The Meursault Investigation (8 page)

Say, the ghost is absent again this evening. Two nights in a row. He must be conducting the dead, or reading books nobody understands.

No, thanks, no café au lait for me! I despise that concoction.

Actually, it’s Fridays I don’t like. I often spend them on the balcony of my apartment, looking at the people, the streets, and the mosque. It’s so imposing, it’s as though it prevents you from seeing God. I’ve lived there — I’m on the fourth floor — for twenty years now, I think. The whole place is falling into ruin. When I lean over my balcony and observe young children playing, it seems like I’m watching a live broadcast of the new generations, in ever-increasing numbers, as they push the old ones toward the edge of the cliff. It’s shameful, but I feel hatred when I see them. They’re stealing something from me. I slept very badly last night.

My neighbor’s an invisible man who takes it upon himself, every weekend, to read the Koran at the top of his voice all night long. Nobody dares tell him to stop, because it’s God who’s making him shout. I myself don’t dare, I’m marginal enough in this city as it is. His voice is nasal, plaintive, and obsequious. It sounds as if he’s alternating roles, from torturer to victim and back. I always react that way when I hear someone recite the Koran. I get the feeling it’s not a book, it’s a dispute between a heaven and a creature! As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I like
traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip. I’ve loathed Fridays ever since Independence, I think. Am I a believer? I’ve dealt with the heaven question by recognizing the obvious: I realized very young that among all those who nattered on about my condition, whether angels, gods, devils, or books, I was the only one who knew the sorrow and obligation of death, work, and sickness. I alone pay the electric bill, I alone will be eaten by worms in the end. So get lost! And therefore I detest religions and submission. Who wants to run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth, has never had to know hunger or work for a living?

My father? Oh, I’ve told you everything I know about him. I learned to write his name in my school notebooks, the way you write an address. A family name and nothing else. There’s no other trace of him; I don’t even have an old jacket or a photograph. Mama always refused to describe his looks or his character, to give him a body or share the smallest memory with me. And I had no paternal uncles and no tribe to help reestablish his outline. Nothing. And so, when I was a little boy, I imagined him as rather like Musa, but bigger. Immense, gigantic, capable of fits of cosmic anger, sitting at the world’s border, doing his night watchman’s job. My theory is, it was either weariness or cowardice that caused him to leave. You know, maybe I’ve taken after him. I left my own family before I had one, for I’ve never been married. Sure, I’ve known the love of lots of women, but it never untied the heavy, suffocating knot of secrets that bound me to my mother. After all these years of bachelorhood, here’s
my conclusion: I have always nurtured a mighty distrust of women. Basically, I’ve never believed them.

Mother, death, love — everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination. The truth is that women have never been able to free me from my own mother, from the smoldering anger I felt toward her, or to protect me from her eyes, which followed me everywhere for a long time. In silence. As if they were asking me why I hadn’t found Musa’s body or why I’d survived instead of him or why I’d come into the world. And then you have to consider the modesty that was obligatory in those days. Accessible women were rare, and in a village like Hadjout, you couldn’t come across a woman with her face uncovered, much less talk to one. I didn’t have any female cousin anywhere around. The only part of my life that was anything like a love story was what I had with Meriem. She’s the only woman who found the patience to love me and lead me back to life. It wasn’t quite summer yet when I met her, in 1963. Everyone was riding the wave of post-Independence enthusiasm, and I can still remember her wild hair and her passionate eyes, which come and visit me sometimes in insistent dreams. After my relationship with Meriem, I became aware that women would get themselves out of my way, they’d make, so to speak, a detour, as if they could instinctively tell I was another woman’s son and not a potential companion. My appearance didn’t help much either. I’m not talking about my body, I’m talking about what a woman divines or desires in a man. Women have an intuition about what’s unfinished and avoid men who cling to their youthful doubts too long. Meriem was the only one
willing to defy my mother, even though she almost never met her and didn’t really know her except from running up against my silences and my hesitations. She and I saw each other about ten times that summer. Then we had a correspondence that lasted several months, and then she stopped writing to me and everything dissolved. Maybe because of a death or a marriage or a change of address. Who knows? There’s an old mailman in my neighborhood who wound up in prison because he’d fallen into the habit of throwing away his undelivered letters at the end of each day.

Today’s Friday. It’s the day closest to death in my calendar. People dress ridiculously, they stroll through the streets at noon still wearing pajamas, practically, shuffling around in slippers as though Friday exempts them from the demands of civility. In our country, religious faith encourages laziness in private matters and authorizes spectacular negligence every Friday. You’d think men observed God’s day by being completely scruffy and slovenly. Have you noticed that people are dressing worse and worse? Without care, without elegance, without concern for the harmony of colors or nuances. Nothing. Old men like me, fond of red turbans, vests, bow ties, or beautiful, shiny shoes, are becoming rarer and rarer. We seem to be disappearing at the same rate as the public parks. It’s the Friday prayer hour I detest the most — and always have, ever since childhood, but even more for the past several years. The imam’s voice, shouting through the loudspeakers, the rolled-up prayer rugs tucked under people’s arms, the thundering minarets, the garish architecture of the mosque, and the hypocritical haste of the
devout on their way to water and bad faith, ablutions and recitations. You’ll see this spectacle everywhere on Friday, my friend — you’re not in Paris anymore. It’s almost always the same scene and has been for years. The neighbors start to stir, dragging their feet and moving slow, a long time after their pack of kids, who wake up early and swarm around, like maggots on my body. The new car gets washed and rewashed. Then there’s the sun, which runs its course uselessly on that eternal day, and the almost physical sensation of the idleness of the whole cosmos, reduced to balls that must be washed and verses that must be recited. Sometimes I get to thinking: Now that these people don’t have to go underground and the land is theirs, they don’t know where to go. Friday? It’s not a day when God rested, it’s a day when he decided to run away and never come back. I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough to
know what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?

On Friday all the bars are closed and I have nothing to do. People look at me strangely, because despite my age I entreat no one and reach out to no one. It doesn’t seem right to be so close to death without feeling close to God. “Forgive them [my God], for they know not what they do.” With my whole body and all my hands, I’m clinging to this life, which I alone shall lose and which I’m the sole witness to. As for death, I got close to it years ago, and it never brought me closer to God. It only made me long to have more powerful, more voracious senses and increased the depth of my own mystery. The others are marching to death in single file, and me, I’ve come back from it, and I can report there’s nothing on the other side but an empty beach in the sun. What would I do if I had an appointment with God and on the way I met a man who needed help fixing his car? I don’t know. I’m the fellow whose vehicle broke down, not the driver looking for the way to sainthood. Of course, I keep quiet here in the city, and my neighbors don’t like my independence, though they envy it and would be happy to make me pay for it. Children fall silent when I approach them, except for some who mutter insults as I go by, but they’re always ready to run away if I turn around, the little cowards. Centuries ago, I might have been burned alive for my convictions, and for the empty red wine bottles found in the neighborhood Dumpsters. Nowadays, people just avoid me. I feel something close to divine pity for this teeming anthill and its disorganized hopes. How can you believe God has spoken to only one man, and that one man has stopped
talking forever? Sometimes I page through their book,
the
Book, and what I find there are strange redundancies, repetitions, lamentations, threats, and daydreams. I get the impression that I’m listening to a soliloquy spoken by some old night watchman, some
assas
.

Ah, Fridays!

Remember the bar ghost, the guy who has a way of circling around us, as though he’s trying to hear me better or steal my story? Well, I often wonder what he does with his Fridays. Does he go to the beach? To the movies? Does he too have a mother, or a wife he likes to kiss? Intriguing mystery, eh? Have you noticed that generally, on Fridays, the sky looks like sagging sails, the shops close, and the whole universe is deserted by noon? That’s when a kind of feeling grips my heart, the sense that I must have committed some secret fault. I went through so many awful days like that in Hadjout, and always with the sensation of being stuck forever in a deserted railroad station.

For decades I’ve stood on my balcony and observed these people: killing one another, rising again, waiting forever, hesitating over their departure schedules, shaking their heads, talking to themselves, digging in their pockets like panicked travelers, looking at the sky instead of a watch, surrendering to strange venerations, digging holes to lie in so they can meet their God sooner. I’ve observed these people so often that today I see them as a single person, a man I avoid talking to for any length of time and keep at a respectful distance. My balcony overlooks the city’s public space: broken playground slides, a few scrawny, tormented trees, some dirty staircases,
some windblown plastic bags clinging to people’s legs, other balconies decorated with unidentified laundry, water cisterns, and satellite dishes. My neighbors bustle about before my eyes like familiar miniatures: a mustachioed retired military man who washes his car with infinitely drawn-out, almost masturbatory pleasure; another man, sad-eyed and very dark, who’s discreetly charged with handling the rental of chairs, tables, dishes, lightbulbs, and so forth for funerals as well as for marriages. There’s a fireman with a bad limp who regularly beats his wife and who stands on the landing of their apartment at dawn — because she always ends up throwing him out — and begs her forgiveness, all the while shouting his own mother’s name. And nothing else but that, for God’s sake! Well, I suppose you’re familiar with that sort of thing, even though you’ve lived in exile for years, or so you claim.

I’m telling you about this because it’s one side of my universe. My other balcony, the invisible one in my head, looks out over the scene with the white-hot beach, the impossible trace of Musa’s body, and the sun, fixed above the head of a man holding a cigarette or a revolver, I can’t really tell. I see this scene from far off. The man has brown skin, he’s wearing a pair of shorts a bit too long for him, and his silhouette’s rather slight; he seems to be propelled, his very muscles seem to be tensed, by some blind force, as if he’s a robot. In one corner, there are a few pilings holding up a bungalow, and at the other end, the rock that marks the limit of this universe. The scene never changes, and I beat against it like a fly against a windowpane. It’s impossible to penetrate. I can’t step inside and run across
the sand and change the order of things. What do I feel when I see this scene, over and over? The same things I felt when I was seven years old. Curiosity, excitement, the wish to pass through the screen or follow the white rabbit. Sadness, because I can’t clearly make out Musa’s face. Also anger. And always, the urge to weep. Feelings grow old slowly, not as fast as skin. Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn’t feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we’re six and it’s nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.

In this scene where nothing moves, your hero doesn’t look at all like the other one, the one I killed. He was big, vaguely blond, with enormous circles under his eyes, and he always wore the same checked shirt. Who was he, this other one? You’re wondering, right? There’s always another, my friend. In love, in friendship, or even on a train, there he is, the other, sitting across from you and staring at you, or turning his back to you and deepening the perspectives of your solitude.

And so there’s one in my story too.

I squeezed the trigger and fired twice. Two bullets. One in the belly, and the other in the neck. That makes seven all told, I thought at once, absurdly. (But the first five, the ones that killed Musa, had been fired twenty years earlier …)

Mama was behind me, and I could feel her eyes on my back like a hand pushing me, holding me upright, guiding my arm, slightly tilting my head at the moment when I took aim. The face of the man I’d just killed kept its look of surprise — big, round eyes and grotesquely contorted mouth. A dog barked in the distance. The lemon tree in the courtyard of our house trembled under the black, hot sky. My body was entirely rigid, as though frozen by a cramp. The butt of the gun was sticky with perspiration. It was night, but everything was clearly visible. Because of the luminous moon. It looked so close, you could have jumped up and touched it. The man was giving off his last drops of terror sweat. He’s going to sweat until he returns all his water to the earth, I said to myself, and then he’ll steep for a while and mingle with the mud. I began to imagine his death as a disintegration of elements. The monstrousness of my crime would vanish with them somehow. It was not a murder but a
restitution
. I also thought — even if it may seem odd for a kid like me — that he wasn’t a Muslim, and that therefore his
death wasn’t forbidden. But that was a coward’s thought, and I knew it right away. I remember the look in his eyes. He wasn’t even accusing me, I don’t think, he was just staring at me the way you stare at an unexpected dead end. Mama was still behind me, and I could gauge her relief by her breathing, which calmed down and suddenly became very soft. Before, she’d done nothing but wheeze. (“Ever since Musa died,” a voice said to me.) The moon was looking on too, it too; the whole sky seemed to be nothing but moon. It had already begun to soothe the earth, and the damp heat was rapidly diminishing. The dog somewhere on the dark horizon started barking a second time, at length, and nearly roused me from the languor I’d fallen into. I found it ridiculous that a man could die so easily, that he could conclude our acquaintance with such a theatrical, almost comic collapse. My temples were throbbing from the deafening panic in my heart.