“No, my son,” he told me, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I’m with you. But you can’t see it because your heart is blind. I’ll pray for you.”
Then, I don’t know why, there was something that burst within me. I started to shout at the top of my lungs and I insulted him and I told him not to pray. I’d taken him by the collar of his cassock. With mixed leaps of anger and joy, I unleashed upon him the entire contents of my heart. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he? Yet, none of his certainties were worth more than a single strand of a woman’s hair. He wasn’t even sure of being alive because he lived like a dead man. I myself seemed to be empty-handed. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, more sure than him, sure of my life and this death that was to come. Yes, I only had that. But at least, I held onto this truth as much as it held onto me. I had been right, I’m still right, I was always right. I’d grown up that way and I would have been able to live another way. I had done this, and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done one thing while I had done another. And after? It was if I had waited the entire time for the minute and the humble dawn when I would be justified. Nothing, nothing had importance, and I knew quite well why. He also knew why. In the depths of my future, during this wh
ole absurd life that I’d led, an obscure breeze rose up towards me across the years that had not yet come, and this breeze equalized on its way everything they proposed to me then in the not much more real years that I lived. What mattered to me was the death of others, the love of a mother, what mattered to me was her God, the lives we choose, the destinies we select, since a single destiny had to choose me myself and with me billions of privileges that, like him, my brothers would tell themselves. Didn’t he understand, didn’t he understand so? Everyone was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others too, we would condemn them one day. He too, we would condemn him one day. What did it matter if, charged with murder, he was executed for not having cried at his mother’s funeral? Salamano’s dog was worth as much as his wife. The little automatic woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson had married or Marie who wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was my friend just as much as Céleste who was worth more than him? What did it matter that Marie gave her mouth to a new Meursault? He understood so, this condemned man, and that in the depths of my future…In screaming all this, I was suffocating. But, already, they were tearing the chaplain from my hands, and the guards were threatening me. He, nevertheless, calmed them and looked at me for a while in silence. His eyes were filled with tears. He turned away, and he disappeared.
With him gone, I regained my calm. I was exhausted, and I threw myself onto my bunk. I believe that I slept because I woke up with the stars in my face. The sounds of the countryside rose up to me. Smells of night, of earth, and salt were cooling off my temples. The marvelous peace of that sleepy summer entered me like a tide. At this moment, and at the limit of the night, sirens screamed. They announced departures for a world that now was evermore indifferent to me. For the first time in a very long time, I thought of maman. It seemed to me that I understood why at the end she had taken a “fiancé,” why she had played to begin again. Over there, over there too, around that asylum where lives extinguish, the night was like a melancholy truce. So close to death, maman must have felt liberated and ready to relive everything. No one, no one had the right to cry over her. And me too, I felt ready to relive it all. As if this great anger had purged me of evil, empty of hope, before this night charged with 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 was still. So that everything is consummated, so that I feel less alone, I can only hope that on the day of my execution there will be many spectators and that they greet me with cries of hate.