The Meursault Investigation

by Kamel Daoud

  Then, guided by I don’t know what instinct, Meriem waited until Mama left us for a few minutes before showing me the book. It was a short book in a pretty small format. The cover reproduced a watercolor of a man wearing a suit, hands in his pockets, half turning his back to the sea in the background. Pale colors, indecisive pastels. That’s what I remember about it. The title of the book was The Other, and the murderer’s name was written in severe black letters on the top right: Meursault. But I was distracted, unsettled by that woman’s presence. I ventured to look at her hair, her hands, and her neck while she was exchanging some courteous small talk with Mama, who’d come back in from the kitchen. Ever since then, I think, I’ve liked observing women from the back, I like the promise of a hidden face and a body you can’t discern. I even caught myself — me, who had no knowledge of the subject whatsoever — trying to think up an imaginary name for her scent. One thing I noticed right away was her lively, penetrating intelligence, which was combined with a sort of innocence. Later she told me she was from the east, from Constantine. She claimed the status of a “free woman” — and she accompanied that declaration with a look of defiance that spoke volumes about her resistance to her family’s conservatism.

  Yes, right, I’m rambling again. You want me to talk about the book, about my reaction when I saw it? To tell you the truth, that episode … I don’t know how to start telling you about it. Meriem left, taking away her smell, the nape of her neck, her grace, and her smile, and I was already thinking about tomorrow. Mama and I were both dazed. We had just discovered, all at once, the last traces of Musa’s footsteps, his murderer’s name — which we had never known — and his exceptional fate. “Everything was written!” Mama blurted out, and I was surprised by the involuntary aptness of her words. Written, yes, but in the form of a book, and not by some god. Did we feel ashamed of our stupidity? Did we contain an irrepressible urge to laugh like fools, us, the ridiculous pair stationed in the wings of a masterpiece we didn’t even know existed? The whole world knew the murderer, his face, his look, his portrait, and even his clothes, except … the two of us! The Arab’s mother and her son, the pathetic Land Administration functionary. Two poor, pitiful natives who had read nothing and put up with everything. Like donkeys. We spent the night avoiding each other’s eyes. God, it was painful to find out we were idiots! The night was long. Mama cursed the young woman and then fell silent. As for me, I was thinking about her breasts and her lips, the way they moved like living fruit. The following morning, Mama shook me awake brutally, bent over me like a threatening old sorceress, and issued her order: “If she comes back, don’t open the door!” I had seen that coming, and I knew why she said it. But I was ready for her, I was prepared to respond.

  As you will guess, my friend, I obviously did no such thing. I went out early, skipping the usual cup of coffee. As Meriem and I had agreed, I waited for her outside the Hadjout train station, and when I saw her arriving in the bus from Algiers, it was like a hole in my heart. Her presence alone wouldn’t be enough to ease my longing. When we found ourselves face-to-face, I felt clumsy and gauche. She smiled at me, first with her eyes, then with her wide, radiant mouth. I stammered as I told her I wanted to know more about the book, and we started walking.

  And that lasted for weeks, for months, for centuries.

  I’m sure you get it. I was about to experience what Mama’s vigilance had always managed to neutralize: incandescence, desire, dreaminess, expectation, the madness of the senses. That’s what French books of days gone by refer to as le tourment, “the pangs.” I can’t describe the forces that take hold of your body when you fall in love, which in my vocabulary is a hazy and imprecise word, a myopic millipede crawling up the back of something huge. The book, of course, served as a pretext. The book and, later, other books. Meriem showed it to me again and patiently explained, that time and all the other times we saw each other, the context it was written in, its success, the books it inspired, and the infinity of commentaries on every one of its chapters. It all made my head spin.

  But on that particular day, the second of our acquaintance, what I mostly looked at were her fingers on the pages of the book, her red nails sliding across the paper, and I forbade myself to think about what she would say if I took hold of her hands. Which was, however, the very thing I wound up doing. And it made her laugh. She knew that at that particular moment, Musa wasn’t very important to me. For once. We parted in the early afternoon, and she promised she’d come back. But before going, she asked me what research she would have to do, where she should look, to prove that Mama and I really were the Arab’s family. That was an old problem for us, I explained, because we barely had a family name … The remark made her laugh again, but I was hurt. So then I headed for my office. I hadn’t even thought about how people would react to my absence! I didn’t give a damn, my friend.

  And of course, that very evening, I began to read that wretched book. My reading progressed slowly, but I was held as if spellbound. At one and the same time, I felt insulted and revealed to myself. I spent the whole night reading that book. My heart was pounding, I was about to suffocate, it was like reading a book written by God himself. A veritable shock, that’s what it was. Everything was there except the essential thing: Musa’s name! Nowhere to be found. I counted and recounted, the word “Arab” appeared twenty-five times, but no name, not for any of us. Nothing at all, my friend. Only salt and dazzle and some reflections on the condition of a man charged with a divine mission. Meursault’s book didn’t teach me anything about Musa except that he had no name, not even at the last moment of his life. On the other hand, it let me see into the murderer’s soul as if I were his angel. I found weirdly distorted memories in there, such as the description of the beach, the fabulously lit hour of the murder, the old bungalow that was never found, the days of his trial, and the hours spent in his cell while my mother and I were wandering the streets of Algiers, looking for Musa’s body. This man, your writer, seemed to have stolen my twin Zujj, my own description, and even the details of my life and my memories of my interrogation! I read almost the whole night through, laboriously, word by word. It was a perfect joke. I was looking for traces of my brother in the book, and what I found there instead was my own reflection, I discovered I was practically the murderer’s double. I finally came to the last lines in the book: “… 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.” God, how I would have wanted that! There was a large crowd of spectators, of course, but for his crime, not for his trial. And what spectators! Adoring fans, idolaters! No cries of hate ever came from that throng of admirers. Those last lines overwhelmed me. A masterpiece, my friend. A mirror held up to my soul and to what would become of me in this country, between Allah and ennui.

  I didn’t sleep that night, as you may imagine. I watched the sky beside the lemon tree.

  I didn’t show the book to Mama. She would have made me read it over and over, endlessly, right up until Judgment Day, I swear to you. At sunrise I tore the cover off and hid the book in a corner of the shed. Naturally, I didn’t talk to Mama about my date with Meriem the day before, but she detected in my eyes the presence of another woman in my blood. Meriem never came back to our house. I saw her fairly regularly during the following weeks — it lasted all summer, in fact. We agreed that I’d go to the station every day for the arrival of the bus from Algiers. When she could get away, we’d spend a few hours together, walking, idling, sometimes lying under a tree, never for very long. If she didn’t come, I’d turn on my heels and go back to work. I started to hope the book would prove to be inexhaustible, would become infinite, so that she’d keep leaning her shoulder against my chest in delight. I told her about almost everything: my childhood, the day of Musa’s death, our illiterate and idiotic investigation, the empty grave in El-Kettar cemetery, and the strict rules of our family mourning. The only secret I hesitated to share with her was Joseph’s murder. She taught
me to read the book in a certain way, tilting it sideways as though to make invisible details fall out. She gave me other books written by that man, and others besides, which allowed me to understand, little by little, how your hero saw the world. Meriem slowly explained to me his beliefs and his fabulous, solitary images. I gathered that he was a sort of orphan who had recognized a sort of fatherless twin in the world and who had suddenly acquired the gift of brotherhood, precisely because of his solitude. I didn’t grasp everything, sometimes Meriem seemed to be speaking to me from another planet, she had a voice I loved to hear. And I loved her, deeply. Love. What a strange feeling, right? It’s like being drunk. You’ve lost your balance, your senses are dulled, but you’ve got this oddly precise and totally useless insight.

  From the very beginning, because I was a wretch, I knew our romance would come to an end, knew I could never hope to keep her in my life. But for the time being, I wanted only one thing: to hear her breathing beside me. Meriem had guessed my state and found it amusing for a while before she realized the depth of my despair. Was that what scared her off? I believe so. Or else she just gradually got tired, I didn’t amuse her anymore, she’d exhausted the possibilities of the rather new and exotic path I represented, my “case” stopped being entertaining. I’m bitter, that’s wrong. She didn’t reject me, I swear to you. On the contrary, I even think she felt a kind of love for me. But she contented herself with loving my disappointment in love, so to speak, and with giving my sorrow the nobility of a precious object, and then, just as a kingdom was beginning to fall into place for me, she went away. Ever since, I’ve betrayed women methodically and saved the best of myself for the partings. That’s the first law inscribed on my tablet of life. Do you want to note down my definition of love? It’s pompous but sincere, I concocted it all by myself. Love is kissing someone, sharing their saliva, and going back all the way to the obscure memory of your own birth. I therefore operated as a widower, which adds to one’s appeal and attracts the tender feelings of the unwary female. I’ve been approached by unhappy women and by others too young to understand.

  After Meriem left me, I read the book again, and then again. Over and over. Looking to find traces of her in it, her way of reading, her conscientious intonation. Strange, isn’t it? To go on a quest for life through the glittering proof of a death! But I’m rambling again, these digressions must be annoying. And yet …

  One day we were relaxing under a tree at the edge of the village. Mama pretended ignorance, but she knew I was seeing the girl who’d come from the city to dig around in our cemeteries. Our relationship had changed, Mama’s and mine, and I felt a dull temptation to commit some definitively brutal act that would free me from her, monster that she was. My hand brushed against Meriem’s breasts, almost by accident. I was drowsing in the broiling shade of the tree, and she had laid her head on my thighs. She arched her back a little to look up at me. Her hair was in her eyes, and she burst into a warbling laugh filled with the lights of another life. I leaned over her face. It was nice, and, sort of joking around, I kissed her on the mouth, canceling the smile on her parted lips. She didn’t say anything and I stayed in that bent-over position. I had the whole sky in my eyes when I straightened up, and it was blue and gold. I felt the weight of Meriem’s head on my thigh. We stayed like that, half asleep, for a long time. When it got too hot, she stood up, and I followed her. I caught up with her, put my arm around her waist, and we walked together, like a single body. She smiled the whole time, dreamily, her eyes nearly closed. We reached the train station, still embracing. You could do that in those days. Not like today. While we were looking at each other with a new curiosity aroused by physical desire, she said, “I’m darker than you.” I asked her if she could come back one evening. She laughed again and shook her head to say no. I dared to ask, “Do you want to marry me?” Her gulp of surprise was like a dagger in my heart. She hadn’t been expecting that. I think she would have preferred to let our relationship continue as a source of natural amusement rather than become the prelude to a more serious engagement. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered that I didn’t know what that meant when I used words, but when I was silent, it became obvious in my head. You’re smiling? Hmm, that means you understand … Yes, it’s a big fib. From beginning to end. The scene’s too perfect, I made it all up. Of course I never dared to say any such thing to Meriem. Her extravagant beauty, her disposition, and her assurance of a better life than mine always struck me dumb. Her type of woman has disappeared in this country today: free, brash, disobedient, aware of their body as a gift, not as a sin or a shame. The only time I saw a cold shadow come over her was when she told me about her domineering, polygamous father, whose lecherous eyes stirred up doubt and panic in her. Books delivered her from her family and offered her a pretext for getting away from Constantine; as soon as she could, she’d enrolled in the University of Algiers.

  Meriem left around the end of summer, our romance had lasted only several weeks, and the day I realized she was gone forever I broke every dish in the house, insulting Mama and Musa and all the world’s victims. Anger blurred my sight, but I remember Mama sitting calmly and watching me empty myself of my passion, serene and almost amused by her victory over all the women in the world. What followed was nothing but a long wrench of separation. Meriem wrote me letters that came to my office. I’d answer her with fury and anger. She’d describe her studies, the progress of her thesis, her tribulations as a rebellious student, but then everything gradually dwindled. Her letters became shorter and less frequent. Until one day they simply stopped altogether. All the same, I kept waiting for the Algiers bus at the train station, just to make myself suffer, for months and months.

  Listen, I think this is the last get-together for you and me, go over there and insist that he join us. He’ll come this time …

  Bonjour, monsieur. You look as though you have Latin ancestry, nothing surprising about that in this town, which has given herself to sailors from all over the globe since the dawn of time. You’re a teacher? No. Hey, Musa! Another bottle and some olives, please! What’s this? The gentleman is deaf and dumb? Our guest doesn’t speak any language? Is that true? He reads lips … Well, at least you know how to read. My young friend here has a book in which no one listens to anyone else. You should like it. It should be more interesting than your newspaper clippings, in any case.

  What would you call a story that puts four characters around a table: a Kabyle waiter the size of a giant, an apparently tubercular deaf-mute, a young graduate student with a skeptical eye, and an old wine bibber who makes assertions but offers no proofs?

  XV

  I beg you to forgive this old man I’ve become. Which is itself a great mystery, by the way. These days, I’m so old that I often tell myself, on nights when multitudes of stars are sparkling in the sky, there must necessarily be something to be discovered from living so long. Living, what an effort! At the end, there must necessarily be, there has to be, some sort of essential revelation. It shocks me, this disproportion between my insignificance and the vastness of the cosmos. I often think there must be something all the same, something in the middle between my triviality and the universe!

  But often enough I backslide, I start roaming the beach with a pistol in my fist, scouting around for the first Arab who looks like me so I can kill him. With my history, tell me, what else can I do but replay it over and over? Mama’s still alive, but she’s mute. We haven’t spoken for years, and I content myself with drinking her coffee. The rest of the country is of no concern to me, except for the lemon tree, the beach, the bungalow, the sun, and the echo of the gunshot. And so I’ve lived this way a long time, like a sort of sleepwalker, shuttling between the offices where I’ve worked and my different residences. Some sketchy affairs with various women, a lot of exhaustion. No, nothing happened after Meriem left. I lived like the other people in the country, but with more discretion and more indifference. I watched the post-Independence enthusiasm consume itse
lf and the illusions collapse, and then I started to get old, and now I’m sitting here in a bar, telling you this story that nobody ever tried to hear, except for Meriem and you, with a deaf-mute for a witness.

  I’ve lived like a sort of ghost, observing the living as they bustle about in this big fishbowl. I’ve known the giddy feeling that comes with possessing an overwhelming secret, and that’s how I’ve walked around, with a kind of endless monologue in my head. There have certainly been moments when I had a terrible urge to shout out to the world that I was Musa’s brother and that we, Mama and I, were the only genuine heroes of that famous story, but who would have believed us? Who? What evidence could we offer? Two initials and a novel where no given name appears? The worst was when the packs of moon dogs started fighting and ripping one another apart to establish whether your hero had the same nationality as me or the people who shared his building. A fine joke! In the scuffle, nobody wondered what Musa’s nationality was. He’s referred to as the Arab, even by Arabs. Tell me, is that a nationality, “Arab”? And where’s this country everybody claims to carry in their hearts, in their vitals, but which doesn’t exist anywhere?

  I went to Algiers a few times. Nobody talks about us, about my brother or Mama or me. Nobody! Our grotesque capital city, exposing its entrails to the open air, seemed like the worst of all the insults hurled at that unpunished crime. Millions of Meursaults, piled on top of one another, confined between a dirty beach and a mountain, dazed by murder and sleep, colliding with one another for lack of space. God, how I loathe the city of Algiers, the monstrous chewing sound it makes, its stench of rotten vegetables and rancid oil! It doesn’t have a bay, it has jaws. And its waters won’t be returning my brother’s body to me, that’s for sure! Once you’ve seen that city from the back, you can understand why the crime was perfect. And so I see them everywhere, your Meursaults, even in my apartment building here in Oran. Facing my balcony, just behind the last building on the outskirts of the city, there’s an imposing mosque standing unfinished, like thousands of others in this country. I often look out at it from my window, and I loathe its architecture, the big finger pointed at the sky, the concrete still gaping. I also loathe the imam, who looks at his flock as if he’s the steward of some kingdom. The hideous minaret makes me itch to speak some absolute blasphemy, something along the lines of “I will not prostrate myself before your pile of clay,” and to repeat it in the wake of Iblis, the devil himself … Sometimes I’m tempted to climb up that prayer tower, reach the level where the loudspeakers are hung, lock myself in, and belt out my widest assortment of invective and sacrilege. I long to list my impieties in detail. To bellow that I don’t pray, I don’t do my ablutions, I don’t fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine — and what’s more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I’m free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.