The Meursault Investigation (7 page)

I sometimes thought about poking around that beach at the exact hour of the crime. That is, during the summer, when the sun’s so close to earth it can make you crazy or drive you to shed blood, but that would be a futile exercise. Besides, the sea bothers me. I’m definitively afraid of the water. I don’t like to go swimming — the waves swallow me up too fast.
“Malou khouya, malou majache
.
El b’har eddah âliyah rah ou ma wellache.”
(Where is he, my brother, why didn’t he come back? The sea took him from me, he never came back.) I love that old song. It’s a local tune. A man sings about his brother, who was swept out to sea. I’ve got several images in my head, but I think I’ve been drinking a bit too fast. The truth is, I’ve actually done it. Six times … Yes, I went there six times, there to that beach. But I never found anything, no empty cartridges, no footsteps, no witnesses, no dried blood on the rock. Nothing. I looked for years. Until one Friday, ten years ago, more or less, the day when I
saw
him. Under a rock, a few meters from the water, I suddenly saw a silhouette that merged with a dark wedge of shadow. I’d walked on the beach for a long time, as I recall. I intended to get knocked out by the sun, to suffer sunstroke or a fainting spell and thus relive to some degree what your author describes. And I admit it, I’d also had a lot to drink. The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation. It shattered into needles on the sand and on the sea but never ever flagged. At one point, I had the impression of knowing where I was going, but that impression was surely mistaken. And then, down at the end of the beach, I spotted a tiny spring flowing in a trickle over the sand behind the rock. And I saw
a man
, dressed in overalls and nonchalantly lying there. I looked at him with fear and fascination; he seemed to barely notice me. One of us two was an insistent ghost, and the shadow — very deep, very black — had the coolness of a threshold. Then … then it seemed that the scene veered off into some sort of amusing delirium. When I raised my hand, the shadow did the same. And when I took a step to the side, it turned and
changed its resting point. Then I stopped, with my heart pounding, and I realized I had my mouth hanging open, like an idiot, and no weapon, not even a knife. I was sweating profusely, the big drops burning my eyes. No one was around, and the sea was mute. I knew for sure I was looking at a reflection, but I had no idea of what! I groaned out loud, and the shadow flickered. I took a backward step, and the shadow did the same, in a kind of weird contraction. I found myself stretched out on my back, shivering with cold, bludgeoned by bad wine. I’d walked backward about ten meters before collapsing in tears. Yes, I assure you, I wept for Musa years after his death. My efforts to reconstruct the crime at the scene where it had been committed were leading me to an impasse, to a ghost, to madness. All of which is to tell you there’s no point in your going to the cemetery, or to Bab-el-Oued, or to the beach. You won’t find anything. I’ve already tried, my friend. I told you right from the start: This story takes place somewhere in someone’s head, in mine and in yours and in the heads of people like you. In a sort of beyond.

Don’t do any geographical searching — that’s the point I’m trying to make.

You’ll get a better grasp on my version of the facts if you accept the idea that this story is like an origin myth: Cain comes here to build cities and roads, and to domesticate people and soil and plants. Zujj is the poor relative, loafing in the sunshine, his whole attitude so lazy it’s evident he owns nothing, not even a flock of sheep, that could arouse envy or motivate murder. In a certain way,
your
Cain killed
my
brother for … nothing! Not even for his livestock.

We should stop here. You’ve got enough material to write a good book, no? The story of the Arab’s brother. Another Arab story. You’re hooked …

Ah, the ghost, my double … see him there, behind you, holding his beer? I’ve been taking note of his maneuvers. He’s getting progressively closer to us, ever so casually. A real crab, that one. The ritual is always the same. He spreads out his newspaper and reads it diligently during the first hour. Then he cuts out articles and news items — relating to murders, I think, because I once took a look at what he’d left on the table. Next he looks out the window and drinks. Then the contours of his silhouette get blurry and he himself becomes diaphanous and almost fades away. Like a reflection. You forget he’s there, you hardly step around him when the bar’s crowded. No one’s ever heard him speak. The waiter seems to guess what he wants to order. He’s always wearing that same old jacket, worn at the elbows, and the same bangs on his big forehead, and his look is always the same, intelligent and cold. And let’s not forget the cigarette. His eternal cigarette, connecting him to heaven by the fine coil of smoke twisting and rising above him. He’s hardly ever looked at me, despite the years we’ve been neighbors in here. Ha, ha, I’m his Arab. Or maybe he’s mine.

Good night, my friend.

I used to love stealing the bread Mama hid on top of the armoire and then watching her look all over for it, muttering curses the whole time. One night a few months after Musa’s death, when we were still living in Algiers, I waited until she fell asleep, swiped the key to the trunk where she kept supplies, and ate almost all the sugar. The next morning she panicked, she was grumbling to herself, and then she started scratching her face with her fingernails and wailing about her plight: a husband vanished, a son killed, and another son observing her with an almost cruel joy in his eyes. Well, yes! I remember that, I remember feeling a strange jubilation at seeing her really suffering for once. To prove my existence, I had to disappoint her. It was like fate. That tie bound us together, deeper than death.

One day Mama wanted me to go to the neighborhood mosque, which served more or less as a day-care center, supervised by a young imam. It was summer, and the sun was so harsh Mama had to drag me into the street by my hair. I struggled like a maniac and managed to get free of her. Then I shouted an insult and, still holding the bunch of grapes she’d tried to coax me with just a minute or two before, I ran away. I ran until I tripped and fell and the grapes got completely crushed in the dust. I cried my eyes out and ended up going to the mosque, all contrite. I don’t
know what came over me, but when the imam asked what was causing me such grief, I accused another kid of hitting me. I think that was my first lie. My own personal version of eating the forbidden fruit. Because from then on, I became wily and deceitful, I started to grow up. Now, that first lie of mine, I told it on a summer day. Just like your hero the murderer — bored, solitary, examining his own tracks, spinning his wheels, trying to make sense of the world by trampling the bodies of Arabs.

Arab
. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes. In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period. The others were “the strangers,” the
roumis
God brought here to put us to the test, but whose days were numbered anyway: One day or another, they would leave, there was no doubt about that. And so nobody responded to them, people clammed up in their presence, leaned on the wall, and waited. Your writer-murderer was wrong, my brother and his friend had no intention whatsoever of killing them, him and his pimp friend. They were just waiting for them to leave, all of them, your hero, the pimp, and the thousands and thousands of others. We all knew it, we knew it from early childhood, we didn’t even need to talk about it: We knew one day they’d eventually leave. When we happened to pass through a European neighborhood, we used to amuse ourselves by pointing at the houses and divvying them up like spoils of war. One of us would say, “This one’s mine, I touched it first!” and set off a frenzy of claims and counterclaims. We were five years old when we started doing that, can you imagine?
As if our intuition was telling us what would happen when Independence came, but leaving out the weapons.

And so my brother had to be seen through your hero’s eyes in order to become an “Arab” and consequently die. On that miserable morning in the summer of 1942 — as I’ve already mentioned several times — Musa had announced that he’d be home earlier than usual. Which annoyed me a little, because it meant I’d have less time for playing in the street. Musa was wearing his blue overalls and his espadrilles. He drank his café au lait, looked at the walls the way people today browse through their phones, and then suddenly stood up, maybe after coming to a definitive decision about his schedule and the hour of his rendezvous with some friends. Every day, or almost, went the same way: a foray in the morning, followed — if there was no work at the port or in the market — by long hours of idleness. Musa slammed the door behind him, leaving my mother’s question unanswered: “Will you bring home some bread?”

One point in particular keeps nagging at me: How did my brother end up on that beach? We’ll never know. That detail’s an immeasurable mystery. You can get dizzy thinking about it and then wondering how a man could lose his name, plus his life, plus his own corpse, all in a single day. Yes, that’s it, basically. This story — I’m going to allow myself to get a little bombastic here — it’s everybody’s story these days. He was Musa to us, his family, his neighbors, but it was enough for him to venture a few meters into the French part of the city, a single glance from one of them was enough, to make him lose everything, starting with his name, which went floating
off into some blind spot in the landscape. In fact, Musa didn’t do anything that day but get too close to the sun, in a way. He was supposed to meet one of his friends, a certain Larbi, who as I recall played the flute. Incidentally, he’s never been found, this Larbi guy. He vanished from the neighborhood to avoid my mother, the police, the whole story, and even the story in your book. All that’s left of him is his first name, which makes an odd echo: Larbi l’Arabe, Larbi the Arab. But he’s a false twin, he couldn’t be more anonymous … Oh, right, there’s still the prostitute! I never talk about her, because her part is truly insulting. It’s a tall tale invented by your hero. Did he have to make up such an improbable story, a working whore whose brother wanted to avenge her? I acknowledge that your hero had the talent to create a tragedy out of a newspaper clipping and bring a mad emperor to life out of a fire, but I confess, he disappointed me there. Why a whore? To insult Musa’s memory, to smear him and thus diminish the gravity of the author’s own misdeed? I’ve come to doubt that. I think rather that his twisted mind conceived some abstract characters. This country, our land, in the form of two imaginary women: the famous Marie, brought up in a greenhouse of impossible innocence, and the alleged sister of Musa alias Zujj, a distant symbol of our land, plowed by customers and passersby, reduced to dependence on an immoral, violent pimp. A whore whose honor her Arab brother feels himself duty-bound to avenge. If you had met me a few decades ago, I would have served you up the version with the prostitute slash Algerian land and the settler who abuses her with repeated rapes and violence. But I’ve gained some
distance now. We never had a sister, my brother Zujj and I, period.

I can’t help wondering, over and over, what was Musa doing on that beach that day? I don’t know. Idleness is an easy explanation, and blaming it on destiny is too pompous. Maybe the proper question, after all, is the following: What was
your
hero doing on that beach? And not only that day but every day, going a long way back! A century, to be frank. No, believe me, I’m not one of those. It doesn’t matter that he was French and I’m Algerian, except that Musa was on the beach first, and it was your hero who came looking for him. Reread the paragraph in the book. He himself admits he was slightly lost when they came upon the two Arabs, almost by chance. What I mean to say is, your hero had a life that shouldn’t have led him to such murderous idleness. He was starting to get famous, he was young and free, he had a paying job, and he was capable of seeing things as they are. He should have moved to Paris by then, or married Marie. Why did he go to that very beach on that very day? What’s inexplicable is not only the murder but also the fellow’s life. He’s a corpse that magnificently describes the quality of the light in this country while stuck in some hereafter with no gods and no hells. Nothing but blinding routine. His life? If he hadn’t killed and written, nobody would have remembered him.

I want some more to drink. Call him.

Hey, Musa!

It was already the case some years ago, and it’s still the case today: When I add things up and go over my lists, I’m always a little surprised. In the first place, the beach
doesn’t really exist, and also there’s Musa’s alleged sister, who’s either an allegory or just a pathetic last-minute excuse. And then there are the witnesses: One by one, they turn out to be pseudonyms, or not really neighbors, or memories, or people who fled after the crime. My list is down to two couples and an orphan. On one side, your Meursault and his mother; on the other, Mama and Musa; and right in the middle, unable to be the son of either, me, sitting in this bar and trying to hold your attention.

Judging from your enthusiasm, the book’s success is still undiminished, but I repeat, I think it’s an awful swindle. After Independence, the more I read of your hero’s work, the more I had the feeling I was pressing my face against the window of a big room where a party was going on that neither my mother nor I had been invited to. Everything happened without us. There’s not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward. Not a single trace, my friend! The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance. No one! There’s good reason to get a little angry, don’t you think? If only your hero had been content with bragging, without going so far as to write a book! There were thousands like him back then, but it was his talent that made his crime perfect.