online

  his bed. The drawer of the night table was open, lined with an English newspaper in which he read a whole article. Then he stretched out on the bed again. The man's head had been lying on the wound, and three or four fingers would have fit inside that wound. Mersault stared at his hands and his fingers, and childish desires rose in his heart. An intense and secret fervor swelled within him, and it was a nostalgia for cities filled with sunlight and women, with the green evenings that close all wounds. Tears burst from his eyes. Inside him widened a great lake of solitude and silence above which ran the sad song of his deliverance.

  2

  In the train taking him north, Mersault stared at his hands. The train's speed turned the lowering sky into an onrush of heavy clouds. Mersault was alone in the overheated compartment—he had left suddenly in the middle of the night, and with the dark morning hours ahead of him, he let the mild landscape of Bohemia rush by, the impending rain between the tall silky poplars and the distant factory chimneys filling him with an impulse to burst into tears. Then he looked at the white plaque with its three sentences: Nicht hinauslehnen, E pericoloso sporgersi, II est dangereux de se pencher au-dehors. He looked again at his hands, which lay like live, wild animals on his knees: the left one long and supple, the right thicker, muscular. He knew them, recognized them, yet they were distinct from himself, as though capable of actions in which his will had no part. One came to rest against his forehead now, pressing against the fever which throbbed in his temples. The other slid down his jacket and took out of its pocket a cigarette that he immediately discarded as soon as he became aware of an overpowering desire to vomit. His hands returned to his knees, palms cupped, where they offered Mersault the emblem of his life, indifferent once more and offered to anyone who would take it.

  He traveled for two days. But now it was not an

  instinct of escape which drove him on. The very monotony of the journey satisfied him. The train which was jolting him halfway across Europe suspended him between two worlds—it had taken him abroad, and would deposit him somewhere, draw him out of a life the very moment of which he wanted to erase and lead him to the threshold of a new world where desire would be king. Not for a single moment was Mersault bored. He sat in his corner, rarely disturbed by anyone, stared at his hands, then at the countryside, and reflected. He deliberately extended his trip as far as Breslau, merely rousing himself at the border to change tickets. He wanted to stay where he was, contemplating his freedom. He was tired and did not feel well enough to move; he hoarded every last fragment of his strength, his hopes, kneaded them together until he had refashioned himself and his fate as well. He loved these long nights when the train rushed along the gleaming rails, roaring through the village stations where only a clock was illuminated, the sudden stops among the clustered lights of city stations where there was no time to discover where he was before the train was already swallowed up, a golden warmth cast into the compartments and then gone. Hammers pounded on the wheels, the engine exhaled its cloud of steam, and the robot gesture of the switchman lowering his red disc hurled Mersault into the train's wild course, only his lucidity, his anxiety awake. The crosswork puzzle of lights and

  shadows went on in the compartment, a black and gold motley: Dresden, Bautzen, Gerlitz, Lugknitz. The long lonely night ahead of him, with all the time in the world to decide on the actions of a future life, the patient straggle with the thoughts eluding him on a station siding, recaptured and pursued again, the consequences reappearing and escaping once more before the dance of wires glistening under the rain and the lights. Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formulate the hope in his heart, that would resolve his anxiety. In his weakened state, he needed formulas. The night and then the day passed in this obstinate struggle with the word, the image which from now on would constitute the whole tonality of his mind, the sympathetic or miserable dream of his future. He closed his eyes. It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. Mersault thought about his life and exercised his bewildered consciousness and his longing for happiness in a train compartment which was like one of those cells where a man learns to know what he is by what is more than himself.

  On the morning of the second day, in the middle of a field, the train slowed down. Breslau was still hours away, and the day broke over the vast Silesian plain, a treeless sea of mud under an overcast sky sagging with rainclouds. As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals, huge black birds with glistening wings flew in flocks a few yards above the

  ground, incapable of rising any higher under a rain-swollen sky heavy as a tombstone. They circled in a slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost inseparable from it, and flap in the same lethargic flight, until it was far enough away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot. Mersault wiped the steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long streaks his fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his list pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape disappeared.

  A few hours later he arrived in Breslau. From a distance the city looked like a forest of factory chimneys and church steeples. At close range, it was made of brick and black stone; men in visored caps walked slowly through the streets. Mersault fol-lowed them, spent the morning in a workmen's cafe. A boy was playing the harmonica: tune of a senti-mental stupidity which eased the soul. Mersault de-cided to travel south again, after buying a comb. The next day he was in Vienna. He slept a part of the day and the whole next night. When he awak-ened, his fever was completely gone. He stuffed himself on soft-boiled eggs and thick cream for breakfast, and feeling a little squeamish walked out into a morning speckled with sunshine and rain. Vi-enna was a refreshing city: there was nothing to visit. St. Stephen's Cathedral was too big, and bored him. He preferred the cafes around it, and in the evening a little dancehall near the banks of the canal. During the day he strolled along the Ring, in the luxury of the shopwindows and the elegant women. He enjoyed this frivolous and expensive de-cor which divides man from himself in the least nat-ural city in the world. But the women were pretty, the flowers bright and sturdy in the gardens, and over the Ring at twilight, in the brilliant carefree crowd, Mersault stared at the futile caracole of stone horses against the red sky. It was then that he remembered his friends Rose and Claire. For the first time since Lyons, he wrote a letter. It was the overflow of his silence that he put down on paper:

  Dear Children,

  I'm writing from Vienna. I don't know what you're doing, but speaking for myself I'm traveling for a living. I've seen a lot of beautiful things with a heavy heart. Here in Vienna beauty has been replaced by civilization. It's a relief. I'm not looking at churches or ruins. I take walks in the Ring. And in the evening, over the theaters and the sumptuous palaces, the blind steeplechase of stone horses in the sunset fills me with a strange mixture of bitterness and delight. Mornings I eat soft-boiled eggs and thick cream. I get up late, the hotel people shower attention on me. I'm very impressed with the style of the maitres d'hotel and stuffed with good food (oh, the cream here). There are lots of shows and the women are good-looking. The
only thing missing is the sun.

  What are you up to? Tell me about yourselves and describe the sun to a miserable wretch who has no roots anywhere and who remains your faithful

  Patrice Mersault

  That evening, having written his letter, he went back to the dancehall. He had arranged to spend the evening with Helen, one of the hostesses who knew a little French and understood his poor German. Leaving the dancehall at two in the morning he walked her home, made love efficiently, and wakened the next morning against Helen's back, disinterestedly admiring her long hips and broad shoul-

  ders. He got up without waking her, slipped the money into her shoe. As he was about to open the door, she called to him: "But darling, you've made a mistake." He returned to the bed. And he had made a mistake. Unfamiliar with Austrian currency, he had left a five-hundred shilling note instead of a hundred shillings. "No," he said smiling, "its for you—you were wonderful." Helen's freckled face broke into a grin under her rumpled blond hair; she jumped up on the bed and kissed him on both cheeks. That kiss, doubtless the first she had given him spontaneously, kindled a spark of emotion in Mersault. He made her lie down, tucked her in, walked to the door again and looked back with a smile. "Goodbye," he said. She opened her eyes wide above the sheet that was pulled up to her nose and let him vanish without a word.

  A few days later, Mersault received an answer postmarked Algiers:

  Dear Patrice,

  We're in Algiers. Your children would be very glad to see you again. If you have nothing to do in the world, why don't you come to Algiers—we have room for you in the House. We're all happy here. We're ashamed of it, of course, but only for appearance's sake. And because of popular prejudice. If happiness appeals to you, come and try it here. It's better than re-enlisting. We bend our brows to your paternal kisses,

  Rose, Claire, Catherine

  P.S. Catherine protests against the word paternal. Catherine is living with us. If you approve, she can be your third daughter.

  He decided to return to Algiers by way of Genoa. As other men need to be alone before making their crucial decisions, Mersault, poisoned by solitude and alienation, needed to withdraw into friendship and confidence, to enjoy an apparent security before choosing his life.

  In the train heading across northern Italy toward Genoa, he listened to the thousand voices that lured him on, the siren songs of happiness. By the time he reached the first cypresses, springing straight up from the naked soil, he had yielded. He still felt weak, feverish. But something in him had relented. Soon, as the sun advanced through the day and the sea drew closer, under a broad sky pouring light and air over the shivering olive trees, the exultation which stirred the world joined the enthusiasms of his own heart. The noise of the train, the chatter in the crowded compartment, everything that laughed and sang around him kept time to a kind of inner dance which projected him, sitting motionless hour after hour, to the ends of the earth and at last released him, jubilant and speechless, into the deafening bustle of Genoa, the brilliant harbor echoing the brilliant sky, where desire and indolence struggled against each other until dark. He was thirsty, hungry for love, eager for pleasure. The gods who burned within him cast him into the sea, on a tiny

  beach at one end of the harbor, where the water tasted of salt and tar and he swam until he forgot his own body. Then he wandered through the narrow, redolent streets of the old part of the city, letting the colors claw at his eyes and the sky devour itself above the houses, the cats sleeping among the summer's filth flattened by the burden of the sun. He walked along a road overlooking the entire city, and the flickering fragrant sea rose toward him in one long, irresistible swell. Closing his eyes, Mersault gripped the warm stone he sat on, opening them again to stare at this city where sheer excess of life flaunted its exultant bad taste. At noon he would sit on the ramp leading down to the harbor and watch the women walking up from the offices on the docks. In sandals and bright summer dresses, breasts bobbing, they left Mersault's tongue dry and his heart pounding with desire, a desire in which he recognized both a release and a justification. Evenings, he would see the same women in the streets and follow them, the ardent animal coiled in his loins stirring with a fierce delight. For two days he smoldered in this inhuman exultation. On the third day he left Genoa for Algiers.

  All during the crossing, staring at the water and the light on the water, first in the morning, then in the middle of the day, and then in the evening, he matched his heart against the slow pulse of the sky, and returned to himself. He scorned the vulgarity of certain cures. Stretched out on the deck, he real-

  ized that there could be no question of sleeping but that he must stay awake, must remain conscious despite friends, despite the comfort of body and soul. He had to create his happiness and his justification. And doubtless the task would be easier for him now. At the strange peace that filled him as he watched the evening suddenly freshening upon the sea, the first star slowly hardening in the sky where the light died out green to be reborn yellow, he realized that after this great tumult and this fury, what was dark and wrong within him was gone now, yielding to the clear water, transparent now, of a soul restored to kindness, to resolution. He understood. How long he had craved a woman's love! And he was not made for love. All his life—the office on the docks, his room and his nights of sleep there, the restaurant he went to, his mistress—he had pursued single-mindedly a happiness which in his heart he believed was impossible. In this he was no different from everyone else. He had played at wanting to be happy. Never had he sought happiness with a conscious and deliberate desire. Never until the day . . . And from that moment on, because of a single act calculated in utter lucidity, his life had changed and happiness seemed possible. Doubtless he had given birth to this new being in suffering—but what was that suffering compared to the degrading farce he had performed till now? He saw, for instance, (hat what had attached him to Marthe was vanity, not love. Even that miracle of the lips she offered

  him was nothing more than the delighted astonishment of a power acknowledged and awakened by the conquest. The meaning of his affair with Marthe consisted of the replacement of that initial astonishment by a certainty, the triumph of vanity over modesty. What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men's eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it. Now he knew he was not made for such love, but for the innocent and terrible love of the dark god he would henceforth serve.

  As often happens, what was best in his life had crystallized around what was worst. Claire and her friends, Zagreus and his will to happiness had all crystallized around Marthe. He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if it was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. Most men cannot even prove they are note mediocre. He had won that right. But the proof re-mained to be shown, the risk to be run. Only one thing had changed. He felt free of his past, and of what he had lost. He wanted nothing now but this

  contraction and this enclosure inside himself, this lucid and patient fervor in the face of the world. As with warm dough that's squeezed and kneaded, all he wanted was to hold his life between his hands: the way he felt during those two long nights on the train when he would talk to himself, prepare himself to live. To lick the life like barley sugar, to shape it, sharpen it, love it at last—that was his whole passion. This presence of himself to himself— henceforth his effort would be to maintain it in the face of everything in his life, even at the cost of a solitude he knew now was so difficult to endure. He would not submit. All his violence would help him now, and at the point to which it raised him, his love would join him,
like a furious passion to live.

  The sea wrinkled slowly against the ship's sides. The sky filled with stars. And Mersault, in silence, felt in himself extreme and violent powers to love, to marvel at this life with its countenance of sunlight and tears, this life in its salt and hot stone—it seemed that by caressing this life, all his powers of love and despair would unite. That was his poverty, that was his sole wealth. As if by writing zero, he was starting over but with a consciousness of his powers and a lucid intoxication which urged him on in the face of his fate.

  And then Algiers—the slow arrival in the morning, the dazzling cascade of the Casbah above the sea, the hills and the sky, the bay's outstretched arms, the houses among the trees and the smell, al-

  ready upon him, of the docks. Then Mersault realized that not once since Vienna had he thought of Zagreus as the man he had killed with his own hands. He recognized in himself that power to forget which only children have, and geniuses, and the innocent. Innocent, overwhelmed by joy, he understood at last that he was made for happiness.