The Meursault Investigation (13 page)

Oh, what a joke! Do you understand now? Do you understand why I laughed the first time I read your hero’s book? There I was, expecting to find my brother’s last words between those covers, the description of his breathing, his features, his face, his answers to his murderer; instead I read only two lines about an Arab. The word “Arab” appears twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once. The first time Mama saw me printing the first
letters of the alphabet in my new school notebook, she handed me the two newspaper articles and commanded me to read them. I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. “It’s your brother!” she shot at me in a tone of reproach, as if I’d failed to recognize a body in a morgue. I remained silent. What could I add to that? All of a sudden, I saw what she expected me to do: to make Musa live after dying in his place. A fine brief, don’t you think? With two paragraphs, I had to find a body, some alibis, and some accusations. It was a way of continuing Mama’s investigations, her search for Zujj, my twin. That led to a strange book — which I perhaps should have written out, as a matter of fact, if I’d had your hero’s gift — a counter-investigation. I crammed everything I could between the lines of those two brief newspaper items, I swelled their volume until I made them a cosmos. And so Mama got a complete imaginary reconstruction of the crime, including the color of the sky, the circumstances, the words exchanged between the victim and his murderer, the atmosphere in the courtroom, the policemen’s theories, the cunning of the pimp and the other witnesses, the lawyers’ pleas … Well, I can talk about it like that now, but at the time it was an incredibly disordered jumble, a kind of
Thousand and One Nights
of lies and infamy. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, but most often I was proud. I was giving my mother what she’d searched for in vain in the cemeteries and European neighborhoods of Algiers. That production — an imaginary book for an old woman who had no words — lasted a long time. It came in cycles, don’t get me wrong. We wouldn’t talk about it for months, but then, all of a sudden, she’d start fidgeting and mumbling, and she’d end
up planting herself in front of me and brandishing the two crumpled scraps of newspaper. Sometimes I felt like a ridiculous medium communicating between Mama and a phantom book; she’d ask it questions, and I was supposed to translate its answers.

So that’s how my language learning was marked by death. Of course, I read other books, history, geography, but everything had to be related to our family history, to my brother’s murder on that blasted beach. That was a mug’s game that stopped only sometime in the last months before Independence; maybe my mother could sense Joseph’s presence — he was still alive then. Maybe she could make out his mad footsteps as he prowled around Hadjout, around his own future grave, in his beach sandals. I had exhausted all the resources of the language and my imagination. We had no other choice than to wait. For something to happen. To wait for the famous night when a terrorized Frenchman would wind up in our dark courtyard. Yes, I killed Joseph because I had to counterbalance the absurdity of our situation. What happened to those two newspaper clippings? God knows. Maybe they crumbled into dust, maybe they were folded and refolded so many times they dissolved. Or maybe Mama eventually threw them away. I would surely have been inspired enough to write out everything I made up back then, but I didn’t have the resources to do it, nor did I realize that the crime could become a book and the victim a simple ricochet of bright light. Is that my fault?

So you can guess the effect it had on us when a young woman with very short, dark brown hair knocked on our door one day and asked a question nobody had ever
asked before: “Is this the family home of Musa Uld el-Assas?” It was a Monday in March 1963. The country was in full celebration mode, but a kind of fear underlay the rejoicing, for the beast fattened on seven years of war had become voracious and refused to go back underground. A muted power struggle was raging among the conquering commanders.

“Is this the family home of Musa Uld el-Assas?”

MERIEM

I often repeat that question to myself and try to recapture the cheerful tone she asked it in — very polite and friendly, like a luminous proof of innocence.

It was my mother who opened the door — I wasn’t far away, lounging in a corner of the courtyard, I couldn’t be bothered to get up — and I was surprised to hear the caller’s clear, womanly voice. No one had ever come to pay us a visit. Mama and I constituted a couple that discouraged all forms of sociability, and people avoided me in particular. I was a somber, taciturn bachelor, perceived as a coward. I hadn’t fought in the revolution, and that fact was remembered with rancor and tenacity. The strangest thing, however, was to hear Musa’s name spoken by a person other than my mother — I myself always said “him.” The two newspaper clippings referred to him only with his initials — or maybe not, I don’t remember. So anyway, I heard Mama answer “Who?” and then she listened to a long explanation I missed most of. “Better say that to my son,” Mama declared, and she invited the visitor inside.
It was high time for me to get up and see who’d come calling. And so I saw her: a small thin woman with dark green eyes, a guileless, white-hot sun. Her beauty hurt my heart. I felt my chest imploding. Until that moment, I’d never looked at a woman as one of life’s possibilities. I had enough to do, what with extracting myself from Mama’s womb, burying the dead, and killing fugitives. You see what I mean? We lived as recluses, I’d grown used to it, and then all of a sudden this young woman shows up, poised to sweep all before her, everything, my life, the world Mama and I had. I felt ashamed, I got scared. “My name is Meriem,” she said. Mama had her sit on a stool, her skirt hiked up a little, I tried not to look at her legs. She explained to me in French that she was a teacher, and she was working on a book that told my brother’s story, and the book was written by his murderer.

We were there in the courtyard, Mama and I, speechless, trying to understand what it all meant. Musa was rising from the dead, in a way, stirring in his grave and obliging us once again to feel the heavy sorrow that was his legacy. Meriem sensed our confusion and repeated her explanations slowly, kindly, and also a bit cautiously. She addressed Mama and me in turn, murmuring as though we were convalescents. We remained silent, but eventually I came out of my trance and asked some questions that couldn’t hide how flustered I was.

In fact, I think I felt as though a sixth and final bullet had just pierced a new hole in my brother’s skin. And that’s how Musa my brother died three times in a row. The first time was at two o’clock in the afternoon on “the day of the beach”; the second time, when I had to dig him
an empty grave; and the third and last time, when Meriem entered our lives.

I vaguely recall the scene: Mama suddenly on the alert, her eyes mad and staring, herself coming and going under the pretext of making more tea or looking for the sugar, the shadows spreading on the walls, Meriem’s discomfort. “I had the impression I’d showed up with my tale and my questions and interrupted a funeral,” she admitted to me later, after we started seeing each other — unbeknownst to Mama, naturally. Before she left, she took the famous little volume out of her bag, the same work you so sensibly keep in your briefcase. In her view, the thing was very simple. A celebrated author had told the story of an Arab’s death and made it into an overwhelming book — “like a sun in a box” was the way she put it, I remember that. She’d been intrigued by the mystery of the Arab’s identity, had decided to conduct her own investigation, and by sheer pugnacity had followed the trail back to us. “Months and months of knocking on doors and questioning all kinds of people, just so I could find you,” she told me with a disarming smile. And she made a date with me for the next day, at the train station.

I was in love with her from the first second, and I hated her instantly too, for having come into my world like that, tracking a dead man, upsetting my equilibrium. Good God, what a wretch I was!

So Meriem came in and explained herself, speaking in a soft, gentle tone that held us in thrall as though we were hypnotized. It had taken her months to locate the beginning of our trail in Bab-el-Oued, where practically no one remembered us. She was preparing a thesis — like you, in fact — on your hero and that strange book of his, wherein he tells a murder story with the genius of a mathematician examining a dead leaf. She’d wanted to find the Arab’s family, that’s what had led her to us after a long investigation on the other side of the mountain, in the country of the living.

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.