The Meursault Investigation (6 page)

The murderer lived somewhere in a neighborhood not far from the sea, but many years later I discovered that he somehow had no address. There was a building with a vaguely sagging upper story above a café, poorly protected by a few trees, but its windows were always closed in those days, so I think Mama insulted an anonymous old Frenchwoman with no connection to our tragedy. Long after Independence, a new tenant opened the shutters and eliminated the last possibility of a mystery. This is all to tell you that no one was ever able to say he’d crossed the murderer’s path or looked into his eyes or understood his motives. Mama questioned a great many people, so many that I eventually felt ashamed for her, as if she was begging for money and not clues. Her investigations served as a ritual to lessen her pain, and her comings and goings in the French part of the city turned, however incongruously, into opportunities to take some extended walks. I recall the day when we finally arrived at the sea, the last witness left to question. The sky was gray, and a few meters away from me was our family’s immense and mighty adversary, the thief of Arabs and the killer of marauders in overalls. It was indeed the last witness on Mama’s list. As soon as we got there, she pronounced Sidi Abderrahman’s name and then, several times, the name of God, ordered me to stay away from the water, sat down, and massaged her aching ankles. I stood behind her, a child facing the immensity of both the crime and the horizon. Please make a note of that sentence, I think it’s important. What did I feel? Nothing except the wind on my skin — it was autumn, the autumn after the murder. I tasted the salt, I saw the dense gray waves. That’s
all. The sea was like a wall with soft, moving edges. Far off, up in the sky, there were some heavy white clouds. I started picking up things that were lying on the sand: seashells, glass shards, bottle caps, clumps of dark seaweed. The sea told us nothing, and Mama remained motionless on the shore, like someone bending over a grave. Finally she stood up straight, looked attentively right and left, and said in a hoarse voice, “God’s curse be upon you!” Then she took me by the hand and led me away from the sand, as she’d done so often before. I followed her.

So I had a ghost’s childhood. There were happy moments, of course, but what did they matter, scattered through those long condolences? And I don’t suppose you’re putting up with this pretentious monologue of mine for the happy moments. Besides, it was you who came to me — I really wonder how you were able to track us down! You’re here because you think, as I once thought, that you can find Musa or his body, identify the place where the murder was committed, and trumpet your discovery to the whole world. I understand you. You want to find a corpse, and I’m trying to get rid of one. And not just one, believe me! But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. That’s denial of a shockingly violent kind, don’t you think? As soon as the shot is fired, the murderer turns around, heading for a mystery he considers worthier of interest than the Arab’s life. He continues on his way, the bedazzled martyr. As for my brother Zujj,
he’s
discreetly removed from the scene and deposited I don’t know where. Neither seen nor known, only killed. It’s like his body was hidden by God in person! There’s no trace in the official
reports filed in any police station, none in the minutes of the trial, nothing in the book or in the cemeteries. Nothing. Sometimes my imagination runs even wilder than usual, I get even more lost. Maybe it was me, I’m Cain,
I
killed my brother! I’ve often wanted to kill Musa since he died, to get rid of his corpse, to get Mama’s affection back, to recover my body and my senses, to … In any case, it’s a strange story. It’s your hero who does the killing, it’s me who feels guilty, and I’m the one condemned to wandering …

One last memory: the visits to the hereafter, on Fridays, at the summit of Bab-el-Oued. I’m talking about El-Kettar cemetery, otherwise known as “the Perfumer” because of the former jasmine distillery located nearby. Every other Friday, we’d go to the cemetery to visit Musa’s empty grave. Mama would whimper, which I found uncalled-for and ridiculous, because there wasn’t anything in that hole. I remember the mint that grew in the cemetery, the trees, the winding aisles, Mama’s white haik against the overly blue sky. Everybody in the neighborhood knew the hole was empty, knew Mama filled it with her prayers and an invented biography. That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly. Those days, the cemetery days, were the first days when I turned to pray, not toward Mecca but toward the world. Nowadays I’m still working on better versions of those prayers. But back then I had discovered, in some
obscure way, a form of sensuality. How can I explain it to you? The angle of the light, the vigorous blue of the sky, and the wind awakened me to something more disturbing than the simple satisfaction you feel after a need is met. Remember I wasn’t quite ten years old, and therefore still clinging to my mother’s breast. That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me. My mother never guessed it was there that I definitively buried Musa one day, mutely shouting at him to leave me alone. Precisely
there
, in El-Kettar, an Arab cemetery. Today it’s a dirty place, inhabited by fugitives and drunks. I’m told that marble is stolen from the tombs each and every night. You want to go and see it? It’ll be a waste of time, you won’t find anyone there, and you especially won’t find a trace of that grave, which was dug like the Prophet Yusuf’s well. If the body’s not in it, you can’t prove anything. Mama wasn’t entitled to anything. Not to apologies before Independence, not to a pension afterward.

Actually, we would have had to start all over from the beginning and go a different way — the way of books, for example, and more specifically of one book, the one you bring with you every day to this bar. I read it twenty years after it came out, and it overwhelmed me with its sublime lying and its magical accord with my life. A strange story, isn’t it? Let’s summarize: We have a confession, written in the first person, but we have no other evidence to prove Meursault’s guilt; his mother never existed, for him least of all; Musa was an Arab replaceable by a thousand others of his kind, or by a crow, even, or a reed, or whatever else; the beach has disappeared, erased by footprints or agglomerations of concrete; the only witness was a star,
namely the sun; the plaintiffs were illiterate, and they moved out of town; and finally, the trial was a wicked travesty put on by idle colonials. What can you do with a man who meets you on a desert island and tells you that yesterday he killed a certain Friday? Nothing.

In this movie I saw one day, a man was mounting some long flights of stairs to reach an altar where he was supposed to have his throat cut by way of soothing some god or other. The man was climbing with his head down, moving slowly, heavily, as if exhausted, undone, subdued, but most of all as if already dispossessed of his own body. I was struck by his fatalism, by his incredible passivity. I’m sure some people thought he was defeated, but I knew he was quite simply elsewhere. I could tell from his way of carrying his own body on his own back, like a porter with a burden. Well then, I was like that man, I felt the porter’s weariness more than the victim’s fear.

Night has fallen. Look at this incredible city, doesn’t it present a magnificent counterpoint? I think something immense, something infinite is required to balance out our human condition. I love Oran at night, despite the proliferation of rats and of all these dirty, unhealthy buildings that are constantly getting repainted; at this hour, it seems that people are entitled to something more than their routine.

Will you come tomorrow?

I admire your patience, cunning pilgrim that you are — I think I’m really starting to like you! For once, I have a chance to talk about this story … Picture an old whore dazed by an excess of men; she and this story of mine share some features. It’s like a text written on parchment and scattered all over the world; it’s brittle, patched up, no longer recognizable, infinitely rehashed — and yet look at you, sitting beside me and hoping for something new, something never heard before. This story doesn’t suit your quest for purity, I swear to you. If you want to light your way, you should look for a woman, not a dead man.

Shall we order the same wine as yesterday? I love its rough edges, its freshness. The other day, a wine producer was telling me his troubles. It’s impossible to find workers, because the activity is considered
haram
, illicit. Even the country’s banks are piling on and refusing him credit! Ha, ha! I’ve always wondered, what’s the reason for this complicated relationship with wine? Why is it treated as though it’s of the devil, when it’s supposed to be flowing profusely in Paradise? Why is it forbidden down here and promised up there? Drunken driving. Maybe God doesn’t want humanity to drink while it’s driving the universe to its place, holding on to the steering wheel of heaven … Yes, yes, I agree, the argument’s
a bit muddled. As you’re starting to realize, I like to ramble.

You’re here to find a corpse and write your book. But you should be aware that even though I know the story — all too well — I know virtually nothing about its geography. Algiers is only a shadow in my mind. I almost never go there. Sometimes I see it on television, looking like an outdated actress left over from the days of revolutionary theater. So there’s no geography in this story. Generally speaking, it takes place in three settings of national importance: the city, whether that one or another one; the mountains, where you take refuge when you’re attacked or you want to make war; and the village, which is for each and every one of us the ancestral home. Everybody wants a village wife and a big-city whore. Just by looking out the windows of this bar, I can sort the local humans for you according to one of those three addresses. And so when Musa went away into the mountains to speak to God about eternity, Mama and I left the city and went back to the village. That’s all. There was nothing more until I learned to read and the little scrap of newspaper Mama kept between her breasts for so long — the one that reported the murder of Musa/Zujj — suddenly became a book with a name. Just think, we’re talking about one of the most-read books in the world. My brother might have been famous if your author had merely deigned to give him a name. H’med or Kaddour or Hammou, just a name, damn it! Mama could have had a martyr’s widow’s pension, and I could have had a known, recognized brother, a brother I could have prided myself on. But no, he didn’t name him, because if he had, my brother would have
caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.

Let’s go back. It’s always a good thing to go back and review the basics. A Frenchman kills an Arab who’s lying on a deserted beach. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon on a summer day in 1942. Five gunshots, followed by a trial. The killer’s condemned to death for having buried his mother badly and spoken of her with too much indifference. Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness. A pimp named Raymond is angry with a whore and asks your hero to write her a threatening letter, which he does. Things go downhill, and then the story seems to resolve itself in a murder. The Arab is killed because the murderer thinks he wants to avenge the prostitute, or maybe because he has the insolence to take a siesta. You find my summary of your book unsettling, eh? But it’s the naked truth. All the rest is nothing but embellishments, the products of your writer’s genius. Afterward, nobody bothers about the Arab, his family, or his people. When the murderer leaves prison, he writes a book that becomes famous, in which he recounts how he stood up to God, a priest, and the absurd. You can turn that story in all directions, it doesn’t hold up. It’s the story of a crime, but the Arab isn’t even killed in it — well, he
is
killed, but barely, delicately, with the fingertips, as it were. He’s the second most important character in the book, but he has no name, no face, no words. Does that make any sense to you, educated man that you are? The story’s absurd! It’s a blatant lie. Have another glass, it’s on me. Your Meursault doesn’t describe a world in his book, he describes the end of a world. A world where property
is useless, marriage practically unnecessary, and weddings halfhearted, where it’s as though people are already sitting on their luggage, empty, superficial, holding on to their sick and fetid dogs, incapable of forming more than two sentences or pronouncing four words in a row. Robots! Yes, that’s the word, it wasn’t coming to me. I remember that little woman, a Frenchwoman, the one the writer-killer describes so well. He observes her one day in a restaurant. Jerky movements, shining eyes, tics, anxiety about the bill, robot gestures. I also remember the pendulum clock that was right in the middle of Hadjout, and I think it’s that Frenchwoman’s twin. The thing stopped for good a few years before Independence, it seems to me.

So the mystery struck me as more and more unfathomable. See, I’ve got a mother and a murder on
my
back too. Me too. It’s fate. I too have killed, in accordance with the desires of this earth, one day when I had nothing to do. Ah! I swore to myself so many times I’d never revisit that episode, but every move I make either dramatizes it or evokes it involuntarily. I was waiting for a little nosy-nose like yourself to come along, someone I could finally tell this tale to …

Inside my head, the map of the world is a triangle. At the top, in Bab-el-Oued, there’s the house where Musa was born. Lower down, overlooking the Algiers coast, there’s the place with no address where the murderer never came into the world. And finally, even lower, there’s the beach. The beach, yes indeed! These days it doesn’t exist anymore, or it’s slowly shifted itself elsewhere. According to witnesses, there was a time when you could still spot
the little wooden bungalow at the far end of the beach. The back of the house rested against the rocks, and the pilings that held it up in front went straight down into the water. The commonness of the place struck me when I went there with Mama that autumn, the autumn after the crime. I’ve already described that scene to you, right? Me and Mama on the seashore, me ordered to stay back, and Mama facing the waves and cursing them? I have that feeling every time I get close to the sea. A bit of terror at first, an accelerated heartbeat, followed rather quickly by disappointment. It was as if the place was simply too confined! It seemed like trying to squeeze the
Iliad
into a narrow space on the street, between a grocery store and a barber shop. Yes, the scene of the crime was in fact a terrible letdown. In my view, my brother Musa’s story needs the entire earth! Ever since that day, I’ve cultivated a wild hypothesis: Musa wasn’t killed on that famous Algiers beach! There must be another, hidden place, a setting that was disappeared. That would explain everything, all at once! Why the murderer was so relaxed after being sentenced to death and even after his execution, why my brother was never found, and why the court preferred judging a man who didn’t weep over his mother’s death to judging a man who killed an Arab.