The Stranger

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This document As I Lay Dying, a novel by William Faulkner, is a timeless literary work first published in 1935. The story follows the Bundren family’s journey to bury their deceased matriarch, exploring themes of death, family, and resilience. Through engaging prose and intricate character relationships, Faulkner delves into the complexities of human nature and the impact of grief. This SEO-optimized document offers valuable insights into Faulkner’s narrative style and the emotional depth of his characters, making it a compelling read for literature enthusiasts and those interested in exploring profound themes within American literature.

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L BE R T CAM U S

“Matthew Ward has done

Camus and us a great service.

The Stranger is now a dif-

ferent and better novel for

its American readers; it is

now our classic as well as

France’s.”’ —Chicago Sun-Times

L BE R T CAM U S

“Matthew Ward has done

Camus and usa great service.

The Stranger is now a dif-

ferent and better novel for

its American readers; it is

now our classic as well as

France’s.”’ —Chicago Sun-Times

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T H E

S TRAN

G E R

FICTION/LITERATURE

Gracie ante atest published

in English, in 1946, Albert Camus’s first novel, THE STRAN-

GER (L’etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of

American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who

unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-

drenched Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed “the

nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

Now, in an illuminating new American translation, extraordi-

nary for its exactitude and clarity, the original intent of THE STRANGER is made more immediate. This haunting novel has

been given a new life for generations to come.

Translated from the French by Matthew Ward

$8.00

50800>

01 9

"780679°7202

ISBN O-675-720c0-0

Cover design by Mare J. Cohen

Photograph by Barnaby Hall

T H E

S TR AN G E R

FICTION/LITERATURE

“ince it was first published

in English, in 1946, Albert Camus’s first novel, THE STRAN-

GER (L’étranger), has had a profound impact on millions of

American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who

unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-

drenched Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed “the

nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

Now, in an illuminating new Américan translation, extraordi-

nary for its exactitude and clarity, the original intent of THE STRANGER is made more immediate. This haunting novel has

been given a new life for generations to come.

Translated from the French by Matthew Ward

$8.00

50800>

01 9

"780679°7202

ISON O-t759-7e0¢c0-0

Cover design by Marc J. Cohen

Photograph by Barnaby Hall

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THE STRANGER

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ALSO BY

ALBERT

CAMUS

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957

Notebooks 1942-1951 (Carnets,

janvier 1942—mars 1951)

1965

Notebooks 1935-1942 (Carnets,

mai 1935—février 1942)

1963

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Actuelles —a selection)

1961

The Possessed (Les Possédés)

1960

Caligula and Three Other Plays (Caligula,

Le Malentendu, L’Etat de siége,

Les Justes)

1958

Exile and the Kingdom (L’Exil

et le Royaume) 1958

The Fall (La Chute)

1957

The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)

and Other Essays

1955

The Rebel (L’Homme Révolté)

1954

The Plague (La Peste)

1948

The Stranger (L’Etranger) 1946

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THE

STRANGER

ALBERT CAMUS

Translated from the French

by Matthew Ward

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

NEW YORK

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Vv First VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, Marcu 1989

Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in

French as L'Etranger by Librairie Gallimard, France, in 1942.

1969 by Mme Veuve Albert Camus. This translation origi-

nally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in

1988.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Camus, Albert, 1913-1960.

The Stranger.

(Vintage international)

Translation of: Létranger.

I. Ward, Matthew.

II. Title.

PQ2605.A3734E813 1989

843'.914

88-40378 ISBN 0-679-72020-0 (pbk. )

Manufactured in the United States of America

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The Stranger demanded of Camus the creation of a style

at once literary and profoundly popular, an artistic

sleight of hand that would make the complexities of a

man’s life appear simple. Despite appearances, though,

neither Camus nor Meursault ever tried to make things

simple for themselves. Indeed, in the mind of a moralist,

simplification is tantamount to immorality, and Meursault

and Camus are each moralists in their own way. What

little Meursault says or feels or does resonates with all he

does not say, all he does not feel, all he does not do. The “simplicity” of the text is merely apparent and every-

where paradoxical.

Camus acknowledged employing an “American method” in writing The Stranger, in the first half of the

book in particular: the short, precise sentences; the

depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness;

and, in places, the “tough guy” tone. Hemingway, Dos

Passos, Faulkner, Cain, and others had pointed the way.

There is some irony then in the fact that for forty years

the only translation available to American audiences

should be Stuart Gilbert’s “Britannic” rendering. His

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NOTE

is the version we have all read, the version I read as a

schoolboy in the boondocks some twenty years ago. As

all translators do, Gilbert gave the novel a consistency

and voice all his own. A certain paraphrastic earnestness

might be a way of describing his effort to make the text

intelligible, to help the English-speaking reader under-

stand what Camus meant. In addition to giving the text

a more “American” quality, I have also attempted to

venture farther into the letter of Camus’s novel, to

capture what he said and how he said it, not what he

meant. In theory, the latter should take care of itself.

When Meursault meets old Salamano and his dog in

the dark stairwell of their apartment house, Meursault

observes, “I] était avec son chien.” With the reflex of a

well-bred Englishman, Gilbert restores the conventional

relation between man and beast and gives additional

adverbial information: “As usual, he had his dog with

him.” But I have taken Meursault at his word: “He was

with his dog.”"—in the way one is with a spouse or a

friend. A sentence as straightforward as this gives us the

world through Meursault’s eyes. As he says toward the

end of his story, as he sees things, Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as Salamano’s wife. Such peculiarities

of perception, such psychological increments of character

are Meursault. It is by pursuing what is unconventional

in Camus’s writing that one approaches a degree of its

still startling originality.

In the second half of the novel Camus gives freer

rein to a lyricism which is his alone as he takes Meursault, now stripped of his liberty, beyond sensation to enforced

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NOTE

memory, unsatisfied desire and, finally, to a kind of

understanding.

In this stylistic difference between the two parts, as everywhere, an impossible fidelity has been my purpose.

No sentence in French literature in English trans-

lation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the obser-

vation that “the curious feeling the son has for his mother

constitutes all his sensibility.” And Sartre, in his “Ex-

plication de L’Etranger,” goes out of his way to point out

Meursault’s use of the child’s word “Maman” when

speaking of his mother. To use the more removed, adult “Mother” is, I believe, to change the nature of Meursault’s

curious feeling for her. It is to change his very sensibility.

As Richard Howard pointed out in his classic state-ment on retranslation in his prefatory note to The Im-

moralist, time reveals all translation to be paraphrase. All

translations date; certain works do not. Knowing this,

and with a certain nostalgia, I bow in Stuart Gilbert’s

direction and ask, as Camus once did, for indulgence and understanding from the reader of this first American

translation of The Stranger, which I affectionately dedi-

cate to Karel Wahrsager.

The special circumstances under which this transla-

tion was completed require that I thank my editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, for years of patience and faith.

Nancy Festinger and Melissa Weissberg also deserve my

gratitude.

Vil

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PART ONE

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Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.

I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased.

Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

The old people’s home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers, I'll take the two o’clock bus and

get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the

vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked my boss for

two days off and there was no way he was going to re-

fuse me with an excuse like that.

But he wasn’t too happy about it. I even said, “It’s not my fault.” He didn’t

say anything. Then I thought I shouldn't have said that.

After all, I didn’t have anything to apologize for. He's

the one who should have offered his condolences. But he

probably will day after tomorrow, when he sees I’m in mourning. For now, it’s almost as if Maman weren't dead.

After the funeral, though, the case will be closed, and

everything will have a more official feel to it.

I caught the two o'clock bus. It was very hot.

I ate

at the restaurant, at Céleste’s, as usual. Everybody felt

very sorry for me, and Céleste said, “You only have one

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mother.” When I left, they walked me to the door.

was a little distracted because I still had to go up to Emmanuel’s place to borrow a black tie and an arm band.

He lost his uncle a few months back.

I ran so as not to miss the bus. It was probably be-

cause of all the rushing around, and on top of that the bumpy ride, the smell of gasoline, and the glare of the

sky and the road, that I dozed off.

I slept almost

the whole way. And when I woke up, I was slumped

against a soldier who smiled at me and asked if I’d been

traveling long.

I said, “Yes,” just so I wouldn't have to

say anything else.

The home is two kilometers from the village. I walked

them.

I wanted to see Maman right away. But the care-

taker told me I had to see the director first. He was busy,

so I waited awhile. The caretaker talked the whole time

and then I saw the director. I was shown into his office.

He was a little old man with the ribbon of the Legion

of Honor in his lapel. He looked at me with his clear

eyes. Then he shook my hand and held it so long I

didn’t know how to get it loose. He thumbed through

a file and said, “Madame Meursault came to us three

years ago. You were her sole support.” I thought he was

criticizing me for something and | started to explain.

But he cut me off. “You don’t have to justify yourself, my dear boy. I’ve read your mother’s file. You weren't

able to provide for her properly. She needed someone to

look after her. You earn only a modest salary. And the

truth of the matter is, she was happier here.” I said,

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“Yes, sir.’ He added, “You see, she had friends here,

people her own age. She was able to share things from

the old days with them. You're young, and it must have been hard for her with you.”

It was true. When she was at home with me, Maman

used to spend her time following me with her eyes, not

saying a thing. For the first few days she was at the home

she cried a lot. But that was because she wasn’t used to

it. A few months later and she would have cried if she’d

been taken out. She was used to it. That’s partly why I

didn’t go there much this past year. And also because it

took up my Sunday—not to mention the trouble of

getting to the bus, buying tickets, and spending two hours

traveling.

The director spoke to me again. But I wasn’t really

listening anymore. Then he said, “I suppose you'd like

to see your mother.” I got up without saying anything

and he led the way to the door. On the way downstairs, he

explained, “We've moved her to our little mortuary. So

as not to upset the others. Whenever one of the residents

dies, the others are a bit on edge for the next two or

three days. And that makes it difficult to care for them.” We crossed a courtyard where there were lots of old

people chatting in little groups. As we went by, the talk-

ing would stop. And then the conversation would start

up again behind us. The sound was like the muffled

jabber of parakeets. The director stopped at the door of

a small building. “I'll leave you now, Monsieur Meur-

sault. If you need me for anything, I'll be in my office.

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As is usually the case, the funeral is set for ten o'clock in

the morning. This way you'll be able to keep vigil over

the departed. One last thing: it seems your mother

often expressed to her friends her desire for a religious

burial.

I've taken the liberty of making the necessary

arrangements. But I wanted to let you know.” I thanked

him. While not an atheist, Maman had never in her life

given a thought to religion.

I went in.

It was a very bright, whitewashed room

with a skylight for a roof. The furniture consisted of some chairs and some cross-shaped sawhorses. T'wo of

them, in the middle of the room, were supporting a

closed casket. All you could see were some shiny screws,

not screwed down all the way, standing out against the

walnut-stained planks.

Near the casket was an Arab

nurse in a white smock, with a brightly colored scarf on

her head.

Just then the caretaker came in behind me. He must

have been running. He stuttered a little. “We put the

cover on, but I’m supposed to unscrew the casket so you

can see her.” He was moving toward the casket when I stopped him. He said, “You don’t want to?” I answered, “No.” He was quiet, and I was embarrassed because I

felt I shouldn’t have said that. He looked at me and then

asked, “Why not?” but without criticizing, as if he just wanted to know. I said, “I don’t know.” He started twirl-

ing his moustache, and then without looking at me, again

he said, “I understand.” He had nice pale blue eyes and

a reddish complexion. He offered me a chair and then

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sat down right behind me. The nurse stood up and went

toward the door. At that point the caretaker said to me,

“She’s got an abscess.” I didn’t understand, so I looked

over at the nurse and saw that she had a bandage wrapped around her head just below the eyes. Where

her nose should have been, the bandage was flat.

All

you could see of her face was the whiteness of the ban-

dage.

When she'd gone, the caretaker said, “I'll leave you

alone.” I don’t know what kind of gesture I made, but

he stayed where he was, behind me. Having this presence breathing down my neck was starting to annoy me. The room was filled with beautiful late-afternoon sunlight.

Two homets were buzzing against the glass roof.

could feel myself getting sleepy. Without turning around,

I said to the caretaker, “Have you been here long?”

Right away he answered, “Five years’—as if he’d been

waiting all along for me to ask.

After that he did a lot of talking. He would have been

very surprised if anyone had told him he would end up

caretaker at the Marengo home. He was sixty-four and came from Paris. At that point I interrupted him. “Oh,

you're not from around here?” Then I remembered that

before taking me to the director's office, he had talked

to me about Maman. He'd told me that they had to

bury her quickly, because it gets hot in the plains, espe-

cially in this part of the country. That was when he told

me he had lived in Paris and that he had found it hard

to forget it.

In Paris they keep vigil over the body for

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three, sometimes four days. But here you barely have

time to get used to the idea before you have to start running after the hearse. Then his wife had said to him, “Hush now, that’s not the sort of thing to be telling the

gentleman.” The old man had blushed and apologized.

I'd stepped in and said, “No, not at all.” I thought what

he’d been saying was interesting and made sense.

In the little mortuary he told me that he’d come to

the home because he was destitute. He was in good

health, so he’d offered to take on the job of caretaker.

pointed out that even so he was still a resident. He said

no, he wasn't. I'd already been struck by the way he had of saying “they” or “the others” and, less often, “the

old people,” talking about the patients, when some of

them weren't any older than he was. But of course it

wasn't the same. He was the caretaker, and to a certain

extent he had authority over them.

Just then the nurse came in. Night had fallen sud-

denly. Darkness had gathered, quickly, above the sky-

light. The caretaker turned the switch and I was blinded

by the sudden flash of light. He suggested I go to the

dining hall for dinner. But I wasn’t hungry. Then he

offered to bring me a cup of coffee with milk. I like milk

in my coffee, so I said yes, and he came back a few minutes later with a tray. I drank the coffee. Then I felt

like having a smoke. But I hesitated, because I didn’t know if I could do it with Maman right there. I thought

about it; it didn’t matter.

I offered the caretaker a ciga-

rette and we smoked.

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At one point he said, “You know, your mother’s

friends will be coming to keep vigil too.

It’s customary.

I have to go get some chairs and some black coffee.” I

asked him if he could turn off one of the lights. The

glare on the white walls was making me drowsy. He said

he couldn't. That was how they'd been wired: it was all

or nothing.

I didn’t pay too much attention to him after

that. He left, came back, set up some chairs. On one of them he stacked some cups around a coffee pot. Then

he sat down across from me, on the other side of Maman.

The nurse was on that side of the room too, but with

her back to me.

I couldn't see what she was doing. But

the way her arms were moving made me think she was

knitting.

It was pleasant; the coffee had warmed me

up, and the smell of Howers on the night air was coming

through the open door. I think I dozed off for a while.

It was a rustling sound that woke me up. Because

I'd had my eyes closed, the whiteness of the room seemed

even brighter than before. There wasn’t a shadow any-where in front of me, and every object, every angle and

curve stood out so sharply it made my eyes hurt. That’s when Maman’s friends came in. There were about ten

in all, and they floated into the blinding light without a

sound. They sat down without a single chair creaking.

saw them more clearly than I had ever seen anyone, and

not one detail of their faces or their clothes escaped me.

But I couldn’t hear them, and it was hard for me to be-

lieve they really existed. Almost all the women were wearing aprons, and the strings, which were tied tight

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around their waists, made their bulging stomachs stick

out even more. I’d never noticed what huge stomachs

old women can have. Almost all the men were skinny

and carried canes. What struck me most about their

faces was that I couldn't see their eyes, just a faint

glimmer in a nest of wrinkles. When they'd sat down,

most of them looked at me and nodded awkwardly, their

lips sucked in by their toothless mouths, so that I couldn't

tell if they were greeting me or if it was just a nervous

tic.

I think they were greeting me.

It was then that I

realized they were all sitting across from me, nodding

their heads, grouped around the caretaker. For a second

I had the ridiculous feeling that they were there to judge

me.

Soon one of the women started crying. She was in

the second row, hidden behind one of her companions,

and I couldn't see her very well. She was crying softly,

steadily, in little sobs.

I thought she’d never stop. The

others seemed not to hear her. They sat there hunched

up, gloomy and silent. They would look at the casket,

or their canes, or whatever else, but that was all they would look at. The woman kept on crying. It surprised

me, because I didn’t know who she was.

I wished I

didn’t have to listen to her anymore. But I didn’t dare

say anything. The caretaker leaned over and said some-

thing to her, but she shook her head, mumbled some-

thing, and went on crying as much as before. Then the

caretaker came around to my side. He sat down next to

me. After a long pause he explained, without looking at

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me, “She was very close to your mother. She says your mother was her only friend and now she hasn't got any-

one.” We just sat there like that for quite a while. The womans sighs and sobs were quieting down. She sniffled

a lot. Then finally she shut up.

I didn’t feel drowsy anymore, but I was tired and my back was hurting me.

Now it was all these people not making a sound that

was getting on my nerves. Except that every now and

then I'd hear a strange noise and I couldn't figure out what it was. Finally I realized that some of the old

people were sucking at the insides of their cheeks and making these weird smacking noises. They were so lost

in their thoughts that they weren't even aware of it.

even had the impression that the dead woman lying in

front of them didn’t mean anything to them. But I think now that that was a false impression.

We all had some coffee, served by the caretaker.

After that I don’t know any more. The night passed.

I remember opening my eyes at one point and seeing that

all the old people were slumped over asleep, except for one

old man, with his chin resting on the back of his hands wrapped around his cane, who was staring at me as if he were just waiting for me to wake up. Then I dozed off

again.

I woke up because my back was hurting more

and more. Dawn was creeping up over the skylight. Soon

afterwards, one of the old men woke up and coughed a

lot. He kept hacking into a large checkered handker-

chief, and every cough was like a convulsion. He woke

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the others up, and the caretaker told them that they

ought to be going. They got up. The uncomfortable

vigil had left their faces ashen looking. On their way

out, and much to my surprise, they all shook my hand—

as if that night during which we hadn't exchanged as much as a single word had somehow brought us closer

together.

I was tired. The caretaker took me to his room and

I was able to clean up a little.

I had some more coffee

and milk, which was very good. When I went outside,

the sun was up. Above the hills that separate Marengo

from the sea, the sky was streaked with red. And the

wind coming over the hills brought the smell of salt

with it. It was going to be a beautiful day.

It had been

a long time since I’d been out in the country, and [| could feel how much I'd enjoy going for a walk if it

hadn’t been for Maman.

But I waited in the courtyard, under a plane tree.

breathed in the smell of fresh earth and I wasn’t sleepy

anymore. I thought of the other guys at the office. They'd

be getting up to go to work about this time: for me that

was always the most difficult time of day. I thought about

those things a little more, but I was distracted by the

sound of a bell ringing inside the buildings. There was some commotion behind the windows, then everything

quieted down again. The sun was now a little higher in

the sky: it was starting to warm my feet. The caretaker came across the courtyard and told me that the director

was asking for me.

I went to his office. He had me sign

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a number of documents.

I noticed that he was dressed

in black with pin-striped trousers.

He picked up the

telephone and turned to me. “The undertaker’s men

arrived a few minutes ago. I’m going to ask them to seal

the casket. Before I do, would you like to see your

mother one last time?” I said no. He gave the order into

the telephone, lowering his voice: “Figeac, tell the men

they can go ahead.”

After that he told me he would be attending the

funeral and I thanked him. He sat down behind his desk

and crossed his short legs. He informed me that he and

I would be the only ones there, apart from the nurse on

duty. The residents usually weren't allowed to attend

funerals. He only let them keep the vigil. “It’s more humane that way,’ he remarked. But in this case he'd

given one of mother’s old friends—Thomas Pérez— permission to join the funeral procession. At that the

director smiled. He said, “I’m sure you understand. It’s

a rather childish sentiment. But he and your mother were

almost inseparable. The others used to tease them and

say, Pérez has a fiancée.’ He'd laugh. They enjoyed it.

And the truth is he’s taking Madame Meursault’s death

very hard.

I didn’t think I could rightfully refuse him

permission. But on the advice of our visiting physician,

I did not allow him to keep the vigil last night.” We didn’t say anything for quite a long time. The

director stood up and looked out the window of his office.

A moment later he said, “Here’s the priest from Marengo

already. He’s early.” He warned me that it would take at

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least three-quarters of an hour to walk to the church, which is in the village itself. We went downstairs. Out

in front of the building stood the priest and two altar

boys. One of them was holding a censer, and the priest

was leaning toward him, adjusting the length of its silver

chain. As we approached, the priest straightened up. He

called me “my son” and said a few words to me. He went

inside; I followed.

I noticed right away that the screws on the casket

had been tightened and that there were four men wear-

ing black in the room. The director was telling me that the

hearse was waiting out in the road and at the same time

I could hear the priest beginning his prayers. From then

on everything happened very quickly. The men moved

toward the casket with a pall. The priest, his acolytes, the

director and I all went outside. A woman I didn’t know

was standing by the door. “Monsieur Meursault,” the

director said.

I didn’t catch the woman’s name; I just understood that she was the nurse assigned by the home.

Without smiling she lowered her long, gaunt face. Then

we stepped aside to make way for the body. We fol-

lowed the pall bearers and left the home. Outside the

gate stood the hearse. Varnished, glossy, and oblong, it reminded me of a pencil box. Next to it was the funeral

director, a little man in a ridiculous getup, and an awk-

ward, embarrassed-looking old man. I realized that it was Monsieur Pérez. He was wearing a soft felt hat with a

round crown and a wide brim (he took it off as the

casket was coming through the gate), a suit with trousers

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that were corkscrewed down around his ankles, and a

black tie with a knot that was too small for the big white

collar of his shirt. His lips were trembling below a nose

dotted with blackheads. Strange, floppy, thick-rimmed

ears stuck out through his fine, white hair, and I was

struck by their blood-red color next to the pallor of his

face. The funeral director assigned us our places. First came the priest, then the hearse. Flanking it, the four

men. Behind it, the director and myself and, bringing up

the rear, the nurse and Monsieur Pérez.

The sky was already filled with light. The sun was beginning to bear down on the earth and it was getting

hotter by the minute.

I don’t know why we waited so

long before getting under way.

I was hot in my dark

clothes. The little old man, who had put his hat back on,

took it off again.

I turned a little in his direction and

was looking at him when the director started talking to

me about him. He told me that my mother and Monsieur

Pérez often used to walk down to the village together in

the evenings, accompanied by a nurse.

I was looking at

the countryside around me. Seeing the rows of cypress

trees leading up to the hills next to the sky, and the

houses standing out here and there against that red

and green earth, I was able to understand Maman better.

Evenings in that part of the country must have been a

kind of sad relief. But today, with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, it was in-human and oppressive.

We got under way.

It was then that I noticed that

)

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Pérez had a slight limp. Little by little, the hearse was

picking up speed and the old man was losing ground.

One of the men flanking the hearse had also dropped

back and was now even with me.

I was surprised at how fast the sun was climbing in the sky.

I noticed that

for quite some time the countryside had been buzzing

with the sound of insects and the crackling of grass. The

sweat was pouring down my face.

I wasn't wearing a

hat, so I fanned myself with my handkerchief. ‘The man

from the undertaker's said something to me then which

I missed. He was lifting the edge of his cap with his

tight hand and wiping his head with a handkerchief

with his left at the same time. I said, “What?” He pointed

up at the sky and repeated, “Pretty hot.” I said, “Yes.”

A minute later he asked, “Is that your mother in there?”

Again I said, “Yes.” “Was she old?” I answered, “Fairly,”

because I didn’t know the exact number. After that he was quiet. I turned around and saw old Pérez about fifty

meters behind us. He was going as fast as he could, swing-

ing his felt hat at the end of his arm.

I looked at the

director, too. He was walking with great dignity, without

a single wasted motion. A few beads of sweat were form-

ing on his forehead, but he didn’t wipe them off.

The procession seemed to me to be moving a little

faster. All around me there was still the same glowing

countryside flooded with sunlight. The glare from the

sky was unbearable. At one point, we went over a section

of the road that had just been repaved. The tar had

burst open in the sun. Our feet sank into it, leaving its

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shiny pulp exposed. Sticking up above the top of the

hearse, the coachman’s hard leather hat looked as if it

had been molded out of the same black mud.

I felt a

little lost between the blue and white of the sky and the monotony of the colors around me—the sticky black of

the tar, the dull black of all the clothes, and the shiny

black of the hearse. All of it—the sun, the smell of leather

and horse dung from the hearse, the smell of varnish and

incense, and my fatigue after a night without sleep—was making it hard for me to see or think straight.

I turned around again: Pérez seemed to be way back there, fading

in the shimmering heat. Then I lost sight of him alto-

gether.

I looked around and saw that he’d left the road

and cut out across the fields.

I also noticed there was a

bend in the road up ahead.

I realized that Pérez, who knew the country, was taking a short cut in order to catch

up with us. By the time we rounded the bend, he was

back with us. Then we lost him again. He set off cross country once more, and so it went on.

I could feel the

blood pounding in my temples.

After that, everything seemed to happen so fast, so

deliberately, so naturally that I don’t remember any of

it anymore. Except for one thing: as we entered the

village, the nurse spoke to me. She had a remarkable

voice which didn’t go with her face at all, a melodious, quavering voice. She said, “If you go slowly, you risk

getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up

a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.” She

was right. There was no way out. Several other images

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from that day have stuck in my mind: for instance,

Pérez’s face when he caught up with us for the last time,

just outside the village. Big tears of frustration and ex-

haustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because

of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They

spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film

over his ruined face. Then there was the church and

the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the

graves in the cemetery, Pérez fainting Che crumpled like

a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman’s

casket, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more

people, voices, the village, waiting in front of a café, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy when the bus

entered the nest of lights that was Algiers and I knew I

was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.

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As I was waking up, it came to me why my boss had seemed annoyed when I asked him for two days off:

today is Saturday.

I'd sort of forgotten, but as I was

getting up, it came to me. And, naturally, my boss

thought about the fact that I'd be getting four days’

vacation that way, including Sunday, and he couldn't

have been happy about that. But, in the first place, it

isn’t my fault if they buried Maman yesterday instead

of today, and second, I would have had Saturday and Sunday off anyway. Obviously, that still doesn’t keep me

from understanding my boss’s point of view.

I had a hard time getting up, because I was tired

from the day before. While I was shaving, I wondered

what I was going to do and I decided to go for a swim.

caught the streetcar to go to the public beach down at

the harbor. Once there, I dove into the channel. There

were lots of young people. In the water I ran into Marie Cardona, a former typist in our office whom I'd had a

thing for at the time. She did too, I think. But she’d left

soon afterwards and we didn’t have the time.

I helped

her onto a float and as I did, I brushed against her breasts.

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I was still in the water when she was already lying flat

on her stomach on the float. She turned toward me. Her

hair was in her eyes and she was laughing.

I hoisted myself up next to her. It was nice, and, sort of joking

around, I let my head fall back and rest on her stomach.

She didn’t say anything so I left it there.

I had the whole

sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold. On the back

of my neck I could feel Marie’s heart beating softly. We

lay on the float for a long time, half asleep. When the

sun got too hot, she dove off and I followed.

I caught

up with her, put my arm around her waist, and we swam together. She laughed the whole time. On the

dock, while we were drying ourselves off, she said, “I’m

darker than you.” I asked her if she wanted to go to

the movies that evening. She laughed again and told me

there was a Fernandel movie she'd like to see. Once we

were dressed, she seerned very surprised to see I was

wearing a black tie and she asked me if I was in mourn-

ing.

I told her Maman had died. She wanted to know how long ago, so I said, “Yesterday.” She gave a little

start but didn’t say anything.

I felt like telling her it wasn't my fault, but I stopped myself because I re-membered that I'd already said that to my boss.

It didn’t mean anything. Besides, you always feel a little guilty.

By that evening Marie had forgotten all about it. The movie was funny in parts, but otherwise it was just too

stupid.

She had her leg pressed against mine.

I was

fondling her breasts. ‘Toward the end of the show, I gave

her a kiss, but not a good one. She came back to my place.

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When I woke up, Marie had gone. She'd explained

to me that she had to go to her aunt’s.

I remembered that

it was Sunday, and that bothered me: I don’t like Sun-

days. So I rolled over, tried to find the salty smell Marie’s

hair had left on the pillow, and slept until ten. Then I smoked a few cigarettes, still in bed, till noon.

I didn’t

feel like having lunch at Céleste’s like I usually did be-

cause they'd be sure to ask questions and I don't like

that.

I fixed myself some eggs and ate them out of the

pan, without bread because I didn’t have any left and

I didn’t feel like going downstairs to buy some.

After lunch I was a little bored and I wandered around the apartment.

It was just the right size when Maman was here. Now it’s too big for me, and I’ve had

to move the dining room table into my bedroom. I live in

just one room now, with some saggy straw chairs, a ward-

robe whose mirror has gone yellow, a dressing table, and

a brass bed. I’ve let the rest go. A little later, just for something to do, I picked up an old newspaper and read

it.

I cut out an advertisement for Kruschen Salts and

stuck it in an old notebook where I put things from the

papers that interest me.

I also washed my hands, and

then I went out onto the balcony.

My room looks out over the main street in the neigh-

borhood. It was a beautiful afternoon. Yet the pavement

was wet and slippery, and what few people there were were in a hurry. First, it was families out for a walk: two

little boys in sailor suits, with trousers below the knees,

looking a little cramped in their stiff clothes, and a little

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girl with a big pink bow and black patent-leather shoes.

Behind them, an enormous mother, in a brown silk

dress, and the father, a rather frail little man I know by

sight. He had on a straw hat and a bow tie and was

carrying a walking stick. Seeing him with his wife, I understood why people in the neighborhood said he was

distinguished. A little later the local boys went by, hair greased back, red ties, tight-fitting jackets, with em-

broidered pocket handkerchiefs and square-toed shoes.

thought they must be heading to the movies in town.

That was why they were leaving so early and hurrying

toward the streetcar, laughing loudly.

After them, the street slowly emptied out.

The

matinees had all started, I guess. The only ones left were

the shopkeepers and the cats. The sky was clear but dull

above the fig trees lining the street. On the sidewalk

across the way the tobacconist brought out a chair, set

it in front of his door, and straddled it, resting his arms

on the back. The streetcars, packed a few minutes before,

were almost empty. In the little café Chez Pierrot, next

door to the tobacconist’s, the waiter was sweeping up the

sawdust in the deserted restaurant inside. It was Sunday

all right.

I turned my chair around and set it down like the

tobacconist’s because I found that it was more comfortable

that way. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, went inside to

get a piece of chocolate, and went back to the window to

eat it. Soon after that, the sky grew dark and I thought

we were in for a summer storm. Gradually, though, it

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cleared up again. But the passing clouds had left a hint

of rain hanging over the street, which made it look

darker.

I sat there for a long time and watched the sky.

At five o'clock some streetcars pulled up, clanging

away. They were bringing back gangs of fans from the

local soccer stadium. They were crowded onto the run-

ning boards and hanging from the handrails. ‘The street-

cars that followed brought back the players, whom I recognized by their little athletic bags. They were shout-

ing and singing at the tops of their lungs that their team would never die. Several of them waved to me. One of them even yelled up to me, “We beat ‘em!” And I nodded, as if to say “Yes.” From then on there was a

steady stream of cars.

The sky changed again. Above the rooftops the sky

had taken on a reddish glow, and with evening coming

on the streets came to life. People were straggling back

from their walks.

I recognized the distinguished little man among the others. Children were either crying or

lagging behind. Almost all at once moviegoers spilled

out of the neighborhood theaters into the street. The young men among them were gesturing more excitedly

than usual and I thought they must have seen an ad-

venture film. The ones who had gone to the movies in town came back a little later. They looked more serious.

They were still laughing, but only now and then, and

they seemed tired and dreamy. But they hung around anyway, walking up and down the sidewalk across the

street. The local girls, bareheaded, were walking arm in

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arm. The young men had made sure they would have

to bump right into them and then they would make

cracks. The girls giggled and turned their heads away.

Several of the girls, whom I knew, waved to me.

Then the street lamps came on all of a sudden and made the first stars appearing in the night sky grow dim.

I felt my eyes getting tired from watching the street

filled with so many people and lights. The street lamps

were making the pavement glisten, and the light from

the streetcars would glint off someone's shiny hair, or off

a smile or a silver bracelet. Soon afterwards, with the

streetcars running less often and the sky already blue

above the trees and the lamps, the neighborhood emptied

out, almost imperceptibly, until the first cat slowly made

its way across the now deserted street. Then I thought maybe I ought to have some dinner. My neck was a little

stiff from resting my chin on the back of the chair for

so long.

I went downstairs to buy some bread and spa-

ghetti, did my cooking, and ate standing up.

I wanted to smoke a cigarette at the window, but the air was getting

colder and I felt a little chilled. I shut my windows, and

as I was coming back I glanced at the mirror and saw a

corner of my table with my alcohol lamp next to some

pieces of bread. It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I

was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had

changed.

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I worked hard at the office today. The boss was nice. He

asked me if I wasn't too tired and he also wanted to know Maman’s age.

I said, “About sixty,” so as not to make a mistake; and I don’t know why, but he seemed

to be relieved somehow and to consider the matter

closed.

There was a stack of freight invoices that had piled

up on my desk, and I had to go through them all. Before

leaving the office to go to lunch, I washed my hands.

really like doing this at lunchtime.

I don’t enjoy it so much in the evening, because the roller towel you use

is soaked through: one towel has to last all day.

I men-

tioned it once to my boss. He told me he was sorry but

it was really a minor detail.

I left a little late, at half past

twelve, with Emmanuel, who works as a dispatcher. The

office overlooks the sea, and we took a minute to watch

the freighters in the harbor, which was ablaze with sun-

light. Then a truck came toward us with its chains

rattling and its engine backfiring. Emmanuel said, “How

‘bout it?” and I started running. The truck passed us and

we ran after it. I was engulfed by the noise and the dust.

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I couldn't see anything, and all I was conscious of was

the sensation of hurtling forward in a mad dash through

cranes and winches, masts bobbing on the horizon and

the hulls of ships alongside us as we ran.

I was first to

grab hold and take a flying leap. Then I reached out

and helped Emmanuel scramble up. We were out of

breath; the truck was bumping around on the uneven

cobblestones of the quay in a cloud of dust and sun.

Emmanuel was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe.

We arrived at Céleste’s dripping with sweat. Céleste

was there, as always, with his big belly, his apron, and his

white moustache. He asked me if things were “all right

now.” I told him yes they were and said I was hungry.

ate fast and had some coffee. Then I went home and

slept for a while because I'd drunk too much wine, and when I woke up I felt like having a smoke. It was late

and I ran to catch a streetcar.

I worked all afternoon. It

got very hot in the office, and that evening, when I

left, I was glad to walk back slowly along the docks. ‘The

sky was green; I felt good. But I went straight hoine because I wanted to boil myself some potatoes.

On my way upstairs, in the dark, I ran into old Salamano, my neighbor across the landing. He was with

his dog. The two of them have been inseparable for

eight years. The spaniel has a skin disease—mange, I think—which makes almost all its hair fall out and

leaves it covered with brown sores and scabs.

After

living together for so long, the two of them alone in one

tiny room, they've ended up looking like each other. Old

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Salamano has reddish scabs on his face and wispy yellow

hair. As for the dog, he’s sort of taken on his master’s

stooped look, muzzle down, neck straining. They look as

if they belong to the same species, and yet they hate each

other. Twice a day, at eleven and six, the old man takes

the dog out for a walk. They haven't changed their route

in eight years. You can see them in the rue de Lyon, the

dog pulling the man along until old Salamano stumbles.

Then he beats the dog and swears at it. The dog cowers

and trails behind. Then it’s the old man who pulls the

dog. Once the dog has forgotten, it starts dragging its

master along again, and again gets beaten and sworn at.

Then they both stand there on the sidewalk and stare at

each other, the dog in terror, the man in hatred. It’s the

same thing every day. When the dog wants to urinate,

the old man won't give him enough time and yanks at

him, so that the spaniel leaves behind a trail of little

drops.

If the dog has an accident in the room, it gets

beaten again. This has been going on for eight years.

Céleste is always saying, “It’s pitiful,” but really, who's

to say? When I ran into him on the stairs, Salamano was swearing away at the dog. He was saying, “Filthy, stink-

ing bastard!” and the dog was whimpering.

I said “Good evening, but the old man just went on cursing. So I

asked him what the dog had done. He didn’t answer.

All he said was “Filthy, stinking bastard!” I could barely

see him leaning over his dog, trying to fix something on

its collar.

I spoke louder. Then, without turning around,

he answered with a kind of suppressed rage, “He’s always

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there.” Then he left, yanking at the animal, which was

letting itself be dragged along, whimpering.

Just then my other neighbor came in. The word

around the neighborhood is that he lives off women. But when you ask him what he does, he’s a “warehouse guard.” Generally speaking, he’s not very popular. But

he often talks to me and sometimes stops by my place for

a minute, because I listen to him.

I find what he. has to

say interesting. Besides, I don’t have any reason not to

talk to him. His name is Raymond Sintés. He’s a little

on the short side, with broad shoulders and a nose like

a boxer’s. He always dresses very sharp. And once he

said to me, talking about Salamano, “If that isn’t pitiful!”

He asked me didn’t I think it was disgusting and I said

no.

We went upstairs and I was about to leave him when

he said, “I've got some blood sausage and some wine at my place. How about joining me?” I figured it would save

me the trouble of having to cook for myself, so I ac-

cepted. He has only one room too, and a little kitchen

with no window. Over his bed he has a pink-and-white

plaster angel, some pictures of famous athletes, and

two or three photographs of naked women. The room was dirty and the bed was unmade.

First he lit his

parafin lamp, then he took a pretty dubious-looking bandage out of his pocket and wrapped it around his

tight hand.

I asked him what he'd done to it. He said

he'd been in a fight with some guy who was trying to

start trouble.

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“You see, Monsieur Meursault,” he said, “it’s not that

I'm a bad guy, but I have a short fuse. This guy says to

me, ‘If you're man enough you'll get down off that

streetcar.

I said, ‘C'mon, take it easy. Then he said,

‘You're yellow.’ So I got off and I said to him, ‘I think

you better stop right there or I’m gonna have to teach

you a lesson.’ And he said, “You and who else?’ So I

let him have it. He went down. I was about to help him

up but he started kicking me from there on the ground.

So I kneed him one and slugged him a couple of times.

His face was all bloody.

I asked him if he’d had enough.

He said, ‘Yes.’” All this time, Sintés was fiddling with

his bandage.

I was sitting on the bed. He said, “So you

see, I wasn’t the one who started it. He was asking for

it.” It was true and I agreed. Then he told me that as a

matter of fact he wanted to ask my advice about the whole business, because I was a man, I knew about

things, I could help him out, and then we'd be pals.

didn’t say anything, and he asked me again if I wanted

to be pals. I said it was fine with me: he seemed pleased.

He got out the blood sausage, fried it up, and set out

glasses, plates, knives and forks, and two bottles of wine.

All this in silence. Then we sat down. As we ate, he

started telling me his story. He was a little hesitant at

first. “I knew this lady . . . as a matter of fact, well, she

was my mistress.” The man hed had the fight with was

this woman’s brother. He told me he'd been keeping

her.

I didn’t say anything, and yet right away he added

that he knew what people around the neighborhood

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were saying, but that his conscience was clear and that

he was a warehouse guard.

“To get back to what I was saying,” he continued,

“T realized that she was cheating on me.” He'd been

giving her just enough to live on. He paid the rent on

her room and gave her twenty francs a day for food. “Three hundred francs for the room, six hundred for

food, a pair of stockings every now and then—that made

it a thousand francs. And Her Highness refused to work.

But she was always telling me that things were too tight,

that she couldn't get by on what I was giving her. And

I'd say to her, “Why not work half-days? You'd be helping

me out on all the little extras. I bought you a new outfit

just this month, I give you twenty francs a day, I pay

your rent, and what do you do? . . . You have coffee in

the afternoons with your friends. You even provide the

coffee and sugar. And me, I provide the money. I’ve been

good to you, and this is how you repay me. But she

wouldn't work; she just kept on telling me she couldn't make ends meet—and that’s what made me realize she

was cheating on me.” Then he told me that he’d found a lottery ticket in

her purse and she hadn't been able to explain how she

paid for it. A short time later he’d found a ticket from the

shop in Mont-de-Piété in her room which proved that

she'd pawned two bracelets. Until then he hadn't even known the bracelets existed. “It was clear that she was

cheating on me. So I left her. But first I smacked her

around. And then I told her exactly what I thought of

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her.

I told her that all she was interested in was getting

into the sack. You see, Monsieur Meursault, it’s like I

told her: ‘You don’t realize that everybody's jealous of how good you have it with me. Someday you'll know just

”» how good it was.’

He’d beaten her till she bled. He’d never beaten her

before. “I'd smack her around a little, but nice-like, you

might say. She'd scream a little.

I'd close the shutters

and it always ended the same way. But this time it’s

for real. And if you ask me, she still hasn’t gotten what

she has coming.” Then he explained that that was what he needed

advice about. He stopped to adjust the lamp’s wick, which was smoking.

I just listened. I'd drunk close to a

liter of wine and my temples were buming.

I was smoking Raymond's cigarettes because I'd run out. The

last streetcars were going by, taking the now distant sounds of the neighborhood with them. Raymond went

on. What bothered him was that he “still had sexual

feelings for her.’ But he wanted to punish her.

First

he'd thought of taking her to a hotel and calling the

vice squad to cause a scandal and have her listed as a common prostitute. After that he'd looked up some of his underworld friends. But they didn’t come up with any-

thing. As Raymond pointed out to me, a lot of good it

does being in the underworld. He’d said the same thing

to them, and then they'd suggested “marking” her. But

that wasn’t what he wanted. He was going to think

about it. But first he wanted to ask me something. Be-

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fore he did, though, he wanted to know what I thought

of the whole thing.

I said I didn’t think anything but

that it was interesting. He asked if I thought she was

cheating on him, and it seemed to me she was; if [|

thought she should be punished and what I would do

in his place, and I said you can't ever be sure, but I understood his wanting to punish her.

I drank a little

more wine. He lit a cigarette and let me in on what he

was thinking about doing. He wanted to write her a

letter, “one with a punch and also some things in it to

make her sorry for what she’s done.” Then, when she

came running back, he’d go to bed with her and “right

at the last minute” he'd spit in her face and throw her

out. Yes, that would punish her, I thought. But Ray-mond told me he didn’t think he could write the kind

of letter it would take and that he'd thought of asking

me to write it for him. Since I didn’t say anything, he

asked if I'd mind doing it right then and I said no.

He downed a glass of wine and then stood up. He pushed aside the plates and the little bit of cold sausage wed left. He carefully wiped the oilcloth covering the

table. Then from a drawer in his night table he took out

a sheet of paper, a yellow envelope, a small red pen box,

and a square bottle with purple ink in it. When he told

me the woman's name I realized she was Moorish.

I wrote the letter.

I did it just as it came to me, but I

tried my best to please Raymond because I didn’t have

any reason not to please him. Then I read it out loud. He

listened, smoking and nodding his head; then he asked

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me to read it again. He was very pleased. He said,

“I

could tell you knew about these things.” I didn’t notice

at first, but he had stopped calling me “monsieur.” It

was only when he announced “Now youre a pal, Meursault” and said it again that it struck me. He re-

peated his remark and I said, “Yes.” I didn't mind being

his pal, and he seemed set on it. He sealed the letter

and we finished off the wine. Then we sat and smoked

for a while without saying anything. Outside, every-

thing was quiet; we heard the sound of a car passing.

said, “It’s late.” Raymond thought so too. He remarked how quickly the time passed, and in a way it was true.

I felt sleepy, but it was hard for me to get up.

I must

have looked tired, because Raymond told me not to let

things get to me. At first I didn’t understand. Then he

explained that he’d heard about Maman’s death but

that it was one of those things that was bound to happen

sooner or later.

I thought so too.

I got up. Raymond gave me a very firm handshake

and said that men always understand each other.

I left

his room, closing the door behind me, and paused for a minute in the dark, on the landing. The house was

quiet, and a breath of dark, dank air wafted up from

deep in the stairwell. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears.

I stood there, motionless. And in

old Salamano’s room, the dog whimpered softly.

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I worked hard all week. Raymond stopped by and told

me he’d sent the letter.

I went to the movies twice with Emmanuel, who doesn’t always understand what's going

on on the screen. So you have to explain things to him.

Yesterday was Saturday, and Marie came over as we'd

planned.

I wanted her so bad when I saw her in that

pretty red-and-white striped dress and leather sandals.

You could make out the shape of her firm breasts, and

her tan made her face look like a Hower. We caught a

bus and went a few kilometers outside Algiers, to a

beach with rocks at either end, bordered by shore grass

on the land side. The four o'clock sun wasn’t too hot,

but the water was warm, with slow, gently lapping waves.

Marie taught me a game. As you swam, you had to skim off the foam from the crest of the waves with your mouth, hold it there, then roll over on your back and

spout it out toward the sky. This made a delicate froth

which disappeared into the air or fell back in a warm

spray over my face. But after a while my mouth was

stinging with the salty bitterness. Then Marie swam

over to me and pressed herself against me in the water.

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She put her lips on mine. Her tongue cooled my lips

and we tumbled in the waves for a moment.

When we'd gotten dressed again on the beach, Marie

looked at me with her eyes sparkling.

I kissed her. We

didn’t say anything more from that point on.

I held her

to me and we hurried to catch a bus, get back, go to my

place, and throw ourselves onto my bed.

Id left my window open, and the summer night air flowing over

our brown bodies felt good.

That morning Marie stayed and I told her that we would have lunch together.

I went downstairs to buy some meat. On my way back upstairs I heard a woman's

voice in Raymond's room. A little later old Salamano

growled at his dog; we heard the sound of footsteps and claws on the wooden stairs and then “Lousy, stinking

bastard” and they went down into the street.

I told Marie all about the old man and she laughed. She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up.

When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later

she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean any-

thing but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But

as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she

laughed in such a way that I kissed her.

It was then

that we heard what sounded like a fight break out in Raymond's room.

First we heard a woman's shrill voice and then Raymond saying, “You used me, you used me. I'll teach you to use me.” There were some thuds and the woman

screamed, but in such a terrifying way that the landing

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immediately filled with people. Marie and I went to see,

too. The woman was still shrieking and Raymond was

still hitting her. Marie said it was terrible and I didn’t

say anything. She asked me to go find a policeman, but

I told her I didn’t like cops. One showed up anyway with

the tenant from the third floor, who's a plumber. The

cop knocked on the door and we couldn’t hear anything anymore. He knocked harder and after a minute the woman started crying and Raymond opened the door.

He had a cigarette in his mouth and an innocent look on

his face. The girl rushed to the door and told the police-man that Raymond had hit her. “What's your name?”

the cop said. Raymond told him. “Take that cigarette

out of your mouth when youre talking to me,” the cop

said. Raymond hesitated, looked at me, and took a drag

on his cigarette. Right then the cop slapped him—a

thick, heavy smack right across the face. The cigarette

went flying across the landing. The look on Raymond’s

face changed, but he didn’t say anything for a minute,

and then he asked, in a meek voice, if he could pick up

his cigarette. The cop said to go ahead and added, “Next time you'll know better than to clown around

with a policeman.” Meanwhile the girl was crying and

she repeated, “He beat me up! He’s a pimp!” “Officer,” Raymond asked, “is that legal, calling a man a pimp like

that?” But the cop ordered him to shut his trap. Then Raymond turned to the girl and said, “You just wait, sweetheart—we'e not through yet.” The cop told him

to knock it off and said that the girl was to go and he was

to stay in his room and wait to be summoned to the

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police station. He also said that Raymond ought to be ashamed to be so drunk that he’d have the shakes like

that. Then Raymond explained, “I’m not drunk, officer.

It’s just that I’m here, and you're there, and I’m shaking,

I can’t help it.” He shut his door and everybody went

away. Marie and I finished fixing lunch. But she wasn't

hungry; I ate almost everything. She left at one o'clock

and I slept awhile.

Around three o'clock there was a knock on my door

and Raymond came in.

I didn’t get up. He sat down on

the edge of my bed. He didn’t say anything for a minute

and I asked him how it had all gone. He told me that

he'd done what he wanted to do but that she'd slapped

him and so he'd beaten her up. I'd seen the rest.

I told

him it seemed to me that she'd gotten her punishment now and he ought to be happy. He thought so too, and

he pointed out that the cop could do anything he wanted,

it wouldn't change the fact that she’d gotten her beat-

ing. He added that he knew all about cops and how to

handle them. Then he asked me if I'd expected him to

hit the cop back.

I said I wasn't expecting anything, and

besides I didn’t like cops. Raymond seemed pretty happy.

He asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with him.

got up and started combing my hair. He told me that

I'd have to act as a witness for him.

It didn’t matter to

me, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to say.

According to Raymond, all I had to do was to state that

the girl had cheated on him.

I agreed to act as a wit-

ness for him.

We went out and Raymond bought me a brandy.

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Then he wanted to shoot a game of pool, and I just

barely lost. Afterwards he wanted to go to a whorehouse,

but I said no, because I don’t like that. So we took our

time getting back, him telling me how glad he was that

he'd been able to give the woman what she deserved.

found him very friendly with me and I thought it was a

nice moment.

From a distance I noticed old Salamano standing on

the doorstep. He looked flustered. When we got closer,

I saw that he didn’t have his dog. He was looking all

over the place, turning around, peering into the darkness

of the entryway, muttering incoherently, and then he

started searching the street again with his little red eyes.

When Raymond asked him what was wrong, he didn’t answer right away.

I barely heard him mumble “Stink-

ing bastard,” and he went on fidgeting around.

I asked

him where his dog was. He snapped at me and said he

was gone. And then all of a sudden the words came

pouring out: “I took him to the Parade Ground, like

always. There were lots of people around the booths

at the fair.

I stopped to watch “The King of the Escape

Artists. And when I was ready to go, he wasn't there.

Sure, I've been meaning to get him a smaller collar for

a long time. But I never thought the bastard would take

off like that.” Then Raymond pointed out to him that the dog

might have gotten lost and that he would come back.

He gave examples of dogs that had walked dozens of

kilometers to get back to their masters. Nevertheless, the

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old man looked even more flustered. “But they'll take him away from me, don’t you see?

If only somebody would take him in. But that’s impossible—everybody’s

disgusted by his scabs. The police’ll get him for sure.”

So I told him he should go to the pound and they'd give

the dog back to him after he paid a fee. He asked me if

it was a big fee.

I didn’t know. Then he got mad: “Pay money for that bastard—ha! He can damn well die!” And he started cursing the dog. Raymond laughed and

went inside.

I followed him and we parted upstairs on

the landing. A minute later I heard the old man’s foot-

steps and he knocked on my door. When I opened it, he

stood in the doorway for a minute and said, “Excuse me,

excuse me.” I asked him to come in, but he refused. He

was looking down at the tips of his shoes and his scabby

hands were trembling. Without looking up at me he

asked, “They're not going to take him away from me,

are they, Monsieur Meursault? They'll give him back

to me. Otherwise, what’s going to happen to me?” [|

told him that the pound kept dogs for three days so that

their owners could come and claim them and that after

that they did with them as they saw fit. He looked at

me in silence. Then he said, “Good night.” He shut his

door and I[ heard him pacing back and forth. His bed

creaked.

And from the peculiar little noise coming

through the partition, I realized he was crying.

For some reason I thought of Maman. But I had to get up

early the next morning.

I wasn’t hungry, and I went

to bed without any dinner.

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Raymond called me at the office. He told me that a

friend of his Che’d spoken to him about me) had invited

me to spend the day Sunday at his little beach house,

near Algiers. I said I'd really like to, but I'd promised to

spend the day with a girlfriend. Raymond immediately

told me that she was invited too. His friend’s wife would

be very glad not to be alone with a bunch of men.

I wanted to hang up right away because I know the

boss doesn’t like people calling us from town. But Ray-mond asked me to hang on and told me he could have

passed on the invitation that evening, but he had some-

thing else to tell me. He'd been followed all day by a

group of Arabs, one of whom was the brother of his former mistress. “If you see him hanging around the

building when you get home this evening, let me know.”

I said I would.

A little later my boss sent for me, and for a second I

was annoyed, because I thought he was going to tell me

to do less talking on the phone and more work. But that

wasn’t it at all. He told me he wanted to talk to me about

a plan of his that was still pretty vague. He just wanted

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to have my opinion on the matter. He was planning to

open an office in Paris which would handle his business

directly with the big companies, on the spot, and he wanted to know how I felt about going there.

I’d be

able to live in Paris and to travel around for part of the

year as well. “You're young, and it seems to me it’s the

kind of life that would appeal to you.” I said yes but

that really it was all the same to me. Then he asked me

if I wasn’t interested in a change of life.

I said that peo-

ple never change their lives, that in any case one life was

as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with

mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I

never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition,

and that that was disastrous in business. So I went back

to work.

I would rather not have upset him, but I

couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back

on it, | wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had

lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my

studies I learned very quickly that none of it really

mattered.

That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me

if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any differ-

ence to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her.

I answered the same way

I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that

I probably didn’t love her. “So why marry me, then?”

she said.

I explained to her that it didn’t really matter

and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Besides,

she was the one who was doing the asking and all I was

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saying was yes. Then she pointed out that marriage was

a serious thing.

I said, “No.” She stopped talking for a

minute and looked at me without saying anything. Then

she spoke. She just wanted to know if I would have

accepted the same proposal from another woman, with whom I was involved in the same way.

I said, “Sure.” Then she said she wondered if she loved me, and there was no way I could know about that. After another moment's silence, she mumbled that I was peculiar, that

that was probably why she loved me but that one day I

might hate her for the same reason. I didn’t say anything,

because I didn’t have anything to add, so she took my arm

with a smile and said she wanted to marry me.

I said

we could do it whenever she wanted. Then I told her

about my boss’s proposition and she said she'd love to see

Paris.

I told her that I’d lived there once and she asked

me what it was like. I said, “It’s dirty. Lots of pigeons and

dark courtyards. Everybody's pale.” Then we went for a walk through the main streets to

the other end of town. The women were beautiful and I

asked Marie if she’d noticed. She said yes and that she

understood what I meant. For a while neither of us said

anything. But I wanted her to stay with me, and I told

her we could have dinner together at Céleste’s.

She would have liked to but she had something to do. We

were near my place and I said goodbye to her. She

looked at me. “Don’t you want to know what I have to

do?” I did, but I hadn't thought to ask, and she seemed to

be scolding me.

Then, seeing me so confused, she

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laughed again and she moved toward me with her whole

body to offer me her lips.

I had dinner at Céleste’s. I'd already started eating when a strange little woman came in and asked me if

she could sit at my table. Of course she could. Her

gestures were jerky and she had bright eyes in a little

face like an apple. She took off her jacket, sat down, and

studied the menu feverishly. She called Céleste over and

ordered her whole meal all at once, in a voice that was

clear and very fast at the same time. While she was

waiting for her first course, she opened her bag, took

out a slip of paper and a pencil, added up the bill in

advance, then took the exact amount, plus tip, out of a

vest pocket and set it down on the table in front of her.

At that point the waiter brought her first course and she

gulped it down. While waiting for the next course, she

again took out of her bag a blue pencil and a magazine

that listed the radio programs for the week. One by one,

and with great care, she checked off almost every pro-

gram. Since the magazine was about a dozen pages long,

she meticulously continued this task throughout the

meal.

I had already finished and she was still checking away with the same zeal. Then she stood up, put her

jacket back on with the same robotlike movements, and

left.

I didn’t have anything to do, so I left too and fol-

lowed her for a while. She had positioned herself right

next to the curb and was making her way with in-

credible speed and assurance, never once swerving or

looking around.

I eventually lost sight of her and turned

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back.

I thought about how peculiar she was but forgot

about her a few minutes later.

I found old Salamano waiting outside my door. |

asked him in and he told me that his dog was lost, be-

cause it wasn't at the pound. The people who worked

there had told him that maybe it had been run over. He

asked if he could find out at the police station. They

told him that they didn’t keep track of things like that

because they happened every day.

I told old Salamano

that he could get another dog, but he was right to point

out to me that he was used to this one.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed and Salamano

had sat down on a chair in front of the table. He was

facing me and he had both hands on his knees. He had

kept his old felt hat on. He was mumbling bits and pieces

of sentences through his yellowing moustache. He was

getting on my nerves a little, but I didn’t have anything

to do and I didn't feel sleepy. Just for something to say, I

asked him about his dog. He told me he’d gotten it after

his wife died. He had married fairly late. When he was young he'd wanted to go into the theater: in the army he

used to act in military vaudevilles. But he had ended

up working on the railroads, and he didn’t regret it,

because now he had a small pension. He hadn't been happy with his wife, but he'd pretty much gotten used

to her. When she died he had been very lonely. So he

asked a shop buddy for a dog and he'd gotten this one

very young. He'd had to feed it from a bottle. But since

a dog doesn’t live as long as a man, they'd ended up

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being old together. “He was bad-tempered,” Salamano

said. “We'd have a run-in every now and then. But he was a good dog just the same.” I said he was well bred

and Salamano looked pleased. “And,” he added, “you

didn’t know him before he got sick.

His coat was the

best thing about him.” Every night and every morning

after the dog had gotten that skin disease, Salamano

rubbed him with ointment. But according to him, the

dog’s real sickness was old age, and there’s no cure for

old age.

At that point I yawned, and the old man said he’d be

going. I told him that he could stay and that I was sorry

about what had happened to his dog. He thanked me.

He told me that Maman was very fond of his dog. He

called her “your poor mother.” He said he supposed I

must be very sad since Maman died, and I didn’t say

anything. Then he said, very quickly and with an em-

barrassed look, that he realized that some people in the neighborhood thought badly of me for having sent Maman to the home, but he knew me and he knew I

loved her very much.

I still don’t know why, but I said

that until then I hadn’t realized that people thought

badly of me for doing it, but that the home had seemed

like the natural thing since I didn’t have enough money

to have Maman cared for. “Anyway,” I added, “it had

been a long time since she'd had anything to say to me,

and she was bored all by herself.” “Yes,” he said, “and at

least in a home you can make a few friends.” Then he

said good night. He wanted to sleep. His life had changed

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now and he wasn’t too sure what he was going to do.

For the first time since I’d known him, and with a furtive

gesture, he offered me his hand, and I felt the scales on

his skin. He gave a little smile, and before he left he

said, “I hope the dogs don’t bark tonight.

I always think

“) .

Its mine.”

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I had a hard time waking up on Sunday, and Marie had

to call me and shake me. We didn't eat anything, be-

cause we wanted to get to the beach early.

I felt com-

pletely drained and I had a slight headache. My cigarette

tasted bitter. Marie made fun of me because, she said,

I had on a “funeral face.” She had put on a white

linen dress and let her hair down.

I told her she was

beautiful and she laughed with delight.

On our way downstairs we knocked on Raymond's

door. He told us he’d be right down. Once out in the

street, because I was so tired and also because we hadn't opened the blinds, the day, already bright with sun, hit me like a slap in the face. Marie was jumping with joy

and kept on saying what a beautiful day it was.

I felt a

little better and I noticed that I was hungry. I told Marie, who pointed to her oilcloth bag where she'd put our bath-

ing suits and a towel.

I just had to wait and then we

heard Raymond shutting his door.

He had on blue

trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. But he’d put on

a straw hat, which made Marie laugh, and his forearms

were all white under the black hairs.

I found it a little

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repulsive. He was whistling as he came down the stairs

and he seemed very cheerful. He said “Good morning,

old man” to me and called Marie “mademoiselle.” The day before, we'd gone to the police station

and I'd testified that the girl had cheated on Raymond.

He'd gotten off with a warming. They didn’t check out my statement. Outside the front door we talked about

it with Raymond, and then we decided to take the bus.

The beach wasn’t very far, but we'd get there sooner

that way. Raymond thought his friend would be glad

to see us get there early. We were just about to leave when all of a sudden Raymond motioned to me to look

across the street.

I saw a group of Arabs leaning against

the front of the tobacconist’s shop. ‘They were staring at

us in silence, but in that way of theirs, as if we were

nothing but stones or dead trees. Raymond told me that

the second one from the left was his man, and he seemed

worried. But, he added, it was all settled now. Marie

didn’t really understand and asked us what was wrong.

I told her that they were Arabs who had it in for Ray-

mond. She wanted to get going right away. Raymond drew himself up and laughed, saying we'd better step

on it.

We headed toward the bus stop, which wasn't far,

and Raymond said that the Arabs weren't following us.

I turned around. They were still in the same place and

they were looking with the same indifference at the spot where we'd just been standing. We caught the bus.

Raymond, who seemed very relieved, kept on cracking

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jokes for Marie.

I could tell he liked her, but she hardly

said anything to him. Every once in a while she'd look at

him and laugh.

We got off in the outskirts of Algiers. The beach

wasn't far from the bus stop. But we had to cross a small

plateau which overlooks the sea and then drops steeply down to the beach.

It was covered with yellowish rocks

and the whitest asphodels set against the already hard

blue of the sky. Marie was having fun scattering the

petals, taking big swipes at them with her oilcloth bag.

We walked between rows of small houses behind green

or white fences, some with their verandas hidden be-

hind the tamarisks, others standing naked among the

rocks, Before we reached the edge of the plateau, we could already see the motionless sea and, farther out, a

massive, drowsy-looking promontory in the clear water.

The faint hum of a motor rose up to us in the still air.

And way off, we saw a tiny trawler moving, almost im-perceptibly, across the dazzling sea.

Marie gathered

some rock irises. From the slope leading down to the

beach, we could see that there were already some people

swimming.

Raymond's friend lived in a little wooden bungalow

at the far end of the beach. The back of the house

rested up against the rocks, and the pilings that held it

up in front went straight down into the water. Raymond introduced us. His friend’s name was Masson. He was a

big guy, very tall and broad-shouldered, with a plump,

sweet little wife with a Parisian accent. Right off he told

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us to make ourselves at home and said that his wife had

just fried up some fish he’d caught that morning.

I told

him how nice I thought his house was. He told me that

he spent Saturdays and Sundays and all his days off

there. “With my wife, of course,” he added. Just then

his wife was laughing with Marie. For the first time

maybe, I really thought I was going to get married.

Masson wanted to go for a swim, but his wife and Raymond didn’t want to come. The three of us went down to the beach and Marie jumped right in. Masson

and I waited a little. He spoke slowly, and I noticed

that he had a habit of finishing everything he said with

“and I'd even say,” when really it didn’t add anything to

the meaning of his sentence. Referring to Marie, he

said, “She’s stunning, and I'd even say charming.” After

that I didn’t pay any more attention to this mannerism

of his, because I was absorbed by the feeling that the

sun was doing me a lot of good. The sand was starting

to get hot underfoot. I held back the urge to get into the

water a minute longer, but finally I said to Masson,

“Shall we?” I dove in. He waded in slowly and started swimming only when he couldn’t touch bottom anymore.

He did the breast stroke, and not too well, either, so I

left him and joined Marie. The water was cold and I was

glad to be swimming. Together again, Marie and I swam out a ways, and we felt a closeness as we moved

in unison and were happy.

Out in deeper water we floated on our backs and

the sun on my upturned face was drying the last of the

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water trickling into my mouth. We saw Masson making

his way back to the beach to stretch out in the sun.

From far away he looked huge. Marie wanted us to swim together.

I got behind her to hold her around

the waist. She used her arms to move us forward and

I did the kicking. The little splashing sound followed

us through the morning air until I got tired.

I left

Marie and headed back, swimming smoothly and breath-

ing easily. On the beach I stretched out on my stomach

alongside Masson and put my face on the sand.

I said

it was nice and he agreed. Soon afterwards Marie came

back.

I rolled over to watch her coming.

She was

glistening all over with salty water and holding her hair

back. She lay down right next to me and the combined warmth from her body and from the sun made me doze

off.

Marie shook me and told me that Masson had gone

back up to the house, that it was time for lunch.

I got

up tight away because I was hungry, but Marie told me

I hadn't kissed her since that morning.

It was true, and yet I had wanted to. “Come into the water,” she said.

We ran and threw ourselves into the first little waves.

We swam a few strokes and she reached out and held

on to me.

I felt her legs wrapped around mine and I wanted her.

When we got back, Masson was already calling us.

I said I was starving and then out of the blue he an-nounced to his wife that he liked me. The bread was

good; I devoured my share of the fish. After that there

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was some meat and fried potatoes. We all ate without

talking. Masson drank a lot of wine and kept filling my

glass. By the time the coffee came, my head felt heavy

and I smoked a lot.

Masson, Raymond, and I talked

about spending August together at the beach, sharing expenses. Suddenly Marie said, “Do you know what

time it is?

It’s only eleven-thirty!’ We were all sur-

prised, but Masson said that we'd eaten very early and

that it was only natural because lunchtime was when-

ever you were hungry. For some reason that made Marie

laugh.

I think she'd had a little too much to drink.

Then Masson asked me if I wanted to go for a walk on

the beach with him. “My wife always takes a nap after

lunch. Me, I don’t like naps. I need to walk. I tell her all

the time it’s better for her health. But it’s her business.”

Marie said she'd stay and help Madame Masson with

the dishes. The little Parisienne said that first they'd have

to get rid of the men. The three of us went down to the

beach.

The sun was shining almost directly overhead onto

the sand, and the glare on the water was unbearable.

There was no one left on the beach. From inside the bungalows bordering the plateau and jutting out over

the water, we could hear the rattling of plates and

silverware.

It was hard to breathe in the rocky heat

rising from the ground. At first Raymond and Masson

discussed people and things I didn’t know about.

gathered they'd known each other for a long time and

had even lived together at one point. We headed down

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to the sea and walked along the water's edge. Now and

then a little wave would come up higher than the

others and wet our canvas shoes.

I wasn’t thinking

about anything, because I was half asleep from the sun

beating down on my bare head.

At that point Raymond said something to Masson which I didn’t quite catch.

But at the same time I

noticed, at the far end of the beach and a long way from

us, two Arabs in blue overalls coming in our direction.

I looked at Raymond and he said, “It’s him.” We kept

walking. Masson asked how they'd managed to follow

us all this way. I thought they must have seen us get on

the bus with a beach bag, but I didn’t say anything.

The Arabs were walking slowly, but they were

already much closer. We didn’t change our pace, but Raymond said, “If there’s any trouble, Masson, you

take the other one.

I'll take care of my man. Meursault,

if another one shows up, he’s yours.” I said, “Yes,” and Masson put his hands in his pockets. The blazing sand looked red to me now. We moved steadily toward the

Arabs. The distance between us was getting shorter and

shorter. When we were just a few steps away from each

other, the Arabs stopped. Masson and I slowed down.

Raymond went right up to his man.

I couldn't hear what he said to him, but the other guy made a move as though he were going to butt him. Then Raymond struck

the first blow and called Masson right away. Masson went

for the one that had been pointed out as his and hit him

twice, as hard as he could. The Arab fell flat in the water,

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facedown, and lay there for several seconds with bubbles

bursting on the surface around his head. Meanwhile Raymond had landed one too, and the other Arab’s face

was bleeding. Raymond turned to me and said, “Watch

this. I'm gonna let him have it now.’ I shouted, “Look

out, he’s got a knife!” But Raymond's arm had already

been cut open and his mouth slashed. Masson lunged

forward. But the other Arab had gotten back up and gone

around behind the one with the knife. We didn’t dare

move. They started backing off slowly, without taking

their eyes off us, keeping us at bay with the knife. When

they thought they were far enough away, they took off

running as fast as they could while we stood there

motionless in the sun and Raymond clutched at his arm

dripping with blood.

Masson immediately said there was a doctor who

spent his Sundays up on the plateau. Raymond wanted

to go see him right away. But every time he tried to talk

the blood bubbled in his mouth. We steadied him and made our way back to the bungalow as quickly as we

could. Once there, Raymond said that they were only

flesh wounds and that he could make it to the doctor’s.

He left with Masson and I stayed to explain to the women what had happened. Madame Masson was cry-

ing and Marie was very pale.

I didn’t like having to ex-

plain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and

looked at the sea.

Raymond came back with Masson around one-thirty.

His arm was bandaged up and he had an adhesive

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plaster on the corer of his mouth. The doctor had told

him that it was nothing, but Raymond looked pretty

grim. Masson tried to make him laugh.

But he still

wouldn't say anything. When he said he was going down to the beach, I asked him where he was going.

He said he wanted to get some air. Masson and I said wed go with him. But that made him angry and he swore

at us. Masson said not to argue with him.

I followed

him anyway.

We walked on the beach for a long time. By now

the sun was overpowering. It shattered into little pieces

on the sand and water.

I had the impression that Ray-mond knew where he was going, but I was probably

wrong. At the far end of the beach we finally came to a

little spring running down through the sand behind a

large rock. There we found our two Arabs. They were

lying down, in their greasy overalls. They seemed per-

fectly calm and almost content. Our coming changed

nothing.

The one who had attacked Raymond was

looking at him without saying anything. The other one

was blowing through a little reed over and over again, watching us out of the corner of his eye. He kept repeat-

ing the only three notes he could get out of his in-

strument.

The whole time there was nothing but the sun and

the silence, with the low gurgling from the spring and

the three notes. Then Raymond put his hand in his

hip pocket, but the others didn’t move, they just kept

looking at each other.

I noticed that the toes on the one

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playing the flute were tensed. But without taking his

eyes off his adversary, Raymond asked me, “Should I

let him have it?” I thought that if I said no he'd get

himself all worked up and shoot for sure. All I said was,

“He hasn't said anything yet.

It'd be pretty lousy to

shoot him like that.” You could still hear the sound of

the water and the flute deep within the silence and the

heat. Then Raymond said, “So I'll call him something

and when he answers back, I'll let him have it.” I answered, “Right. But if he doesn’t draw his knife, you

can’t shoot.” Raymond started getting worked up. The

other Arab went on playing, and both of them were watching every move Raymond made. “No,” I said

to Raymond, “take him on man to man and give me your

gun. If the other one moves in, or if he draws his knife,

I'l] let him have it.” The sun glinted off Raymond's gun as he handed it

to me. But we just stood there motionless, as if every-

thing had closed in around us. We stared at each other

without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double

silence of the flute and the water.

It was then that I

realized that you could either shoot or not shoot. But

all of a sudden, the Arabs, backing away, slipped be-

hind the rock. So Raymond and I turned and headed

back the way we'd come. He seemed better and talked

about the bus back.

I went with him as far as the bungalow, and as he climbed the wooden steps, I just stood there at the

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bottom, my head ringing from the sun, unable to face

the effort it would take to climb the wooden staircase

and face the women again. But the heat was so intense

that it was just as bad standing still in the blinding

stream falling from the sky. To stay or to go, it amounted

to the same thing. A minute later I turned back toward

the beach and started walking.

There was the same dazzling red glare. The sea

gasped for air with each shallow, stifled little wave that

broke on the sand.

I was walking slowly toward the

rocks and I could feel my forehead swelling under the

sun. All that heat was pressing down on me and making

it hard for me to go on. And every time I felt a blast of

its hot breath strike my face, I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists in my trouser pockets, and strained every nerve

in order to overcome the sun and the thick drunkenness

it was spilling over me. With every blade of light that

flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a piece of broken glass, my jaws tightened.

I walked for a long

time.

From a distance I could see the small, dark mass of

rock surrounded by a blinding halo of light and sea

spray. I was thinking of the cool spring behind the rock.

I wanted to hear the murmur of its water again, to escape

the sun and the strain and the women’s tears, and to

find shade and rest again at last. But as I got closer, I

saw that Raymond’s man had come back.

He was alone. He was lying on his back, with his

hands behind his head, his forehead in the shade of the

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rock, the rest of his body in the sun. His blue overalls seemed to be steaming in the heat.

I was a little sur-

prised. As far as I was concerned, the whole thing was

over, and I’d gone there without even thinking about it.

As soon as he saw me, he sat up a little and put his

hand in his pocket. Naturally, I gripped Raymond's gun inside my jacket. Then he lay back again, but with-

out taking his hand out of his pocket.

I was pretty far

away from him, about ten meters or so. I could tell he was

glancing at me now and then through half-closed eyes.

But most of the time, he was just a form shimmering

before my eyes in the fiery air. The sound of the waves

was even lazier, more drawn out than at noon.

It was

the same sun, the same light still shining on the same

sand as before. For two hours the day had stood still;

for two hours it had been anchored in a sea of molten

lead. On the horizon, a tiny steamer went by, and I made out the black dot from the corner of my eye be-

cause I hadn't stopped watching the Arab.

It occurred to me that all I had to do was turn around and that would be the end of it. But the whole

beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back. I

took a few steps toward the spring. The Arab didn’t

move. Besides, he was still pretty far away. Maybe it

was the shadows on his face, but it looked like he was

laughing.

I waited. The sun was starting to burn my

cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my

eyebrows. The sun was the same as it had been the

day I'd buried Maman, and like then, my forehead

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especially was hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing

under the skin.

It was this burning, which I couldn't

stand anymore, that made me move forward.

I knew

that it was stupid, that I wouldn't get the sun off me

by stepping forward. But I took a step, one step, forward.

And this time, without getting up, the Arab drew his

knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off

the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead. At the same instant the sweat in my eye-

brows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and

covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were

blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. All I could

feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my fore-

head and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear fying up from

the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That's when everything began to reel. The sea carried up a

thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open

from one end to the other to rain down fire. My whole

being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the

revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside

of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafen-

ing at the same time, is where it all started.

I shook off

the sweat and sun.

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at

the motionless body where the bullets lodged without

leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times

on the door of unhappiness.

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PART TWO

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Right after my arrest I was questioned several times, but

it was just so they could find out who I was, which didn’t

take long. The first time, at the police station, nobody seemed very interested in my case. A week later, how-

ever, the examining magistrate looked me over with

curiosity. But to get things started he simply asked my name and address, my occupation, the date and place of my birth. Then he wanted to know if I had hired an

attorney.

I admitted I hadn't and inquired whether it

was really necessary to have one. “Why do you ask?”

he said.

I said I thought my case was pretty simple. He

smiled and said, “That’s your opinion. But the law is

the law. If you don’t hire an attorney yourself, the court

will appoint one.” I thought it was very convenient that

the court should take care of those details.

I told him

so. He agreed with me and concluded that it was a

good law.

At first, I didn’t take him seriously.

I was led into a

curtained room, there was a single lamp on his desk which was shining on a chair where he had me sit while

he remained standing in the shadows.

I had read

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descriptions of

scenes like this in books and it all seemed like a game to me.

After our conversation,

though, I looked at him and saw a tall, fine-featured man with deep-set blue eyes, a long gray moustache, and

lots of thick, almost white hair. He struck me as being

very reasonable and, overall, quite pleasant, despite a

nervous tic which made his mouth twitch now and then.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but

just in time, I remembered that I had killed a man.

The next day a lawyer came to see me at the prison.

He was short and chubby, quite young, his hair care-

fully slicked back. Despite the heat (I was in my shirt

sleeves), he had on a dark suit, a wing collar, and an

odd-looking tie with broad black and white stripes. He

put the briefcase he was carrying down on my bed, in-

troduced himself, and said he had gone over my fie.

My case was a tricky one, but he had no doubts we'd

win, if I trusted him.

I thanked him and he said, “Let’s

get down to business.”

He sat down on the bed and explained to me that

there had been some investigations into my private life.

It had been learned that my mother had died recently at

the home. Inquiries had then been made in Marengo.

The investigators had learned that I had “shown in-

sensitivity’ the day of Maman’s funeral. “You under-

stand,” my lawyer said, “it’s a little embarrassing for me

to have to ask you this. But it’s very important. And it

will be a strong argument for the prosecution if I can’t come up with some answers.” He wanted me to help him.

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He asked if I had felt any sadness that day. The ques-

tion caught me by surprise and it seemed to me that I would have been very embarrassed if I'd had to ask it.

Nevertheless I answered that I had pretty much lost the

habit of analyzing myself and that it was hard for me to

tell him what he wanted to know.

I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or

another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead.

Here the lawyer interrupted me and he seemed very upset. He made me promise I wouldn't say

that at my hearing or in front of the examining magis-

trate.

I explained to him, however, that my nature was

such that my physical needs often got in the way of my

feelings. The day I buried Maman, I was very tired and

sleepy, so much so that I wasn’t really aware of what

was going on. What I can say for certain is that I would

rather Maman hadn't died. But my lawyer didn’t seem

satisfied. He said, “That's not enough.” He thought for a minute. He asked me if he could

say that that day I had held back my natural feelings.

said, “No, because it’s not true.” He gave me a strange

look, as if he found me slightly disgusting. He told me

in an almost snide way that in any case the director

and the staff of the home would be called as witnesses

and that “things could get very nasty” for me.

I pointed

out to him that none of this had anything to do with my

case, but all he said was that it was obvious I had never

had any dealings with the law.

He left, looking angry.

I wished I could have made

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him stay, to explain that I wanted things between us to

be good, not so that he’d defend me better but, if I can

put it this way, good in a natural way. Mostly, I could

tell) I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t under-

stand me, and he was sort of holding it against me.

felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody

else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

Shortly after that, I was taken before the examining

magistrate again.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and this time his office was filled with sunlight barely

softened by a flimsy curtain. It was very hot. He had me

sit down and very politely informed me that, “due to

unforeseen circumstances,’ my lawyer had been unable

to come. But I had the right to remain silent and to wait

for my lawyer’s counsel.

I said that I could answer for

myself. He pressed a button on the table. A young clerk came in and sat down right behind me.

The two of us leaned back in our chairs.

The examination began. He started out by saying that peo-

ple were describing me as a taciturn and withdrawn person and he wanted to know what I thought.

I an-swered, “It’s just that I don’t have much to say. So I

keep quiet.” He smiled the way he had the first time,

agreed that that was the best reason of all, and added,

“Besides, it’s not important.” Then he looked at me

without saying anything, leaned forward rather abruptly,

and said very quickly, “What interests me is you.” I

didn’t really understand what he meant by that, so I

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didn’t respond. “There are one or two things,’ he

added, “that I don’t quite understand. I’m sure you'll

help me clear them up.” I said it was all pretty simple.

He pressed me to go back over that day.

I went back

over what I had already told him: Raymond, the beach,

the swim, the quarrel, then back to the beach, the little

spring, the sun, and the five shots from the revolver.

After each sentence he would say, “Fine, fine.” When I

got to the body lying there, he nodded and said, “Good.”

But I was tired of repeating the same story over and

over. It seemed as if I had never talked so much in my

life.

After a short silence, he stood up and told me that he wanted to help me, that I interested him, and that, with

God’s help, he would do something for me.

But first

he wanted to ask me a few more questions. Without working up to it, he asked if I loved Maman. I said,

“Yes, the same as anyone, and the clerk, who up to then

had been typing steadily, must have hit the wrong key,

because he lost his place and had to go back. Again

without any apparent logic, the magistrate then asked if

I had fired all five shots at once.

I thought for a minute

and explained that at first I had fired a single shot and

then, a few seconds later, the other four. Then he said, “Why did you pause between the first and second shot?” Once again I could see the red sand and feel the burning

of the sun on my forehead. But this time I didn’t answer.

In the silence that followed, the magistrate seemed to be

getting fidgety. He sat down, ran his fingers through his

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hair, put his elbows on his desk, and leaned toward me

slightly with a strange look on his face. “Why, why did

you shoot at a body that was on the ground?’ Once again

I didn’t know how to answer. The magistrate ran his hands across his forehead and repeated his question with

a slightly different tone in his voice. “Why? You must

tell me. Why?” Still I didn’t say anything.

Suddenly he stood up, strode over to a far corner

of his office, and pulled out a drawer in a file cabinet.

He took out a silver crucifix which he brandished as he

came toward me. And in a completely different, almost

cracked voice, he shouted, “Do you know what this is?”

I said, “Yes, of course.” Speaking very quickly and pas-

sionately, he told me that he believed in God, that it

was his conviction that no man was so guilty that God would not forgive him, but in order for that to happen

a man must repent and in so doing become like a child whose heart is open and ready to embrace all. He was

leaning all the way over the table. He was waving his

crucifix almost directly over my head. To tell the truth,

I had found it very hard to follow his reasoning, first

because I was hot and there were big flies in his office

that kept landing on my face, and also because he was

scaring me a little. At the same time I knew that that

was ridiculous because, after all, I was the criminal. He

went on anyway. I vaguely understood that to his mind

there was just one thing that wasn’t clear in my con-

fession, the fact that I had hesitated before I fired my

second shot. The rest was fine, but that part he couldn't understand.

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I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it,

because it really didn’t matter. But he cut me off and

urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full

height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He

sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men

believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him.

That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his

life would become meaningless. “Do you want my life to

be meaningless?” he shouted. As far as I could see, it

didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so.

But from across the table he had already thrust the

crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally,

“I

am a Christian.

I ask Him to forgive you your sins. How

can you not believe that He suffered for you?” I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough.

It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever [| want to get rid of someone I’m not really listening to,

I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted

triumphant. “You see, you see!” he said. “You do believe,

don’t you, and you're going to place your trust in Him,

arent you? Obviously, I again said no. He fell back

in his chair.

He seemed to be very tired. He didn’t say anything

for a minute while the typewriter, which hadn't let up

the whole time, was still tapping out the last few sen-

tences. Then he looked at me closely and with a little

sadness in his face. In a low voice he said, “I have never

seen a soul as hardened as yours. The criminals who have come before me have always wept at the sight of this image of suffering.” I was about to say that that was

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precisely because they were criminals.

But then I

realized that I was one too. It was an idea I couldn't get

used to. Then the judge stood up, as if to give me the

signal that the examination was over. He simply asked,

in the same weary tone, if I was sorry for what I had

done.

I thought about it for a minute and said that more than sorry I felt kind of annoyed.

I got the im-pression he didn’t understand. But that was as far as

things went that day.

After that, I saw a lot of the magistrate, except that my lawyer was with me each time. But it was just a

matter of clarifying certain things in my previous state-

ments. Or else the magistrate would discuss the charges

with my lawyer. But on those occasions they never really

paid much attention to me. Anyway, the tone of the ques-

tioning gradually changed. The magistrate seemed to

have lost interest in me and to have come to some sort

of decision about my case. He didn’t talk to me about God anymore, and I never saw him as worked up as he

was that first day. The result was that our discussions became more cordial. A few questions, a brief conversa-

tion with my lawyer, and the examinations were over.

As the magistrate put it, my case was taking its course.

And then sometimes, when the conversation was of a

more general nature, I would be included.

I started to

breathe more freely. No one, in any of these meetings,

was rough with me. Everything was so natural, so well

handled, and so calmly acted out that I had the ridicu-

lous impression of being “one of the family.” And I can

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say that at the end of the eleven months that this in-

vestigation lasted, I was almost surprised that I had ever enjoyed anything other than those rare moments when

the judge would lead me to the door of his office, slap me

on the shoulder, and say to me cordially, “That’s all for

today, Monsieur Antichrist.” I would then be handed

back over to the police.

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There are some things I’ve never liked talking about. A

few days after I entered prison, I realized that I wouldn’t

like talking about this part of my life.

Later on, though, I no longer saw any point to my

reluctance. In fact, I wasn't really in prison those first

few days: I was sort of waiting for something to happen.

It was only after Marie’s first and last visit that it all

started. From the day I got her letter (she told me she would no longer be allowed to come, because she wasn’t

my wife), from that day on I felt that I was at home in my cell and that my life was coming to a standstill

there. The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they

asked me what I was in for.

I said I'd killed an Arab

and they were all silent. A few minutes later, it got dark.

They showed me how to fix the mat I was supposed to

sleep on. One end could be rolled up to make a pillow.

All night I felt bugs crawling over my face. A few days

later I was put in a cell by myself, where I slept on wooden boards suspended from the wall.

I had a bucket

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for a toilet and a tin washbasin. The prison was on

the heights above the town, and through a small window

I could see the sea. One day as I was gripping the bars, my face straining toward the light, a guard came in and

told me I had a visitor.

I thought it must be Marie.

was.

To get to the visiting room I went down a long cor-

ridor, then down some stairs and, finally, another cor-

tidor.

I walked into a very large room brightened by a

huge bay window. The room was divided. into three

sections by two large grates that ran the length of the room. Between the two grates was a space of eight to

ten meters which separated the visitors from the prisoners.

I spotted Marie standing at the opposite end of the room

with her striped dress and her sun-tanned face. On my

side of the room there were about ten prisoners, most

of them Arabs. Marie was surrounded by Moorish women

and found herself between two visitors: a little, thin-

lipped old woman dressed in black and a fat, bareheaded woman who was talking at the top of her voice and making lots of gestures. Because of the distance between

the grates, the visitors and the prisoners were forced to

speak very loud. When I walked in, the sound of the

voices echoing off the room's high, bare walls and the

harsh light pouring out of the sky onto the windows and

spilling into the room brought on a kind of dizziness.

My cell was quieter and darker. It took me a few seconds

to adjust. But eventually I could see each face clearly,

distinctly in the bright light.

I noticed there was a

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guard sitting at the far end of the passage between the

two grates. Most of the Arab prisoners and their families

had squatted down facing each other. They weren't

shouting. Despite the commotion, they were managing to make themselves heard by talking in very low voices.

Their subdued murmuring, coming from lower down, formed a kind of bass accompaniment to the conversa-

tions crossing above their heads.

I took all this in very

quickly as I made my way toward Marie. Already pressed

up against the grate, she was smiling her best smile for

me.

I thought she looked very beautiful, but I didn’t know how to tell her.

“Well?” she called across to me. “Well, here I am.”

“Are you all right? Do you have everything you want?”

“Yes, everything.” We stopped talking and Marie went on smiling. The

fat woman yelled to the man next to me, her husband

probably, a tall blond guy with an honest face. It was the

continuation of a conversation already under way.

“Jeanne wouldn't take him,” she shouted as loudly as

she could. “Uh-huh,” said the man.

“I told her you'd

take him back when you get out, but she wouldn't take

him.” Then it was Marie’s turn to shout, that Raymond

sent his regards, and I said, “Thanks.” But my voice was drowned out by the man next to me, who asked, “Is he

all right?” His wife laughed and said, “He’s never been

better.” The man on my left, a small young man with

delicate hands, wasn’t saying anything.

I noticed that

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he was across from the little old lady and that they were

staring intently at each other. But I didn’t have time to watch them any longer, because Marie shouted to me

that I had to have hope. I said, “Yes.” I was looking at

her as she said it and I wanted to squeeze her shoulders through her dress. I wanted to feel the thin material and

I didn’t really know what else I had to hope for other

than that. But that was probably what Marie meant,

because she was still smiling. All I could see was the

sparkle of her teeth and the little folds of her eyes. She

shouted again, “You'll get out and we'll get married!” I answered, “You think so?” but it was mainly just to say

something. Then very quickly and still in a very loud

voice she said yes, that I would be acquitted and that we would go swimming again. But the other woman took

her turn to shout and said that she had left a basket at

the clerk’s office. She was listing all the things she had

put in it, to make sure they were all there, because they

cost a lot of money. The young man and his mother

were still staring at each other. The murmuring of the

Arabs continued below us. Outside, the light seemed to

surge up over the bay window.

I was feeling a little sick and I'd have liked to leave.

The noise was getting painful. But on the other hand, I wanted to make the most of Marie’s being there.

I don’t know how much time went by. Marie told me about her

job and she never stopped smiling. The murmuring, the

shouting, and the conversations were crossing back and

forth. The only oasis of silence was next to me where

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the small young man and the old woman were gazing at

each other. One by one the Arabs were taken away.

Almost everyone stopped talking as soon as the first one

left. The little old woman moved closer to the bars,

and at the same moment a guard motioned to her son.

He said “Goodbye, Maman,” and she reached between

two bars to give him a long, slow little wave.

She left just as another man came in, hat in hand,

and took her place. Another prisoner was brought in and

they talked excitedly, but softly, because the room had

once again grown quiet. They came for the man on my

tight, and his wife said to him without lowering her

voice, as if she hadn’t noticed there was no need to

shout anymore, “Take care of yourself and be careful.” Then it was my turn. Marie threw me a kiss.

I looked

back before disappearing. She hadn't moved and her face

was still pressed against the bars with the same sad, forced

smile on it.

Shortly after that was when she wrote to me. And

the things I’ve never liked talking about began. Anyway,

I shouldn't exaggerate, and it was easier for me than

for others. When I was first imprisoned, the hardest

thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man.

For example, I would suddenly have the urge to be on a

beach and to walk down to the water. As I imagined the sound of the first waves under my feet, my body enter-

ing the water and the sense of relief it would give me,

all of a sudden I would feel just how closed in I was by

the walls of my cell. But that only lasted a few months.

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Afterwards my only thoughts were those of a prisoner.

I waited for the daily walk, which I took in the courtyard,

or for a visit from my lawyer. The rest of the time | managed pretty well. At the time, I often thought that

if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead,

little by little I would have gotten used to it.

I would

have waited for birds to fly by or clouds to mingle,

just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as,

in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday

to hold Marie’s body in my arms. Now, as I think back

on it, I wasn’t in a hollow tree trunk. There were others

worse off than me. Anyway, it was one of Maman’s ideas,

and she often repeated it, that after a while you could

get used to anything.

Besides, I usually didn’t take things so far. The first months were hard. But in fact the effort I had to make

helped pass the time. For example, I was tormented by my desire for a woman. It was only natural; I was young.

I never thought specifically of Marie. But I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones

I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their

faces and crowded with my desires.

In one sense, it

threw me off balance. But in another, it killed time.

had ended up making friends with the head guard, who

used to make the rounds with the kitchen hands at meal-

time. He’s the one who first talked to me about women.

He told me it was the first thing the others complained

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about.

I told him it was the same for me and that I

thought it was unfair treatment. “But,” he said, “that’s

exactly why youre in prison.” “What do you mean that’s why?” “Well, yes—freedom, that’s why. They've taken away your freedom.” I'd never thought about that.

agreed. “It’s true,” I said. “Otherwise, what would be

the punishment?” “Right.

You see, you understand

these things. The rest of them don’t. But they just end

up doing it by themselves.” The guard left after that.

There were the cigarettes, too. When I entered

prison, they took away my belt, my shoelaces, my tie, and

everything I had in my pockets, my cigarettes in par-

ticular. Once I was in my cell, I asked to have them back.

But I was told I wasn’t allowed. The first few days were

really rough. That may be the thing that was hardest

for me.

I would suck on chips of wood that I broke off my bed planks. I walked around nauseated all day long.

I couldn’t understand why they had taken them away when they didn’t hurt anybody. Later on I realized that

that too was part of the punishment. But by then I had gotten used to not smoking and it wasn’t a punishment anymore.

Apart from these annoyances, I wasn’t too unhappy.

Once again the main problem was killing time. Eventu-

ally, once I learned how to remember things, I wasn’t

bored at all. Sometimes I would get to thinking about my room, and in my imagination I would start at one

corner and circle the room, mentally noting everything

there was on the way. At first it didn’t take long. But

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every time I started over, it took a little longer.

I would remember every piece of furniture; and on every piece of

furniture, every object; and of every object, all the de-

tails; and ot the details themselves—a flake, a crack, or

a chipped edge—the color and the texture. At the same

time I would try not to lose the thread of my inventory,

to make a complete list, so that after a few weeks I

could spend hours just enumerating the things that

were in my room. And the more I thought about it, the

more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked

or forgotten.

I realized then that a man who had lived

only one day could easily live for a hundred years in

prison. He would have enough memories to keep him

from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.

Then there was sleep. At first, I didn’t sleep well at

night and not at all during the day. Little by little, my

nights got better and I was able to sleep during the day,

too. In fact, during the last few months I’ve been sleep-

ing sixteen to eighteen hours a day. That would leave

me six hours to kill with meals, nature’s call, my memories, and the story about the Czechoslovakian.

Between my straw mattress and the bed planks, [|

had actually found an old scrap of newspaper, yellow

and transparent, half-stuck to the canvas. On it was a

news story, the first part of which was missing, but which must have taken place in Czechoslovakia.

A man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune. Twenty-

five years later, and now rich, he had returned with a

wife and a child. His mother was running a hotel with

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his sister in the village where he’d been born. In order

to surprise them, he had left his wife and child at another

hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn’t recognize

him when he walked in. As a joke he'd had the idea of

taking a room. He had shown off his money. During the

night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death

with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his

body in the river. The next morning the wife had come

to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the

traveler's identity.

The mother hanged herself.

The

sister threw herself down a well.

I must have read that

story a thousand times. On the one hand it wasn't very

likely. On the other, it was perfectly natural. Anyway,

I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he

got and that you should never play games.

So, with all the sleep, my memories, reading my

crime story, and the alternation of light and darkness,

time passed. Of course I had read that eventually you wind up losing track of time in prison. But it hadn't meant much to me when Id read it. I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time:

long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their

names. Only the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow’’ still

had any meaning for me.

One day when the guard told me that I'd been in for

five months, I believed it, but I didn’t understand it.

For me it was one and the same unending day that was unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to

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do. That day, after the guard had left, I looked at my-

self in my tin plate. My reflection seemed to remain

serious even though I was trying to smile at it.

I moved

the plate around in front of me.

I smiled and it still had

the same sad, stern expression. It was near the end of the

day, the time of day I don't like talking about, that

nameless hour when the sounds of evening would rise up from every floor of the prison in a cortege of silence. | moved closer to the window, and in the last light of day

I gazed at my reflection one more time.

It was still serious—and what was surprising about that, since at

that moment I was too? But at the same time, and for

the first time in months, I distinctly heard the sound

of my own voice.

I recognized it as the same one that

had been ringing in my ears for many long days, and I

realized that all that time I had been talking to myself.

Then I remembered what the nurse at Maman’s funeral

said. No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine

what nights in prison are like.

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But I can honestly say that the time from summer to summer went very quickly. And I knew as soon as the

weather turned hot that something new was in store for

me. My case was set down for the last session of the

Court of Assizes, and that session was due to end some

time in June. The trial opened with the sun glaring out-

side. My lawyer had assured me that it wouldn't last more

than two or three days. “Besides,” he had added, “the

court will be pressed for time. Yours isn’t the most im-

portant case of the session. Right after you, there's a

patricide coming up.” They came for me at seven-thirty in the morning and

I was driven to the courthouse in the prison van. The

two policemen took me into a small room that smelled

of darkness. We waited, seated near a door through which we could hear voices, shouts, chairs being dragged

across the floor, and a lot of commotion which made me

think of those neighborhood fétes when the hall is

cleared for dancing after the concert. The policemen

told me we had to wait for the judges and one of them

offered me a cigarette, which I turned down. Shortly

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after that he asked me if I had the “jitters.” I said no—

and that, in a way, I was even interested in seeing a trial.

I'd never had the chance before. “Yeah,” said the other

policeman, “but it gets a little boring after a while.”

A short time later a small bell rang in the room.

Then they took my handcuffs off. They opened the door

and led me into the dock.

The room was packed.

Despite the blinds, the sun filtered through in places

and the air was already stifling. They hadn’t opened the

windows.

I sat down with the policemen standing on

either side of me.

It was then that I noticed a row of

faces in front of me. They were all looking at me: |

realized that they were the jury. But I can’t say what distinguished one from another.

I had just one im-

pression: I was sitting across from a row of seats on a

streetcar and al] these anonymous passengers were look-

ing over the new arrival to see if they could find some-

thing funny about him.

I knew it was a silly idea since it

wasn't anything funny they were after but a crime.

There isn’t much difference, though—in any case that

was the idea that came to me.

I was feeling a little dizzy too, with all those people

in that stuffy room. I looked around the courtroom again

but I couldn't make out a single face.

I think that at

first I hadn't realized that all those people were crowding

in to see me. Usually people didn’t pay much attention

to me. It took some doing on my part to understand that

I was the cause of all the excitement.

I said to the police-

man, “Some crowd!” He told me it was because of the

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press and he pointed to a group of men at a table just

below the jury box. He said, “That's them.” I asked, “Who?” and he repeated, “The press.” He knew one of

the reporters, who just then spotted him and was making

his way toward us. He was an older, friendly man with

a twisted little grin on his face. He gave the policeman a warm handshake.

I noticed then that everyone was waving and exchanging greetings and talking, as if they

were in a club where people are glad to find themselves among others from the same world. That is how I ex-

plained to myself the strange impression I had of being

odd man out, a kind of intruder. Yet the reporter turned and spoke to me with a smile. He told me that he hoped everything would go well for me.

I thanked him and

he added, “You know, we've blown your case up a little.

Summer is the slow season for the news. And your story

and the parricide were the only ones worth bothering

about.” Then he pointed in the direction of the group

he had just left, at a little man who looked like a

fattened-up weasel.

He told me that the man was a

special correspondent for a Paris paper. “Actually, he

didn’t come because of you. But since they assigned him

to cover the parricide trial, they asked him to send a dis-

patch about your case at the same time.” And again [|

almost thanked him. But I thought that that would be

tidiculous. He waved cordially, shyly, and left us. We

waited a few more minutes.

My lawyer arrived, in his gown, surrounded by lots

of colleagues. He walked over to the reporters and shook

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some hands. They joked and laughed and looked com-

pletely at ease, until the moment when the bell in the

court rang. Everyone went back to his place. My lawyer walked over to me, shook my hand, and advised me to

respond briefly to the questions that would be put to me,

not to volunteer anything, and to leave the rest to him.

To my left I heard the sound of a chair being pulled

out and I saw a tall, thin man dressed in red and wear-

ing a pince-nez who was carefully folding his robe as he

sat down. That was the prosecutor. A bailiff said, “All

rise.’ At the same time two large fans started to whir.

Three judges, two in black, the third in red, entered with

files in hand and walked briskly to the rostrum which dominated the room. The man in the red gown sat on

the chair in the middle, set his cap down in front of him, wiped his bald little head with a handkerchief, and an-nounced that the court was now in session.

The reporters already had their pens in hand. They

all had the same indifferent and somewhat snide look on

their faces. One of them, however, much younger than

the others, wearing gray flannels and a blue tie, had left

his pen lying in front of him and was looking at me. All

I could see in his slightly lopsided face were his two

very bright eyes, which were examining me closely

without betraying any definable emotion. And I had the

odd impression of being watched by myself. Maybe it

was for that reason, and also because I wasn’t familiar

with all the procedures, that I didn’t quite understand everything that happened next: the drawing of lots for

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the jury; the questions put by the presiding judge to my

lawyer, the prosecutor, and the jury (each time, the

jurors heads would all turn toward the bench at the

same time); the quick reading of the indictment, in which I recognized names of people and places; and some more questions to my lawyer.

Anyway, the presiding judge said he was going to

proceed with the calling of witnesses. The bailiff read off

some names that caught my attention. In the middle of

what until then had been a shapeless mass of spectators,

I saw them stand up one by one, only to disappear

again through a side door: the director and the caretaker

from the home, old Thomas Pérez, Raymond, Masson, Salamano, and Marie. She waved to me, anxiously.

was still feeling surprised that I hadn’t seen them before when Céleste, the last to be called, stood up.

I recog-

nized next to him the little woman from the restaurant,

with her jacket and her stiff and determined manner.

She was staring right at me. But I didn’t have time to

think about them, because the presiding judge started

speaking.

He said that the formal proceedings were

about to begin and that he didn’t think he needed to remind the public to remain silent. According to him,

he was there to conduct in an impartial manner the pro-

ceedings of a case which he would consider objectively.

The verdict returned by the jury would be taken in a

spirit of justice, and, in any event, he would have the courtroom cleared at the slightest disturbance.

It was getting hotter, and I could see the people in

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the courtroom fanning themselves with newspapers, which made a continuous low rustling sound.

The presiding judge gave a signal and the bailiff brought

over three fans made of woven straw which the three judges started waving immediately.

My examination began right away. The presiding

judge questioned me calmly and even, it seemed to me,

with a hint of cordiality. Once again he had me state

my name, age, date and place of birth, and although it

irritated me, I realized it was only natural, because it would be a very serious thing to try the wrong man. Then

he reread the narrative of what I'd done, turning to me every few sentences to ask “Is that correct?” Each time

I answered “Yes, Your Honor,’ as my lawyer had in-

structed me to do.

It took a long time because the judge went into minute detail in his narrative. The

reporters were writing the whole time.

I was conscious

of being watched by the youngest of them and by

the little robot woman. Everyone on the row of streetcar

seats was turned directly toward the judge, who coughed,

leafed through his file, and turned toward me, fanning

himself.

He told me that he now had to turn to some ques-

tions that might seem irrelevant to my case but might in

fact have a significant bearing on it.

I knew right away

he was going to talk about Maman again, and at the

same time I could feel how much it irritated me. He asked me why I had put Maman in the home. I answered

that it was because I didn’t have the money to have her

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looked after and cared for. He asked me if it had been

hard on me, and I answered that Maman and I didn’t expect anything from each other anymore, or from any-

one else either, and that we had both gotten used to our new lives. The judge then said that he didn’t want to dwell on this point, and he asked the prosecutor if he had

any further questions.

The prosecutor had his back half-turned to me, and

without looking at me he stated that, with the court's

permission, he would like to know whether I had gone

back to the spring by myself intending to kill the Arab.

“No,” I said. Well, then, why was I armed and why

did I return to precisely that spot? I said it just happened

that way. And the prosecutor noted in a nasty voice,

“That will be all for now.” After that things got a little

confused, at least for me. But after some conferring, the judge announced that the hearing was adjourned until

the afternoon, at which time the witnesses would be

heard.

I didn’t even have time to think.

I was taken out,

put into the van, and driven to the prison, where I had something to eat. After a very short time, just long enough for me to realize I was tired, they came back

for me; the whole thing started again, and I found

myself in the same courtroom, in front of the same

faces. Only it was much hotter, and as if by some

miracle each member of the jury, the prosecutor, my

lawyer, and some of the reporters, too, had been pro-

vided with straw fans. The young reporter and the little

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robot woman were still there. They weren't fanning

themselves, but they were still watching me without

saying a word.

I wiped away the sweat covering my face, and I had

barely become aware of where I was and what I was

doing when I heard the director of the home being

called. He was asked whether Maman ever complained about me, and he said yes but that some of it was just a way the residents all had of complaining about their

relatives. The judge had him clarify whether she used

to reproach me for having put her in the home, and the

director again said yes. But this time he didn’t add any-

thing else. To another question he replied that he had

been surprised by my calm the day of the funeral. He was asked what he meant by “calm.” The director then

looked down at the tips of his shoes and said that I

hadn’t wanted to see Maman, that I hadn’t cried once,

and that I had left right after the funeral without pay-

ing my last respects at her grave. And one other thing

had surprised him: one of the men who worked for the undertaker had told him I didn’t know how old Maman

was. There was a brief silence, and then the judge asked him if he was sure I was the man he had just been

speaking of. The director didn't understand the question,

so the judge told him, “It’s a formality.” He then asked

the prosecutor if he had any questions to put to the

witness, and the prosecutor exclaimed, “Oh no, that is

quite sufficient!” with such glee and with such a tri-umphant look in my direction that for the first time in

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years I had this stupid urge to cry, because I could feel how much all these people hated me.

After asking the jury and my lawyer if they had any questions, the judge called the caretaker. The same

ritual was repeated for him as for all the others. As he

took the stand the caretaker glanced at me and then

looked away. He answered the questions put to him. He

said I hadn’t wanted to see Maman, that I had smoked

and slept some, and that I had had some coffee.

It was

then I felt a stirring go through the room and for the

first time I realized that I was guilty. The caretaker was

asked to repeat the part about the coffee and the cigarette.

The prosecutor looked at me with an ironic gleam in his

eye. At that point my lawyer asked the caretaker if it

wasn't true that he had smoked a cigarette with me. But

the prosecutor objected vehemently to this question. “Who is on trial here and what kind of tactics are these,

trying to taint the witnesses for the prosecution in an

effort to detract from testimony that remains nonethe-

less overwhelming!” In spite of all that, the judge directed

the caretaker to answer the question. The old man

looked embarrassed and said, “I know I was wrong to do

it. But I couldn’t refuse the cigarette when monsieur

offered it to me.” Lastly, I was asked if I had anything to

add. “Nothing,” I said, “except that the witness is right.

It’s true, I did offer him a cigarette.” The caretaker gave

me a surprised and somehow grateful look. He hesitated

and then he said that he was the one who offered me

the coffee. My lawyer was exultant and stated loudly that

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the jury would take note of the fact. But the prosecutor

shouted over our heads and said, “Indeed, the gentlemen

of the jury will take note of the fact. And they will

conclude that a stranger may offer a cup of coffee, but

that beside the body of the one who brought him into the

world, a son should have refused it.” The caretaker went

back to his bench.

When Thomas Pérez’s turn came, a bailiff had to

hold him up and help him get to the witness stand.

Pérez said it was really my mother he had known and

that he had seen me only once, on the day of the funeral.

He was asked how I had acted that day and he replied, “You understand, I was too sad. So I didn’t see anything.

My sadness made it impossible to see anything.

Be-

cause for me it was a very great sadness. And I even

fainted. So I wasn’t able to see monsieur.” The prosecu-

tor asked him if he had at least seen me cry. Pérez answered no. The prosecutor in turn said, “The gentle-men of the jury will take note.” But my lawyer got angry. He asked Pérez in what seemed to be an exag-

gerated tone of voice if he had seen me not cry. Pérez

said, “No.” The spectators laughed. And my lawyer,

rolling up one of his sleeves, said with finality, “Here we have a perfect reflection of this entire trial: everything

is true and nothing is true!” The prosecutor had a blank

expression on his face, and with a pencil he was poking

holes in the title page of his case file.

After a five-minute recess, during which my lawyer

told me that everything was working out for the best, we

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heard the testimony of Céleste, who was called by the

defense. “The defense” meant me. Every now and then

Céleste would glance over in my direction and rotate

his panama hat in his hands. He was wearing the new

suit he used to put on to go with me to the races some-

times on Sundays. But I think he must not have been

able to get his collar on, because he only had a brass

stud keeping his shirt fastened. He was asked if I was

a customer of his and he said, “Yes, but he was also a

friend”; what he thought of me, and he answered that I

was a man; what he meant by that, and he stated that everybody knew what that meant; if he had noticed that

I was ever withdrawn, and all he would admit was that

I didn’t speak unless I had something to say. The prosecu-

tor asked him if I kept up with my bill. Céleste laughed

and said, “Between us those were just details.” He was

again asked what he thought about my crime. He put his hands on the edge of the box, and you could tell he had something prepared. He said, “The way I see it, it’s bad

luck. Everybody knows what bad luck is.

It leaves you

defenseless. And there it is! The way I see it, it’s bad

luck.” He was about to go on, but the judge told him

that that would be all and thanked him. Céleste was a

little taken aback. But he stated that he had more to say.

He was asked to be brief. He again repeated that it was

bad luck. And the judge said, “Yes, fine. But we are here

to judge just this sort of bad luck. Thank you.” And

as if he had reached the end of both his knowledge and

his goodwill, Céleste then turned toward me.

It looked

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to me as if his eyes were glistening and his lips were

trembling. He seemed to be asking me what else he

could do.

I said nothing; I made no gesture of any kind,

but it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss

a man. The judge again instructed him to step down.

Céleste went and sat among the spectators. He sat there throughout the entire trial, leaning forward, his elbows on

his knees, the panama hat in his hands, listening to

everything that was said.

Marie entered. She had put on a hat and she was still

beautiful.

But I liked her better with her hair loose.

From where I was sitting, I could just make out the

slight fullness of her breasts, and I recognized the little

pout of her lower lip. She seemed very nervous. Right away she was asked how long she had known me. She

said since the time she worked in our office. The judge wanted to know what her relation to me was. She said

she was my friend. To another question she answered

yes, it was true that she was supposed to marry me. Flip-

ping through a file, the prosecutor asked her bluntly when our “liaison” had begun. She indicated the date.

The prosecutor remarked indifferently that if he was

not mistaken, that was the day after Maman died. Then

in a slightly ironic tone he said that he didn’t mean to

dwell on such a delicate matter, and that he fully ap-

preciated Marie’s misgivings, but (and here his tone

grew firmer) that he was duty bound to go beyond propriety. So he asked Marie to describe briefly that day when I had first known her. Marie didn’t want to, but

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at the prosecutor's insistence, she went over our swim,

the movies, and going back to my place. The prosecutor

said that after Marie had given her statements to the examining magistrate, he had consulted the movie list-

ings for that day. He added that Marie herself would tell

the court what film was showing. In an almost expression-

less voice she did in fact tell the court that it was a

Fernandel film. By the time she had finished there was

complete silence in the courtroom. The prosecutor then

rose and, very gravely and with what struck me as real emotion in his voice, his finger pointing at me, said slowly and distinctly, “Gentlemen of the jury, the day

after his mother's death, this man was out swimming,

starting up a dubious liaison, and going to the movies, a comedy, for laughs.

I have nothing further to say.” He

sat down in the still-silent courtroom.

But all of a

sudden Marie began to sob, saying it wasn’t like that,

there was more to it, and that she was being made to say

the opposite of what she was thinking, that she knew me

and I hadn't done anything wrong. But at a signal from

the judge, the bailiff ushered her out and the trial pro-

ceeded.

Hardly anyone listened after that when Masson testi-

fied that I was an honest man “and I'd even say a

decent one.” Hardly anyone listened to Salamano either, when he recalled how I had been good to his dog and when he answered a question about my mother and me

by saying that I had run out of things to say to Maman

and that was why I'd put her in the home. “You must

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understand,’ Salamano kept saying, “you must under-

stand.” But no one seemed to understand.

He was

ushered out.

Next came Raymond, who was the last witness. He waved to me and all of a sudden, he blurted out that I was innocent. But the judge advised him that he was being asked not for judgments but for facts. He was instructed

to wait for the questions before responding.

He was

directed to state precisely what his relations with the

victim were. Raymond took this opportunity to say that

he was the one the victim hated ever since he had hit

the guy's sister.

Nevertheless, the judge asked him whether the victim hadn’t also had reason to hate me.

Raymond said that my being at the beach was just

chance. The prosecutor then asked him how it was that

the letter that set the whole drama in motion had been

written by me. Raymond responded that it was just

chance. The prosecutor retorted that chance already had

a lot of misdeeds on its conscience in this case. He wanted to know if it was just by chance that I hadn't

intervened when Raymond had beaten up his girlfriend,

just by chance that I had acted as a witness at the police

station, and again just by chance that my statements on

that occasion had proved to be so convenient. Finishing

up, he asked Raymond how he made his living, and when Raymond replied “warehouse guard,” the prosecu-

tor informed the jury that it was common knowledge that

the witness practiced the profession of procurer.

I was

his friend and accomplice. They had before them the

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basest of crimes, a crime made worse than sordid by the

fact that they were dealing with a monster, a man with-

out morals. Raymond wanted to defend himself and my lawyer objected, but they were instructed that they must

let the prosecutor finish. “I have little to add,” the prose-

cutor said. “Was he your friend?” he asked Raymond.

“Yes,” Raymond said. “We were pals.” The prosecutor

then put the same question to me, and I looked at Ray-

mond, who returned my gaze.

I answered, “Yes.” The prosecutor then turned to the jury and declared, “The

same man who the day after his mother died was in-

dulging in the most shameful debauchery killed a man

for the most trivial of reasons and did so in order to

settle an affair of unspeakable vice.”

He then sat down.

But my lawyer had lost his

patience, and, raising his hands so high that his sleeves

fell, revealing the creases of a starched shirt, he shouted, “Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother

or for killing a man?” The spectators laughed. But the prosecutor rose to his feet again, adjusted his robe, and

declared that only someone with the naiveté of his esteemed colleague could fail to appreciate that between

these two sets of facts there existed a profound, funda-mental, and tragic relationship. “Indeed,” he loudly

exclaimed, “I accuse this man of burying his mother

with crime in his heart!” This pronouncement seemed

to have a strong effect on the people in the courtroom.

My lawyer shrugged his shoulders and wiped the sweat

from his brow. But he looked shaken himself, and I

realized that things weren't going well for me.

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The trial was adjourned. As I was leaving the court-house on my way back to the van, I recognized for a

brief moment the smell and color of the summer eve-

ning. In the darkness of my mobile prison I could make

out one by one, as if from the depths of my exhaustion,

all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a cer-

tain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries

of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the

last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich

sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before

night engulfs the port: all this mapped out for me a

route I knew so well before going to prison and which now I traveled blind. Yes, it was the hour when, a long

time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep.

And yet something had changed, since it was back to

my cell that I went to wait for the next day . . . as if

familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as

easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.

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Even in the prisoner’s dock it's always interesting to hear

people talk about you. And during the summations by

the prosecutor and my lawyer, there was a lot said about

me, maybe more about me than about my crime. But

were their two speeches so different after all> My lawyer

raised his arms and pleaded guilty, but with an explana-

tion. The prosecutor waved his hands and proclaimed my

guilt, but without an explanation. One thing bothered me

a little, though. Despite everything that was on my mind,

I felt like intervening every now and then, but my lawyer

kept telling me, “Just keep quiet—it won't do your case

any good.” In a way, they seemed to be arguing the

case as if it had nothing to do with me. Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being

decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.

There were times when I felt like breaking in on all of them and saying, “Wait a minute! Who’s the accused

here? Being the accused counts for something. And I

have something to say!” But on second thought, I didn’t

have anything to say. Besides, I have to admit that what-

ever interest you can get people to take in you doesn't

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last very long. For example, I got bored very quickly

with the prosecutor’s speech. Only bits and pieces—a

gesture or a long but isolated tirade—caught my atten-

tion or aroused my interest.

The gist of what he was saying, if I understood him

correctly, was that my crime was premeditated. At least

that is what he tried to show. As he himself said, “I will

prove it to you, gentlemen, and I will prove it in two

ways.

First, in the blinding clarity of the facts, and

second, in the dim light cast by the mind of this

criminal soul.” He reminded the court of my insensi-

tivity; of my ignorance when asked Maman’s age; of my swim the next day—with a woman; of the Fernandel

movie; and finally of my taking Marie home with me. It

took me a few minutes to understand the last part be-

cause he kept saying “his mistress’ and to me she was

Marie. Then he came to the business with Raymond.

thought his way of viewing the events had a certain

consistency. What he was saying was plausible.

I had

agreed with Raymond to write the letter in order to lure

his mistress and submit her to mistreatment by a man

“of doubtful morality.” I had provoked Raymond’s ad-

versaries at the beach. Raymond had been wounded.

had asked him to give me his gun.

I had gone back

alone intending to use it.

I had shot the Arab as I

planned. I had waited. And to make sure I had done the

job right, I fired four more shots, calmly, point-blank—

thoughtfully, as it were. “And there you have it, gentlemen,” said the prosecu-

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tor. “I have retraced for you the course of events which

led this man to kill with full knowledge of his actions.

I stress this point,” he said, “for this is no ordinary murder, no thoughtless act for which you might find

mitigating circumstances. This man, gentlemen, this man is intelligent. You heard him, didn’t you? He knows how to answer. He knows the value of words. And no

one can say that he acted without realizing what he

was doing.”

I was listening, and I could hear that I was being judged intelligent. But I couldn’t quite understand how

an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing

accusations against a guilty man. At least that was what

struck me, and I stopped listening to the prosecutor until

I heard him say, “Has he so much as expressed any re-

morse?

Never, gentlemen. Not once during the pre-

liminary hearings did this man show emotion over his

heinous offense.’ At that point, he turned in my direc-

tion, pointed his finger at me, and went on attacking me without my ever really understanding why. Of course, I

couldn't help admitting that he was right.

I didn’t feel much remorse for what I'd done. But I was surprised by how relentless he was.

I would have liked to have tried

explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I

had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.

My mind was always on what was coming next, today

or tomorrow. But naturally, given the position I'd been

put in, I couldn't talk to anyone in that way.

I didn’t

have the right to show any feeling or goodwill. And I

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tried to listen again, because the prosecutor started talk-

ing about my soul.

He said that he had peered into it and that he had found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He said the truth

was that I didn’t have a soul and that nothing human,

not one of the moral principles that govern men’s hearts,

was within my reach. “Of course,” he added, “we cannot blame him for this. We cannot complain that he lacks

what it was not in his power to acquire. But here in this

court the wholly negative virtue of tolerance must give way to the sterner but loftier virtue of justice. Espe-

cially when the emptiness of a man’s heart becomes, as

we find it has in this man, an abyss threatening to

swallow up society.’ It was then that he talked about my attitude toward Maman. He repeated what he had

said earlier in the proceedings. But it went on much longer than when he was talking about my crime—so

long, in fact, that finally all I was aware of was how hot a morning it was. At least until the prosecutor stopped and

after a short silence continued in a very low voice filled

with conviction: “Tomorrow, gentlemen, this same court

is to sit in judgment of the most monstrous of crimes: the murder of a father.” According to him, the imagination re-

coiled before such an odious offense. He went so far

as to hope that human justice would mete out punish-ment unflinchingly. But he wasn’t afraid to say it: my

callousness inspired in him a horror nearly greater than

that which he felt at the crime of parricide. And also according to him, a man who is morally guilty of killing

IO!

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his mother severs himself from society in the same way

as the man who raises a murderous hand against the

father who begat him. In any case, the one man paved

the way for the deeds of the other, in a sense fore-shadowed and even legitimized them. “I am convinced,

gentlemen,” he added, raising his voice, “that you will

not think it too bold of me if I suggest to you that the man who is seated in the dock is also guilty of the murder

to be tried in this court tomorrow. He must be punished

accordingly.” Here the prosecutor wiped his face, which

was glistening with sweat. He concluded by saying that

his duty was a painful one but that he would carry it

out resolutely. He stated that I had no place in a society

whose most fundamental rules I ignored and that I could

not appeal to the same human heart whose elementary

response I knew nothing of. “I ask you for this man’s

head,” he said, “and I do so with a heart at ease. For

if in the course of what has been a long career I have

had occasion to call for the death penalty, never as

strongly as today have I felt this painful duty made

easier, lighter, clearer by the certain knowledge of a

sacred imperative and by the horror I feel when I look

into a man’s face and all I see is a monster.” When the prosecutor returned to his seat, there was a

rather long silence. My head was spinning with heat and astonishment. The presiding judge cleared his throat and

in a very low voice asked me if I had anything to add.

stood up, and since I did wish to speak, I said, almost at

random, in fact, that I never intended to kill the Arab.

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The judge replied by saying that at least that was an

assertion, that until then he hadn’t quite grasped the

nature of my defense, and that before hearing from my

lawyer he would be happy to have me state precisely the

motives for my act. Fumbling a little with my words and

realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that

it was because of the sun. People laughed. My lawyer

threw up his hands, and immediately after that he was

given the floor. But he stated that it was late and that he would need several hours. He requested that the trial be reconvened in the afternoon. The court granted his

motion.

That afternoon the big fans were still churning

the thick air in the courtroom and the jurors’ brightly

colored fans were all moving in unison. It seemed to me

as if my lawyer's summation would never end. At one

point, though, I listened, because he was saying, “It is

true I killed a man.” He went on like that, saying “I” whenever he was speaking about me.

I was completely

taken aback.

I leaned over to one of the guards and

asked him why he was doing that. He told me to keep

quiet, and a few seconds later he added, “All lawyers

do it.” I thought it was a way to exclude me even further

from the case, reduce me to nothing, and, in a sense, sub-

stitute himself for me. But I think I was already very

far removed from that courtroom. Besides, my lawyer seemed ridiculous to me. He rushed through a plea of

provocation, and then he too talked about my soul. But

to me he seemed to be a lot less talented than the

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prosecutor. “I, too,” he said, “have peered into this man’s

soul, but unlike the esteemed representative of the government prosecutor's office, I did see something there,

and I can assure you that I read it like an open book.” What he read was that I was an honest man, a steadily employed, tireless worker, loyal to the firm that employed

him, well liked, and sympathetic to the misfortunes of

others. To him, I was a model son who had supported

his mother as long as he could. In the end I had hoped

that a home for the aged would give the old woman the

comfort that with my limited means I could not provide

for her. “Gentlemen,” he added, “I am amazed that so much has been made of this home. For after all, if it

were necessary to prove the usefulness and importance

of such institutions, all one would have to say is that

it is the state itself which subsidizes them.” The only

thing is, he didn’t say anything about the funeral, and I

thought that that was a glaring omission in his sum-

mation. But all the long speeches, all the interminable

days and hours that people had spent talking about my

soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirl-

ing river that was making me dizzy.

In the end, all I remember is that while my lawyer

went on talking, I could hear through the expanse of chambers and courtrooms an ice cream vendor blowing

his tin trumpet out in the street.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one

in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys:

the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain

evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed.

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The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there

seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it

over with and get back to my cell and sleep.

I barely

even heard when my lawyer, wrapping up, exclaimed

that the jury surely would not send an honest, hard-working man to his death because he had lost control of

himself for one moment, and then he asked them to find extenuating circumstances for a crime for which I was

already suffering the most agonizing of punishments—

eternal remorse. Court was adjourned and my lawyer

sat back down. He looked exhausted. But his colleagues came over to shake his hand.

I heard: “That was

brilliant!” One of them even appealed to me as a wit-

ness. “Wasn't it?” he said.

I agreed, but my congratula-

tions weren't sincere, because I was too tired.

Meanwhile, the sun was getting low outside and it

wasn't as hot anymore. From what street noises I could

hear, I sensed the sweetness of evening coming on.

There we all were, waiting. And what we were all wait-

ing for really concerned only me.

I looked around the

room again. Everything was the same as it had been the

first day. My eyes met those of the little robot woman and the reporter in the gray jacket. That reminded me

that I hadn’t tried to catch Marie’s eye once during the whole trial. I hadn't forgotten about her; I’d just had too much to do.

I saw her sitting between Céleste and Ray-mond. She made a little gesture as if to say “At last.” There was a worried little smile on her face. But my

heart felt nothing, and I couldn't even return her smile.

The judges came back in. Very quickly a series of

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questions was read to the jury.

I heard “guilty of murder” . . . “premeditated” . . . “extenuating cir-cumstances.” The jurors filed out, and I was taken to

the little room where I had waited before. My lawyer

joined me. He was very talkative and spoke to me more

confidently and cordially than he ever had before. He

thought that everything would go well and that I would

get off with a few years in prison or at hard labor. |

asked him whether he thought there was any chance of

overturning the verdict if it was unfavorable. He said

no. His tactic had been not to file any motions so as not

to antagonize the jury. He explained to me that verdicts werent set aside just like that, for nothing. That seemed obvious and I accepted his logic. Looking at it objectively,

it made perfect sense. Otherwise there would be too much pointless paperwork. “Anyway,” he said, “we can

always appeal. But I’m convinced that the outcome will

be favorable.” We waited a long time—almost three-quarters of an

hour, I think. Then a bell rang. My lawyer left me, say-

ing, “The foreman of the jury is going to announce the

verdict.

You'll only be brought in for the passing of sentence. Doors slammed. People were running on stairs somewhere, but I couldn't tell if they were nearby or far

away. Then I heard a muffled voice reading something in

the courtroom. When the bell rang again, when the

door to the dock opened, what rose to meet me was the

silence in the courtroom, silence and the strange feeling

I had when I noticed that the young reporter had turned

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his eyes away.

I didn’t look in Marie’s direction.

I didn’t have time to, because the presiding judge told me in

bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people. Then

it seemed to me that I suddenly knew what was on everybody's face. It was a look of consideration, I’m sure.

The policemen were very gentle with me. The lawyer

put his hand on my wrist.

I wasn’t thinking about any-

thing anymore. But the presiding judge asked me if I

had anything to say.

I thought about it.

I said, “No.”

That’s when they took me away.

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For the third time I’ve refused to see the chaplain.

don’t have anything to say to him; I don’t feel like

talking, and I'll be seeing him soon enough as it is. All

I care about right now is escaping the machinery of

justice, seeing if there’s any way out of the inevitable.

They've put me in a different cell. From this one, when

I’m stretched out on my bunk, I see the sky and that’s

all I see.

I spend my days watching how the dwindling

of color turns day into night. Lying here, I put my

hands behind my head and wait. I can’t count the times

I've wondered if there have ever been any instances of condemned men escaping the relentless machinery, dis-

appearing before the execution or breaking through the

cordon of police. Then I blame myself every time for

not having paid enough attention to accounts of execu-

tions. A man should always take an interest in those

things. You never know what might happen.

I'd read

stories in the papers like everybody else. But there must have been books devoted to the subject that I’d never

been curious enough to look into. Maybe I would have

found some accounts of escapes in them.

I might have

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discovered that in at least one instance the wheel had

stopped, that in spite of all the unrelenting calculation,

chance and luck had, at least once, changed something.

Just once!

In a way, I think that would have been enough. My heart would have taken over from there.

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to

society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that

doesn’t speak to the imagination. What really counted

was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of

the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give

whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope

meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran

like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought

it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury.

Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in

the machinery again.

Despite my willingness to understand, I just couldn't

accept such arrogant certainty. Because, after all, there

really was something ridiculously out of proportion be-tween the verdict such certainty was based on and the imperturbable march of events from the moment the

verdict was announced. The fact that the sentence had

been read at eight o'clock at night and not at five o'clock,

the fact that it could have been an entirely different

one, the fact that it had been decided by men who change

their underwear, the fact that it had been handed down

in the name of some vague notion called the French Cor German, or Chinese) people—all of it seemed to de-

tract from the seriousness of the decision.

I was forced

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to admit, however, that from the moment it had been

passed its. consequences became as real and as serious

as the wall against which I pressed the length of my

body.

At times like this I remembered a story Maman used

to tell me about my father.

I never knew him. Maybe

the only thing I did know about the man was the story Maman would tell me back then: he'd gone to watch a murderer be executed. Just the thought of going had made him sick to his stomach. But he went anyway,

and when he came back he spent half the morning throwing up.

I remember feeling a little disgusted by

him at the time. But now I understood, it was perfectly

normal. How had I not seen that there was nothing

more important than an execution, and that when you

come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?

If I ever got out of this

prison I would go and watch every execution there was.

But I think it was a mistake even to consider the pos-

sibility. Because at the thought that one fine morning I would find myself a free man standing behind a cordon

of police—on the outside, as it were—at the thought

of being the spectator who comes to watch and then can

go and throw up afterwards, a wave of poisoned joy rose

in my throat. But I wasn’t being reasonable.

It was a mistake to let myself get carried away by such imaginings,

because the next minute I would get so cold that I would

curl up into a ball under my blanket and my teeth would

be chattering and I couldn’t make them stop.

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But naturally, you can’t always be reasonable.

other times, for instance, I would make up new laws.

I would reform the penal code.

I'd realized that the most

important thing was to give the condemned man a

chance. Even one in a thousand was good enough to

set things right. So it seemed to me that you could come

up with a mixture of chemicals that if ingested by the

patient (that’s the word I'd use: “patient”) would kill

him nine times out of ten. But he would know this—

that would be the one condition. For by giving it some

hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I

could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that

you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was

that it had been decided once and for all that the patient

was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrange-ment, a tacit agreement that there was no question of

going back on.

If by some extraordinary chance the

blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing

that bothered me most was that the condemned man

had to hope the machine would work the first time. And

I say that’s wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the

whole secret of good organization.

In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral col-laboration.

It was in his interest that everything go off

without a hitch.

I was also made to see that until that moment I’d had mistaken ideas about these things. For a long time I believed—and I don’t know why—that to get to the

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guillotine you had to climb stairs onto a scaffold.

I think

it was because of the French Revolution—I mean, be-

cause of everything I'd been taught or shown about it.

But one morning I remembered seeing a photograph that

appeared in the papers at the time of a much-talked-about

execution. In reality, the machine was set up right on

the ground, as simple as you please.

It was much narrower than I’d thought.

It was funny I'd never

noticed that before. I'd been struck by this picture be-

cause the guillotine looked like such a precision in-

strument, perfect and gleaming. You always get exag-

gerated notions of things you don’t know anything about.

I was made to see that contrary to what I thought,

everything was very simple: the guillotine is on the

same level as the man approaching it. He walks up to

it the way you walk up to another person. That bothered

me too. Mounting the scaffold, going right up into the

sky, was something the imagination could hold on to.

Whereas, once again, the machine destroyed everything:

you were killed discreetly, with a little shame and with

great precision.

There were two other things I was always thinking

about: the dawn and my appeal.

I would reason with

myself, though, and try not to think about them any-

more.

I would stretch out, look at the sky, and force

myself to find something interesting about it.

It would

turn green: that was evening.

I would make another

effort to divert my thoughts. I would listen to my heart-

beat.

I couldn’t imagine that this sound which had been

with me for so long could ever stop. I’ve never really

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had much of an imagination. But still I would try to

picture the exact moment when the beating of my

heart would no longer be going on inside my head. But

it was no use. The dawn or my appeal would still be

there.

I would end up telling myself that the most

rational thing was not to hold myself back.

They always came at dawn, I knew that. And so I

spent my nights waiting for that dawn. I’ve never liked being surprised. If something is going to happen to me,

I want to be there. That’s why I ended up sleeping only

a little bit during the day and then, all night long, waited patiently for the first light to show on the pane of sky.

The hardest time was that uncertain hour when I knew

they usually set to work. After midnight, I would wait and watch. My ears had never heard so many noises or

picked up such small sounds. One thing I can say,

though, is that in a certain way I was lucky that whole

time, since I never heard footsteps. Maman used to say

that you can always find something to be happy about.

In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day

slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

Because I might just as easily have heard footsteps and my heart could have burst. Even though I would rush

to the door at the slightest shuffle, even though, with my ear pressed to the wood, I would wait frantically

until I heard the sound of my own breathing, terrified

to find it so hoarse, like a dog’s panting, my heart would

not burst after all, and I would have gained another twenty-four hours.

All day long there was the thought of my appeal.

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think I got everything out of it that I could.

I would

assess my holdings and get the maximum return on my

thoughts.

I would always begin by assuming the worst:

my appeal was denied. “Well, so I’m going to die.” Sooner than other people will, obviously. But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew per-

fectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you

die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for

thousands of years.

In fact, nothing could be clearer.

Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would

still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of

life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by im-agining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Since were all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter. Therefore (and the difficult thing

was not to lose sight of all the reasoning that went into

this “therefore”, I had to accept the rejection of my

appeal.

Then and only then would I have the right, so to speak—would I give myself permission, as it were—to consider the alternative hypothesis: I was pardoned. The

trouble was that I would somehow have to cool the hot blood that would suddenly surge through my body and

sting my eyes with a delirious joy. It would take all my

strength to quiet my heart, to be rational.

In order to

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make my resignation to the first hypothesis more plau-

sible, I had to be level-headed about this one as well.

If I succeeded, I gained an hour of calm. That was something anyway.

It was at one such moment that I once again refused

to see the chaplain.

I was lying down, and I could tell

from the golden glow in the sky that evening was coming on.

I had just denied my appeal and I could

feel the steady pulse of my blood circulating inside me.

I didn't need to see the chaplain. For the first time in

a long time I thought about Marie. The days had been

long since she'd stopped writing. That evening I thought

about it and told myself that maybe she had gotten

tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also

occurred to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These

things happen. How was I to know, since apart from our

two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to

keep us together or even to remind us of each other?

Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing

to me.

I wasn’t interested in her dead. That seemed

perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well

that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me.

I wasn’t

even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those

things.

It was at that exact moment that the chaplain came

in. When I saw him I felt a little shudder go through me.

He noticed it and told me not to be afraid.

I told him

that it wasn’t his usual time. He replied that it was just

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a friendly visit and had nothing to do with my appeal, which he knew nothing about. He sat down on my bunk

and invited me to sit next to him.

I refused. All the

same, there was something very gentle about him.

He sat there for a few seconds, leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, looking at his hands. They

were slender and sinewy and they reminded me of two nimble animals. He slowly rubbed one against the other.

Then he sat there, leaning forward like that, for so long

that for an instant I seemed to forget he was there.

But suddenly he raised his head and looked straight

at me. “Why have you refused to see me?” he asked.

said that I didn’t believe in God. He wanted to know if

I was sure and I said that I didn’t see any reason to ask

myself that question: it seemed unimportant. He then

leaned back against the wall, hands flat on his thighs.

Almost as if it wasn’t me he was talking to, he remarked

that sometimes we think we’re sure when in fact we're

not.

I didn’t say anything. He looked at me and asked, “What do you think?” I said it was possible. In any

case, I may not have been sure about what really did

interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

And it just so happened that what he was talking about

didn’t interest me.

He looked away and without moving asked me if I

wasn't talking that way out of extreme despair.

I ex-plained to him that I wasn’t desperate.

I was just afraid, which was only natural. “Then God can help you,” he

said. “Every man I have known in your position has

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turned to Him.” I acknowledged that that was their right.

It also meant that they must have had the time for it. As

for me, I didn’t want anybody’s help, and I just didn’t

have the time to interest myself in what didn’t interest

me.

At that point he threw up his hands in annoyance

but then sat forward and smoothed out the folds of his

cassock. When he had finished he started in again, ad-

dressing me as “my friend.” If he was talking to me this way, it wasn’t because I was condemned to die; the way

he saw it, we were all condemned to die. But I interrupted him by saying that it wasn’t the same thing and that be-

sides, it wouldn't be a consolation anyway. “Certainly,”

he agreed. “But if you don’t die today, you'll die to-morrow, or the next day. And then the same question

will arise. How will you face that terrifying ordeal?” I

said I would face it exactly as I was facing it now.

At that he stood up and looked me straight in the

eye. It was a game I knew well.

I played it a lot with Emmanuel and Céleste and usually they were the ones who looked away. The chaplain knew the game well

too, I could tell right away: his gaze never faltered.

And his voice didn’t falter, either, when he said, “Have

you no hope at allP And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing re-

mains?” “Yes,” I said.

Then he lowered his head and sat back down. He

told me that he pitied me. He thought it was more than

a man could bear.

I didn’t feel anything except that he

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was beginning to annoy me. Then I turned away and

went and stood under the skylight.

I leaned my shoulder

against the wall.

Without really following what he

was saying, I heard him start asking me questions

again. He was talking in an agitated, urgent voice.

could see that he was genuinely upset, so I listened more closely.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would

be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from

which I had to free myself. According to him, human

justice was nothing and divine justice was everything.

pointed out that it was the former that had condemned

me. His response was that it hadn't washed away my sin

for all that.

I told him I didn’t know what a sin was.

All they had told me was that I was guilty.

I was

guilty, | was paying for it, and nothing more could be

asked of me. At that point he stood up again, and the

thought occurred to me that in such a narrow cell, if

he wanted to move around he didn’t have many options.

He could either sit down or stand up.

I was staring at the ground. He took a step toward me

and stopped, as if he didn't dare come any closer. He

looked at the sky through the bars. “You're wrong, my son, he said. “More could be asked of you. And it may

be asked.” “And what’s that?” “You could be asked to

see.” “See what?’ The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a

voice that sounded very weary to me. “Every stone here

sweats with suffering, I know that.

I have never looked

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at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my

heart I know that the most wretched among you have

seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is

the face you are asked to see.”

This perked me up a little.

I said I had been looking

at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn’t

anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe

at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them.

But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun

and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.

I had

searched for it in vain. Now it was all over. And in any

case, I’d never seen anything emerge from any sweat-

ing stones.

The chaplain looked at me with a kind of sadness.

I now had my back flat against the wall, and light was

streaming over my forehead. He muttered a few words

I didn’t catch and abruptly asked if he could embrace

me. “No,” I said. He turned and walked over to the wall

and slowly ran his hand over it. “Do you really love this

earth as much as all that?” he murmured.

I didn’t

answer.

He stood there with his back to me for quite a long

time. His presence was grating and oppressive.

I was

just about to tell him to go, to leave me alone, when all

of a sudden, turning toward me, he burst out, “No, I

refuse to believe you!

I know that at one time or another

you've wished for another life.” I said of course I had,

but it didn’t mean any more than wishing to be rich,

to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped

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mouth.

It was all the same.

But he stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life. Then I

shouted at him, “One where I could remember this

life!” and that’s when I told him I'd had enough. He wanted to talk to me about God again, but I went up

to him and made one last attempt to explain to him that

I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste

it on God. He tried to change the subject by asking

me why I was calling him “monsieur” and not “father.”

That got me mad, and I told him he wasn't my father;

he wasn’t even on my side.

“Yes, my son,’ he said, putting his hand on my

shoulder, “I am on your side. But you have no way of knowing it, because your heart is blind.

I shall pray for

you.”

Then, I don’t know why, but something inside me

snapped.

I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I

insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me.

I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock.

I was pour-

ing out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy. He seemed so certain about every-

thing, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure

he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come

up emptyhanded.

But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life

and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that

was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on

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it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was

always right.

I had lived my life one way and I could

just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I

hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done

another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time

for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to

be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew

why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd

lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were

still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever

was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than

the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths

or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the

lives people choose or the fate they think they elect

matter to me when were all elected by the same fate,

me and billions of privileged people like him who also

called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't

he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only

privileged people. The others would all be condemned

one day. And he would be condemned, too. What would

it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral?

Sala-mano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife. The

little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted

me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was

as much my friend as Céleste, who was worth a lot more

than him? What did it matter that Marie now offered

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her lips to a new Meursault? Couldn't he, couldn't this condemned man see . . . And that from somewhere deep

in my future . . . All the shouting had me gasping for

air. But they were already tearing the chaplain from my

grip and the guards were threatening me. He calmed

them, though, and looked at me for a moment without

saying anything. His eyes were full of tears. Then he

turned and disappeared.

With him gone, I was able to calm down again. |

was exhausted and threw myself on my bunk.

I must

have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in.

Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my

temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer

flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour

before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing

departures for a world that now and forever meant noth-

ing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman.

I felt as if I understood why at the end

of her life she had taken a “fiance,” why she had

played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wist-

ful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt

free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody

had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it

all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean,

tid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with

signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference

of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a

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brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I

was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for

me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a

large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and

that they greet me with cries of hate.

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ABOUT THE

AUTHOR

Albert Camus, son of a working-class family, was born

in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life

in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs—in

the weather bureau, in an automobile-accessory firm, in

a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to journalism as

a career.

His report on the unhappy state of the Muslims of the Kabylie region aroused the Algerian government to action and brought him public notice.

From 1935 to 1938 he ran the Théatre de |’Equipe,

a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux,

Gide, Synge, Dostoevski, and others. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of Combat, then an important underground newspaper. Camus was always very ac-

tive in the theater, and several of his plays have

been published and produced.

His fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and

the Kingdom, his philosophical essays, The Myth of

Sisyphus and The Rebel; and his plays have assured

his preeminent position in modern French letters.

1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Litera-

ture. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short

the career of one of the most important literary fgures

of the Western world when he was at the very summit

of his powers.

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ABOUT THE

TRANSLATOR

Matthew Ward is a poet, critic, and translator.

His

translations include works by Colette, Barthes, Picasso,

Sartre, and others. He was educated at Stanford, Uni-

versity College in Dublin (where he was a Fulbright

Scholar), and Columbia. He taught for several years at

the Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York. Matthew Ward was born in Colorado and now lives in Man-hattan.

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