“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, something 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 all the contents of my heart. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he? Yet none of his certainties were worth more than a strand of women’s hair. He wasn’t even sure he was alive; he lived like a dead man. I appeared empty-hande
d. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, surer than him, sure of my life and this coming death. Yes, that’s all I had. But at least I held onto this truth as it held onto me. I had been right, I am still right, I was always right. I’d grown up that way and would have managed to live another way. I’d done this and hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done one thing, but I’d done the other. And after? It was as if I had waited the whole time for this minute and for this humble dawn at which I would be justified. Nothing, nothing had importance, and I surely knew why. He also knew why. In the depths of my future, across this whole absurd life I’d led, an obscure breeze rose up towards me from the years that had not yet come, and on its way this breeze equalized everything that had been proposed to me then in the not much realer years that I lived. What mattered to me was the death of others, the love of a mother, what mattered to me was his God, the lives we choose, the destinies we select, because a single destiny had chosen me—and, with me, billions of privileges—as my brothers, like him, would tell themselves. Didn’t he understand? Didn’t he understand it? Everyone was privileged. There were only privileged people. One day the others would also be condemned. He too would be condemned. What did it matter if, charged with murder, he was executed for not crying at his mother’s funeral? Salamano’s dog was just as important 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 just as much a friend to me as Céleste who was better than him? What did it matter that Marie gave her mouth to a new Meursault? Did he understand it, this condemned man, and that in the depths of my future…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 watched me for a while in silence. His eyes were filled with tears. He turned away, and he disappeared.
With him gone, I regained my composure. I was exhausted, and I threw myself onto my bunk. I think I slept because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside rose up towards me. Smells of night, earth, and salt cooled my temples. The marvelous peace of that sleepy summer entered me like a tide. At that 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 maman. It seemed that I understood why she had taken a “fiancé” towards the end, why she had played with new beginnings. And there, even there, by that asylum where lives slowly 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, emptied me of hope, before this night full of signs and stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. Feeling it so close to me, so fraternal at last, I felt that I had been happy, and that I still was. To consummate it at all, to feel less alone, I can only hope that there are lots of spectators on the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.