Final Version
“No, my son,” he told me, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I’m on your side. But you just don’t know it, because your heart is blind. I will pray for you.”
Then, I don’t know why, but something inside me burst. I started to shout at the top of my lungs and I insulted him and I told him not to pray. I took him by the collar of his cassock. With mixed leaps of anger and joy, I unleashed upon him everything that was in my heart. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he? Yet none of his certainties was worth more than a strand of hair off a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he lived like a dead man. I seemed to be the empty-handed one. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, surer than him, sure of my life and this death that was to come. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I held onto this truth as tightly as it held onto me. I had been right, I am still right, I was always right. I had lived my life that way and would have been able to live it another. I had 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’d been
waiting the whole time for this moment and for this humble dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. He also knew why. From the depths of my future, throughout this whole absurd life I’d led, a dark breeze had been rising up towards me from the years that had not yet come, and on its way this breeze leveled out everything that had been offered to me then in the years not much more real than those that I’d been living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me, what did his God or the lives we choose, the destinies we elect, matter to me, because a single destiny had chosen me and, with me, billions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Didn’t he understand? Didn’t he understand that? Everyone was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would also be condemned one day. He too would be condemned. What would it matter if, charged with murder, he were executed for not crying at his mother’s funeral? Salamano’s dog was worth just 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 as much a friend to me as Céleste who was worth a lot more than him? What did it matter that Marie gave her lips to a new Meursault? Did he understand it, this condemned man, that from 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 calmed them, nevertheless, and watched me for a while in silence. His eyes were filled with tears. He turned away and disappeared.
With him gone, I regained my calm. I was exhausted and threw myself onto my bunk. I think I slept because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting towards me. Smells of night, earth, and salt cooled my temples. The marvelous peace of that sleepy summer passed through me like a tide. At that moment, at the edge of night, sirens screamed. They were announcing 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 free and ready to relive it all. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And me too, I felt ready to relive it all. As if that great anger had purged me of evil, emptied me of hope, in that 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 was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I could only hope that there be lots of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
Draft 3 Audio