The Stranger
Chapter Five
by Albert Camus
The Stranger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)
Ebooks: The Stranger
https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/camus_l_etranger.html
Albert Camus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus
Absurdism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism
The Myth of Sisyphus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
DBanach: The Myth of Sisyphus
http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm
V
For the third time, I refused to receive the chaplain. I have nothing to say to him, I don't want to talk, I'll see him soon enough. What interests me at the moment is to escape the mechanics, to know if the inevitable can have a way out. I was changed cells. From it, when I lie down, I see the sky and I see only him. All my days are spent looking on his face at the decline of colors that leads day to night. Lying down, I put my hands under my head and wait. I do not know how many times I have wondered if there are examples of death row inmates who have escaped the relentless mechanism, disappeared before the execution, broken the cords of agents. I blamed myself for not paying enough attention to the execution stories. These issues should always be addressed. You never know what can happen. Like everyone else, I had read reports in the newspapers. But there were certainly special books that I had never had the curiosity to consult. There, perhaps, I would have found stories of escape. I would have learned that in at least one case the wheel had stopped, that in this irresistible premeditation, chance and luck, only once, had changed something. Once! In a sense, I think that would have been enough for me. My heart would have done the rest. Newspapers often talked about a debt that was owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But this does not speak to the imagination. What mattered was a possibility of escape, a leap out of the relentless rite, a race to madness that offered all the chances of hope. Naturally, the hope was to be shot on a street corner, in the middle of a race, and a bullet on the fly. But all things considered, nothing allowed me this luxury, everything forbade me, the mechanics took me back.
Despite my good will, I could not accept this insolent certainty. For finally, there was a ridiculous disproportion between the judgment on which it had been founded and its imperturbable course from the moment that judgment had been pronounced. The fact that the sentence had been read at twenty o'clock rather than at seventeen, the fact that it could have been quite different, that it had been taken by men who change clothes, that it had been credited with a notion as imprecise as the French (or German, or Chinese) people, it seemed to me that all this took much seriousness away from such a decision. Yet, I was forced to recognize that from the second it had been taken, its effects became as certain, as serious, as the presence of this wall all along which I crushed my body.
I remembered in those moments a story that mom was telling me about my dad. I hadn't known him. Perhaps all I knew about this man was what I was told then as a mother: he had gone to see an assassin executed. He was sick at the thought of going there. He had done so, however, and on his way back he had vomited part of the morning. My father disgusted me a little then. Now I understood, it was so natural. How could I not have seen that nothing was more important than a capital execution and that, in short, it was the only thing really interesting for a man! If I ever got out of this prison, I would go and see all the executions. I thought it was wrong to think about that possibility. Because at the idea of seeing myself free in the early morning behind a cordon of agents, on the other side in a way, at the idea of being the spectator who comes to see and who will be able to vomit afterwards, a flood of poisoned joy rose to my heart. But that was not reasonable. I was wrong to indulge in these assumptions because, the next moment, I was so terribly cold that I curled up under my blanket. I was snapping my teeth without being able to hold back.
But, of course, one cannot always be reasonable. Other times, for example, I was doing bills. I was reforming the penalties. I had noticed that the main thing was to give the convict a chance. Only one in a thousand was enough to fix many things. Thus, it seemed to me that we could find a chemical combination whose absorption would kill the patient (I thought: the patient) nine times out of ten. He would know, that was the condition. Because when I thought carefully, when I looked at things calmly, I found that what was defective with the cleaver was that there was no chance, absolutely none. Once and for all, in short, the death of the patient had been decided. It was a closed case, a well-defined combination, an agreement heard and on which there was no question of going back. If the blow failed, by extraordinary, we started again. Therefore, what was annoying was that the convict had to want the machine to work properly. I say that is the flawed side. This is true, in a sense. But, in another sense, I was forced to recognize that all the secret of a good organization was there. In short, the convict was obliged to collaborate morally. It was in his interest that everything went smoothly.
I was also obliged to note that until now I had had ideas on these issues that were not right. I believed for a long time – and I don't know why – that to go to the guillotine, you had to climb a scaffold, climb steps. I think it was because of the Revolution of 1789, I mean because of everything I had been taught or made to see on these issues. But one morning, I remembered a photograph published by the newspapers on the occasion of a resounding execution. In reality, the machine was placed on the ground, the simplest in the world. It was much narrower than I thought. It was funny enough that I hadn't noticed earlier. This machine on the picture had struck me by its appearance of a precision work, finished and sparkling. We always get exaggerated ideas of what we don't know. On the contrary, I had to note that everything was simple: the machine is at the same level as the man who walks towards it. He joins her as one walks to meet a person. That too was boring. The ascent to the scaffold, the ascent in the sky, the imagination could cling to it. Whereas, again, the mechanics crushed everything: we were killed discreetly, with a little shame and a lot of precision.
There were also two things I was thinking about all the time: dawn and my appeal. I reasoned myself, however, and tried not to think about it anymore. I stretched out, I looked at the sky, I tried to take an interest in it. It turned green, it was evening. I was still making an effort to divert the course of my thoughts. I listened to my heart. I could not imagine that this noise that had been with me for so long could ever stop. I never had a true imagination. Yet I was trying to imagine a certain second when the beating of this heart would no longer extend into my head. But in vain. The dawn or my appeal was there. I ended up telling myself that the most reasonable thing was not to constrain myself.
It was at dawn that they came, I knew it. In short, I spent my nights waiting for this dawn. I never liked to be surprised. When something happens to me, I prefer to be there. That's why I ended up sleeping only a little in my days and, throughout my nights, I waited patiently for the light to be born on the sky glass. The hardest part was the dubious hour when I knew they were usually operating. After midnight, I was waiting and watching. Never before had my ear perceived so many noises, distinguished from sounds so faint. I can say, by the way, that in a way I was lucky during this whole period, since I never heard a step. Mom often said that you're never quite unhappy. I approved of it in my prison, when the sky was brightening and a new day was slipping into my cell. Because as well, I could have heard footsteps and my heart could have burst. Even if the slightest slip threw me at the door, even if, with my ear glued to the wood, I waited madly until I heard my own breath, afraid to find it hoarse and if like the grumble of a dog, in the end my heart did not burst and I had still gained twenty-four hours.
All day long, there was my appeal. I think I made the most of that idea. I calculated my effects and got the best return from my reflections. I always took the worst guess: my appeal was dismissed. "Well, then I will die." Earlier than others, it was obvious. But everyone knows that life is not worth living. Basically, I was aware that dying at thirty or seventy years of age does not matter because, naturally, in both cases, other men and women will live, and this for thousands of years. Nothing was clearer, in short. It was always me who would die, whether now or twenty years from now. At that moment, what bothered me a little in my reasoning was this terrible leap that I felt in me at the thought of twenty years of life to come. But I just had to stifle it by imagining what my thoughts would be like in twenty years when I would still have to get to that point. As long as we die, how and when, it doesn't matter, it was obvious. So (and the difficult thing was not to lose sight of all that this "therefore" represented of reasoning), therefore, I had to accept the dismissal of my appeal.
At that moment, only then, I had the right, so to speak, I was somehow giving myself permission to address the second hypothesis: I was pardoned. The annoying thing was that it was necessary to make less fiery this impulse of blood and body that stung my eyes with insane joy. I had to try to reduce this cry, to reason with it. I had to be natural even in this hypothesis, to make my resignation in the first more plausible. When I succeeded, I gained an hour of calm. That, all the same, was to be considered.
It was at a similar time that I once again refused to receive the chaplain. I was lying down and I guessed the approach of the summer evening to a certain blonde of the sky. I had just dismissed my appeal and I could feel the waves of my blood flowing regularly within me. I didn't need to see the chaplain. For the first time in a long time, I thought of Mary. There were long days she didn't write to me anymore. That night, I thought about it and thought maybe she had grown tired of being the mistress of a death row inmate. The idea also came to me that she might be sick or dead. That was the order of things. How would I have known since apart from our two now separate bodies, nothing bound us and reminded us of each other. From that moment on, moreover, the memory of Mary would have been indifferent to me. Dead, she no longer interested me. I found it normal as I understood very well that people forget me after my death. They had nothing more to do with me. I couldn't even say it was hard to think.
That's when the chaplain came in. When I saw him, I had a little tremor. He noticed it and told me not to be afraid. I told him that he usually came at another time. He replied that it was a friendly visit that had nothing to do with my appeal of which he knew nothing. He sat on my bunk and invited me to stand next to him. I refused. I still found him a very soft air.
He sat for a while, forearms on his knees, head down, looking at his hands. They were thin and muscular, they reminded me of two agile beasts. He slowly rubbed them against each other. Then he stayed that way, his head still down, for so long that I felt, for a moment, that I had forgotten him.
But he suddenly raised his head and looked me in the face: "Why," he told me, "are you refusing my visits?" I replied that I did not believe in God. He wanted to know if I was sure of it and I said I didn't have to ask myself: it seemed like a trivial question. He then overturned backwards and leaned against the wall, his hands flat on his thighs. Almost without seeming to be talking to me, he observed that we thought we were sure, sometimes, and, in reality, we were not. I didn't say anything. He looked at me and asked, "What do you think?" I replied that it was possible. In any case, I may not have been sure what I was really interested in, but I was quite sure of what I wasn't interested in. And precisely, what he was talking about did not interest me.
He looked away and, still without changing his position, asked me if I was not speaking like this out of excessive despair. I explained to him that I was not desperate. I was only scared, it was natural. "God would help you then," he remarked. Everyone I knew in your case was turning to him. I recognized that it was their right. It also proved that they had the time. As for me, I did not want to be helped and I lacked time to be interested in what did not interest me.
At this moment, his hands had a gesture of annoyance, but he straightened up and arranged the folds of his dress. When he finished, he addressed me calling me "my friend": if he spoke to me like this it was not because I was sentenced to death; in his opinion, we were all sentenced to death. But I interrupted him by telling him that it was not the same thing and that, moreover, it could not be, in any case, a consolation. "Certainly," he agreed. But you will die later if you do not die today. The same question will then arise. How will you approach this terrible ordeal? I replied that I would approach it exactly as I was approaching it at the moment.
He stood up at that word and looked me straight in the eye. It's a game I knew well. I often had fun with Emmanuel or Celeste and, in general, they looked away. The chaplain also knew this game well, I immediately understood it: his gaze did not tremble. And his voice also didn't shake when he said to me, "Do you have no hope and live with the thought that you are going to die entirely? "Yes," I replied.
So, he lowered his head and sat down. He told me he was complaining to me. He considered this impossible for a man to bear. I only felt that he was starting to annoy me. I turned away and went under the skylight. I leaned from the shoulder against the wall. Without following him well, I heard that he was starting to question me again. He spoke in a worried and pressing voice. I understood that he was moved and I listened to him better.
He told me he was certain that my appeal would be accepted, but I bore the weight of a sin that had to be gotten rid of. According to him, the righteousness of men was nothing and the righteousness of God everything. I noticed that it was the first one that condemned me. He replied that she had not, however, washed away my sin. I told him I didn't know what a sin was. I had only been taught that I was a culprit. I was guilty, I was paying, nothing more could be asked of me. At that moment, he got up again and I thought that in this cell so narrow, if he wanted to stir, he had no choice. You had to sit or stand up.
My eyes were fixed on the ground. He took a step towards me and stopped, as if he didn't dare to move forward. He looked at the sky through the bars. "You're wrong, my son," he told me, "you could be asked for more. You may be asked. – And what? – You might be asked to see. – See what?
The priest looked all around him and he replied in a voice that I suddenly found very tired: "All these stones sweat pain, I know it. I never looked at them without anxiety. But, from the bottom of my heart, I know that the most miserable among you have seen a divine face emerge from your darkness. It is this face that you are asked to see.
I got a little animated. I said I had been looking at these walls for months. There was nothing and no one I knew better in the world. Perhaps, a long time ago, I had looked for a face. But this face had the color of the sun and the flame of desire: it was mary's. I had searched for it in vain. Now it was over. And in any case, I hadn't seen anything come out of that stone sweat.
The chaplain looked at me with a kind of sadness. I was now completely leaning against the wall and the day flowed down my forehead. He said a few words that I didn't hear and asked me very quickly if I would allow him to kiss me: "No," I replied. He turned around and walked towards the wall on which he passed his hand slowly: "So do you love this land so much?" he whispered. I did not answer anything.
It remained diverted for quite a long time. His presence weighed and annoyed me. I was going to tell him to leave, to leave me, when he suddenly cried out with a kind of brilliance, turning to me: "No, I can't believe you. I am sure you have wished for another life. I told him that naturally, but it didn't matter any more than wishing to be rich, to swim very fast or to have a better mouth. It was of the same order. But he stopped me and he wanted to know how I saw this other life. So I shouted at him, "A life where I could remember this one," and immediately I told him I had had enough. He still wanted to talk to me about God, but I walked up to him and tried to explain to him one last time that I had little time left. I didn't want to lose it with God. He tried to change the subject by asking me why I called him "sir" and not "my father." This me off and I told him that he was not my father: he was with others.
"No, my son," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. I am with you. But you can't know because you have a blind heart. I will pray for you.
So, I don't know why, there's something that broke out in me. I started screaming and insulted him and told him not to pray. I had taken him by the collar of his cassock. I poured out the bottom of my heart upon him with leaps mixed with joy and anger. He looked so certain, didn't he? Yet none of her certainties were worth a woman's hair. He wasn't even sure if he was alive since he lived like a dead man. I looked like I was empty-handed. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, more sure than him, sure of my life and of this death that was coming. Yes, I only had that. But at least I held this truth as much as it held me. I was right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived in this way and I could have lived in this other way. I had done this and I had not done that. I hadn't done one thing while I had done that other. What's next? It was as if I had been waiting all the time for that minute and that little dawn where I would be justified. Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew why. He too knew why. From the depths of my future, during all this absurd life that I had led, a dark breath came back to me through years that had not yet come and this breath equalized in its path everything that was then offered to me in the no more real years that I was living. What did the death of others, the love of a mother, what her God mattered to me, the lives we choose, the destinies we elect, since a single destiny was to elect me and with me billions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. So did he understand? Everyone was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others, too, would one day be condemned. He, too, would be condemned. What did it matter if, accused of murder, he was executed for not crying at his mother's funeral? Salamano's dog was worth as much as his wife. The little automatic woman was as guilty as the Parisian that Masson had married or Marie who wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was my boyfriend as much as Celeste who was better than him? What did it matter that Mary gave her mouth to a new Meursault today? Did he understand, then, this condemned man, and that from the bottom of my future... I was suffocating by shouting all this. But already, the chaplain was being snatched from my hands and the guards were threatening me. He, however, calmed them down and looked at me for a moment in silence. His eyes were full of tears. He turned away and disappeared.
He left, I found calm. I was exhausted and threw myself on my bunk. I think I slept because I woke up with stars on my face. Country noises were rising up to me. Smells of night, earth and salt refreshed my temples. The wonderful peace of that sleeping summer entered me like a tide. At this moment, and at the edge of the night, sirens screamed. They announced departures for a world that was now forever indifferent to me. For the first time in a long time, I thought of Mom. It seemed to me that I understood why at the end of a life she had taken a "fiancé", why she had played to start again. There, there too, around this asylum where lives were extinguished, the evening was like a melancholic truce. So close to death, Mom must have felt liberated and ready to relive everything. No one, no one had the right to cry over her. And I, too, felt ready to relive everything. As if this great anger had purged me of evil, emptied of hope, before this night full of signs and stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. To experience it so similar to me, so fraternal at last, I felt that I had been happy, and that I still was. For everything to be consumed, so that I feel less alone, I had to wish that there would be many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would welcome me with cries of hate.